Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(59)
They approach, the goofier-looking of the pair in the lead. Smiling, Brady leans out his window. “Help you boys?”
“We want to know if you got Jerry Garcia in there,” Goofy says.
“No,” Brady says, smiling more widely than ever, “but if I did, I’d sure let him out.”
They look so ridiculously disappointed, Brady almost laughs. Instead, he points down at Goofy’s pants. “Your fly’s unzipped,” he says, and when Goofy looks down, Brady flicks a finger at the soft underside of his chin. A little harder than he intended—actually quite a lot—but what the hell.
“Gotcha,” Brady says merrily.
Goofy smiles to show yes, he’s been gotten, but there’s a red weal just above his Adam’s apple and surprised tears swim in his eyes.
Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy start away. Goofy looks back over his shoulder. His lower lip is pushed out and now he looks like a third-grader instead of just another preadolescent come-stain who’ll be f**king up the halls of Beal Middle School come September.
“That really hurt,” he says, with a kind of wonder.
Brady’s mad at himself. A finger-flick hard enough to bring tears to the kid’s eyes means he’s telling the straight-up truth. It also means Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy will remember him. Brady can apologize, can even give them free cones to show his sincerity, but then they’ll remember that. It’s a small thing, but small things mount up and then maybe you have a big thing.
“Sorry,” he says, and means it. “I was just kidding around, son.”
Goofy gives him the finger, and Not Quite So Goofy adds his own middle digit to show solidarity. They go into the comics store, where—if Brady knows boys like these, and he does—they will be invited to either buy or leave after five minutes’ browsing.
They’ll remember him. Goofy might even tell his parents, and his parents might lodge a complaint with Loeb’s. It’s unlikely but not impossible, and whose fault was it that he’d given Goofy Boy’s unprotected neck a snap hard enough to leave a mark, instead of just the gentle flick he’d intended? The ex-cop has knocked Brady off-balance. He’s making him screw things up, and Brady doesn’t like that.
He starts the ice cream truck’s engine. The bells begin bonging a tune from the loudspeaker on the roof. Brady turns left on Hanover Street and resumes his daily round, selling cones and Happy Boys and Pola Bars, spreading sugar on the afternoon and obeying all speed limits.
9
Although there are plenty of parking spaces on Lake Avenue after seven P.M.—as Olivia Trelawney well knew—they are few and far between at five in the afternoon, when Hodges and Janey Patterson get back from Sunny Acres. Hodges spots one three or four buildings down, however, and although it’s small (the car behind the empty spot has poached a little), he shoehorns the Toyota into it quickly and easily.
“I’m impressed,” Janey says. “I could never have done that. I flunked my driver’s test on parallel parking the first two times I went.”
“You must have had a hardass.”
She smiles. “The third time I wore a short skirt, and that did the trick.”
Thinking about how much he’d like to see her in a short skirt—the shorter the better—Hodges says, “There’s really no trick to it. If you back toward the curb at a forty-five-degree angle, you can’t go wrong. Unless your car’s too big, that is. A Toyota’s perfect for city parking. Not like a—” He stops.
“Not like a Mercedes,” she finishes. “Come up and have coffee, Bill. I’ll even feed the meter.”
“I’ll feed it. In fact, I’ll max it out. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
“You learned some stuff from my mom, didn’t you? That’s why you were so quiet all the way back.”
“I did, and I’ll fill you in, but that’s not where the conversation starts.” He’s looking at her full in the face now, and it’s an easy face to look into. Christ, he wishes he were fifteen years younger. Even ten. “I need to be straight with you. I think you’re under the impression that I came looking for work, and that’s not the case.”
“No,” she says. “I think you came because you feel guilty about what happened to my sister. I simply took advantage of you. I’m not sorry, either. You were good with my mother. Kind. Very . . . very gentle.”
She’s close, her eyes a darker blue in the afternoon light and very wide. Her lips open as if she has more to say, but he doesn’t give her a chance. He kisses her before he can think about how stupid it is, how reckless, and is astounded when she kisses him back, even putting her right hand on the nape of his neck to make their contact a little firmer. It goes on for no more than five seconds, but it seems much longer to Hodges, who hasn’t had a kiss like this one in quite awhile.
She pulls back, brushes a hand through his hair, and says, “I’ve wanted to do that all afternoon. Now let’s go upstairs. I’ll make coffee and you make your report.”
But there’s no report until much later, and no coffee at all.
10
He kisses her again in the elevator. This time her hands link behind his neck, and his travel down past the small of her back to the white pants, snug across her bottom. He is aware of his too-big stomach pressing against her trim one and thinks she must be revolted by it, but when the elevator opens, her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are bright, and she’s showing small white teeth in a smile. She takes his hand and pulls him down the short hall between the elevator and the apartment door.