‘I’ve seen it do that before,’ he said, leaving Sandy to reflect on how dense and thankless human beings were, for the most part; how quickly their senses dulled, rendering the marvelous mundane. ‘All the guys said it really blew its stack an hour ago, but none of them could describe it.’ This was said with a contempt Sandy didn’t find surprising. In the world of the police communications officer, everything is describable; the world’s cartography must and can be laid out in ten-codes.
‘Well, don’t look at me,’ Sandy said. ‘I can tell you one thing, though. It was bright.’
‘Oh. Bright.’ Matt gave him a look that said Not just a gramma but a loser gramma. Then he went back inside.
By seven o’clock, Troop D’s TV reception (always an important consideration when you were off the road) had returned to normal. Dispatch communications were back to normal. Mister Dilloii had eaten his usual big bowl of Gravy Train and then hung out in the kitchen, trolling for scraps, so he was back to normal. And when Curt poked his head into the SC’s office at seven forty-five to tell Sandy he wanted to go into the shed and check on his specimens, Sandy could think of no way to stop him. Sandy was in charge of Troop D that evening, no argument there, but when it came to the Buick, Curt had as much authority as he did, maybe even a little more. Also, Curt was already wearing the damn yellow rope around his waist.
The rest was looped over his forearm in a coil.
‘Not a good idea,’ Sandy told him. That was about as close to no as he could get.
‘Bosh.’ It was Curtis’s favorite word in 1983. Sandy hated it. He thought it was a snotty word.
He looked over Curt’s shoulder and saw they were alone. ‘Curtis,’ he said, ‘you’ve got a wife at home, and the last time we talked about her, you said she might be pregnant. Has that changed?’
‘No, but she hasn’t been to the — ‘
‘So you’ve got a wife for sure and a maybe baby. And if she’s not preg this time, she probably will be next time. That’s nice. It’s just the way it should be. What I don’t understand is why you’d put all that on the line for that goddam Buick.’
‘Come on, Sandy — I put it on the line every time I get into a cruiser and go out on the road. Every time I step out and approach. It’s true of everyone who works the job.’
‘This is different and we both know it, so you can quit the high school debate crap. Don’t you remember what happened to Ennis?’
‘I remember,’ Curt said, and Sandy supposed he did, but Ennis Rafferty had been gone almost four years by then. He was, in a way, as out-of-date as the stacks of County Americans in Shed B. And as for more recent developments? Well, the frogs had just been frogs. Jimmy might have been named after a President, but he was really just a gerbil. And Curtis was wearing the rope. The rope was supposed to make everything all right. Sure, Sandy thought, and no toddler wearing a pair of water-wings ever drowned in a swimming pool. If he said that to Curt, would Curtis laugh? No. Because Sandy was sitting in the big chair that night, the acting SC, the visible symbol of the PSP. But Sandy thought he would see laughter in Curt’s eyes, just the same. Curtis had forgotten the rope had never been tested, that if the force hiding inside the Buick decided it wanted him, there might be a single last flash of purple light and then nothing but a length of yellow line lying on the cement floor with an empty loop at the end of it; so long, partner, happy trails to you, one more curious cat off hunting satisfaction in the big nowhere. But Sandy couldn’t order him to stand down as he’d ordered Matt Babicki to drive down the hill. All he could do was get into an argument with him, and it was no good arguing with a man who had that bright and twirly let’s-play-Bingo look in his eyes. You could cause plenty of hard feelings, but you could never convince the other guy that you had the right side of the argument.
‘You want me to hold the other end of the rope?’ Sandy asked him. ‘You came in here wanting something, and it surely wasn’t my opinion.’
‘Would you?’ Curt grinned. ‘I’d like that.’
Sandy went out with him, and he held the rope with most of the coil snubbed around his elbow and Dicky-Duck Eliot standing behind him, ready to grab his belt loops if something happened and Sandy started to slide. The acting SC, standing in the side doorway of Shed 13, not braced but ready to brace if something funny happened, biting his lower lip and breathing
just a little too fast. His pulse felt like maybe a hundred and twenty beats a minute. He could still feel the chill in the shed even though the thermometer was by then easing its way back up; in Shed B, early summer had been revoked and what one met at the door was the dank cold of a hunting camp when you arrive in November, the stove in the middle of the room as dead as an unchurched god. Time slowed to a crawl. Sandy opened his mouth to ask Curt if he was going to stay in there forever, then glanced down at his watch and saw only forty seconds had passed. He did tell Curt not to go around to the far side of the Buick. Too much chance of snagging the rope.
‘And Curtis? When you open the trunk, stand clear!’
‘Roger that.’ He sounded almost amused, indulgent, like a kid promising Mother and Dad that no, he won’t speed, he won’t take a drink at the party, he will watch out for the other guy, oh gosh yes, of course, you bet. Anything to keep them happy long enough to get the Christ out of the house, and then . . . yeeeeeee-HAW!
He opened the driver’s door of the Buick and leaned in past the steering wheel. Sandy braced again for the pull he more than half-expected, the yank. He must have communicated the feeling backward, because he felt Dicky grab his belt loops. Curt reached, reached, and then stood up holding the shoebox with the crickets inside. He peered through the holes.
‘Looks like they’re all still there,’ he said, sounding a little disappointed.
‘You’d think they’d be roasted,’ Dicky-Duck said. ‘All that fire.’
But there had been no fire, just light. There wasn’t a single scorch-mark on the shed’s walls, they could see the thermometer’s needle standing in the fifties, and electing not to believe that number wasn’t much of an option, not with the shed’s dank chill pushing into their faces. Still, Sandy knew how Dicky Eliot felt. When your head was still pounding from the dazzle and the last of the afterimages still seemed to be dancing in front of your eyes, it was hard to believe that a bunch of crickets sitting on ground zero could come through unscathed.
Yet they had. Every single one of them, as it turned out. So did the bullfrog, except its yellow-black eyes had gone cloudy and dull. It was present and accounted for, but when it hopped, it hopped right into the wall of its cage. It had gone blind.
Curt opened the trunk and moved back from it all in the same gesture, a move almost like ballet and one most policemen know. Sandy braced in the doorway again, hands fisted on the slack rope, ready for it to go taut. Dicky-Duck once more snagged a tight hold on his belt loops. And again there was nothing.
Curt leaned into the trunk.
‘Cold in here,’ he called. His voice sounded hollow, oddly distant. ‘And I’m getting that smell — the cabbage smell. Also peppermint. And . . . wait . . .’
Sandy waited. When nothing came, he called Curt’s name.
‘I think it’s salt,’ Curt said. ‘Like the ocean, almost. This is the center of it, the vortex, right here in the trunk. I’m sure of it.’
‘I don’t care if it’s the Lost Dutchman Mine,’ Sandy told him. ‘I want you out of there.
Now.’
‘Just a second more.’ He leaned deep into the trunk. Sandy almost expected him to jerk forward as if something was pulling him, Curt Wilcox’s idea of a knee-slapper. Perhaps he thought of it, but in the end he knew better. He simply got Matt Babicki’s windowbox and pulled it out. He turned and held it up so Sandy and Dicky could see. The flowers looked fine and blooming. They were dead a couple of days later, but there was nothing very supernatural about that; they had been frozen in the trunk of the car as surely as they would have been if Curtis had put them in the freezer for awhile.