Christine - Stephen King [194]
'Nice guy,' I said.
'A real prince,' he agreed.
My dad, who is no slouch, asked me if it had to do with Arnie. 'She's his girl, isn't she?'
'Well,' I said, not sure just what the situation was, and uncomfortable for reasons of my own, 'she has been. I don't know about now.'
'Problems?'
'I didn't do such a hot job being his eyes, did I?'
'It's hard to see from a hospital bed, Dennis. I'll see you mother and Ellie are out Tuesday afternoon. Just be careful, okay?'
Since then, I've pondered exactly what he might have meant by that; he surely couldn't have been worried about me trying to jump Leigh's bones, with one upper leg still in plaster and a half-cast on my back. I think maybe he was just afraid that something had gotten terribly out of whack, with my old childhood friend suddenly a stranger, and a stranger who was out on bail at that.
I sure thought something was out of whack, and it scared the piss out of me. The Keystone doesn't publish on Christmas, but all three Pittsburgh network-TV affiliates and both the independent channels had the story of what had happened to Will Darnell, along with bizarre and frightening pictures of his house. The side facing the road had been demolished. It was the only word which fit. That side of the house looked as if some mad Nazi had driven a Panzer tank through it. The story had been headlined this morning - FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED IN BIZARRE DEATH OF SUSPECTED CRIME FIGURE. That was bad enough, even without another picture of Will Darnell's house with that big hole punched in the side. But you had to check page three to get the rest of it. The other item was smaller because Will Darnell had been a 'suspected crime figure', and Don Vandenberg had only been a dipshit dropout gas-jockey.
SERVICE STATION ATTENDANT KILLED IN CHRISTMAS EVE HIT-AND-RUN, this headline read. A single column followed. The story ended with the Libertyville Chief of Police theorizing that the driver had probably been drunk or stoned. Neither he nor the Keystone made any attempt to connect the deaths, which had been separated by almost ten miles on the night of a screaming blizzard which had stopped all traffic in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. But I could make connections. I didn't want to, but I couldn't help it. And hadn't my father been looking at me strangely several times during the morning? Yes. Once or twice it had seemed he would say something - I had no idea what I would say if he did; Will Darnell's death, bizarre as it had been, was nowhere nearly as bizarre as my suspicions. Then he had closed his mouth without speaking. That, to be up front about it, was something of a relief.
The doorbell chimed at two past two.
'Come on in!' I yelled, getting up on my crutches again anyway.
The door opened and Leigh poked her head in. 'Dennis?'
'Yeah. Come on in.'
She did, looking very pretty in a bright red ski parka and dark blue pants. She pushed the parka's fur-edged hood back.
'Sit down, she said, unzipping her parka. 'Go on, right now, that's an order. You look like a big dumb stork on those things.'
'Keep it up,' I said, sitting down again with an ungainly plop. When you're cast in plaster, it's never like in the movies; you never sit down like Cary Grant getting ready to have cocktails at the Ritz with Ingrid Bergman. It all happens at once, and if the cushion you land on doesn't give out a big loud raspberry, as if your sudden descent had scared you into cutting the cheese, you count yourself ahead of the game. This time I got lucky. 'I'm such a sucker for flattery that I make myself sick.'
'How are you, Dennis?'
'Mending,' I said.' How about you?'
'I've been better,' she said in a low voice, and bit at her lower lip. This can sometimes be a seductive gesture on a girl's part, but it wasn't this time.
'Hang up your coat and sit down yourself.'
'Okay.' Her eyes touched mine, and looking at them was a little much. I looked someplace else, thinking about Arnie.
She hung her coat up and came back into the living room slowly. 'Your folks - '
'I