Christine - Stephen King [127]
He wet his lips and said, 'Sell her, Arnie, why don't you? When she's completely restored, sell her away. You could get a lot of money. A couple - three thousand, maybe.'
Again that frightened, tired look seemed to sweep over Arnie's face, but Michael couldn't tell for sure. The sunset had faded to a bitter orange line on the western horizon, and the little yard was dark. Then the look - if it had been there at all - went away.
'No, I couldn't do that, Dad,' Arnie said gently, as if speaking to a child. 'I couldn't do that now. I've put too much into her. Way too much.'
And then he was gone, cutting across the, yard to the sidewalk, joining the other shadows, and there was only the sound of his footfalls coming back, soon lost.
Put too much into her? Have you? Exactly what, Arnie? What have you put into her?
Michael looked down at the leaves, then around at his yard. Beneath the hedge and under the overhang of the garage, cold snow glimmered in the coming dark, livid and stubbornly waiting for reinforcements. Waiting for winter.
32 REGINA AND MICHAEL
She's real fine, my 409,
My four-speed, dual-quad, Positraction 409.
- The Beach Boys
Regina was tired - she tired more easily these days, it seemed - and they went to bed together around nine, long before Arnie came in. They made love that was dutiful and joyless (lately they made love a lot, it was almost always dutiful and joyless, and Michael had begun having the unpleasant feeling that his wife was using his penis as a sleeping pill), and as they lay in their twin beds after, Michael asked casually: 'How did you sleep last night?'
'Quite well,' Regina said candidly, and Michael knew she was lying. Good.
'I came up around eleven and Arnie seemed restless,' Michael said, still keeping his voice casual. He was deeply uneasy now - there had been something in Arnie's face tonight, something he hadn't been able to read because of the damned shadows. It was probably nothing, nothing at all, but it glowed in his mind like a baleful neon sign that simply would not shut off. Had his son looked guilty and scared? Or had it just been the light? Unless he could resolve that, sleep would be a long time coming tonight and it might not come at all.
'I got up around one,' Regina said, and then hurried to add, 'Just to use the bathroom. I checked in on him.' She laughed a little wistfully. 'Old habits die hard, don't they?'
'Yes,' Michael said. 'I guess they do.'
'He was sleeping deeply then. I wish I could get him to wear pyjamas in cold weather.'
'He was in his skivvies?'
'Yes.'
He settled back, immeasurably relieved and more than a little ashamed of himself as well. But it was better to know for sure. It was all very well for him to tell Arnie that he knew the boy could no more commit a murder than he could walk on water. But the mind, that perverse monkey the mind can conceive of anything and seems to take a perverse delight in doing so. Just maybe, Michael thought, lacing his hands behind his head and looking up at the dark ceiling, just maybe that's the peculiar damnation of the living. In the mind a wife can rut, laughing, with a best friend, a best friend can cast plots against you and plan backstabbings, a son can commit murder by auto.
Better to be ashamed and put the monkey to sleep.
Arnie had been here at one o'clock. It was unlikely Regina was mistaken about the time because of the digital clock-radio on their bureau - it told the time in numbers that were big and blue and unmistakable. His son had been here at one o'clock, and the Welch boy had been run down three miles away twenty-five minutes later. Impossible to believe that Arnie could have dressed, gone out (without Regina, who had surely been lying wakeful, hearing him), gone down to Darnell's, gotten Christine, and driven out to where Moochie Welch had been killed. Physically impossible.
Not that