Read From a Buick 8 for Free Online

for the men in the white coats because the Troop D Sergeant Commanding has lost his shit, you can back me up. After all, you were here.'
    Arky's smile faded. His iron-gray hair fluffed around his head in the limp, hot breeze that had sprung up. 'You sure dat a good idear, Sarge?'
    'Curiosity killed the cat,' I said, 'but - '
    ' - satisfaction brought him back,' Shirley finished from behind me. 'A great big dose of it, is what Trooper Curtis Wilcox used to say. Can I join you? Or is this the Boys' Club today?'
    'No sex discrimination on the smokers' bench,' I said. 'Join us, please.'
    Like me, Shirley had just finished her shift and Steff Colucci had taken her place at dispatch. She sat next to Ned, gave him a smile, and brought a pack of Parliaments out of her purse. It was two-double-oh-two, we all knew better, had for years, and we went right on killing ourselves. Amazing. Or maybe, considering we live in a world where drunks can crush State Troopers against the sides of eighteen-wheelers and where make-believe Buicks show up from time to time at real gas stations, not so amazing. Anyway, it was nothing to me right then.
    Right then I had a story to tell.

THEN

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    In 1979, the Jenny station at the intersection of SR 32 and the Humboldt Road was still open, but it was staggering badly; OPEC took all the little 'uns out in the end. The mechanic and owner was Herbert
    'Hugh' Bossey, and on that particular day he was over in Lassburg, getting his teeth looked after - a bear for his Snickers bars and RC Colas was Hugh Bossey.no mech on duty because of tooth-ake, said the sign taped in the window of the garage bay. The pump-jockey was a high school dropout named Bradley Roach, barely out of his teens. This fellow, twenty-two years and untold thousands of beers later, would come along and kill the father of a boy who was not then born, crushing him against the side of a Freuhof box, turning him like a spindle, unrolling him like a noisemaker, spinning him almost skinless into the weeds and leaving his bloody clothes inside-out on the highway like a magic trick. But all that is in the yet-to-be. We are in the past now, in the magical land of Then.

    At around ten o'clock on a morning in July, Brad Roach was sitting in the office of the Jenny station with his feet up, reading Inside View. On the front was a picture of a flying saucer hovering ominously over the White House.
    The bell in the garage dinged as the tires of a vehicle rolled over the airhose on the tarmac. Brad looked up to see a car - the very one which would spend so many years in the darkness of Shed B - pull up to the second of the station's two pumps. That was the one labeledhi test. It was a beautiful midnight-blue Buick, old (it had the big chrome grille and the portholes running up the sides) but in mint condition. The paint sparkled, the windshield sparkled, the chrome bar sweeping along the side of the body sparkled, and even betore the driver opened the door and got out, Bradley Roach knew there was something wrong with it. He just couldn't put his finger on what it was. He dropped his newspaper on the desk (he never would have been allowed to take it out of the desk drawer in the first place, if the boss hadn't been overtown paying for his sweet tooth) and got up just as the Roadmaster's driver opened his door on the far side of the pumps and got out. It had rained heavily the night before and the roads were still wet (hell, still underwater in some of the low places on the west side of Statler Township) but the sun had come out around eight o'clock and by ten the day was both bright and warm. Nevertheless, the man who got out of the car was dressed in a black trenchcoat and large black hat. 'Looked like a spy in some old movie,' Brad said to Ennis Rafferty an hour or so later, indulging in what was, for him, a flight of poetic fancy. The trenchcoat, in fact, was so long it nearly