Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(96)

“Not yet. Right now I’m going to roll on this, and I need you to help me. The scumbucket killed her, I want his ass, and I mean to have it. Will you help?”

“Yes.” Not How much trouble could I get in. Not This could totally screw me up for Harvard. Not Leave me out of it. Just Yes. God bless Jerome Robinson.

“You have to go on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella as me and send the guy who did this a message. Do you remember my username?”

“Yeah. Kermitfrog19. Let me get some pa—”

“No time. Just remember the gist of it. And don’t post for at least an hour. He has to know I didn’t send it before the explosion. He has to know I’m still alive.”

Jerome says, “Give it.”

Hodges gives it and breaks the connection without saying goodbye. He slips the phone into his pants pocket, along with Holly’s sunglasses case.

A fire truck comes swaying around the corner, followed by two police cars. They speed past the Soames Funeral Home, where the mortician and the minister from Elizabeth Wharton’s service are now standing on the sidewalk, shading their eyes against the glare of the sun and the burning car.

Hodges has a lot of talking to do, but there’s something more important to do first. He strips off his suit coat, kneels down, and covers the arm in the gutter. He feels tears pricking at his eyes and forces them back. He can cry later. Right now tears don’t fit the story he has to tell.

The cops, two young guys riding solo, are getting out of their cars. Hodges doesn’t know them. “Officers,” he says.

“Got to ask you to clear the area, sir,” one of them says, “but if you witnessed that—” He points to the burning remains of the Toyota. “—I need you to stay close so someone can interview you.”

“I not only saw it, I should have been in it.” Hodges takes out his wallet and flips it open to show the police ID card with RETIRED stamped across it in red. “Until last fall, my partner was Pete Huntley. You should call him ASAP.”

One of the other cops says, “It was your car, sir?”

“Yeah.”

The first cop says, “Then who was driving it?”





23


Brady arrives home well before noon with all his problems solved. Old Mr. Beeson from across the street is standing on his lawn. “Didja hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Big explosion somewheres downtown. There was a lot of smoke, but it’s gone now.”

“I was playing the radio pretty loud,” Brady says.

“I think that old paint fact’ry exploded, that’s what I think. I knocked on your mother’s door, but I guess she must be sleepun.” His eyes twinkle with what’s unsaid: Sleepun it off.

“I guess she must be,” Brady says. He doesn’t like the idea that the nosy old cock-knocker did that. Brady Hartsfield’s idea of great neighbors would be no neighbors. “Got to go, Mr. Beeson.”

“Tell your mum I said hello.”

He unlocks the door, steps in, and locks it behind him. Scents the air. Nothing. Or . . . maybe not quite nothing. Maybe the tiniest whiff of unpleasantness, like the smell of a chicken carcass that got left a few days too long in the trash under the sink.

Brady goes up to her room. He turns down the coverlet, exposing her pale face and glaring eyes. He doesn’t mind them so much now, and so what if Mr. Beeson’s a neb-nose? Brady only needs to keep things together for another few days, so f*ck Mr. Beeson. Fuck her glaring eyes, too. He didn’t kill her; she killed herself. The way the fat ex-cop was supposed to kill himself, and so what if he didn’t? He’s gone now, so f*ck the fat ex-cop. The Det is definitely Ret. Ret in peace, Detective Hodges.

“I did it, Mom,” he says. “I pulled it off. And you helped. Only in my head, but . . .” Only he’s not completely sure of that. Maybe it really was Mom who reminded him to lock the fat ex-cop’s car doors again. He wasn’t thinking about that at all.

“Anyway, thanks,” he finishes lamely. “Thanks for whatever. And I’m sorry you’re dead.”

The eyes glare up at him.

He reaches for her—tentatively—and uses the tips of his fingers to close her eyes the way people sometimes do in movies. It works for a few seconds, then they roll up like tired old windowshades and the glare resumes. The you-killed-me-honeyboy glare.

It’s a major buzzkill and Brady pulls the coverlet back over her face. He goes downstairs and turns on the TV, thinking at least one of the local stations will be broadcasting from the scene, but none of them are. It’s very annoying. Don’t they know a car-bomb when one explodes in their faces? Apparently not. Apparently Rachael Ray making her favorite f*cking meatloaf is more important.

He turns off the idiot box and hurries to the control room, saying chaos to light up his computers and darkness to kill the suicide program. He does a shuffling little dance, shaking his fists over his head and singing what he remembers of “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead,” only changing witch to cop. He thinks it will make him feel better, but it doesn’t. Between Mr. Beeson’s long nose and his mother’s glaring eyes, his good feeling—the feeling he worked for, the feeling he deserved—is slipping away.

Never mind. There’s a concert coming up, and he has to be ready for it. He sits at the long worktable. The ball bearings that used to be in his suicide vest are now in three mayonnaise jars. Next to them is a box of Glad food-storage bags, the gallon size. He begins filling them (but not overfilling them) with the steel bearings. The work soothes him, and his good feelings start to come back. Then, just as he’s finishing up, a steamboat whistle toots.