“This is the craziest thing I ever heard of,” Will Darnell said at last.
“It’ll get crazier,” Mercer said, smiling sincerely. “You’re going away for a very long time, Will. Maybe someday they’ll put you in charge of the prison motor pool.”
“I know you,” Will said, looking at him. “Your name is Mercer. I knew your father well. He was the crookedest cop that ever came out of King’s County.”
The blood fell out of Rick Mercer’s face and he raised his hand.
“Stop it, Rick,” Junkins said.
“Sure,” Will said. “You guys have your fun. Make your jokes about the prison motor pool. I’ll be back here doing business in two weeks. And if you don’t know it, you’re even stupider than you look.”
He glanced around at them, his eyes intelligent, sardonic… and trapped. Abruptly he raised his aspirator to his mouth and breathed in deeply.
“Get this bag of shit out of here,” Mercer said. He was still white.
“Are you all right?” Junkins asked. They were sitting in an unmarked state Ford half an hour later. The sun had decided to come out and shone blindingly on melting snow and wet streets. Darnell’s Garage sat silent. Darnell’s records—and Cunningham’s street-rod Plymouth—were safely penned up inside.
“That crack he made about my father,” Mercer said heavily. “My father shot himself, Rudy. Blew his head off. And I always thought… in college I read…” He shrugged. “Lots of cops eat the gun. Melvin Purvis did it, you know. He was the man who got Dillinger. But you wonder.” Mercer lit a cigarette and drew smoke downstairs in a long, shuddery breath.
“He didn’t know anything,” Junkins said.
“The fuck he didn’t,” Mercer said. He unrolled his window and threw the cigarette out. He unclipped the mike under the dash. “Home, this is Mobile Two.”
“Ten-four, Mobile Two.”
“What’s happening with our carrier pigeon?”
“He’s on Interstate Eighty-four coming up on Port Jervis.” Port Jervis was the crossover point between Pennsylvania and New York.
“New York is all ready?”
“Affirmative.”
“You tell them again that I want him northeast of Middletown before they grab him, and his toll-ticket taken in evidence.”
“Ten-four.”
Mercer put the mike back and smiled thinly. “Once he crosses into New York, there’s not a question in the world about it being Federal—but we’ve still got first dibs. Isn’t that beautiful?”
Junkins didn’t answer. There was nothing beautiful about it—from Darnell with his aspirator to Mercer’s father eating his gun, there was nothing beautiful about it. Junkins was filled with a spooky feeling of inevitability, a feeling that the ugly things were not ending but only just beginning to happen. He felt halfway through a dark story that might prove too terrible to finish. Except he had to finish it now, didn’t he? Yes.
The terrible feeling, the terrible image persisted: that the first time he had talked to Arnie Cunningham, he had been talking to a drowning man, and the second time he had talked to him, the drowning had happened—and he was talking to a corpse.
The cloud cover over western New York was breaking, and Arnie’s spirits began to rise. It always felt good to get away from Libertyville, away from… from everything. Not even the knowledge that he had contraband in the boot could quench that feeling of lift. And at least it wasn’t dope this time. Far in the back of his mind—hardly even acknowledged, but there—was the idle speculation about how things would be different and how his life would change if he just dumped the cigarettes and kept on going. If he just left the entire depressing mess behind.
But of course he wouldn’t. Leaving Christine after he had put so much into her was of course impossible.
He turned up the radio and hummed along with something current. The sun, weakened by December but still trying to be bold, broke cover entirely and Arnie grinned.
He was still grinning when the New York State Police car pulled up beside him in the passing lane and paced him. The loudspeaker on top began to chant, “This is for the Chrysler! Pull over, Chrysler! Pull over!”
Arnie looked over, the grin fading from his lips. He stared into a pair of black sunglasses. Copglasses. The terror that seized him was deeper than he would have believed any emotion could be—and it wasn’t for himself. His mouth went totally dry. His mind went into a blurring overdrive. He saw himself tramping the gas pedal and running for it, and perhaps he would have done it if he had been driving Christine… but he wasn’t. He saw Will Darnell telling him that if he got caught holding a bag, it was his bag. Most of all he saw Junkins, Junkins with his sharp brown eyes, and knew this was Junkins’s doing.
He wished Rudolph Junkins was dead.
“Pull over, Chrysler! I’m not talking to hear my own voice! Pull over right now!”
Can’t say anything, Arnie thought incoherently as he veered over into the breakdown lane. His balls were crawling, his stomach churning madly. He could see his own eyes in the rearview, wall-eyed with fear behind his glasses—not for him, though. Not for him. Christine. He was afraid for Christine. What they might do to Christine.
His panic-stricken mind spun up a kaleidoscope of jumbled images. College application forms with the words REJECTED—CONVICTED FELON stamped across them. Prison bars, blued steel. A judge bending down from a high bench, his face white and accusing. Big bull queers in a prison yard looking for fresh meat. Christine riding the conveyor into the car-crusher in the junkyard behind the garage.
And then, as he stopped the Chrysler and put it in park, the State Police car pulling in behind him (and another, appearing like magic, pulling in ahead of him), a thought came from nowhere, full of cold comfort: Christine can take care of herself.
Another thought came as the cops got out and came toward him, one holding a search warrant in his hand. It also seemed to come from nowhere, but it reverberated in Roland D. LeBay’s raspy, old man’s tones:
And she’ll take care of you, boy. All you got to do is go on believing in her and she’ll take care of you.
Arnie opened the car door and got out a moment before one of the cops could open it.
“Arnold Richard Cunningham?” one of the cops asked. “Yes, indeed,” Arnie said calmly. “Was I speeding?”
“No, son,” one of the others said. “But you are in a world of hurt, all the same.”
The first cop stepped forward as formally as a career Army officer. “I have a duly executed document here permitting the search of this 1966 Chrysler Imperial in the name of the People of New York State and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States of America. Further—”
“Well, that just about covers the motherfucking waterfront, doesn’t it?” Arnie said. His back flared dully, and he jammed his hands against it.
The cop’s eyes widened slightly at the old voice coming out of this kid, but then he went on.
“Further, to seize any contraband found in the course of this search in the name of the People of New York State and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States of America.”
“Fine,” Arnie said. None of it seemed real. Blue lights flashed a confusion. People passing in their cars turned to look, but he found he had no desire to turn from them, to hide his face, and that was something of a relief.
“Give me the keys, kid,” one of the cops said.
“Why don’t you just get them yourself, you shitter?” Arnie said.
“You’re not helping yourself, kiddo,” the cop said, but he looked startled and a little fearful all the same; for a moment the kid’s voice had deepened and roughened and he had sounded forty years older and a pretty tough customer—nothing like the skinny runt he saw before him at all.
He leaned in, got the keys, and three of the cops immediately headed for the boot. They know, Arnie thought, resigned. At least this had nothing to do with Junkins’s obsession with Buddy Repperton and Moochie Welch and the others (at least not directly, he amended cautiously); this smelled like a well-planned and well-coordinated operation against Will’s smuggling operations from Libertyville into New York and New England.