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Late August:
Repperton and Cunningham get into it, and Darnell kicks
Repperton out. He's tired of Repperton, the constant braggadocio, the cock-
of-the-walk manner. He's hurting custom, and while he'll make all the runs
into New York and New England that Will wants, he's careless, and
carelessness is dangerous. He has a tendency to exceed the double-nickel
speed limit, he's gotten speeding tickets. All it would take is one nosy cop to
put them all in court. Darnell isn't afraid of going to jail—not in Libertyville
but it would look bad. There was a time when he didn't care much how things
looked, but he's older now.
Will got up, poured coffee, and tipped in a capful of brandy. He paused,
thought it over, and tipped in a second capful. He sat down, took a cigar out
of his breast pocket, looked at it, and lit it. Fuck you, emphysema. Take this.
Fragrant smoke rising around him, good hot coffee laced with brandy before
him, Darnell stared out into his shadowy, silent garage and thought some
more.
September:
The kid asks him to jump an inspection sticker and loan him a
dealer plate so he can take his girl to a football game. Darnell does it—hell,
there was a day when he used to
sell
inspection stickers for seven dollars
and never even look at the car it was going on. Besides, the kid's car is
looking good. A little rough, maybe, and it's still more than a little noisy, but
all in all, pretty damn good. He's going a real job of restoration.
And that's pretty damn strange, isn't it, when you consider that
no one has
ever seen him really work on it.
Oh, little things, sure. Replacing bulbs in the parking lights. Changing tires.
The kid is no dummy about cars: Will sat right in this chair one day and
watched him replace the upholstery in the back seat. But no one has seen him
working on the car's exhaust system, which was totally shot when he wheeled
the '58 in here for the first time late last summer. And no one has seen him
doing any bodywork, either, although the Fury's bod, which had an advanced
case of cancer when the kid brought it in, now looks cherry.
Darnell knew what Jimmy Sykes thought, because he had asked him once.
Jimmy thought Arnie did the serious work at night, after everyone was gone.
"That's one hell of a lot of night work," Darnell said aloud, and felt a sudden
chill that not even the brandy-laced coffee could dispel, A lot of night work,
yeah. It must have been. Because what the kid seemed to be doing days was
listening to the greaser music on WDIL. That, and a lot of aimless fooling
around.
"I guess he does the big stuff at night," Jimmy had said, with all the guileless
faith of a child explaining how Santa Claus gets down the chimney or how
the tooth fairy put the quarter under his pillow. Will didn't believe in either
Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and he didn't believe that Arnie had restored
Christine at night, either.
Two other facts rolled around uneasily in his mind like pool balls looking for
a pocket in which to come to rest.
He knew that Cunningham had been driving the car around out back a lot
before it was street-legal, that was one thing. Just cruising slowly up and
down the narrow lanes between the thousands of junked cars in the block-
long back lot. Driving at five miles an hour, around and around after dark,
after everyone had gone home, circling the big crane with the round
electromagnet and the great box of the car-crusher. Cruising. The one time
Darnell asked him about it, Arnie had told him he was checking out a shimmy
in the front end. But the kid couldn't lie for shit. No one ever checked out a
shimmy at five miles an hour.
That was what Cunningham did after everyone else went home. That had
been his night work. Cruising out back, threading his way in and out of the
junkets, headlights flickering unsteadily in their rust-eaten sockets.
Then there was the Plymouth's odometer. It ran backward. Cunningham had
pointed that out to him with a sly little smile. It ran backward at an extremely
fast rate. He told Will that he figured the odometer turned back five miles or
so for every actual mile travelled. Will had been frankly amazed. He had
heard of setting odometers back in the used-car business, and he had done a
good bit of it himself (along with stuffing transmissions full of sawdust to
stifle their death whines and pouring boxes of oatmeal into terminally ill
radiators to temporarily plug their leaks), but he had never seen one that ran
backward spontaneously. He would have thought it impossible. Arnie had
just smiled a funny little smile and called it a glitch.
It was a glitch, all right, Will thought. One hell of a glitch.
The two thoughts clicked lazily off each other and rolled in different
directions.
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