Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(64)
“What do you mean to do?”
Hodges tells her.
14
They don’t have to wait for the morning paper; the news that Donald Davis, already under suspicion for the murder of his wife, has confessed to the Turnpike Joe killings leads the eleven P.M. news. Hodges and Janey watch it in bed. For Hodges, the return engagement has been strenuous but sublimely satisfactory. He’s still out of breath, he’s sweaty and in need of a shower, but it’s been a long, long time since he felt this happy. This complete.
When the newscaster moves on to a puppy stuck in a drainpipe, Janey uses the remote to kill the TV. “Okay. It could work. But God, is it risky.”
He shrugs. “With no police resources to call on, I see it as my best way forward.” And it’s fine with him, because it’s the way he wants to go forward.
He thinks briefly of the makeshift but very effective weapon he keeps in his dresser drawer, the argyle sock filled with ball bearings. He imagines how satisfying it would be to use the Happy Slapper on the sonofabitch who ran one of the world’s heaviest passenger sedans into a crowd of defenseless people. That probably won’t happen, but it’s possible. In this best (and worst) of all worlds, most things are.
“What did you make of what my mother said at the end? About Olivia hearing ghosts?”
“I need to think about that a little more,” Hodges says, but he’s already thought about it, and if he’s right, he might have another path to Mr. Mercedes. Given his druthers, he wouldn’t involve Jerome Robinson any more than he already has, but if he’s going to follow up on old Mrs. Wharton’s parting shot, he may have to. He knows half a dozen cops with Jerome’s computer savvy and can’t call on a single one of them.
Ghosts, he thinks. Ghosts in the machine.
He sits up and swings his feet out onto the floor. “If I’m still invited to stay over, what I need right now is a shower.”
“You are.” She leans over and sniffs at the side of his neck, her hand lightly clamped on his upper arm giving him a pleasurable shiver. “And you certainly do.”
When he’s showered and back in his boxers, he asks her to power up her computer. Then, with her sitting beside him and looking on attentively, he slips under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and leaves a message for merckill. Fifteen minutes later, and with Janey Patterson nestled next to him, he sleeps . . . and never so well since childhood.
15
When Brady gets home after several hours of aimless cruising, it’s late and there’s a note on the back door: Where you been, honeyboy? There’s homemade lasagna in the oven. He only has to look at the unsteady, downslanting script to know she was seriously loaded when she wrote it. He untacks the note and lets himself in.
Usually he checks on her first thing, but he smells smoke and hustles to the kitchen, where a blue haze hangs in the air. Thank God the smoke detector in here is dead (he keeps meaning to replace it and keeps forgetting, too many other fish to fry). Thanks are also due for the powerful stove fan, which has sucked up just enough smoke to keep the rest of the detectors from going off, although they soon will if he can’t air the place out. The oven is set at three-fifty. He turns it off. He opens the windows over the sink, then the back door. There’s a floor fan in the utility closet where they keep the cleaning supplies. He sets it up facing the runaway stove, and turns it on at the highest setting.
With that done he finally goes into the living room and checks on his mother. She’s crashed out on the couch, wearing a housedress that’s open up top and rucked to her thighs below, snoring so loudly and steadily she sounds like an idling chainsaw. He averts his eyes and goes back into the kitchen, muttering f**k-f*ck-f*ck-f*ck under his breath.
He sits at the table with his head bent, his palms cupping his temples, and his fingers plunged deep into his hair. Why is it that when things go wrong, they have to keep on going wrong? He finds himself thinking of the Morton Salt motto: “When it rains it pours.”
After five minutes of airing-out, he risks opening the oven. As he regards the black and smoking lump within, any faint hunger pangs he might have felt when he got home pass away. Washing will not clean that pan; an hour of scouring and a whole box of Brillo pads will not clean that pan; an industrial laser probably wouldn’t clean that pan. That pan is a gone goose. It’s only luck that he didn’t get home to find the f**king fire department here and his mother offering them vodka collinses.
He shuts the oven—he doesn’t want to look at that nuclear meltdown—and goes back to look at his mother instead. Even as his eyes are running up and down her bare legs, he’s thinking, It would be better if she did die. Better for her and better for me.
He goes downstairs, using his voice commands to turn on the lights and his bank of computers. He goes to Number Three, centers the cursor on the Blue Umbrella icon . . . and hesitates. Not because he’s afraid there won’t be a message from the fat ex-cop but because he’s afraid there will be. If so, it won’t be anything he wants to read. Not the way things are going. His head is f**ked up already, so why f**k it up more?
Except there might be an answer to what the cop was doing at the Lake Avenue condo. Has he been questioning Olivia Trelawney’s sister? Probably. At sixty-two, he’s surely not boffing her.
Brady clicks the mouse, and sure enough:
kermitfrog19 wants to chat with you!