‘Oh well.’ The kid talking to himself now. Nobody but himself. ‘I’ll bone up. Get ready. I’ve got time. No sense being impatient. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction — ‘
‘What if that’s a lie?’ Sandy asked. He was surprised at how tired of that little jingle-jangle he had grown. ‘What if there’s no satisfaction? What if you’re never able to solve for x?’
Curt looked up at him, almost shocked. Then he grinned. ‘What do you think Ennis would say? If we could ask him, that is?’
Sandy found the question both patronizing and insensitive. He opened his mouth to say so
— to say something, anyway — and then didn’t. Curtis Wilcox didn’t mean any harm; he was just flying high on adrenaline and possibility, as hyped as any junkie. And he really was a kid. Even Sandy recognized that, although they were much of an age.
‘Ennis would tell you to be careful,’ Sandy said. ‘I’m sure of that much.’
‘I will,’ Curt agreed, starting up the stairs. ‘Oh yeah, of course I will.’ But those were just words, like the Doxology you rush through in order to get free of church on Sunday morning.
Sandy knew it even if Probationary Trooper Wilcox did not.
In the weeks that followed, it became obvious to Tony Schoondist (not to mention the rest of the Troop D personnel) that there wasn’t enough manpower to institute twenty-four-hour surveillance of the Buick in the shed out back. Nor did the weather cooperate; the second half of that August was rainy and unseasonably cold.
Visitors added another headache. Troop D didn’t live in a vacuum on top of its hill, after all; the motor-pool was next door, the County Attorney (plus his staff) was just down the
road, there were lawyers, there were perps cooling their heels in the Bad Boy Corner, the occasional Boy Scout tour, the steady trickle of folks who wanted to lodge complaints (against their neighbors, against their spouses, against Amish buggy-drivers taking too much of the road, against the State Troopers themselves), wives bringing forgotten lunches or sometimes boxes of fudge, and sometimes just interested John Q.’s who wanted a look at what their tax dollars were buying. These latter were usually surprised and disappointed by the calmness of the barracks, the ho-hum sense of bureaucracy at work. It didn’t feel like their favorite TV shows.
One day toward the end of that month, Statler’s member of the United States House of Representatives dropped by, along with ten or twelve of his closest media friends, to do a meet-and-greet and to make a statement about the Police Aid, Science, and Infrastructure bill then pending before the House, a bill this fellow just happened to be co-sponsoring. Like many US Representatives from rural districts, this fellow looked like a small-town barber who had had a lucky day at the dog-track and hoped for a blowjob before bedtime. Standing beside one of the cruisers (Sandy thought it was the one with the busted headrest), he told his media friends how important the police were, especially the fine men and women of the Pennsylvania State Police, most especially the fine men and women of Troop D (that was a bit of information shortfall, there being no female Troopers or PCOs in D at that time, but none of the Troopers offered a correction, at least not while the cameras were rolling). They were, the Representative said, a thin gray line dividing Mr and Mrs John Q. Taxpayer from the evil of the Chaos Gang, and so on and so on, God bless America, may all your children grow up to play the violin. Captain Diment came down from Butler, presumably because someone felt his stripes would lend a little extra tone to the event, and he later told Tony Schoondist in a low growl: ‘That toupee-wearing touchhole asked me to fix his wife’s speeding ticket.’
And all the time the Representative was blathering and the entourage was touring and the reporters were reporting and the cameras were rolling, the Buick Roadmaster was sitting just fifty yards away, blue as deep dusk on its fat and luxy whitewalls. It sat under the big round thermometer Tony and Curt had mounted on one of the beams. It sat there with its zeroed odometer and dirt wouldn’t stick to it. To the Troopers who knew about it, the damned thing felt like an itch between the shoulderblades, the one place you can’t . . . quite . . . reach.
There was bad weather to contend with, there were all kinds of John Q.’s to contend with
— many who came to praise the family but who weren’t of the family — and there were also visiting police officers and Troopers from other barracks. These last were in some ways the most dangerous, because cops had sharp eyes and nosy minds. What might they have thought if they’d seen a Trooper in a rain-slicker (or a certain janitor with a Swedish accent) standing out there by Shed B like one of those big-hat soldiers guarding the gate at Buckingham Palace? Occasionally walking over to the roll-up door and peering inside? Might a visiting
policeman seeing this have been curious about what was in there? Does a bear shit in the woods?
Curt solved this as well as it could be solved. He sent Tony a memo that said it was a shame the way the raccoons kept getting into our garbage and scattering it around, and that Phil Candleton and Brian Cole had agreed to build a little hutch to store the garbage cans in.
Curt thought that out behind Shed B would be a good place for it, if the SC agreed. SC
Schoondist wrote OK across the top of the memo, and that one did get filed. What the memo neglected to mention was that the Troop hadn’t had any real problems with coons since Arky bought a couple of plastic garbage cans from Sears, the kind with the snap-down tops.
The hutch was built, painted (PSP gray, of course), and ready for action three days after the memo landed in Tony’s in-basket. Prefab and purely functional, it was just big enough for two garbage cans, three shelves, and one State Trooper sitting on a kitchen chair. It served the dual purpose of keeping the Trooper on watch (a) out of the weather, and (b) out of sight.
Every ten or fifteen minutes the man on duty would get up, leave the hutch, and look through one of the windows in Shed B’s rear roll-up door. The hutch was stocked with soda, munchies, magazines, and a galvanized pail. The pail had a paper strip reading I COULD NOT
HOLD IT ANY LONGER taped to the side. That was Jackie O’Hara’s touch. The others called him The Irish Wonder Boy, and he never failed to make them laugh. He was making them laugh even three years later as he lay in his bedroom, dying of esophageal cancer, eyes glassy with morphine, telling stories about Padeen the bogtrotter in a hoarse whisper while his old mates visited and sometimes held his hand when the pain was especially bad.
Later on, there would be plenty of video cameras at Troop D — at all the PSP barracks, because by the nineties, all the cruisers were equipped with dashboard-mounted Panasonic Eyewitness models. These were made specially for law enforcement organizations, and came without mikes. Video of road-stops was legal; because of existing wiretap laws, audio was not. But all of that was later. In the late summer of 1979, they had to make do with a videocam Huddie Royer had gotten for his birthday. They kept it on one of the shelves out in the hutch, stored in its box and wrapped in plastic to make sure it stayed dry. Another box contained extra batteries and a dozen blank tapes with the cellophane stripped off so they’d be ready to go. There was also a slate with a number chalked on it: the current temperature inside the shed. If the person on duty noticed a change, he erased the last observation, wrote in the current one, and added a chalk arrow pointing either up or down. It \vas the closest thing to a written record Sergeant Schoondist would allow.
Tony seemed delighted with this jury-rig. Curt tried to emulate him, but sometimes his worry and frustration broke through. ‘There won’t be anyone on watch the next time something happens,’ he said. ‘You wait and see if I’m not right — it’s always the way.
Nobody’ll volunteer for midnight to four some night, and whoever comes on next will look in and see the trunk-lid up and another dead bat on the floor. You wait and see.’
Curt tried persuading Tony to at least keep a surveillance sign-up sheet. There was no shortage of volunteers, he argued; what they were short on was organization and scheduling, things that would be easy to change. Tony remained adamant: no paper trail. When Curt volunteered to take over more of the sentry duty himself (many of the Troopers took to calling it Hutch Patrol), Tony refused and told him to ease off. ‘You’ve got other responsibilities,’ he said. ‘Not the least of them is your wife.’