Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(59)

8


It’s Friday afternoon and the suburban streets are feverish with kids released from school. There aren’t many on Harper Road, but there are still some, and this gives Brady a perfect reason to cruise slowly past number sixty-three and peek in the window. Except he can’t, because the drapes are drawn. And the overhang to the left of the house is empty except for the lawnmower. Instead of sitting in his house and watching TV, where he belongs, the Det-Ret is sporting about in his crappy old Toyota.

Sporting about where? It probably doesn’t matter, but Hodges’s absence makes Brady vaguely uneasy.

Two little girls trot to the curb with money clutched in their hands. They have undoubtedly been taught, both at home and at school, to never approach strangers, especially strange men, but who could be less strange than good old Mr. Tastey?

He sells them a cone each, one chocolate and one vanilla. He joshes with them, asks how they got so pretty. They giggle. The truth is one’s ugly and the other’s worse. As he serves them and makes change, he thinks about the missing Corolla, wondering if this break in Hodges’s afternoon routine has anything to do with him. Another message from Hodges on the Blue Umbrella might cast some light, give an idea of where the ex-cop’s head is at.

Even if it doesn’t, Brady wants to hear from him.

“You don’t dare ignore me,” he says as the bells tinkle and chime over his head.

He crosses Hanover Street, parks in the strip mall, kills the engine (the annoying chimes fall blessedly silent), and hauls his laptop out from under the seat. He keeps it in an insulated case because the truck is always so f*cking cold. He boots it up and goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella courtesy of the nearby coffee shop’s Wi-Fi.

Nothing.

“You f*cker,” Brady whispers. “You don’t dare ignore me, you f*cker.”

As he zips the laptop back into its case, he sees a couple of boys standing outside the comic book shop, talking and looking at him and grinning. Given his five years of experience, Brady estimates that they’re sixth- or seventh-graders with a combined IQ of one-twenty and a long future of collecting unemployment checks. Or a short one in some desert country.

They approach, the goofier-looking of the pair in the lead. Smiling, Brady leans out his window. “Help you boys?”

“We want to know if you got Jerry Garcia in there,” Goofy says.

“No,” Brady says, smiling more widely than ever, “but if I did, I’d sure let him out.”

They look so ridiculously disappointed, Brady almost laughs. Instead, he points down at Goofy’s pants. “Your fly’s unzipped,” he says, and when Goofy looks down, Brady flicks a finger at the soft underside of his chin. A little harder than he intended—actually quite a lot—but what the hell.

“Gotcha,” Brady says merrily.

Goofy smiles to show yes, he’s been gotten, but there’s a red weal just above his Adam’s apple and surprised tears swim in his eyes.

Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy start away. Goofy looks back over his shoulder. His lower lip is pushed out and now he looks like a third-grader instead of just another preadolescent come-stain who’ll be f*cking up the halls of Beal Middle School come September.

“That really hurt,” he says, with a kind of wonder.

Brady’s mad at himself. A finger-flick hard enough to bring tears to the kid’s eyes means he’s telling the straight-up truth. It also means Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy will remember him. Brady can apologize, can even give them free cones to show his sincerity, but then they’ll remember that. It’s a small thing, but small things mount up and then maybe you have a big thing.

“Sorry,” he says, and means it. “I was just kidding around, son.”

Goofy gives him the finger, and Not Quite So Goofy adds his own middle digit to show solidarity. They go into the comics store, where—if Brady knows boys like these, and he does—they will be invited to either buy or leave after five minutes’ browsing.

They’ll remember him. Goofy might even tell his parents, and his parents might lodge a complaint with Loeb’s. It’s unlikely but not impossible, and whose fault was it that he’d given Goofy Boy’s unprotected neck a snap hard enough to leave a mark, instead of just the gentle flick he’d intended? The ex-cop has knocked Brady off-balance. He’s making him screw things up, and Brady doesn’t like that.

He starts the ice cream truck’s engine. The bells begin bonging a tune from the loudspeaker on the roof. Brady turns left on Hanover Street and resumes his daily round, selling cones and Happy Boys and Pola Bars, spreading sugar on the afternoon and obeying all speed limits.





9


Although there are plenty of parking spaces on Lake Avenue after seven P.M.—as Olivia Trelawney well knew—they are few and far between at five in the afternoon, when Hodges and Janey Patterson get back from Sunny Acres. Hodges spots one three or four buildings down, however, and although it’s small (the car behind the empty spot has poached a little), he shoehorns the Toyota into it quickly and easily.

“I’m impressed,” Janey says. “I could never have done that. I flunked my driver’s test on parallel parking the first two times I went.”

“You must have had a hardass.”

She smiles. “The third time I wore a short skirt, and that did the trick.”