it. Darnell looks at it and thinks, It's never gonna run again. That's all; it's never gonna run another foot.
At the end of the month the Welch kid gets killed on JFK Drive.
December: A State Police detective comes sucking around. Junkins. He comes sucking around one day and talks to Cunningham; then he comes sucking around on a day when Cunningham isn't here and wants to know how come the kid is lying about how much damage Repperton and his dogturd friends (of whom the late and unlamented Peter 'Moochie' Welch was one) did to Cunningham's Plymouth. Why you talking to me? Darnell asks him, wheezing and coughing through a cloud of cigar smoke, Talk to him, it's his fucking Plymouth, not mine. I just run this place so working joes can keep their cars running and keep putting food on the tables for their families.
Junkins listens patiently to this rap. He knows Will Darnell is doing a hell of a lot more than just running a do-it-yourself garage and a junkyard, but Darnell knows he knows, so that's okay.
Junkins lights a cigarette and says, I'm talking to you because I already talked to the kid and he won't tell me. For a little while there I thought he wanted to tell me; I got the feeling he's scared green about sometliing. Then he tightened up and wouldn't tell me squat.
Darnell says, If you think Arnie ran down that Welch kid, say so.
Junkins says, I don't. His parents say he was home asleep, and it doesn't feel like they're lying to cover up for him. But Welch was one of the guys that trashed his car, we're pretty sure of that, and I'm positive he's lying about how bad they trashed it and I don't know why and it's driving me crazy.
Too bad, Darnell says with no sympathy at all.
Junkins asks, How bad was it, Mr Darnell? You tell me.
And Darnell tells his first and only lie during the interview with Junkins: I really didn't notice.
He noticed, all right, and he knows why Arnie is lying about it, trying to minimize it, and this cop would know why too, if it wasn't so obvious he was walking all over it instead of seeing it. Cunningham is lying because the damage was horrible, the damage was much worse than this state gumshoe can imagine, those hoods didn't just beat up on Cunningham's '58, they killed it. Cunningham is lying because, altthough nobody saw him do much of anything during the week after the tow-truck brought Christine back to stall twenty, the car was basically as good as new - even better than it had been before.
Cunningham lied to the cop because the truth was incredible.
'Incredible,' Darnell said out loud, and drank the rest of his coffee. He looked down at the telephone, reached for it, and then drew his hand back. He had a call to make, but it might be better to finish thinking this through first - have all his ducks in a row.
He himself was the only one (other than Cunningham himself) who could appreciate the incredibility of what had happened: the car's complete and total exoneration. Jimmy was too soft in the attic, and the other guys were in and out, not regular custom at all. Still, there had been comments about what a fantastic job Cunningham had done; a lot of the guys who had been doing repairs on their rolling iron during that week in November had used the word incredible, and several of them had looked uneasy. Johnny Pomberton, who bought and sold used trucks, had been trying to get an old dumpster he'd picked up in running shape that week. Johnny knew cars and trucks better than anyone else in Libertyville, maybe anyone else in all of Pennsylvania. He told Will frankly and flat-out that he couldn't believe it. It's like voodoo, Johnny Pomberton had said, and then uttered a laugh without much humour. Will only sat there looking politely interested, and after a second or two the old man shook his head and went away.
Sitting in his office and looking out at the garage, eerily silent in the slack time that came every year in the weeks before Christmas, Will thought (not for the first time) that most people would accept anything they saw it happen right before their very eyes. In a very real sense there was no supernatural, no abnormal; what happened, happened, and that was the end.