Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(111)

Hodges realizes he’s heard those cheerful, tinkling bells more than a lot lately. In the spring of his depression, crashed out in his La-Z-Boy, watching afternoon TV (and sometimes playing with the gun now riding against his ribs), it seems he heard them every day. Heard them and ignored them, because only kids pay actual attention to the ice cream man. Except some deeper part of his mind didn’t completely ignore them. It was the deep part that kept coming back to Bowfinger, and his satiric comment about Mrs. Melbourne.

She thinks they walk among us, Mr. Bowfinger said, but it hadn’t been space aliens Mrs. Melbourne had been concerned about on the day Hodges had done his canvass; it had been black SUVs, and chiropractors, and the people on Hanover Street who played loud music late at night.

Also, the Mr. Tastey man.

That one looks suspicious, she had said.

This spring it seems like he’s always around, she had said.

A terrible question surfaces in his mind, like one of the snakes always lying in wait for Pitfall Harry: if he had paid attention to Mrs. Melbourne instead of dismissing her as a harmless crank (the way he and Pete dismissed Olivia Trelawney), would Janey still be alive? He doesn’t think so, but he’s never going to know for sure, and he has an idea that the question will haunt a great many sleepless nights in the weeks and months to come.

Maybe the years.

He looks out at the parking lot . . . and there he sees a ghost. A gray one.

He turns back to Jerome and Holly, now standing side by side, and doesn’t even have to ask.

“Yeah,” Jerome says. “Holly drove it here.”

“The registration and the sticker decal on the license plate are both a tiny bit expired,” Holly says. “Please don’t be mad at me, okay? I had to come. I wanted to help, but I knew if I just called you, you’d say no.”

“I’m not mad,” Hodges says. In fact, he doesn’t know what he is. He feels like he’s entered a dreamworld where all the clocks run backward.

“What do we do now?” Jerome asks. “Call the cops?”

But Hodges is still not ready to let go. The young man in the picture may have a cauldron of crazy boiling away behind his bland face, but Hodges has met his share of psychopaths and knows that when they’re taken by surprise, most collapse like puffballs. They’re only dangerous to the unarmed and unsuspecting, like the broke folks waiting to apply for jobs on that April morning in 2009.

“Let’s you and I take a ride to Mr. Hartsfield’s place of residence,” Hodges says. “And let’s go in that.” He points to the gray Mercedes.

“But . . . if he sees us pull up, won’t he recognize it?”

Hodges smiles a sharklike smile Jerome Robinson has never seen before. “I certainly hope so.” He holds out his hand. “May I have the key, Holly?”

Her abused lips tighten. “Yes, but I’m going.”

“No way,” Hodges says. “Too dangerous.”

“If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for you.” She won’t look directly at him and her eyes keep skipping past his face, but her voice is firm. “You can make me stay, but if you do, I’ll call the police and give them Brady Hartsfield’s address just as soon as you’re gone.”

“You don’t have it,” Hodges says. This sounds feeble even to him.

Holly doesn’t reply, which is a form of courtesy. She won’t even need to go inside Discount Electronix and ask the dirty blonde; now that they have the name, she can probably suss out the Hartsfield address from her devilish iPad.

Fuck.

“All right, you can come. But I drive, and when we get there, you and Jerome are going to stay in the car. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, Mr. Hodges.”

This time her eyes go to his face and stay there for three whole seconds. It might be a step forward. With Holly, he thinks, who knows.

10

Because of drastic budget cuts that kicked in the previous year, most city patrol cars are solo rides. This isn’t the case in Lowtown. In Lowtown every shop holds a deuce, the ideal deuce containing at least one person of color, because in Lowtown the minorities are the majority. At just past noon on June third, Officers Laverty and Rosario are cruising Lowbriar Avenue about half a mile beyond the overpass where Bill Hodges once stopped a couple of trolls from robbing a shorty. Laverty is white. Rosario is Latina. Because their shop is CPC 54, they are known in the department as Toody and Muldoon, after the cops in an ancient sitcom called Car 54, Where Are You? Amarilis Rosario sometimes amuses her fellow blue knights at roll call by saying, “Ooh, ooh, Toody, I got an idea!” It sounds extremely cute in her Dominican accent, and always gets a laugh.

On patrol, however, she’s Ms. Taking Care of Business. They both are. In Lowtown you have to be.

“The cornerboys remind me of the Blue Angels in this air show I saw once,” she says now.

“Yeah?”

“They see us coming, they peel off like they’re in formation. Look, there goes another one.”

As they approach the intersection of Lowbriar and Strike, a kid in a Cleveland Cavaliers warmup jacket (oversized and totally superfluous on this day) suddenly decamps from the corner where he’s been jiving around and heads down Strike at a trot. He looks about thirteen.

“Maybe he just remembered it’s a schoolday,” Laverty says.