Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(111)

“Yeah.” She pauses Pitfall Harry in mid-jump over a coiled snake in order to give him a closer inspection. What she sees is Hodges’s police ID, with his thumb strategically placed to hide its year of expiration.

“Oooh,” she says, and holds out her hands with the twig-thin wrists together. “I’m a bad, bad girl and handcuffs are what I deserve. Whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks.”

Hodges gives a brief smile and tucks his ID away. “Isn’t Brady Hartsfield the third member of your happy band? I don’t see him.”

“Out with the flu. He says. Want my best guess?”

“Hit me.”

“I think maybe he finally had to put dear old Mom in rehab. He says she drinks and he has to take care of her most of the time. Which is probably why he’s never had a gee-eff. You know what that is, right?”

“I’m pretty sure, yeah.”

She examines him with bright and mordant interest. “Is Brady in trouble? I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s a little on the, you know, peekee-yoolier side.”

“I just need to speak to him.”

Anthony Frobisher—Tones—joins them. “May I help you, sir?”

“It’s five-oh,” Freddi says. She gives Frobisher a wide smile that exposes small teeth badly in need of cleaning. “He found out about the meth lab in the back.”

“Can it, Freddi.”

She makes an extravagant lip-zipping gesture, finishing with the twist of an invisible key, but doesn’t go back to her game.

In Hodges’s pocket, his cell phone rings. He silences it with his thumb.

“I’m Detective Bill Hodges, Mr. Frobisher. I have a few questions for Brady Hartsfield.”

“He’s out with the flu. What did he do?”

“Tones is a poet and don’t know it,” Freddi Linklatter observes. “Although his feet show it, because they’re Longfel—”

“Shut up, Freddi. For the last time.”

“Can I have his address, please?”

“Of course. I’ll get it for you.”

“Can I un-shut for a minute?” Freddi asks.

Hodges nods. She punches a key on her computer. Pitfall Harry is replaced by a spread-sheet headed STORE PERSONNEL.

“Presto,” she says. “Forty-nine Elm Street. That’s on the—”

“North Side, yeah,” Hodges says. “Thank you both. You’ve been very helpful.”

As he leaves, Freddi Linklatter calls after him, “It’s something with his mom, betcha anything. He’s freaky about her.”





9


Hodges has no more than stepped out into the bright sunshine when Jerome almost tackles him. Holly lurks just behind. She’s stopped biting her lips and gone to her fingernails, which look badly abused. “I called you,” Jerome says. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I was asking questions. What’s got you all white-eyed?”

“Is Hartsfield in there?”

Hodges is too surprised to reply.

“Oh, it’s him,” Jerome says. “Got to be. You were right about him watching you, and I know how. It’s like that Hawthorne story about the purloined letter. Hide in plain sight.”

Holly stops munching her fingernails long enough to say, “Poe wrote that story. Don’t they teach you kids anything?”

Hodges says, “Slow down, Jerome.”

Jerome takes a deep breath. “He’s got two jobs, Bill. Two. He must only work here until mid-afternoon or something. After that he works for Loeb’s.”

“Loeb’s? Is that the—”

“Yeah, the ice cream company. He drives the Mr. Tastey truck. The one with the bells. I’ve bought stuff from him, my sister has, too. All the kids do. He’s on our side of town a lot. Brady Hartsfield is the ice cream man!”

Hodges realizes he’s heard those cheerful, tinkling bells more than a lot lately. In the spring of his depression, crashed out in his La-Z-Boy, watching afternoon TV (and sometimes playing with the gun now riding against his ribs), it seems he heard them every day. Heard them and ignored them, because only kids pay actual attention to the ice cream man. Except some deeper part of his mind didn’t completely ignore them. It was the deep part that kept coming back to Bowfinger, and his satiric comment about Mrs. Melbourne.

She thinks they walk among us, Mr. Bowfinger said, but it hadn’t been space aliens Mrs. Melbourne had been concerned about on the day Hodges had done his canvass; it had been black SUVs, and chiropractors, and the people on Hanover Street who played loud music late at night.

Also, the Mr. Tastey man.

That one looks suspicious, she had said.

This spring it seems like he’s always around, she had said.

A terrible question surfaces in his mind, like one of the snakes always lying in wait for Pitfall Harry: if he had paid attention to Mrs. Melbourne instead of dismissing her as a harmless crank (the way he and Pete dismissed Olivia Trelawney), would Janey still be alive? He doesn’t think so, but he’s never going to know for sure, and he has an idea that the question will haunt a great many sleepless nights in the weeks and months to come.

Maybe the years.

He looks out at the parking lot . . . and there he sees a ghost. A gray one.