E-Book Overview
The state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in Shed B out back of the barracks ever since 1979, when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call from a gas station just down the road and came back with an abandoned Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew immediately that this one was...wrong, just wrong. A few hours later, when Rafferty vanished, Wilcox and his fellow troopers knew the car was worse than dangerous.Curt's avid curiosity took the lead, and they investigated as best they could, as much as they dared. Over the years, the troop absorbed the mystery as part of the background to their work, the Buick 8 sitting out there like a still-life painting that breathes -- inhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of what world it came from.In the fall of 2001, a few months after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his eightee-year-old boy, Ned, starts coming by the barracks. Sandy Dearborn, Sergeant Commanding, knows it's the boy's way of holding onto his father, and Ned is allowed to become part of the Troop D family. One day he looks in the window of Shed B and discovers family secret. Like his father, Ned wants answers...From a Buick 8 is an audiobook about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable.
E-Book Content
By Stephen King and published by Hodder & Stoughton FICTION: Carrie 'Salem's Lot The Shining Night Shift The Stand Christine The Talisman (with Peter Straub) Pet Sematary It Misery The Tommy knockers The Dark Half Four Past Midnight Needful Things Gerald's Game Dolores Claiborne Nightmares and Dreamscapes Insomnia Rose Madder Desperation The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass Bag of Bones The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Hearts in Atlantis Dreamcatcher By Stephen King as Richard Bachman Thinner The Bachman Books The Regulators NON-FICTION: On Writing (A Memoir of the Craft) Permissions to follow Copyright © 2002 by Stephen King The right of Stephen King to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Hodder and Stoughton A division of Hodder Headline 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library Hardcover edition ISBN 0 340 77069 4 Trade paperback edition ISBN 0 340 79234 5 Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Hodder & Stoughton A division of Hodder Headline 338 Euston Road London NW1 3BH This is for Surendra and Geeta Patel NOW: Sandy Curt Wilcox's boy came around the barracks a lot the year after his father died, I mean a lot, but nobody ever told him get out the way or asked him what in hail he was doing there again. We understood what he was doing: trying to hold on to the memory of his father. Cops know a lot about the psychology of grief; most of us know more about it than we want to. That was Ned Wilcox's senior year at Statler High. He must have quit off the football team; when it