“It’s too late for sorry, man,” I said.
I got one crutch and then the other. I pulled myself up little by little, slipping twice before I could get the crutches under me again. Now my hands felt like pieces of furniture. Arnie made no move to help me; he stood with his back against the van, his eyes wide and shocked.
“Dennis, I can’t help it,” he whispered. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me.”
“Is LeBay there?” I asked him.
“He’s always here,” Arnie groaned. “Oh God, always! Except—”
“The car?”
“When Christine… when she goes, then he’s with her. That’s the only time he’s… he’s…”
Arnie fell silent. His head slipped over to one side. His chin rolled on his chest in a boneless pivot. His hair dangled toward the snow. Spit ran out of his mouth and splattered on his boots. And then he began to scream thinly and beat his gloved fists on the van behind him:
“Go away! Go away! Go awaaaaay!”
Then nothing for maybe five seconds nothing except the shuddering of his body, as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his clothes; nothing except that slow, horrible roll of his chin on his chest.
I thought maybe he was winning, that he was beating the dirty old sonofabitch. But when he looked up, Arnie was gone. LeBay was there.
“It’s all going to happen just like he said,” LeBay told me. “Let it go, boy. Maybe I won’t drive over you.”
Come on over to Darnell’s tonight, I said. My voice was harsh, my throat as dry as sand. “We’ll play. I’ll bring Leigh. You bring Christine.”
“I’ll pick my own time and place,” LeBay said, and grinned with Arnie’s mouth, showing Arnie’s teeth, which were young and strong—a mouth still years from the indignity of dentures. “You won’t know when or where. But you’ll know… when the time comes.”
“Think again,” I said, almost casually. “Come to Darnell’s tonight, or she and I start talking tomorrow.”
He laughed, an ugly contemptuous sound. “And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?”
“Oh, we won’t be taken seriously at first,” I said. “I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons… uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff.”
He was still grinning, but his eyes looked at me with narrow suspicion. That, and something else. I thought that something else was the first sparkle of fear.
“And what you don’t seem to realize is how many people know something is wrong.”
His grin faltered. Of course he must have realized that, and been worried about it. But maybe killing gets to be a fever; maybe after a while you are simply unable to stop and count the cost.
“Whatever weird, filthy kind of life you still have is all wrapped up in that car,” I said. “You knew it, and you planned to use Arnie from the very beginning—except that “planned” is the wrong word, because you never really planned anything, did you? You just followed your intuitions.”
He made a snarling sound and turned to go.
“You really want to think about it,” I called after him. “Arnie’s father knows something is rotten. So does mine. I think there must be some police somewhere who’d be willing to listen to anything about how their friend Junkins died. And it all comes back to Christine, Christine, Christine. Sooner or later someone’s going to run her through the crusher in the back of Darnell’s just on general principles.”
He had turned back and was looking at me with a bright mixture of hate and fear in his eyes.
“We’ll keep talking, and a lot of people will laugh at us, I don’t doubt it. But I’ve got two pieces of cast with Arnie’s signature on them. Only one of them isn’t his. It’s yours. I’ll take them to the state cops and keep pestering them until they have a handwriting specialist confirm that. People are going to start watching Arnie. People are going to start watching Christine too. You get the picture?”
“Sonny, you don’t worry me one fucking bit.” But his eyes said something different. I was getting to him, all right.
“It’s going to happen,” I said. “People are only rational on the surface. They still toss salt over their left shoulder if they spill the shaker, they don’t walk under ladders, they believe in survival after death. And sooner or later — probably sooner, with Leigh and me shooting off our mouths—someone is going to turn that car of yours into a sardine can. And I’m willing to bet that when it goes, you’ll go with it.”
“Don’t you just wish!” he sneered.
“We’ll be at Darnell’s tonight,” I said. “If you’re good, you can get rid of both of us. That won’t end it either, but it might give you some breathing space… time enough to get out of town. But I don’t think you’re good enough, chum. It’s gone on too long. We’re getting rid of you.”
I crutched back to my Duster and got in. I used the crutches more clumsily than I had to, tried to make myself look more incapacitated than I really was. I had rocked him by mentioning the signatures; it was time to leave before I overplayed my hand. But there was one more thing. One thing guaranteed to drive LeBay into a frenzy.
I pulled my left leg in with my hands, slammed the door, and leaned out.
I looked into his eyes and smiled.
“She’s great in bed,” I said. “Too bad you’ll never know.”
With a furious roar, he charged at me. I rolled up the window and slapped down the door-lock. Then, leisurely, I started the engine while he slammed his gloved fists on the glass. His face was snarling, terrible. There was no Arnie in it now. No Arnie at all. My friend was gone. I felt a dark sorrow that was deeper than tears or fear, but I kept that slow, insulting, dirty grin on my face. Then, slowly, I raised my middle finger to the glass.
“Fuck you, LeBay,” I said, and then pulled out, leaving him to stand there in the lot, shaking with that simple, unswerving fury his brother had told me of. It was that more than anything else that I was counting on to bring him tonight.
We’d see.
50
PETUNIA
Something warm was running in my eyes
But I found my baby somehow that night,
I held her tight, I kissed her our last kiss…
I drove about four blocks before the reaction set in, and then I had to pull over. I had the shakes, bad. Not even the heater, turned up to full, could kill them. My breath came in harsh little gasps. I clutched myself to keep warm, but it seemed that I would never be warm again, never. That face, that horrible face, and Arnie buried somewhere inside, he’s always here, Arnie had said, always except when—what? When Christine rolled by herself, of course. LeBay couldn’t be both places at the same time. That was beyond even his powers.
At last I was able to drive on again, and I wasn’t even aware that I had been crying until I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the wet circles under my eyes.
It was quarter to ten by the time I made it out to Johnny Pomberton’s place. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing green gum-rubber boots and a heavy red-and-black-checked hunting jacket. An old hat with a grease-darkened bill was tilted up on his balding head as he studied the grey sky.
“More snow comin, the radio says. Didn’t know as you’d really be out, boy, but I brung her around forya just in case. What do you think of her?”