Shirley dropped the posthole digger and when it hit the concrete, I saw a plug of the dead thing’s yellow flesh caught in it like a piece of diseased dirt. Her face was bone-white except for two wild bright patches of red in her cheeks and another blooming on her throat like a birthmark.
‘Huddie,’ she whispered.
‘What?’ I asked. I could hardly talk, my throat was that dry.
‘Huddie!’
‘ What, goddammit?’
‘It could think,’ she whispered. Her eyes were big and horrified, swimming with tears. ‘We killed a thinking being. That’s murder.’
‘Bullshit’s what that is,’ George said. ‘Even if it’s not, what damn good does it do to go on about it?’
Whining — but not in the same urgent way as before — Mister Dillon pushed in between me and Shirley. There were big bald patches in the fur on his neck and back and chest, as if he had the mange. The tip of one ear seemed to be singed clean off. He stretched out his neck and sniffed the corpse of the thing lying beside the roll-up door.
‘Grab him outta there,’ George said.
‘No, he’s all right,’ I said.
As D scented at the limp and now unmoving tangle of pink tendrils on the thing’s head, he whined again. Then he lifted his leg and pissed on the severed piece of trunk or horn or whatever it was. With that done he backed away, still whining.
I could hear a faint hiss. The smell of cabbage was getting stronger, and the yellow color was fading from the creature’s flesh. It was turning white. Tiny, almost invisible ribbons of steam were starting to drift up. That’s where the worst of the stench was, in that rising vapor.
The thing had started to decompose, like the rest of the stuff that had come through.
‘Shirley, go back inside,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a 99 to handle.’
She blinked rapidly, like someone who is just coming to. ‘The tanker,’ she said. ‘George S.
Oh Lord, I forgot.’
‘Take the dog with you,’ I said.
‘Yes. All right.’ She paused. ‘What about—?’ She gestured at the tools scattered on the concrete, the ones we’d used to kill the creature as it lay against the door, mangled and screaming. Screaming what? For mercy? Would it (or its kind) have accorded mercy to one of us, had our positions been reversed? I don’t think so . . . but of course I wouldn’t, would I?
Because you have to get through first one night and then another and then a year of nights and then ten. You have to be able to turn off the lights and lie there in the dark. You have to
believe you only did what would have been done to you. You have to arrange your thoughts because you know you can only live with the lights on so much of the time.
‘I don’t know, Shirley,’ I said. I felt very tired, and the smell of the rotting cabbage was making me sick to my stomach. ‘What the fuck does it matter, it’s not like there’s going to be a trial or an inquest or anything official. Go on inside. You’re the PCO. So communicate.’
She nodded jerkily. ‘Come on, Mister Dillon.’
I wasn’t sure D would go with her but he did, walking neatly behind one of Shirley’s brown low-heeled shoes. He kept whining, though, and just before they went out the side door he kind of shivered all over, as if he’d caught a chill.
‘We oughtta get out, too,’ George said to Eddie. He started to rub at his eyes, realized he was still wearing gloves, and stripped them off. ‘We’ve got a prisoner to take care of.’
Eddie looked as surprised as Shirley had when I reminded her that she had business to deal with over in Poteenville. ‘Forgot all about the loudmouth sonofabitch,’ he said. ‘He broke his nose, George — I heard it.’
‘Yeah?’ George said. ‘Oh what a shame.’
Eddie grinned. You could see him trying to pull it back. It widened, instead. They have a way of doing that, even under the worst of circumstances. Especially under the worst of circumstances.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Take care of him.’
‘Come with us,’ Eddie said. ‘You shouldn’t be in here alone.’
‘Why not? It’s dead, isn’t it?’
‘That’s not.’ Eddie lifted his chin in the Buick’s direction. ‘Goddam fake car’s hinky, still hinky, and I mean to the max. Don’t you feel it?’
‘I feel something,’ George said. ‘Probably just reaction from dealing with that . . .’ He gestured at the dead creature. ‘. . . that whatever-it-was.’
‘No,’ Eddie said. ‘What you feel’s coming from the goddam Buick, not that dead thing. It breathes, that’s what I think. Whatever that car really is, it breathes. I don’t think it’s safe to be in here, Hud. Not for any of us.’
‘You’re overreacting.’
‘The hell I am. It breathes. It blew that pink-headed thing out on the exhale, the way you can blow a booger out of your nose when you sneeze. Now it’s getting ready to suck back in.
I tell you I can feel it.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I just want one quick look around, okay? Then I’m going to grab the tarp and cover up . . . that.’ I jerked my thumb at what we’d killed. ‘Anything more complicated can wait for Tony and Curt. They’re the experts.’
But calming him down was impossible. He was working himself into a state.
‘You can’t let them near that fake car until it sucks in again.’ Eddie looked balefully at the Buick. ‘And you better be ready for an argument on the subject. The Sarge’ll want to come in
and Curt will want to come in even more, but you can’t let them. Because — ‘
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s getting ready to suck back in, you can feel it. We ought to get you your own eight hundred number, Eddie. You could make your fortune reading palms over the phone.’
‘Yeah, go ahead, laugh. You think Ennis Rafferty’s laughing, wherever he is? I’m telling you what I know, whether you like it or not. It’s breathing. It’s what it’s been doing all along.
This time when it sucks back, it’s going to be hard. Tell you what. Let me and George help you with the tarp. We’ll cover the thing up together and then we’ll all go out together.’
That seemed like a bad idea to me, although I didn’t know exactly why. ‘Eddie, I can handle this. Swear to God. Also, I want to take a few pictures of Mr E.T. before he rots away to nothing but stone-crab soup.’
‘Quit it,’ George said. He was looking a little green.
‘Sorry. I’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Go on, now, you guys, take care of your subject.’
Eddie was staring at the Buick, standing there on its big smooth whitewall tires, its trunk open so its ass end looked like the front end of a crocodile. ‘I hate that thing,’ he said. ‘For two cents — ‘
George was heading for the door by then, and Eddie followed without finishing what he’d do for two cents. It wasn’t that hard to figure out, anyway.
The smell of the decaying creature was getting worse by the minute, and I remembered the Puff-Pak Curtis had worn when he’d come in here to investigate the plant that looked like a lily. I thought it was still in the hutch. There was a Polaroid camera, too, or had been the last time I looked.
Very faint, from the parking lot, I heard George calling to Shirley, asking her if she was all right. She called back and said she was. A second or two later, Eddie yelled ‘FUCK!’ at the top of his voice. Another country heard from. He sounded pissed like a bear. I figured his prisoner, probably high on drugs and with a broken nose to boot, had upchucked in the back of Unit 6. Well, so what? There are worse things than having a prisoner blow chunks in your ride. Once, while I was assisting at the scene of a three-car collision over in Patchin, I stashed the drunk driver who’d caused it all in the back of my unit for safekeeping while I set out some road flares. When I returned, I discovered that my subject had taken off his shirt and taken a shit in it. He then used one of the sleeves as a squeeze-tube — you have to imagine a baker decorating a cake to get what I’m trying to describe here — and wrote his name on both side windows in the back. He was trying to do the rear window, too, only he ran out of his special brown icing. When I asked him why he’d want to do such a nasty goddam thing, he looked at me with that cockeyed hauteur only a longtime drunk can manage and said, ‘It’s a nasty goddam world, Trooper.’