Christine

“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.