Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(138)

“What did you do?” a girl is shouting. “What did you do to him?”

Jerome wheels back the other way and sees the girl sitting one wheelchair in from the aisle reaching for Hartsfield. Jerome shouts, “Holly! Don’t let her do that!”

Holly lurches to her feet, stumbles, and almost falls on top of Brady. It surely would have been the last fall of her life, but she manages to keep her feet and grab the wheelchair girl’s hands. There’s hardly any strength in them, and she feels an instant of pity. She bends down close and shouts to be heard. “Don’t touch him! He’s got a bomb, and I think it’s hot!”

The wheelchair girl shrinks away. Perhaps she understands; perhaps she’s only afraid of Holly, who’s looking even wilder than usual just now.

Brady’s shivers and twitches are strengthening. Holly doesn’t like that, because she can see something, a dim yellow light, under his shirt. Yellow is the color of trouble.

“Jerome?” Tanya says. “What are you doing here?”

An usher is approaching. “Clear the aisle!” the usher shouts over the music. “You have to clear the aisle, folks!”

Jerome grasps his mother’s shoulders. He pulls her to him until their foreheads are touching. “You have to get out of here, Mom. Take the girls and go. Right now. Make the usher go with you. Tell her your daughter is sick. Please don’t ask questions.”

She looks in his eyes and doesn’t ask questions.

“Mom?” Barbara begins. “What . . .” The rest is lost in the crash of the band and the choral accompaniment from the audience. Tanya takes Barbara by the arm and approaches the usher. At the same time she’s motioning for Hilda, Dinah, and Betsy to join her.

Jerome turns back to Holly. She’s bent over Brady, who continues to shudder as cerebral storms rage inside his head. His feet tapdance, as if even in unconsciousness he’s really feeling that goodtime ’Round Here beat. His hands fly aimlessly around, and when one of them approaches the dim yellow light under his tee-shirt, Jerome bats it away like a basketball guard rejecting a shot in the paint.

“I want to get out of here,” the wheelchair girl moans. “I’m scared.”

Jerome can relate to that—he also wants to get out of here, and he’s scared to death—but for now she has to stay where she is. Brady has her blocked in, and they don’t dare move him. Not yet.

Holly is ahead of Jerome, as she so often is. “You have to stay still for now, honey,” she tells the wheelchair girl. “Chill out and enjoy the concert.” She’s thinking how much simpler this would be if she’d managed to kill him instead of just bashing his sicko brains halfway to Peru. She wonders if Jerome would shoot Hartsfield if she asked him to. Probably not. Too bad. With all this noise, he could probably get away with it.

“Are you crazy?” the wheelchair girl asks wonderingly.

“People keep asking me that,” Holly says, and—very gingerly—she begins to pull up Brady’s tee-shirt. “Hold his hands,” she tells Jerome.

“What if I can’t?”

“Then OJ the motherf*cker.”

The sell-out audience is on its feet, swaying and clapping. The beachballs are flying again. Jerome takes one quick glance behind him and sees his mother leading the girls up the aisle to the exit, the usher accompanying them. That’s one for our side, at least, he thinks, then turns back to the business at hand. He grabs Brady’s flying hands and pins them together. The wrists are slippery with sweat. It’s like holding a couple of struggling fish.

“I don’t know what you’re doing, but do it fast!” he shouts at Holly.

The yellow light is coming from a plastic gadget that looks like a customized TV remote control. Instead of numbered channel buttons, there’s a white toggle-switch, the kind you use to flip on a light in your living room. It’s standing straight up. There’s a wire leading from the gadget. It goes under the man’s butt.

Brady makes a grunting sound and suddenly there’s an acidic smell. His bladder has let go. Holly looks at the peebag on his lap, but it doesn’t seem to be attached to anything. She grabs it and hands it to the wheelchair girl. “Hold this.”

“Eeuw, it’s pee,” the wheelchair girl says, and then: “It’s not pee. There’s something inside. It looks like clay.”

“Put it down.” Jerome has to shout to be heard over the music. “Put it on the floor. Gently.” Then, to Holly: “Hurry the hell up!”

Holly is studying the yellow ready-lamp. And the little white nub of the toggle-switch. She could push it forward or back and doesn’t dare do either one, because she doesn’t know which way is off and which way is boom.

She plucks Thing Two from where it was resting on Brady’s stomach. It’s like picking up a snake that’s bloated with poison, and takes all her courage. “Hold his hands, Jerome, you just hold his hands.”

“He’s slippery,” Jerome grunts.

We already knew that, Holly thinks. One slippery son of a bitch. One slippery motherf*cker.

She turns the gadget over, willing her hands not to shake and trying not to think of the four thousand people who don’t even know their lives now depend on poor messed-up Holly Gibney. She looks at the battery cover. Then, holding her breath, she slides it down and lets it drop to the floor.