She wept, crying out her fear and shock and horror, holding onto me. I was glad to have her. My left leg throbbed dully. I looked up into the rearview mirror at the empty slot where Christine had been. Now that it had happened, it seemed to me that any other conclusion would have been impossible. The peace of the last two weeks, the simple joy of having Leigh on my side, all of that now seemed to be the unnatural thing, the false thing - as false as the phoney war between Hitier's conquest of Poland and the Wehrmacht's rolling assault on France.
And I began to see the end of things, how it would be.
She looked up at me, her checks wet. 'What now, Dennis? What do we do now?'
'Now we end it.'
'How? What do you mean?'
Speaking more to myself than to her, I said, 'He needs an alibi. We have to be ready when he goes away. The garage. Darnell's. I'm going to trap it in there. Try to kill it.' 'Dennis, what are you talking about?'
'He'll leave town,' I said. 'Don't you see? All of the people Christine has killed - they make a ring around Arnie. He'll know that. He'll get Arnie out of town again.'
LeBay, you mean.
I nodded, and Leigh shuddered.
'We have to kill it. You know that.'
'But how? Please, Dennis . . . how are we going to do it?'
And at last I had an idea.
PART III: CHRISTINE - TEENAGE DEATH-SONGS Chapter 48 PREPARATIONS
There's a killer on the road,
His brain is squirming like a toad . . .
- The Doors
I dropped Leigh off at her house and told her to call me if she saw Christine cruising around.
'What are you going to do? Come over here with a flame-thrower?'
'A bazooka,' I said, and we both started to laugh hysterically.
'Nuke the '58! Nuke the '58!' Leigh yelled, and we got laughing again - but all the time we were laughing we were scared half out of our minds . . . maybe more than half. And all the time we were laughing I was sick over Arnie, both over what he had seen and what I had done. And I think Leigh felt the same. It's just that sometimes you have to laugh. Sometimes you just do. And when it comes, nothing can keep that laugh away. It just walks in and does its stuff.
'So what do I tell my folks?' she asked me when we finally started to come down a little. 'I've got to tell them something, Dennis! I can't just let them risk being run down in the street!'
'Nothing,' I said. 'Tell them nothing at all.'
'But - '
'For one thing, they wouldn't believe you. For another, nothing's going to happen as long as Arnie's in Libertyville. I'd stake my life on that.'
'You are, dummy,' she whispered.
'I know. My life, my mother's, my father's, my sister's.'
'How will we know if he leaves?'
'I'll take care of that. You're going to be sick tomorrow. You're not going to school.'
'I'm sick right now,' she said in a low voice. 'Dennis, what's going to happen? What are you planning?'
'I'll call you later tonight,' I said, and kissed her. Her lips were cold.
When I got home, Elaine was struggling into her parka and muttering black imprecations at people who sent other people down to Tom's for milk and bread just when Dance Fever was coming on TV. She was prepared to be grumpy at me as well, but she cheered up when I offered to give her a lift down to the market and back. She also gave me a suspicious look, as if this unexpected kindness to the little sister might be the onset of some disease. Herpes, maybe. She asked me if I felt all right. I only smiled blandly and told her to hop in before I changed my mind, although by now my right leg was aching and my left was throbbing fiercely. I could talk on and on to Leigh about how Christine wouldn't roll as long as Arnie was in Libertyville, and intellectually I knew that was right . . . but it didn't change the instinctive rolling in my guts when I thought of Ellie walking the two blocks to Tom's and crossing the dark suburban sidestreets in her bright yellow parka. I kept seeing Christine parked down one of those streets, crouched in the dark like an old bitch hunting dog.