Mr. Mercedes: A Novel (36 page)

“Holly. Holly. Listen to me.”

She’s looking, but is she listening? He doesn’t know, and there’s no time.

“I loved her, but you can’t tell anyone.
You can’t tell anyone I loved her
. Maybe later, but not now. Do you understand?”

She nods.

“I need your cell number. And I may need
you
.” His cold mind hopes he won’t, that the house in Sugar Heights will be empty this afternoon, but he doesn’t think it will be. Holly’s mother and uncle will have to leave, at least for awhile, but Charlotte won’t want her daughter to go with them. Because Holly has mental problems. Holly is delicate. Hodges wonders just how many breakdowns she’s had, and if there have been suicide attempts. These thoughts zip across his mind like shooting stars, there at one moment, gone the next. He has no time for Holly’s delicate mental condition.

“When your mother and uncle go to the police station, tell them you don’t need anyone to stay with you. Tell them you’re okay by yourself. Can you do that?”

She nods, although she almost certainly has no idea what he’s talking about.

“Someone will call you. It might be me, or it might be a young man named Jerome.
Jerome
. Can you remember that name?”

She nods, then opens her purse and takes out a glasses case.

This is not working, Hodges thinks. The lights are on but nobody’s home. Still, he has to try. He grasps her shoulders.

“Holly, I want to catch the guy who did this. I want to make him pay. Will you help me?”

She nods. There’s no expression on her face.

“Say it, then. Say you’ll help me.”

She doesn’t. She slips a pair of sunglasses from the case instead, and pops them on as if there weren’t a car burning in the street and Janey’s arm in the gutter. As if there weren’t people screaming and already the sound of an approaching siren. As if this were a day at the beach.

He shakes her lightly.
“I need your cell phone number.”

She nods agreeably but says nothing. She snaps her purse closed and turns back to the burning car. The greatest despair he has ever known sweeps through Hodges, sickening his belly and scattering the thoughts that were, for the space of thirty or forty seconds, perfectly clear.

Aunt Charlotte comes sidewheeling around the corner with her hair—mostly black but white at the roots—flying out behind her. Uncle Henry follows. His jowly face is pasty except for the clownish spots of red high on his cheeks.

“Sharlie, stop!” Uncle Henry cries. “I think I’m having a heart attack!”

His sister pays no attention. She grabs Holly’s elbow, jerks her around, and hugs her fiercely, mashing Holly’s not inconsiderable nose between her breasts.
“DON’T LOOK!”
Charlotte bellows, looking.
“DON’T LOOK, SWEETHEART, DON’T LOOK AT IT!”

“I can hardly breathe,” Uncle Henry announces. He sits on the curb and hangs his head down. “God, I hope I’m not dying.”

More sirens have joined the first. People have begun to creep forward so they can get a closer look at the burning wreck in the street. A couple snap photos with their phones.

Hodges thinks, Enough explosive to blow up a car. How much more does he have?

Aunt Charlotte still has Holly in a deathgrip, bawling at her not to look. Holly isn’t struggling to get away, but she’s got one hand behind her. There’s something in it. Although he knows it’s probably just wishful thinking, Hodges hopes it might be for him. He takes what she’s holding out. It’s the case her sunglasses were in. Her name and address are embossed on it in gold.

There’s also a phone number.

22

Hodges takes his Nokia from his inside suit coat pocket, aware as he flips it open that it would probably be so much melted plastic and fizzing wire in the glove compartment of his baked Toyota, if not for Janey’s gentle chaffing.

He hits Jerome on speed-dial, praying the kid will pick up, and he does.

“Mr. Hodges? Bill? I think we just heard a big explo—”

“Shut up, Jerome. Just listen.” He’s walking down the glass-littered sidewalk. The sirens are closer now, soon they’ll be here, and all he has to go on is pure intuition. Unless, that is, his subconscious mind is already making the connections. It’s happened before; he didn’t get all those department commendations on Craigslist.

“Listening,” Jerome says.

“You know nothing about the City Center case. You know nothing about Olivia Trelawney or Janey Patterson.” Of course the three of them had dinner together at DeMasio’s, but he doesn’t think the cops will get that far for awhile, if ever.

“I know squat,” Jerome says. There’s no distrust or hesitance in his voice. “Who’ll be asking? The police?”

“Maybe later. First it’ll be your parents. Because that explosion you heard was my car. Janey was driving. We swapped at the last minute. She’s . . . gone.”

“Christ, Bill, you have to tell five-oh! Your old partner!”

Hodges thinks of her saying He’s
ours
. We still see eye to eye on
that
, right?

Right, he thinks. Still eye to eye on that, Janey.

“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
fuck
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
fuck
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 fucking 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.

Brady looks up, frowning. That’s a special cue he programmed into his Number Three. It sounds when he’s got a message on the Blue Umbrella site, but that’s impossible. The only person he’s been communicating with via the Blue Umbrella is Kermit William Hodges, aka the fat ex-cop, aka the permanently Ret Det.

He rolls over in his office chair, paddling his feet, and stares at Number Three. The Blue Umbrella icon is now sporting a
1
in a little red circle. He clicks on it. He stares, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the message on his screen.

kermitfrog19 wants to chat with you!

Do you want to chat with kermitfrog19?

Y N

Brady would like to believe this message was sent last night or this morning before Hodges and the blond bimbo left his house, but he can’t. He just heard it come in.

Summoning his courage—because this is much scarier than looking into his dead mother’s eyes—he clicks
Y
and reads.

Missed me.

And here’s something to remember, asshole: I’m like your side mirror. You know, OBJECTS ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

I know how you got into her Mercedes, and it wasn’t the valet key. But you believed me about that, didn’t you? Sure you did. Because you’re an asshole.

I’ve got a list of all the other cars you burglarized between 2007 and 2009.

I’ve got other info I don’t want to share right now, but here’s something I WILL share: it’s PERP, not PERK.

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m no longer going to catch you and turn you in to the cops. Why should I? I’m not a cop anymore.

I’m going to kill you.

See you soon, mama’s boy.

Even in his shock and disbelief, it’s that last line that Brady’s eyes keep returning to.

He walks to his closet on legs that feel like stilts. Once inside with the door closed, he screams and beats his fists on the shelves. Instead of the nigger family’s dog, he managed to kill his own mother. That was bad. Now he’s managed to kill someone else instead of the cop, and that’s worse. Probably it was the blond bitch. The blond bitch wearing the Det-Ret’s hat for some weirdo reason only another blonde could understand.