Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(61)
A moment later she’s looking down at him, a lock of her hair tumbled over one of her eyes. She sticks out her lower lip and blows it back. “Keep still. Let me do the work. And stay with me. I don’t mean to be bossy, but I haven’t had sex in two years, and the last I did have sucked. I want to enjoy this. I deserve it.”
The clinging, slippery warmth of her encloses him in a warm hug, and he can’t help raising his hips.
“Stay still, I said. Next time you can move all you want, but this is mine.”
It’s difficult, but he does as she says.
Her hair tumbles into her eyes again, and this time she can’t use her lower lip to blow it back because she’s gnawing at it in little bites he thinks she’ll feel later. She spreads both hands and rubs them roughly through the graying hair on his chest, then down to the embarrassing swell of his gut.
“I need . . . to lose some weight,” he gasps.
“You need to shut up,” she says, then moves—just a little—and closes her eyes. “Oh God, that’s deep. And nice. You can worry about your diet program later, okay?” She begins to move again, pauses once to readjust the angle, then settles into a rhythm.
“I don’t know how long I can . . .”
“You better.” Her eyes are still closed. “You just better hold out, Detective Hodges. Count prime numbers. Think of the books you liked when you were a kid. Spell xylophone backwards. Just stay with me. I won’t need long.”
He stays with her just long enough.
11
Sometimes when he’s feeling upset, Brady Hartsfield retraces the route of his greatest triumph. It soothes him. On this Friday night he doesn’t go home after turning in the ice cream truck and making the obligatory joke or two with Shirley Orton in the front office. He drives his clunker downtown instead, not liking the front-end shimmy or the too-loud blat of the engine. Soon he will have to balance off the cost of a new car (a new used car) against the cost of repairs. And his mother’s Honda needs work even more desperately than his Subaru does. Not that she drives the Honda very often these days, and that’s good, considering how much of her time she spends in the bag.
His trip down Memory Lane begins on Lake Avenue, just past the bright lights of downtown, where Mrs. Trelawney always parked her Mercedes on Thursday nights, and wends up Marlborough Street to City Center. Only this evening he gets no farther than the condo. He brakes so suddenly that the car behind almost rear-ends him. The driver hits his horn in a long, outraged blast, but Brady pays no attention. It might as well have been a foghorn on the other side of the lake.
The driver pulls around him, buzzing down his passenger-side window to yell Asshole at the top of his lungs. Brady pays no attention to that, either.
There must be thousands of Toyota Corollas in the city, and hundreds of blue Toyota Corollas, but how many blue Toyota Corollas with bumper stickers reading SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE? Brady is betting there’s just one, and what the hell is the fat ex-cop doing in the old lady’s condominium apartment? Why is he visiting Mrs. Trelawney’s sister, who now lives there?
The answer seems obvious: Detective Hodges (Ret.) is hunting.
Brady is no longer interested in reliving last year’s triumph. He pulls an illegal (and completely out-of-character) U-turn, now heading for the North Side. Heading for home with a single thought in his head, blinking on and off like a neon sign.
You bastard. You bastard. You bastard.
Things are not going the way they are supposed to. Things are slipping out of his control. It’s not right.
Something needs to be done.
12
As the stars come out over the lake, Hodges and Janey Patterson sit in the kitchen nook, gobbling takeout Chinese and drinking oolong tea. Janey is wearing a fluffy white bathrobe. Hodges is in his boxers and tee-shirt. When he used the bathroom after making love (she was curled in the middle of the bed, dozing), he got on her scale and was delighted to see he’s four pounds lighter than the last time he weighed himself. It’s a start.
“Why me?” Hodges says now. “Don’t get me wrong, I feel incredibly lucky—even blessed—but I’m sixty-two and overweight.”
She sips tea. “Well, let’s think about that, shall we? In one of the old detective movies Ollie and I used to watch on TV when we were kids, I’d be the greedy vixen, maybe a nightclub cigarette girl, who tries to charm the crusty and cynical private detective with her fair white body. Only I’m not the greedy type—nor do I have to be, considering the fact that I recently inherited several million dollars—and my fair white body has started to sag in several vital places. As you may have noticed.”
He hasn’t. What he has noticed is that she hasn’t answered his question. So he waits.
“Not good enough?”
“Nope.”
Janey rolls her eyes. “I wish I could think of a way to answer you that’s gentler than ‘Men are very stupid’ or more elegant than ‘I was horny and wanted to brush away the cobwebs.’ I’m not coming up with much, so let’s go with those. Plus, I was attracted to you. It’s been thirty years since I was a dewy debutante and much too long since I got laid. I’m forty-four, and that allows me to reach for what I want. I don’t always get it, but I’m allowed to reach.”