I tried to jam down the clutch with my left foot and that silver bolt of pain came again, making me throw my head back and grind my teeth until it subsided a little.
“Dennis, I’m going down the street and find a phone and call a doctor.” Her face was white and scared. “You broke it again, didn’t you? When you fell?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But you can’t do that, Leigh. It’ll be your folks or mine if we don’t end it now. You know that. LeBay won’t stop. He has a well-developed sense of vengeance. We can’t stop.”
“But you can’t drive it!” she wailed. She looked up into the cab at me, crying now. The hood of her parka had fallen back in our mutual struggle to get me up into the driver’s seat, where I now sat in magnificent uselessness. I could see a scatter of snowflakes in her dark blond hair.
“Go inside there,” I said. “See if you can find a broom, or a long stick of wood.”
“What good will that do?” she asked, crying harder.
“Just get it, and then we’ll see.”
She went into the dark maw of the open door and disappeared from view. I held onto my leg and sparred with terror. If I really had broken my leg again, there was a good chance I’d be wearing a built-up heel on my left foot for the rest of my life. But there might not even be that much of my life left if we couldn’t put a stop to Christine. Now there was a cheery thought.
Leigh came back with a push broom. “Will this do?” she asked.
“To get us inside, yes. Then we’ll have to see if we can find something better.”
The handle was the type that unscrews. I got hold of it, unthreaded it, and tossed the bristle end aside. Holding it in my left hand along my side—just another goddam crutch I pushed down the clutch with it. It held for a moment, then slipped off. The clutch sprang back up. The top of the handle almost bashed me in the mouth. Lookin good, Guilder. But it would have to do.
“Come on, get in,” I said.
“Dennis, are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be,” I said.
She looked at me for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay.”
She went around to the passenger side and got in. I slammed my own door, depressed Petunia’s clutch with the broom-handle, and geared into first. I had the clutch halfway out and Petunia was just starting to roll forward when the broom-handle slipped off the clutch again. The septic tanker ran inside Darnell’s Garage with a series of neck-snapping jerks, and when I slammed my right foot down on the brake, the truck stalled. We were mostly inside.
“Leigh, I’ve got to have something with a wider foot,” I said. “This broom-handle don’t cut it.”
“I’ll see what there is.”
She got out and began to walk around the edge of the garage floor, hunting. I stared around. Creepy, Leigh had said, and she was right. The only cars left were four or five old soldiers so gravely wounded that no one had cared enough to claim them. All the rest of the slant spaces with their numbers stencilled in white paint were empty. I glanced at stall twenty and then glanced away.
The overhead tyre racks were likewise nearly empty. A few baldies remained, heeled over against one another like giant doughnuts blackened in a fire, but that was all. One of the two lifts was partially up, with a wheel-rim caught beneath it. The front-end alignment chart on the right-hand wall glimmered faintly red and white, the two headlight targets like bloodshot eyes. And shadows, everywhere. Overhead, big box-shaped heaters pointed their louvers this way and that, roosting up there like weird bats.
It seemed very much like a death-place.
Leigh had used another of Jimmy’s keys to open Will’s office. I could see her moving back and forth in there through the window Will had used to look out at his customers… those working joes who had to keep their cars running so they could blah-blah-blah. She flipped some switches, and the overhead fluorescents came on in snowcold ranks. So the electric company hadn’t cut off the juice. I’d have to have her turn the lights off again—we couldn’t afford to risk attracting attention—but at least we could have some heat.
She opened another door and disappeared temporarily from view. I glanced at my watch. One-thirty now.
She came back, and I saw that she was holding an O-Cedar mop, the kind with the wide yellow sponge along the foot.
“Would this be any good?”
“Only perfect,” I said. “Get in, kiddo. We’re in business.”
She climbed up once more, and I pushed the clutch down with the mop. “Lots better,” I said. “Where did you find it?”
“In the bathroom,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.
“Bad in there?”
“Dirty, reeking of cigars, and there’s a whole pile of mouldy books in the corner. The kind they sell at those little hole-in-the-wall stores.”
So that was what Darnell left behind him, I thought: an empty garage, a pile of Beeline Books, and a phantom reek of Roi-Tan cigars. I felt cold again, and thought that if I had my way, I’d see this place bulldozed flat and pasted over with hottop. I could not shake the feeling that it was an unmarked grave of a sort—the place where LeBay and Christine had killed my friend’s mind and taken over his life.
“I can’t wait to get out of here,” Leigh said, looking around nervously.
“Really? I kind of like it. I was thinking of moving in.” I caressed her shoulder and looked deeply into her eyes. “We could start a family,” I breathed.
She held up a fist. “Want me to start a nosebleed?”
“No, that’s all right. For what it’s worth, I can’t wait to get out of here, either.” I drove Petunia the rest of the way inside. I found that I could run the clutch pretty well using the O-Cedar mop… in first gear, at least. The handle had a tendency to bend, and I would have preferred something thicker, but it would have to do unless we could find something better in the meantime.
“We’ve got to turn off the lights again,” I said, killing the engine. “The wrong people might see them.”
She got out and turned them off while I swung Petunia in a wide circle and then carefully backed it up until the rear end almost touched the window between the garage and Darnell’s office. Now the big truck’s snout was pointing directly back at the open overhead door through which we had entered.
With the lights off, the shadows descended again. The light coming in through the open door was weak, muted by the snow, white and without strength. It spread on the oil-stained, cracked concrete like a pie-wedge and simply died halfway across the floor.
“I’m cold, Dennis,” Leigh called from Darnell’s office. “He’s got the switches for the heat marked. Can I turn them on?”
“Go ahead,” I called back.
A moment later the garage whispered with the sound of the blowers. I leaned back against the seat, gently running my hands over my left leg. The material of my jeans was stretched smoothly over the thigh, tight and without a wrinkle. The sonofabitch was swelling. And it hurt. Christ, did it hurt.
Leigh came back and climbed up beside me. She told me again how terrible I looked, and for some reason my mind cross-patched and I thought of the afternoon Arnie had brought Christine down here, of the be-bop queen’s husband yelling for Arnie to get that hunk of junk out from in front of his house, and of Arnie telling me the guy was a regular Robert Deadford. How we had gotten the giggles. I closed my eyes against the sting of tears.
With nothing to do but wait, time slowed down. It was quarter of two, then two o’clock. Outside, the snow had thickened a little, but not much. Leigh got out of the truck and pushed the button that trundled the door back down. That made it even darker inside.