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?”
I got my crutches under me again and got out of my car.
Road salt gritted under the crutches” rubber tips, but the going felt safe. Standing in front of Johnny Pomberton’s woodpile was one of the strangest-looking vehicles I’ve ever seen in my life. A faint, pungent odour, not exactly pleasant, drifted over from it to where we stood.
At one time, far back in its career, it had been a GM product—or so the logo on its gigantic snout advertised. Now it was a little bit of everything. One thing it surely was, and that was big. The top of its grille would have been head-high on a tall man. Behind and over it, the cab loomed like a big square helmet. Behind that, supported by two sets of double wheels on each side, was a long, tubular body, like the body of a gasoline tanker truck.
Except that I never saw a tanker truck before this one that was painted bright pink. The word PETUNIA was written across the side in Roman gothic letters two feet high,
“I don’t know what to think of her,” I said. “What is she?”
Pomberton poked a Camel cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a quick flick of his horny thumbnail on the tip of a wooden match. “Kaka sucker,” he said.
“What?”
He grinned. “Twenty-thousand-gallon capacity, he said. “She’s a corker, is Petunia.”
“I don’t get you.” But I was starting to. There was an absurd, grisly irony to it that Arnie—the old Arnie would have appreciated.
I had asked Pomberton over the phone if he had a big, heavy truck to rent, and this was the biggest one currently in his yard. All four of his dump trucks were working, two in Libertyville and two others in Philly Hill. He’d had a grader, he explained to me, but it had had a nervous bustdown just after Christmas. He said he was having a devilish job keeping his trucks rolling since Darnell’s Garage shut down.
Petunia was essentially a tanker, no more and no less. Her job was pumping out septic systems.
“How much does she weigh?” I asked Pomberton.
He flicked away his cigarette. “Dry, or loaded with shit?”
I gulped. “Which is it now?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Do you think I’d rentcher a loaded truck?” He pronounced it ludded truck. “Naw, naw—she’s dry, dry as a bone and all hosed out. Sure she is. Still a little fragrant, though, ain’t she?”
I sniffed. She was fragrant, all right.
“It could be a lot worse,” I said. “I guess.”
“Sure,” Pomberton said. “You bet, Old Petunia’s original pedigree was lost long ago, but what’s on her current registration is eighteen thousand pounds, GVW.”
“What’s that?”
“Gross vehicle weight,” he said. “If they pull you over on the Interstate and you weigh more than eighteen thousand the ICC gets upset. Dry, she prob'ly goes around, I dunno, eight-nine thousand Pounds. She’s got a five- speed tranny with a two-speed differential, giving you ten forward speeds all told… if you can run a clutch.”
He cast a dubious eye up and down my crutches and lit another cigarette.
“Can you run a clutch?”
“Sure,” I said with a straight face. “If it isn’t really stiff.” But for how long? That was the question.
“Well, that’s your business and I won’t mess into it.” He looked at me brightly. “I’ll give you a ten per cent
