Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(33)
She places a palm on the nape of his neck and ruffles his hair with the tips of her fingers, sending a shiver all the way down to the small of his back. She touches his upper lip with the tip of her tongue, just a flick, there and gone, then pulls back and gives him the wide-eyed starlet stare.
“My honeyboy,” she breathes, like the heroine of some romantic chick-flick—the kind where the men wave swords and the women wear low-cut dresses with their cakes pushed up into shimmery globes.
He pulls away hastily. She smiles at him, then looks back at the TV, where good-looking young people in bathing suits are running along a beach. He opens the pizza box with hands that are shaking slightly, takes out a slice, and drops it in her salad bowl.
“Eat that,” he says. “It’ll sop up the booze. Some of it.”
“Don’t be mean to Mommy,” she says, but with no rancor and certainly no hurt. She pulls her robe closed, doing it absently, already lost in the world of the survivors again, intent on discovering who will be voted off the island this week. “And don’t forget about my car, Brady. It needs a sticker.”
“It needs a lot more than that,” he says, and goes into the kitchen. He grabs a Coke from the fridge, then opens the door to the basement. He stands there in the dark for a moment, then speaks a single word: “Control.” Below him, the fluorescents (he installed them himself, just as he remodeled the basement himself) flash on.
At the foot of the stairs, he thinks of Frankie. He almost always does when he stands in the place where Frankie died. The only time he didn’t think of Frankie was when he was preparing to make his run at City Center. During those weeks everything else left his mind, and what a relief that was.
Brady, Frankie said. His last word on Planet Earth. Gurgles and gasps didn’t count.
He puts his pizza and his soda on the worktable in the middle of the room, then goes into the closet-sized bathroom and drops trou. He won’t be able to eat, won’t be able to work on his new project (which is certainly not a router), he won’t be able to think, until he takes care of some urgent business.
In his letter to the fat ex-cop, he stated he was so sexually excited when he crashed into the job-seekers at City Center that he was wearing a condom. He further stated that he masturbates while reliving the event. If that were true, it would give a whole new meaning to the term autoerotic, but it isn’t. He lied a lot in that letter, each lie calculated to wind Hodges up a little more, and his bogus sex-fantasies weren’t the greatest of them.
He actually doesn’t have much interest in girls, and girls sense it. It’s probably why he gets along so well with Freddi Linklatter, his cyber-dyke colleague at Discount Electronix. For all Brady knows, she might think he’s gay. But he’s not gay, either. He’s largely a mystery to himself—an occluded front—but one thing he knows for sure: he’s not asexual, or not completely. He and his mother share a gothic rainbow of a secret, a thing not to be thought of unless it is absolutely necessary. When it does become necessary, it must be dealt with and put away again.
Ma, I see your panties, he thinks, and takes care of his business as fast as he can. There’s Vaseline in the medicine cabinet, but he doesn’t use it. He wants it to burn.
6
Back in his roomy basement workspace, Brady speaks another word. This one is chaos.
On the far side of the control room is a long shelf about three feet above the floor. Ranged along it are seven laptop computers with their darkened screens flipped up. There’s also a chair on casters, so he can roll rapidly from one to another. When Brady speaks the magic word, all seven come to life. The number 20 appears on each screen, then 19, then 18. If he allows this countdown to reach zero, a suicide program will kick in, scrubbing his hard discs clean and overwriting them with gibberish.
“Darkness,” he says, and the big countdown numbers disappear, replaced by desktop images that show scenes from The Wild Bunch, his favorite movie.
He tried apocalypse and Armageddon, much better start-up words in his opinion, full of ringing finality, but the word-recognition program has problems with them, and the last thing he wants is having to replace all his files because of a stupid glitch. Two-syllable words are safer. Not that there’s much on six of the seven computers. Number Three is the only one with what the fat ex-cop would call “incriminating information,” but he likes to look at that awesome array of computing power, all lit up as it is now. It makes the basement room feel like a real command center.
Brady considers himself a creator as well as a destroyer, but knows that so far he hasn’t managed to create anything that will exactly set the world on fire, and he’s haunted by the possibility that he never will. That he has, at best, a second-rate creative mind.
Take the Rolla, for instance. That had come to him in a flash of inspiration one night when he’d been vacuuming the living room (like using the washing machine, such a chore is usually beneath his mother). He had sketched a device that looked like a footstool on bearings, with a motor and a short hose attachment on the underside. With the addition of a simple computer program, Brady reckoned the device could be designed to move around a room, vacuuming as it went. If it hit an obstacle—a chair, say, or a wall—it would turn on its own and start off in a new direction.
He had actually begun building a prototype when he saw a version of his Rolla trundling busily around the window display of an upscale appliance store downtown. The name was even similar; it was called a Roomba. Someone had beaten him to it, and that someone was probably making millions. It wasn’t fair, but what is? Life is a crap carnival with shit prizes.