Christine - Stephen King [154]
Fragrant smoke rising around him, good hot coffee laced with brandy before him, Darnell stared out into his shadowy, silent garage and thought some more.
September: The kid asks him to jump an inspection sticker and loan him a dealer plate so he can take his girl to a football game. Darnell does it - hell, there was a day when he used to sell inspection stickers for seven dollars and never even look at the car it was going on. Besides, the kid's car is looking good. A little rough, maybe, and it's still more than a little noisy, but all in all, pretty damn good. He's going a real job of restoration.
And that's pretty damn strange, isn't it, when you consider that no one has ever seen him really work on it.
Oh, little things, sure. Replacing bulbs in the parking lights. Changing tyres. The kid is no dummy about cars: Will sat right in this chair one day and watched him replace the upholstery in the back seat. But no one has seen him working on the car's exhaust system, which was totally shot when he wheeled the '58 in here for the first time late last summer. And no one has seen him doing any bodywork, either, although the Fury's bod, which had an advanced case of cancer when the kid brought it in, now looks cherry.
Darnell knew what Jimmy Sykes thought, because he had asked him once. Jimmy thought Arnie did the serious work at night, after everyone was gone.
'That's one hell of a lot of night work,' Darnell said aloud, and felt a sudden chill that not even the brandy-laced coffee could dispel, A lot of night work, yeah. It must have been. Because what the kid seemed to be doing days was listening to the greaser music on WDIL. That, and a lot of aimless fooling around.
'I guess he does the big stuff at night,' Jimmy had said, with all the guileless faith of a child explaining how Santa Claus gets down the chimney or how the tooth fairy put the quarter under his pillow. Will didn't believe in either Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and he didn't believe that Arnie had restored Christine at night, either.
Two other facts rolled around uneasily in his mind like poolballs looking for a pocket in which to come to rest.
He knew that Cunningham had been driving the car around out back a lot before it was street-legal, that was one thing. Just cruising slowly up and down the narrow lanes between the thousands of junked cars in the block-long back lot. Driving at five miles an hour, around and around after dark, after everyone had gone home, circling the big crane with the round electromagnet and the great box of the car-crusher. Cruising. The one time Darnell asked him about it, Arnie had told him he was checking out a shimmy in the front end. But the kid couldn't lie for shit. No one ever checked out a shimmy at five miles an hour.
That was what Cunningham did after everyone else went home. That had been his night work. Cruising out back, threading his way in and out of the junkets, headlights flickering unsteadily in their rust-eaten sockets.
Then there was the Plymouth's milometer. It ran backward. Cunningham had pointed that out to him with a sly little smile. It ran backward at an extremely fast rate. He told Will that he figured the milometer turned back five miles or so for every actual mile travelled. Will had been frankly amazed. He had heard of setting milometers back in the used-car business, and he had done a good bit of it himself (along with stuffing transmissions full of sawdust to stifle their death whines and pouring boxes of oatmeal into terminally ill radiators to temporarily plug their leaks), but he had never seen one that ran backward spontaneously. He would have thought it impossible. Arnie had just smiled a funny little smile and called it a glitch.
It was a glitch, all right, Will thought. One hell of a glitch.
The two thoughts clicked lazily off each other and rolled in different directions.
Boy, that's some pretty car, isn't it? He fixed