Free Christine by Stephen King

up in the lively drug traffic at Libertyville High and Darby Junior High, and I had also heard that he was on a nodding acquaintance with the big-time crooks in Pittsburgh and Philly. I didn't believe that stuff—at least, I didn't think I did—but I knew that if you wanted firecrackers or cherry-bombs or bottle-rockets for the Fourth of July, Will Darnell would sell them to you. I had also heard, from my father, that Will had been indicted twelve years before, when I was but a lad of five, as one of the kingpins in a stolen-car ring that stretched from our part of the world east to New York City and all the way up to Bangor, Maine. Eventually the charges were dropped. But my dad also said he was pretty sure that Will Darnell might be up to his ears in other shenanigans; anything from truck hijackings to fake antiques.
    A good place to stay away from, Dennis, my father had said. This had been a year ago, not long after I got my first clunker and had invested twenty dollars in renting one of Darnell's Do-It-Yourself Garage bays to try and replace the carburetor, an experiment that had ended in dismal failure.
    A good place to stay away from—and here I was, pulling in through the main gates behind my friend Arnie after dark, nothing left of the day but a tinge of furnace red on the horizon. My headlights picked out enough discarded auto-parts, wreckage, and general all-around dreck to make me feel more depressed and tired than ever. I realized I hadn't called home, and that my mother and father would probably be wondering just where the hell I was.
    Arnie drove up to a big garage door with a sign beside it reading HONK FOR ENTRY. There was a feeble light spilling out through a grime-coated window beside the door somebody was at home—and I barely restrained an impulse to lean out of my window and tell Arnie to drive his car over to my house for the night. I had a vision of us stumbling onto Will Darnell and his cronies inventorying hijacked color TVs or repainting stolen Cadillacs. The Hardy Boys come to Libertyville.
    Arnie just sat there, not honking, not doing anything and I was about to get out and ask him what was what when he came back to where I was parked. Even in the last of the failing light, he looked deeply embarrassed.
    "Would you mind honking your horn for me, Dennis?" he said humbly. "Christine's doesn't seem to work."
    "Sure."
    "Thanks."
    I beeped my horn twice, and after a pause the big garage door went rattling up. Will Darnell himself was standing there, his belly pushing out over his belt. He waved Arnie inside impatiently.
    I turned my car around, parked it facing out, and went inside myself.
    The interior was huge, vault-like, and terribly sil2nt at the end of the day. There were as many as five dozen slant-parking stalls, each equipped with its own bolted-down toolbox for do-it-yourselfers who had ailing cars but no tools. The ceiling overhead was high, and crossed with naked, gantry-like beams.
    Signs were plastered everywhere: ALL TOOLS MUST BE INSPECTED BEFORE YOU LEAVE and MAKE APPOINTMENT FOR LIFT-TIME IN ADVANCE and MOTOR MANUALS ON FIRST-COME FIRST-SERVE BASIS and NO PROFANITY OR SWEARING WILL BE TOLERATED. Dozens of others; everywhere you turned, one seemed to jump right out at you. A big sign-man was Will Darnell.
    "Stall twenty! Stall twenty!" Darnell yelled at Arnie in his irritable, wheezy voice. "Get it over there and shut it off before we all choke!"
    "We all" seemed to be a group of men at an oversized card-table in the far corner. Poker-chips, cards, and bottles of beer were scattered across the table. They were looking at Arnie's new acquisition with varying expressions of disgust and amusement.
    Arnie drove across to stall twenty, parked it, and shut it off. Blue exhaust drifted in the huge, cavernous space.
    Darnell turned to me. He was wearing a sail-like white shirt and brown khaki pants. Great rolls of fat bulged out his neck and hung in dewlaps from below his chin.
    "Kiddo," he