Christine (42 page)

Michael went in and had no better luck; he came out with nothing more than a dry throat and a face that looked ten years older than it had going in.

At the motel, Regina told Warberg what Arnie had said and asked him if there was any chance he might be right.

Warberg looked thoughtful. “Yes, that's a possible defense,” he said. “But it would be a helluva lot more possible if Arnie was the first domino in line. He's not. There's a used-car dealer here in Albany named Henry Buck. He was the catcher. He's been arrested too.”

“What has he said?” Michael asked.

“I have no way of knowing. But when I tried to speak to his lawyer, he declined to speak with me. I find that ominous. If Buck talks, he puts the onus on Arnie. I'll bet you my house and lot that Buck can testify your son knew that secret compartment was there, and that's bad.”

Warberg looked at them closely.

“You see, what your boy said to you is really only half-smart, Mrs. Cunningham. I'll be talking to him tomorrow, before they move him back to Pennsylvania. What I hope to make him see is that there's a possibility this whole thing could come down on his head.”

• • •

The first flakes of snow began to swirl out of the heavy sky as they turned onto Steve and Vicky's street.
Is it snowing in Libertyville yet?
Arnie wondered, and touched the keys on their leather tab in his pocket. Probably it was.

Christine was still in Darnell's Garage, impounded. That was all right. At least she was out of the weather. He would pick her up again. In time.

The previous weekend was like a blurred bad dream. His parents, haranguing him in the little white room, had seemed to bear the disconnected faces of strangers; they were heads talking in a foreign language. The lawyer they had hired, Warley or Warmly or whatever, kept talking about something he called the domino theory, and about the need to get out of “the condemned building before the whole thing falls down on your head, boy—there are two states and three Federal agencies bringing up the wrecking balls.”

But Arnie was more worried about Christine.

It seemed clearer and clearer to him that Roland D. LeBay was either with him or hovering someplace near—he was, perhaps, coalescing inside him. This idea did not frighten Arnie; it comforted him. But he had to be careful. Not of Junkins; he felt that Junkins had only suspicions, and that they all lay in wrong directions, radiating out from Christine rather than in toward her.

But Darnell . . . there could be problems with Will. Yes, real problems.

That first night in Albany, after his mother and father had gone back to their motel, Arnie had been conducted to a holding cell, where he had fallen asleep with surprising ease and speed. And he had had a dream—not quite a nightmare, but something that seemed terribly disquieting. He had awakened watchfully in the middle of the night, his body running with sweat.

He had dreamed that Christine had been reduced in scale to a tiny '58 Plymouth no longer than a man's hand. It was on a slotcar track surrounded by HO-scale scenery that was amazingly apt—here was a plastic street that could be Basin Drive, here was another that could be JFK Drive, where Moochie Welch had been killed. A Lego building that looked exactly like Libertyville High. Plastic houses, paper trees . . .

. . . and a gigantic, hulking Will Darnell was at the controls that dictated how fast or how slowly the tiny Fury ran through all of this. His breath wheezed in and out of his damaged lungs with a windstorm sound.

You don't want to open your mouth, kiddo,
Will said. He loomed over this scale-model world like the Amazing Colossal Man.
You don't want to frig with me because I'm in control; I can do this—

And slowly, Will began to turn the control knob over toward
FAST
.

No!
Arnie tried to scream.
No, don't do that, please! I love her! Please, you'll kill her!

On the track, the tiny Christine raced through the tiny Libertyville faster and faster, her rear end switching on the curves as she shimmied on the far edge of centrifugal force, that dish-shaped mystery. Now she was simply a blur of white-over-red, her engine a high, angry wasp-whine.

Please!
Arnie screamed.
Pleeeeeaaaaase!

At last, Will had begun to turn the control back, looking grimly pleased. The little car began to slow down.

If you start to get ideas, you just want to remember where your car is, kiddo. Keep your mouth shut and we'
ll both live to fight another day. I've been in tighter jams than this—

Arnie had reached out to grasp the little car, to rescue it from the track. The dream-Will had slapped his hand away.

Whose bag is it, kiddo?

Will, please—

Let me hear you say it.

It's my bag.

Just remember it, kiddo.

And Arnie had awakened with that in his ears. There had been no more sleep for him that night.

Was it so unlikely that Will would know . . . well, would know something about Christine? No. He saw a great deal from behind that window, but he knew how to keep his mouth shut—at least until the time was right to open it. He might know what Junkins did not, that Christine's regeneration in November was not just strange but totally impossible. He would know that a lot of the repairs had never been made, at least not by Arnie.

What else would he know?

With a creeping coldness that moved up his legs to the root of his guts, Arnie realized at last that Will could have been at the garage the night Repperton and the others had died. In fact, it was more than possible. It was
probable.
Jimmy Sykes was simple, and Will didn't like to trust him alone.

You don't want to open your mouth. You don't want to frig with me because I can do this. . . .

But even supposing Will knew, who would believe him? It was too late for self-delusion now, and Arnie could no longer put the unthinkable thought away from himself . . . he no longer even wanted to. Who would believe Will if Will decided to tell someone that Christine sometimes ran by herself? That she had been out on her own the night Moochie Welch was killed, and the night those other hoods were killed? Would the police believe that? They would laugh themselves into a hemorrhage. Junkins? Getting warmer, but Arnie didn't believe Junkins would be able to accept such a thing, even if he wanted to. Arnie had seen his eyes. So even if Will did know, what good would his knowledge do?

Then, with mounting horror, Arnie realized that it didn't matter. Will would be out on bail tomorrow or the next day, and then Christine would be his hostage. He could torch it—he had torched plenty of cars in his time, as Arnie knew from sitting in the office and listening to him yarn—and after she was torched, a burned hulk, helpless, there was the crusher out back. In goes the cindered hulk of Christine on the conveyor belt, out comes a smashed cube of metal.

The cops have sealed the place.

But that didn't cut any ice, either. Will Darnell was a very old fox, and he stayed prepared for any contingency. If Will wanted to get in and torch Christine, he would do it . . . although it was much more likely, Arnie thought, that he would hire an insurance specialist to do the job—a guy who would throw double handfuls of charcoal-lighter cubes into the car and then toss a match.

In his mind's eye Arnie could see the blossoming flames. He could smell charring upholstery.

He lay on the cell bunk, his mouth dry, his heart beating rapidly in his chest.

You don't want to open your mouth. You don't want to frig with me. . . .

Of course, if Will tried something and got careless—if his concentration lapsed for even a moment—Christine would get him. But somehow Arnie didn't think Will would get careless.

• • •

The next day he had been taken back to Pennsylvania, charged, then bailed for a nominal sum. There would be a preliminary hearing in January, and there was already talk of a grand jury. The bust was front-page material across the state, although Arnie was only identified as “a youth” whose name was “being withheld by state and Federal authorities due to his minor status.”

Arnie's name was common enough knowledge in Libertyville, however. In spite of its new exurban sprawl of drive-ins, fast-food emporiums, and Bowl-a-Ramas, it was still a faculty town where a lot of people were living in other people's back pockets. These people, mostly associated with Horlicks University, knew who had been driving for Will Darnell and who had been arrested over the New York State line with a trunkful of contraband cigarettes. It was Regina's nightmare.

Arnie went home in the custody of his parents—bailed for a thousand dollars—after a brief detour to jail. It was all nothing but a big shitting game of Monopoly, really. His parents had come up with the Get Out of Jail Free card. As expected.

• • •

“What are you smiling about, Arnie?” Regina asked him. Michael was driving the wagon along at fast walking speed, looking through the swirls of snow for Steve and Vicky's ranchhouse.

“Was I smiling?”

“Yes,” she said, and touched his hair.

“I don't really remember,” he said remotely, and she took her hand away.

• • •

They had come home on Sunday and his parents had left him pretty much alone, either because they didn't know how to talk to him or because they were utterly disgusted with him . . . or perhaps it was a combination of the two. He didn't give a crap which, and that was the truth. He felt washed out, exhausted, a ghost of himself. His mother had gone to bed and slept all that afternoon, after taking the telephone off the hook. His father puttered aimlessly in his workroom, running his electric planer periodically and then shutting it off.

Arnie sat in the living room watching a football playoff doubleheader, not knowing who was playing, not caring, content to watch the players run around, first in bright warm California sunshine, later in a mixture of rain and sleet that turned the playing field to churned-up mud and erased the lines.

Around six o'clock he dozed off.

And dreamed.

He dreamed again that night and the next, in the bed where he had slept since earliest childhood, the elm outside casting its old familiar shadow (a skeleton each winter that gained miraculous new flesh each May). These dreams were not like the dream of the giant Will looming over the slotcar track. He could not remember these dreams at all more than a few moments after waking. Perhaps that was just as well. A figure by the roadside; a fleshless finger tapping a decayed palm in a lunatic parody of instruction; an uneasy sense of freedom and . . . escape? Yes, escape. Nothing else except. . .

Yes, he escaped from these dreams and back into reality with one repeating image: He was behind the wheel of Christine, driving slowly through a howling blizzard, snow so thick that he could literally see no farther than the end of her hood. The wind was not a scream; it was a lower, more sinister sound, a basso roar. Then the image had changed. The snow wasn't snow any longer; it was tickertape. The roar of the wind was the roar of a great crowd lining both sides of Fifth Avenue. They were cheering him. They were cheering Christine. They were cheering because he and Christine had . . . had . . .

Escaped.

Each time this confused dream retreated, he thought,
When this is over I'm getting out. Getting out for sure. Going to drive to Mexico.
And Mexico, as he imagined its steady sun and its rural quiet, seemed more real than the dreams.

Shortly after awakening from the last of these dreams, the idea of spending Christmas with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, just like in the old days, had come to him. He awoke with it, and it clanged in his head with a peculiar persistence. The idea seemed to be an awfully good one, an all-important one. To get out of Libertyville before. . .

Well, before Christmas. What else?

So he began talking to his mother and father about it, coming down particularly hard on Regina. On Wednesday, she abruptly gave in and agreed. He knew she had talked to Vicky, and Vicky hadn't been inclined to lord it over her, so it was all right.

Now, on Christmas Eve, he felt that
everything
would soon be all right.

• • •

“There it is, Mike,” Regina said, “and you're going to drive right by it, just like you do every time we come here.”

Michael grunted and turned into the driveway. “I saw it,” he said in the perpetually defensive tone he always seemed to use around his wife.
He's a donkey,
Arnie thought.
She talks to him like a donkey, she rides him like a donkey, and he brays like a donkey.

“You're smiling again,” Regina said.

“I was just thinking about how much I love you both,” Arnie said. His father looked at him, surprised and touched; there was a soft gleam in his mother's eyes that might have been tears.

They really believed it.

The shitters.

• • •

By three o'clock that Christmas Eve the snow was still only isolated flurries, although the flurries were beginning to blend into each other. The delay in the storm's arrival was not good news, the weather forecasters said. It had compacted itself and turned even more vicious. Predictions of possible accumulations had gone from a foot to a possible eighteen inches, with serious drifting in high winds.

Leigh Cabot sat in the living room of her house, across from a small natural Christmas tree that was already beginning to shed its needles (in her house she was the voice of traditionalism and for four years had successfully staved off her father's wish for a synthetic tree and her mother's wish to kick off the holiday season with a goose or a capon instead of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey). She was alone in the house. Her mother and father had gone over to the Stewarts' for Christmas Eve drinks; Mr. Stewart was her father's new boss, and they liked each other. This was a friendship Mrs. Cabot was eager to promote. In the last ten years they had moved six times, hopping all over the eastern seaboard, and of all the places they had been, her mom liked Libertyville the best. She wanted to stay here, and her husband's friendship with Mr. Stewart could go a long way toward ensuring that.