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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 24 страница



The preacher’s voice: Who giveth this woman to this man?

Roland D. LeBay rose from one of the camp chairs like the prow of a skeletal ghost-ship from Hades. He was grinning—and for the first time Arnie saw who had been sitting around him: Buddy Repperton, Richie Trelawney, Moochie Welch. Richie Trelawney was black and charred, most of his hair burned off. Blood had poured down Buddy Repperton’s chin and had caked his shirt like hideous vomit. But Moochie Welch was the worst; Moochie Welch had been ripped open like a laundry bag. They were smiling. All of them were smiling.

I do, Roland D. LeBay croaked. He grinned, and a tongue slimed with graveyard mould lolled from the stinking hole of his mouth. I give her, and he’s got the receipt to prove it. She’s all his. The bitch is the ace of spades… and she’s all his.

Arnie became aware that he was moaning in the telephone booth, clutching the receiver against his chest. With a tremendous effort he pulled himself all the way out of the daze—vision, whatever it had been—and got hold of himself.

This time when he reached for the change on the ledge, he spilled half of it onto the floor. He plugged a dime into the slot and scrabbled through the telephone book until he found the hospital number. Dennis. Dennis would be there, Dennis always had been. Dennis wouldn’t let him down. Dennis would help.

The switchboard girl answered, and Arnie said, “Room Two-forty, please.”

The connection was made. The phone began to ring It rang… and rang… and rang. Just as he was about to give up, a brisk female voice said, “Second floor, C-Wing, who were you trying to reach?”

“Guilder,” Arnie said. “Dennis Guilder.”

“Mr Guilder’s in Physical Therapy right now, the female voice said. “You could reach him at eight o’clock.”

Arnie thought of telling her it was important—very important—but suddenly he was overwhelmed with a need to get out of the phone booth. Claustrophobia was like a giant’s hand pushing down on his chest. He could smell his own sweat. The smell was sour, bitter.

“Sir?”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll call back,” Arnie said. He broke the connection and nearly burst out of the booth, leaving his change scattered on the ledge and the floor. A few people turned around to look at him, mildly interested, and then turned back to their food again.

“Pizza’s ready,” the counterman said.

Arnie glanced up at the clock and saw he had been in the booth for almost twenty minutes. There was sweat all over his face. His armpits felt like a jungle. His legs were trembling—the muscles in his thighs felt as if they might simply give out and spill him onto the floor.

He paid for the pizza, nearly dropping his wallet as he tucked his three dollars in change back in.

“You okay?” the counterman asked. “You look a little white around the gills.”

“I’m fine,” Arnie said. Now he felt as if he might vomit. He snatched the pizza in its white box with the word GINO’s emblazoned across the top and fled into the cold sharp clarity of the night. The last of the clouds had blown away, and the stars twinkled like chipped diamonds. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking first at the stars and then at Christine, parked across the street, waiting faithfully.

She would never argue or complain, Arnie thought. She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny. She—she—

She loved him.

Yes; he sensed that was true. Just as he sometimes sensed that LeBay would not have sold her to anyone else, not for two hundred and fifty, not for two thousand. She had been sitting there waiting for the right buyer. One who would…

One who would love her for herself alone, that voice inside whispered.

“Yes. That was it; that was exactly it.

Arnie stood there with his pizza forgotten in his hands, white steam rising lazily from the grease-spotted box. He looked at Christine, and such a confusing whirl of emotions ran through him that there might have been a cyclone in his body, rearranging everything it did not simply destroy. Oh, he loved and loathed her, he hated her and cherished her, he needed her and needed to run from her, she was his and he was hers and



(I now pronounce you man and wife joined and sealed from this day forth for ever and ever, until death do you part)

But worst of all was the horror, the terrible numbing horror, the realization that… that…

(how did you hurt your back that night, Arnie? after Repperton—the late Clarence “Buddy” Repperton—and his buddies trashed her? How did you hurt your back so that now you have to wear this stinking brace all the time? How did you hurt your back?)

The answer rose and Arnie began to run, trying to beat the realization, to get to Christine before he saw the whole thing plain and went mad.

He ran for Christine, running his tangled emotions and some terrible drawing realization a foot race; he ran to her the way a hype runs for his works when the shakes and the jitters get so bad he can no longer think of anything but relief; he ran the way that the damned run to their appointed doom; he ran as a bridegroom runs to the place where his bride stands waiting.

He ran because inside Christine none of these things mattered—not his mother, father, Leigh, Dennis, or what he had done to his back that night when everyone was gone, that night after he had taken his almost totally destroyed Plymouth from the airport and back to Darnell’s, and after the place was empty he had put Christine’s transmission in neutral and pushed her, pushed her until she began to roll on her flat tyres, pushed her until she was out the door and he could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and the abandonded hulks with their stellated glass and their ruptured gas tanks; he had pushed her until the sweat ran off him in rivers and his heart thudded like a runaway horse in his chest and his back cried out for mercy; he had pushed her, his body pumping as if in some hellish consummation; he had pushed her, and inside the milometer ran slowly backward, and some fifty feet beyond the door his back began to really throb, and he kept pushing, and then his back began to scream in protest, and he kept pushing, muscling it along on the flat, slashed tyres, his hands going numb, his back screaming, screaming, screaming. And then—

He reached Christine and flung himself inside, shuddering and panting. His pizza fell on the floor. He picked it up and set it on the seat, feeling calm slowly wash through him like a soothing balm. He touched the steering wheel, let his hands slip down it, tracing its delicious curve. He took one glove off and felt in his pocket for his keys. For LeBay’s keys.

He could still remember what had happened that night, but it did not seem horrible now; now, sitting behind Christine’s steering wheel, it seemed rather wonderful.

It had been a miracle.

He remembered how it had suddenly become easier to push the car because the tyres were healing themselves magically, kneading themselves together without a scar and then inflating. The broken glass had begun to re-assemble from nowhere, knitting itself upward with small, scratchy, crystalline sounds, The dents began to pop back out.

He simply pushed her until she was right enough to run, and then he had driven her, cruising between the rows until the milometer ran back past what Repperton and his friends had done. And then Christine was okay.

What could be so horrible about that?

“Nothing,” a voice said.

He looked around. Roland D. LeBay was sitting on the passenger side of the car, wearing a black double-breasted suit, a white shirt, a blue tie. A row of medals hung askew on one lapel of his suit-coat—it was the outfit he had been buried in, Arnie knew that even though he had never actually seen it. Only LeBay looked younger and tougher. A man you’d not want to fool with.

“Start her up,” LeBay said. “Get the heater going and let’s motorvate.”

“Sure,” Arnie said, and turned the key. Christine pulled out, tyres crunching on the packed snow. He had pushed her that night until almost all the damage had been repaired. No, not repaired—negated. Negated was the right word for what had happened. And then he had put her back in stall twenty, leaving the rest to do himself.

“Let’s have us some music,” the voice beside him said.

Arnie turned on the radio. Dion was singing” Donna the Prima Donna”.

“You going to eat that pizza, or what?” The voice seemed to be changing somehow.

“Sure,” Arnie said. “You want apiece?”

Leering: “I never say no to a piece of anything.” Arnie opened the pizza box with one hand and pulled a piece free. “Here you g—”

His eyes widened. The slice of pizza began to tremble, the long threads of cheese dangling down beginning to sway like the strands of a spiderweb broken by the wind.

It wasn’t LeBay sitting there anymore.

It was him.

It was Arnie Cunningham at roughly age fifty, not as old as LeBay had been when he and Dennis first met him on that August day, not that old, but getting there, friends and neighbours, getting there. His older self was wearing a slightly yellowed T-shirt and dirty, oil-smeared bluejeans. The glasses were hornrims, taped at one bow. The hair was cut short and receding. The grey eyes were muddy and bloodshot. The mouth had taken all the tucks of sour loneliness. Because this—this thing, apparition, whatever it was—it was alone. He felt that.

Alone except for Christine.

This version of himself and Roland D. LeBay could have been son and father: the resemblance was that great.

“You going to drive? Or are you going to stare at me?” this thing asked, and it suddenly began to age before Arnie’s stunned eyes. The iron-coloured hair went white, the T-shirt rippled and thinned, the body beneath twisted with age. The wrinkles raced across the face and then sank in like lines of acid. The eyes sank into their sockets and the corneas yellowed. Now only the nose thrust forward, and it was the face of some ancient carrion-eater, but still his face, oh, yes, still his.

“See anything green?” this sept—no, this octogenarian “Arnie Cunningham croaked, as its body twisted and writhed and withered on Christine’s red seat. “See anything green? See anything green? See anything—” The voice cracked and rose and whined into a shrill, senile treble, and now the skin broke open in sores and surface tumours and behind the glasses milky cataracts covered both eyes like shades being pulled down. It was rotting before his very eyes and the smell of it was what he had smelled in Christine before, what Leigh had smelled, only it was worse now, it was the high, gassy, gagging smell of high-speed decay, the smell of his own death, and Arnie began to whine as Little Richard came on the radio singing “Tutti Frutti,” and now the thing’s hair was failing out in gossamer white drifts and its collarbones poked through the shiny, stretched skin above the T-shirt’s sagging round collar, they poked through like grotesque white pencils. Its lips were shrivelling away from the final surviving teeth that leaned this way and that like tombstones, it was him, it was dead, and yet it lived—like Christine, it lived,

“See anything green?” it gibbered. “See anything green?”

Arnie began to scream.

 

 

JUNKINS AGAIN

 

The fenders were clickin the guard-rail posts,

The guys beside me were just as white as ghosts.

One says, “Slow down, I see spots,

The lines in the road just look like dots.”

— Charlie Ryan

 

Arnie pulled into Darnell’s Garage about an hour later. His rider—if there really had been a rider—was long gone. The smell was gone too; it had undoubtedly been just an illusion. If you hung around the shitters for long enough, Arnie reasoned, everything started to smell like shit. And that made them happy, of course.

Will was sitting behind his desk in his glassed-in office, eating a hoagie. He raised one drippy hand but didn’t come out. Arnie blipped his horn and parked.

It had all been some kind of dream. Simple as that. Some crazy kind of dream. Calling home, calling Leigh, trying to call Dennis and having that nurse tell him Dennis was in Physical Therapy—it was like being denied three times before the cock crew, or something. He had freaked a little bit. Anyone would have freaked, after the shitstorm he’d been through since August. It was all a question of perspective, after all, wasn’t it? All his life he had been one thing to people, and now he was coming out of his shell, turning into a normal everyday person with normal everyday concerns. It was not at all surprising that people should resent this, because when someone changed

(for better or worse, for richer or poorer) it was natural for people to get a little weird about it. It fucked up their perspective.

Leigh has spoken as if she thought he was crazy, and that was nothing but bullshit of the purest ray serene. He had been under strain, of course he had, but strain was a natural part of life. If Miss High-Box-Oh-So-Preppy Leigh Cabot thought otherwise, she was in for an abysmal fucking at the hands of that all-time champion rapist, Life. She’d probably end up taking Big Reds to get out of first gear in the morning and Nembies or ’Ludes to come down at night.

Ah, but he wanted her—even now, thinking about her, he felt a great, unaccountable, unnameable desire sweep through him like cold wind, making him squeeze Christine’s wheel fiercely in his hands. It was a hot wanting too great, too elemental, for naming. It was its own force.

But he was all right now. He felt he had… crossed the last bridge, or something.

He had come back to himself sitting in the middle of a narrow access road beyond the farthest parking-lot reaches of the Monroeville Mail—which meant he was roughly halfway to California. Getting out, looking behind the car, he had seen a hole smashed through a snowbanks and there was melting snow sprayed across Christine’s hood. Apparently he had lost control, gone skating across the lot (which, even with the Christmas shopping season in full swing, was mercifully empty this far out), and had crashed through the bank. Damn lucky he hadn’t been in an accident. Damn lucky.

He had sat there for a while, listening to the radio and looking through the windscreen at the half-moon floating overhead. Bobby Helms had come on singing “Jingle Bell Rock”, a Sound of the Season, as the deejays said, and he had smiled a little, feeling better. He couldn’t remember what exactly it was that he had seen (or thought he had seen), and he didn’t really want to. Whatever it had been, it was the first and last time. He was quite sure of that. People had gotten him imagining things. They’d probably be delighted if they knew… but he wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction.

Things were going to be better all the way around. He would mend his fences at home—in fact, could start tonight by watching some TV with his folks, just like in the old days. And he would win Leigh back. If she didn’t like the car, no matter how weird her reasons were, fine. Maybe he would, even buy another car sometime soon and tell her he had traded Christine in. He could keep Christine here, rent space. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. And Will. This was going to be his last run for Will, this coming weekend. That bullshit had gone just about far enough; he could feel it. Let Will think he was a chicken if that’s what he wanted to think. A felony rap for interstate transport of unlicensed cigarettes and alcohol wouldn’t look all that hot on his college application, would it? A Federal felony rap. No. Not too cool.

He laughed a little. He did feel better. Purged. On his way over to the garage he ate his pizza even though it was cold. He was ravenous. It had struck him a bit peculiar that one piece was gone—in fact, it made him a bit uneasy—but he dismissed it. He had probably eaten it during that strange blank period, or maybe even thrown it out the window. Whoo, that had been spooky. No more of that shit. And he had laughed again, this time a little less shakily.

Now he got out of the car, slammed the door, and started toward Will’s office to find out what he had for him to do this evening. It suddenly occurred to him that tomorrow was the last day of school before the Christmas vacation, and that put an extra spring in his step.

That was when the side door, the one beside the big carport door, opened and a man let himself in. It was Junkins. Again.

He saw Arnie looking at him and raised a hand. “Hi, Arnie.”

Arnie glanced at Will. Through the glass, Will shrugged and went on eating his hoagie.

“Hello,” Arnie said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Junkins said. He smiled, and then his eyes slid past Arnie to Christine, appraising, looking for damage. “Do you want to do something for me?”

“Not fucking likely,” Arnie said. He could feel his head starting to throb with rage again.

Rudy Junkins smiled, apparently unoffended.

“I just dropped by. How you been?”

He stuck out his hand. Arnie only looked at it. Not embarrassed in the slightest, Junkins dropped his hand, walked around to Christine, and began examining her again. Arnie watched him, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white. He felt a fresh pulse of anger each time Junkins dropped one of his hands onto Christine.

“Look, maybe you ought to buy a season ticket or something,” Arnie said. “Like to the Steelers games.”

Junkins turned and looked at him questioningly.

“Never mind,” Arnie said sullenly.

Junkins went on looking. “You know,” he said, it’s a hell of a strange thing, what happened to Buddy Repperton and those other two boys, isn’t it?”

Fuck it, Arnie thought. I’m not going to fool around with this shitter.

“I was in Philadelphia. Chess tourney.”

“I know,” Junkins said.

“Jesus! You’re really checking me out!”

Junkins walked back to Arnie. There was no smile on his face now. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “I’m checking you out. Three of the boys I believe were involved in vandalizing your car are now dead, along with a fourth boy who was apparently just along for the ride on Tuesday night. That’s a pretty big coincidence. It’s nine miles too big for me. You bet I’m checking you out.”

Arnie stared at him, surprised out of his anger, uncertain. “I thought it was an accident… that they were liquored up and speeding and—”

“There was another car involved,” Junkins said.

“How do you know that?”

“There were tracks in the snow, for one thing. Unfortunately, the wind had blurred them too much for us to be able to get a decent photo. But one of the barriers at the Squantic Hills State Park gate was broken, and we found traces of red paint on it. Buddy’s Camaro wasn’t red. It was blue.”

He measured Arnie with his eyes.

“We also found traces of red paint embedded in Moochie Welch’s skin, Arnie. Can you dig that? Embedded. Do you know how hard a car has to hit a guy to embed paint in his skin?”

“You ought to go out there and start counting red cars,” Arnie said coldly. “You’ll be up to twenty before you get to Basin Drive, I guarantee it.”

“You bet,” Junkins said. “But we sent our samples to the FBI lab in Washington, where they have samples of every shade of paint they ever used in Detroit. We got the results back today. Any idea what they were? Want to guess?”

Arnie’s heart was thudding dully in his chest; there was a corresponding beat at his temples. “Since you’re here, I’d guess it was Autumn Red. Christine’s colour.”

“Give that man a Kewpie doll,” Junkins said. He lit a cigarette and looked at Arnie through the smoke. He had abandoned any pretence of good humour; his gaze was stony.

Arnie clapped his hands to his head in an exaggerated gesture of exasperation. “Autumn Red, great. Christine’s a custom job but there were Fords from 1959 to 1963 painted Autumn Red, and Thunderbirds, and Chevrolet offered that shade from 1962 to 1964, and for a while in the mid-fifties you could get a Rambler painted Autumn Red. I’ve been working on my ’58 for half a year now, I get the car books; you can’t do work on an old car without the books, or you’re screwed before you start. Autumn Red was a popular choice. I know it”—he looked at Junkins fixedly—“and you know it, too. Don’t you?”

Junkins said nothing; he only went on looking at Arnie in that fixed, stony, unsettling way. Arnie had never seen looked at in that way by anyone in his life, but he recognized the gaze, He supposed anyone would. It was a look of strong, frank suspicion. It scared him. A few months ago—even a few weeks ago—that was probably all it would have done. But now it made him furious as well.

“You’re really reaching. Just what the hell have you got against me anyway, Mr Junkins? Why are you on my ass?” Junkins laughed and walked around in a large half-circle. The place was entirely empty except for the two of them out here and Will in his office, finishing his hoagie and licking olive oil off his hands and still watching them closely.

“What have I got against you?” He said. “How does first-degree murder sound to you, Arnie? Does that grab you with any force?”

Arnie grew very still.

“Don’t worry,” Junkins said, still walking. “No big tough cop scene. No menacing threats about going downtown—except in this case downtown would be Harrisburg. No Miranda card. Everything is still fine for our hero, Arnold Cunningham.”

“I don’t understand any of what you’re—”

“You… understand. PLENTY!” Junkins roared at him. He had stopped next to a giant yellow hulk of a truck—another of Johnny Pomberton’s dumpsters-in-the-making. He stared at Arnie. “Three of the kids who beat on your car are dead. Autumn Red paint samples were taken at both crime scenes, leading us to believe that the vehicle the perpetrator used in both cases was at least in part Autumn Red. And gee whiz! It just turns out that the car those kids trashed is mostly Autumn Red. And you stand there and push your glasses up on your nose and tell me you don’t understand what I’m talking about.”

“I was in Philadelphia when it happened,” Arnie said quietly. “Don’t you get that? Don’t you get that at all?”

“Kiddo,” Junkins said flipping his cigarette away, “that’s the worst part of it. That’s the part that really stinks.”

“I wish you’d get out of here or put me under arrest or something. Because I’m supposed to punch in and do some work.”

“For now,” Junkins said, “talk is all I’ve got. The first time—when Welch got killed—you were supposed to be home in bed.”

“Pretty thin, I know,” Arnie said. “Believe me, if I’d known this shit was going to come down on my head, I would have hired a sick friend to sit up with me.”

“Oh, no—that was good,” Junkins said. “Your mother and father had no cause to doubt your tale. I could tell that from speaking to them. And alibis—the true ones—usually have more holes than a Salvation Army suit. It’s when they start to look like suits of armour that I get nervous.”

“Holy Jumping Jesus!” Arnie almost screamed. “It was a fucking chess meet! I’ve been in the chess club for four years now!”

“Until today,” Junkins said, and Arnie grew still again. Junkins nodded. “Oh yeah, I talked to the club advisor. Herbert Slawson. He says that the first three years you never missed a meeting, even came to a couple with a low-grade case of the flu. You were his star player. Then, this year, you were spotty right from the start—”

“I had my car to work on… and I got a girl—”

“He said you missed the first three tourneys, and he was pretty surprised when your name turned up on the trip sheet for the Northern States meet. He thought you’d lost all your interest in the club.”

“I told you—”

“Yes, you did. Too busy. Cars and girls, just what makes most kids too busy. But you regained your interest long enough to go to Philly—and then you dropped out. That strikes me as very odd.”

“I can’t see anything funny about it,” Arnie said, but his voice seemed distant, almost lost in the surf-roar of blood in his ears.

“Bullshit. It looks as if you knew it was coming down and set yourself up with an airtight alibi.”

The roar in his head had even assumed the steady, wavelike beats of surf, each beat accompanied by a dull thrust of pain. He was getting a headache—why wouldn’t this monstrous man with his prying brown eyes just go away? None of it was true, none of it, He hadn’t set anything up, not an alibi, not anything. He had been as surprised as anyone else when he read in the paper what had happened. Of course he had been. There was nothing strange going on, unless it was this lunatic’s paranoia, and

(how did you hurt your back anyway, Arnie? and by the way, do you see anything green? do you see) he closed his eyes and for a moment the world seemed to lurch out of its orbit and he saw that green, grinning, rotting face floating before him, saying: Start her up. Get the heater going and let’s motorvate. And while we’re at it, let’s get the shitters that wrecked our car. Let’s grease the little cockknockers, kid, what do you say? Let’s hit them so fucking hard the corpse-cutter down at city, hospital will have to pull the paint-chips out of their carcasses with pliers. What do you say? Find some doowop music on the radio and let’s cruise. Let’s—

He groped back behind him, touched Christine—her hard, cool, reassuring surface—and things dropped back into place again. He opened his eyes.

“There’s only one other thing, really,” Junkins said, “and it’s very subjective. Nothing you could put on a report. You’re different this time, Arnie. Harder, somehow. It’s almost as if you’ve put on twenty years.”

Arnie laughed, and was relieved to hear it sounded quite natural. “Mr Junkins, you’ve got a screw loose.”

Junkins didn’t join him in his laughter. “Uh-huh. I know it. The whole thing is screwy—screwier than anything I’ve investigated in the ten years I’ve been a detective. Last time, I felt like I could reach you, Arnie. I felt you were… I don’t know. Lost, unhappy, groping around, trying to get out. Now I don’t feel that at all. I almost feel like I’m talking to a different person. Not a very nice one.”

“I’m done-talking to you,” Arnie said abruptly, and began walking toward the office.

“I want to know what happened,” Junkins called after him. “And I’m going to find out. Believe me.”

“Do me a favour and stay away from here,” Arnie said. “You’re crazy.”

He let himself into the office, closed the door behind him, and noticed his hands weren’t shaking at all. The room was stuffy with the smells of cigar and olive oil and garlic. He crossed in front of Will without speaking, took his time-card out of the rack, and punched in: ka-thud. Then he looked through the glass window and saw Junkins standing there, looking at Christine. Will said nothing. Arnie could hear the noisy engine of the big man’s respiration. A couple of minutes later Junkins left.

“Cop,” Will said, and ripped out a long belch. It sounded like a chainsaw.

“Yeah.”

“Repperton?”

“Yeah. He thinks I had something to do with it.”

“Even though you were in Philly?”

Arnie shook his head. “He doesn’t even seem to care about that.”

He’s a smart cop then, Will thought. He knows the facts are wrong, and his intuition tells him there’s something even wronger than that, so he’s gotten further with it than most cops ever would, but he could spend a million years and not get all the way to the truth. He thought of the empty car driving itself into stall twenty like some weird wind-up toy. The empty ignition slot turning over to START, The engine revving once, like a warning snarl, and then failing off.

And thinking of these things, Will did not trust himself to look Arnie in the face, even though his own experience in routine deceit was nearly lifelong.

“I don’t want to send you to Albany if the cops are watching you.”

“I don’t care if you send me to Albany or not, but you don’t have to worry about the heat. He’s the only cop I’ve seen, and he’s crazy. He’s not interested in anything but two cases of hit-and-run.”

Now Will’s eyes did meet Arnie’s: Arnie’s grey and distant, Will’s a faded no-colour, the corneas a dim yellow; they were the eyes of an ancient tomcat who has seen a thousand mice turned inside out.

“He’s interested in you,” he said. “I’d better send Jimmy.”

“You like the way Jimmy drives, do you?”

Will looked at Arnie for a moment and then sighed. Okay,” he said. “But if you see that cop, you back off. And if you get caught holding a bag, Cunningham, it’s your bag. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Arnie said. “Do you want me to do some work tonight, or what?”

“There’s a ’77 Buick in forty-nine. Pull the starter motor. Check the solenoid. If it seems okay, pull that too.”

Arnie nodded and left. Will’s thoughtful eyes drifted from his retreating back to Christine. He had no business sending him to Albany this weekend and he knew it. The kid knew it too, but he was going to push ahead anyway. He had said he’d go, and he was now going to by-God do it. And if anything happened, the kid would stand up. Will was sure of it. There was a time when he surely wouldn’t have done, but that time was past now.


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