NOS4A2(61)

The ebony body gleamed like a torpedo, like a polished slab of volcanic glass. The rear side door, which had been rusty and mismatched, had been replaced by an original, sent to him by a collector in one of the former Soviet republics. He had reupholstered the interior in kidskin leather, replaced the foldout trays and drawers in the rear of the limo with new walnut components, handmade by a carpenter in Nova Scotia. It was all original, even the vacuum-tube radio, although he had toyed with the idea of installing a CD player, bolting a Bose subwoofer into the trunk. In the end he had decided against it. When you had a Mona Lisa, you didn’t spray-paint a baseball cap on her.

He had promised his daughter on some long-ago, hot, thunderstormy, summer afternoon that he would fix the Rolls up for her prom, and here it was, finished at last, with just under a week to spare. After prom he could sell it; fully restored, the Wraith was good for quarter of a million dollars on the collectors’ market. Not bad for a car that cost just five thousand dollars American when it was released. Not bad at all, when you considered he had paid just twice that to buy it in an FBI auction, ten years earlier.

“Who do you think owned it before you?” Michelle asked one time, after he mentioned where he got it.

“Drug dealer, I imagine,” he said.

“Boy,” she told him, “I hope no one was murdered in it.”

It looked good—but looking good wasn’t enough. He didn’t think Michelle belonged in it, out on the road, until he had clocked a dozen miles on it himself, seen how it handled when it was all the way up to speed.

“Come on, you beautiful bitch,” he said to the car. “Let’s wake you up and see what you can do.”

Demeter got behind the wheel, banged the door shut behind him, and turned the key.

The engine slammed roughly to life—a ragged, almost savagely triumphant blast of noise—but then immediately settled down to a low, luxuriant rumble. The creamy leather front seat was more comfortable than the Tempur-Pedic bed he slept in. Back in the days when the Wraith had been assembled, things were built like tanks, built to last. This car, he felt sure, would outlive him.

He was right.

He had left his cell phone on his worktable, and he wanted it before he took the car out, didn’t want to wind up stranded somewhere if the Wraith decided to throw a rod or some such shit. He reached for the latch, which was when he got his first surprise of the afternoon. The lock slammed down, the sound of it loud enough that he almost cried out.

Demeter was so startled—so unprepared—that he wasn’t sure he had really seen it happen. But then the other locks went down, one after another—bang, bang, bang—just like someone firing a gun, and he couldn’t tell himself he was imagining all that.

“What the f*ck?”

He pulled at the lock on the driver’s-side door, but it stayed down as if welded in place.

The car shuddered from the idling force of the engine, exhaust piling up around the sideboards.

Demeter leaned forward to switch the ignition off, which was when he received his second surprise of the day. The key wouldn’t turn. He wiggled it forward and back, then put his wrist into it, but the key was locked into place, fully engaged, couldn’t be yanked out.

The radio popped on, playing “Jingle Bell Rock” at top volume—so loud it hurt his ears—a song that had no business playing in the spring. At the sound of it, Demeter’s whole body went rough and cold with chickenflesh. He poked the OFF switch, but his capacity for surprise was running thin, and he felt no special amazement when it wouldn’t turn off. He punched buttons to change the station, but no matter where the tuner leaped, it was “Jingle Bell Rock” on every channel.

He could see exhaust fogging the air now. He could taste it, the dizzying reek, making him light-headed. Bobby Helms assured him that Jingle Bell time was a swell time to haul around in a one-horse sleigh. He had to shut that shit up, had to have some quiet, but when he spun the volume dial, it didn’t go down, didn’t do anything.

Fog churned around the headlights. His next breath was a mouthful of poison and set off a coughing fit so strenuous it felt as if it were tearing away the inner lining of his throat. Thoughts flashed by like horses on an accelerating carousel. Michelle wouldn’t be back home for another hour and a half. The closest neighbors were three-quarters of a mile away—no one around to hear him screaming. The car wouldn’t turn off, the locks wouldn’t cooperate, it was like something in a f*cking spy movie—he imagined a hired killer with a name like Blow Job operating the Rolls-Royce by remote control—but that was crazy. He himself had torn the Wraith down and put it back together, and he knew there was nothing wired into it that would give someone power over the engine, the locks, the radio.

Even as these notions occurred to him, he was fumbling on the dash for the automatic garage-door opener. If he didn’t get some air in the garage, he would pass out in another moment or two. For a panicky instant, he felt nothing and thought, Not there, it’s not there—but then his fingers found it behind the raised hump of the housing for the steering wheel. He closed his hand around it, then pointed it at the garage door and pressed the button.

The door rattled up toward the ceiling. The gearshift banged itself into the reverse position, and the Wraith jumped back at the door, tires shrilling.

Nathan Demeter screamed, grabbed the steering wheel—not to control the car but just to have something to hold on to. The slender whitewalls grabbed at the pebble drive, throwing rocks against the undercarriage. The Wraith fell straight back like a kart on some mad backward rollercoaster, plunging three hundred feet down the steep grade of the drive toward the lane below. It seemed to Nathan that he screamed the whole way, although in fact he stopped well before the car was halfway down the hill. The scream he heard was trapped in his own head.