Christine by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page B

Arnie looked very small behind the wheel.
    He rolled down the window and beckoned me over. We had to raise our voices to make ourselves heard clearly that was another thing about Arnie's girl Christine; she had an extremely loud and rumbling voice. She was going to have to be Midasized in a hurry. If there was anything left of" the exhaust system to attach a silencer to, that was, besides a lot of rusty lace. Since Arnie sat down behind the wheel, the little accountant in the automotive section or my brain had totted up expenses of about six hundred dollars not including the cracked windscreen. God knew how much that might cost to replace.
    "I'm taking her down to Darnell"s!" Arnie yelled. "His ad in the paper says I can park it in one of the back bays for twenty dollars a week!"
    "Arnie, twenty a week for one of those back bays is too much!" I bellowed back.
    Here was more robbery of the young and innocent. Darnell's Garage sat next door to a four-acre automobile wasteland that went by the falsely cheerful name of Darnell's Used Auto Parts. I had been there a few times, once to buy a starter for my Duster, once to get a rebuilt carb for the Mercury which had been my first car. Will Darnell was a great fat pig of a man who drank a lot and smoked long rank cigars, although he was reputed to have a bad asthmatic condition. He professed to hate almost every car-owning teenager in Libertyville… but that didn't keep him from catering to them and rooking them.
    "I know," Arnie yelled over the bellowing engine. "But it's only for a week or two, until I find a cheaper place. I can't take it home like this, Dennis, my dad and mom would have a shit fit!"
    That was certainly true. I opened my mouth to say something else—maybe to beg him again to stop this madness before it got completely out of control. Then I shut my mouth again. The deal was done. Besides, I didn't want to compete with that bellowing silencer anymore, or stand there pulling a lot of evil fried-carbon exhaust into my lungs.
    "All right," I said. "I'll follow you."
    "Good deal," he said, grinning. "I'm going by Walnut Street and Basin Drive. I want to stay off the main roads."
    "Okay."
    "Thanks, Dennis."
    He dropped the hydramatic transmission into D again, and the Plymouth lurched forward two feet and then almost stalled. Arnie goosed the accelerator a little and Christine broke dirty wind. The Plymouth crept down LeBay's driveway to the street. When he pushed the brake, only one of the tail-lights flashed. My mental automotive accountant relentlessly rang up another five dollars.
    He hauled the wheel to the left and pulled out into the street. The remains of the silencer scraped rustily at the lowest point of the driveway. Arnie gave it more gas, and the car roared like a refugee from the demo derby at Philly Plains. Across the street, people leaned forward on their porches or came to their doors to see what was going on.
    Bellowing and snarling, Christine rolled up the street at about ten miles an hour, sending out great stinking clouds of blue oil-smoke that hung and then slowly raftered in the mellow August evening.
    At the stop sign forty yards up, it stalled. A kid rode past the hulk on his Raleigh, and his impudent, brassy shout drifted back to me: "Put it in a trash-masher, mister!"
    Arnie's closed fist popped out of the window. His middle finger went up as he flipped the kid the bird. Another first. I had never seen Arnie flip anyone the bird in my life.
    The starter whined, the motor sputtered and caught. This time there was a whole rattling series of backfires. It was as if someone had just opened up with a machine-gun on Laurel Drive, Libertyville, U.S.A. I groaned.
    Someone would call the cops pretty soon, reporting a public nuisance, and they would grab Arnie for driving an unregistered, uninspected vehicle—and probably for the nuisance charge as well. That would not exactly ease the situation at home.
    There was one final echoing bang—it rolled