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Lyrics quotes in this book are assigned to the singer (or singers, or group) most commonly associated with them. This may offend the purist who feels that a song lyric belongs more to the writer 35 страница



“Dennis, you won’t be able to work the clutch in that truck now—”

“Yeah, I will. Help me back, Leigh.”

“You’re as white as a ghost. I think we ought to get you to a doctor.”

“No. Help me back.”

“Dennis—”

“Leigh, help me back!”

We inched our way back to Petunia through the snow leaving shuffling, troubled tracks in the snow behind us. I reached up, laid hold of the steering wheel, and did a chin-up to get in, scraping feebly at the running board with my right leg… and still, in the end, Leigh had to get behind me and put both hands on my kiester and shove. At last I was behind Petunia’s wheel, hot and shivering with pain. My shirt was wet with snowmelt and sweat. Until that day in January of 1979, I don’t think I knew how much pain can make you sweat.

I tried to jam down the clutch with my left foot and that silver bolt of pain came again, making me throw my head back and grind my teeth until it subsided a little.

“Dennis, I’m going down the street and find a phone and call a doctor.” Her face was white and scared. “You broke it again, didn’t you? When you fell?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you can’t do that, Leigh. It’ll be your folks or mine if we don’t end it now. You know that. LeBay won’t stop. He has a well-developed sense of vengeance. We can’t stop.”

“But you can’t drive it!” she wailed. She looked up into the cab at me, crying now. The hood of her parka had fallen back in our mutual struggle to get me up into the driver’s seat, where I now sat in magnificent uselessness. I could see a scatter of snowflakes in her dark blond hair.

“Go inside there,” I said. “See if you can find a broom, or a long stick of wood.”

“What good will that do?” she asked, crying harder.

“Just get it, and then we’ll see.”

She went into the dark maw of the open door and disappeared from view. I held onto my leg and sparred with terror. If I really had broken my leg again, there was a good chance I’d be wearing a built-up heel on my left foot for the rest of my life. But there might not even be that much of my life left if we couldn’t put a stop to Christine. Now there was a cheery thought.

Leigh came back with a push broom. “Will this do?” she asked.

“To get us inside, yes. Then we’ll have to see if we can find something better.”

The handle was the type that unscrews. I got hold of it, unthreaded it, and tossed the bristle end aside. Holding it in my left hand along my side—just another goddam crutch I pushed down the clutch with it. It held for a moment, then slipped off. The clutch sprang back up. The top of the handle almost bashed me in the mouth. Lookin good, Guilder. But it would have to do.

“Come on, get in,” I said.

“Dennis, are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay.”

She went around to the passenger side and got in. I slammed my own door, depressed Petunia’s clutch with the broom-handle, and geared into first. I had the clutch halfway out and Petunia was just starting to roll forward when the broom-handle slipped off the clutch again. The septic tanker ran inside Darnell’s Garage with a series of neck-snapping jerks, and when I slammed my right foot down on the brake, the truck stalled. We were mostly inside.

“Leigh, I’ve got to have something with a wider foot,” I said. “This broom-handle don’t cut it.”

“I’ll see what there is.”

She got out and began to walk around the edge of the garage floor, hunting. I stared around. Creepy, Leigh had said, and she was right. The only cars left were four or five old soldiers so gravely wounded that no one had cared enough to claim them. All the rest of the slant spaces with their numbers stencilled in white paint were empty. I glanced at stall twenty and then glanced away.

The overhead tyre racks were likewise nearly empty. A few baldies remained, heeled over against one another like giant doughnuts blackened in a fire, but that was all. One of the two lifts was partially up, with a wheel-rim caught beneath it. The front-end alignment chart on the right-hand wall glimmered faintly red and white, the two headlight targets like bloodshot eyes. And shadows, everywhere. Overhead, big box-shaped heaters pointed their louvers this way and that, roosting up there like weird bats.



It seemed very much like a death-place.

Leigh had used another of Jimmy’s keys to open Will’s office. I could see her moving back and forth in there through the window Will had used to look out at his customers… those working joes who had to keep their cars running so they could blah-blah-blah. She flipped some switches, and the overhead fluorescents came on in snowcold ranks. So the electric company hadn’t cut off the juice. I’d have to have her turn the lights off again—we couldn’t afford to risk attracting attention—but at least we could have some heat.

She opened another door and disappeared temporarily from view. I glanced at my watch. One-thirty now.

She came back, and I saw that she was holding an O-Cedar mop, the kind with the wide yellow sponge along the foot.

“Would this be any good?”

“Only perfect,” I said. “Get in, kiddo. We’re in business.”

She climbed up once more, and I pushed the clutch down with the mop. “Lots better,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“In the bathroom,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.

“Bad in there?”

“Dirty, reeking of cigars, and there’s a whole pile of mouldy books in the corner. The kind they sell at those little hole-in-the-wall stores.”

So that was what Darnell left behind him, I thought: an empty garage, a pile of Beeline Books, and a phantom reek of Roi-Tan cigars. I felt cold again, and thought that if I had my way, I’d see this place bulldozed flat and pasted over with hottop. I could not shake the feeling that it was an unmarked grave of a sort—the place where LeBay and Christine had killed my friend’s mind and taken over his life.

“I can’t wait to get out of here,” Leigh said, looking around nervously.

“Really? I kind of like it. I was thinking of moving in.” I caressed her shoulder and looked deeply into her eyes. “We could start a family,” I breathed.

She held up a fist. “Want me to start a nosebleed?”

“No, that’s all right. For what it’s worth, I can’t wait to get out of here, either.” I drove Petunia the rest of the way inside. I found that I could run the clutch pretty well using the O-Cedar mop… in first gear, at least. The handle had a tendency to bend, and I would have preferred something thicker, but it would have to do unless we could find something better in the meantime.

“We’ve got to turn off the lights again,” I said, killing the engine. “The wrong people might see them.”

She got out and turned them off while I swung Petunia in a wide circle and then carefully backed it up until the rear end almost touched the window between the garage and Darnell’s office. Now the big truck’s snout was pointing directly back at the open overhead door through which we had entered.

With the lights off, the shadows descended again. The light coming in through the open door was weak, muted by the snow, white and without strength. It spread on the oil-stained, cracked concrete like a pie-wedge and simply died halfway across the floor.

“I’m cold, Dennis,” Leigh called from Darnell’s office. “He’s got the switches for the heat marked. Can I turn them on?”

“Go ahead,” I called back.

A moment later the garage whispered with the sound of the blowers. I leaned back against the seat, gently running my hands over my left leg. The material of my jeans was stretched smoothly over the thigh, tight and without a wrinkle. The sonofabitch was swelling. And it hurt. Christ, did it hurt.

Leigh came back and climbed up beside me. She told me again how terrible I looked, and for some reason my mind cross-patched and I thought of the afternoon Arnie had brought Christine down here, of the be-bop queen’s husband yelling for Arnie to get that hunk of junk out from in front of his house, and of Arnie telling me the guy was a regular Robert Deadford. How we had gotten the giggles. I closed my eyes against the sting of tears.

With nothing to do but wait, time slowed down. It was quarter of two, then two o’clock. Outside, the snow had thickened a little, but not much. Leigh got out of the truck and pushed the button that trundled the door back down. That made it even darker inside.

She came back, climbed up, and said, “There’s a funny gadget on the side of the door—see it? It looks just like the electronic garage door-opener we used to have when we lived in Weston.”

I sat up suddenly. Stared at it. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, Jesus.”

“What’s the matter?”

“That’s just what it is. A garage door-opener. And there’s one of the transmitter gadgets on Christine. Arnie mentioned that to me Thanksgiving night. You’ve got to break it, Leigh. Use the handle of that push broom.”

So she got down again, picked up the broom-handle, and stood below the electric eye gadget, looking up and bashing at it with the handle. She looked like a woman trying to kill a bug near the ceiling. At last she was rewarded with a crunch of plastic and a tinkle of glass.

She came back slowly, tossing the broom-handle aside and got up beside me. “Dennis, don’t you think it’s time you told me exactly what you’ve got in mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, and pointed at the closed overhead door. Five square windows in a line three-quarters of the way up its height let in minimal light through dirty glass. “When it gets dark you plan to open that door again, don’t you?”

 

I nodded. The door itself was wood, but it was braced with hinged steel strips, like the inner gate of an old-time elevator. I’d let her in, but once the door was shut, Christine wouldn’t be able to bash her way out again. I hoped. It made me cold to think how close we’d come to overlooking the electronic door-opener.

Open the door at dusk, yes. Let Christine in, yes. Close the door again. Then I would use Petunia to batter her to death.

“Okay,” she said, “that’s the trap. But once she—it—comes in, how are you going to get that door shut again to keep her in? Maybe there’s a button in Darnell’s office that does it, but I didn’t see it.”

“So far as I know, there isn’t one,” I said. “So you’re going to be standing over there by the button that shuts the door.” I pointed. The manual button was located on the right side of the door, about two feet below the ruin of the electric door-opener box. “You’ll be against the wall, out of sight. When Christine comes in—always assuming she does—you’re going to push the button that starts the door coming down and then step outside in a hurry. The door comes down. And, bam! The trap’s shut.”

Her face set. “On you as well as her. In the words of the immortal Wordsworth, that sucks.”

“That’s Coleridge, not Wordsworth. There’s no other way to do it, Leigh. If you’re still inside when that door comes down, Christine is going to run you down. Even if there was a button in Darnell’s office—well, you saw in the paper what happened to the side of his house.”

Her face was stubborn. “Park over by the switch. And when she comes in, I’ll reach out the window and hit the button and lower the door.”

“If I park there, I’ll be in sight. And if this tank is in sight, she won’t come in.”

“I don’t like it!” she burst out. “I don’t like leaving you alone! It’s like you tricked me!”

In a way, that’s just what I had done, and for whatever it’s worth, I would not do it the same way now—but I was going on eighteen then, and there’s no male chauvinist pig like an eighteen-year-old male chauvinist pig. I put an arm around her shoulders. She resisted stiffly for a moment and then came to me, “There’s just no other way,” I said. “If it wasn’t for my leg, or if you could drive a manual shift—” I shrugged.

“I’m scared for you, Dennis. I want to help.”

“You’ll be helping plenty. You’re the one that’s really in danger, Leigh—you’ll be outside, on the floor, when she comes in. I’m just going to sit up here in the cab and beat that bitch back into component parts.”

“I only hope it works that way,” she said, and put her head on my chest. I touched her hair.

So we waited.

In my mind’s eye I could see Arnie coming out of the main building at LHS, books under his arm. I could see Regina waiting for him there in the Cunninghams’ compact wagon, radiant with happiness, Arnie smiling remotely and submitting to her embrace. Arnie, you’ve made the right decision… you don’t know how relieved, how happy, your father and I are. Yes, Mom. Do you want to drive, honey? No, you drive, Mom. That’s okay.

The two of them setting off for Penn State through the light snow, Regina driving, Arnie sitting in the shotgun seat with his hands folded stiffly in his lap, his face pale and unsmiling and clear of acne.

And back in the student parking lot at LHS, Christine sitting silently in the driveway. Waiting for the snow to thicken. Waiting for dark.

At three-thirty or so, Leigh went back through Darnell’s office to use the bathroom, and while she was gone I dry-swallowed two more Darvon. My leg was a steady, leaden agony.

Shortly after that, I lost coherent track of time. The dope had me fuddled, I guess. The whole thing began to seem Dreamlike the deepening shadows, the white light coming in through the windows slowly changing to an ashy grey, the drone of the overhead heaters.

I think that Leigh and I made love… not in the ordinary way, not with my leg the way it was, but some kind of sweet substitute. I seem to remember her breath steepening in my ear until she was nearly panting; I seem to remember her whispering for me to be careful, to please be careful, that she had lost Arnie and could not bear to lose me too. I seem to remember an explosion of pleasure that made the pain disappear in a brief but total way that not all the Darvon in the world could manage… but brief was the right word. It was all too brief. And then I think I dozed.

The next thing I remember for sure was Leigh shaking me fully awake and whispering my name over and over in my ear.

“Huh? What?” I was spaced out and my leg was full of a glassy pain, simply waiting to explode. There was an ache in my temples, and my eyes felt too big for their sockets. I blinked around at Leigh like a large stupid owl.

“It’s dark,” she said. “I thought I heard something.”

I blinked again and saw that she looked drawn and frightened. Then I glanced toward the door and saw that it was standing wide open.

“How the hell did that—”

“Me,” she said. “I opened it.”

“Cripes!” I said, straightening up a little and wincing at the pain in my leg. “That wasn’t too smart, Leigh. If she had come—”

“She didn’t,” Leigh said. “It started to get dark, that’s all, and to snow harder. So I got out and opened the door and then I came back here. I kept thinking you’d wake up in a minute… you were mumbling… and I kept thinking, “I’ll wait until it’s really dark, I’ll just wait until it’s really dark,” and then I saw I was fooling myself, because it’s been dark for almost half an hour now and I was only thinking I could still see some light. Because I wanted to see it, I guess. And… just now… I thought I heard something.”

Her lips began to tremble and she pressed them tightly together.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was quarter of six. If everything had gone right, my parents and sister would be together with Michael and Leigh’s folks now. I looked through Petunia’s windscreen at the square of snow-shot darkness where the garage entrance was. I could hear the wind shrieking. A thin creeper of snow had already blown in onto the cement.

“You just heard the wind,” I said uneasily. “It’s walking and talking out there.”

“Maybe. But—”

I nodded reluctantly. I didn’t want her to leave the safety of Petunia’s high cab, but if she didn’t go now, maybe she never would. I wouldn’t let her, and she would let me not let her. And then, when and if Christine came, all she would have to do would be to reverse back out of Darnell’s.

And wait for a more opportune time.

“Okay,” I said. “But remember… stand back in that little niche to the right of the door. If she comes, she may just stand outside for a while.” Scenting the air like an animal, I thought. “Don’t get scared, don’t move. Don’t let her freak you into giving yourself away. Just be cool and wait until she comes in. Then push that button and get the hell out. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Dennis, will this work?”

“It should, if she comes at all.”

“I won’t see you until it’s over.”

“I guess that’s so.”

She leaned over, placed her left hand tightly on the side of my neck, and kissed my mouth. “Be careful, Dennis,” she said, “But kill it. It’s really not a she at all—just an it. Kill it.”

“I will,” I said.

She looked in my eyes and nodded. “Do it for Arnie,” she said. “Set him free.”

I hugged her hard and she hugged me back. Then she slid across the seat. She hit her little handbag with her knee and it fell to the floor of the cab. She paused, head cocked, a startled, thoughtful look in her eyes. Then she smiled, bent over, picked it up, and began to rummage quickly through it.

“Dennis,” she said, “do you remember the Morte d’arthur?”

“A little.” One of the classes Leigh and Arnie and I had all shared before my football injury was Fudgy Bowen’s Classics of English Literature, and one of the first things we had been faced with in there was Malory’s Morte d’arthur. Why Leigh asked me this now was a mystery to me.

She had found what she wanted. It was a filmy pink scarf, nylon, the sort of thing a girl wears over her head on a day when a misty sort of rain is falling. She tied it around the left forearm of my parka.

“What the hell?” I asked, smiling a little.

“Be my knight,” she said, and smiled back—but her eyes were serious. “Be my knight, Dennis.”

I picked up the squeegee mop she had found in Will’s bathroom and made a clumsy salute with it. “Sure,” I said. “Just call me Sir O-Cedar.”

“Joke about it if you want,” she said, “but don’t really joke about it. Okay?”

“All right,” I said. “If it’s what you want, I’ll be your parfit goddam gentil knight.”

She laughed a little, and that was better.

“Remember about that button kiddo. Push it hard. We don’t want that door to just burp once and stop on its track. No escapes, right?”

“Right.”

She got out of Petunia, and I can close my eyes now and see her as she was then, in that clean and silent moment just before everything went terribly wrong—a tall, pretty girl with long blond hair the colour of raw honey, slim hips, long legs, and those striking, Nordic cheekbones, now wearing a ski-parka and faded Lee Riders, moving with a dancer’s grace. I can still see it and I still dream about it, because of course while we were busy setting up Christine, she was busy setting us up—that old and infinitely wise monster. Did we really think we could outsmart her so easily? I guess we did.

My dreams are in terrible slow motion. I can see the softly lovely motion of her hips as she walks; I can hear the hollow click of her Frye boots on the oil-stained cement floor; I can ever hear the soft, dry whish-whish of her parka’s quilted inner lining brushing against her blouse. She’s walking slowly and her head is up—now she is the animal, but no predator; she walks with the cautious grace of a zebra approaching a waterhole at dusk. It is the walk of an animal that scents danger. I try to scream to her through Petunia’s windscreen. Come back, Leigh, come back quick, you were right, you heard something, she’s out there now, out there in the snow with her headlights off, crouched down, Leigh, come back!

She stopped suddenly, her hands tensing into fists, and that was when sudden savage circles of light sprang to life in the snowy dark outside. They were like white eyes opening.

Leigh froze, hideously exposed on the open floor. She was thirty feet inside the door and slightly to the right of centre. She turned toward the headlights, and I could see the dazed, uncertain expression on her face.

I was just as stunned, and that first vital moment passed unused. Then the headlights sprang forward and I could see the dark, low-slung shape of Christine behind them; I could hear the mounting, furious howl of her engine as she leaped toward us from across the street where she had been waiting all along—maybe even since before dark. Snow tunnelled back from her roof and skirted across her windscreen in filmy nets that were almost instantly melted by the defroster. She hit the tarmac leading up to the entrance, still gaining speed. Her engine was a V-8 scream of rage.

“Leigh!” I screamed, and clawed for Petunia’s ignition switch.

Leigh broke to the right and ran for the wall-button. Christine roared inside as she reached it and pushed it. I heard the rattle-rumble of the overhead door descending on its track.

Christine came in angling to the right, going for Leigh. She dug a great clout of dry wood and splinters from the wall. There was a metallic screech as part of her right bumper pulled loose—a sound like a drunk’s scream of laughter. Sparks cascaded across the floor as she went into a long, slewing turn. She missed Leigh, but she wouldn’t when she went back; Leigh was stuck in that right-hand corner with nowhere to hide. She might be able to make it outside, but I was terribly afraid that the door wasn’t coming down fast enough to cut off Christine. The descending door might peel off her roof, but that wouldn’t stop her and I knew it.

Petunia’s engine bellowed and I dragged out the headlight button. Her brights came on, splashing over the closing door, and over Leigh. She was backed up against the wall, her eyes wide. Her parka took on a weird, almost electric blue colour in the headlights, and my mind informed me with sickening and clinical accuracy that her blood would look purple.

I saw her glance upward for a moment and then back down at Christine.

The Fury’s tyres screamed violently as she leaped at Leigh. Smoke rose from the new black marks on the concrete, and I just had time to register the fact that there were people inside of Christine: a whole carload of them.

At the same instant that Christine roared toward her, Leigh leaped upward with a big ungainly Jack-in-the-box spring. My mind, seeming to run at a speed approaching light, wondered for a moment if she was intending to leap right over the Plymouth, as if, instead of Fryes, she wore boots of the seven-league variety.

Instead, she caught and gripped the rusted metal struts which supported an overhead shelf about nine feet above the floor, over three feet above her head. This shelf skirted all four walls. On the night Arnie and I had first brought Christine in, that entire shelf had been crammed with recapped tyres and old baldies waiting to be recapped—in some funny way it had reminded me of a well-stocked library shelf. Now it was mostly empty. Holding those angled struts, Leigh swung her jeaned legs up like a kid who means to throw his legs right over his own shoulders—what we used to call skinning the cat in grammar school. Christine’s snout smashed into the wall directly below her. If she had been any slower getting her legs up, they would have been mashed off at the knees. A piece of chrome flew. Two of the remaining tyres tumbled from the shelf and bounced crazily on the cement like giant rubber doughnuts.

Leigh’s head smashed back against the wall with battering, dazing force as Christine reversed, all four of her tyres laying rubber and squirting blue smoke.

And what was I doing “all this time,” you wonder? It wasn’t all that time, that is my answer. Even as I used the O-Cedar mop to depress Petunia’s clutch and gear into first, the overhead door was just thumping down. All of it had happened in the space of seconds.

Leigh was still holding onto the struts supporting the tyre shelf, but now she only hung there, head down, dazed.

I let the clutch out, and a cold part of my mind took over: Easy, man—if you pop the clutch and stall this fucker, she’s dead.

Petunia rolled. I revved the engine up to a bellow and let the clutch out all the way. Christine roared at Leigh again, her hood crimped almost double from her first hit, bright metal showing through the broken paint at the sharpest points of bend. It looked as if her hood and grille had grown shark’s teeth.

I hit Christine three-quarters of the way toward the front and she slid around, one of her tyres pulling off the rim. The ’58 slammed into a litter of old bumper jacks and junk parts in one corner; there was a booming crash as she struck the wall, and then the hot sound of her engine, revving and falling off, revving and falling off. The entire left front end was bashed in—but she was still running.

I slammed on Petunia’s brake with my right foot and barely managed to avoid crushing Leigh myself. Petunia’s engine stalled. Now the only sound in the garage was Christine’s screaming engine.

“Leigh!” I screamed over it. “Leigh, run!”

She looked over at me groggily, and now I could see sticky braids of blood in her hair—it was as purple as I had expected. She let go of the struts, landed on her feet, staggered, and went to one knee.

Christine came for her. Leigh got up, took two wobbling steps, and got on her blind side, behind Petunia. Christine swerved and struck the truck’s front end. I was thrown roughly to the right. Pain roared through my left leg.

“Get up!” I screamed at Leigh, trying to lean even farther over and open the door. “Get up!”

Christine backed off, and when she came again she cut hard to the right and went out of my line of vision around the back of Petunia. I caught just a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror bolted outside the driver’s side window. Then I could only hear the scream of her tyres.

 

 

Barely conscious, Leigh simply wandered off, holding both hands laced to the back of her head. Blood trickled through her fingers. She walked in front of Petunia’s grille toward me and then just stopped.

I didn’t have to see in order to know-what was going to happen next. Christine would reverse again, back to my side, and then crush her against the wall.

Desperately, I shoved the clutch in with the mop and keyed the engine again. It turned over, coughed, stalled. I could smell gasoline in the air, heavy and rich. I had flooded the engine.

Christine reappeared in the rearview mirror. She came at Leigh, who managed to stumble backward just out of reach. Christine slammed nose-on into the wall with crunching force. The passenger door popped open and the horror was complete; the hand not clutching the mop-handle went to my mouth and I screamed through it.

Sitting on the passenger side like a grotesque life-sized doll was Michael Cunningham. His head, lolling limply on the stalk of his neck, snapped over to one side as Christine reversed to make another try at Leigh, and I saw his face had the high, rosy colour of carbon monoxide poisoning. He hadn’t taken my advice. Christine had gone to the Cunninghams’ house first, as I had vaguely suspected she might. Michael came home from school and there she was, standing in the driveway, his son’s restored 1958 Plymouth. He had gone to it, and somehow Christine had… had gotten him. Had he maybe gotten in just to sit behind the wheel for a moment, as I had that day in LeBay’s garage? He might have. Just to see what vibrations he could pick up. If so, he must have picked up some terrible vibes indeed during his last few minutes on earth. Had Christine started herself up? Driven herself into the garage? Maybe. Maybe. And had Michael discovered that he could neither turn off the madly revving engine or get out of the car? Had he maybe turned his head and perhaps seen the true guiding spirit of Arnie’s ’58 Fury, lounging in the shotgun seat, and fainted in terror?

It didn’t matter now. Leigh was all that mattered.

She had seen, too. Her screams, high, despairing, and shrill, floated in the exhaust-stinking air like hysterically bright balloons. But it had, at least, cut through her daze.

She turned and ran for Will Darnell’s office, blood splattering behind her in dime-sized drops as she went. Blood was soaking into the collar of her parka—too much blood.

Christine backed up, laying rubber and leaving a scatter of glass behind. As she pulled around in a tight circle to go after Leigh, centrifugal force pulled the passenger door shut again—but not before I saw Michael’s head loll back the other way.

Christine held still for a moment, her nose pointed toward Leigh, her engine revving. Perhaps LeBay was savouring the instant before the kill. If so, I’m glad, because if Christine had gone for her right away, she would have been killed then. But as it was, I had an instant of time, I turned the key again, babbling something aloud—a prayer, I guess—and this time Petunia’s engine coughed into life. I let the clutch out and stepped down on the accelerator as Christine leaped forward again. This time I struck her right side. There was a shrill scream of tearing metal as Petunia’s bumper punched through her mudguard. Christine heeled over and smashed against the wall. Glass broke. Her engine raced and raved. Behind the wheel, LeBay turned toward me, grinning with hate.


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