it,
Her heart denied it.
She stood fascinated, her small gloved hands on the rail of the display area, watching it race around and around, moving fast, driving itself, until her mother pulled her gently away.
And over everything, seeming to cause the very tinsel strung along the ceiling to vibrate, the ominous laughter of the department-store Santa.
Leigh slept more deeply, dreams and memories slowly fading, and outside daylight came creeping in like cold milk, illuminating a street that was Sunday-morning empty and Sunday-morning silent. The season’s first fall of snow was unmarred except for the tyre tracks that swerved to the kerb in front of the Cabot house and then moved smoothly away again, toward the intersection at the end of this suburban block.
She didn’t rise until nearly ten o’clock (her mother, who didn’t believe in slugabeds, finally called for her to come down and have breakfast before lunch), and by then the day had already warmed up to nearly sixty degrees—in western Pennsylvania, early November is apt to be every bit as capricious as early April. So by ten o’clock the snow had melted. And the tracks were gone.
25
BUDDY VISTS THE AIRPORT
We shut ’em up and then we shut ’em down.
One night some ten days later, as cardboard turkeys and construction-paper cornucopias were beginning to appear in grammar school windows, a blue Camaro, so radically jacked in the back that its nose seemed almost to scrape the road, slid into the long-term parking lane at the airport.
Sandy Galton looked out from his glass booth nervously. From the driver’s side of the Ford the happy smiling face of Buddy Repperton tilted up toward him. Buddy’s face was scrubbed with a week-old beard and his eyes held a maniacal glitter that was more cocaine than Thanksgiving cheer—he and the boys had scored a pretty good gram that evening. All in all, Buddy looked quite a bit like a depraved Clint Eastwood.
“How are they hanging, Sandy?” Buddy asked.
Dutiful laughter from the Camaro greeted this sally. Don Vandenberg, Moochie Welch, and Richie Trelawney were with Buddy, and between the gram of coke and the six bottles of Texas Driver Buddy had procured for the occasion, they were feeling pretty much reet and compleet. They had come to do a little dirty boogie on Arnie Cunningham’s Plymouth.
“Listen, if you guys get caught, I’m gonna lose my job,” Sandy said nervously. He was the only one cold sober, and be was regretting ever having mentioned that Cunningham was parking his heap here. The thought that he might go to jail as well had fortunately not occurred to him.
“If you or any of your Mission Imfuckingpossible force are caught, the Secretary will disavow you ever fuckin lived,” Moochie said from the back seat, and there was more laughter.
Sandy looked around for other cars—witnesses—but there were no planes due for more than an hour and the parking lot was as deserted as the mountains of the moon. The weather had turned very cold, and a wind as keen as a fresh razor-blade whined across the runways and taxi-ways and hooted miserably between the ranks of empty cars. Above and to his left, the Apco sign banged restlessly back and forth.
“You can laugh, you retard,” Sandy said. “I never saw you, that’s all. If you get caught, I’ll say I was takin a crap.”
“Jesus, what a baby,” Buddy said. He looked sorrowful. “I never thought you were such a baby, Sandy. Honest.”
“Arf! Arf!” Richie barked, and there was more laughter. “Roll over and play dead for Daddy Warbucks, Sandy!”
Sandy flushed. “I don’t care,” he said. “Just be careful.”
“We will, man,” Buddy said sincerely. He had saved back a seventh bottle of Texas Driver and a pretty decent toot of nose-candy. Now he handed both up to Sandy. “Here. Enjoy yourself.”
Sandy grinned in spite of himself. “Okay,” he said, and added, just so they’d know he was no sad sack: “Do a good job.”
Buddy’s smile hardened, became metallic. The light went out of his eyes; they became dull and dead and frightening. “Oh, we will,” he said. “We will.”
The Camaro drifted into the parking lot. For a while Sandy could follow its progress toward the back by the moving tail-lights, and then Buddy doused them. The sound of the motor, burbling through twin glasspack mufflers, came back for a few moments on the wind, and then that sound was gone, too.
Sandy dumped the coke out on the counter by his portable TV and tooted it with a rolled-up dollar bill. Then he got into the Texas Driver. He knew that being discovered drunk on the job would also get him canned, but he didn’t much care. Being drunk was better than being cat-jumpy and always staring around for one of the two grey Airport Security cars.
The wind was blowing toward him, and he could hear too much, he could hear.
A tinkle of breaking glass, muffled laughter, a loud metallic thonk.
More breaking glass.
A pause.
Low voices drifting to him on the cold wind. He was unable to pick up the individual words; they were distorted.
Suddenly there was a perfect fusillade of blows; Sandy winced at the sound. More breaking glass in the dark, and a tinkle of metal falling on the pavement—chrome or something, he supposed. He found himself wishing Buddy had brought more coke. Coke was sort of cheery stuff, and he sure could use some cheering up right about now. It sounded as if some pretty bad stuff was going on down at the far end of that parking lot.
And then a louder voice, urgent and commanding, Buddy’s for sure:
“Do it there!”
A mutter of protest.
Buddy again: “Never mind that! On the dashboard, I said!”
Another mutter.
Buddy: “I don’t give a shit!”
And for some reason this produced a stifle of laughter.
Sweaty now in spite of the knifing cold, Sandy suddenly slid his glass window shut and snapped on the TV. He drank deeply, grimacing at the heavy taste of the mixed fruit juice and cheap wine. He didn’t care for it, but Texas Driver was what they all drank when they weren’t drinking Iron City beer, and what was he supposed to do? Make out he was better than them, or something? That would get him fried, sooner or later. Buddy didn’t like wimps.
He drank, and began to feel a little better or at least a little drunker. When one of the Airport Security cars did pass, he hardly even flinched. The cop raised a hand to Sandy. Sandy raised a hand right back, just as cool as you could want.
About fifteen minutes after it had cruised toward the back of the lot, the blue Camaro reappeared, this time in the exit lane. Buddy sat cool and relaxed behind the wheel, a three-quarters-empty bottle of Driver propped in his crotch. He was smiling, and Sandy noted uneasily how bloodshot and weird his eyes looked. That wasn’t just wine, and it wasn’t just coke, either. Buddy Repperton was no one to fuck with; Cunningham would find that out, if nothing else.
“All taken care of, my good man” Buddy said.
“Good,” Sandy said, and tried a smile. It felt a little sick. He had no feelings about Cunningham one way or another, and he was not a particularly imaginative person, but he could make a good guess about how Cunningham was going to feel when he saw what had come of all his careful work restoring that red and white
