Free From a Buick 8 by Stephen King

Bibi Roth confirmed this - no VIN number, either.'
    'But Roach had reason to believe the owner drowned in the stream behind the gas station!'
    'Pooh,' Shirley said. 'The driver's overcoat turned out to be a plastic garbage can. So much for Bradley Roach's ideas.'
    'Plus,' Phil put in, 'Ennis arid your dad observed no tracks going down the slope behind the station, and the grass was still wet. If the guy had gone down there, he would have left sign.'
    'Mostly, Tony wanted to keep it in-house,' Shirley said. 'Would you say that's a fair way to put it, Sandy?'
    'Yes. The Buick itself was strange, but our way of dealingwith it wasn't much different from the way Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    we'd deal with anything out of the ordinary: a Trooper down - like your father, last year - or one who's used his weapon, or an accident, like when George Morgan was in hot pursuit of that crazy asshole who snatched his kids.'
    We were all silent for a moment. Cops have nightmares, any Trooper's wife will tell you that, and in the bad dream department, George Morgan was one of the worst. He'd been doing ninety, closing in on the crazy asshole, who had a habit of beating the kids he had snatched and claimed to love, when it happened.
    George is almost on top of him and all at once here's this senior citizen crossing the road, seventy years old, slower than creeping bullfrog Jesus, and legally blind. The asshole would have been the one to hit her if she'd started across three seconds earlier, but she didn't. No, the asshole blew right by her, the rearview mirror on the passenger side of his vehicle so close it almost took off her nose. Next comes George, and kapow. He had twelve blameless years on the State Police, two citations for bravery, community service awards without number. He was a good father to his children, a good husband to his wife, and all of that ended when a woman from Lassburg Gut tried to cross the street at the wrong moment and he killed her with PSP cruiser D-27. George was exonerated by the State Board of Review and came back to a desk job on the Troop, rated PLD - permanent light duty - at his own request. He could have gone back full-time as far as the brass was concerned, but there was a problem: George Morgan could no longer drive. Not even the family car to the market. He got the shakes every time he slid behind the wheel. His eyes teared up until he was suffering from a kind of waterlogged hysterical blindness. That summer he worked nights, on dispatch. In the afternoons he coached the Troop D-sponsored Little League team all the way to the state tournament. When that was over, he gave the kids their trophy and their pins, told them how proud of them he was, then went home (a player's mother drovehim), drank two beers, and blew his brains out in the garage. He didn't leave a note; cops rarely do. I wrote a press release in the wake of that. Reading it, you never would have guessed it was written with tears on my face. And it suddenly seemed very important that I communicate some of the reason why to Curtis Wilcox's son.
    'We're a family,' I said. 'I know that sounds corny, but it's true. Even Mister Dillon knew that much, and you do, too. Don't you?'
    The kid nodded his head. Of course he did. In the year after his father died, we were the family that mattered to him most, the one he sought out and the one that gave him what he needed to get on with his life. His mother and sisters loved him, and he loved them, but they were going on with their lives in a way that Ned could not . . . at least not yet. Some of it was being male instead of female. Some of it was being eighteen. Some of it was all those questions of why that wouldn't go away. I said, 'What families say and how families act when they're in their houses with the doors shut and how they talk and behave when they're out on their lawns and the doors are open . . . those can be very different things. Ennis knew