Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(134)

“Where?” Jerome asks. “Tell us. We’ll get him. We will.”

“It won’t be easy. He’s going to be on red alert right now, always checking his personal perimeter. And he knows you, Jerome. You’ve bought ice cream from that damn Mr. Tastey truck. You told me so.”

“Bill, he’s sold ice cream to thousands of people.”

“Sure, but how many black people on the West Side?”

Jerome is silent, and now he’s the one biting his lips.

“How big a bomb?” Gallison asks. “Maybe I should pull the fire alarm?”

“Only if you want to get a whole shitload of people killed,” Hodges says. It’s becoming progressively difficult to talk. “The minute he senses danger, he’ll blow whatever he’s got. Do you want that?”

Gallison doesn’t reply, and Hodges turns back to the two unlikely associates God—or some whimsical fate—has ordained should be with him tonight.

“We can’t take a chance on you, Jerome, and we certainly can’t take a chance on me. He was stalking me long before I even knew he was alive.”

“I’ll come up from behind,” Jerome says. “Blindside him. In the dark, with nothing but the lights from the stage, he’ll never see me.”

“If he’s where I think he is, your chances of doing that would be fifty-fifty at best. That’s not good enough.”

Hodges turns to the woman with the graying hair and the face of a neurotic teenager. “It’s got to be you, Holly. By now he’ll have his finger on the trigger, and you’re the only one who can get close without being recognized.”

She covers her abused mouth with one hand, but that isn’t enough and she adds the other. Her eyes are huge and wet. God help us, Hodges thinks. It isn’t the first time he has had this thought in relation to Holly Gibney.

“Only if you come with me,” she says through her hands. “Maybe then—”

“I can’t,” Hodges says. “I’m having a heart attack.”

“Oh great,” Gallison moans.

“Mr. Gallison, is there a handicapped area? There must be, right?”

“Sure. Halfway down the auditorium.”

Not only did he get in with his explosives, Hodges thinks, he’s perfectly located to inflict maximum casualties.

He says: “Listen, you two. Don’t make me say this twice.”

35

Thanks to the emcee’s introduction, Brady has relaxed a bit. The carnival crap he saw being offloaded during his reconnaissance trip is either offstage or suspended overhead. The band’s first four or five songs are just warm-ups. Pretty soon the set will roll in either from the sides or drop down from overhead, because the band’s main job, the reason they’re here, is to sell their latest helping of audio shit. When the kids—many of them attending their first pop concert—see those bright blinking lights and the Ferris wheel and the beachy backdrop, they’re going to go out of their teenybop minds. It’s then, right then, that he’ll push the toggle-switch on Thing Two, and ride into the darkness on a golden bubble of all that happiness.

The lead singer, the one with all the hair, is finishing a syrupy ballad on his knees. He holds the last note, head bowed, emoting his faggy ass off. He’s a lousy singer and probably already overdue for a fatal drug overdose, but when he raises his head and blares, “How ya feelin out there?” the audience goes predictably batshit.

Brady looks around, as he has every few seconds—checking his perimeter, just as Hodges said he would—and his eyes fix on a little black girl sitting a couple of rows up to his right.

Do I know her?

“Who are you looking for?” the pretty girl with the stick legs shouts over the intro to the next song. He can barely hear her. She’s grinning at him, and Brady thinks how ridiculous it is for a girl with stick legs to grin at anything. The world has f**ked her royally, up the ying-yang and out the wazoo, and how does that deserve even a small smile, let alone such a cheek-stretching moony grin? He thinks, She’s probably stoned.

“Friend of mine!” Brady shouts back.

Thinking, As if I had any.

As if.

36

Gallison leads Holly and Jerome away to . . . well, to somewhere. Hodges sits on the crate with his head lowered and his hands planted on his thighs. One of the roadies approaches hesitantly and offers to call an ambulance for him. Hodges thanks him but refuses. He doesn’t believe Brady could hear the warble of an approaching ambulance (or anything else) over the din ’Round Here is producing, but he won’t take the chance. Taking chances is what brought them to this pass, with everyone in the Mingo Auditorium, including Jerome’s mother and sister, at risk. He’d rather die than take another chance, and rather hopes he will before he has to explain this shit-coated clusterf*ck.

Only . . . Janey. When he thinks of Janey, laughing and tipping his borrowed fedora at just the right insouciant angle, he knows that if he had it to do over again, he’d likely do it the same way.

Well . . . most of it. Given a do-over, he might have listened a little more closely to Mrs. Melbourne.

She thinks they walk among us, Bowfinger had said, and the two of them had had a manly chuckle over that, but the joke was on them, wasn’t it? Because Mrs. Melbourne was right. Brady Hartsfield really is an alien, and he was among them all the time, fixing computers and selling ice cream.