Mr. Mercedes: A Novel (52 page)

“Therapy,” she says, and then all the strength runs out of her legs. She sits down in the aisle. Her fingers relax on the knotted end of the Happy Slapper, and it drops beside one sneaker.

Onstage, the band plays on.

41

A hand is tugging at his arm.

“Jerome?
Jerome!
”

He turns from Holly and the slumped form of Brady Hartsfield to see his little sister, her eyes wide with dismay. His mom is right behind her. In his current hyper state, Jerome isn’t a bit surprised, but at the same time he knows the danger isn’t over.

“What did you
do
?” a girl is shouting. “What did you
do
to him?”

Jerome wheels back the other way and sees the girl sitting one wheelchair in from the aisle reaching for Hartsfield. Jerome shouts,
“Holly! Don’t let her do that!”

Holly lurches to her feet, stumbles, and almost falls on top of Brady. It surely would have been the last fall of her life, but she manages to keep her feet and grab the wheelchair girl’s hands. There’s hardly any strength in them, and she feels an instant of pity. She bends down close and shouts to be heard.
“Don’t touch him! He’s got a bomb, and I think it’s hot!”

The wheelchair girl shrinks away. Perhaps she understands; perhaps she’s only afraid of Holly, who’s looking even wilder than usual just now.

Brady’s shivers and twitches are strengthening. Holly doesn’t like that, because she can see something, a dim yellow light, under his shirt. Yellow is the color of trouble.

“Jerome?” Tanya says. “What are you doing here?”

An usher is approaching. “Clear the aisle!” the usher shouts over the music. “You have to clear the aisle, folks!”

Jerome grasps his mother’s shoulders. He pulls her to him until their foreheads are touching. “You have to get out of here, Mom. Take the girls and go. Right now. Make the usher go with you. Tell her your daughter is sick. Please don’t ask questions.”

She looks in his eyes and doesn’t ask questions.

“Mom?” Barbara begins. “What . . .” The rest is lost in the crash of the band and the choral accompaniment from the audience. Tanya takes Barbara by the arm and approaches the usher. At the same time she’s motioning for Hilda, Dinah, and Betsy to join her.

Jerome turns back to Holly. She’s bent over Brady, who continues to shudder as cerebral storms rage inside his head. His feet tapdance, as if even in unconsciousness he’s really feeling that goodtime ’Round Here beat. His hands fly aimlessly around, and when one of them approaches the dim yellow light under his tee-shirt, Jerome bats it away like a basketball guard rejecting a shot in the paint.

“I want to get out of here,” the wheelchair girl moans. “I’m scared.”

Jerome can relate to that—he also wants to get out of here, and he’s scared to death—but for now she has to stay where she is. Brady has her blocked in, and they don’t dare move him. Not yet.

Holly is ahead of Jerome, as she so often is. “You have to stay still for now, honey,” she tells the wheelchair girl. “Chill out and enjoy the concert.” She’s thinking how much simpler this would be if she’d managed to kill him instead of just bashing his sicko brains halfway to Peru. She wonders if Jerome would shoot Hartsfield if she asked him to. Probably not. Too bad. With all this noise, he could probably get away with it.

“Are you
crazy
?” the wheelchair girl asks wonderingly.

“People keep asking me that,” Holly says, and—very gingerly—she begins to pull up Brady’s tee-shirt. “Hold his hands,” she tells Jerome.

“What if I can’t?”

“Then OJ the motherfucker.”

The sell-out audience is on its feet, swaying and clapping. The beachballs are flying again. Jerome takes one quick glance behind him and sees his mother leading the girls up the aisle to the exit, the usher accompanying them. That’s one for our side, at least, he thinks, then turns back to the business at hand. He grabs Brady’s flying hands and pins them together. The wrists are slippery with sweat. It’s like holding a couple of struggling fish.

“I don’t know what you’re doing, but do it fast!” he shouts at Holly.

The yellow light is coming from a plastic gadget that looks like a customized TV remote control. Instead of numbered channel buttons, there’s a white toggle-switch, the kind you use to flip on a light in your living room. It’s standing straight up. There’s a wire leading from the gadget. It goes under the man’s butt.

Brady makes a grunting sound and suddenly there’s an acidic smell. His bladder has let go. Holly looks at the peebag on his lap, but it doesn’t seem to be attached to anything. She grabs it and hands it to the wheelchair girl. “Hold this.”

“Eeuw, it’s
pee
,” the wheelchair girl says, and then: “It’s
not
pee. There’s something inside. It looks like clay.”

“Put it down.” Jerome has to shout to be heard over the music. “Put it on the floor.
Gently
.” Then, to Holly: “Hurry the hell up!”

Holly is studying the yellow ready-lamp. And the little white nub of the toggle-switch. She could push it forward or back and doesn’t dare do either one, because she doesn’t know which way is
off
and which way is
boom
.

She plucks Thing Two from where it was resting on Brady’s stomach. It’s like picking up a snake that’s bloated with poison, and takes all her courage. “Hold his hands, Jerome, you just hold his hands.”

“He’s
slippery
,” Jerome grunts.

We already knew that, Holly thinks. One slippery son of a bitch. One slippery
motherfucker
.

She turns the gadget over, willing her hands not to shake and trying not to think of the four thousand people who don’t even know their lives now depend on poor messed-up Holly Gibney. She looks at the battery cover. Then, holding her breath, she slides it down and lets it drop to the floor.

Inside are two double-A batteries. Holly hooks a fingernail onto the ridge of one and thinks, God, if You’re there, please let this work. For a moment she can’t make her finger move. Then one of Brady’s hands slips free of Jerome’s grip and slaps her upside the head.

Holly jerks and the battery she’s been worrying pops out of the compartment. She waits for the world to explode, and when it doesn’t, she turns the remote control over. The yellow light has gone out. Holly begins to cry. She grabs the master wire and yanks it free of Thing Two.

“You can let him go n—” she begins, but Jerome already has. He’s hugging her so tight she can hardly breathe. Holly doesn’t care. She hugs him back.

The audience is cheering wildly.

“They think they’re cheering for the song, but they’re really cheering for us,” she manages to whisper in Jerome’s ear. “They just don’t know it yet. Now let me go, Jerome. You’re hugging me too tight. Let me go before I pass out.”

42

Hodges is still sitting on the crate in the storage area, and not alone. There’s an elephant sitting on his chest. Something’s happening. Either the world is going away from him or he’s going away from the world. He thinks it’s the latter. It’s like he’s inside a camera and the camera is going backwards on one of those dolly-track things. The world is as bright as ever, but getting smaller, and there’s a growing circle of darkness around it.

He holds on with all the force of his will, waiting for either an explosion or no explosion.

One of the roadies is bending over him and asking if he’s all right. “Your lips are turning blue,” the roadie informs him. Hodges waves him away. He must listen.

Music and cheers and happy screams. Nothing else. At least not yet.

Hold on, he tells himself. Hold on.

“What?” the roadie asks, bending down again. “What?”

“I have to hold on,” Hodges whispers, but now he can hardly breathe at all. The world has shrunk to the size of a fiercely gleaming silver dollar. Then even that is blotted out, not because he’s lost consciousness but because someone is walking toward him. It’s Janey, striding slow and hipshot. She’s wearing his fedora tipped sexily over one eye. Hodges remembers what she said when he asked her how he had been so lucky as to end up in her bed: I have no regrets . . . Can we leave it at that?

Yeah, he thinks.
Yeah
. He closes his eyes, and tumbles off the crate like Humpty off his wall.

The roadie grabs him but can only soften the fall, not stop it. The other roadies gather.

“Who knows CPR?” asks the one who grabbed Hodges.

A roadie with a long graying ponytail steps forward. He’s wearing a faded Judas Coyne tee-shirt, and his eyes are bright red. “I do, but man, I’m so stoned.”

“Try it anyway.”

The roadie with the ponytail drops to his knees. “I think this guy is on the way out,” he says, but goes to work.

Upstairs, ’Round Here starts a new song, to the squeals and cheers of their female admirers. These girls will remember this night for the rest of their lives. The music. The excitement. The beachballs flying above the swaying, dancing crowd. They will read about the explosion that didn’t happen in the newspapers, but to the young, tragedies that don’t happen are only dreams.

The memories: they’re the reality.

43

Hodges awakens in a hospital room, surprised to find himself still alive but not at all surprised to see his old partner sitting at his bedside. His first thought is that Pete—hollow-eyed, needing a shave, the points of his collar turning up so they almost poke his throat—looks worse than Hodges feels. His second thought is for Jerome and Holly.

“Did they stop it?” he rasps. His throat is bone-dry. He tries to sit up. The machines surrounding him begin to beep and scold. He lies back down, but his eyes never leave Pete Huntley’s face.
“Did they?”

“They did,” Pete says. “The woman says her name is Holly Gibney, but I think she’s really Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. That guy, the perp—”

“The perk,” Hodges says. “He thinks of himself as the perk.”

“Right now he doesn’t think of himself as anything, and the doctors say his thinking days are probably over for good. Gibney belted the living shit out of him. He’s in a deep coma. Minimal brain function. When you get on your feet again, you can visit him, if you want. He’s three doors down.”

“Where am I? County?”

“Kiner. The ICU.”

“Where are Jerome and Holly?”

“Downtown. Answering a shitload of questions. Meanwhile, Sheena’s mother is running around and threatening her own murder-spree if we don’t stop harassing her daughter.”

A nurse comes in and tells Pete he’ll have to leave. She says something about Mr. Hodges’s vital signs and doctor’s orders. Hodges holds up his hand to her, although it’s an effort.

“Jerome’s a minor and Holly’s got . . . issues. This is all on me, Pete.”

“Oh, we know that,” Pete says. “Yes indeed. This gives a whole new meaning to going off the reservation. What in God’s name did you think you were doing, Billy?”

“The best I could,” he says, and closes his eyes.

He drifts. He thinks of all those young voices, singing along with the band. They got home. They’re okay. He holds that thought until sleep takes him under.

THE PROCLAMATION

THE OFFICE OF THE MAYOR

WHEREAS, Holly Rachel Gibney and Jerome Peter Robinson uncovered a plot to commit an act of Terrorism at the Mingo Auditorium adjacent to the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex; and

WHEREAS, in realizing that to inform MAC Security Personnel might cause said Terrorist to set off an explosive device of great power, said explosive device accompanied by several pounds of metal shrapnel, they raced to the Mingo Auditorium; and

WHEREAS, they did confront said Terrorist themselves, at great personal risk; and

WHEREAS, they did subdue said Terrorist and prevent great loss of life and injury; and

WHEREAS, they have done this City a great and heroic service,

NOW THEREFORE, I, Richard M. Tewky, Mayor, do hereby award Holly Rachel Gibney and Jerome Peter Robinson the Medal of Service, this city’s highest honor, and proclaim that all City Services shall be rendered to them without charge for a period of ten (10) years; and

NOW THEREFORE, recognizing that some Acts are beyond repayment, we thank them with all our hearts.

In testimony thereof,

I set my signature and

The City Seal.

Richard M. Tewky

Mayor