Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(87)
“Well, you take care of yourse—”
“I hab to go,” he says, and breaks the connection just before another gust of hysterical laughter sweeps through him. Yes, he had to put his mother to bed. And yes, it was the flu. Not the Swine Flu or the Bird Flu, but a new strain called Gopher Flu. Brady howls and pounds the dashboard of his Subaru. He pounds so hard he hurts his hand, and that makes him laugh harder still.
This fit goes on until his stomach aches and he feels a little like puking. It has just begun to ease off when he sees the lobby door of the condo across the street open.
Brady snatches up Thing Two and slides the on switch. The ready-lamp glows yellow. He raises the short stub of the antenna. He gets out of his car, not laughing now, and creeps to the concrete bumper again, being careful to stay in the shadow of the nearest support pillar. He puts his thumb on the toggle-switch and angles Thing Two down—but not at the Toyota. He’s aiming at Hodges, who is rummaging in his pants pocket. The blonde is next to him, wearing the same pantsuit she had on earlier, but with different shoes and purse.
Hodges brings out his keys.
Brady pushes Thing Two’s toggle-switch, and the yellow ready-lamp turns operational green. The lights of Hodges’s car flash. At the same instant, the green light on Thing Two gives a single quick blink. It has caught the Toyota’s PKE code and stored it, just as it caught the code of Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes.
Brady used Thing Two for almost two years, stealing PKEs and unlocking cars so he could toss them for valuables and cash. The income from these ventures was uneven, but the thrill never faded. His first thought on finding the spare key in the glove compartment of Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes (it was in a plastic bag along with her owner’s manual and registration) was to steal the car and joyride it all the way across the city. Bang it up a little just for the hell of it. Maybe slice the upholstery. But some instinct had told him to leave everything just as it was. That the Mercedes might have a larger role to play. And so it had proved.
Brady hops into his car and puts Thing Two back in his own glove compartment. He’s very satisfied with his morning’s work, but the morning isn’t over. Hodges and Olivia’s sister will be going to a visitation. Brady has his own visitation to make. The MAC will be open by now, and he wants a look around. See what they have for security. Check out where the cameras are mounted.
Brady thinks, I’ll find a way in. I’m on a roll.
Also, he’ll need to go online and score a ticket to the concert Thursday night. Busy, busy, busy.
He begins to whistle.
11
Hodges and Janey Patterson step into the Eternal Rest parlor of the Soames Funeral Home at quarter to ten, and thanks to her insistence on hurrying, they’re the first arrivals. The top half of the coffin is open. The bottom half is swaddled in a blue silk swag. Elizabeth Wharton is wearing a white dress sprigged with blue florets that match the swag. Her eyes are closed. Her cheeks are rosy.
Janey hurries down an aisle between two ranks of folding chairs, looks briefly at her mother, then hurries back. Her lips are trembling.
“Uncle Henry can call cremation pagan if he wants to, but this open-coffin shit is the real pagan rite. She doesn’t look like my mother, she looks like a stuffed exhibit.”
“Then why—”
“It was the trade-off I made to shut Uncle Henry up about the cremation. God help us if he looks under the swag and sees the coffin’s pressed cardboard painted gray to look like metal. So it’ll . . . you know . . .”
“I know,” Hodges says, and gives her a one-armed hug.
The deceased woman’s friends trickle in, led by Althea Greene, Wharton’s nurse, and Mrs. Harris, who was her housekeeper. At twenty past ten or so (fashionably late, Hodges thinks), Aunt Charlotte arrives on her brother’s arm. Uncle Henry leads her down the aisle, looks briefly at the corpse, then stands back. Aunt Charlotte stares fixedly into the upturned face, then bends and kisses the dead lips. In a barely audible voice she says, “Oh, sis, oh, sis.” For the first time since he met her, Hodges feels something for her other than irritation.
There is some milling, some quiet talk, a few low outbursts of laughter. Janey makes the rounds, speaking to everyone (there aren’t more than a dozen, all of the sort Hodges’s daughter calls “goldie-oldies”), doing her due diligence. Uncle Henry joins her, and on the one occasion when Janey falters—she’s trying to comfort Mrs. Greene—he puts an arm around her shoulders. Hodges is glad to see it. Blood tells, he thinks. At times like this, it almost always does.
He’s the odd man out here, so he decides to get some air. He stands on the front step for a few moments, scanning the cars parked across the street, looking for a man sitting by himself in one of them. He sees no one, and realizes he hasn’t seen Holly the Mumbler, either.
He ambles around to the visitors’ parking lot and there she is, perched on the back step. She’s dressed in a singularly unbecoming shin-length brown dress. Her hair is put up in unbecoming clumps at the sides of her head. To Hodges she looks like Princess Leia after a year on the Karen Carpenter diet.
She sees his shadow on the pavement, gives a jerk, and hides something behind her hand. He comes closer, and the hidden object turns out to be a half-smoked cigarette. She gives him a narrow, worried look. Hodges thinks it’s the look of a dog that’s been beaten too many times with a newspaper for piddling under the kitchen table.