‘Are you done yet?’ Sandy was even starting to sound like Old Gammer Dearborn to himself, but he couldn’t help it.
‘Yeah. Guess so.’ Curtis sounding disappointed. Sandy jumped when he slammed the Buick’s trunk-lid back down, and Dick’s fingers tightened on the back of his pants. Sandy had an idea ole Dicky-Duck had come pretty close to yanking him right out the doorway and on to his ass in the parking lot. Curt, meantime, walked slowly toward them with the frog cage, the sneaker box, and the windowbox stacked up in his arms. Sandy kept coiling up the rope as he came so Curt wouldn’t trip over it.
When they were all outside again, Dicky took the cage and looked wonderingly at the blind bullfrog. ‘That beats everything,’ he said.
Curt slipped out of the loop around his waist, then knelt on the macadam and opened the shoebox. Four or five other Troopers had gathered around by then. The crickets hopped out almost as soon as Curt took the lid off the box, but not before both Curtis and Sandy had a chance to take attendance. Eight, the number of cylinders in yonder Buick’s useless engine.
Eight, the same number of crickets that had gone in.
Curt looked disgusted and disappointed. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘In the end, that’s what it always comes to. If there’s a formula — some binomial theorem or quadratic equation or something like that — I don’t see it.’
‘Then maybe you better give it a pass,’ Sandy said.
Curt lowered his head and watched the crickets go hopping across the parking lot, widening out from each other, going their separate ways, and no equation or theorem ever invented by any mathematician who ever breathed could predict where any single one of them might end up. They were Chaos Theory hopping. The goggles were still hung around Curt’s neck on their elastic strap. He fingered them for a few moments, then glanced at Sandy. His mouth was set. The disappointed look had gone out of his eyes. The other one, the half-crazed let’s-play-Bingo-until-the-money’s-all-gone look, had come back to take its place.
‘Don’t think I’m ready to do that,’ he said. ‘There must be . . .’
Sandy gave him a chance, and when Curtis didn’t finish, he asked: ‘There must be what?’
But Curtis only shook his head, as if he could not say. Or would not.
Three days went by. They waited for another bat-thing or another cyclone of leaves, but there was nothing immediate in the wake of the lightshow; the Buick just sat there. Troop D’s piece of Pennsylvania was quiet, especially on the second shift, which suited Sandy Dearborn right down to the ground. One more clay and he’d be off for two. Huddle’s turn to run the show again. Then, when Sandy came back, Tony Schoondist would be in the big chair, where he belonged. The temperature in Shed B still hadn’t equalized with the temperature of the outside world, but was getting there. It had risen into the low sixties, and Troop D had come to think of the sixties as safe territory.
For the first forty-eight hours after the monster light-quake, they’d kept someone out there around the clock. After twenty-four uneventful hours, some of the men had started grumbling about putting in the extra time, and Sandy couldn’t much blame them. It was uncompensated time, of course. Had to be. How could they have sent Overtime Reports for Shed B-watching to Scranton? What would they have put in the space marked REASON FOR OVERTIME
ACTIVITY?
Curt Wilcox wasn’t crazy about dropping the full-time surveillance, but he understood the realities of the situation. In a brief conference, they decided on a week’s worth of spot checks, most to be performed by Troopers Dearborn and Wilcox. And if Tony didn’t like that when he got back from sunny California, he could change it.
So now comes eight o’clock of a summer evening right around the time of the solstice, the sun not down but sitting red and bloated on the Short Hills, casting the last of its long and longing light. Sandy was in the office, beavering away at the weekend duty roster, that big chair fitting him pretty well just then. There were times when he could imagine himself sitting in it more or less permanently, and that summer evening was one of them. I think I could do this job: that was what was going through his mind as George Morgan rolled up the driveway in Unit D-ll. Sandy raised his hand to George and grinned when George ticked a little salute off the brim of his big hat in return: right-back-atcha.
George was on patrol that shift, but happened to be close by and so came in to gas up. By the nineties, Pennsylvania State Troopers would no longer have that option, but in 1983 you could still pump your go-juice at home and save the state a few pennies. He put the pump on slow automatic and strolled over to Shed B for a peek.
There was a light on inside (they always left it on) and there it was, the Troop D bonus baby, Old ’54, sitting quiet with its chrome gleaming, looking as if it had never eaten a State Trooper, blinded a frog, or produced a freak bat. George, still a few years from his personal finish-line (two cans of beer and then the pistol in the mouth, jammed way up in back past the soft palate, not taking any chances, when a cop decides to do it he or she almost always gets it right), stood at the roll-up door as they all did from time to time, adopting the stance they all seemed to adopt, kind of loose and spraddle-legged like a sidewalk superintendent at a city
building site, hands on hips (Pose A) or crossed on the chest (Pose B) or cupped to the sides of the face if the day was especially bright (Pose C). It’s a stance that says the sidewalk superintendent in question is a man with more than a few of the answers, an expert gent with plenty of time to discuss taxes or politics or the haircuts of the young.
George had his look and was just about to turn away when all at once there was a thud from in there, toneless and heavy. This was followed by a pause (long enough, he told Sandy later, for him to think he’d imagined the sound in the first place) and then there was a second thud. George saw the Buick’s trunk-lid move up and down in the middle, just once, quick. He started for the side door, meaning to go in and investigate. Then he recalled what he was dealing with, a car that sometimes ate people. He stopped, looked around for someone else —
for backup — and saw no one. There’s never a cop around when you need one. He considered going into the shed by himself anyway, thought of Ennis — four years and still not home for lunch — and ran for the barracks instead.
‘Sandy, you better come.’ George standing in the doorway, looking scared and out of breath. ‘I think maybe one of these idiots may have locked some other idiot in the trunk of that fucking nuisance in Shed B. Like for a joke.’
Sandy stared at him, thunderstruck. Unable (or perhaps unwilling) to believe that anyone, even that dope Santerre, could do such a thing. Except people could, he knew it. He knew something else, as well — incredible as it might seem, in many cases they meant no harm.
George mistook the acting SC’s surprise for disbelief. ‘I might be wrong, but honest-to-God I’m not pulling your chain. Something’s thumping the lid of the trunk. From the inside.
Sounds like with his fist. I started to go in on my own, then changed my mind.’
‘That was the right call,’ Sandy said. ‘Come on.’
They hurried out, stopping just long enough so Sandy could look in the kitchen and then bawl upstairs to the common room. No one. The barracks was never deserted, but it was deserted now, and why? Because there was never a cop around when you needed one, that was why. Herb Avery was running dispatch that night, at least that was one, and he joined them.
‘Want me to call someone in off the road, Sandy? I can, if you want.’
‘No.’ Sandy was looking around, trying to remember where he’d last seen the coil of rope.
In the hutch, probably. Unless some yo-yo had taken it home to haul something upstairs with, which would be just about par for the course. ‘Come on, George.’
The two of them crossed the parking lot in the red sunset light, their trailing shadows all but infinite, going first to the roll-up door for a little look-see. The Buick sat there as it had ever since old Johnny Parker dragged it in behind his tow-truck (Johnny now retired and getting through his nights with an oxygen tank beside his bed — but still smoking). It cast its own shadow on the concrete floor.