A third headlight stared from the center of the hood, below a silver ornament that looked like the engine of a futuristic express train.
Ace walked slowly around it, trying to eat it up with his eyes.
There was a pair of chromed grilles on either side of the back deck; he had no idea what they were for. The fat Goodyear whitewalls were so clean they almost glowed under the hanging lights.
Written in flowing chrome script across the back deck were the words “Tucker Talisman.” Ace had never heard of such a model.
He had thought the Torpedo was the only car Preston Tucker had ever turned out.
You have another problem, old buddy-there are no license plates on this thing. Are you going to try getting all the way back to Maine in a car that sticks out like a sore thumb, a car with no plates, a car loaded with guns and explosive devices?
Yes. He was. It was a bad idea, of course, a really bad idea… but the alternative-which would involve trying to fuck over Mr.
Leland Gaunt-seemed so much worse. Besides, this was a dream.
He shook the keys out of the envelope, went around to the trunk, and hunted in vain for a keyhole. After a few moments he remembered the movie with Jeff Bridges and understood. Like the German VW Beetle and the Chevy Corvair, the Tucker’s engine was back here. The trunk was up front.
Sure enough, he found the keyhole directly under that weird third headlight. He opened the trunk. It was indeed very cozy, and empty except for a single object. It was a small bottle of white dust with a spoon attached to the cap by a chain. A small piece of paper had been taped to the chain. Ace pulled it free and read the message which had been written there in teeny capital letters:
Ace followed orders.
5
Feeling much better with a little of Mr. Gaunt’s incomparable blow lighting up his brain like the front of Henry Beaufort’s Rock-Ola, Ace loaded the guns and the clips of ammo into the trunk. He put the crate of blasting caps into the back seat, pausing for just a moment to inhale deeply. The sedan had that incomparable newcar smell, nothing like it in the world (except maybe for pussy), and when he got behind the wheel, he saw that it was brand new: the odometer of Mr. Gaunt’s Tucker Talisman was set at 00000.0.
Ace pushed the ignition key into the slot and turned it.
The Talisman started up with a low, throaty, delightful rumble.
How many horses under the hood? He didn’t know, but it felt like a whole herd of them. There had been lots of automotive books in prison, and Ace had read most of them. The Tucker Torpedo had been a flathead six, about three hundred and fifty cubic inches, a lot like the cars Mr. Ford had built between 1948 and 1952. It had had something like a hundred and fifty horses under the hood.
This one felt bigger. A lot bigger.
Ace felt an urge to get out, go around back, and see if he could worry the hood open… but it was like thinking too much about that crazy name-Yog-whatever. Somehow it seemed like a bad idea. What seemed like a good idea was to get this thing back to Castle Rock just as fast as he could.
He started to get out of the car to use the door control, then honked the horn instead, just to see if anything would happen.
Something did. The door trundled silently up on its rails.
There’s a sound sensor around someplace for sure, he told himself, but he no longer believed it. He no longer even cared. He shifted into first and the Talisman throbbed out of the garage. He honked again as he started down the rutty path to the hole in the fence, and in the rearview mirror he saw the garage lights go out and the door start to descend. He also caught a glimpse of his Challenger, standing with its nose to the wall and the crumpled tarp on the floor beside it.
He had an odd feeling that he was never going to see it again. Ace found he didn’t care about that, either.
6
The Talisman not only ran like a dream, it seemed to know its own way back to Storrow Drive and the turnpike north. Every now and then the turnblinkers went on by themselves. When this happened, Ace simply made the next turn. In no time at all the creepy little Cambridge slum where he had found the Tucker was behind him, and the shape of the Tobin Bridge, more familiarly known as the Mystic River Bridge, was looming in front of him,-a black gantry against the darkening sky.
Ace pulled the light-switch, and a sharply defined fan of radiance at once sprang out before him. When he turned the wheel, the fan of light turned with it. That center headlight was a hell of a rig. No wonder they drove the poor bastard who thought this car up out of business, Ace thought.
He was about thirty miles north of Boston when he noticed the needle of the fuel gauge was sitting on the peg beyond E. He pulled off at the nearest exit and cruised Mr. Gaunt’s ride to a stop at the pumps of a Mobile station which stood at the ramp’s foot. The pump jockey pushed his cap back on his head with one greasy thumb and walked around the car admiringly. “Nice car!” he said. “Where’d you get it?”
Without thinking, Ace said, “The Plains of Leng. Yog-Sothoth Vintage Motors.”
“Huh?”
“Just fill it up, son-this isn’t Twenty Questions.”
“Oh!” the pump jockeysaid, taking a second look at Ace and becoming obsequious at once. “Sure! You bet!”
And he tried, but the pump clicked off after running just fourteen cents into the tank. The pump jockey tried to squeeze more in by running the pump manually, but the gas only slopped out, running down the Talisman’s gleaming yellow flank and dripping onto the tarmac.
“I guess it doesn’t need gas,” the jockeysaid timidly.
“Guess not.”
“Maybe your fuel gauge is bust-”
“Wipe that gas off the side of my car. You want the paint to blister? What’s the matter with you?”
The kid sprang to do it, and Ace went into the bathroom to help his nose a little. When he came out, the pump jockey was standing at a respectful distance from the Talisman, twisting his rag nervously in both hands.
He’s scared, Ace thought. Scared of what? Me?
No; the kid in the Mobile coverall barely glanced in Ace’s direction. It was the Tucker that kept drawing his gaze.
He tried to touch it, Ace thought.
The revelation-and that was what it was, exactly what it wasbrought a grim little smile to the corners of his mouth.
He tried to touch it and something happened. What it was don’t really matter. It taught him that he can look but he better not touch, and that’s all that does matter.
“Won’t be no charge,” the pump ’ockeysaid.
“You got that right.” Ace slid behind the wheel and got rolling in a hurry. He had a brand-new idea about the Talisman. In a way it was a scary idea, but in another way it was a really great idea. He thought that maybe the gas gauge always read empty… and that the tank was always full.
7
The toll-gates for passenger cars in New Hampshire are the automated kind; you throw a buck’s worth of change (No Pennies Please) into the basket, the red light turns green, and you go. Except when Ace rolled the Tucker Talisman up to the basket jutting out from the post, the light turned green on its own and the little sign shone out:
“Betcha fur,” Ace muttered, and drove on toward Maine.
By the time he left Portland behind, he had the Talisman cruising along at just over eighty miles an hour, and there was plenty left under the hood. just past the Falmouth exit, he topped a rise and saw a State Police cruiser lurking beside the highway. The distinctive torpedo-shape of a radar gun jutted from the driver’s window.