Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(136)

Jibba-Jibba, she thinks.

Pay you back, she thinks.

Gallison leads them through the carpentry shop and costume shop, past a cluster of dressing rooms, then down a corridor wide enough to transport flats and completed sets. The corridor ends at a freight elevator with the doors standing open. Happy pop music booms down the shaft. The current song is about love and dancing. Nothing Holly can relate to.

“You don’t want the elevator,” Gallison says, “it goes backstage and you can’t get to the auditorium from there without walking right through the band. Listen, is that guy really having a heart attack? Are you guys really cops? You don’t look like cops.” He glances at Jerome. “You’re too young.” Then to Holly, his expression even more doubtful. “And you’re . . .”

“Too freaky?” Holly supplies.

“I wasn’t going to say that.” Maybe not, but it’s what he’s thinking. Holly knows; a girl once nicknamed Jibba-Jibba always does.

“I’m calling the cops,” Gallison says. “The real cops. And if this is some kind of joke—”

“Do what you need to do,” Jerome says, thinking Why not? Let him call in the National Guard if he wants to. This is going to be over, one way or the other, in the next few minutes. Jerome knows it, and he can see that Holly does, too. The gun Hodges gave him is in his pocket. It feels heavy and weirdly warm. Other than the air rifle he had when he was nine or ten (a birthday present given to him despite his mother’s reservations), he has never carried a gun in his life, and this one feels alive.

Holly points to the left of the elevator. “What about that door?” And when Gallison doesn’t reply immediately: “Help us. Please. Maybe we’re not real cops, maybe you’re right about that, but there really is a man in the audience tonight who’s very dangerous.”

She takes a deep breath and says words she can hardly believe, even though she knows they are true. “Mister, we’re all you’ve got.”

Gallison thinks it over, then says, “The stairs’ll take you to Auditorium Left. It’s a long flight. At the top, there’s two doors. The one on the left goes outside. The one on the right opens on the auditorium, way down by the stage. That close, the music’s apt to bust your eardrums.”

Touching the grip of the pistol in his pocket, Jerome asks, “And exactly where’s the handicapped section?”

38

Brady does know her. He does.

At first he can’t get it, it’s like a word that’s stuck on the tip of your tongue. Then, as the band starts some song about making love on the dancefloor, it comes to him. The house on Teaberry Lane, the one where Hodges’s pet boy lives with his family, a nest of niggers with white names. Except for the dog, that is. He’s named O’dell, a nigger name for sure, and Brady meant to kill him . . . only he ended up killing his mother instead.

Brady remembers the day the niggerboy came running to the Mr. Tastey truck, his ankles still green from cutting the fat ex-cop’s lawn. And his sister shouting, Get me a chocolate! Pleeeease?

The sister’s name is Barbara, and that’s her, big as life and twice as ugly. She’s sitting two rows up to the right with her friends and a woman who has to be her mother. Jerome isn’t with them, and Brady is savagely glad. Let Jerome live, that’s fine.

But without his sister.

Or his mother.

Let him see what that feels like.

Still looking at Barbara Robinson, his finger creeps beneath Frankie’s picture and finds Thing Two’s toggle-switch. He caresses it through the thin fabric of the tee-shirt the way he was allowed—on a few fortunate occasions only—to caress his mother’s ni**les. Onstage, the lead singer of ’Round Here does a split that must just about crush his balls (always supposing he has any) in those tight jeans he’s wearing, then springs to his feet and approaches the edge of the stage. Chicks scream. Chicks reach out as if to touch him, their hands waving, their fingernails—painted in every girlish color of the rainbow—gleaming in the footlights.

“Hey, do you guys like an amusement park?” Cam hollers.

They scream that they do.

“Do you guys like a carnival?”

They scream that they love a carnival.

“Have you ever been kissed on the midway?”

The screams are utterly delirious now. The audience is on its feet again, the roving spotlights once more skimming over the crowd. Brady can no longer see the band, but it doesn’t matter. He already knows what’s coming, because he was there at the load-in.

Lowering his voice to an intimate, amplified murmur, Cam Knowles says, “Well, you’re gonna get that kiss tonight.”

Carnival music starts up—a Korg synthesizer set to play a calliope tune. The stage is suddenly bathed in a swirl of light: orange, blue, red, green, yellow. There’s a gasp of amazement as the midway set starts to descend. Both the carousel and the Ferris wheel are already turning.

“THIS IS THE TITLE TRACK OF OUR NEW ALBUM, AND WE REALLY HOPE YOU ENJOY IT!” Cam bellows, and the other instruments fall in around the synth.

“The desert cries in all directions,” Cam Knowles intones. “Like eternity, you’re my infection.” To Brady he sounds like Jim Morrison after a prefrontal lobotomy. Then he yells jubilantly: “What’ll cure me, guys?”