Mr. Mercedes

1

Hodges is up at six A.M. on Thursday morning and makes himself a big breakfast: two eggs, four slices of bacon, four slices of toast. He doesn’t want it, but he forces himself to eat every bite, telling himself it’s body gasoline. He might get a chance to eat again today, but he might not. Both in the shower and as he chews his way resolutely through his big breakfast (no one to watch his weight for now), a thought keeps recurring to him, the same one he went to sleep with the night before. It’s like a haunting.

Just how much explosive?

This leads to other unpleasant considerations. Like how the guy—the perk—means to use it. And when.

He comes to a decision: today is the last day. He wants to track Mr. Mercedes down himself, and confront him. Kill him? No, not that (probably not that), but beating the shit out of him would be excellent. For Olivia. For Janey. For Janice and Patricia Cray. For all the other people Mr. Mercedes killed and maimed at City Center the year before. People so desperate for jobs they got up in the middle of the night and stood waiting in a dank fog for the doors to open. Lost lives. Lost hopes. Lost souls.

So yes, he wants the sonofabitch. But if he can’t nail him today, he’ll turn the whole thing over to Pete Huntley and Izzy Jaynes and take the consequences… which, he knows, may well lead to some jail time. It doesn’t matter. He’s got plenty on his conscience already, but he guesses it can bear a little more weight. Not another mass killing, though. That would destroy what little of him there is left.

He decides to give himself until eight o’clock tonight; that’s the line in the sand. He can do as much in those thirteen hours as Pete and Izzy. Probably more, because he’s not constrained by routine or procedure. Today he will carry his father’s M&P .38. And the Happy Slapper—that, too.

The Slapper goes in the right front pocket of his sportcoat, the revolver under his left arm. In his study, he grabs his Mr. Mercedes file—it’s quite fat now—and takes it back to the kitchen. While he reads through it again, he uses the remote to fire up the TV on the counter and tunes in Morning at Seven on Channel Six. He’s almost relieved to see that a crane has toppled over down by the lakeshore, half-sinking a barge filled with chemicals. He doesn’t want the lake any more polluted than it already is (assuming that’s possible), but the spill has pushed the car-bomb story back to second place. That’s the good news. The bad is that he’s identified as the detective, now retired, who was the lead investigator of the City Center Massacre task force, and the woman killed in the car-bombing is identified as Olivia Trelawney’s sister. There’s a still photo of him and Janey standing outside the Soames Funeral Home, taken by God knows who.

“Police are not saying if there’s a connection to last year’s mass killing at City Center,” the newscaster says gravely, “but it’s worth noting that the perpetrator of that crime has as yet not been caught. In other crime news, Donald Davis is expected to be arraigned…”

Hodges no longer gives Shit One about Donald Davis. He kills the TV and returns to the notes on his yellow legal pad. He’s still going through them when his phone rings—not the cell (although today he’s carrying it), but the one on the wall. It’s Pete Huntley.

“You’re up with the birdies,” Pete says.

“Good detective work. How can I help you?”

“We had an interesting interview yesterday with Henry Sirois and Charlotte Gibney. You know, Janelle Patterson’s aunt and uncle?”

Hodges waits for it.

“The aunt was especially fascinating. She thinks Izzy was right, and you and Patterson were a lot more than just acquaintances. She thinks you were very good friends.”

“Say what you mean, Pete.”

“Making the beast with two backs. Laying some pipe. Slicing the cake. Hiding the salami. Doing the horizontal b—”

“I think I get it. Let me tell you something about Aunt Charlotte, okay? If she saw a photo of Justin Bieber talking to Queen Elizabeth, she’d tell you the Beeb was tapping her. ‘Just look at their eyes,’ she’d say.”

“So you weren’t.”

“No.”

“I’ll take that on a try-out basis—mostly for old times’ sake—but I still want to know what you’re hiding. Because this stinks.”

“Read my lips: not… hiding… anything.”

Silence from the other end. Pete is waiting for Hodges to grow uncomfortable and break it, for the moment forgetting who taught him that trick.

At last he gives up. “I think you’re digging yourself a hole, Billy. My advice is to drop the shovel before you’re in too deep to climb out.”

“Thanks, partner. Always good to get life-lessons at quarter past seven in the morning.”

“I want to interview you again this afternoon. And this time I may have to read you the words.”

The Miranda warning is what he means.

“Happy to make that work. Call me on my cell.”

“Really? Since you retired, you never carry it.”

“I’m carrying it today.” Yes indeed. Because for the next twelve or fourteen hours, he’s totally unretired.

He ends the call and goes back to his notes, wetting the tip of his index finger each time he turns a page. He circles a name: Radney Peeples. The Vigilant Guard Service guy he talked to out in Sugar Heights. If Peeples is even halfway doing his job, he may hold the key to Mr. Mercedes. But there’s no chance he won’t remember Hodges, not after Hodges first braced him for his company ID and then questioned him. And he’ll know that today Hodges is big news. There’s time to think about how to solve the problem; Hodges doesn’t want to call Vigilant until regular business hours. Because the call has to look like ordinary routine.

The next call he receives—on his cell this time—is from Aunt Charlotte. Hodges isn’t surprised to hear from her, but that doesn’t mean he’s pleased.

“I don’t know what to do!” she cries. “You have to help me, Mr. Hodges!”

“Don’t know what to do about what?”

“The body! Janelle’s body! I don’t even know where it is!”

Hodges gets a beep and checks the incoming number.

“Mrs. Gibney, I have another call and I have to take it.”

“I don’t see why you can’t—”

“Janey’s not going anywhere, so just stand by. I’ll call you back.”

He cuts her off in the middle of a protesting squawk and goes to Jerome.

“I thought you might need a chauffeur today,” Jerome says. “Considering your current situation.”

For a moment Hodges doesn’t know what the kid is talking about, then remembers that his Toyota has been reduced to charred fragments. What remains of it is now in the custody of the PD’s Forensics Department, where later today men in white coats will be going over it to determine what kind of explosive was used to blow it up. He got home last night in a taxi. He will need a ride. And, he realizes, Jerome may be useful in another way.

“That would be good,” he says, “but what about school?”

“I’m carrying a 3.9 average,” Jerome says patiently. “I’m also working for Citizens United and team-teaching a computer class for disadvantaged kids. I can afford to skip a day. And I already cleared it with my mom and dad. They just asked me to ask you if anyone else was going to try to blow you up.”

“Actually, that’s not out of the question.”

“Hang on a second.” Faintly, Hodges hears Jerome calling: “He says no one will.”

In spite of everything, Hodges has to smile.

“I’ll be there double-quick,” Jerome says.

“Don’t break any speed laws. Nine o’clock will be fine. Use the time to practice your thespian skills.”

“Really? What role am I thesping?”

“Law office paralegal,” Hodges says. “And thanks, Jerome.”

He breaks the connection, goes into his study, boots up his computer, and searches for a local lawyer named Schron. It’s an unusual name and he finds it with no trouble. He notes down the firm and Schron’s first name, which happens to be George. Then he returns to the kitchen and calls Aunt Charlotte.

“Hodges,” he says. “Back atcha.”

“I don’t appreciate being hung up on, Mr. Hodges.”

“No more than I appreciate you telling my old partner that I was fucking your niece.”

He hears a shocked gasp, followed by silence. He almost hopes she’ll hang up. When she doesn’t, he tells her what she needs to know.

“Janey’s remains will be at the Huron County Morgue. You won’t be able to take possession today. Probably not tomorrow, either. There’ll have to be an autopsy, which is absurd given the cause of death, but it’s protocol.”

“You don’t understand! I have plane reservations!”

Hodges looks out his kitchen window and counts slowly to five.

“Mr. Hodges? Are you still there?”

“As I see it, you have two choices, Mrs. Gibney. One is to stay here and do the right thing. The other is to use your reservation, fly home, and let the city do it.”

Aunt Charlotte begins to snivel. “I saw the way you were looking at her, and the way she was looking at you. All I did was answer the woman cop’s questions.”

“And with great alacrity, I have no doubt.”

“With what?”

He sighs. “Let’s drop it. I suggest you and your brother visit the County Morgue in person. Don’t call ahead, let them see your faces. Talk to Dr. Galworthy. If Galworthy’s not there, talk to Dr. Patel. If you ask them in person to expedite matters—and if you can manage to be nice about it—they’ll give you as much help as they can. Use my name. I go back to the early nineties with both of them.”

“We’d have to leave Holly again,” Aunt Charlotte says. “She’s locked herself in her room. She’s clicking away on her laptop and won’t come out.”

Hodges discovers he’s pulling his hair and makes himself stop. “How old is your daughter?”

A long pause. “Forty-five.”

“Then you can probably get away with not hiring a sitter.” He tries to suppress what comes next, and can’t quite manage it. “Think of the money you’ll save.”

“I can hardly expect you to understand Holly’s situation, Mr. Hodges. As well as being mentally unstable, my daughter is very sensitive.”

Hodges thinks: That must make you especially difficult for her. This time he manages not to say it.

“Mr. Hodges?”

“Still here.”

“You don’t happen to know if Janelle left a will, do you?”

He hangs up.

2

Brady spends a long time in the motel shower with the lights off. He likes the womblike warmth and the steady drumming sound. He also likes the darkness, and it’s good that he does because soon he’ll have all he ever wanted. He’d like to believe there’s going to be a tender mother-and-child reunion—perhaps even one of the mother-and-lover type—but in his heart he doesn’t. He can pretend, but… no.

Just darkness.

He’s not worried about God, or about spending eternity being slow-roasted for his crimes. There’s no heaven and no hell. Anyone with half a brain knows those things don’t exist. How cruel would a supreme being have to be to make a world as fucked-up as this one? Even if the vengeful God of the televangelists and child-molesting blackrobes did exist, how could that thunderbolt-thrower possibly blame Brady for the things he’s done? Did Brady Hartsfield grab his father’s hand and wrap it around the live power line that electrocuted him? No. Did he shove that apple slice down Frankie’s throat? No. Was he the one who talked on and on about how the money was going to run out and they’d end up living in a homeless shelter? No. Did he cook up a poisoned hamburger and say, Eat this, Ma, it’s delicious?

Can he be blamed for striking out at the world that has made him what he is?

Brady thinks not.

He muses on the terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center (he muses on them often). Those clowns actually thought they were going to paradise, where they’d live in a kind of eternal luxury hotel being serviced by gorgeous young virgins. Pretty funny, and the best part? The joke was on them… not that they knew it. What they got was a momentary view of all those windows and a final flash of light. After that, they and their thousands of victims were just gone. Poof. Seeya later, alligator. Off you go, killers and killed alike, off you go into the universal null set that surrounds one lonely blue planet and all its mindlessly bustling denizens. Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.

3

Brady dresses and drives to a twenty-four-hour drugstore near the airport. He’s seen in the bathroom mirror that his mother’s electric razor left a lot to be desired; his skull needs more maintenance. He gets disposable razors and shaving cream. He grabs more batteries, because you can never have enough. He also picks up a pair of clear glass spectacles from a spinner rack. He chooses hornrims because they give him a studently look. Or so it seems to him.

On his way to the checkout, he stops at a cardboard stand-up display featuring the four clean-cut boys in ’Round Here. The copy reads GET YOUR GEAR ON FOR THE BIG SHOW JUNE 3RD! Only someone has crossed out JUNE 3RD and written 2NITE below it.

Although Brady usually takes an M tee-shirt—he’s always been slim—he picks out an XL and adds it to the rest of his swag. No need to stand in line; this early he’s the only customer.

“Going to the show tonight?” the checkout girl asks.

Brady gives her a big grin. “I sure am.”

On his way back to the motel, Brady starts to think about his car. To worry about his car. The Ralph Jones alias is all very fine, but the Subaru is registered to Brady Hartsfield. If the Det-Ret discovers his name and tells five-oh, that could be a problem. The motel is safe enough—they no longer ask for plate numbers, just a driver’s license—but the car is not.

The Det-Ret’s not close, Brady tells himself. He was just trying to freak you out.

Except maybe not. This particular Det solved a lot of cases before he was Ret, and some of those skills still seem to be there.

Instead of going directly back to the Motel 6, Brady swings into the airport, takes a ticket, and leaves the Subaru in long-term parking. He’ll need it tonight, but for now it’s fine where it is.

He glances at his watch. Ten to nine. Eleven hours until the showtime, he thinks. Maybe twelve hours until the darkness. Could be less; could be more. But not much more.

He puts on his new glasses and carries his purchases the half-mile back to the motel, whistling.

4

When Hodges opens his front door, the first thing Jerome keys on is the .38 in the shoulder rig. “You’re not going to shoot anyone with that, are you?”

“I doubt it. Think of it as a good luck charm. It was my father’s. And I have a permit to carry concealed, if that was on your mind.”

“What’s on my mind,” Jerome says, “is whether or not it’s loaded.”

“Of course it is. What did you think I was going to do if I did have to use it? Throw it?”

Jerome sighs and ruffles his cap of dark hair. “This is getting heavy.”

“Want out? If you do, you’re taillights. Right this minute. I can still rent a car.”

“No, I’m good. It’s you I’m wondering about. Those aren’t bags under your eyes, they’re suitcases.”

“I’ll be okay. Today is it for me, anyway. If I can’t track this guy down by nightfall, I’m going to see my old partner and tell him everything.”

“How much trouble will you be in?”

“Don’t know and don’t much care.”

“How much trouble will I be in?”

“None. If I couldn’t guarantee that, you’d be in period one algebra right now.”

Jerome gives him a pitying look. “Algebra was four years ago. Tell me what I can do.”

Hodges does so. Jerome is willing but doubtful.

“Last month—you can’t ever tell my folks this—a bunch of us tried to get into Punch and Judy, that new dance club downtown? The guy at the door didn’t even look at my beautiful fake ID, just waved me out of the line and told me to go get a milkshake.”

Hodges says, “I’m not surprised. Your face is seventeen, but fortunately for me, your voice is at least twenty-five.” He slides Jerome a piece of paper with a phone number written on it. “Make the call.”

Jerome tells the Vigilant Guard Service receptionist who answers that he is Martin Lounsbury, a paralegal at the firm of Canton, Silver, Makepeace, and Jackson. He says he’s currently working with George Schron, a junior partner assigned to tie up a few loose ends concerning the estate of the late Olivia Trelawney. One of those loose ends has to do with Mrs. Trelawney’s computer. His job for the day is to locate the I-T specialist who worked on the machine, and it seems possible that one of the Vigilant employees in the Sugar Heights area may be able to help him locate the gentleman.

Hodges makes a thumb-and-forefinger circle to indicate Jerome is doing well, and passes him a note.

Jerome reads it and says, “One of Mrs. Trelawney’s neighbors, Mrs. Helen Wilcox, mentioned a Rodney Peeples?” He listens, then nods. “Radney, I see. What an interesting name. Perhaps he could call me, if it’s not too much trouble? My boss is a bit of a tyrant, and I’m really under the gun here.” He listens. “Yes? Oh, that’s great. Thanks so much.” He gives the receptionist the numbers of his cell and Hodges’s landline, then hangs up and wipes make-believe sweat from his forehead. “I’m glad that’s over. Whoo!”

“You did fine,” Hodges assures him.

“What if she calls Canton, Silver, and Whoozis to check? And finds out they never heard of Martin Lounsbury?”

“Her job is to pass messages on, not investigate them.”

“What if the Peeples guy checks?”

Hodges doesn’t think he will. He thinks the name Helen Wilcox will stop him. When he talked to Peeples that day outside the Sugar Heights mansion, Hodges caught a strong vibe that Peeples’s relationship with Helen Wilcox was more than just platonic. Maybe a little more, maybe a lot. He thinks Peeples will give Martin Lounsbury what he wants so he’ll go away.

“What do we do now?” Jerome asks.

What they do is something Hodges spent at least half his career doing. “Wait.”

“How long?”

“Until Peeples or some other security grunt calls.” Because right now Vigilant Guard Service is looking like his best lead. If it doesn’t pan out, they’ll have to go out to Sugar Heights and start interviewing neighbors. Not a prospect he relishes, given his current news-cycle celebrity.

In the meantime, he finds himself thinking again of Mr. Bowfinger, and Mrs. Melbourne, the slightly crackers woman who lives across the street from him. With her talk about mysterious black SUVs and her interest in flying saucers, Mrs. Melbourne could have been a quirky supporting character in an old Alfred Hitchcock movie.

She thinks they walk among us, Bowfinger had said, giving his eyebrows a satirical wiggle, and why in God’s name should that keep bouncing around in Hodges’s head?

It’s ten of ten when Jerome’s cell rings. The little snatch of AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” makes them both jump. Jerome grabs it.

“It says CALL BLOCKED. What should I do, Bill?”

“Take it. It’s him. And remember who you are.”

Jerome opens the line and says, “Hello, this is Martin Lounsbury.” Listens. “Oh, hello, Mr. Peeples. Thanks so much for getting back to me.”

Hodges scribbles a fresh note and pushes it across the table. Jerome scans it quickly.

“Uh-huh… yes… Mrs. Wilcox speaks very highly of you. Very highly, indeed. But my job has to do with the late Mrs. Trelawney. We can’t finish clearing her estate until we can inventory her computer, and… yes, I know it’s been over six months. Terrible how slowly these things move, isn’t it? We had a client last year who actually had to apply for food stamps, even though he had a seventy-thousand-dollar bequest pending.”

Don’t over-butter the muffin, Jerome, Hodges thinks. His heart is hammering in his chest.

“No, it’s nothing like that. I just need the name of the fellow who worked on it for her. The rest is up to my boss.” Jerome listens, eyebrows pulling together. “You can’t? Oh, that’s a sha—”

But Peeples is talking again. The sweat on Jerome’s brow is no longer imaginary. He reaches across the table, grabs Hodges’s pen, and begins to scribble. While he writes, he keeps up a steady stream of uh-huhs and okays and I sees. Finally:

“Hey, that’s great. Totally great. I’m sure Mr. Schron can roll with this. You’ve been a big help, Mr. Peeples. So I’ll just…” He listens some more. “Yes, it’s a terrible thing. I believe Mr. Schron is dealing with some… uh… some aspects of that even as we speak, but I really don’t know anythi… you did? Wow! Mr. Peeples, you’ve been great. Yes, I’ll mention that. I certainly will. Thanks, Mr. Peeples.”

He breaks the connection and puts the heels of his hands to his temples, as if to quell a headache.

“Man, that was intense. He wanted to talk about what happened yesterday. And to say that I should tell Janey’s relatives that Vigilant stands ready to help in any way they can.”

“That’s great, I’m sure he’ll get an attaboy in his file, but—”

“He also said he talked to the guy whose car got blown up. He saw your picture on the news this morning.”

Hodges isn’t surprised and at this minute doesn’t care. “Did you get a name? Tell me you got a name.”

“Not of the I-T guy, but I did get the name of the company he works for. It’s called Cyber Patrol. Peeples says they drive around in green VW Beetles. He says they’re in Sugar Heights all the time, and you can’t miss them. He’s seen a woman and a man driving them, both probably in their twenties. He called the woman ‘kinda dykey.’”

Hodges has never even considered the idea that Mr. Mercedes might actually be Ms. Mercedes. He supposes it’s technically possible, and it would make a neat solution for an Agatha Christie novel, but this is real life.

“Did he say what the guy looked like?”

Jerome shakes his head.

“Come on in my study. You can drive the computer while I co-pilot.”

In less than a minute they are looking at a rank of three green VW Beetles with CYBER PATROL printed on the sides. It’s not an independent company, but part of a chain called Discount Electronix with one big-box store in the city. It’s located in the Birch Hill Mall.

“Man, I’ve shopped there,” Jerome says. “I’ve shopped there lots of times. Bought video games, computer components, a bunch of chop-sockey DVDs on sale.”

Below the photo of the Beetles is a line reading MEET THE EXPERTS. Hodges reaches over Jerome’s shoulder and clicks on it. Three photos appear. One is of a narrow-faced girl with dirty-blond hair. Number two is a chubby guy wearing John Lennon specs and looking serious. Number three is a generically handsome fellow with neatly combed brown hair and a bland say-cheese smile. The names beneath are FREDDI LINKLATTER, ANTHONY FROBISHER, and BRADY HARTSFIELD.

“What now?” Jerome asks.

“Now we take a ride. I just have to grab something first.”

Hodges goes into his bedroom and punches the combo of the small safe in the closet. Inside, along with a couple of insurance policies and a few other financial papers, is a rubber-banded stack of laminated cards like the one he currently carries in his wallet. City cops are issued new IDs every two years, and each time he got a new one, he stored the old one in here. The crucial difference is that none of the old ones have RETIRED stamped across them in red. He takes out the one that expired in December of 2008, removes his final ID from his wallet, and replaces it with the one from his safe. Of course flashing it is another crime—State Law 190.25, impersonating a police officer, a Class E felony punishable by a $25,000 fine, five years in jail, or both—but he’s far beyond worrying about such things.

He tucks his wallet away in his back pocket, starts to close the safe, then re-thinks. There’s something else in there he might want: a small flat leather case that looks like the sort of thing a frequent flier might keep his passport in. This was also his father’s.

Hodges slips it into his pocket with the Happy Slapper.

5

After cleansing the stubble on his skull and donning his new plain glass specs, Brady strolls down to the Motel 6 office and pays for another night. Then he returns to his room and unfolds the wheelchair he bought on Wednesday. It was pricey, but what the hell. Money is no longer an issue for him.

He puts the explosives-laden ASS PARKING cushion on the seat of the chair, then slits the lining of the pocket on the back and inserts several more blocks of his homemade plastic explosive. Each block has been fitted with a lead azide blasting plug. He gathers the connecting wires together with a metal clip. Their ends are stripped down to the bare copper, and this afternoon he’ll braid them into a single master wire.

The actual detonator will be Thing Two.

One by one, he tapes Baggies filled with ball bearings beneath the wheelchair’s seat, using crisscrossings of filament tape to hold them in place. When he’s done, he sits on the end of the bed, looking solemnly at his handiwork. He really has no idea if he’ll be able to get this rolling bomb into the Mingo Auditorium… but he had no idea if he’d be able to escape from City Center after the deed was done, either. That worked out; maybe this will, too. After all, this time he won’t have to escape, and that’s half the battle. Even if they get wise and try to grab him, the hallway will be crammed with concertgoers, and his score will be a lot higher than eight.

Out with a bang, Brady thinks. Out with a bang, and fuck you, Detective Hodges. Fuck you very much.

He lies down on the bed and thinks about masturbating. Probably he should while he’s still got a prick to masturbate with. But before he can even unsnap his Levi’s, he’s fallen asleep.

On the night table beside him stands a framed picture. Frankie smiles from it, holding Sammy the Fire Truck in his lap.

6

It’s nearly eleven A.M. when Hodges and Jerome arrive at Birch Hill Mall. There’s plenty of parking, and Jerome pulls his Wrangler into a spot directly in front of Discount Electronix, where all the windows are sporting big SALE signs. A teenage girl is sitting on the curb in front of the store, knees together and feet apart, bent studiously over an iPad. A cigarette smolders between the fingers of her left hand. It’s only as they approach that Hodges sees there’s gray in the teenager’s hair. His heart sinks.

“Holly?” Jerome says, at the same time Hodges says, “What in the hell are you doing here?”

“I was pretty sure you’d figure it out,” she says, butting her butt and standing up, “but I was starting to worry. I was going to call you if you weren’t here by eleven-thirty. I’m taking my Lexapro, Mr. Hodges.”

“So you said, and I’m glad to hear it. Now answer my question and tell me what you’re doing here.”

Her lips tremble, and although she managed eye contact to begin with, her gaze now sinks to her loafers. Hodges isn’t surprised he took her for a teenager at first, because in many ways she still is one, her growth stunted by insecurities and by the strain of keeping her balance on the emotional highwire she’s been walking all her life.

“Are you mad at me? Please don’t be mad at me.”

“We’re not mad,” Jerome says. “Just surprised.”

Shocked is more like it, Hodges thinks.

“I spent the morning in my room, browsing the local I-T community, but it’s like we thought, there are hundreds of them. Mom and Uncle Henry went out to talk to people. About Janey, I think. I guess there’ll have to be another funeral, but I hate to think about what will be in the coffin. It just makes me cry and cry.”

And yes, big tears are rolling down her cheeks. Jerome puts an arm around her. She gives him a shy grateful glance.

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to think when my mother is around. It’s like she puts interference in my head. I guess that makes me sound crazy.”

“Not to me,” Jerome says. “I feel the same way about my sister. Especially when she plays her damn boy-band CDs.”

“When they were gone and the house was quiet, I got an idea. I went back down to Olivia’s computer and looked at her email.”

Jerome slaps his forehead. “Shit! I never even thought of checking her mail.”

“Don’t worry, there wasn’t any. She had three accounts—Mac Mail, Gmail, and AO-Hell—but all three folders were empty. Maybe she deleted them herself, but I don’t think so because—”

“Because her desktop and hard drive were full of stuff,” Jerome says.

“That’s right. She has The Bridge on the River Kwai in her iTunes. I’ve never seen that. I might check it out if I get a chance.”

Hodges glances toward Discount Electronix. With the sun glaring on the windows it’s impossible to tell if anyone’s watching them. He feels exposed out here, like a bug on a rock. “Let’s take a little stroll,” he says, and leads them toward Savoy Shoes, Barnes & Noble, and Whitey’s Happy Frogurt Shoppe.

Jerome says, “Come on, Holly, give. You’re drivin me crazy here.”

That makes her smile, which makes her look older. More her age. And once they’re away from the big Discount Electronix show windows, Hodges feels better. It’s obvious to him that Jerome is delighted with her, and he feels the same (more or less in spite of himself), but it’s humbling to find he’s been scooped by a Lexapro-dependent neurotic.

“He forgot to take off his SPOOK program, so I thought maybe he forgot to empty her junk mail as well, and I was right. She had like four dozen emails from Discount Electronix. Some of them were sales notices—like the one they’re having now, although I bet the only DVDs they have left aren’t much good, they’re probably Korean or something—and some of them were coupons for twenty percent off. She also had coupons for thirty percent off. The thirty percent coupons were for her next Cyber Patrol out-call.” She shrugs. “And here I am.”

Jerome stares at her. “That’s all it took? Just a peek into her junk mail folder?”

“Don’t be so surprised,” Hodges says. “All it took to catch the Son of Sam was a parking ticket.”

“I walked around back while I was waiting for you,” Holly says. “Their Web page says there are only three I-Ts in the Cyber Patrol, and there are three of those green Beetles back there. So I guess the guy is working today. Are you going to arrest him, Mr. Hodges?” She’s biting her lips again. “What if he fights? I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Hodges is thinking hard. Three computer techs in the Cyber Patrol: Frobisher, Hartsfield, and Linklatter, the skinny blond woman. He’s almost positive it will turn out to be Frobisher or Hartsfield, and whichever one it is won’t be prepared to see kermitfrog19 walking through the door. Even if Mr. Mercedes doesn’t run, he won’t be able to hide the initial shock of recognition.

“I’m going in. You two are staying here.”

“Going in with no backup?” Jerome asks. “Gee, Bill, I don’t think that’s very sma—”

“I’ll be all right, I’ve got the element of surprise going for me, but if I’m not back out in ten minutes, call nine-one-one. Got it?”

“Yes.”

Hodges points at Holly. “You stay close to Jerome. No more lone-wolf investigations.” I should talk, he thinks.

She nods humbly, and Hodges walks away before they can engage him in further discussion. As he approaches the doors of Discount Electronix, he unbuttons his sportcoat. The weight of his father’s gun against his ribcage is comforting.

7

As they watch Hodges enter the electronics store, a question occurs to Jerome. “Holly, how did you get here? Taxi?”

She shakes her head and points into the parking lot. There, parked three rows back from Jerome’s Wrangler, is a gray Mercedes sedan. “It was in the garage.” She notes Jerome’s slack-jawed amazement and immediately becomes defensive. “I can drive, you know. I have a valid driver’s license. I’ve never had an accident, and I have Safe Driver’s Insurance. From Allstate. Do you know that the man who does the Allstate ads on TV used to be the president on 24?”

“That’s the car…”

She frowns, puzzled. “What’s the big deal, Jerome? It was in the garage and the keys were in a basket in the front hall. So what’s the big fat deal?”

The dents are gone, he notes. The headlights and windshield have been replaced. It looks as good as new. You’d never know it was used to kill people.

“Jerome? Do you think Olivia would mind?”

“No,” he says. “Probably not.” He is imagining that grille covered with blood. Pieces of shredded cloth dangling from it.

“It wouldn’t start at first, the battery was dead, but she had one of those portable jump-stations, and I knew how to use it because my father had one. Jerome, if Mr. Hodges doesn’t make an arrest, could we walk down to the frogurt place?”

He barely hears her. He’s still staring at the Mercedes. They returned it to her, he thinks. Well, of course they did. It was her property, after all. She even got the damage repaired. But he’d be willing to bet she never drove it again. If there were spooks—real ones—they’d be in there. Probably screaming.

“Jerome? Earth to Jerome.”

“Huh?”

“If everything turns out okay, let’s get frogurt. I was sitting in the sun and waiting for you guys and I’m awfully hot. I’ll treat. I’d really like ice cream, but…”

He doesn’t hear the rest. He’s thinking Ice cream.

The click in his head is so loud he actually winces, and all at once he knows why one of the Cyber Patrol faces on Hodges’s computer looked familiar to him. The strength goes out of his legs and he leans against one of the walkway support posts to keep from falling.

“Oh my God,” he says.

“What’s wrong?” She shakes his arm, chewing her lips frantically. “What’s wrong? Are you sick, Jerome?”

But at first he can only say it again: “Oh my God.”

8

Hodges thinks that the Birch Hill Mall Discount Electronix looks like an enterprise with about three months to live. Many of the shelves are empty, and the stock that’s left has a disconsolate, neglected look. Almost all of the browsers are in the Home Entertainment department, where fluorescent pink signs proclaim WOW! DVD BLOWOUT! ALL DISCS 50% OFF! EVEN BLU-RAY! Although there are ten checkout lines, only three are open, staffed by women in blue dusters with the yellow DE logo on them. Two of these women are looking out the window; the third is reading Twilight. A couple of other employees are wandering the aisles, doing a lot of nothing much.

Hodges doesn’t want any of them, but he sees two of the three he does want. Anthony Frobisher, he of the John Lennon specs, is talking to a customer who has a shopping basket full of discounted DVDs in one hand and a clutch of coupons in the other. Frobisher’s tie suggests that he might be the store manager as well as a Cyber Patrolman. The narrow-faced girl with the dirty-blond hair is at the back of the store, seated at a computer. There’s a cigarette parked behind one ear.

Hodges strolls up the center aisle of the DVD BLOWOUT. Frobisher looks at him and raises a finger to say Be with you soon. Hodges smiles and gives him a little I’m okay wave. Frobisher returns to the customer with the coupons. No recognition there. Hodges walks on to the back of the store.

The dirty blond looks up at him, then back at the screen of the computer she’s using. No recognition from her, either. She’s not wearing a Discount Electronix shirt; hers says WHEN I WANT MY OPINION, I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU. He sees she’s playing an updated version of Pitfall!, a cruder version of which fascinated his daughter Alison a quarter of a century before. Everything that goes around comes around, Hodges thinks. A Zen concept for sure.

“Unless you’ve got a computer question, talk to Tones,” she says. “I only do crunchers.”

“Tones would be Anthony Frobisher?”

“Yeah. Mr. Spiffy in the tie.”

“You’d be Freddi Linklatter. Of the Cyber Patrol.”

“Yeah.” She pauses Pitfall Harry in mid-jump over a coiled snake in order to give him a closer inspection. What she sees is Hodges’s police ID, with his thumb strategically placed to hide its year of expiration.

“Oooh,” she says, and holds out her hands with the twig-thin wrists together. “I’m a bad, bad girl and handcuffs are what I deserve. Whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks.”

Hodges gives a brief smile and tucks his ID away. “Isn’t Brady Hartsfield the third member of your happy band? I don’t see him.”

“Out with the flu. He says. Want my best guess?”

“Hit me.”

“I think maybe he finally had to put dear old Mom in rehab. He says she drinks and he has to take care of her most of the time. Which is probably why he’s never had a gee-eff. You know what that is, right?”

“I’m pretty sure, yeah.”

She examines him with bright and mordant interest. “Is Brady in trouble? I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s a little on the, you know, peekee-yoolier side.”

“I just need to speak to him.”

Anthony Frobisher—Tones—joins them. “May I help you, sir?”

“It’s five-oh,” Freddi says. She gives Frobisher a wide smile that exposes small teeth badly in need of cleaning. “He found out about the meth lab in the back.”

“Can it, Freddi.”

She makes an extravagant lip-zipping gesture, finishing with the twist of an invisible key, but doesn’t go back to her game.

In Hodges’s pocket, his cell phone rings. He silences it with his thumb.

“I’m Detective Bill Hodges, Mr. Frobisher. I have a few questions for Brady Hartsfield.”

“He’s out with the flu. What did he do?”

“Tones is a poet and don’t know it,” Freddi Linklatter observes. “Although his feet show it, because they’re Longfel—”

“Shut up, Freddi. For the last time.”

“Can I have his address, please?”

“Of course. I’ll get it for you.”

“Can I un-shut for a minute?” Freddi asks.

Hodges nods. She punches a key on her computer. Pitfall Harry is replaced by a spread-sheet headed STORE PERSONNEL.

“Presto,” she says. “Forty-nine Elm Street. That’s on the—”

“North Side, yeah,” Hodges says. “Thank you both. You’ve been very helpful.”

As he leaves, Freddi Linklatter calls after him, “It’s something with his mom, betcha anything. He’s freaky about her.”

9

Hodges has no more than stepped out into the bright sunshine when Jerome almost tackles him. Holly lurks just behind. She’s stopped biting her lips and gone to her fingernails, which look badly abused. “I called you,” Jerome says. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I was asking questions. What’s got you all white-eyed?”

“Is Hartsfield in there?”

Hodges is too surprised to reply.

“Oh, it’s him,” Jerome says. “Got to be. You were right about him watching you, and I know how. It’s like that Hawthorne story about the purloined letter. Hide in plain sight.”

Holly stops munching her fingernails long enough to say, “Poe wrote that story. Don’t they teach you kids anything?”

Hodges says, “Slow down, Jerome.”

Jerome takes a deep breath. “He’s got two jobs, Bill. Two. He must only work here until mid-afternoon or something. After that he works for Loeb’s.”

“Loeb’s? Is that the—”

“Yeah, the ice cream company. He drives the Mr. Tastey truck. The one with the bells. I’ve bought stuff from him, my sister has, too. All the kids do. He’s on our side of town a lot. Brady Hartsfield is the ice cream man!”

Hodges realizes he’s heard those cheerful, tinkling bells more than a lot lately. In the spring of his depression, crashed out in his La-Z-Boy, watching afternoon TV (and sometimes playing with the gun now riding against his ribs), it seems he heard them every day. Heard them and ignored them, because only kids pay actual attention to the ice cream man. Except some deeper part of his mind didn’t completely ignore them. It was the deep part that kept coming back to Bowfinger, and his satiric comment about Mrs. Melbourne.

She thinks they walk among us, Mr. Bowfinger said, but it hadn’t been space aliens Mrs. Melbourne had been concerned about on the day Hodges had done his canvass; it had been black SUVs, and chiropractors, and the people on Hanover Street who played loud music late at night.

Also, the Mr. Tastey man.

That one looks suspicious, she had said.

This spring it seems like he’s always around, she had said.

A terrible question surfaces in his mind, like one of the snakes always lying in wait for Pitfall Harry: if he had paid attention to Mrs. Melbourne instead of dismissing her as a harmless crank (the way he and Pete dismissed Olivia Trelawney), would Janey still be alive? He doesn’t think so, but he’s never going to know for sure, and he has an idea that the question will haunt a great many sleepless nights in the weeks and months to come.

Maybe the years.

He looks out at the parking lot… and there he sees a ghost. A gray one.

He turns back to Jerome and Holly, now standing side by side, and doesn’t even have to ask.

“Yeah,” Jerome says. “Holly drove it here.”

“The registration and the sticker decal on the license plate are both a tiny bit expired,” Holly says. “Please don’t be mad at me, okay? I had to come. I wanted to help, but I knew if I just called you, you’d say no.”

“I’m not mad,” Hodges says. In fact, he doesn’t know what he is. He feels like he’s entered a dreamworld where all the clocks run backward.

“What do we do now?” Jerome asks. “Call the cops?”

But Hodges is still not ready to let go. The young man in the picture may have a cauldron of crazy boiling away behind his bland face, but Hodges has met his share of psychopaths and knows that when they’re taken by surprise, most collapse like puffballs. They’re only dangerous to the unarmed and unsuspecting, like the broke folks waiting to apply for jobs on that April morning in 2009.

“Let’s you and I take a ride to Mr. Hartsfield’s place of residence,” Hodges says. “And let’s go in that.” He points to the gray Mercedes.

“But… if he sees us pull up, won’t he recognize it?”

Hodges smiles a sharklike smile Jerome Robinson has never seen before. “I certainly hope so.” He holds out his hand. “May I have the key, Holly?”

Her abused lips tighten. “Yes, but I’m going.”

“No way,” Hodges says. “Too dangerous.”

“If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for you.” She won’t look directly at him and her eyes keep skipping past his face, but her voice is firm. “You can make me stay, but if you do, I’ll call the police and give them Brady Hartsfield’s address just as soon as you’re gone.”

“You don’t have it,” Hodges says. This sounds feeble even to him.

Holly doesn’t reply, which is a form of courtesy. She won’t even need to go inside Discount Electronix and ask the dirty blonde; now that they have the name, she can probably suss out the Hartsfield address from her devilish iPad.

Fuck.

“All right, you can come. But I drive, and when we get there, you and Jerome are going to stay in the car. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, Mr. Hodges.”

This time her eyes go to his face and stay there for three whole seconds. It might be a step forward. With Holly, he thinks, who knows.

10

Because of drastic budget cuts that kicked in the previous year, most city patrol cars are solo rides. This isn’t the case in Lowtown. In Lowtown every shop holds a deuce, the ideal deuce containing at least one person of color, because in Lowtown the minorities are the majority. At just past noon on June third, Officers Laverty and Rosario are cruising Lowbriar Avenue about half a mile beyond the overpass where Bill Hodges once stopped a couple of trolls from robbing a shorty. Laverty is white. Rosario is Latina. Because their shop is CPC 54, they are known in the department as Toody and Muldoon, after the cops in an ancient sitcom called Car 54, Where Are You? Amarilis Rosario sometimes amuses her fellow blue knights at roll call by saying, “Ooh, ooh, Toody, I got an idea!” It sounds extremely cute in her Dominican accent, and always gets a laugh.

On patrol, however, she’s Ms. Taking Care of Business. They both are. In Lowtown you have to be.

“The cornerboys remind me of the Blue Angels in this air show I saw once,” she says now.

“Yeah?”

“They see us coming, they peel off like they’re in formation. Look, there goes another one.”

As they approach the intersection of Lowbriar and Strike, a kid in a Cleveland Cavaliers warmup jacket (oversized and totally superfluous on this day) suddenly decamps from the corner where he’s been jiving around and heads down Strike at a trot. He looks about thirteen.

“Maybe he just remembered it’s a schoolday,” Laverty says.

Rosario laughs. “As if, esse.”

Now they are approaching the corner of Lowbriar and Martin Luther King Avenue. MLK is the ghetto’s other large thoroughfare, and this time half a dozen cornerboys decide they have business elsewhere.

“That’s formation flying, all right,” Laverty says. He laughs, although it’s not really funny. “Listen, where do you want to eat?”

“Let’s see if that wagon’s on Randolph,” she says. “I’m in a taco state of mind.”

“Señor Taco it is,” he says, “but lay off the beans, okay? We’ve got another four hours in this… huh. Check it, Rosie. That’s weird.”

Up ahead, a man is coming out of a storefront with a long flower box. It’s weird because the storefront isn’t a florist’s; it’s King Virtue Pawn & Loan. It’s also weird because the man looks Caucasian and they are now in the blackest part of Lowtown. He’s approaching a dirty white Econoline van that’s standing on a yellow curb: a twenty-dollar fine. Laverty and Rosario are hungry, though, they’ve got their faces fixed for tacos with that nice hot picante sauce Señor Taco keeps on the counter, and they might have let it go. Probably would have.

But.

With David Berkowitz, it was a parking ticket. With Ted Bundy, it was a busted taillight. Today a florist’s box with badly folded flaps is all it takes to change the world. As the guy fumbles for the keys to his old van (not even Emperor Ming of Mongo would leave his vehicle unlocked in Lowtown), the box tilts downward. The end comes open and something slides partway out.

The guy catches it and shoves it back in before it can fall into the street, but Jason Laverty spent two tours in Iraq and he knows an RPG launcher when he sees it. He flips on the blues and hooks in behind the guy, who looks around with a startled expression.

“Sidearm!” he snaps at his partner. “Get it out!”

They fly out the doors, double-fisted Glocks pointing at the sky.

“Drop the box, sir!” Laverty shouts. “Drop the box and put your hands on the van! Lean forward. Do it now!”

For a moment the guy—he’s about forty, olive-skinned, round-shouldered—hugs the florist’s box tighter against his chest, like a baby. But when Rosie Rosario lowers her gun and points it at his chest, he drops the box. It splits wide open and reveals what Laverty tentatively identifies as a Russian-made Hashim antitank grenade launcher.

“Holy shit!” Rosario says, and then: “Toody, Toody, I got an id—”

“Officers, lower your weapons.”

Laverty keeps his focus on Grenade Launcher Guy, but Rosario turns and sees a gray-haired Cauc in a blue jacket. He’s wearing an earpiece and has his own Glock. Before she can ask him anything, the street is full of men in blue jackets, all running for King Virtue Pawn & Loan. One is carrying a Stinger battering ram, the kind cops call a baby doorbuster. She sees ATF on the backs of the jackets, and all at once she has that unmistakable I-stepped-in-shit feeling.

“Officers, lower your weapons. Agent James Kosinsky, ATF.”

Laverty says, “Maybe you’d like one of us to cuff him first? Just asking.”

ATF agents are piling into the pawnshop like Christmas shoppers into Walmart on Black Friday. A crowd is gathering across the street, as yet too stunned by the size of the strike force to start casting aspersions. Or stones, for that matter.

Kosinsky sighs. “You may as well,” he says. “The horse has left the barn.”

“We didn’t know you had anything going,” Laverty says. Meanwhile, Grenade Launcher Guy already has his hands off the van and behind him with the wrists pressed together. It’s pretty clear this isn’t his first rodeo. “He was unlocking his van and I saw that poking out of the end of the box. What was I supposed to do?”

“What you did, of course.” From inside the pawnshop there comes the sound of breaking glass, shouts, and then the boom of the doorbuster being put to work. “Tell you what, now that you’re here, why don’t you throw Mr. Cavelli there in the back of your car and come on inside. See what we’ve got.”

While Laverty and Rosario are escorting their prisoner to the cruiser, Kosinsky notes the number.

“So,” he says. “Which one of you is Toody and which one is Muldoon?”

11

As the ATF strike force, led by Agent Kosinsky, begins its inventory of the cavernous storage area behind King Virtue Pawn & Loan’s humble façade, a gray Mercedes sedan is pulling to the curb in front of 49 Elm Street. Hodges is behind the wheel. Today Holly is riding shotgun—because, she claims (with at least some logic), the car is more hers than theirs.

“Someone is home,” she points out. “There’s a very badly maintained Honda Civic in the driveway.”

Hodges notes the shuffling approach of an old man from the house directly across the street. “I will now speak with Mr. Concerned Citizen. You two will keep your mouths shut.”

He rolls down his window. “Help you, sir?”

“I thought maybe I could help you,” the old guy says. His bright eyes are busy inventorying Hodges and his passengers. Also the car, which doesn’t surprise Hodges. It’s a mighty fine car. “If you’re looking for Brady, you’re out of luck. That in the driveway is Missus Hartsfield’s car. Haven’t seen it move in weeks. Not sure it even runs anymore. Maybe Missus Hartsfield went off with him, because I haven’t seen her today. Usually I do, when she toddles out to get her post.” He points to the mailbox beside the door of 49. “She likes the catalogs. Most women do.” He extends a knuckly hand. “Hank Beeson.”

Hodges shakes it briefly, then flashes his ID, careful to keep his thumb over the expiration date. “Good to meet you, Mr. Beeson. I’m Detective Bill Hodges. Can you tell me what kind of car Mr. Hartsfield drives? Make and model?”

“It’s a brown Subaru. Can’t help you with the model or the year. All those rice-burners look the same to me.”

“Uh-huh. Have to ask you to go back to your house now, sir. We may come by to ask you a few questions later.”

“Did Brady do something wrong?”

“Just a routine call,” Hodges says. “Go on back to your house, please.”

Instead of doing that, Beeson bends lower for a look at Jerome. “Aren’t you kinda young to be on the cops?”

“I’m a trainee,” Jerome says. “Better do as Detective Hodges says, sir.”

“I’m goin, I’m goin.” But he gives the trio another stem-to-stern onceover first. “Since when do city cops drive around in Mercedes-Benzes?”

Hodges has no answer for that, but Holly does. “It’s a RICO car. RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. We take their stuff. We can use it any way we want because we’re the police.”

“Well, yeah. Sure. Stands to reason.” Beeson looks partly satisfied and partly mystified. But he goes back to his house, where he soon appears to them again, this time looking out a front window.

“RICO is the feds,” Hodges says mildly.

Holly tips her head fractionally toward their observer, and there’s a faint smile on her hard-used lips. “Do you think he knows that?” When neither of them answers, she becomes businesslike. “What do we do now?”

“If Hartsfield’s in there, I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest. If he’s not but his mother is, I’m going to interview her. You two are going to stay in the car.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Jerome says, but by the expression on his face—Hodges can see it in the rearview mirror—he knows this objection will be overruled.

“It’s the only one I have,” Hodges says.

He gets out of the car. Before he can close the door, Holly leans toward him and says: “There’s no one home.” He doesn’t say anything, but she nods as if he had. “Can’t you feel it?”

Actually, he can.

12

Hodges walks up the driveway, noting the drawn drapes in the big front window. He looks briefly in the Honda and sees nothing worth noting. He tries the passenger door. It opens. The air inside is hot and stale, with a faintly boozy smell. He shuts the door, climbs the porch steps, and rings the doorbell. He hears it cling-clong inside the house. Nobody comes. He tries it again, then knocks. Nobody comes. He hammers with the side of his fist, very aware that Mr. Beeson from across the street is taking all this in. Nobody comes.

He strolls to the garage and peers through one of the windows in the overhead door. A few tools, a mini-fridge, not much else.

He takes out his cell phone and calls Jerome. This block of Elm Street is very still, and he can hear—faintly—the AC/DC ringtone as the call goes through. He sees Jerome answer.

“Have Holly jump on her iPad and check the city tax records for the owner’s name at 49 Elm. Can she do that?”

He hears Jerome asking Holly.

“She says she’ll see what she can do.”

“Good. I’m going around back. Stay on the line. I’ll check in with you at roughly thirty-second intervals. If more than a minute goes by without hearing from me, call nine-one-one.”

“You positive you want to do this, Bill?”

“Yes. Be sure Holly knows that getting the name isn’t a big deal. I don’t want her getting squirrelly.”

“She’s chill,” Jerome says. “Already tapping away. Just make sure you stay in touch.”

“Count on it.”

He walks between the garage and the house. The backyard is small but neatly kept. There’s a circular bed of flowers in the middle. Hodges wonders who planted them, Mom or Sonny Boy. He mounts three wooden steps to the back stoop. There’s an aluminum screen door with another door inside. The screen door is unlocked. The house door isn’t.

“Jerome? Checking in. All quiet.”

He peers through the glass and sees a kitchen. It’s squared away. There are a few plates and glasses in the drainer by the sink. A neatly folded dishwiper hangs over the oven handle. There are two placemats on the table. No placemat for Poppa Bear, which fits the profile he has fleshed out on his yellow legal pad. He knocks, then hammers. Nobody comes.

“Jerome? Checking in. All quiet.”

He puts his phone down on the back stoop and takes out the flat leather case, glad he thought of it. Inside are his father’s lock-picks—three silver rods with hooks of varying sizes at the ends. He selects the medium pick. A good choice; it slides in easily. He fiddles around, turning the pick first one way, then the other, feeling for the mechanism. He’s just about to pause and check in with Jerome again when the pick catches. He twists, quick and hard, just as his father taught him, and there’s a click as the locking button pops up on the kitchen side of the door. Meanwhile, his phone is squawking his name. He picks it up.

“Jerome? All quiet.”

“You had me worried,” Jerome says. “What are you doing?”

“Breaking and entering.”

13

Hodges steps into the Hartsfield kitchen. The smell hits him at once. It’s faint, but it’s there. Holding his cell phone in his left hand and his father’s .38 in the right, Hodges follows his nose first into the living room—empty, although the TV remote and scattering of catalogs on the coffee table makes him think that the couch is Mrs. Hartsfield’s downstairs nest—and then up the stairs. The smell gets stronger as he goes. It’s not a stench yet, but it’s headed in that direction.

There’s a short upstairs hall with one door on the right and two on the left. He clears the righthand room first. It’s guest quarters where no guests have stayed for a long time. It’s as sterile as an operating theater.

He checks in with Jerome again before opening the first door on the left. This is where the smell is coming from. He takes a deep breath and enters fast, crouching until he’s assured himself there’s no one behind the door. He opens the closet—this door is the kind that folds on a center hinge—and shoves back the clothes. No one.

“Jerome? Checking in.”

“Is anyone there?”

Well… sort of. The coverlet of the double bed has been pulled up over an unmistakable shape.

“Wait one.”

He looks under the bed and sees nothing but a pair of slippers, a pair of pink sneakers, a single white ankle sock, and a few dust kitties. He pulls the coverlet back and there’s Brady Hartsfield’s mother. Her skin is waxy-pale, with a faint green undertint. Her mouth hangs ajar. Her eyes, dusty and glazed, have settled in their sockets. He lifts an arm, flexes it slightly, lets it drop. Rigor has come and gone.

“Listen, Jerome. I’ve found Mrs. Hartsfield. She’s dead.”

“Oh my God.” Jerome’s usually adult voice cracks on the last word. “What are you—”

“Wait one.”

“You already said that.”

Hodges puts his phone on the night table and draws the coverlet down to Mrs. Hartsfield’s feet. She’s wearing blue silk pajamas. The shirt is stained with what appears to be vomit and some blood, but there’s no visible bullet hole or stab wound. Her face is swollen, yet there are no ligature marks or bruises on her neck. The swelling is just the slow death-march of decomposition. He pulls up her pajama top enough so he can see her belly. Like her face, it’s slightly swollen, but he’s betting that’s gas. He leans close to her mouth, looks inside, and sees what he expected: clotted goop on her tongue and in the gutters between her gums and her cheeks. He’s guessing she got drunk, sicked up her last meal, and went out like a rock star. The blood could be from her throat. Or an aggravated stomach ulcer.

He picks up the phone and says, “He might have poisoned her, but it’s more likely she did it to herself.”

“Booze?”

“Probably. Without a postmortem, there’s no way to tell.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Sit tight.”

“We still don’t call the police?”

“Not yet.”

“Holly wants to talk to you.”

There’s a moment of dead air, then she’s on the line, and clear as a bell. She sounds calm. Calmer than Jerome, actually.

“Her name is Deborah Hartsfield. The kind of Deborah that ends in an H.”

“Good job. Give the phone back to Jerome.”

A second later Jerome says, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

I don’t, he thinks as he checks the bathroom. I’ve lost my mind and the only way to get it back is to let go of this. You know that.

But he thinks of Janey giving him his new hat—his snappy private eye fedora—and knows he can’t. Won’t.

The bathroom is clean… or almost. There’s some hair in the sink. Hodges sees it but doesn’t take note of it. He’s thinking of the crucial difference between accidental death and murder. Murder would be bad, because killing close family members is all too often how a serious nutcase starts his final run. If it was an accident or suicide, there might still be time. Brady could be hunkered down somewhere, trying to decide what to do next.

Which is too close to what I’m doing, Hodges thinks.

The last upstairs room is Brady’s. The bed is unmade. The desk is piled helter-skelter with books, most of them science fiction. There’s a Terminator poster on the wall, with Schwarzenegger wearing dark glasses and toting a futuristic elephant gun.

I’ll be back, Hodges thinks, looking at it.

“Jerome? Checking in.”

“The guy from across the street is still scoping us. Holly thinks we should come inside.”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

“When I’m sure this place is clear.”

Brady has his own bathroom. It’s as neat as a GI’s footlocker on inspection day. Hodges gives it a cursory glance, then goes back downstairs. There’s a small alcove off the living room, with just enough space for a small desk. On it is a laptop. A purse hangs by its strap from the back of the chair. On the wall is a large framed photograph of the woman upstairs and a teenage version of Brady Hartsfield. They’re standing on a beach somewhere with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. They’re wearing identical million-dollar smiles. It’s more girlfriend-boyfriend than mother-son.

Hodges looks with fascination upon Mr. Mercedes in his salad days. There’s nothing in his face that suggests homicidal tendencies, but of course there almost never is. The resemblance between the two of them is faint, mostly in the shape of the noses and the color of the hair. She was a pretty woman, really just short of beautiful, but Hodges is willing to guess that Brady’s father didn’t have similar good looks. The boy in the photo seems… ordinary. A kid you’d pass on the street without a second glance.

That’s probably the way he likes it, Hodges thinks. The Invisible Man.

He goes back into the kitchen and this time sees a door beside the stove. He opens it and looks at steep stairs descending into darkness. Aware that he makes a perfect silhouette for anyone who might be down there, Hodges moves to one side while he feels for the light switch. He finds it and steps into the doorway again with the gun leveled. He sees a worktable. Beyond it, a waist-high shelf runs the length of the room. On it is a line of computers. It makes him think of Mission Control at Cape Canaveral.

“Jerome? Checking in.”

Without waiting for an answer, he goes down with the gun in one hand and his phone in the other, perfectly aware of what a grotesque perversion of all established police procedure this is. What if Brady is under the stairs with his own gun, ready to shoot Hodges’s feet off at the ankles? Or suppose he’s set up a boobytrap? He can do it; this Hodges now knows all too well.

He strikes no tripwire, and the basement is empty. There’s a storage closet, the door standing open, but nothing is stored there. He sees only empty shelves. In one corner is a litter of shoeboxes. They also appear to be empty.

The message, Hodges thinks, is Brady either killed his mother or came home and found her dead. Either way, he then decamped. If he did have explosives, they were on those closet shelves (possibly in the shoeboxes) and he took them along.

Hodges goes upstairs. It’s time to bring in his new partners. He doesn’t want to drag them in deeper than they already are, but there are those computers downstairs. He knows jack shit about computers. “Come around to the back,” he says. “The kitchen door is open.”

14

Holly steps in, sniffs, and says, “Oough. Is that Deborah Hartsfield?”

“Yes. Try not to think about it. Come downstairs, you guys. I want you to look at something.”

In the basement, Jerome runs a hand over the worktable. “Whatever else he is, he’s Mr. Awesomely Neat.”

“Are you going to call the police, Mr. Hodges?” Holly is biting her lips again. “You probably are and I can’t stop you, but my mother is going to be so mad at me. Also, it doesn’t seem fair, since we’re the ones who found out who he is.”

“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do,” Hodges says, although she’s right; it doesn’t seem fair at all. “But I’d sure like to know what’s on those computers. That might help me make up my mind.”

“He won’t be like Olivia,” Holly says. “He’ll have a good password.”

Jerome picks one of the computers at random (it happens to be Brady’s Number Six; not much on that one) and pushes the recessed button on the back of the monitor. It’s a Mac, but there’s no chime. Brady hates that cheery chime, and has turned it off on all his computers.

Number Six flashes gray, and the boot-up worry-circle starts going round and round. After five seconds or so, gray turns to blue. This should be the password screen, even Hodges knows that, but instead a large 20 appears on the screen. Then 19, 18, and 17.

He and Jerome stare at it in perplexity.

“No, no!” Holly nearly screams it. “Turn it off!”

When neither of them moves immediately, she darts forward and pushes the power button behind the monitor again, holding it down until the screen goes dark. Then she lets out a breath and actually smiles.

“Jeepers! That was a close one!”

“What are you thinking?” Hodges asks. “That they’re wired up to explode, or something?”

“Maybe they only lock up,” Holly says, “but I bet it’s a suicide program. If the countdown gets to zero, that kind of program scrubs the data. All the data. Maybe just in the one that’s on, but in all of them if they’re wired together. Which they probably are.”

“So how do you stop it?” Jerome asks. “Keyboard command?”

“Maybe that. Maybe voice-ac.”

“Voice-what?” Hodges asks.

“Voice-activated command,” Jerome tells him. “Brady says Milk Duds or underwear and the countdown stops.”

Holly giggles through her fingers, then gives Jerome a timid push on the shoulder. “You’re silly,” she says.

15

They sit at the kitchen table with the back door open to let in fresh air. Hodges has an elbow on one of the placemats and his brow cupped in his palm. Jerome and Holly keep quiet, letting him think it through. At last he raises his head.

“I’m going to call it in. I don’t want to, and if it was just between Hartsfield and me, I probably wouldn’t. But I’ve got you two to consider—”

“Don’t do it on my account,” Jerome says. “If you see a way to go on, I’ll stick with you.”

Of course you will, Hodges thinks. You might think you know what you’re risking, but you don’t. When you’re seventeen, the future is strictly theoretical.

As for Holly… previously he would have said she was a kind of human movie screen, with every thought in her head projected large on her face, but at this moment she’s inscrutable.

“Thanks, Jerome, only…” Only this is hard. Letting go is hard, and this will be the second time he has to relinquish Mr. Mercedes.

But.

“It’s not just us, see? He could have more explosive, and if he uses it on a crowd…” He looks directly at Holly. “… the way he used your cousin Olivia’s Mercedes on a crowd, it would be on me. I won’t take that chance.”

Speaking carefully, enunciating each word as if to make up for what has probably been a lifetime of mumbling, Holly says, “No one can catch him but you.”

“Thanks, but no,” he says gently. “The police have resources. They’ll start by putting a BOLO out on his car, complete with license plate number. I can’t do that.”

It sounds good but he doesn’t believe it is good. When he’s not taking insane risks like the one he took at City Center, Brady’s one of the smart ones. He will have stashed the car somewhere—maybe in a downtown parking lot, maybe in one of the airport parking lots, maybe in one of those endless mall parking lots. His ride is no Mercedes-Benz; it’s an unobtrusive shit-colored Subaru, and it won’t be found today or tomorrow. They might still be looking for it next week. And if they do find it, Brady won’t be anywhere near it.

“No one but you,” she insists. “And only with us to help you.”

“Holly—”

“How can you give up?” she cries at him. She balls one hand into a fist and strikes herself in the middle of the forehead with it, leaving a red mark. “How can you? Janey liked you! She was even sort of your girlfriend! Now she’s dead! Like the woman upstairs! Both of them, dead!”

She goes to hit herself again and Jerome takes her hand. “Don’t,” he says. “Please don’t hit yourself. It makes me feel terrible.”

Holly starts to cry. Jerome hugs her clumsily. He’s black and she’s white, he’s seventeen and she’s in her forties, but to Hodges Jerome looks like a father comforting his daughter after she came home from school and said no one invited her to the Spring Dance.

Hodges looks out at the small but neatly kept Hartsfield backyard. He also feels terrible, and not just on Janey’s account, although that is bad enough. He feels terrible for the people at City Center. He feels terrible for Janey’s sister, whom they refused to believe, who was reviled in the press, and who was then driven to suicide by the man who lived in this house. He even feels terrible about his failure to pay heed to Mrs. Melbourne. He knows that Pete Huntley would let him off the hook on that one, and that makes it worse. Why? Because Pete isn’t as good at this job as he, Hodges, still is. Pete never will be, not even on his best day. A good enough guy, and a hard worker, but…

But.

But but but.

All that changes nothing. He needs to call it in, even if it feels like dying. When you shove everything else aside, there’s just one thing left: Kermit William Hodges is at a dead end. Brady Hartsfield is in the wind. There might be a lead in the computers—something to indicate where he is now, what his plans might be, or both—but Hodges can’t access them. Nor can he justify continuing to withhold the name and description of the man who perpetrated the City Center Massacre. Maybe Holly’s right, maybe Brady Hartsfield will elude capture and commit some new atrocity, but kermitfrog19 is out of options. The only thing left for him to do is to protect Jerome and Holly if he can. At this point, he may not even be able to manage that. The nosyparker across the street has seen them, after all.

He steps out on the stoop and opens his Nokia, which he has used more today than in all the time since he retired.

He thinks Doesn’t this just suck, and speed-dials Pete Huntley.

16

Pete picks up on the second ring. “Partner!” he shouts exuberantly. There’s a babble of voices in the background, and Hodges’s first thought is that Pete’s in a bar somewhere, half-shot and on his way to totally smashed.

“Pete, I need to talk to you about—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll eat all the crow you want, just not right now. Who called you? Izzy?”

“Huntley!” someone shouts. “Chief’s here in five! With press! Where’s the goddam PIO?”

PIO, Public Information Officer. Pete’s not in a bar and not drunk, Hodges thinks. He’s just over-the-moon fucking happy.

“No one called me, Pete. What’s going on?”

“You don’t know?” Pete laughs. “Just the biggest armaments bust in this city’s history. Maybe the biggest in the history of the USA. Hundreds of M2 and HK91 machine guns, rocket launchers, fucking laser cannons, crates of Lahti L-35s in mint condition, Russian AN-9s still in grease… there’s enough stuff here to stock two dozen East European militias. And the ammo! Christ! It’s stacked two stories high! If the fucking pawnshop had caught on fire, all of Lowtown would have gone up!”

Sirens. He hears sirens. More shouts. Someone is bawling for someone else to get those sawhorses up.

“What pawnshop?”

“King Virtue Pawn & Loan, south of MLK. You know the place?”

“Yeah…”

“And guess who owns it?” But Pete is far too excited to give him a chance to guess. “Alonzo Moretti! Get it?”

Hodges doesn’t.

“Moretti is Fabrizio Abbascia’s grandson, Bill! Fabby the Nose! Is it starting to come into focus now?”

At first it still doesn’t, because when Pete and Isabelle questioned him, Hodges simply plucked Abbascia’s name out of his mental file of old cases where someone might bear him animus… and there have been several hundred of those over the years.

“Pete, King Virtue’s black-owned. All the businesses down there are.”

“The fuck it is. Bertonne Lawrence’s name is on the sign, but the shop’s a lease, Lawrence is a front, and he’s spilling his guts. You know the best part? We own part of the bust, because a couple of patrol cops kicked it off a week or so before the ATF was gonna roll these guys up. Every detective in the department is down here. The Chief’s on his way, and he’s got a press caravan bigger than the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with him. No way are the feds gonna hog this one! No way!” This time his laugh is positively loonlike.

Every detective in the department, Hodges thinks. Which leaves what for Mr. Mercedes? Bupkes is what.

“Bill, I gotta go. This… man, this is amazing.”

“Sure, but first tell me what it has to do with me.”

“What you said. The car-bomb was revenge. Moretti trying to pay off his grandfather’s blood debt. In addition to the rifles, machine guns, grenades, pistols, and other assorted hardware, there’s at least four dozen crates of Hendricks Chemicals Detasheet. Do you know what that is?”

“Rubberized explosive.” Now it’s coming into focus.

“Yeah. You set it off with lead azide detonators, and we know already that was the kind that was used to blow the stuff in your car. We haven’t got a chem analysis on the explosive itself, but when we do, it’ll turn out to be Detasheet. You can count on it. You’re one lucky old sonofabitch, Bill.”

“That’s right,” Hodges says. “I am.”

He can picture the scene outside King Virtue: cops and ATF agents everywhere (probably arguing over jurisdiction already), and more coming all the time. Lowbriar closed off, probably MLK Avenue, too. Crowds of lookie-loos gathering. The Chief of Police and other assorted big boys on their way. The mayor won’t miss the chance to make a speech. Plus all those reporters, TV crews, and live broadcast vans. Pete is bullshit with excitement, and is Hodges going to launch into a long and complicated story about the City Center Massacre, and a computer chat-room called Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, and a dead mommy who probably drank herself to death, and a fugitive computer repairman?

No, he decides, I am not.

What he does is wish Pete good luck and push END.

17

When he comes back into the kitchen, Holly is no longer there, but he can hear her. Holly the Mumbler has turned into Holly the Revival Preacher, it seems. Certainly her voice has that special good-God-a’mighty cadence, at least for the moment.

“I’m with Mr. Hodges and his friend Jerome,” she’s saying. “They’re my friends, Momma. We had a nice lunch together. Now we’re seeing some of the sights, and this evening we’re going to have a nice supper together. We’re talking about Janey. I can do that if I want.”

Even in his confusion over their current situation and his continuing sadness about Janey, Hodges is cheered by the sound of Holly standing up to Aunt Charlotte. He can’t be sure it’s for the first time, but by the living God, it might be.

“Who called who?” he asks Jerome, nodding toward her voice.

“Holly made the call, but it was my idea. She had her phone turned off so her mother couldn’t call her. She wouldn’t do it until I said her mother might call the cops.”

“So what if I did,” Holly is saying now. “It was Olivia’s car and it’s not like I stole it. I’ll be back tonight, Momma. Until then, leave me alone!”

She comes back into the room looking flushed, defiant, years younger, and actually pretty.

“You rock, Holly,” Jerome says, and holds his hand up for a high-five.

She ignores this. Her eyes—still snapping—are fixed on Hodges. “If you call the police and I get in trouble, I don’t care. But unless you already did, you shouldn’t. They can’t find him. We can. I know we can.”

Hodges realizes that if catching Mr. Mercedes is more important to anyone on earth than it is to him, that person is Holly Gibney. Maybe for the first time in her life she’s doing something that matters. And doing it with others who like and respect her.

“I’m going to hold on to it a little longer. Mostly because the cops are otherwise occupied this afternoon. The funny part—or maybe I mean the ironic part—is that they think it has to do with me.”

“What are you talking about?” Jerome asks.

Hodges glances at his watch and sees it’s twenty past two. They have been here long enough. “Let’s go back to my place. I can tell you on the way, and then we can kick this around one more time. If we don’t come up with anything, I’ll have to call my partner back. I’m not risking another horror show.”

Although the risk is already there, and he can see by their faces that Jerome and Holly know it as well as he does.

“I went in that little study beside the living room to call my mother,” Holly says. “Mrs. Hartsfield’s got a laptop. If we’re going to your house, I want to bring it.”

“Why?”

“I may be able to find out how to get into his computers. She might have written down the keyboard prompts or voice-ac password.”

“Holly, that doesn’t seem likely. Mentally ill guys like Brady go to great lengths to hide what they are from everyone.”

“I know that,” Holly says. “Of course I do. Because I’m mentally ill, and I try to hide it.”

“Hey, Hol, come on.” Jerome tries to take her hand. She won’t let him. She takes her cigarettes from her pocket instead.

“I am and I know I am. My mother knows, too, and she keeps an eye on me. She snoops on me. Because she wants to protect me. Mrs. Hartsfield will have been the same. He was her son, after all.”

“If the Linklatter woman at Discount Electronix was right,” Hodges says, “Mrs. Hartsfield would have been drunk on her ass a good deal of the time.”

Holly replies, “She could have been a high-functioning drunk. Have you got a better idea?”

Hodges gives up. “Okay, take the laptop. What the hell.”

“Not yet,” she says. “In five minutes. I want to smoke a cigarette. I’ll go out on the stoop.”

She goes out. She sits down. She lights up.

Through the screen door, Hodges calls: “When did you become so assertive, Holly?”

She doesn’t turn around to answer. “I guess when I saw pieces of my cousin burning in the street.”

18

At quarter to three that afternoon, Brady leaves his Motel 6 room for a breath of fresh air and spies a Chicken Coop on the other side of the highway. He crosses and orders his last meal: a Clucker Delight with extra gravy and coleslaw. The restaurant section is almost deserted, and he takes his tray to a table by the windows so he can sit in the sunshine. Soon there will be no more of that for him, so he might as well enjoy a little while he still can.

He eats slowly, thinking of all the times he brought home takeout from the Chicken Coop, and how his mother always asked for a Clucker with double slaw. He has ordered her meal without even thinking about it. This brings tears, and he wipes them away with a paper napkin. Poor Mom!

Sunshine is nice, but its benefits are ephemeral. Brady considers the more lasting benefits darkness will provide. No more listening to Freddi Linklatter’s lesbo-feminist rants. No more listening to Tones Frobisher explain why he can’t go out on service calls because of his RESPONSIBILITY TO THE STORE, when it’s really because he wouldn’t know a hard drive crash if it bit him on the dick. No more feeling his kidneys turning to ice as he drives around in the Mr. Tastey truck in August with the freezers on high. No more whapping the Subaru’s dashboard when the radio cuts out. No more thinking about his mother’s lacy panties and long, long thighs. No more fury at being ignored and taken for granted. No more headaches. And no more sleepless nights, because after today it will be all sleep, all the time.

With no dreams.

When he’s finished his meal (he eats every bite), Brady buses his table, wipes up a splatter of gravy with another napkin, and dumps his trash. The girl at the counter asks him if everything was all right. Brady says it was, wondering how much of the chicken and gravy and biscuits and coleslaw will have a chance to digest before the explosion rips his stomach open and sprays what’s left everywhere.

They’ll remember me, he thinks as he stands at the edge of the highway, waiting for a break in traffic so he can go back to the motel. Highest score ever. I’ll go down in history. He’s glad now that he didn’t kill the fat ex-cop. Hodges should be alive for what’s coming tonight. He should have to remember. He should have to live with it.

Back in the room, he looks at the wheelchair and the explosives-stuffed urine bag lying on the explosives-stuffed ASS PARKING cushion. He wants to get to the MAC early (but not too early; the last thing he wants is to stand out more than he will just by being male and older than thirteen), but there’s still a little time. He’s brought his laptop, not for any particular reason but just out of habit, and now he’s glad. He opens it, connects to the motel’s WiFi, and goes to Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. There he leaves one final message—a kind of insurance policy.

With that attended to, he walks back to the airport’s long-term parking lot and retrieves his Subaru.

19

Hodges and his two apprentice detectives arrive on Harper Road shortly before three-thirty. Holly shoots a cursory glance around, then totes the late Mrs. Hartsfield’s laptop into the kitchen and powers it up. Jerome and Hodges stand by, both hoping there will be no password screen… but there is.

“Try her name,” Jerome says.

Holly does. The Mac shakes its screen: no.

“Okay, try Debbie,” Jerome says. “Both the –ie one and the one that ends with an i.”

Holly brushes a clump of mouse-brown hair out of her eyes so he can see her annoyance clearly. “Find something to do, Jerome, okay? I don’t want you looking over my shoulder. I hate that.” She shifts her attention to Hodges. “Can I smoke in here? I hope I can. It helps me think. Cigarettes help me think.”

Hodges gets her a saucer. “Smoking lamp’s lit. Jerome and I will be in my study. Give a holler if you find something.”

Small chance of that, he thinks. Small chance of anything, really.

Holly pays no attention. She’s lighting up. She’s left the revival-preacher voice behind and returned to mumbling. “Hope she left a hint. I have hint-hope. Hint-hope is what Holly has.”

Oh boy, Hodges thinks.

In the study, he asks Jerome if he has any idea what kind of hint she’s talking about.

“After three tries, some computers will give you a password hint. To jog your memory in case you forget. But only if one has been programmed.”

From the kitchen there comes a hearty, non-mumbled cry: “Shit! Double shit! Triple shit!”

Hodges and Jerome look at each other.

“Guess not,” Jerome says.

20

Hodges turns his own computer on and tells Jerome what he wants: a list of all public gatherings for the next seven days.

“I can do that,” Jerome says, “but you might want to check this out first.”

“What?”

“It’s a message. Under the Blue Umbrella.”

“Click it.” Hodges’s hands are clenched into fists, but as he reads merckill’s latest communiqué, they slowly open. The message is short, and although it’s of no immediate help, it contains a ray of hope.

Jerome says, “I think you just got a Dear John, Bill.”

Hodges thinks so, too, but he doesn’t care. He’s focused on the PS. He knows it might be a red herring, but if it’s not, they have some time.

From the kitchen comes a waft of cigarette smoke and another hearty cry of shit.

“Bill? I just had a bad thought.”

“What’s that?”

“The concert tonight. That boy band, ’Round Here. At the Mingo. My sister and my mother are going to be there.”

Hodges considers this. Mingo Auditorium seats four thousand, but tonight’s attendees will be eighty percent female—mommies and their preteen daughters. There will be men in attendance, but almost every one of them will be chaperoning their daughters and their daughters’ friends. Brady Hartsfield is a good-looking guy of about thirty, and if he tries going to that concert by himself, he’ll stick out like a sore thumb. In twenty-first-century America, any single man at an event primarily aimed at little girls attracts notice and suspicion.

Also: Enjoy your Weekend, I know I will.

“Do you think I should call Mom and tell her to keep the girls home?” Jerome looks dismayed at the prospect. “Barb’ll probably never speak to me again. Plus there’s her friend Hilda and a couple of others…”

From the kitchen: “Oh, you damn thing! Give it up!”

Before Hodges can reply, Jerome says, “On the other hand, it sure sounds like he has something planned for the weekend, and this is only Thursday. Or is that just what he wants us to think?”

Hodges tends to think the taunt is real. “Find that Cyber Patrol picture of Hartsfield again, would you? The one you get when you click on MEET THE EXPERTS.”

While Jerome does that, Hodges calls Marlo Everett in Police Records.

“Hey, Marlo, Bill Hodges again. I… yeah, lot of excitement in Lowtown, I heard about it from Pete. Half the force is down there, right?… uh-huh… well, I won’t keep you long. Do you know if Larry Windom is still head of security at the MAC? Yeah, that’s right, Romper-Stomper. Sure, I’ll hold.”

While he does, he tells Jerome that Larry Windom took early retirement because the MAC offered him the job at twice the salary he was making as a detective. He doesn’t say that wasn’t the only reason Windom pulled the pin after twenty. Then Marlo is back. Yes, Larry’s still at the MAC. She even has the number of the MAC’s security office. Before he can say goodbye, she asks him if there’s a problem. “Because there’s a big concert there tonight. My niece is going. She’s crazy about those twerps.”

“It’s fine, Marls. Just some old business.”

“Tell Larry we could use him today,” Marlo says. “The squadroom is dead empty. Nary a detective in sight.”

“I’ll do that.”

Hodges calls MAC Security, identifies himself as Detective Bill Hodges, and asks for Windom. While he waits, he stares at Brady Hartsfield. Jerome has enlarged the photo so it fills the whole screen. Hodges is fascinated by the eyes. In the smaller version, and in a line with the two I-T colleagues, those eyes seemed pleasant enough. With the picture filling the screen, however, that changes. The mouth is smiling; the eyes aren’t. The eyes are flat and distant. Almost dead.

Bullshit, Hodges tells himself (scolds himself). This is a classic case of seeing something that’s not there based on recently acquired knowledge—like a bank-robbery witness saying I thought he looked shifty even before he pulled out that gun.

Sounds good, sounds professional, but Hodges doesn’t believe it. He thinks the eyes looking out of the screen are the eyes of a toad hiding under a rock. Or under a cast-off blue umbrella.

Then Windom’s on the line. He has the kind of booming voice that makes you want to hold the phone two inches from your ear while you talk to him, and he’s the same old yapper. He wants to know all about the big bust that afternoon. Hodges tells him it’s a mega-bust, all right, but beyond that he knows from nothing. He reminds Larry that he’s retired.

But.

“With all that going on,” he says, “Pete Huntley kind of drafted me to call you. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Jesus, no. I’d like to have a drink with you, Billy. Talk over old times now that we’re both out. You know, hash and trash.”

“That would be good.” Pure hell is what it would be.

“How can I help?”

“You’ve got a concert there tonight, Pete says. Some hot boy band. The kind all the little girls love.”

“Iy-yi-yi, do they ever. They’re already lining up. And tuning up. Someone’ll shout out one of those kids’ names, and they all scream. Even if they’re still coming in from the parking lot they scream. It’s like Beatlemania back in the day, only from what I hear, this crew ain’t the Beatles. You got a bomb threat or something? Tell me you don’t. The chicks’ll tear me apart and the mommies will eat the leftovers.”

“What I’ve got is a tip that you may have a child molester on your hands tonight. This is a bad, bad boy, Larry.”

“Name and description?” Hard and fast, no bullshit. The guy who left the force because he was a bit too quick with his fists. Anger issues, in the language of the department shrink. Romper-Stomper, in the language of his colleagues.

“His name is Brady Hartsfield. I’ll email you his picture.” Hodges glances at Jerome, who nods and makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “He’s approximately thirty years old. If you see him, call me first, then grab him. Use caution. If he tries to resist, subdue the motherfucker.”

“With pleasure, Billy. I’ll pass this along to my guys. Any chance he’ll be with a… I don’t know… a beard? A teenage girl or someone even younger?”

“Unlikely but not impossible. If you spot him in a crowd, Lar, you gotta take him by surprise. He could be armed.”

“How good are the chances he’s going to be at the show?” He actually sounds hopeful, which is typical Larry Windom.

“Not very.” Hodges absolutely believes this, and it’s not just the Blue Umbrella hint Hartsfield dropped about the weekend. He has to know that in a girls-night-out audience, he’d have no way of being unobtrusive. “In any case, you understand why the department can’t send cops, right? With all that’s going on in Lowtown?”

“Don’t need them,” Windom says. “I’ve got thirty-five guys tonight, most of the regulars retired po-po. We know what we’re doing.”

“I know you do,” Hodges says. “Remember, call me first. Us retired guys don’t get much action, and we have to protect what we do get.”

Windom laughs. “I hear you on that. Email me the picture.” He recites an e-address which Hodges jots down and hands to Jerome. “If we see him, we grab him. After that, it’s your bust… Uncle Bill.”

“Fuck you, Uncle Larry,” Hodges says. He hangs up, turns to Jerome.

“The pic just went out to him,” Jerome says.

“Good.” Then Hodges says something that will haunt him for the rest of his life. “If Hartsfield’s as clever as I think he is, he won’t be anywhere near the Mingo tonight. I think your mom and sis are good to go. If he does try crashing the concert, Larry’s guys will have him before he gets in the door.”

Jerome smiles. “Great.”

“See what else you can find. Concentrate on Saturday and Sunday, but don’t neglect next week. Don’t neglect tomorrow, either, because—”

“Because the weekend starts on Friday. Gotcha.”

Jerome gets busy. Hodges walks out to the kitchen to check on how Holly’s doing. What he sees stops him cold. Lying next to the borrowed laptop is a red wallet. Deborah Hartsfield’s ID, credit cards, and receipts are scattered across the table. Holly, already on her third cigarette, is holding up a MasterCard and studying it through a haze of blue smoke. She gives him a look that’s both frightened and defiant.

“I’m just trying to find her diddly-dang password! Her purse was hanging over the back of her office chair, and her billfold was right there on top, so I put it in my pocket. Because sometimes people keep their passwords in their billfolds. Women especially. I didn’t want her money, Mr. Hodges. I have my own money. I get an allowance.”

An allowance, Hodges thinks. Oh, Holly.

Her eyes are brimming with tears and she’s biting her lips again. “I’d never steal.”

“Okay,” he says. He thinks of patting her hand and decides it might be a bad idea just now. “I understand.”

And Jesus-God, what’s the BFD? On top of all the shit he’s pulled since that goddam letter dropped through his mail slot, lifting a dead woman’s wallet is chump-change. When all this comes out—as it surely will—Hodges will say he took it himself.

Holly, meanwhile, is not finished.

“I have my own credit card, and I have money. I even have a checking account. I buy video games and apps for my iPad. I buy clothes. Also earrings, which I like. I have fifty-six pairs. And I buy my own cigarettes, although they’re very expensive now. It might interest you to know that in New York City, a pack of cigarettes now costs eleven dollars. I try not to be a burden because I can’t work and she says I’m not but I know I am—”

“Holly, stop. You need to save that stuff for your shrink, if you have one.”

“Of course I have one.” She flashes a grim grin at the stubborn password screen of Mrs. Hartsfield’s laptop. “I’m fucked up, didn’t you notice?”

Hodges chooses to ignore this.

“I was looking for a slip of paper with the password on it,” she says, “but there wasn’t one. So I tried her Social Security number, first forwards and then backwards. Same deal with her credit cards. I even tried the credit card security codes.”

“Any other ideas?”

“A couple. Leave me alone.” As he leaves the room, she calls: “I’m sorry about the smoke, but it really does help me think.”

21

With Holly crunching in the kitchen and Jerome doing likewise in his study, Hodges settles into the living room La-Z-Boy, staring at the blank TV. It’s a bad place to be, maybe the worst place. The logical part of his mind understands that everything which has happened is Brady Hartsfield’s fault, but sitting in the La-Z-Boy where he spent so many vapid, TV-soaked afternoons, feeling useless and out of touch with the essential self he took for granted during his working life, logic loses its power. What creeps in to take its place is a terrifying idea: he, Kermit William Hodges, has committed the crime of shoddy police work, and has aided and abetted Mr. Mercedes by so doing. They are the stars of a reality TV show called Bill and Brady Kill Some Ladies. Because when Hodges looks back, so many of the victims seem to be women: Janey, Olivia Trelawney, Janice Cray and her daughter Patricia… plus Deborah Hartsfield, who might have been poisoned instead of poisoning herself. And, he thinks, I haven’t even added Holly, who’ll likely come out of this even more grandly fucked up than she was going in, if she can’t find that password… or if she does find it and there’s nothing on Mom’s computer that can help us to find Sonny Boy. And really, how likely is that?

Sitting here in this chair—knowing he should get up but as yet unable to move—Hodges thinks his own destructive record with women stretches back even further. His ex-wife is his ex for a reason. Years of near-alcoholic drinking were part of it, but for Corinne (who liked a drink or three herself and probably still does), not the major part. It was the coldness that first stole through the cracks in the marriage and finally froze it solid. It was how he shut her out, telling himself it was for her own good, because so much of what he did was nasty and depressing. How he made it clear in a dozen ways—some large, some small—that in a race between her and the job, Corinne Hodges always came in second. As for his daughter… well. Jeez. Allie never misses sending him birthday and Christmas cards (although the Valentine’s Day cards stopped about ten years ago), and she hardly ever misses the Saturday-evening duty-call, but she hasn’t been to see him in a couple of years. Which really says all that needs saying about how he bitched up that relationship.

His mind drifts to how beautiful she was as a kid, with those freckles and that mop of red hair—his little carrot-top. She’d pelt down the hall to him when he came home and jump fearlessly, knowing he’d drop whatever he was holding and catch her. Janey mentioned being crazy about the Bay City Rollers, and Allie’d had her own faves, her own bubble-gum boy-toys. She bought their records with her own allowance, little ones with the big hole in the center. Who was on them? He can’t remember, only that one of the songs went on and on about every move you make and every step you take. Was that Bananarama or the Thompson Twins? He doesn’t know, but he does know he never took her to a concert, although Corrie might have taken her to see Cyndi Lauper.

Thinking about Allie and her love of pop music rings in a new thought, one that makes him sit up straight, eyes wide, hands clutching the La-Z-Boy’s padded arms.

Would he have let Allie go to that concert tonight?

The answer is absolutely not. No way.

Hodges checks his watch and sees it’s closing in on four o’clock. He gets up, meaning to go into the study and tell Jerome to call his moms and tell her to keep those girls away from the MAC no matter how much they piss and moan. He’s called Larry Windom and taken precautions, but precautions be damned. He would never have put Allie’s life in Romper-Stomper’s hands. Never.

Before he can get two steps toward the study, Jerome calls out: “Bill! Holly! Come here! I think I found something!”

22

They stand behind Jerome, Hodges looking over his left shoulder and Holly over his right. On the screen of Hodges’s computer is a press release.

“What do you think?” Jerome asks.

“I think you nailed it.” An enormous wave of relief sweeps through Hodges. Not the concert tonight, or a crowded downtown dance club, or the Groundhogs-Mudhens minor league baseball game tomorrow night. It’s this thing at Embassy Suites. Got to be, it’s too perfectly rounded to be anything else. There’s method in Brady Hartsfield’s madness; to him, alpha equals omega. Hartsfield means to finish his career as a mass murderer the same way he started it, by killing the city’s jobless.

Hodges turns to see how Holly is taking this, but Holly has left the room. She’s back in the kitchen, sitting in front of Deborah Hartsfield’s laptop and staring at the password screen. Her shoulders are slumped. In the saucer beside her, a cigarette has smoldered down to the filter, leaving a neat roll of ash.

This time he risks touching her. “It’s okay, Holly. The password doesn’t matter because now we’ve got the location. I’m going to get with my old partner in a couple of hours, when this Lowtown thing’s had a chance to settle a bit, and tell him everything. They’ll put out a BOLO on Hartsfield and his car. If they don’t get him before Saturday morning, they’ll get him as he approaches the job fair.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do tonight?”

“I’m thinking about that.” There is one thing, although it’s such a long shot it’s practically a no-shot.

Holly says, “What if you’re wrong about it being the career-day? What if he plans to blow up a movie theater tonight?”

Jerome comes into the room. “It’s Thursday, Hol, and still too early for the big summer pictures. Most screens won’t be playing to even a dozen people.”

“The concert, then,” she says. “Maybe he doesn’t know it’ll be all girls.”

“He’ll know,” Hodges says. “He’s a creature of improvisation, but that doesn’t make him stupid. He’ll have done at least some advance planning.”

“Can I have just a little more time to try and crack her password? Please?”

Hodges glances at his watch. Ten after four. “Sure. Until four-thirty, how’s that?”

A bargaining glint comes into her eyes. “Quarter to five?”

Hodges shakes his head.

Holly sighs. “I’m out of cigarettes, too.”

“Those things will kill you,” Jerome says.

She gives him a flat look. “Yes! That’s part of their charm.”

23

Hodges and Jerome drive down to the little shopping center at the intersection of Harper and Hanover to buy Holly a pack of cigarettes and give her the privacy she clearly wants.

Back in the gray Mercedes, Jerome tosses the Winstons from hand to hand and says, “This car gives me the creeps.”

“Me too,” Hodges admits. “But it didn’t seem to bother Holly, did it? Sensitive as she is.”

“Do you think she’ll be all right? After this is over, I mean.”

A week ago, maybe even two days, Hodges would have said something vague and politically correct, but he and Jerome have been through a lot since then. “For awhile,” he says. “Then… no.”

Jerome sighs the way people do when their own dim view of things has been confirmed. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“So what now?”

“Now we go back, give Holly her coffin nails, and let her smoke one. Then we pack up the stuff she filched from the Hartsfield house. I drive you two back to the Birch Hill Mall. You return Holly to Sugar Heights in your Wrangler, then go home yourself.”

“And just let Mom and Barb and her friends go to that show.”

Hodges blows out a breath. “If it’ll make you feel easier, tell your mother to pull the plug.”

“If I do that, it all comes out.” Still tossing the cigarettes back and forth. “Everything we’ve been doing today.”

Jerome is a bright boy and Hodges doesn’t need to confirm this. Or remind him that eventually it’s all going to come out anyway.

“What will you do, Bill?”

“Go back to the North Side. Park the Mercedes a block or two away from the Hartsfield place, just to be safe. I’ll return Mrs. Hartsfield’s laptop and billfold, then stake out the house. In case he decides to come back.”

Jerome looks doubtful. “That basement room looked like he made a pretty clean sweep. What are the chances?”

“Slim and none, but it’s all I’ve got. Until I turn this thing over to Pete.”

“You really wanted to make the collar, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Hodges says, and sighs. “Yes I did.”

24

When they come back, Holly’s head is down on the table and hidden in her arms. The deconstructed contents of Deborah Hartsfield’s wallet are an asteroid belt around her. The laptop is still on and still showing the stubborn password screen. According to the clock on the wall, it’s twenty to five.

Hodges is afraid she’ll protest his plan to return her home, but Holly only sits up, opens the fresh pack of cigarettes, and slowly removes one. She’s not crying, but she looks tired and dispirited.

“You did your best,” Jerome says.

“I always do my best, Jerome. And it’s never good enough.”

Hodges picks up the red wallet and starts returning the credit cards to the slots. They’re probably not in the same order Mrs. Hartsfield had them in, but who’s going to notice? Not her.

There are photos in an accordion of transparent envelopes, and he flips through them idly. Here’s Mrs. Hartsfield standing arm-in-arm with a broad-shouldered, burly guy in a blue work coverall—the absent Mr. Hartsfield, perhaps. Here’s Mrs. Hartsfield standing with a bunch of laughing ladies in what appears to be a beauty salon. Here’s one of a chubby little boy holding a fire truck—Brady at age three or four, probably. And one more, a wallet-sized version of the picture in Mrs. Hartsfield’s alcove office: Brady and his mom with their cheeks pressed together.

Jerome taps it and says, “You know what that reminds me of a little? Demi Moore and what’s-his-name, Ashton Kutcher.”

“Demi Moore has black hair,” Holly says matter-of-factly. “Except in G.I. Jane, where she hardly had any at all, because she was learning to be a SEAL. I saw that movie three times, once in the theater, once on videotape, and once on my iTunes. Very enjoyable. Mrs. Hartsfield is blond-headed.” She considers, then adds: “Was.”

Hodges slides the photo out of the pocket for a better look, then turns it over. Carefully printed on the back is Mom and Her Honeyboy, Sand Point Beach, Aug 2007. He flicks the picture against the side of his palm a time or two, almost puts it back, then slides it across to Holly, photo-side down.

“Try that.”

She frowns at him. “Try what?”

“Honeyboy.”

Holly types it in, hits RETURN… and utters a very un-Hollylike scream of joy. Because they’re in. Just like that.

There’s nothing of note on the desktop—an address book, a folder marked FAVORITE RECIPES and another marked SAVED EMAILS; a folder of online receipts (she seemed to have paid most of her bills that way); and an album of photos (most of Brady at various ages). There are a lot of TV shows in her iTunes, but only one album of music: Alvin and the Chipmunks Celebrate Christmas.

“Christ,” Jerome says. “I don’t want to say she deserved to die, but…”

Holly gives him a forbidding look. “Not funny, Jerome. Do not go there.”

He holds up his hands. “Sorry, sorry.”

Hodges scrolls rapidly through the saved emails and sees nothing of interest. Most appear to be from Mrs. Hartsfield’s old high school buddies, who refer to her as Debs.

“There’s nothing here about Brady,” he says, and glances at the clock. “We should go.”

“Not so fast,” Holly says, and opens the finder. She types BRADY. There are several results (many in the recipe file, some tagged as Brady Favorites), but nothing of note.

“Try HONEYBOY,” Jerome suggests.

She does and gets one result—a document buried deep in the hard drive. Holly clicks it. Here are Brady’s clothing sizes, also a list of all the Christmas and birthday presents she’s bought him for the last ten years, presumably so she won’t repeat herself. She’s noted his Social Security number. There’s a scanned copy of his car registration, his car insurance card, and his birth certificate. She’s listed his co-workers at both Discount Electronix and Loeb’s Ice Cream Factory. Next to the name Shirley Orton is a notation that would have made Brady laugh hysterically: Wonder is she his gf?

“What’s up with this crap?” Jerome asks. “He’s a grown man, for God’s sake.”

Holly smiles darkly. “What I said. She knew he wasn’t right.”

At the very bottom of the HONEYBOY file, there’s a folder marked BASEMENT.

“That’s it,” Holly says. “Gotta be. Open it, open it, open it!”

Jerome clicks BASEMENT. The document inside is less than a dozen words long.

They stare at the screen for some time without speaking. At last Hodges says, “I don’t get it. Jerome?”

Jerome shakes his head.

Holly, seemingly hypnotized by this message from the dead woman, speaks a single word, almost too low to hear: “Maybe…” She hesitates, chewing her lips, and says it again. “Maybe.”

25

Brady arrives at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex just before six P.M. Although the show isn’t scheduled to start for over an hour, the vast parking lot is already three-quarters full. Long lines have formed outside the doors that open on to the lobby, and they’re getting longer all the time. Little girls are screeching at the top of their lungs. Probably that means they’re happy, but to Brady they sound like ghosts in a deserted mansion. It’s impossible to look at the growing crowd and not recall that April morning at City Center. Brady thinks, If I had a Humvee instead of this Jap shitbox, I could drive into them at forty miles an hour, kill fifty or more that way, then hit the switch and blow the rest into the stratosphere.

But he doesn’t have a Humvee, and for a moment he’s not even sure what to do next—he can’t be seen while he makes his final preparations. Then, at the far end of the lot, he sees a tractor-trailer box. The cab is gone and it’s up on jacks. On the side is a Ferris wheel and a sign reading ’ROUND HERE SUPPORT TEAM. It’s one of the trucks he saw in the loading area during his reconnaissance. Later, after the show, the cab would be reconnected and driven around back for the load-out, but now it looks deserted.

He pulls in on the far side of the box, which is at least fifty feet long and hides the Subaru completely from the bustling parking lot. He takes his fake glasses from the glove compartment and puts them on. He gets out and does a quick walk-around to assure himself the trailer box is as deserted as it looks. When he’s satisfied on that score, he returns to the Subaru and works the wheelchair out of the back. It’s not easy. The Honda would have been better, but he doesn’t trust its unmaintained engine. He places the ASS PARKING cushion on the wheelchair’s seat, and connects the wire protruding from the center of the A in PARKING to the wires hanging from the side pockets, where there are more blocks of plastic explosive. Another wire, connected to a block of plastic in the rear pocket, dangles from a hole he has punched in the seatback.

Sweating profusely, Brady begins the final unification, braiding copper cores and wrapping exposed connection-points with pre-cut strips of masking tape he has stuck to the front of the oversized ’Round Here tee-shirt he bought that morning in the drugstore. The shirt features the same Ferris wheel logo as the one on the truck. Above it are the words KISSES ON THE MIDWAY. Below, it says I LUV CAM, BOYD, STEVE, AND PETE!

After ten minutes of work (with occasional breaks to peek around the edge of the box and make sure he still has this far edge of the parking lot to himself), a spiderweb of connected wires lies on the seat of the wheelchair. There’s no way to wire in the explosives-stuffed Urinesta peebag, at least not that he could figure out on short notice, but that’s okay; Brady has no doubt the other stuff will set it off.

Not that he’ll know for sure, one way or the other.

He returns to the Subaru one more time and takes out the eight-by-ten framed version of a picture Hodges has already seen: Frankie holding Sammy the Fire Truck and smiling his dopey where-the-fuck-am-I smile. Brady kisses the glass and says, “I love you, Frankie. Do you love me?”

He pretends Frankie says yes.

“Do you want to help me?”

He pretends Frankie says yes.

Brady goes back to the wheelchair and sits down on ASS PARKING. Now the only wire showing is the master wire, dangling over the front of the wheelchair seat between his spread thighs. He connects it to Thing Two and takes a deep breath before flicking the power switch. If the electricity from the double-A batteries leaks through… even a little…

But it doesn’t. The yellow ready-lamp goes on, and that’s all. Somewhere, not far away but in a different world, little girls are screaming happily. Soon many of them will be vaporized; many more will be missing arms and legs and screaming for real. Oh well, at least they’ll get to listen to some music by their favorite band before the big bang.

Or maybe not. He’s aware of what a crude and makeshift plan this is; the stupidest no-talent screenwriter in Hollywood could do better. Brady remembers the sign in the corridor leading to the auditorium: NO BAGS NO BOXES NO BACKPACKS. He has none of those things, but all it will take to blow the deal is one sharp-eyed security guard observing a single unconcealed wire. Even if that doesn’t happen, a cursory glance into the wheelchair’s storage pockets will reveal the fact that it’s a rolling bomb. Brady has stuck a ’Round Here pennant in one of those pockets, but otherwise made no effort at concealment.

It doesn’t faze him. He doesn’t know if that makes him confident or just fatalistic, and doesn’t think it matters. In the end, confidence and fatalism are pretty much the same, aren’t they? He got away with running those people over at City Center, and there was almost no planning involved with that, either—just a mask, a hairnet, and some DNA-killing bleach. In his heart, he never really expected to escape, and in this case his expectations are zero. In a don’t-give-a-fuck world, he is about to become the ultimate don’t-give-a-fucker.

He slips Thing Two beneath the oversized tee-shirt. There’s a slight bulge, and he can see a dim yellow glimmer from the ready-lamp through the thin cotton, but both the bulge and the glimmer disappear when he places Frankie’s picture in his lap. He’s pretty much ready to go.

His fake glasses slide down the bridge of his sweat-slippery nose. Brady pushes them back up. By craning his neck slightly, he can see himself in the Subaru’s passenger-side rearview mirror. Bald and bespectacled, he looks nothing like his former self. He looks sick, for one thing—pale and sweaty with dark circles under his eyes.

Brady runs his hand over the top of his head, feeling smooth skin where no stubble will ever have the chance to grow out. Then he backs the wheelchair out of the slot where he has parked his car and begins to roll himself slowly across the expanse of parking lot toward the growing crowd.

26

Hodges gets snared in rush-hour traffic and doesn’t arrive back on the North Side until shortly after six P.M. Jerome and Holly are still with him; they both want to see this through, regardless of the consequences, and since they seem to understand what those consequences may be, Hodges has decided he can’t refuse them. Not that he has much of a choice; Holly won’t divulge what she knows. Or thinks she knows.

Hank Beeson is out of his house and crossing the street before Hodges can bring Olivia Trelawney’s Mercedes to a stop in the Hartsfield driveway. Hodges sighs and powers down the driver’s-side window.

“I sure would like to know what’s going on,” Mr. Beeson says. “Does it have anything to do with all that mess down in Lowtown?”

“Mr. Beeson,” Hodges says, “I appreciate your concern, but you need to go back to your house and—”

“No, wait,” Holly says. She’s leaning across the center console of Olivia Trelawney’s Mercedes so she can look up at Beeson’s face. “Tell me how Mr. Hartsfield sounds. I need to know how his voice sounds.”

Beeson looks perplexed. “Like anyone, I guess. Why?”

“Is it low? You know, baritone?”

“You mean like one of those fat opera singers?” Beeson laughs. “Hell, no. What kind of question is that?”

“Not high and squeaky, either?”

To Hodges, Beeson says, “Is your partner crazy?”

Only a little, Hodges thinks. “Just answer the question, sir.”

“Not low, not high and squeaky. Regular! What’s going on?”

“No accent?” Holly persists. “Like… um… Southern? Or New England? Or Brooklyn, maybe?”

“No, I said. He sounds like anybody.”

Holly sits back, apparently satisfied.

Hodges says, “Go back inside, Mr. Beeson. Please.”

Beeson snorts but backs off. He pauses at the foot of his steps to cast a glare over his shoulder. It’s one Hodges has seen many times before, the I pay your salary, asshole glare. Then he goes inside, slamming the door behind him to make sure they get the point. Soon he appears once more at the window with his arms folded over his chest.

“What if he calls the cop shop to ask what we’re doing here?” Jerome asks from the back seat.

Hodges smiles. It’s wintry but genuine. “Good luck with that tonight. Come on.”

As he leads them single-file along the narrow path between the house and the garage, he checks his watch. Quarter past six. He thinks, How the time flies when you’re having fun.

They enter the kitchen. Hodges opens the basement door and reaches for the light switch.

“No,” Holly says. “Leave it off.”

He looks at her questioningly, but Holly has turned to Jerome.

“You have to do it. Mr. Hodges is too old and I’m a woman.”

For a moment Jerome doesn’t get it, then he does. “Control equals lights?”

She nods. Her face is tense and drawn. “It should work if your voice is anywhere close to his.”

Jerome steps into the doorway, clears his throat self-consciously, and says, “Control.”

The basement remains dark.

Hodges says, “You’ve got a naturally low voice. Not baritone, but low. It’s why you sound older than you really are when you’re on the phone. See if you can raise it up a little.”

Jerome repeats the word, and the lights in the basement come on. Holly Gibney, whose life has not exactly been a sitcom, laughs and claps her hands.

27

It’s six-twenty when Tanya Robinson arrives at the MAC, and as she joins the line of incoming vehicles, she wishes she’d listened to the girls’ importuning and left for the concert an hour earlier. The lot is already three-quarters full. Guys in orange vests are flagging traffic. One of them waves her to the left. She turns that way, driving with slow care because she’s borrowed Ginny Carver’s Tahoe for tonight’s safari, and the last thing she wants is to get into a fender-bender. In the seats behind her, the girls—Hilda Carver, Betsy DeWitt, Dinah Scott, and her own Barbara—are literally bouncing with excitement. They have loaded the Tahoe’s CD changer with their ’Round Here CDs (among them they have all six), and they squeal “Oh, I love this one!” every time a new tune comes on. It’s noisy and it’s stressful and Tanya is surprised to find she’s enjoying herself quite a lot.

“Watch out for the crippled guy, Mrs. Robinson,” Betsy says, pointing.

The crippled guy is skinny, pale, and bald, all but floating inside his baggy tee-shirt. He’s holding what looks like a framed picture in his lap, and she can also see one of those urine bags. A sadly jaunty ’Round Here pennant juts from a pocket on the side of his wheelchair. Poor man, Tanya thinks.

“Maybe we should help him,” Barbara says. “He’s going awful slow.”

“Bless your kind heart,” Tanya says. “Let me get us parked, and if he hasn’t made it to the building when we walk back, we’ll do just that.”

She slides the borrowed Tahoe into an empty space and turns it off with a sigh of relief.

“Boy, look at the lines,” Dinah says. “There must be a zillion people here.”

“Nowhere near that many,” Tanya says, “but it is a lot. They’ll open the doors soon, though. And we’ve got good seats, so don’t worry about that.”

“You’ve still got the tickets, right, Mom?”

Tanya ostentatiously checks her purse. “Got them right here, hon.”

“And we can have souvenirs?”

“One each, and nothing that costs over ten dollars.”

“I’ve got my own money, Mrs. Robinson,” Betsy says as they climb out of the Tahoe. The girls are a little nervous at the sight of the crowd growing outside the MAC. They cluster together, their four shadows becoming a single dark puddle in the strong early-evening sunlight.

“I’m sure you do, Bets, but this is on me,” Tanya says. “Now listen up, girls. I want you to give me your money and phones for safekeeping. Sometimes there are pickpockets at these big public gatherings. I’ll give everything back when we’re safe in our seats, but no texting or calling once the show starts—are we clear on that?”

“Can we each take a picture first, Mrs. Robinson?” Hilda asks.

“Yes. One each.”

“Two!” Barbara begs.

“All right, two. But hurry up.”

They each take two pictures, promising to email them later, so everyone has a complete set. Tanya takes a couple of her own, with the four girls grouped together and their arms around each other’s shoulders. She thinks they look lovely.

“Okay, ladies, hand over the cash and the cackleboxes.”

The girls give up thirty dollars or so among them and their candy-colored phones. Tanya puts everything in her purse and locks Ginny Carver’s van with the button on the key-fob. She hears the satisfying thump of the locks engaging—a sound that means safety and security.

“Now listen, you crazy females. We’re all going to hold hands until we’re in our seats, okay? Let me hear your okay.”

“Okaay!” the girls shout, and grab hands. They’re tricked out in their best skinny jeans and their best sneakers. All are wearing ’Round Here tees, and Hilda’s ponytail has been tied with a white silk ribbon that says I LUV CAM in red letters.

“And we’re going to have fun, right? Best time ever, right? Let me hear your okay.”

“OKAAAYYYY!”

Satisfied, Tanya leads them toward the MAC. It’s a long walk across hot macadam, but none of them seems to mind. Tanya looks for the bald man in the wheelchair and spies him making his way toward the back of the handicapped line. That one is much shorter, but it still makes her sad to see all those broken folks. Then the wheelchairs start to move. They’re letting the handicapped people in first, and she thinks that’s a good idea. Let all or at least most of them get settled in their own section before the stampede begins.

As Tanya’s party reaches the end of the shortest line of abled people (which is still very long), she watches the skinny bald guy propel himself up the handicap ramp and thinks how much easier it would be for him if he had one of those motorized chairs. She wonders about the picture in his lap. Some loved relative who’s gone on? That seems the most likely.

Poor man, she thinks again, and sends up a brief prayer to God, thanking Him that her own two kids are all right.

“Mom?” Barbara says.

“Yes, honey?”

“Best time ever, right?”

Tanya Robinson squeezes her daughter’s hand. “You bet.”

A girl starts singing “Kisses on the Midway” in a clear, sweet voice. “The sun, baby, the sun shines when you look at me… The moon, baby, the moon glows when you’re next to me…”

More girls join in. “Your love, your touch, just a little is never enough… I want to love you my way…”

Soon the song is floating up into the warm evening air a thousand voices strong. Tanya is happy to add her voice, and after the CD-a-thon coming from Barbara’s room these last two weeks, she knows all the words.

Impulsively, she bends down and kisses the top of her daughter’s head.

Best time ever, she thinks.

28

Hodges and his junior Watsons stand in Brady’s basement control room, looking at the row of silent computers.

“Chaos first,” Jerome says. “Then darkness. Right?”

Hodges thinks, It sounds like something out of the Book of Revelation.

“I think so,” Holly says. “At least that’s the order she had them in.” To Hodges, she says, “She was listening, see? I bet she was listening a lot more than he knew she was listening.” She turns back to Jerome. “One thing. Very important. Don’t waste time if you get chaos to turn them on.”

“Right. The suicide program. Only what if I get nervous and my voice goes all high and squeaky like Mickey Mouse?”

She starts to reply, then sees the look in his eye. “Hardy-har-har.” But she smiles in spite of herself. “Go on, Jerome. Be Brady Hartsfield.”

He only has to say chaos once. The computers flash on, and the numbers start descending.

“Darkness!”

The numbers continue to count down.

“Don’t shout,” Holly says. “Jeez.”

16. 15. 14.

“Darkness.”

“I think you’re too low again,” Hodges says, trying not to sound as nervous as he feels.

12. 11.

Jerome wipes his mouth. “D-darkness.”

“Mushmouth,” Holly observes. Perhaps not helpfully.

8. 7. 6.

“Darkness.”

5.

The countdown disappears. Jerome lets out a gusty sigh of relief. What replaces the numbers is a series of color photographs of men in old-timey Western clothes, shooting and being shot. One has been frozen as he and his horse crash through a plate glass window.

“What kind of screensavers are those?” Jerome asks.

Hodges points at Brady’s Number Five. “That’s William Holden, so I guess they must be scenes from a movie.”

“The Wild Bunch,” Holly says. “Directed by Sam Peckinpah. I only watched it once. It gave me nightmares.”

Scenes from a movie, Hodges thinks, looking at the grimaces and gunfire. Also scenes from inside Brady Hartsfield’s head. “Now what?”

Jerome says, “Holly, you start at the first one. I’ll start at the last one. We’ll meet in the middle.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Holly says. “Mr. Hodges, can I smoke in here?”

“Why the hell not?” he says, and goes over to the cellar stairs to sit and watch them work. As he does, he rubs absently at the hollow just below his left collarbone. That annoying pain is back. He must have pulled a muscle running down the street after his car exploded.

29

The air conditioning in the MAC’s lobby strikes Brady like a slap, causing his sweaty neck and arms to break out in gooseflesh. The main part of the corridor is empty, because they haven’t let in the regular concertgoers yet, but the right side, where there are velvet ropes and a sign reading HANDICAPPED ACCESS, is lined with wheelchairs that are moving slowly toward the checkpoint and the auditorium beyond.

Brady doesn’t like how this is playing out.

He had assumed that everyone would smoosh in at the same time, as they had at the Cleveland Indians game he’d gone to when he was eighteen, and the security guys would be overwhelmed, just giving everyone a cursory look and then passing them on. The concert staff letting in the crips and gooniebirds first is something he should have forseen, but didn’t.

There are at least a dozen men and women in blue uniforms with brown patches on their shoulders reading MAC SECURITY, and for the time being they have nothing to do but check out the handicapped folks rolling slowly past them. Brady notes with growing coldness that although they’re not checking the storage pockets on all the wheelchairs, they are indeed checking the pockets on some of them—every third or fourth, and sometimes two in a row. When the crips clear security, ushers dressed in ’Round Here tee-shirts are directing them toward the auditorium’s handicapped section.

He always knew he might be stopped at the security checkpoint, but had believed he could still take plenty of ’Round Here’s young fans with him if that happened. Another bad assumption. Flying glass might kill a few of those closest to the doors, but their bodies would also serve as a blast-shield.

Shit, he thinks. Still—I only got eight at City Center. I’m bound to do better than that.

He rolls forward, the picture of Frankie in his lap. The edge of the frame rests against the toggle-switch. The minute one of those security goons bends to look into the pockets on the sides of the wheelchair, Brady will press a hand down on the picture, the yellow lamp will turn green, and electricity will flow to the lead azide detonators nestled in the homemade explosive.

There are only a dozen wheelchairs ahead of him. Chilled air blows down on his hot skin. He thinks of City Center, and how the Trelawney bitch’s heavy car jounced and rocked as it ran over the people after he hit them and knocked them down. As if it were having an orgasm. He remembers the rubbery air inside the mask, and how he screamed with delight and triumph. Screamed until he was so hoarse he could hardly speak at all and had to tell his mother and Tones Frobisher at DE that he had come down with laryngitis.

Now there’s just ten wheelchairs between him and the checkpoint. One of the guards—probably the head honcho, since he’s the oldest and the only one wearing a hat—takes a backpack from a young girl who’s as bald as Brady himself. He explains something to her, and gives her a claim-check.

They’re going to catch me, Brady thinks coldly. They are, so get ready to die.

He is ready. Has been for some time now.

Eight wheelchairs between him and the checkpoint. Seven. Six. It’s like the countdown on his computers.

Then the singing starts outside, muffled at first.

“The sun, baby, the sun shines when you look at me… The moon, baby…”

When they hit the chorus, the sound swells to that of a cathedral choir: girls singing at the top of their lungs.

“I WANT TO LOVE YOU MY WAY… WE’LL DRIVE THE BEACHSIDE HIGHWAY…”

At that moment, the main doors swing open. Some girls cheer; most continue singing, and louder than ever.

“IT’S GONNA BE A NEW DAY… I’LL GIVE YOU KISSES ON THE MIDWAY!”

Chicks wearing ’Round Here tops and their first makeup pour in, their parents (mostly mommies) struggling to keep up and stay connected to their brats. The velvet rope between the main part of the corridor and the handicapped zone is knocked over and trampled underfoot. A beefy twelve- or thirteen-year-old with an ass the size of Iowa is shoved into the wheelchair ahead of Brady’s, and the girl inside it, who has a cheerfully pretty face and sticks for legs, is almost knocked over.

“Hey, watch it!” the wheelchair-girl’s mother shouts, but the fat bitch in the double-wide jeans is already gone, waving a ’Round Here pennant in one hand and her ticket in the other. Someone thumps into Brady’s chair, the picture shifts in his lap, and for one cold second he thinks they’re all going to go up in a white flash and a hail of steel bearings. When they don’t, he raises the picture enough to peer underneath, and sees the ready-lamp is still glowing yellow.

Close one, Brady thinks, and grins.

It’s happy confusion in the hallway, and all but one of the security guards who were checking the handicapped concertgoers move to do what they can with this new influx of crazed singing teens and preteens. The one guard who remains on the handicapped side of the corridor is a young woman, and she’s waving the wheelchairs through with barely a glance. As Brady approaches her he spots the guy in charge, Hat Honcho, standing on the far side of the corridor almost directly opposite. At six-three or so, he’s easy to see, because he towers over the girls, and his eyes never stop moving. In one hand he holds a piece of paper, which he glances down at every now and again.

“Show me your tickets and go,” the security woman says to the pretty wheelchair-girl and her mother. “Righthand door.”

Brady sees something interesting. The tall security guy in the hat grabs a guy of twenty or so who looks to be on his own and pulls him out of the scrum.

“Next!” the security woman calls to him. “Don’t hold up the line!”

Brady rolls forward, ready to push Frankie’s picture against the toggle-switch on Thing Two if she shows even a passing interest in the pockets of his wheelchair. The corridor is now wall to wall with pushing, singing girls, and his score will be a lot higher than thirty. If the corridor has to do, that will be fine.

The security woman points at the picture. “Who’s that, hon?”

“My little boy,” Brady says with a game smile. “He was killed in an accident last year. The same one that left me…” He indicates the chair. “He loved ’Round Here, but he never got to hear their new album. Now he will.”

She’s harried, but not too harried for sympathy; her eyes soften. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Brady says, thinking: You stupid cunt.

“Go straight ahead, sir, then bear to the right. You’ll find the two handicapped aisles halfway down the auditorium. Great views. If you need help getting down the ramp—it’s pretty steep—look for one of the ushers wearing the yellow armbands.”

“I’ll be okay,” Brady says, smiling at her. “Great brakes on this baby.”

“Good for you. Enjoy the show.”

“Thank you, ma’am, I sure will. Frankie will, too.”

Brady rolls toward the main entrance. Back at the security checkpoint, Larry Windom—known to his police colleagues as Romper-Stomper—releases the young man who decided on the spur of the moment to use his kid sister’s ticket when she came down with mono. He looks nothing like the creep in the photo Bill Hodges sent him.

The auditorium features stadium seating, which delights Brady. The bowl shape will concentrate the explosion. He can imagine the packets of ball bearings taped under his seat fanning out. If he’s lucky, he thinks, he’ll get the band as well as half the audience.

Pop music plays from the overhead speakers, but the girls who are filling the seats and choking the aisles drown it out with their own young and fervent voices. Spotlights swing back and forth over the crowd. Frisbees fly. A couple of oversized beachballs bounce around. The only thing that surprises Brady is that there’s no sign of the Ferris wheel and all that midway shit onstage. Why did they haul it all in, if they weren’t going to use it?

An usher with a yellow armband has just finished placing the pretty girl with the stick legs, and comes up to assist Brady, but Brady waves him off. The usher gives him a grin and a pat on the shoulder as he goes by to help someone else. Brady rolls down to the first of the two sections reserved for the handicapped. He parks next to the pretty girl with the stick legs.

She turns to him with a smile. “Isn’t this exciting?”

Brady smiles back, thinking, You don’t know the half of it, you crippled bitch.

30

Tanya Robinson is looking at the stage and thinking of the first concert she ever went to—it was the Temps—and how Bobby Wilson kissed her right in the middle of “My Girl.” Very romantic.

She’s roused from these thoughts by her daughter, who’s shaking her arm. “Look, Mom, there’s the crippled man. Over there with the other wheelchair-people.” Barbara points to the left and down a couple of rows. Here the seats have been removed to make room for two ranks of wheelchairs.

“I see him, Barb, but it’s not polite to stare.”

“I hope he has a good time, don’t you?”

Tanya smiles at her daughter. “I sure do, honey.”

“Can we have our phones back? We need them for the start of the show.”

To take pictures with is what Tanya Robinson assumes… because it’s been a long time since she’s been to a rock show. She opens her purse and doles out the candy-colored phones. For a wonder, the girls just hold them. For the time being, they’re too busy goggling around to call or text. Tanya puts a quick kiss on top of Barb’s head and then sits back, lost in the past, thinking of Bobby Wilson’s kiss. Not quite the first, but the first good one.

She hopes that when the time comes, Barb will be as lucky.

31

“Oh my happy clapping Jesus,” Holly says, and hits her forehead with the heel of her hand. She’s finished with Brady’s Number One—nothing much there—and has moved on to Number Two.

Jerome looks up from Number Five, which seems to have been exclusively dedicated to video games, most of the Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty sort. “What?”

“It’s just that every now and then I run across someone even more screwed in the head than me,” she says. “It cheers me up. That’s terrible, I know it is, but I can’t help it.”

Hodges gets up from the stairs with a grunt and comes over to look. The screen is filled with small photos. They appear to be harmless cheesecake, not much different from the kind he and his friends used to moon over in Adam and Spicy Leg Art back in the late fifties. Holly enlarges three of them and arranges them in a row. Here is Deborah Hartsfield wearing a filmy robe. And Deborah Hartsfield wearing babydoll pajamas. And Deborah Hartsfield in a frilly pink bra-and-panty set.

“My God, it’s his mother,” Jerome says. His face is a study in revulsion, amazement, and fascination. “And it looks like she posed.”

It looks that way to Hodges, too.

“Yup,” Holly says. “Paging Dr. Freud. Why do you keep rubbing your shoulder, Mr. Hodges?”

“Pulled a muscle,” he says. But he’s starting to wonder about that.

Jerome glances at the desktop screen of Number Three, starts to check out the photos of Brady Hartsfield’s mother again, then does a double-take. “Whoa,” he says. “Look at this, Bill.”

Sitting in the lower lefthand corner of Number Three’s desktop is a Blue Umbrella icon.

“Open it,” Hodges says.

He does, but the file is empty. There’s nothing unsent, and as they now know, all old correspondence on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella goes straight to data heaven.

Jerome sits down at Number Three. “This must be his go-to glowbox, Hols. Almost got to be.”

She joins him. “I think the other ones are mostly for show—so he can pretend he’s on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise or something.”

Hodges points to a file marked 2009. “Let’s look at that one.”

A mouse-click discloses a subfile titled CITY CENTER. Jerome opens it and they stare at a long list of stories about what happened there in April of 2009.

“The asshole’s press clippings,” Hodges says.

“Go through everything on this one,” Holly tells Jerome. “Start with the hard drive.”

Jerome opens it. “Oh man, look at this shit.” He points to a file titled EXPLOSIVES.

“Open it!” Holly says, shaking his shoulder. “Open it, open it, open it!”

Jerome does, and reveals another loaded subfile. Drawers within drawers, Hodges thinks. A computer’s really nothing but a Victorian rolltop desk, complete with secret compartments.

Holly says, “Hey guys, look at this.” She points. “He downloaded the whole Anarchist Cookbook from BitTorrent. That’s illegal!”

“Duh,” Jerome says, and she punches him in the arm.

The pain in Hodges’s shoulder is worse. He walks back to the stairs and sits heavily. Jerome and Holly, huddled over Number Three, don’t notice him go. He puts his hands on his thighs (My overweight thighs, he thinks, my badly overweight thighs) and begins taking long slow breaths. The only thing that can make this evening worse would be having a heart attack in a house he’s illegally entered with a minor and a woman who is at least a mile from right in the head. A house where a bullshit-crazy killer’s pinup girl is lying dead upstairs.

Please God, no heart attack. Please.

He takes more long breaths. He stifles a belch and the pain begins to ease.

With his head lowered, he finds himself looking between the stairs. Something glints there in the light of the overhead fluorescents. Hodges drops to his knees and crawls underneath to see what it is. It turns out to be a stainless steel ball bearing, bigger than the ones in the Happy Slapper, heavy in his palm. He looks at the distorted reflection of his face in its curved side, and an idea starts to grow. Only it doesn’t exactly grow; it surfaces, like the bloated body of something drowned.

Farther beneath the stairs is a green garbage bag. Hodges crawls to it with the ball bearing clutched in one hand, feeling the cobwebs that dangle from the undersides of the steps caress his receding hair and growing forehead. Jerome and Holly are chattering excitedly, but he pays no attention.

He grabs the garbage bag with his free hand and begins to back out from beneath the stairs. A drop of sweat runs into his left eye, stinging, and he blinks it away. He sits down on the steps again.

“Open his email,” Holly says.

“God, you’re bossy,” Jerome says.

“Open it, open it, open it!”

Right you are, Hodges thinks, and opens the garbage bag. There are snippets of wire inside, and what appears to be a busted circuit board. They are lying on top of a khaki-colored garment that looks like a shirt. He brushes the bits of wire aside, pulls the garment out, holds it up. Not a shirt but a hiker’s vest, the kind with lots of pockets. The lining has been slashed in half a dozen places. He reaches into one of these cuts, feels around, and pulls out two more ball bearings. It’s not a hiker’s vest, at least not anymore. It’s been customized.

Now it’s a suicide vest.

Or was. Brady unloaded it for some reason. Because his plans changed to the Careers Day thing on Saturday? That has to be it. The explosives are probably in his car, unless he’s stolen another one already. He—

“No!” Jerome cries. Then he screams it. “No! No, no, OH GOD NO!”

“Please don’t let it be,” Holly whimpers. “Don’t let it be that.”

Hodges drops the vest and hurries across to the bank of computers to see what they’re looking at. It’s an email from a site called FanTastic, thanking Mr. Brady Hartsfield for his order.

You may download your printable ticket at once. No bags or backpacks will be allowed at this event. Thank you for ordering from FanTastic, where all the best seats to all the biggest shows are only a click away.

Below this: ’ROUND HERE MINGO AUDITORIUM MIDWEST CULTURE AND ARTS COMPLEX JUNE 3, 2010 7 PM.

Hodges closes his eyes. It’s the fucking concert after all. We made an understandable mistake… but not a forgivable one. Please God, don’t let him get inside. Please God, let Romper-Stomper’s guys catch him at the door.

But even that could be a nightmare, because Larry Windom is under the impression that he’s looking for a child molester, not a mad bomber. If he spots Brady and tries to collar him with his usual heavy-handed lack of grace—

“It’s quarter of seven,” Holly says, pointing to the digital readout on Brady’s Number Three. “He might still be waiting in line, but he’s probably inside already.”

Hodges knows she’s right. With that many kids going, seating will have started no later than six-thirty.

“Jerome,” he says.

The boy doesn’t reply. He’s staring at the ticket receipt on the computer screen, and when Hodges puts his hand on Jerome’s shoulder, it’s like touching a stone.

“Jerome.”

Slowly, Jerome turns around. His eyes are huge. “We been so stupid,” he whispers.

“Call your moms.” Hodges’s voice remains calm, and it’s not even that much of an effort, because he’s in deep shock. He keeps seeing the ball bearing. And the slashed vest. “Do it now. Tell her to grab Barbara and the other kids she brought and beat feet out of there.”

Jerome pulls his phone from the clip on his belt and speed-dials his mother. Holly stares at him with her arms crossed tightly over her breasts and her chewed lips pulled down in a grimace.

Jerome waits, mutters a curse, then says: “You have to get out of there, Mom. Just take the girls and go. Don’t call me back and ask questions, just go. Don’t run. But get out!”

He ends the call and tells them what they already know. “Voicemail. It rang plenty of times, so she’s not talking on it and it’s not shut off. I don’t get it.”

“What about your sister?” Hodges says. “She must have a phone.”

Jerome is hitting speed-dial again before he can finish. He listens for what seems to Hodges like an age, although he knows it can only be ten or fifteen seconds. Then he says, “Barb! Why in hell aren’t you picking up? You and Mom and the other girls have to get out of there!” He ends the call. “I don’t get this. She always carries it, that thing is practically grafted to her, and she should at least feel it vibra—”

Holly says, “Oh shit and piss.” But that’s not enough for her. “Oh, fuck!”

They turn to her.

“How big is the concert place? How many people can fit inside?”

Hodges tries to retrieve what he knows about the Mingo Auditorium. “Seats four thousand. I don’t know if they allow standees or not, I can’t remember that part of the fire code.”

“And for this show, almost all of them are girls,” she says. “Girls with cell phones practically grafted to them. Most of them gabbing away while they wait for the show to start. Or texting.” Her eyes are huge with dismay. “It’s the circuits. They’re overloaded. You have to keep trying, Jerome. You have to keep trying until you get through.”

He nods numbly, but he’s looking at Hodges. “You should call your friend. The one in the security department.”

“Yeah, but not from here. In the car.” Hodges looks at his watch again. Ten of seven. “We’re going to the MAC.”

Holly clenches a fist on either side of her face. “Yes,” she says, and Hodges finds himself remembering what she said earlier: They can’t find him. We can.

In spite of his desire to confront Hartsfield—to wrap his hands around Hartsfield’s neck and see the bastard’s eyes bulge as his breath stops—Hodges hopes she’s wrong about that. Because if it’s up to them, it may already be too late.

32

This time it’s Jerome behind the wheel and Hodges in back. Olivia Trelawney’s Mercedes gathers itself slowly, but once the twelve-cylinder engine gets cranking, it goes like a rocket… and with the lives of his mother and sister on the line, Jerome drives it like one, weaving from lane to lane and ignoring the protesting honks of the cars around him. Hodges estimates they can be at the MAC in twenty minutes. If the kid doesn’t pile them up, that is.

“Call the security man!” Holly says from the passenger seat. “Call him, call him, call him!”

As Hodges takes his Nokia out of his jacket pocket, he instructs Jerome to take the City Bypass.

“Don’t backseat-drive me,” Jerome says. “Just make the call. And hurry.”

But when he tries to access his phone’s memory, the fucking Nokia gives a single weak tweet and then dies. When was the last time he charged it? Hodges can’t remember. He can’t remember the number of the security office, either. He should have written it down in his notebook instead of depending on the phone.

Goddam technology, he thinks… but whose fault is it, really?

“Holly. Dial 555-1900 and then give me your phone. Mine’s dead.” Nineteen hundred is the department. He can get Windom’s number from Marlo again.

“Okay, what’s the area code here? My phone’s on—”

She breaks off as Jerome swerves around a panel truck and drives straight at an SUV in the other lane, flashing his lights and yelling, “Get out of the way!” The SUV swerves and Jerome skates the Mercedes past with a coat of paint to spare.

“—on Cincinnati,” Holly finishes. She sounds as cool as a Popsicle.

Hodges, thinking he could use some of the drugs she’s on, recites the area code. She dials and hands her phone to him over the seat.

“Police Department, how may I direct your call?”

“I need to talk to Marlo Everett in Records, and right away.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I saw Ms. Everett leave half an hour ago.”

“Have you got her cell number?”

“Sir, I’m not allowed to give that information ou—”

He has no inclination to engage in a time-consuming argument that will surely prove fruitless, and clicks off just as Jerome swings onto the City Bypass, doing sixty. “What’s the holdup, Bill? Why aren’t you—”

“Shut up and drive, Jerome,” Holly says. “Mr. Hodges is doing the best he can.”

The truth is, she really doesn’t want me to reach anyone, Hodges thinks. Because it’s supposed to be us and only us. A crazy idea comes to him, that Holly is using some weird psychic vibe to make sure it stays them and only them. And it might. Based on the way Jerome’s driving, they’ll be at the MAC before Hodges is able to get hold of anyone in authority.

A cold part of his mind is thinking that might be best. Because no matter who Hodges reaches, Larry Windom is the man in charge at the Mingo, and Hodges doesn’t trust him. Romper-Stomper was always a bludgeoner, a go-right-at-em kind of guy, and Hodges doubts he has changed.

Still, he has to try.

He hands Holly’s phone back to her and says, “I can’t figure this fucking thing out. Call Directory Assistance and—”

“Try my sister again first,” Jerome says, and raps off the number.

Holly dials Barbara’s phone, her thumb moving so fast it’s a blur. Listens. “Voicemail.”

Jerome curses and drives faster. Hodges can only hope there’s an angel riding on his shoulder.

“Barbara!” Holly hollers. No mumbling now. “You and whoever’s with you get your asses out of there right away! ASAP! Pronto!” She clicks off. “Now what? Directory Assistance, you said?”

“Yeah. Get the MAC Security Department number, dial it, and give the phone back to me. Jerome, take Exit 4A.”

“3B’s the MAC.”

“It is if you’re going in front. We’re going to the back.”

“Bill, if my mom and sis get hurt—”

“They won’t. Take 4A.” Holly’s discussion with Directory Assistance has lasted too long. “Holly, what’s the holdup?”

“No direct line into their Security Department.” She dials a new number, listens, and hands him the phone. “You have to go through the main number.”

He presses Holly’s iPhone to his ear hard enough to hurt. It rings. And rings. And rings some more.

As they pass Exits 2A and 2B, Hodges can see the MAC. It’s lit up like a jukebox, the parking lot a sea of cars. His call is finally answered, but before he can say a word, a fembot begins to lecture him. She does it slowly and carefully, as if addressing a person who speaks English as a second language, and not well.

“Hello, and thank you for calling the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex, where we make life better and all things are possible.”

Hodges listens with Holly’s phone mashed against his ear and sweat rolling down his cheeks and neck. It’s six past seven. The bastard won’t do it until the show starts, he tells himself (he’s actually praying), and rock acts always start late.

“Remember,” the fembot says sweetly, “we depend on you for support, and season’s passes to the City Symphony and this fall’s Playhouse Series are available now. Not only will you save fifty percent—”

“What’s happening?” Jerome shouts as they pass 3A and 3B. The next sign reads EXIT 4A SPICER BOULEVARD ½ MILE. Jerome has tossed Holly his own phone and Holly is trying first Tanya, then Barbara again, with no result.

“I’m listening to a fucking recorded ad,” Hodges says. He’s rubbing the hollow of his shoulder again. That ache is like an infected tooth. “Go left at the bottom of the ramp. You’ll want a right turn I think about a block up. Maybe two. By the McDonald’s, anyway.” Although the Mercedes is now doing eighty, the sound of the engine has yet to rise above a sleepy purr.

“If we hear an explosion, I’m going to lose my mind,” Jerome says matter-of-factly.

“Just drive,” Holly says. An unlit Winston jitters between her teeth. “If you don’t wreck us, we’ll be fine.” She’s gone back to Tanya’s number. “We’re going to get him. We’re going to get him get him get him.”

Jerome snatches a glance at her. “Holly, you’re nuts.”

“Just drive,” she repeats.

“You can also use your MAC card to obtain a ten percent discount at selected fine restaurants and local retail businesses,” the fembot informs Hodges.

Then, at long last, she gets down to business.

“There is no one in the main office to take your call now. If you know the number of the extension you wish to reach, you may dial it at any time. If not, please listen carefully, because our menu options have changed. To call the Avery Johns Drama Office, dial one-oh. To call the Belinda Dean Box Office, dial one-one. To reach City Symphony—”

Oh dear Jesus, Hodges thinks, it’s the fucking Sears catalogue. And in alphabetical order.

The Mercedes dips and swerves as Jerome takes the 4A exit and shoots down the curved ramp. The light is red at the bottom. “Holly. How is it your way?”

She checks with the phone still at her ear. “You’re okay if you hurry. If you want to get us all killed, take your time.”

Jerome buries the accelerator. Olivia’s Mercedes shoots across four lanes of traffic listing hard to port, the tires squalling. There’s a thud as they bounce across the concrete divider. Horns blare a discordant flourish. From the corner of his eye, Hodges sees a panel truck climb the curb to avoid them.

“To reach Craft Service and Set Design, dial—”

Hodges punches the roof of the Mercedes. “What happened to HUMAN FUCKING BEINGS?”

Just as the Golden Arches of McDonald’s appear ahead on the right, the fembot tells Hodges he can reach the MAC’s Security Department by dialing three-two.

He does so. The phone rings four times, then is picked up. What he hears makes him wonder if he is losing his mind.

“Hello, and thank you for calling the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex,” the fembot says cordially. “Where we make life better and all things are possible.”

33

“Why isn’t the show starting, Mrs. Robinson?” Dinah Scott asks. “It’s already ten past seven.”

Tanya thinks of telling them about the Stevie Wonder concert she went to when she was in high school, the one that was scheduled to start at eight and finally got underway at nine-thirty, but decides it might be counterproductive.

Hilda’s frowning at her phone. “I still can’t get Gail,” she complains. “All the darn circuits are b—”

The lights begin to dim before she can finish. This provokes wild cheering and waves of applause.

“Oh God, Mommy, I’m so excited!” Barbara whispers, and Tanya is touched to see tears welling in her daughter’s eyes. A guy in a BAM-100 Good Guys tee-shirt struts out. A spotlight tracks him to center stage.

“Hey, you guys!” he shouts. “Howya doin out there?”

A fresh wave of noise assures him that the sellout crowd is doing just fine. Tanya sees the two ranks of Wheelchair People are also applauding. Except for the bald man. He’s just sitting there. Probably doesn’t want to drop his picture, Tanya thinks.

“Are you ready for some Boyd, Steve, and Pete?” the DJ host inquires.

More cheers and screams.

“And are you ready for some CAM KNOWLES?”

The girls (most of whom would be struck utterly dumb in their idol’s actual presence) shriek deliriously. They’re ready, all right. God, are they ready. They could just die.

“In a few minutes you’re going to see a set that’ll knock your eyes out, but for now, ladies and gentlemen—and especially you girls—give it up for… ’ROUND… HEEERRRRE!!!”

The audience surges to its feet, and as the lights on the stage go completely dark, Tanya understands why the girls just had to have their phones. In her day, everyone held up matches or Bic lighters. These kids hold up their cell phones, the combined light of all those little screens casting a pallid moonglow across the bowl of the auditorium.

How do they know to do these things? she wonders. Who tells them? For that matter, who told us?

She cannot remember.

The stage lights come up to bright furnace red. At that moment, a call finally slips through the clogged network and Barbara Robinson’s cell vibrates in her hand. She ignores it. Answering a phone call is the last thing in the world she wants to do right now (a first in her young life), and she couldn’t hear the person on the other end—probably her brother—even if she did. The racket inside the Mingo is deafening… and Barb loves it. She waves her vibrating phone back and forth above her head in big slow swoops. Everyone is doing the same, even her mom.

The lead singer of ’Round Here, dressed in the tightest jeans Tanya Robinson has ever seen, strides onstage. Cam Knowles throws back a tidal wave of blond hair and launches into “You Don’t Have to Be Lonely Again.”

Most of the audience remains on its feet for the time being, holding up their phones. The concert has begun.

34

The Mercedes turns off Spicer Boulevard and onto a feeder road marked with signs reading MAC DELIVERIES and EMPLOYEES ONLY. A quarter of a mile up is a rolling gate. It’s closed. Jerome pulls up next to a post with an intercom on it. The sign here reads CALL FOR ENTRY.

Hodges says, “Tell them you’re the police.”

Jerome rolls down his window and pushes the button. Nothing happens. He pushes it again and this time holds it. Hodges has a nightmarish thought: When Jerome’s buzz is finally answered, it will be the fembot, offering several dozen new options.

But this time it’s an actual human, albeit not a friendly one. “Back’s closed.”

“Police,” Jerome says. “Open the gate.”

“What do you want?”

“I just told you. Open the goddam gate. This is an emergency.”

The gate begins to trundle open, but instead of rolling forward, Jerome pushes the button again. “Are you security?”

“Head custodian,” the crackly voice returns. “If you want security, you gotta call the Security Department.”

“Nobody there,” Hodges tells Jerome. “They’re in the auditorium, the whole bunch of them. Just go.”

Jerome does, even though the gate isn’t fully open. He scrapes the side of the Mercedes’s refurbished body. “Maybe they caught him,” he says. “They had his description, so maybe they already caught him.”

“They didn’t,” Hodges says. “He’s in.”

“How do you know?”

“Listen.”

They can’t pick up actual music yet, but with the driver’s window still down, they can hear a thudding bass progression.

“The concert’s on. If Windom’s men had collared a guy with explosives, they would have shut it down right away and they’d be evacuating the building.”

“How could he get in?” Jerome asks, and thumps the steering wheel. “How?” Hodges can hear the terror in the boy’s voice. All because of him. Everything because of him.

“I have no idea. They had his photo.”

Ahead is a wide concrete ramp leading down to the loading area. Half a dozen roadies are sitting on amp crates and smoking, their work over for the time being. There’s an open door leading to the rear of the auditorium, and through it Hodges can hear music coalescing around the bass progression. There’s another sound, as well: thousands of happily screaming girls, all of them sitting on ground zero.

How Hartsfield got in no longer matters unless it helps to find him, and just how in God’s name are they supposed to do that in a dark auditorium filled with thousands of people?

As Jerome parks at the bottom of the ramp, Holly says: “De Niro gave himself a Mohawk. That could be it.”

“What are you talking about?” Hodges asks as he heaves himself out of the back seat. A man in khaki Carhartts has come into the open door to meet them.

“In Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro played a crazy guy named Travis Bickle,” Holly explains as the three of them hurry toward the custodian. “When he decided to assassinate the politician, he shaved his head so he could get close without being recognized. Except for the middle, that is, which is called a Mohawk. Brady Hartsfield probably didn’t do that, it’d make him look too weird.”

Hodges remembers the leftover hair in the bathroom sink. It was not the bright (and probably tinted) color of the dead woman’s hair. Holly may be nuts, but he thinks she’s right about this; Hartsfield has gone skinhead. Yet Hodges doesn’t see how even that could have been enough, because—

The head custodian steps to meet them. “What’s it about?”

Hodges takes out his ID and flashes it briefly, his thumb once more strategically placed. “Detective Bill Hodges. What’s your name, sir?”

“Jamie Gallison.” His eyes flick to Jerome and Holly.

“I’m his partner,” Holly says.

“I’m his trainee,” Jerome says.

The roadies are watching. Some have hurriedly snuffed smokes that may contain something a bit stronger than tobacco. Through the open door, Hodges can see work-lights illuminating a storage area loaded with props and swatches of canvas scenery.

“Mr. Gallison, we’ve got a serious problem,” Hodges says. “I need you to get Larry Windom down here, right away.”

“Don’t do that, Bill.” Even in his growing distress, he realizes it’s the first time Holly has called him by his first name.

He ignores her. “Sir, I need you to call him on your cell.”

Gallison shakes his head. “The security guys don’t carry cell phones when they’re on duty, because every time we have one of these big shows—big kid shows, I mean, it’s different with adults—the circuits jam up. The security guys carry—”

Holly is twitching Hodges’s arm. “Don’t do it. You’ll spook him and he’ll set it off. I know he will.”

“She could be right,” Jerome says, and then (perhaps recalling his trainee status) adds, “Sir.”

Gallison is looking at them with alarm. “Spook who? Set off what?”

Hodges remains fixed on the custodian. “They carry what? Walkies? Radios?”

“Radios, yuh. They have…” He pulls his earlobe. “You know, things that look like hearie-aids. Like the FBI and Secret Service wear. What’s going on here? Tell me it’s not a bomb.” And, not liking what he sees on Hodges’s pale and sweating face: “Christ, is it?”

Hodges walks past him into the cavernous storage area. Beyond the attic-like profusion of props, flats, and music stands, there’s a carpentry shop and a costume shop. The music is louder than ever, and he’s started to have trouble breathing. The pain is creeping down his left arm, and his chest feels too heavy, but his head is clear.

Brady has either gone bald or mowed it short and dyed what’s left. He may have added makeup to darken his skin, or colored contacts, or glasses. But even with all that, he’d still be a single man at a concert filled with young girls. After the heads-up he gave Windom, Hartsfield still would have attracted notice and suspicion. And there’s the explosive. Holly and Jerome know about that, but Hodges knows more. There were also steel ball bearings, probably a shitload. Even if he wasn’t collared at the door, how could Hartsfield have gotten all that inside? Is the security here really that bad?

Gallison grabs his left arm, and when he shakes it, Hodges feels the pain all the way up to his temples. “I’ll go myself. Grab the first security guy I see and have him radio for Windom to come down here and talk to you.”

“No,” Hodges says. “You will not do that, sir.”

Holly Gibney is the only one of them seeing clearly. Mr. Mercedes is in. He’s got a bomb, and it’s only by the grace of God that he hasn’t triggered it already. It’s too late for the police and too late for MAC Security. It’s also too late for him.

But.

Hodges sits down on an empty crate. “Jerome. Holly. Get with me.”

They do. Jerome is white-eyed, barely holding back panic. Holly is pale but outwardly calm.

“Going bald wouldn’t have been enough. He had to make himself look harmless. I might know how he did that, and if I’m right, I know his location.”

“Where?” Jerome asks. “Tell us. We’ll get him. We will.”

“It won’t be easy. He’s going to be on red alert right now, always checking his personal perimeter. And he knows you, Jerome. You’ve bought ice cream from that damn Mr. Tastey truck. You told me so.”

“Bill, he’s sold ice cream to thousands of people.”

“Sure, but how many black people on the West Side?”

Jerome is silent, and now he’s the one biting his lips.

“How big a bomb?” Gallison asks. “Maybe I should pull the fire alarm?”

“Only if you want to get a whole shitload of people killed,” Hodges says. It’s becoming progressively difficult to talk. “The minute he senses danger, he’ll blow whatever he’s got. Do you want that?”

Gallison doesn’t reply, and Hodges turns back to the two unlikely associates God—or some whimsical fate—has ordained should be with him tonight.

“We can’t take a chance on you, Jerome, and we certainly can’t take a chance on me. He was stalking me long before I even knew he was alive.”

“I’ll come up from behind,” Jerome says. “Blindside him. In the dark, with nothing but the lights from the stage, he’ll never see me.”

“If he’s where I think he is, your chances of doing that would be fifty-fifty at best. That’s not good enough.”

Hodges turns to the woman with the graying hair and the face of a neurotic teenager. “It’s got to be you, Holly. By now he’ll have his finger on the trigger, and you’re the only one who can get close without being recognized.”

She covers her abused mouth with one hand, but that isn’t enough and she adds the other. Her eyes are huge and wet. God help us, Hodges thinks. It isn’t the first time he has had this thought in relation to Holly Gibney.

“Only if you come with me,” she says through her hands. “Maybe then—”

“I can’t,” Hodges says. “I’m having a heart attack.”

“Oh great,” Gallison moans.

“Mr. Gallison, is there a handicapped area? There must be, right?”

“Sure. Halfway down the auditorium.”

Not only did he get in with his explosives, Hodges thinks, he’s perfectly located to inflict maximum casualties.

He says: “Listen, you two. Don’t make me say this twice.”

35

Thanks to the emcee’s introduction, Brady has relaxed a bit. The carnival crap he saw being offloaded during his reconnaissance trip is either offstage or suspended overhead. The band’s first four or five songs are just warm-ups. Pretty soon the set will roll in either from the sides or drop down from overhead, because the band’s main job, the reason they’re here, is to sell their latest helping of audio shit. When the kids—many of them attending their first pop concert—see those bright blinking lights and the Ferris wheel and the beachy backdrop, they’re going to go out of their teenybop minds. It’s then, right then, that he’ll push the toggle-switch on Thing Two, and ride into the darkness on a golden bubble of all that happiness.

The lead singer, the one with all the hair, is finishing a syrupy ballad on his knees. He holds the last note, head bowed, emoting his faggy ass off. He’s a lousy singer and probably already overdue for a fatal drug overdose, but when he raises his head and blares, “How ya feelin out there?” the audience goes predictably batshit.

Brady looks around, as he has every few seconds—checking his perimeter, just as Hodges said he would—and his eyes fix on a little black girl sitting a couple of rows up to his right.

Do I know her?

“Who are you looking for?” the pretty girl with the stick legs shouts over the intro to the next song. He can barely hear her. She’s grinning at him, and Brady thinks how ridiculous it is for a girl with stick legs to grin at anything. The world has fucked her royally, up the ying-yang and out the wazoo, and how does that deserve even a small smile, let alone such a cheek-stretching moony grin? He thinks, She’s probably stoned.

“Friend of mine!” Brady shouts back.

Thinking, As if I had any.

As if.

36

Gallison leads Holly and Jerome away to… well, to somewhere. Hodges sits on the crate with his head lowered and his hands planted on his thighs. One of the roadies approaches hesitantly and offers to call an ambulance for him. Hodges thanks him but refuses. He doesn’t believe Brady could hear the warble of an approaching ambulance (or anything else) over the din ’Round Here is producing, but he won’t take the chance. Taking chances is what brought them to this pass, with everyone in the Mingo Auditorium, including Jerome’s mother and sister, at risk. He’d rather die than take another chance, and rather hopes he will before he has to explain this shit-coated clusterfuck.

Only… Janey. When he thinks of Janey, laughing and tipping his borrowed fedora at just the right insouciant angle, he knows that if he had it to do over again, he’d likely do it the same way.

Well… most of it. Given a do-over, he might have listened a little more closely to Mrs. Melbourne.

She thinks they walk among us, Bowfinger had said, and the two of them had had a manly chuckle over that, but the joke was on them, wasn’t it? Because Mrs. Melbourne was right. Brady Hartsfield really is an alien, and he was among them all the time, fixing computers and selling ice cream.

Holly and Jerome are gone, Jerome carrying the .38 that belonged to Hodges’s father. Hodges has grave doubts about sending the boy into a crowded auditorium with a loaded gun. Under ordinary circumstances he’s a beautifully levelheaded kid, but he’s not apt to be so levelheaded with his mom and sis in danger. Holly needs to be protected, though. Remember you’re just the backup, Hodges told the boy before Gallison led them away, but Jerome made no acknowledgement. He’s not sure Jerome even heard him.

In any case, Hodges has done all he can do. The only thing left is to sit here, fighting the pain and trying to get his breath and waiting for an explosion he prays will not come.

37

Holly Gibney has been institutionalized twice in her life, once in her teens and once in her twenties. The shrink she saw later on (in her so-called maturity) labeled these enforced vacations breaks with reality, which were not good but still better than psychotic breaks, from which many people never returned. Holly herself had a simpler name for said breaks. They were her total freakouts, as opposed to the state of low to moderate freakout in which she lived her day-to-day life.

The total freakout in her twenties had been caused by her boss at a Cincinnati real estate firm called Frank Mitchell Fine Homes and Estates. Her boss was Frank Mitchell, Jr., a sharp dresser with the face of an intelligent trout. He insisted her work was substandard, that her co-workers loathed her, and the only way she could be assured of remaining with the company would be if he continued to cover for her. Which he would do if she slept with him. Holly didn’t want to sleep with Frank Mitchell, Jr., and she didn’t want to lose her job. If she lost her job, she would lose her apartment, and have to go back home to live with her milquetoast father and overbearing mother. She finally resolved the conflict by coming in early one day and trashing Frank Mitchell, Jr.’s, office. She was found in her own cubicle, curled up in a corner. The tips of her fingers were bloody. She had chewed at them like an animal trying to escape a trap.

The cause of her first total freakout was Mike Sturdevant. He was the one who coined the pestiferous nickname Jibba-Jibba.

In those days, as a high school freshman, Holly had wanted nothing except to scurry from place to place with her books clutched to her newly arrived breasts and her hair screening her acne-spotted face. But even then she had problems that went far beyond acne. Anxiety problems. Depression problems. Insomnia problems.

Worst of all, stimming.

Stimming was short for self-stimulation, which sounded like masturbation but wasn’t. It was compulsive movement, often accompanied by fragments of self-directed dialogue. Biting one’s fingernails and chewing one’s lips were mild forms of stimming. More extravagant stimmers waved their hands, slapped at their chests and cheeks, or did curling movements with their arms, as if lifting invisible weights.

Starting at roughly age eight, Holly began wrapping her arms around her shoulders and shivering all over, muttering to herself and making facial grimaces. This would go on for five or ten seconds, and then she would simply continue with whatever she had been doing—reading, sewing, shooting baskets in the driveway with her father. She was hardly aware that she was doing it unless her mother saw her and told her to stop shaking and making faces, people would think she was having a fit.

Mike Sturdevant was one of those behaviorally stunted males who look back on high school as the great lost golden age of their lives. He was a senior, and—very much like Cam Knowles—a boy of godlike good looks: broad shoulders, narrow hips, long legs, and hair so blond it was a kind of halo. He was on the football team (of course) and dated the head cheerleader (of course). He lived on an entirely different level of the high school hierarchy from Holly Gibney, and under ordinary circumstances, she never would have attracted his notice. But notice her he did, because one day, on her way to the caff, she had one of her stimming episodes.

Mike Sturdevant and several of his football-playing buddies happened to be passing. They stopped to stare at her—this girl who was clutching herself, shivering, and making a face that pulled her mouth down and turned her eyes into slits. A series of small, inarticulate sounds—perhaps words, perhaps not—came squeezing through her clenched teeth.

“What are you gibbering about?” Mike asked her.

Holly relaxed her grip on her shoulders, staring at him in wild surprise. She didn’t know what he was saying; she only knew he was staring at her. All his friends were staring at her. And grinning.

She gaped at him. “What?”

“Gibbering!” Mike shouted. “Jibba-jibba-gibbering!”

The others took it up as she ran toward the cafeteria with her head lowered, bumping into people as she went. From then on, Holly Gibney was known to the student body at Walnut Hills High School as Jibba-Jibba, and so she remained until just after the Christmas break. That was when her mother found her curled up naked in the bathtub, saying that she would never go to Walnut Hills again. If her mother tried to make her, she said, she would kill herself.

Voilà! Total freakout!

When she got better (a little), she went to a different school where things were less stressful (a little less). She never had to see Mike Sturdevant again, but she still has dreams in which she’s running down an endless high school corridor—sometimes dressed only in her underwear—while people laugh at her, and point at her, and call her Jibba-Jibba.

She’s thinking of those dear old high school days as she and Jerome follow the head custodian through the warren of rooms below the Mingo Auditorium. That’s what Brady Hartsfield will look like, she decides, like Mike Sturdevant, only bald. Which she hopes Mike is, wherever he may now reside. Bald… fat… pre-diabetic… afflicted with a nagging wife and ungrateful children…

Jibba-Jibba, she thinks.

Pay you back, she thinks.

Gallison leads them through the carpentry shop and costume shop, past a cluster of dressing rooms, then down a corridor wide enough to transport flats and completed sets. The corridor ends at a freight elevator with the doors standing open. Happy pop music booms down the shaft. The current song is about love and dancing. Nothing Holly can relate to.

“You don’t want the elevator,” Gallison says, “it goes backstage and you can’t get to the auditorium from there without walking right through the band. Listen, is that guy really having a heart attack? Are you guys really cops? You don’t look like cops.” He glances at Jerome. “You’re too young.” Then to Holly, his expression even more doubtful. “And you’re…”

“Too freaky?” Holly supplies.

“I wasn’t going to say that.” Maybe not, but it’s what he’s thinking. Holly knows; a girl once nicknamed Jibba-Jibba always does.

“I’m calling the cops,” Gallison says. “The real cops. And if this is some kind of joke—”

“Do what you need to do,” Jerome says, thinking Why not? Let him call in the National Guard if he wants to. This is going to be over, one way or the other, in the next few minutes. Jerome knows it, and he can see that Holly does, too. The gun Hodges gave him is in his pocket. It feels heavy and weirdly warm. Other than the air rifle he had when he was nine or ten (a birthday present given to him despite his mother’s reservations), he has never carried a gun in his life, and this one feels alive.

Holly points to the left of the elevator. “What about that door?” And when Gallison doesn’t reply immediately: “Help us. Please. Maybe we’re not real cops, maybe you’re right about that, but there really is a man in the audience tonight who’s very dangerous.”

She takes a deep breath and says words she can hardly believe, even though she knows they are true. “Mister, we’re all you’ve got.”

Gallison thinks it over, then says, “The stairs’ll take you to Auditorium Left. It’s a long flight. At the top, there’s two doors. The one on the left goes outside. The one on the right opens on the auditorium, way down by the stage. That close, the music’s apt to bust your eardrums.”

Touching the grip of the pistol in his pocket, Jerome asks, “And exactly where’s the handicapped section?”

38

Brady does know her. He does.

At first he can’t get it, it’s like a word that’s stuck on the tip of your tongue. Then, as the band starts some song about making love on the dancefloor, it comes to him. The house on Teaberry Lane, the one where Hodges’s pet boy lives with his family, a nest of niggers with white names. Except for the dog, that is. He’s named O’dell, a nigger name for sure, and Brady meant to kill him… only he ended up killing his mother instead.

Brady remembers the day the niggerboy came running to the Mr. Tastey truck, his ankles still green from cutting the fat ex-cop’s lawn. And his sister shouting, Get me a chocolate! Pleeeease?

The sister’s name is Barbara, and that’s her, big as life and twice as ugly. She’s sitting two rows up to the right with her friends and a woman who has to be her mother. Jerome isn’t with them, and Brady is savagely glad. Let Jerome live, that’s fine.

But without his sister.

Or his mother.

Let him see what that feels like.

Still looking at Barbara Robinson, his finger creeps beneath Frankie’s picture and finds Thing Two’s toggle-switch. He caresses it through the thin fabric of the tee-shirt the way he was allowed—on a few fortunate occasions only—to caress his mother’s nipples. Onstage, the lead singer of ’Round Here does a split that must just about crush his balls (always supposing he has any) in those tight jeans he’s wearing, then springs to his feet and approaches the edge of the stage. Chicks scream. Chicks reach out as if to touch him, their hands waving, their fingernails—painted in every girlish color of the rainbow—gleaming in the footlights.

“Hey, do you guys like an amusement park?” Cam hollers.

They scream that they do.

“Do you guys like a carnival?”

They scream that they love a carnival.

“Have you ever been kissed on the midway?”

The screams are utterly delirious now. The audience is on its feet again, the roving spotlights once more skimming over the crowd. Brady can no longer see the band, but it doesn’t matter. He already knows what’s coming, because he was there at the load-in.

Lowering his voice to an intimate, amplified murmur, Cam Knowles says, “Well, you’re gonna get that kiss tonight.”

Carnival music starts up—a Korg synthesizer set to play a calliope tune. The stage is suddenly bathed in a swirl of light: orange, blue, red, green, yellow. There’s a gasp of amazement as the midway set starts to descend. Both the carousel and the Ferris wheel are already turning.

“THIS IS THE TITLE TRACK OF OUR NEW ALBUM, AND WE REALLY HOPE YOU ENJOY IT!” Cam bellows, and the other instruments fall in around the synth.

“The desert cries in all directions,” Cam Knowles intones. “Like eternity, you’re my infection.” To Brady he sounds like Jim Morrison after a prefrontal lobotomy. Then he yells jubilantly: “What’ll cure me, guys?”

The audience knows, and roars out the words as the band kicks in full-force.

“BABY, BABY, YOU’VE GOT THE LOVE THAT I NEED… YOU AND I, WE GOT IT BAD… LIKE NOTHIN’ THAT I EVER HAD…”

Brady smiles. It is the beatific smile of a troubled man who at long last finds himself at peace. He glances down at the yellow glow of the ready-lamp, wondering if he will live long enough to see it turn green. Then he looks back at the niggergirl, who is on her feet, clapping and shaking her tail.

Look at me, he thinks. Look at me, Barbara. I want to be the last thing you ever see.

39

Barbara takes her eyes from the wonders onstage long enough to see if the bald man in the wheelchair is having as much fun as she is. He has become, for reasons she doesn’t understand, her man in the wheelchair. Is it because he reminds her of someone? Surely that can’t be, can it? The only crippled person she knows is Dustin Stevens at school, and he’s just a little second-grader. Still, there’s something familiar about the crippled bald man.

This whole evening has been like a dream, and what she sees now also seems dreamlike. At first she thinks the man in the wheelchair is waving to her, but that’s not it. He’s smiling… and he’s giving her the finger. At first she can’t believe it, but that’s it, all right.

There’s a woman approaching him, climbing the aisle stairs two by two, going so fast she’s almost running. And behind her, almost on her heels… maybe all this really is a dream, because it looks like…

“Jerome?” Barbara tugs Tanya’s sleeve to draw her attention away from the stage. “Mom, is that…”

Then everything happens.

40

Holly’s initial thought is that Jerome could have gone first after all, because the bald and bespectacled man in the wheelchair isn’t—for the moment, at least—even looking at the stage. He’s turned away and staring at someone in the center section, and it appears to her that the vile son of a bitch is actually flipping that someone the bird. But it’s too late to change places with Jerome, even though he’s the one with the revolver. The man’s got his hand beneath the framed picture in his lap and she’s terribly afraid that means he’s ready to do it. If so, there are only seconds left.

At least he’s on the aisle, she thinks.

She has no plan, the extent of Holly’s planning usually goes no further than what snack she might prepare to go with her evening movie, but for once her troubled mind is clear, and when she reaches the man they’re looking for, the words that come out of her mouth seem exactly right. Divinely right. She has to bend down and shout to be heard over the driving, amplified beat of the band and the delirious shrieks of the girls in the audience.

“Mike? Mike Sturdevant, is that you?”

Brady turns from his contemplation of Barbara Robinson, startled, and as he does, Holly swings the knotted sock Bill Hodges has given her—his Happy Slapper—with adrenaline-loaded strength. It flies a short hard arc and connects with Brady’s bald head just above the temple. She can’t hear the sound it makes over the combined cacophony of the band and the fans, but she sees a section of skull the size of a small teacup cave in. His hands fly up, the one that was hidden knocking Frankie’s picture to the floor, where the glass shatters. His eyes are sort of looking at her, except now they’re rolled up in their sockets so that only the bottom halves of the irises show.

Next to Brady, the girl with the stick-thin legs is staring at Holly, shocked. So is Barbara Robinson. No one else is paying any attention. They’re on their feet, clapping and swaying and singing along.

“I WANT TO LOVE YOU MY WAY… WE’LL DRIVE THE BEACHSIDE HIGHWAY…”

Brady’s mouth is opening and closing like the mouth of a fish that has just been pulled from a river.

“IT’S GONNA BE A NEW DAY… I’LL GIVE YOU KISSES ON THE MIDWAY!”

Jerome lays a hand on Holly’s shoulder and shouts to be heard. “Holly! What’s he got under his shirt?”

She hears him—he’s so close she can feel his breath puff against her cheek with each word—but it’s like one of those radio transmissions that come wavering in late at night, some DJ or gospel-shouter halfway across the country.

“Here’s a little present from Jibba-Jibba, Mike,” she says, and hits him again in exactly the same place, only even harder, deepening the divot in his skull. The thin skin splits and the blood comes, first in beads and then in a freshet, pouring down his neck to color the top of his blue ’Round Here tee-shirt a muddy purple. This time Brady’s head snaps all the way over onto his right shoulder and he begins to shiver and shuffle his feet. She thinks, Like a dog dreaming about chasing rabbits.

Before Holly can hit him again—and she really really wants to—Jerome grabs her and spins her around. “He’s out, Holly! He’s out! What are you doing?”

“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.