Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(26)
Now the kid’s look is one of utter incomprehension, as if Hodges just lapsed into a foreign language, but that’s all right. Sometimes it seeps through, especially with the young ones.
People would be surprised, Hodges thinks. They really would.
22
Brady Hartsfield changes into his other uniform—the white one—and checks his truck, quickly going through the inventory sheet the way Mr. Loeb likes. Everything is there. He pops his head in the office to say hi to Shirley Orton. Shirley is a fat pig, all too fond of the company product, but he wants to stay on her good side. Brady wants to stay on everyone’s good side. Much safer that way. She has a crush on him, and that helps.
“Shirley, you pretty girly!” he cries, and she blushes all the way up to the hairline of her pimple-studded forehead. Little piggy, oink-oink-oink, Brady thinks. You’re so fat your cunt probably turns inside out when you sit down.
“Hi, Brady. West Side again?”
“All week, darlin. You okay?”
“Fine.” Blushing harder than ever.
“Good. Just wanted to say howdy.”
Then he’s off, obeying every speed limit even though it takes him forty f*cking minutes to get into his territory driving that slow. But it has to be that way. Get caught speeding in a company truck after the schools let out for the day, you get canned. No recourse. But when he gets to the West Side—this is the good part—he’s in Hodges’s neighborhood, and with every reason to be there. Hide in plain sight, that’s the old saying, and as far as Brady is concerned, it’s a wise saying, indeed.
He turns off Spruce Street and cruises slowly down Harper Road, right past the old Det-Ret’s house. Oh look here, he thinks. The niggerkid is out front, stripped to the waist (so all the stay-at-home mommies can get a good look at his sweat-oiled sixpack, no doubt) and pushing a Lawn-Boy.
About time you got after that, Brady thinks. It was looking mighty shaggy. Not that the old Det-Ret probably took much notice. The old Det-Ret was too busy watching TV, eating Pop-Tarts, and playing with that gun he kept on the table beside his chair.
The niggerkid hears him coming even over the roar of the mower and turns to look. I know your name, niggerkid, Brady thinks. It’s Jerome Robinson. I know almost everything about the old Det-Ret. I don’t know if he’s queer for you, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It could be why he keeps you around.
From behind the wheel of his little Mr. Tastey truck, which is covered with happy kid decals and jingles with happy recorded bells, Brady waves. The niggerkid waves back and smiles. Sure he does.
Everybody likes the ice cream man.
UNDER DEBBIE’S BLUE UMBRELLA
1
Brady Hartsfield cruises the tangle of West Side streets until seven-thirty, when dusk starts to drain the blue from the late spring sky. His first wave of customers, between three and six P.M., consists of after-school kids wearing backpacks and waving crumpled dollar bills. Most don’t even look at him. They’re too busy blabbing to their buddies or talking into the cell phones they see not as accessories but as necessities every bit as vital as food and air. A few of them say thank you, but most don’t bother. Brady doesn’t mind. He doesn’t want to be looked at and he doesn’t want to be remembered. To these brats he’s just the sugar-pusher in the white uniform, and that’s the way he likes it.
From six to seven is dead time, while the little animals go in for their dinners. Maybe a few—the ones who say thank you—even talk to their parents. Most probably go right on poking the buttons of their phones while Mommy and Daddy yak to each other about their jobs or watch the evening news so they can find out all about the big world out there, where movers and shakers are actually doing shit.
During his last half hour, business picks up again. This time it’s the parents as well as the kids who approach the jingling Mr. Tastey truck, buying ice cream treats they’ll eat with their asses (mostly fat ones) snugged down in backyard lawnchairs. He almost pities them. They are people of little vision, as stupid as ants crawling around their hill. A mass killer is serving them ice cream, and they have no idea.
From time to time, Brady has wondered how hard it would be to poison a truckload of treats: the vanilla, the chocolate, the Berry Good, the Flavor of the Day, the Tastey Frosteys, the Brownie Delites, even the Freeze-Stix and Whistle Pops. He has gone so far as to research this on the Internet. He has done what Anthony “Tones” Frobisher, his boss at Discount Electronix, would probably call a “feasibility study,” and concluded that, while it would be possible, it would also be stupid. It’s not that he’s averse to taking a risk; he got away with the Mercedes Massacre when the odds of being caught were better than those of getting away clean. But he doesn’t want to be caught now. He’s got work to do. His work this late spring and early summer is the fat ex-cop, K. William Hodges.
He might cruise his West Side route with a truckload of poisoned ice cream after the ex-cop gets tired of playing with the gun he keeps beside his living room chair and actually uses it. But not until. The fat ex-cop bugs Brady Hartsfield. Bugs him bad. Hodges retired with full honors, they even threw him a party, and how was that right when he had failed to catch the most notorious criminal this city had ever seen?
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