hell out of it in a very short time. Of course I don’t remember it, but she says she just sat right down and bawled.” Arnie smiled a little, “Up until this year, I couldn’t feature my mother doing that. Now I think I can. Maybe I’m growing up a little, what do you think?”
Junkins lit a cigarette. “Am I missing the point, Arnie? Because I don’t see it yet.”
“She said that she would rather have had me in diapers until I was three than have had me do that. Because, she said, shit wipes off.” Arnie smiled. “You flush it away and it’s gone.”
“The way Moochie Welch is gone?” Junkins asked.
“I know nothing about that.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Scout’s honour?” Junkins asked. The question was humorous but the eyes were not; they probed at Arnie, looking for the smallest break, a crucial flicker.
Down the aisle, the fellow who had been putting on his winter snows dropped a tool on the concrete. It clanged musically and the fellow chanted, almost chorally, “Oh shit on you, you whore.”
Junkins and Arnie both glanced that way briefly, and the moment was broken.
“Sure, Scout’s honour,” Arnie said. “Look, I suppose you have to do this, it’s your job—”
“Sure its my job,” Junkins agreed softly. “The boy was run over three times each way. He was meat. They scraped him up with a shovel.”
“Come on,” Arnie said sickly. His stomach did a lazy barrel roll.
“Why? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with shit? Scrape it up with a shovel?”
“I had nothing to do with it!” Arnie cried, and the man across the way, who had been tinkering with his silencer looked up, startled.
Arnie lowered his voice.
“I’m sorry. I just wish you’d leave me alone. You know damn well I didn’t have anything to do with it. You just went over the whole car. If Christine had hit that Welch kid that many times and that hard, it would be all busted up. I know that much just from watching TV. And when I was taking Auto Shop II two years ago, Mr Smolnack said that the two best ways he knew to totally destroy a car’s front end was to either hit a deer or a person. He was joking a little, but he wasn’t kidding… if you know what I mean.” Arnie swallowed and heard a click in his throat, which was very dry.
“Sure,” Junkins said. “Your car looks all right. But you don’t, kid. You look like a sleepwalker. You look absolutely fucked over. Pardon my French.” He flicked his cigarette away. “You know something, Arnie?”
“What?”
“I think you’re lying faster than a horse can trot.” He slapped Christine’s hood. “Or maybe I should say faster than a Plymouth can run.”
Arnie looked at him, his hand on the outside mirror on the passenger side. He said nothing.
“I don’t think you’re lying about killing the Welch boy. But I think you’re lying about what they did to your car; your girl said they mashed the crap out of it, and she’s a hell of a lot more convincing than you are. She cried while she told me. She said there was broken glass everywhere… Where did you buy replacement glass, by the way?”
“McConnell’s,” Arnie said promptly. “In the Burg.”
“Still got the receipt?”
“Tossed it out.”
“But they’ll remember you. Big order like that.”
“They might,” Arnie said, “but I wouldn’t count on it, Rudy. They’re the biggest auto-glass specialists west of New York and east of Chicago. That covers a lot of ground. They do yea business, and a lot of it’s old cars.”
“Still, they’ll have the paperwork.”
“I paid cash.”
“But your name will be on the invoice.”
“No,” Arnie said, and smiled a wintry smile. “Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage. That way I got a ten per cent discount.”
“You got it all covered, don’t you?”
“Lieutenant Junkins—”
“You’re lying about the glass too, although I’ll be goddamned if I know why.”
“You’d think Christ was lying on Calvary, that’s what I think,” Arnie said angrily. “Since when is it a crime to buy replacement glass if someone busts up your windows? Or pay cash? Or get a discount?”
“Since never,” Junkins said.
“Then leave me be.”
“More important, I think you’re lying about not knowing anything about what happened to the Welch boy. You know something. I want to know what.”
“I don’t know anything,” Arnie said.
“What about—”
“I don’t have anything more to say to you,” Arnie said. “I’m sorry.”
“All right,” Junkins said, giving up so quickly that Arnie was immediately suspicious. He rummaged around in the sportcoat he was wearing under his topcoat and took out his wallet. Arnie saw that Junkins was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster and suspected Junkins had wanted him to see it. He produced a card and gave it to Arnie. “I can be reached at either of those numbers, If you want to talk about anything. Anything at all.”
Arnie put the card in his breast pocket.
Junkins took one more leisurely stroll around Christine. “Hell of a restoration job,” he repeated. He looked squarely at Arnie. “Why didn’t you report it?”
Arnie let out a low shuddering sigh. “Because I thought that would be the end,” he said. “I thought they’d let off.”
“Yeah,” Junkins said. “I thought that might be it. Good night, son.”
“Good night.”
Junkins started away, turned, came back. “Think it over,” he said. “You really do look like hell, you know what I mean? You have a nice girl there. She’s worried about you, and she feels bad about what happened to your car. Your dad’s worried about you, too. I could get that even over the phone. Think it over and then give me a call, son. You’ll sleep better.”
Arnie felt something trembling behind his lips, something small and tearful, something that hurt. Junkins’s brown eyes were kind. He opened his mouth—God alone knew what might have spilled out—and then a monstrous jab of pain walloped him in the back, making him straighten suddenly. It also had the effect of a slap on a hysteric. He felt calmer, clear-headed again.
“Good night,” he repeated. “Good night, Rudy.”
Junkins looked at him a moment longer, troubled, and then left.
Arnie began to shake all over. The trembling started in his hands and spread up his forearms to his elbows, and then it was suddenly everywhere. He grabbed blindly for the doorhandle, found it at last, and slipped into Christine, into the comforting smells of car and fresh upholstery. He turned the key to ACC, the dash lights glowed, and he felt for the radio dial.
As he did so his eyes fell on the swinging leather tab with R.D.L. branded into it and his dream recurred with sudden terrible force: the rotting corpse sitting where he was sitting now; the empty eyesockets staring out through the windshield; the fingerbones gripping the wheel; the empty grin of the skull’s teeth as Christine bore down on Moochie Welch while the radio, tuned to WDIL, played “Last Kiss” by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers.
He suddenly felt sick—puking-sick. Nausea fluttered sickeningly in his stomach and in the back of his throat. Arnie scrambled out of the car and ran for the head, his footfalls hammering crazily in his cars. He just made it. Everything came up; he vomited again and again until there was nothing left but sour spit. Lights danced in front of his eyes. His ears rang and the muscles in his gut throbbed tiredly.
He looked at his pale, harried face in the spotty mirror, at the dark circles under his eyes and the lank spill of hair across his forehead, Junkins was right. He looked like hell.
