chrome - except that there seemed to be another, more unpleasant smell beneath it. An earthy smell. Will breathed deep but could not place it. He thought briefly of old turnips in his father's basement vegetable bin, and his nose wrinkled.
He leaned in. There were no keys in the ignition. The milometer read 52,107.8.
Suddenly the empty ignition slot set into the dashboard revolved, the black slit heeling over of its own accord past ACC to START. The hot engine caught at once and rumbled steadily, full of contented high-octane power.
Will's heart staggered in his chest. His breath caught. Gasping and whooping noisily for breath, he hurried back to his office to find the spare aspirator in one of his desk drawers. His breath, thin and impotent, sounded like winter wind under an entryway door. His face was the colour of old candlewax. His fingers caught in the loose flesh of his throat and pulled restlessly.
Christine's engine turned off again.
No sound now but the tick and click of cooling metal.
Will found his aspirator, plunged it deep into his throat, depressed the trigger, and inhaled. Little by little, the feeling that a wheelbarrowful of cinderblocks was sitting on his chest dissipated. He sat down in the swivel chair and listened gratefully to the sane and expected creak of protest from its springs. He covered his face momentarily with his fat hands.
Nothing really inexplicable . . . until now.
He had seen it.
Nothing had been driving that car. It had come in empty, smelling of something like rotting turnips.
And even then, in spite of his dread, Will's mind began to turn and he began wondering how he could put what he knew to his own advantage.
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 38 BREAKING CONNECTIONS
Well mister, I want a yellow convertible,
Four-door DeVille,
With a Continental spare and wire-chrome wheels.
I want power steering,
And power brakes;
I want a powerful motor with a jet offtake . . .
I want shortwave radio,
I want TV and a phone,
You know I gotta talk to my baby
When I'm ridin along.
- Chuck Berry
The burned out wreck of Buddy Repperton's Camaro was found late on Wednesday afternoon by a park ranger. An old lady who lived with her husband in the tiny town of Upper Squantic had called the ranger station on the lake side of the park. She was badly afflicted with arthritis, and sometimes she couldn't sleep. Last night she thought she had seen flames coming from near the park's south gate. At what time? She reckoned it to be around quarter past ten, because she had been watching the Tuesday Night Movie on CBS and it hadn't been but half over.
On Thursday, a newsphoto of the burned car appeared on the front page of the Libertyville Keystone under a headline which read: THREE KILLED IN CAR CRASH AT SQUANTIC HILLS STATE PARK. A State Police source was quoted as saying 'liquor had probably been a factor' - an officially opaque way of saying that the shattered remains of over half a dozen bottles of a juice-and-wine combination sold under the trade name Texas Driver had been found in the wreckage.
The news struck particularly hard at Libertyville High School; the young always have the greatest difficulty accepting unpleasant intelligence of their own mortality. Perhaps the holiday season made it that much harder.
Arnie Cunningham found himself terribly depressed by the news, Depressed and frightened. First Moochie; now Buddy, Richie Trelawney, and Bobby Stanton. Bobby Stanton, a dipshit little freshman Arnie had never even heard of - what had a dipshit little kid like that been doing with the likes of Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney anyway? Didn't he know that was like going into a den of tigers with nothing for protection but a squirt gun. He found it unaccountably hard to accept the grapevine version, which was simply that Buddy and his friends had gotten pretty well squiffed at the basketball game, and gone out cruising and drinking, and had come to a bad end.
He couldn't quite lose the feeling he was somehow involved.
Leigh had stopped talking to him since the argument. Arnie didn't call her - partly out of pride, partly out of shame, partly out of a wish that she would call him first and things could go back to what they had been . . . before.
Before what? his mind whispered. Well, before she almost choked to death in your car, for one thing. Before you tried to punch out the guy who saved her life.