up. Nothing seemed to work. All the signals were scrambled.
Bright white light washed over him.
'No,' he whispered through a mouthful of broken teeth. 'N - '
The car roared forward and over him. Change flew everywhere. Mooche was pulled and rolled first one way and then the other as Christine reversed into the street again. She stood there, engine revving and falling off to a rich idle, then revving again. She stood there as if thinking.
Then she came at him again. She hit him, jumped the curb, skidded around, and then reversed again, thumping back down.
She screamed forward.
And back.
And forward.
Her headlights glared. Her exhaust pipes jetted hot blue smoke.
The thing in the street no longer looked like a human being; it looked like a scattered bundle of rags.
The car reversed a final time, skidded around in a half-circle, and accelerated, roaring over the bleeding bundle in the street again and going down the Drive, the blast of its engine, still winding up to full rev, rocketing off the walls of the sleeping buildings - but not entirely sleeping now; lights were beginning to flick on, people who lived over their stores were going to their windows to see what all the racket had been about, and if there had been an accident.
One of Christine's headlights had been shattered. Another flickered unsteadily off and on, bleared with a thin wash of Moochie's blood. The grille had been bent inward, and the dents in it approximated the shape and size of Moochie's torso with all the gruesome perfection of a deathmask. Blood was splashed across the hood in fans that spread out as windspeed increased. The exhaust had taken on a heavy, blatting sound; one of Christine's two silencers had been destroyed.
Inside, on the instrument panel, the milometer continued to run backward, as if Christine were somehow slipping back into time, leaving not only the scene of the hit-and-run behind but the actual fact of the hit-and-run.
The silencer was the first thing.
Suddenly that heavy, blatting sound diminished and smoothed out.
The fans of blood on the hood began to run toward the front of the car again in spite of the wind - as if a movie film had been reversed.
The flickering headlight suddenly shone steadily, and a tenth of a mile later the deadlight became a headlight again. With an unimportant tinkling sound - no more than the sound of a small boy's boot breaking the thin scum of ice on a mudpuddle - the glass reassembled itself from nowhere.
There was a hollow punk! punk! punk! sound from the front end, the sound of denting metal, the sound you sometimes get when you squeeze a beer-can. But instead of denting, Christine's grille was popping back out - a bodyshop veteran with fifty years' experience in putting fender-benders right could not have done it more neatly.
Christine turned onto Hampton Street even before the first of those awakened by the screaming of her tyres had reached Moochie's remains. The blood was gone. It had reached the front of the hood and disappeared. The scratches were gone. As she rolled quietly toward the garage door with its HONK FOR ENTRY sign, there was one final punk! as the last dimple - this one in the left front bumper, the spot where Christine had struck Moochie's calf - popped back out.
Christine looked like new.
The car stopped in front of the large garage door in the middle of the darkened, silent building. There was a small plastic box clipped to the driver's side sun-visor. This was a little doodad Will Darnell had given Arnie when Arnie began to run cigarettes and booze over into New York State for him - it was, perhaps, Darnell s version of a gold key to the crapper.
In the still air the door-opener hummed briefly, and the garage door rattled obediently up. Another circuit was made by the rising door, and a few interior rights came on, burning weakly.
The headlight knob on the dashboard suddenly went in, and Christine's duals went out. She rolled inside and whispered across the oil-stained concrete to stall twenty. Behind her, the overhead door, which had been set on a thirty-second timer, rolled back down. The light circuit was broken, and the garage was dark again.
In Christine's ignition switch, the keys dangling down suddenly turned to the left. The engine died. The leather patch with the initials R.D.L. branded into it swung back and forth in decreasing arcs and was finally still.