He had gone in, had gotten his chow, had come out again… and stared right in through the windscreen at Leigh and me, sitting close together, our arms around each other, looking deep into each other’s eyes, as the poets say. Nothing but a coincidence—a grisly, hideous coincidence. Except that even now a part of my mind is coldly convinced that it was Christine that even at that turn, Christine led him there.
There was a long, frozen moment. A little moan escaped Leigh’s throat. Arnie stood not quite halfway across the small parking lot, dressed in his high school jacket, faded jeans, boots. A plaid scarf was tied around his throat. The collar of his jacket was turned up, and its black wings framed a face that was slowly twisting from an expression of sick incredulity into a pallid grimace of hate, The red-and-white-striped bag with the Colonel’s smiling face on it slipped out of one of his gloved hands and thumped onto the packed snow of the parking lot.
“Dennis,” Leigh whispered. “Dennis, oh my God.”
He began to run. I thought he was coming to the car, probably to haul me out and work me over. I could see myself hopping feebly around on my not-so-good good leg under the parking-lot lights that had just come on while Arnie, whose life I had saved all those years going back to kindergarten, beat the living Jesus out of me. He ran, his mouth twisted down in a snarl I had seen before—but not on his face. It was LeBay’s face now.
He didn’t stop at my car; instead he ran right past. I twisted around, and that was when I saw Christine.
I got my door open and began to struggle out, grabbing onto the roof gutter for support. The cold numbed my fingers almost at once.
“Dennis, no!” Leigh cried.
I got on my feet just as Arnie raked open Christine’s door.
“Arnie!” I shouted. “Hey, man!”
His head jerked up. His eyes were wide and blank and glaring. A line of spittle was working its way down from one corner of his mouth. Christine’s grille seemed to be snarling too.
He raised both fists and shook them at me. “You shitter!” His voice was high and cracked. “Have her! You deserve her! She’s shit! You’re both shit! Have each other! You won’t for long!”
People had come to the plate-glass windows of the Kentucky Fried Chicken and the neighbouring Kowloon Express to see what was going on,
“Arnie! Let’s talk, man—”
He jumped in the car and slammed her door. Christine’s engine screamed and her headlights came on, the glaring white eyes of my dream, pinning me like a bug on a card. And over them, behind the glass, was Arnie’s terrible face, the face of a devil sick of sin. That face, both hateful and haunted, has lived in my dreams ever since. Then the face was gone. It was replaced by a skull, a grinning death’s head.
Leigh uttered a high, piercing scream. She had turned around to look, so I knew that it wasn’t just my imagination. She had seen it too.
Christine roared forward, her rear tyres spinning snow back. She didn’t come for the Duster, but for me. I think his intention was to grind me to jelly between his car and mine. It was only my bad left leg that saved me; it buckled and I fell back inside my Duster, bumping my right hip on the wheel and honking the horn.
A cold wave of wind buffeted my face. Christine’s bright red flank passed within three feet of me. She roared down the take-out joint’s IN drive and shot onto JFK Drive without slowing, rear end fishtailing. Then she was gone, still accelerating.
I looked at the snow and could see the fresh zig-zag treads of her tyres. She had missed my open door by no more than three inches.
Leigh was crying. I pulled my left leg into the car with my hands, slammed the door, and held her. Her arms groped for me blindly and then grasped with panicky tightness. “It… it wasn’t…”
“Shhh, Leigh. Never mind. Don’t think about it.”
“That wasn’t Arnie driving that car! It was a dead person! It was a dead person!”
“It was LeBay,” I said, and now that it had happened, I felt a kind of eerie calm instead of the trembly, close-call reaction I should have had—that and the guilt of finally being discovered with my best friend’s girl. “It was him, Leigh. You just met Roland D. LeBay.”
She wept, crying out her fear and shock and horror, holding onto me. I was glad to have her. My left leg throbbed dully. I looked up into the rearview mirror at the empty slot where Christine had been. Now that it had happened, it seemed to me that any other conclusion would have been impossible. The peace of the last two weeks, the simple joy of having Leigh on my side, all of that now seemed to be the unnatural thing, the false thing—as false as the phoney war between Hitier’s conquest of Poland and the Wehrmacht’s rolling assault on France.
And I began to see the end of things, how it would be.
She looked up at me, her checks wet. “What now, Dennis? What do we do now?”
“Now we end it.”
“How? What do you mean?”
Speaking more to myself than to her, I said, “He needs an alibi. We have to be ready when he goes away. The garage. Darnell’s. I’m going to trap it in there. Try to kill it.” “Dennis, what are you talking about?”
“He’ll leave town,” I said. “Don’t you see? All of the people Christine has killed—they make a ring around Arnie. He’ll know that. He’ll get Arnie out of town again.”
LeBay, you mean.
I nodded, and Leigh shuddered.
“We have to kill it. You know that.”
“But how? Please, Dennis… how are we going to do it?”
And at last I had an idea.
48
PREPARATIONS
There’s a killer on the road,
His brain is squirming like a toad…
I dropped Leigh off at her house and told her to call me if she saw Christine cruising around.
“What are you going to do? Come over here with a flame-thrower?”
“A bazooka,” I said, and we both started to laugh hysterically.
“Nuke the ’58! Nuke the ’58!” Leigh yelled, and we got laughing again—but all the time we were laughing we were scared half out of our minds… maybe more than half. And all the time we were laughing I was sick over Arnie, both over what he had seen and what I had done. And I think Leigh felt the same. It’s just that sometimes you have to laugh. Sometimes you just do. And when it comes, nothing can keep that laugh away. It just walks in and does its stuff.
“So what do I tell my folks?” she asked me when we finally started to come down a little. “I’ve got to tell them something, Dennis! I can’t just let them risk being run down in the street!”
“Nothing,” I said. “Tell them nothing at all.”
“But—”
“For one thing, they wouldn’t believe you. For another, nothing’s going to happen as long as Arnie’s in Libertyville. I’d stake my life on that.”
“You are, dummy,” she whispered.
“I know. My life, my mother’s, my father’s, my sister’s.”
“How will we know if he leaves?”
“I’ll take care of that. You’re going to be sick tomorrow. You’re not going to school.”
“I’m sick right now,” she said in a low voice. “Dennis, what’s going to happen? What are you
