Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(18)

“Yeah,” Hodges says. He doesn’t.

“Had a little pleated skirt when she was four or six or something, we couldn’t get her out of it. Two of the moms said they’d take the girls. And I told Candy no. You know why?”

Sure he does.

“Because the competition was at City Center, that’s why. In my mind’s eye I could see about a thousand tweenyboppers and their moms milling around outside, waiting for the doors to open, dusk instead of dawn, but you know the fog comes in off the lake then, too. I could see that cocksucker running at them in another stolen Mercedes—or maybe a f*cking Hummer this time—and the kids and the mommies just standing there, staring like deer in the headlights. So I said no. You should have heard her scream at me, Billy, but I still said no. She wouldn’t talk to me for a month, and she still wouldn’t be talking to me if Maureen hadn’t taken her. I told Mo absolutely no way, don’t you dare, and she said, That’s why I divorced you, Pete, because I got tired of listening to no way and don’t you dare. And of course nothing happened.”

He drinks the rest of the beer, then leans forward again.

“I hope there are plenty of people with me when we catch him. If I nail him alone, I’m apt to kill him just for putting me on the outs with my daughter.”

“Then why hope for plenty of people?”

Pete considers this, then smiles a slow smile. “You have a point there.”

“Do you ever wonder about Mrs. Trelawney?” Hodges asks the question casually, but he has been thinking about Olivia Trelawney a lot since the anonymous letter dropped through the mail slot. Even before then. On several occasions during the gray time since his retirement, he has actually dreamed about her. That long face—the face of a woeful horse. The kind of face that says nobody understands and the whole world is against me. All that money and still unable to count the blessings of her life, beginning with freedom from the paycheck. It had been years since Mrs. T. had had to balance her accounts or monitor her answering machine for calls from bill collectors, but she could only count the curses, totting up a long account of bad haircuts and rude service people. Mrs. Olivia Trelawney with her shapeless boatneck dresses, said boats always listed either to starboard or to port. The watery eyes that always seemed on the verge of tears. No one had liked her, and that included Detective First Grade Kermit William Hodges. No one had been surprised when she killed herself, including that selfsame Detective Hodges. The deaths of eight people—not to mention the injuries of many more—was a lot to carry on your conscience.

“Wonder about her how?” Pete asks.

“If she was telling the truth after all. About the key.”

Pete raises his eyebrows. “She thought she was telling it. You know that as well as I do. She talked herself into it so completely she could have passed a lie-detector test.”

It’s true, and Olivia Trelawney hadn’t been a surprise to either of them. God knows they had seen others like her. Career criminals acted guilty even when they hadn’t committed the crime or crimes they had been hauled in to discuss, because they knew damned well they were guilty of something. Solid citizens just couldn’t believe it, and when one of them wound up being questioned prior to charging, Hodges knows, it was hardly ever because a gun was involved. No, it was usually a car. I thought it was a dog I ran over, they’d say, and no matter what they might have seen in the rearview mirror after the awful double thump, they’d believe it.

Just a dog.

“I wonder, though,” Hodges says. Hoping he seems thoughtful rather than pushy.

“Come on, Bill. You saw what I saw, and any time you need a refresher course, you can come down to the station and look at the photos.”

“I suppose.”

The opening bars of “Night on Bald Mountain” sound from the pocket of Pete’s Men’s Wearhouse sportcoat. He digs out his phone, looks at it, and says, “I gotta take this.”

Hodges makes a be-my-guest gesture.

“Hello?” Pete listens. His eyes grow wide, and he stands up so fast his chair almost falls over. “What?”

Other diners stop eating and look around. Hodges watches with interest.

“Yeah . . . yeah! I’ll be right there. What? Yeah, yeah, okay. Don’t wait, just go.”

He snaps the phone closed and sits down again. All his lights are suddenly on, and in that moment Hodges envies him bitterly.

“I should eat with you more often, Billy. You’re my lucky charm, always were. We talk about it, and it happens.”

“What?” Thinking, It’s Mr. Mercedes. The thought that follows is both ridiculous and forlorn: He was supposed to be mine.

“That was Izzy. She just got a call from a State Police colonel out in Victory County. A game warden spotted some bones in an old gravel pit about an hour ago. The pit’s less than two miles from Donnie Davis’s summer place on the lake, and guess what? The bones appear to be wearing the remains of a dress.”

He raises his hand over the table. Hodges high-fives it.

Pete returns the phone to its sagging pocket and brings out his wallet. Hodges shakes his head, not even kidding himself about what he feels: relief. Enormous relief. “No, this is my treat. You’re meeting Isabelle out there, right?”

“Right.”

“Then roll.”