Mr. Mercedes

1

On Monday, two days after Elizabeth Wharton’s death, Hodges is once more seated in DeMasio’s Italian Ristorante. The last time he was here, it was for lunch with his old partner. This time it’s dinner. His companions are Jerome Robinson and Janelle Patterson.

Janey compliments him on his suit, which already fits better even though he’s only lost a few pounds (and the Glock he’s wearing on his hip hardly shows at all). It’s the new hat Jerome likes, a brown fedora Janey bought Hodges on impulse that very day, and presented to him with some ceremony. Because he’s a private detective now, she said, and every private dick should have a fedora he can pull down to one eyebrow.

Jerome tries it on and gives it that exact tilt. “What do you think? Do I look like Bogie?”

“I hate to disappoint you,” Hodges says, “but Bogie was Caucasian.”

“So Caucasian he practically shimmered,” Janey adds.

“Forgot that.” Jerome tosses the hat back to Hodges, who places it under his chair, reminding himself not to forget it when he leaves. Or step on it.

He’s pleased when his two dinner guests take to each other at once. Jerome—an old head on top of a young body, Hodges often thinks—does the right thing as soon as the ice-breaking foolishness of the hat is finished, taking one of Janey’s hands in both of his and telling her he’s sorry for her loss.

“Both of them,” he says. “I know you lost your sister, too. If I lost mine, I’d be the saddest guy on earth. Barb’s a pain, but I love her to death.”

She thanks him with a smile. Because Jerome’s still too young for a legal glass of wine, they all order iced tea. Janey asks him about his college plans, and when Jerome mentions the possibility of Harvard, she rolls her eyes and says, “A Hah-vad man. Oh my Gawd.”

“Massa Hodges goan have to find hisself a new lawnboy!” Jerome exclaims, and Janey laughs so hard she has to spit a bite of shrimp into her napkin. It makes her blush, but Hodges is glad to hear that laugh. Her carefully applied makeup can’t completely hide the pallor of her cheeks, or the dark circles under her eyes.

When he asks her how Aunt Charlotte, Uncle Henry, and Holly the Mumbler are enjoying the big house in Sugar Heights, Janey grabs the sides of her head as if afflicted with a monster headache.

“Aunt Charlotte called six times today. I’m not exaggerating. Six. The first time was to tell me that Holly woke up in the middle of the night, didn’t know where she was, and had a panic attack. Auntie C said she was on the verge of calling an ambulance when Uncle Henry finally got her settled down by talking to her about NASCAR. She’s crazy about stock car racing. Never misses it on TV, I understand. Jeff Gordon is her idol.” Janey shrugs. “Go figure.”

“How old is this Holly?” Jerome asks.

“About my age, but she suffers from a certain amount of… emotional retardation, I guess you’d say.”

Jerome considers this silently, then says: “She probably needs to reconsider Kyle Busch.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

Janey says Aunt Charlotte has also called to marvel over the monthly electrical bill, which must be huge; to confide that the neighbors seem very standoffish; to announce there is an awfully large number of pictures and all that modern art is not to her taste; to point out (although it sounds like another announcement) that if Olivia thought all those lamps were carnival glass, she had almost certainly been taken to the cleaners. The last call, received just before Janey left for the restaurant, had been the most aggravating. Uncle Henry wanted Janey to know, her aunt said, that he had looked into the matter and it still wasn’t too late to change her mind about the cremation. She said the idea made her brother very upset—he called it “a Viking funeral”—and Holly wouldn’t even discuss it, because it gave her the horrors.

“Their Thursday departure is confirmed,” Janey says, “and I’m already counting the minutes.” She squeezes Hodges’s hand, and says, “There’s one bit of good news, though. Auntie C says that Holly was very taken with you.”

Hodges smiles. “Must be my resemblance to Jeff Gordon.”

Janey and Jerome order dessert. Hodges, feeling virtuous, does not. Then, over coffee, he gets down to business. He has brought two folders with him, and hands one to each of his dinner companions.

“All my notes. I’ve organized them as well as I can. I want you to have them in case anything happens to me.”

Janey looks alarmed. “What else has he said to you on that site?”

“Nothing at all,” Hodges says. The lie comes out smoothly and convincingly. “It’s just a precaution.”

“You sure of that?” Jerome asks.

“Absolutely. There’s nothing definitive in the notes, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t made progress. I see a path of investigation that might—I repeat might—take us to this guy. In the meantime, it’s important that you both remain very aware of what’s going on around you at all times.”

“BOLO our asses off,” Janey says.

“Right.” He turns to Jerome. “And what, specifically, are you going to be on the lookout for?”

The reply is quick and sure. “Repeat vehicles, especially those driven by males on the younger side, say between the ages of twenty-five and forty. Although I think forty’s pretty old. Which makes you practically ancient, Bill.”

“Nobody loves a smartass,” Hodges says. “Experience will teach you that in time, young man.”

Elaine, the hostess, drifts over to ask how everything was. They tell her everything was fine, and Hodges asks for more coffee all around.

“Right away,” she says. “You’re looking much better than the last time you were here, Mr. Hodges. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

Hodges doesn’t mind. He feels better than the last time he was here. Lighter than the loss of seven or eight pounds can account for.

When Elaine’s gone and the waiter has poured more coffee, Janey leans over the table with her eyes fixed on his. “What path? Tell us.”

He finds himself thinking of Donald Davis, who has confessed to killing not only his wife but five other women at rest stops along the highways of the Midwest. Soon the handsome Mr. Davis will be in State, where he will no doubt spend the rest of his life.

Hodges has seen it all before.

He’s not so naïve as to believe that every homicide is solved, but more often than not, murder does out. Something (a certain wifely body in a certain abandoned gravel pit, for instance) comes to light. It’s as if there’s a fumble-fingered but powerful universal force at work, always trying to put wrong things right. The detectives assigned to a murder case read reports, interview witnesses, work the phones, study forensic evidence… and wait for that force to do its job. When it does (if it does), a path appears. It often leads straight to the doer, the sort of person Mr. Mercedes refers to in his letters as a perk.

Hodges asks his dinner companions, “What if Olivia Trelawney actually did hear ghosts?”

2

In the parking lot, standing next to the used but serviceable Jeep Wrangler his parents gave him as a seventeenth birthday present, Jerome tells Janey how good it was to meet her, and kisses her cheek. She looks surprised but pleased.

Jerome turns to Hodges. “You all set, Bill? Need anything tomorrow?”

“Just for you to look into that stuff we talked about so you’ll be ready when we check out Olivia’s computer.”

“I’m all over it.”

“Good. And don’t forget to give my best to your dad and mom.”

Jerome grins. “Tell you what, I’ll pass your best on to Dad. As for Mom…” Tyrone Feelgood Delight makes a brief cameo appearance. “I be steppin round dat lady fo’ de nex’ week or so.”

Hodges raises his eyebrows. “Are you in dutch with your mother? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Nah, she’s just grouchy. And I can relate.” Jerome snickers.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, man. There’s a concert at the MAC Thursday night. This dopey boy band called ’Round Here. Barb and her friend Hilda and a couple of their other friends are insane to see them, although they’re as vanilla pudding as can be.”

“How old’s your sister?” Janey asks.

“Nine. Going on ten.”

“Vanilla pudding’s what girls that age like. Take it from a former eleven-year-old who was crazy about the Bay City Rollers.” Jerome looks puzzled, and she laughs. “If you knew who they were, I’d lose all respect for you.”

“Anyway, none of them have ever been to a live show, right? I mean, other than Barney or Sesame Street on Ice or something. So they pestered and pestered—they even pestered me—and finally the moms got together and decided that since it was an early show, the girls could go even if it was a school night, as long as one of them did the chaperone thing. They literally drew straws, and my mom lost.”

He shakes his head. His face is solemn but his eyes are sparkling. “My mom at the MAC with three or four thousand screaming girls between the ages of eight and fourteen. Do I have to explain any more about why I’m keeping out of her way?”

“I bet she has a great time,” Janey says. “She probably screamed for Marvin Gaye or Al Green not so long ago.”

Jerome hops into his Wrangler, gives them a final wave, and pulls out onto Lowbriar. That leaves Hodges and Janey standing beside Hodges’s car, in an almost-summer night. A quarter moon has risen above the underpass that separates the more affluent part of the city from Lowtown.

“He’s a good guy,” Janey says. “You’re lucky to have him.”

“Yeah,” Hodges says. “I am.”

She takes the fedora off his head and puts it on her own, giving it a small but provocative tilt. “What’s next, Detective? Your place?”

“Do you mean what I hope you mean?”

“I don’t want to sleep alone.” She stands on tiptoe to return his hat. “If I must surrender my body to make sure that doesn’t happen, I suppose I must.”

Hodges pushes the button that unlocks his car and says, “Never let it be said I failed to take advantage of a lady in distress.”

“You are no gentleman, sir,” she says, then adds, “Thank God. Let’s go.”

3

It’s better this time because they know each other a little. Anxiety has been replaced by eagerness. When the lovemaking is done, she slips into one of his shirts (it’s so big her breasts disappear completely and the tails hang down to the backs of her knees) and explores his small house. He trails her a bit anxiously.

She renders her verdict after they’ve returned to the bedroom. “Not bad for a bachelor pad. No dirty dishes in the sink, no hair in the bathtub, no porn videos on top of the TV. I even spied a green vegetable or two in the crisper, which earns you bonus points.”

She’s filched two cans of beer from the fridge and touches hers to his.

“I never expected to be here with another woman,” Hodges says. “Except maybe for my daughter. We talk on the phone and email, but Allie hasn’t actually visited in a couple of years.”

“Did she take your ex’s side in the divorce?”

“I suppose she did.” Hodges has never thought about it in exactly those terms. “If so, she was probably right to.”

“You might be too hard on yourself.”

Hodges sips his beer. It tastes pretty good. As he sips again, a thought occurs to him.

“Does Aunt Charlotte have this number, Janey?”

“No way. That’s not the reason I wanted to come here instead of going back to the condo, but I’d be a liar if I said it never crossed my mind.” She looks at him gravely. “Will you come to the memorial service on Wednesday? Say you will. Please. I need a friend.”

“Of course. I’ll be at the viewing on Tuesday as well.”

She looks surprised, but happily so. “That seems above and beyond.”

Not to Hodges, it doesn’t. He’s in full investigative mode now, and attending the funeral of someone involved in a murder case—even peripherally—is standard police procedure. He doesn’t really believe Mr. Mercedes will turn up at either the viewing or the service on Wednesday, but it’s not out of the question. Hodges hasn’t seen today’s paper, but some alert reporter might well have linked Mrs. Wharton and Olivia Trelawney, the daughter who committed suicide after her car was used as a murder weapon. Such a connection is hardly news, but you could say the same about Lindsay Lohan’s adventures with drugs and alcohol. Hodges thinks there might at least have been a sidebar.

“I want to be there,” he says. “What’s the deal with the ashes?”

“The mortician called them the cremains,” she says, and wrinkles her nose the way she does when she mocks his yeah. “Is that gross or what? It sounds like something you’d pour in your coffee. On the upside, I’m pretty sure I won’t have to fight Aunt Charlotte or Uncle Henry for them.”

“No, you won’t have to do that. Is there going to be a reception?”

Janey sighs. “Auntie C insists. So the service at ten, followed by a luncheon at the house in Sugar Heights. While we’re eating catered sandwiches and telling our favorite Elizabeth Wharton stories, the funeral home people will take care of the cremation. I’ll decide what to do with the ashes after the three of them leave on Thursday. They’ll never even have to look at the urn.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Thanks, but I dread the luncheon. Not Mrs. Greene and the rest of Mom’s few old friends, but them. If Aunt Charlotte freaks, Holly’s apt to have a meltdown. You’ll come to lunch, too, won’t you?”

“If you let me reach inside that shirt you’re wearing, I’ll do anything you want.”

“In that case, let me help you with the buttons.”

4

Not many miles from where Kermit William Hodges and Janelle Patterson are lying together in the house on Harper Road, Brady Hartsfield is sitting in his control room. Tonight he’s at his worktable instead of his bank of computers. And doing nothing.

Nearby, lying amid the litter of small tools, bits of wire, and computer components, is the Monday paper, still rolled up inside its thin plastic condom. He brought it in when he got back from Discount Electronix, but only from force of habit. He has no interest in the news. He has other things to think about. How he’s going to get the cop. How he’s going to get into the ’Round Here concert at the MAC wearing his carefully constructed suicide vest. If he really intends to do it, that is. Right now it all seems like an awful lot of work. A long row to hoe. A high mountain to climb. A… a…

But he can’t think of any other similes. Or are those metaphors?

Maybe, he thinks drearily, I just ought to kill myself now and be done with it. Get rid of these awful thoughts. These snapshots from hell.

Snapshots like the one of his mother, for instance, convulsing on the sofa after eating the poisoned meat meant for the Robinson family’s dog. Mom with her eyes bugging out and her pajama shirt covered with puke—how would that picture look in the old family album?

He needs to think, but there’s a hurricane going on in his head, a big bad Category Five Katrina, and everything is flying.

His old Boy Scout sleeping bag is spread out on the basement floor, on top of an air mattress he scrounged from the garage. The air mattress has a slow leak. Brady supposes he ought to replace it if he means to continue sleeping down here for whatever short stretch of life remains to him. And where else can he sleep? He can’t bring himself to use his bed on the second floor, not with his mother lying dead in her own bed just down the hall, maybe already rotting her way into the sheets. He’s turned on her air conditioner and cranked it up to HI COOL, but he’s under no illusions about how well that will work. Or for how long. Nor is sleeping on the living room couch an option. He cleaned it as well as he could, and turned the cushions, but it still smells of her vomit.

No, it has to be down here, in his special place. His control room. Of course the basement has its own unpleasant history; it’s where his little brother died. Only died is a bit of a euphemism, and it’s a bit late for those.

Brady thinks about how he used Frankie’s name when he posted to Olivia Trelawney under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. It was as if Frankie was alive again for a little while. Only when the Trelawney bitch died, Frankie died with her.

Died again.

“I never liked you anyway,” he says, looking toward the foot of the stairs. It is a strangely childish voice, high and treble, but Brady doesn’t notice. “And I had to.” He pauses. “We had to.”

He thinks of his mother, and how beautiful she was in those days.

Those old days.

5

Deborah Ann Hartsfield was one of those rare ex-cheerleaders who, even after bearing children, managed to hang on to the body that had danced and pranced its way along the sidelines under the Friday-night lights: tall, full-figured, honey-haired. During the early years of her marriage, she took no more than a glass of wine with dinner. Why drink to excess when life was good sober? She had her husband, she had her house on the North Side of the city—not exactly a palace, but what starter-home was?—and she had her two boys.

At the time his mother became a widow, Brady was eight and Frankie was three. Frankie was a plain child, and a bit on the slow side. Brady, on the other hand, had good looks and quick wits. Also, what a charmer! She doted on him, and Brady felt the same about her. They spent long Saturday afternoons cuddled together on the couch under a blanket, watching old movies and drinking hot chocolate while Norm puttered in the garage and Frankie crawled around on the carpet, playing with blocks or a little fire truck that he liked so well he had given it a name: Sammy.

Norm Hartsfield was a lineman for Central States Power. He made a good salary pole-climbing, but had his sights trained on bigger things. Perhaps it was those things he was eyeing instead of watching what he was doing that day beside Route 51, or maybe he just lost his balance a little and reached the wrong way in an effort to steady himself. No matter what the reason, the result was lethal. His partner was just reporting that they’d found the outage and repair was almost complete when he heard a crackling sound. That was twenty thousand volts of coal-fired CSP electricity pouring into Norm Hartsfield’s body. The partner looked up just in time to see Norm tumble out of the cherry-picker basket and plunge forty feet to the ground with his left hand melted and the sleeve of his uniform shirt on fire.

Addicted to credit cards, like most middle Americans as the end of the century approached, the Hartsfields had savings of less than two thousand dollars. That was pretty thin, but there was a good insurance policy, and CSP kicked in an additional seventy thousand, trading it for Deborah Ann’s signature on a paper absolving the company of all blame in the matter of Norman Hartsfield’s death. To Deborah Ann, that seemed like a huge bucketful of cash. She paid off the mortgage on the house and bought a new car. Never did it occur to her that some buckets fill but once.

She had been working as a hairdresser when she met Norm, and went back to that trade after his death. Six months or so into her widowhood, she began seeing a man she had met one day at the bank—only a junior executive, she told Brady, but he had what she called prospects. She brought him home. He ruffled Brady’s hair and called him champ. He ruffled Frankie’s hair and called him little champ. Brady didn’t like him (he had big teeth, like a vampire in a scary movie), but he didn’t show his dislike. He had already learned to wear a happy face and keep his feelings to himself.

One night, before taking Deborah Ann out to dinner, the boyfriend told Brady, Your mother’s a charmer and so are you. Brady smiled and said thank you and hoped the boyfriend would get in a car accident and die. As long as his mother wasn’t with him, that was. The boyfriend with the scary teeth had no right to take his father’s place.

That was Brady’s job.

Frankie choked on the apple during The Blues Brothers. It was supposed to be a funny movie. Brady didn’t see what was so funny about it, but his mother and Frankie laughed fit to split. His mother was happy and all dressed up because she was going out with her boyfriend. In a little while the sitter would come in. The sitter was a stupid greedyguts who always looked in the refrigerator to see what was good to eat as soon as Deborah Ann left, bending over so her fat ass stuck out.

There were two snack-bowls on the coffee table; one contained popcorn, the other apple slices dusted with cinnamon. In one part of the movie people sang in church and one of the Blues Brothers did flips all the way up the center aisle. Frankie was sitting on the floor and laughed hard when the fat Blues Brother did his flips. When he drew in breath to laugh some more, he sucked a piece of cinnamon-dusted apple slice down his throat. That made him stop laughing. He began to jerk around and claw at his neck instead.

Brady’s mother screamed and grabbed him in her arms. She squeezed him, trying to make the piece of apple come out. It didn’t. Frankie’s face went red. She reached into his mouth and down his throat, trying to get at the piece of apple. She couldn’t. Frankie started to lose the red color.

“Oh-my-dear-Jesus,” Deborah Ann cried, and ran for the phone. As she picked it up she shouted at Brady, “Don’t just sit there like an asshole! Pound him on the back!”

Brady didn’t like to be shouted at, and his mother had never called him an asshole before, but he pounded Frankie on the back. He pounded hard. The piece of apple slice did not come out. Now Frankie’s face was turning blue. Brady had an idea. He picked Frankie up by his ankles so Frankie’s head hung down and his hair brushed the rug. The apple slice did not come out.

“Stop being a brat, Frankie,” Brady said.

Frankie continued to breathe—sort of, he was making little breezy whistling noises, anyway—almost until the ambulance got there. Then he stopped. The ambulance men came in. They were wearing black clothes with yellow patches on the jackets. They made Brady go into the kitchen, so Brady didn’t see what they did, but his mother screamed and later he saw drops of blood on the carpet.

No apple slice, though.

Then everyone except Brady went away in the ambulance. He sat on the couch and ate popcorn and watched TV. Not The Blues Brothers; The Blues Brothers was stupid, just a bunch of singing and running around. He found a movie about a crazy guy who kidnapped a bunch of kids who were on their schoolbus. That was pretty exciting.

When the fat sitter showed up, Brady said, “Frankie choked on an apple slice. There’s ice cream in the refrigerator. Vanilla Crunch. Have as much as you want.” Maybe, he thought, if she ate enough ice cream, she’d have a heart attack and he could call 911.

Or just let the stupid bitch lay there. That would probably be better. He could watch her.

Deborah Ann finally came home at eleven o’clock. The fat sitter had made Brady go to bed, but he wasn’t asleep, and when he came downstairs in his pj’s, his mother hugged him to her. The fat babysitter asked how Frankie was. The fat babysitter was full of fake concern. The reason Brady knew it was fake was because he wasn’t concerned, so why would the fat babysitter care?

“He’s going to be fine,” Deborah Ann said, with a big smile. Then, when the fat babysitter was gone, she started crying like crazy. She got her wine out of the refrigerator, but instead of pouring it into a glass, she drank straight from the neck of the bottle.

“He might not be,” she told Brady, wiping wine from her chin. “He’s in a coma. Do you know what that is?”

“Sure. Like in a doctor show.”

“That’s right.” She got down on one knee, so they were face-to-face. Having her so close—smelling the perfume she’d put on for the date that never happened—gave him a feeling in his stomach. It was funny but good. He kept looking at the blue stuff on her eyelids. It was weird but good.

“He stopped breathing for a long time before the EMTs could make some room for the air to go down. The doctor at the hospital said that even if he comes out of his coma, there might be brain damage.”

Brady thought Frankie was already brain-damaged—he was awful stupid, carrying around that fire truck all the time—but said nothing. His mother was wearing a blouse that showed the tops of her titties. That gave him a funny feeling in his stomach, too.

“If I tell you something, do you promise never to tell anyone? Not another living soul?”

Brady promised. He was good at keeping secrets.

“It might be better if he does die. Because if he wakes up and he’s brain-damaged, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

Then she clasped him to her and her hair tickled the side of his face and the smell of her perfume was very strong. She said: “Thank God it wasn’t you, honeyboy. Thank God for that.”

Brady hugged her back, pressing his chest against her titties. He had a boner.

Frankie did wake up, and sure enough, he was brain-damaged. He had never been smart (“Takes after his father,” Deborah Ann said once), but compared to the way he was now, he had been a genius in those pre–apple slice days. He had toilet-trained late, not until he was almost three and a half, and now he was back in diapers. His vocabulary had been reduced to no more than a dozen words. Instead of walking he made his way around the house in a limping shuffle. Sometimes he fell abruptly and profoundly asleep, but that was only in the daytime. At night, he had a tendency to wander, and before he started out on these nocturnal safaris, he usually stripped off his Pampers. Sometimes he got into bed with his mother. More often he got in with Brady, who would awake to find the bed soaked and Frankie staring at him with goofy, creepy love.

Frankie had to keep going to the doctor. His breathing was never right. At its best it was a wet wheeze, at its worst, when he had one of his frequent colds, a rattling bark. He could no longer eat solid food; his meals had to be pureed in the blender and he ate them in a highchair. Drinking from a glass was out of the question, so it was back to sippy cups.

The boyfriend from the bank was long gone, and the fat babysitter didn’t last, either. She said she was sorry, but she just couldn’t cope with Frankie the way he was now. For awhile Deborah Ann got a full-time home care lady to come in, but the home care lady ended up getting more money than Deborah Ann made at the beauty shop, so she let the home care lady go and quit her job. Now they were living off savings. She began to drink more, switching from wine to vodka, which she called a more efficient delivery system. Brady would sit with her on the couch, drinking Pepsi. They would watch Frankie crawl around on the carpet with his fire truck in one hand and his blue sippy cup, also filled with Pepsi, in the other.

“It’s shrinking like the icecaps,” Deborah Ann would say, and Brady no longer had to ask her what it was. “And when it’s gone, we’ll be out on the street.”

She went to see a lawyer (in the same strip mall where Brady would years later flick an annoying goofy-boy in the throat) and paid a hundred dollars for a consultation. She took Brady with her. The lawyer’s name was Greensmith. He wore a cheap suit and kept sneaking glances at Deborah Ann’s titties.

“I can tell you what happened,” he said. “Seen it before. That piece of apple left just enough space around his windpipe to let him keep breathing. It’s too bad you reached down his throat, that’s all.”

“I was trying to get it out!” Deborah Ann said indignantly.

“I know, any good mother would do the same, but you pushed it deeper instead, and blocked his windpipe entirely. If one of the EMTs had done that, you’d have a case. Worth a few hundred thousand at least. Maybe a million-five. Seen it before. But it was you. And you told them what you did. Didn’t you?”

Deborah Ann admitted she had.

“Did they intubate him?”

Deborah Ann said they did.

“Okay, that’s your case. They got an airway into him, but in doing so, they pushed that bad apple in even deeper.” He sat back, spread his fingers on his slightly yellowed white shirt, and peeped at Deborah Ann’s titties again, maybe just to make sure they hadn’t slipped out of her bra and run away. “Hence, brain damage.”

“So you’ll take the case?”

“Happy to, if you can pay for the five years it’ll drag through the courts. Because the hospital and their insurance providers will fight you every step of the way. Seen it before.”

“How much?”

Greensmith named a figure, and Deborah Ann left the office, holding Brady’s hand. They sat in her Honda (then new) and she cried. When that part was over, she told him to play the radio while she ran another errand. Brady knew what the other errand entailed: a bottle of efficient delivery system.

She relived her meeting with Greensmith many times over the years, always ending with the same bitter pronouncement: “I paid a hundred dollars I couldn’t afford to a lawyer in a suit from Men’s Wearhouse, and all I found out was I couldn’t afford to fight the big insurance companies and get what was coming to me.”

The year that followed was five years long. There was a life-sucking monster in the house, and the monster’s name was Frankie. Sometimes when he knocked something over or woke Deborah Ann up from a nap, she spanked him. Once she lost it completely and punched him in the side of the head, sending him to the floor in a twitching, eye-rolling daze. She picked him up and hugged him and cried and said she was sorry, but there was only so much a woman could take.

She went into Hair Today as a sub whenever she could. On these occasions she called Brady in sick at school so he could babysit his little brother. Sometimes Brady would catch Frankie reaching for stuff he wasn’t supposed to have (or stuff that belonged to Brady, like his Atari Arcade handheld), and then he would slap Frankie’s hands until Frankie cried. When the wails started, Brady would remind himself that it wasn’t Frankie’s fault, he had brain damage from that damn, no, that fucking apple slice, and he would be overcome by a mixture of guilt, rage, and sorrow. He would take Frankie on his lap and rock him and tell him he was sorry, but there was only so much a man could take. And he was a man, Mom said so: the man of the house. He got good at changing Frankie’s diapers, but when there was poo (no, it was shit, not poo but shit), he would sometimes pinch Frankie’s legs and shout at him to lay still, damn you, lay still. Even if Frankie was laying still. Laying there with Sammy the Fire Truck clutched to his chest and looking up at the ceiling with his big stupid brain-damaged eyes.

That year was full of sometimes.

Sometimes he loved Frankie up and kissed him.

Sometimes he’d shake him and say This is your fault, we’re going to have to live in the street and it’s your fault.

Sometimes, putting Frankie to bed after a day at the beauty parlor, Deborah Ann would see bruises on the boy’s arms and legs. Once on his throat, which was scarred from the tracheotomy the EMTs had performed. She never commented on these.

Sometimes Brady loved Frankie. Sometimes he hated him. Usually he felt both things at the same time, and it gave him headaches.

Sometimes (mostly when she was drunk), Deborah Ann would rail at the train-wreck of her life. “I can’t get assistance from the city, the state, or the goddam federal government, and why? Because we still have too much from the insurance and the settlement, that’s why. Does anyone care that everything’s going out and nothing’s coming in? No. When the money’s gone and we’re living in a homeless shelter on Lowbriar Avenue, then I’ll be eligible for assistance, and isn’t that just ducky.”

Sometimes Brady would look at Frankie and think, You’re in the way. You’re in the way, Frankie, you’re in the fucking goddam shitass waaay.

Sometimes—often—Brady hated the whole fucking goddam shitass world. If there was a God, like the Sunday guys said on TV, wouldn’t He take Frankie up to heaven, so his mother could go back to work fulltime and they wouldn’t have to be out on the street? Or living on Lowbriar Avenue, where his mother said there was nothing but nigger drug addicts with guns? If there was a God, why had He let Frankie choke on that fucking apple slice in the first place? And then letting him wake up brain-damaged afterward, that was going from bad to fucking goddam shitass worse. There was no God. You only had to watch Frankie crawling around the floor with goddam Sammy in one hand, then getting up and limping for awhile before giving that up and crawling again, to know that the idea of God was fucking ridiculous.

Finally Frankie died. It happened fast. In a way it was like running down those people at City Center. There was no forethought, only the looming reality that something had to be done. You could almost call it an accident. Or fate. Brady didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in fate, and sometimes the man of the house had to be fate’s right hand.

His mother was making pancakes for supper. Frankie was playing with Sammy. The basement door was standing open because Deborah Ann had bought two cartons of cheap off-brand toilet paper at Chapter 11 and they kept it down there. The bathrooms needed re-stocking, so she sent Brady down to get some. His hands had been full when he came back up, so he left the basement door open. He thought Mom would shut it, but when he came down from putting the toilet paper in the two upstairs bathrooms, it was still open. Frankie was on the floor, pushing Sammy across the linoleum and making rrr-rrr sounds. He was wearing red pants that bulged with his triple-thick diapers. He was working ever closer to the open door and the steep stairs beyond, but Deborah Ann still made no move to close the door. Nor did she ask Brady, now setting the table, to do it.

“Rrr-rrr,” said Frankie. “Rrr-rrr.”

He pushed the fire truck. Sammy rolled to the edge of the basement doorway, bumped against the jamb, and there he stopped.

Deborah Ann left the stove. She walked over to the basement door. Brady thought she would bend down and hand Frankie’s fire truck back to him, but she didn’t. She kicked it instead. There was a small clacking sound as it tumbled down the steps, all the way to the bottom.

“Oops,” she said. “Sammy faw down go boom.” Her voice was very flat.

Brady walked over. This was interesting.

“Why’d you do that, Mom?”

Deborah Ann put her hands on her hips, the spatula jutting from one of them. She said, “Because I’m just so sick of listening to him make that sound.”

Frankie opened his mouth and began to blat.

“Quit it, Frankie,” Brady said, but Frankie didn’t. What Frankie did was crawl onto the top step and peer down into the darkness.

In that same flat voice Deborah Ann said, “Turn on the light, Brady. So he can see Sammy.”

Brady turned on the light and peered over his blatting brother.

“Yup,” he said. “There he is. Right down at the bottom. See him, Frankie?”

Frankie crawled a little farther, still blatting. He looked down. Brady looked at his mother. Deborah Ann Hartsfield gave the smallest, most imperceptible nod. Brady didn’t think. He simply kicked Frankie’s triple-diapered butt and down Frankie went in a series of clumsy somersaults that made Brady think of the fat Blues Brother flipping his way along the church aisle. On the first somersault Frankie kept on blatting, but the second time around, his head connected with one of the stair risers and the blatting stopped all at once, as if Frankie were a radio and someone had turned him off. That was horrible, but had its funny side. He went over again, legs flying out limply to either side in a Y shape. Then he slammed headfirst into the basement floor.

“Oh my God, Frankie fell!” Deborah Ann cried. She dropped the spatula and ran down the stairs. Brady followed her.

Frankie’s neck was broken, even Brady could tell that, because it was all croggled in the back, but he was still alive. He was breathing in little snorts. Blood was coming out of his nose. More was coming from the side of his head. His eyes moved back and forth, but nothing else did. Poor Frankie. Brady started to cry. His mother was crying, too.

“What should we do?” Brady asked. “What should we do, Mom?”

“Go upstairs and get me a pillow off the sofa.”

He did as she said. When he came back down, Sammy the Fire Truck was lying on Frankie’s chest. “I tried to get him to hold it, but he can’t,” Deborah Ann said.

“Yeah,” Brady said. “He’s prob’ly paralyzed. Poor Frankie.”

Frankie looked up, first at his mother and then his brother. “Brady,” he said.

“It’ll be okay, Frankie,” Brady said, and held out the pillow.

Deborah Ann took it and put it over Frankie’s face. It didn’t take long. Then she sent Brady upstairs again to put the sofa pillow back and get a wet washcloth. “Turn off the stove while you’re up there,” she said. “The pancakes are burning. I can smell them.”

She washed Frankie’s face to get rid of the blood. Brady thought that was very sweet and motherly. Years later he realized she’d also been making sure there would be no threads or fibers from the pillow on Frankie’s face.

When Frankie was clean (although there was still blood in his hair), Brady and his mother sat on the basement steps, looking at him. Deborah Ann had her arm around Brady’s shoulders. “I better call nine-one-one,” she said.

“Okay.”

“He pushed Sammy too hard and Sammy fell downstairs. Then he tried to go after him and lost his balance. I was making the pancakes and you were putting toilet paper in the bathrooms upstairs. You didn’t see anything. When you got down to the basement, he was already dead.”

“Okay.”

“Say it back to me.”

Brady did. He was an A student in school, and good at remembering things.

“No matter what anybody asks you, never say more than that. Don’t add anything, and don’t change anything.”

“Okay, but can I say you were crying?”

She smiled. She kissed his forehead and cheek. Then she kissed him full on the lips. “Yes, honeyboy, you can say that.”

“Will we be all right now?”

“Yes.” There was no doubt in her voice. “We’ll be fine.”

She was right. There were only a few questions about the accident and no hard ones. They had a funeral. It was pretty nice. Frankie was in a Frankie-size coffin, wearing a suit. He didn’t look brain-damaged, just fast asleep. Before they closed the coffin, Brady kissed his brother’s cheek and tucked Sammy the Fire Truck in beside him. There was just enough room.

That night Brady had the first of his really bad headaches. He started thinking Frankie was under his bed, and that made the headache worse. He went down to his mom’s room and got in with her. He didn’t tell her he was scared of Frankie being under his bed, just that his head ached so bad he thought it was going to explode. She hugged him and kissed him and he wriggled against her tight-tight-tight. It felt good to wriggle. It made the headache less. They fell asleep together and the next day it was just the two of them and life was better. Deborah Ann got her old job back, but there were no more boyfriends. She said Brady was the only boyfriend she wanted now. They never talked about Frankie’s accident, but sometimes Brady dreamed about it. He didn’t know if his mother did or not, but she drank plenty of vodka, so much she eventually lost her job again. That was all right, though, because by then he was old enough to go to work. He didn’t miss going to college, either.

College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.

6

Brady comes out of these memories—a reverie so deep it’s like hypnosis—to discover he’s got a lapful of shredded plastic. At first he doesn’t know where it came from. Then he looks at the newspaper lying on his worktable and understands he tore apart the bag it was in with his fingernails while he was thinking about Frankie.

He deposits the shreds in the wastebasket, then picks up the paper and stares vacantly at the headlines. Oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico and British Petroleum executives are squalling that they’re doing the best they can and people are being mean to them. Nidal Hasan, the asshole shrink who shot up the Fort Hood Army base in Texas, is going to be arraigned in the next day or two. (You should have had a Mercedes, Nidal-baby, Brady thinks.) Paul McCartney, the ex-Beatle Brady’s mom used to call Old Spaniel Eyes, is getting a medal at the White House. Why is it, Brady sometimes wonders, that people with only a little talent get so much of everything? It’s just another proof that the world is crazy.

Brady decides to take the paper up to the kitchen and read the political columns. Those and a melatonin capsule might be enough to send him off to sleep. Halfway up the stairs he turns the paper over to see what’s below the fold, and freezes. There are photos of two women, side by side. One is Olivia Trelawney. The other one is much older, but the resemblance is unmistakable. Especially those thin bitch-lips.

MOTHER OF OLIVIA TRELAWNEY DIES, the headline reads. Below it: Protested Daughter’s “Unfair Treatment,” Claimed Press Coverage “Destroyed Her Life.”

What follows is a two-paragraph squib, really just an excuse to get last year’s tragedy (If you want to use that word, Brady thinks—rather snidely) back on the front page of a newspaper that’s slowly being strangled to death by the Internet. Readers are referred to the obituary on page twenty-six, and Brady, now sitting at the kitchen table, turns there double-quick. The cloud of dazed gloom that has surrounded him ever since his mother’s death has been swept away in an instant. His mind is ticking over rapidly, ideas coming together, flying apart, then coming together again like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. He’s familiar with this process and knows it will continue until they connect with a click of finality and a clear picture appears.

Brady reads all this carefully, with several related questions in mind. Will the fat ex-cop be at the visitation? At the Wednesday memorial service? At the reception? Brady’s betting on all three. Looking for the perk. Looking for him. Because that’s what cops do.

He remembers the last message he sent to Hodges, the good old Det-Ret. Now he smiles and says it out loud: “You won’t see me coming.”

“Make sure he doesn’t,” Deborah Ann Hartsfield says.

He knows she’s not really there, but he can almost see her sitting across the table from him, wearing a black pencil-skirt and the blue blouse he especially likes, the one that’s so filmy you can see the ghost of her underwear through it.

“Because he’ll be looking for you.”

“I know,” Brady says. “Don’t worry.”

“Of course I’ll worry,” she says. “I have to. You’re my honeyboy.”

He goes back downstairs and gets into his sleeping bag. The leaky air mattress wheezes. The last thing he does before killing the lights via voice-command is to set his iPhone alarm for six-thirty. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.

Except for the tiny red lights marking his sleeping computer equipment, the basement control room is completely dark. From beneath the stairs, his mother speaks.

“I’m waiting for you, honeyboy, but don’t make me wait too long.”

“I’ll be there soon, Mom.” Smiling, Brady closes his eyes. Two minutes later, he’s snoring.

7

Janey doesn’t come out of the bedroom until just after eight the following morning. She’s wearing her pantsuit from the night before. Hodges, still in his boxers, is on the phone. He waves one finger to her, a gesture that says both good morning and give me a minute.

“It’s not a big deal,” he’s saying, “just one of those things that nibble at you. If you could check, I’d really appreciate it.” He listens. “Nah, I don’t want to bother Pete with it, and don’t you, either. He’s got all he can handle with the Donald Davis case.”

He listens some more. Janey perches on the arm of the sofa, points at her watch, and mouths, The viewing! Hodges nods.

“That’s right,” he says into the phone. “Let’s say between the summer of 2007 and the spring of 2009. In the Lake Avenue area downtown, where all those new ritzy condos are.” He winks at Janey. “Thanks, Marlo, you’re a doll. And I promise I’m not going to turn into an uncle, okay?” Listens, nodding. “Okay. Yeah. I have to run, but give my best to Phil and the kids. We’ll get together soon. Lunch. Of course on me. Right. Bye.”

He hangs up.

“You need to get dressed in a hurry,” she says, “then take me back to the apartment so I can put on my damn makeup before we go over to the funeral home. It might also be fun to change my underwear. How fast can you hop into your suit?”

“Fast. And you don’t really need the makeup.”

She rolls her eyes. “Tell that to Aunt Charlotte. She’s totally on crow’s-feet patrol. Now get going, and bring a razor. You can shave at my place.” She re-checks her watch. “I haven’t slept this late in five years.”

He heads for the bedroom to get dressed. She catches him at the door, turns him toward her, puts her palms on his cheeks, and kisses his mouth. “Good sex is the best sleeping pill. I guess I forgot that.”

He lifts her high off her feet in a hug. He doesn’t know how long this will last, but while it does, he means to ride it like a pony.

“And wear your hat,” she says, looking down into his face and smiling. “I did right when I bought it. That hat is you.”

8

They’re too happy with each other and too intent on getting to the funeral parlor ahead of the relatives from hell to BOLO, but even on red alert they almost certainly wouldn’t have seen anything that rang warning bells. There are already more than two dozen cars parked in the little strip mall at the intersection of Harper Road and Hanover Street, and Brady Hartsfield’s mud-colored Subaru is the most unobtrusive of the lot. He has picked his spot carefully so that the fat ex-cop’s street is squarely in the middle of his rearview. If Hodges is going to the old lady’s viewing, he’ll come down the hill and make a left on Hanover.

And here he comes, at just past eight-thirty—quite a bit earlier than Brady expected, since the viewing’s not until ten and the funeral parlor’s only twenty minutes or so away. As the car makes its left turn, Brady is further surprised to see the fat ex-cop is not alone. His passenger is a woman, and although Brady only gets a quick glimpse, it’s enough for him to ID Olivia Trelawney’s sister. She’s got the visor down so she can look into the mirror as she brushes her hair. The obvious deduction is that she spent the night in the fat ex-cop’s bachelor bungalow.

Brady is thunderstruck. Why in God’s name would she do that? Hodges is old, he’s fat, he’s ugly. She can’t really be having sex with him, can she? The idea is beyond belief. Then he thinks of how his mother relieved his worst headaches, and realizes—reluctantly—that when it comes to sex, no pairing is beyond belief. But the idea of Hodges doing it with Olivia Trelawney’s sister is infuriating (not in the least because you could say it was Brady himself who brought them together). Hodges is supposed to be sitting in front of his television and contemplating suicide. He has no right to enjoy a jar of Vaseline and his own right hand, let alone a good-looking blonde.

Brady thinks, She probably took the bed while he slept on the sofa.

This idea at least approaches logic, and makes him feel better. He supposes Hodges could have sex with a good-looking blonde if he really wanted to… but he’d have to pay for it. The whore would probably want a weight surcharge, too, he thinks, and laughs as he starts his car.

Before pulling out, he opens the glove compartment, takes out Thing Two, and places it on the passenger seat. He hasn’t used it since last year, but he’s going to use it today. Probably not at the funeral parlor, though, because he doubts they will be going there right away. It’s too early. Brady thinks they’ll be stopping at the Lake Avenue condo first, and it’s not necessary that he beat them there, only that he be there when they come back out. He knows just how he’s going to do it.

It will be like old times.

At a stoplight downtown, he calls Tones Frobisher at Discount Electronix and tells him he won’t be in today. Probably not all week. Pinching his nostrils shut with his knuckles to give his voice a nasal honk, he informs Tones that he has the flu. He thinks of the ’Round Here concert at the MAC on Thursday night, and the suicide vest, and imagines adding Next week I won’t have the flu, I’ll just be dead. He breaks the connection, drops his phone onto the seat next to Thing Two, and begins laughing. He sees a woman in the next lane, all gussied up for work, staring at him. Brady, now laughing so hard tears are streaming down his cheeks and snot is running out of his nose, gives her the finger.

9

“You were talking to your friend in the Records Department?” Janey asks.

“Marlo Everett, yeah. She’s always in early. Pete Huntley, my old partner, used to swear that was because she never left.”

“What fairy tale did you feed her, pray tell?”

“That some of my neighbors have mentioned a guy trying cars to see if they were unlocked. I said I seemed to recall a spate of car burglaries downtown a couple of years back, the doer never apprehended.”

“Uh-huh, and that thing you said about not turning into an uncle, what was that about?”

“Uncles are retired cops who can’t let go of the job. They call in wanting Marlo to run the plate numbers of cars that strike them as hinky for one reason or another. Or maybe they brace some guy who looks wrong, go all cop-faced on his ass and ask for ID. Then they call in and have Marlo run the name for wants and warrants.”

“Does she mind?”

“Oh, she bitches about it for form’s sake, but I don’t really think so. An old geezer named Kenny Shays called in a six-five a few years ago—that’s suspicious behavior, a new code since 9/11. The guy he pegged wasn’t a terrorist, just a fugitive who killed his whole family in Kansas back in 1987.”

“Wow. Did he get a medal?”

“Nothing but an attaboy, which was all he wanted. He died six months or so later.” Ate his gun is what Kenny Shays did, pulling the trigger before the lung cancer could get traction.

Hodges’s cell phone rings. It’s muffled, because he’s once more left it in the glove compartment. Janey fishes it out and hands it over with a slightly ironic smile.

“Hey, Marlo, that was quick. What did you find out? Anything?” He listens, nodding along with whatever he’s hearing and saying uh-huh and never missing a beat in the heavy flow of morning traffic. He thanks her and hangs up, but when he attempts to hand the Nokia back to Janey, she shakes her head.

“Put it in your pocket. Someone else might call you. I know it’s a strange concept, but try to get your head around it. What did you find out?”

“Starting in September of 2007, there were over a dozen car break-ins downtown. Marlo says there could have been even more, because people who don’t lose anything of value have a tendency not to report car burglaries. Some don’t even realize it happened. The last report was logged in March of 2009, less than three weeks before the City Center Massacre. It was our guy, Janey. I’m sure of it. We’re crossing his backtrail now, and that means we’re getting closer.”

“Good.”

“I think we’re going to find him. If we do, your lawyer—Schron—goes downtown to fill in Pete Huntley. He does the rest. We still see eye to eye on that, don’t we?”

“Yes. But until then, he’s ours. We still see eye to eye on that, right?”

“Absolutely.”

He’s cruising down Lake Avenue now, and there’s a spot right in front of the late Mrs. Wharton’s building. When your luck is running, it’s running. Hodges backs in, wondering how many times Olivia Trelawney used this same spot.

Janey looks anxiously at her watch as Hodges feeds the meter.

“Relax,” he says. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

As she heads for the door, Hodges pushes the LOCK button on his key-fob. He doesn’t think about it, Mr. Mercedes is what he’s thinking about, but habit is habit. He pockets his keys and hurries to catch up with Janey so he can hold the door for her.

He thinks, I’m turning into a sap.

Then he thinks, So what?

10

Five minutes later, a mud-colored Subaru cruises down Lake Avenue. It slows almost to a stop when it comes abreast of Hodges’s Toyota, then Brady puts on his left-turn blinker and pulls into the parking garage across the street.

There are plenty of vacant spots on the first and second levels, but they’re all on the inside and no use to him. He finds what he wants on the nearly deserted third level: a spot on the east side of the garage, directly overlooking Lake Avenue. He parks, walks to the concrete bumper, and peers across the street and down at Hodges’s Toyota. He puts the distance at about sixty yards. With nothing in the way to block the signal, that’s a piece of cake for Thing Two.

With time to kill, Brady gets back into his car, fires up his iPad, and investigates the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex website. Mingo Auditorium is the biggest part of the facility. That figures, Brady thinks, because it’s probably the only part of the MAC that makes money. The city’s symphony orchestra plays there in the winter, plus there are ballets and lectures and arty-farty shit like that, but from June to August the Mingo is almost exclusively dedicated to pop music. According to the website, ’Round Here will be followed by an all-star Summer Cavalcade of Song including the Eagles, Sting, John Mellencamp, Alan Jackson, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen. Sounds good, but Brady thinks the people who bought All-Concert Passes are going to be disappointed. There’s only going to be one show in the Mingo this summer, a short one ending with a punk ditty called “Die, You Useless Motherfuckers.”

The website says the auditorium’s capacity is forty-five hundred.

It also says that the ’Round Here concert is sold out.

Brady calls Shirley Orton at the ice cream factory. Once more pinching his nose shut, he tells her she better put Rudy Stanhope on alert for later in the week. He says he’ll try to get in Thursday or Friday, but she better not count on it; he has the flu.

As he expected, the f-word alarms Shirley. “Don’t you come near this place until you can show me a note from your doctor saying you’re not contagious. You can’t be selling ice cream to kids if you’ve got the flu.”

“I dno,” Brady says through his pinched nostrils. “I’be sorry, Shirley. I thing I got id fromb by mother. I had to put her to bed.” That hits his funnybone and his lips begin to twitch.

“Well, you take care of yourse—”

“I hab to go,” he says, and breaks the connection just before another gust of hysterical laughter sweeps through him. Yes, he had to put his mother to bed. And yes, it was the flu. Not the Swine Flu or the Bird Flu, but a new strain called Gopher Flu. Brady howls and pounds the dashboard of his Subaru. He pounds so hard he hurts his hand, and that makes him laugh harder still.

This fit goes on until his stomach aches and he feels a little like puking. It has just begun to ease off when he sees the lobby door of the condo across the street open.

Brady snatches up Thing Two and slides the on switch. The ready-lamp glows yellow. He raises the short stub of the antenna. He gets out of his car, not laughing now, and creeps to the concrete bumper again, being careful to stay in the shadow of the nearest support pillar. He puts his thumb on the toggle-switch and angles Thing Two down—but not at the Toyota. He’s aiming at Hodges, who is rummaging in his pants pocket. The blonde is next to him, wearing the same pantsuit she had on earlier, but with different shoes and purse.

Hodges brings out his keys.

Brady pushes Thing Two’s toggle-switch, and the yellow ready-lamp turns operational green. The lights of Hodges’s car flash. At the same instant, the green light on Thing Two gives a single quick blink. It has caught the Toyota’s PKE code and stored it, just as it caught the code of Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes.

Brady used Thing Two for almost two years, stealing PKEs and unlocking cars so he could toss them for valuables and cash. The income from these ventures was uneven, but the thrill never faded. His first thought on finding the spare key in the glove compartment of Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes (it was in a plastic bag along with her owner’s manual and registration) was to steal the car and joyride it all the way across the city. Bang it up a little just for the hell of it. Maybe slice the upholstery. But some instinct had told him to leave everything just as it was. That the Mercedes might have a larger role to play. And so it had proved.

Brady hops into his car and puts Thing Two back in his own glove compartment. He’s very satisfied with his morning’s work, but the morning isn’t over. Hodges and Olivia’s sister will be going to a visitation. Brady has his own visitation to make. The MAC will be open by now, and he wants a look around. See what they have for security. Check out where the cameras are mounted.

Brady thinks, I’ll find a way in. I’m on a roll.

Also, he’ll need to go online and score a ticket to the concert Thursday night. Busy, busy, busy.

He begins to whistle.

11

Hodges and Janey Patterson step into the Eternal Rest parlor of the Soames Funeral Home at quarter to ten, and thanks to her insistence on hurrying, they’re the first arrivals. The top half of the coffin is open. The bottom half is swaddled in a blue silk swag. Elizabeth Wharton is wearing a white dress sprigged with blue florets that match the swag. Her eyes are closed. Her cheeks are rosy.

Janey hurries down an aisle between two ranks of folding chairs, looks briefly at her mother, then hurries back. Her lips are trembling.

“Uncle Henry can call cremation pagan if he wants to, but this open-coffin shit is the real pagan rite. She doesn’t look like my mother, she looks like a stuffed exhibit.”

“Then why—”

“It was the trade-off I made to shut Uncle Henry up about the cremation. God help us if he looks under the swag and sees the coffin’s pressed cardboard painted gray to look like metal. So it’ll… you know…”

“I know,” Hodges says, and gives her a one-armed hug.

The deceased woman’s friends trickle in, led by Althea Greene, Wharton’s nurse, and Mrs. Harris, who was her housekeeper. At twenty past ten or so (fashionably late, Hodges thinks), Aunt Charlotte arrives on her brother’s arm. Uncle Henry leads her down the aisle, looks briefly at the corpse, then stands back. Aunt Charlotte stares fixedly into the upturned face, then bends and kisses the dead lips. In a barely audible voice she says, “Oh, sis, oh, sis.” For the first time since he met her, Hodges feels something for her other than irritation.

There is some milling, some quiet talk, a few low outbursts of laughter. Janey makes the rounds, speaking to everyone (there aren’t more than a dozen, all of the sort Hodges’s daughter calls “goldie-oldies”), doing her due diligence. Uncle Henry joins her, and on the one occasion when Janey falters—she’s trying to comfort Mrs. Greene—he puts an arm around her shoulders. Hodges is glad to see it. Blood tells, he thinks. At times like this, it almost always does.

He’s the odd man out here, so he decides to get some air. He stands on the front step for a few moments, scanning the cars parked across the street, looking for a man sitting by himself in one of them. He sees no one, and realizes he hasn’t seen Holly the Mumbler, either.

He ambles around to the visitors’ parking lot and there she is, perched on the back step. She’s dressed in a singularly unbecoming shin-length brown dress. Her hair is put up in unbecoming clumps at the sides of her head. To Hodges she looks like Princess Leia after a year on the Karen Carpenter diet.

She sees his shadow on the pavement, gives a jerk, and hides something behind her hand. He comes closer, and the hidden object turns out to be a half-smoked cigarette. She gives him a narrow, worried look. Hodges thinks it’s the look of a dog that’s been beaten too many times with a newspaper for piddling under the kitchen table.

“Don’t tell my mother. She thinks I quit.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Hodges says, thinking that Holly is surely too old to worry about Mommy’s disapproval of what is probably her only bad habit. “Can I share your step?”

“Shouldn’t you be inside with Janey?” But she moves over to make room.

“Just taking a breather. With the exception of Janey herself, I don’t know any of those people.”

She looks him over with the bald curiosity of a child. “Are you and my cousin lovers?”

He’s embarrassed, not by the question but by the perverse fact that it makes him feel like laughing. He sort of wishes he’d just left her to smoke her illicit cigarette. “Well,” he says, “we’re good friends. Maybe we should leave it at that.”

She shrugs and shoots smoke from her nostrils. “It’s all right with me. I think a woman should have lovers if she wants them. I don’t, myself. Men don’t interest me. Not that I’m a lesbian. Don’t get that idea. I write poetry.”

“Yeah? Do you?”

“Yes.” And with no pause, as if it’s all the same thing: “My mother doesn’t like Janey.”

“Really?”

“She doesn’t think Janey should have gotten all that money from Olivia. She says it isn’t fair. It probably isn’t, but I don’t care, myself.”

She’s biting her lips in a way that gives Hodges an unsettling sense of déjà vu, and it takes only a second to realize why: Olivia Trelawney did the same thing during her police interviews. Blood tells. It almost always does.

“You haven’t been inside,” he says.

“No, and I’m not going, and she can’t make me. I’ve never seen a dead person, and I’m not going to start now. It would give me nightmares.”

She kills her cigarette on the side of the step, not rubbing it but plunging it out, stabbing it until the sparks fly and the filter splits. Her face is as pale as milk glass, she’s started to quiver (her knees are almost literally knocking), and if she doesn’t stop chewing her lower lip, it’s going to split open.

“This is the worst part,” she says, and she’s not mumbling now. In fact, if her voice doesn’t stop rising it will soon be a scream. “This is the worst part, this is the worst part, this is the worst part!”

He puts an arm around her vibrating shoulders. For a moment the vibration grows to a whole-body shake. He fully expects her to flee (perhaps lingering just long enough to call him a masher and slap his face). Then the shaking subsides and she actually puts her head on his shoulder. She’s breathing rapidly.

“You’re right,” he says. “This is the worst part. Tomorrow will be better.”

“Will the coffin be closed?”

“Yeah.” He’ll tell Janey it will have to be, unless she wants her cuz sitting out here with the hearses again.

Holly looks at him out of her naked face. She doesn’t have a damn thing going for her, Hodges thinks, not a single scrap of wit, not a single wile. He will come to regret this misperception, but for now he finds himself once more musing on Olivia Trelawney. How the press treated her and how the cops treated her. Including him.

“Do you promise it’ll be closed?”

“Yes.”

“Double promise?”

“Pinky swear, if you want.” Then, still thinking of Olivia and the computer-poison Mr. Mercedes fed her: “Are you taking your medication, Holly?”

Her eyes widen. “How do you know I take Lexapro? Did she tell you?”

“Nobody told me. Nobody had to. I used to be a detective.” He tightens the arm around her shoulders a little and gives her a small, friendly shake. “Now answer my question.”

“It’s in my purse. I haven’t taken it today, because…” She gives a small, shrill giggle. “Because it makes me have to pee.”

“If I get a glass of water, will you take it now?”

“Yes. For you.” Again that naked stare, the look of a small child sizing up an adult. “I like you. You’re a good guy. Janey’s lucky. I’ve never been lucky in my life. I’ve never even had a boyfriend.”

“I’ll get you some water,” Hodges says, and stands up. At the corner of the building, he looks back. She’s trying to light another cigarette, but it’s hard going because the shakes are back. She’s holding her disposable Bic in both hands, like a shooter on the police gun range.

Inside, Janey asks where he’s been. He tells her, and asks if the coffin can be closed at the memorial service the following day. “I think it’s the only way you’ll get her inside,” he says.

Janey looks at her aunt, now at the center of a group of elderly women, all of them talking animatedly. “That bitch hasn’t even noticed Holly’s not in here,” she says. “You know what, I just decided the coffin’s not even going to be here tomorrow. I’ll have the funeral director stash it in the back, and if Auntie C doesn’t like it, she can go spit. Tell Holly that, okay?”

The discreetly hovering funeral director shows Hodges into the next room, where drinks and snacks have been arranged. He gets a bottle of Dasani water and takes it out to the parking lot. He passes on Janey’s message and sits with Holly until she takes one of her little white happy-caps. When it’s down, she smiles at him. “I really do like you.”

And, using that splendid, police-trained capacity for telling the convincing lie, Hodges replies warmly, “I like you too, Holly.”

12

The Midwest Culture and Arts Complex, aka the MAC, is called “the Louvre of the Midwest” by the newspaper and the local Chamber of Commerce (the residents of this midwestern city call it “the Loovah”). The facility covers six acres of prime downtown real estate and is dominated by a circular building that looks to Brady like the giant UFO that shows up at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is Mingo Auditorium.

He wanders around back to the loading area, which is as busy as an anthill on a summer day. Trucks bustle to and fro, and workers are unloading all sorts of stuff, including—weird but true—what looks like sections of a Ferris wheel. There are also flats (he thinks that’s what they’re called) showing a starry night sky and a white sand beach with couples walking hand-in-hand at the edge of the water. The workers, he notes, are all wearing ID badges around their necks or clipped to their shirts. Not good.

There’s a security booth guarding the entrance to the loading area, and that’s not good, either, but Brady wanders over anyway, thinking No risk, no reward. There are two guards. One is inside, noshing a bagel as he monitors half a dozen video screens. The other steps out to intercept Brady. He’s wearing sunglasses. Brady can see himself reflected in the lenses, with a big old gosh-this-is-interesting smile on his face.

“Help you, sir?”

“I was just wondering what’s going on,” Brady says. He points. “That looks like a Ferris wheel!”

“Big concert here Thursday night,” the guard says. “The band’s flogging their new album. Kisses on the Midway, I think it’s called.”

“Boy, they really go all out, don’t they?” Brady marvels.

The guard snorts. “The less they can sing, the bigger the set. You know what? When we had Tony Bennett here last September, it was just him. Didn’t even have a band. The City Symphony backed him up. That was a show. No screaming kids. Actual music. What a concept, huh?”

“I don’t suppose I could go over for a peek. Maybe snap a picture with my cell phone?”

“Nope.” The guard is looking him over too closely. Brady doesn’t like that. “In fact, you’re not supposed to be here at all. So…”

“Gotcha, gotcha,” Brady says, widening his smile. Time to go. There’s nothing here for him, anyway; if they have two guys on duty now, there’s apt to be half a dozen on Thursday night. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.”

“No problem.”

Brady gives him a thumbs-up. The security goon returns it, but stands in the doorway of the security booth, watching him walk away.

He strolls along the edge of a vast and nearly empty parking lot that will be filled to capacity on the night of the ’Round Here show. His smile is gone. He’s musing on the numbfuck ragheads who ran a pair of jetliners into the World Trade Center nine years before. He thinks (without the slightest trace of irony), They spoiled it for the rest of us.

A five-minute trudge takes him to the bank of doors where concertgoers will enter on Thursday night. He has to pay a five-dollar “suggested donation fee” to get in. The lobby is an echoing vault currently filled with art-lovers and student groups. Straight ahead is the gift shop. To the left is the corridor leading to the Mingo Auditorium. It’s as wide as a two-lane highway. In the middle of it is a chrome stand with a sign reading NO BAGS NO BOXES NO BACKPACKS.

Also no metal detectors. It’s possible they haven’t been set up yet, but Brady’s pretty sure they won’t be used at all. There are going to be over four thousand concertgoers pushing to get in, and metal detectors booping and beeping all over the place would create a nightmarish traffic jam. There will be mucho security guards, though, all of them just as suspicious and officious as the sunglasses-wearing ass-munch out back. A man in a quilted vest on a warm June evening would attract their attention at once. In fact, any man without a pigtailed teenybop daughter in tow would be apt to attract attention.

Would you step over here for a minute, sir?

Of course he could blow the vest right then and there and scrag a hundred or more, but that isn’t what he wants. What he wants is to go home, search the Web, find out the name of ’Round Here’s biggest song, and flick the switch halfway through it, when the little chickie-boos are screaming their very loudest and going out of their little chickie-boo minds.

But the obstacles are formidable.

Standing there in the lobby amid the guidebook-toting retirees and junior high school mouth-breathers, Brady thinks, I wish Frankie was alive. If he was, I’d take him to the show. He’d be just stupid enough to like it. I’d even let him bring Sammy the Fire Truck. The thought fills him with the deep and completely authentic sadness that often comes to him when he thinks about Frankie.

Maybe I ought to just kill the fat ex-cop, and myself, and then call it a career.

Rubbing at his temples, where one of his headaches has begun to gather (and now there’s no Mom to ease it), Brady wanders across the lobby and into the Harlow Floyd Art Gallery, where a large hanging banner announces that JUNE IS MANET MONTH!

He doesn’t know exactly who Manet was, probably another old frog painter like van Gogh, but some of the pictures are great. He doesn’t care much for the still-lifes (why in God’s name would you want to spend time painting a melon?), but some of the other ones are possessed of an almost feral violence. One shows a dead matador. Brady looks at it for nearly five minutes with his hands clasped behind him, ignoring the people who jostle by or peer over his shoulder for a look. The matador isn’t mangled or anything, but the blood oozing from beneath his left shoulder looks more real than the blood in all the violent movies Brady has ever seen, and he’s seen plenty. It calms him and clears him and when he finally walks on, he thinks: There has to be a way to do this.

On the spur of the moment he hooks into the gift shop and buys a bunch of ’Round Here shit. When he comes out ten minutes later, carrying a bag with I HAD A MAC ATTACK printed on the side, he again glances down the hallway leading to the Mingo. Just two nights from now, that hallway will become a cattle-chute filled with laughing, pushing, crazily excited girls, most accompanied by longsuffering parents. From this angle he can see that the far righthand side of the corridor has been sectioned off from the rest by velvet ropes. At the head of this sequestered mini-corridor is another sign on another chrome stand.

Brady reads it and thinks, Oh my God.

Oh… my… God!

13

In the apartment that used to belong to Elizabeth Wharton, Janey kicks off her heels and plunks down on the couch. “Thank God that’s over. Did it last a thousand years, or two?”

“Two,” Hodges says. “You look like a woman who could use a nap.”

“I slept until eight,” she protests, but to Hodges it sounds feeble.

“Still might be a good idea.”

“Considering the fact that I’m having dinner with my relatives tonight in Sugar Heights, you could have something there, shamus. You’re off the hook on dinner, by the way. I think they want to talk about everyone’s favorite musical comedy, Janey’s Millions.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“I’m going to split Ollie’s loot with them. Straight down the middle.”

Hodges starts to laugh. He stops when he realizes she’s serious.

Janey hoists her eyebrows. “Got a problem with that? Maybe think a paltry three and a half mil won’t be enough to see me through to my old age?”

“I guess it would, but… it’s yours. Olivia willed it to you.”

“Yes, and the will’s unbreakable, Lawyer Schron assures me of that, but that still doesn’t mean Ollie was in her right mind when she made it. You know that. You saw her, talked to her.” She’s massaging her feet through her stockings. “Besides, if I give them half, I get to watch how they divvy it up. Think of the amusement value.”

“Sure you don’t want me to come with you tonight?”

“Not tonight but definitely tomorrow. That I can’t do alone.”

“I’ll pick you up at quarter past nine. Unless you want to spend another night at my place, that is.”

“Tempting, but no. Tonight is strictly earmarked for family fun. There’s one other thing before you take off. Very important.” She rummages in her purse for a notepad and a pen. She writes, then tears off a page and holds it out to him. Hodges sees two groups of numbers.

Janey says, “The first one opens the gates to the house in Sugar Hill. The second kills the burglar alarm. When you and your friend Jerome are working on Ollie’s computer Thursday morning, I’ll be taking Aunt Charlotte, Holly, and Uncle Henry to the airport. If the guy rigged her computer the way you think he did… and the program’s still there… I don’t think I could stand it.” She’s looking at him pleadingly. “Do you get that? Say you do.”

“I get it,” Hodges says. He kneels beside her like a man getting ready to propose in one of the romantic novels his ex-wife used to like. Part of him feels absurd. Mostly he doesn’t.

“Janey,” he says.

She looks at him, trying to smile, not quite making it.

“I’m sorry. For everything. So, so sorry.” It isn’t just her he’s thinking of, or her late sister, who was so troubled and troublesome. He’s thinking of the ones who were lost at City Center, especially the woman and her baby.

When he was promoted to detective, his mentor was a guy named Frank Sledge. Hodges thought of him as an old guy, but back then Sledge was fifteen years younger than Hodges is now. Don’t you ever let me hear you call them the vics, Sledge told him. That shit’s strictly for assholes and burnouts. Remember their names. Call them by their names.

The Crays, he thinks. They were the Crays. Janice and Patricia.

Janey hugs him. Her breath tickles his ear when she speaks, giving him goosebumps and half a hardon. “I’m going back to California when this is finished. I can’t stay here. I think the world of you, Bill, and if I stayed here I could probably fall in love with you, but I’m not going to do that. I need to make a fresh start.”

“I know.” Hodges pulls away and holds her by the shoulders so he can look her in the face again. It’s a beautiful face, but today she’s looking her age. “It’s all right.”

She dives into her purse again, this time for Kleenex. After she’s dried her eyes, she says, “You made a conquest today.”

“A…?” Then he gets it. “Holly.”

“She thinks you’re wonderful. She told me so.”

“She reminds me of Olivia. Talking to her feels like a second chance.”

“To do the right thing?”

“Yeah.”

Janey wrinkles her nose at him and grins. “Yeah.”

14

Brady goes shopping that afternoon. He takes the late Deborah Ann Hartsfield’s Honda, because it’s a hatchback. Still, one of the items barely fits in the rear. He thinks of stopping at Speedy Postal on his way home and checking for the Gopher-Go he ordered under his Ralph Jones alias, but all that seems like a thousand years ago now, and really, what would be the point? That part of his life is over. Soon the rest will be, too, and what a relief.

He leans the largest of his purchases against the garage wall. Then he goes into the house, and after a brief pause in the kitchen to sniff at the air (no whiff of decay, at least not yet), he goes down to his control room. He speaks the magic word that powers up his row of computers, but only out of habit. He has no urge to slip beneath Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, because he has nothing more to say to the fat ex-cop. That part of his life is also over. He looks at his watch, sees that it’s three-thirty in the afternoon, and calculates that the fat ex-cop now has roughly twenty hours to live.

If you really are fucking her, Detective Hodges, Brady thinks, you better get your end wet while you’ve still got an end.

He unlocks the padlock on the closet door and steps into the dry and faintly oily odor of homemade plastique. He regards the shoeboxes full of explosive and chooses the one that held the Mephisto walking shoes he’s now wearing—a Christmas present from his mother just last year. From the next shelf up he grabs the shoebox filled with cell phones. He takes one of them and the box of boom-clay over to the table in the middle of the room and goes to work, putting the phone in the box and rigging it to a simple detonator powered by double-A batteries. He turns the phone on to make sure it works, then turns it off again. The chance of someone dialing this disposable’s number by mistake and blowing his control room sky-high is small, but why risk it? The chances of his mother finding that poisoned meat and cooking it for her lunch were also small, and look how that turned out.

No, this baby is going to stay off until ten-twenty tomorrow morning. That’s when Brady will stroll into the parking lot behind the Soames Funeral Home. If there’s anyone back there, Brady will say he thought he could cut through the lot to the next street over, where there’s a bus stop (which happens to be true; he checked it on MapQuest). But he doesn’t expect anyone. They’ll all be inside at the memorial service, bawling up a storm.

He’ll use Thing Two to unlock the fat ex-cop’s car and put the shoebox on the floor behind the driver’s seat. He’ll lock the Toyota again and return to his own car. To wait. To watch him go past. To let him reach the next intersection, where Brady can be sure that he, Brady, will be relatively safe from flying debris. Then…

“Ka-pow,” Brady says. “They’ll need another shoebox to bury him in.”

That’s pretty funny, and he’s laughing as he goes back to the closet to get his suicide vest. He’ll spend the rest of the afternoon disassembling it. Brady doesn’t need the vest anymore.

He has a better idea.

15

Wednesday, June 2, 2010, is warm and cloudless. It may still be spring according to the calendar, and the local schools may still be in session, but those things don’t change the fact that this is a perfect summer day in the heartland of America.

Bill Hodges, suited up but as yet blessedly tieless, is in his study, going over a list of car burglaries Marlo Everett sent him by fax. He has printed out a map of the city, and puts a red dot at each burglary location. He sees shoeleather in his future, maybe a lot of it if Olivia’s computer doesn’t pan out, but it’s just possible that some of the burglary victims will mention seeing a similar vehicle. Because Mr. Mercedes had to watch the owners of his target vehicles. Hodges is sure of it. He had to make sure they were gone before he used his gadget to unlock their cars.

He watched them the way he was watching me, Hodges thinks.

This kicks something over in his mind—a brief spark of association that’s bright but gone before he can see what it’s illuminating. That’s okay; if there’s really something there, it will come back. In the meantime, he keeps on checking addresses and making red dots. He has twenty minutes before he has to noose on his tie and go after Janey.

Brady Hartsfield is in his control room. No headache today, and his thoughts, so often muddled, are as clear as the various Wild Bunch screensavers on his computers. He has removed the blocks of plastic explosive from his suicide vest, disconnecting them carefully from the detonator wires. Some of the blocks have gone into a bright red seat cushion printed with the saucy slogan ASS PARKING. He has slipped two more, re-molded into cylinders with detonator wires attached, down the throat of a bright blue Urinesta peebag. With that accomplished, he carefully attaches a stick-on decal to the peebag. He bought it, along with a souvenir tee-shirt, in the MAC gift shop yesterday. The sticker says ’ROUND HERE FANBOY #1. He checks his watch. Almost nine. The fat ex-cop now has an hour and a half to live. Maybe a little less.

Hodges’s old partner Pete Huntley is in one of the interrogation rooms, not because he has anyone to question but because it’s away from the morning hustle and flow of the squadroom. He has notes to go over. He’s holding a press conference at ten, to talk about the latest dark revelations Donald Davis has made, and he doesn’t want to screw anything up. The City Center killer—Mr. Mercedes—is the furthest thing from his mind.

In Lowtown, behind a certain pawnshop, guns are being bought and sold by people who believe they are not being watched.

Jerome Robinson is at his computer, listening to audio clips available at a website called Sounds Good to Me. He listens to a woman laughing hysterically. He listens to a man whistling “Danny Boy.” He listens to a man gargling and a woman apparently in the throes of an orgasm. Eventually he finds the clip he wants. The title is simple: CRYING BABY.

On the floor below, Jerome’s sister Barbara comes bursting into the kitchen, closely followed by Odell. Barbara is wearing a spangly skirt, clunky blue clogs, and a tee-shirt that shows a foxy teenage boy. Below his brilliant smile and careful coif is the legend I LUV CAM 4EVER! She asks her mother if this outfit looks too babyish to wear to the concert. Her mother (perhaps remembering what she wore to her own first concert) smiles and says it’s perfect. Barbara asks if she can wear her mother’s dangly peace-sign earrings. Yes, of course. Lipstick? Well… okay. Eye shadow? No, sorry. Barbara gives a no-harm-in-trying laugh and hugs her mother extravagantly. “I can’t wait until tomorrow night,” she says.

Holly Gibney is in the bathroom of the house in Sugar Heights, wishing she could skip the memorial service, knowing her mother will never let her. If she protests that she doesn’t feel well, her mother’s return serve will be one that goes all the way back to Holly’s childhood: What will people think. And if Holly should protest that it doesn’t matter what people think, they are never going to see any of these people (with the exception of Janey) again in their lives? Her mother would look at her as if Holly were speaking a foreign language. She takes her Lexapro, but her insides knot while she’s brushing her teeth and she vomits it back up. Charlotte calls to ask if she’s almost ready. Holly calls back that she almost is. She flushes the toilet and thinks, At least Janey’s boyfriend will be there. Bill. He’s nice.

Janey Patterson is dressing carefully in her late mother’s condominium apartment: dark hose, black skirt, black jacket over a blouse of deepest midnight blue. She’s thinking of how she told Bill she’d probably fall in love with him if she stayed here. That was a bodacious shading of the truth, because she’s already in love with him. She’s sure a shrink would smile and say it was a daddy thing. If so, Janey would smile right back and tell him that was a load of Freudian bullshit. Her father was a bald accountant who was barely there even when he was there. And one thing you can say about Bill Hodges is that he’s there. It’s what she likes about him. She also likes the hat she bought him. That Philip Marlowe fedora. She checks her watch and sees it’s quarter past nine. He’d better be here soon.

If he’s late, she’ll kill him.

16

He’s not late, and he’s wearing the hat. Janey tells him he looks nice. He tells her she looks better than that. She smiles and kisses him.

“Let’s get this done,” he says.

Janey wrinkles her nose and says, “Yeah.”

They drive to the funeral parlor, where they are once more the first to arrive. Hodges escorts her into the Eternal Rest parlor. She looks around and nods her approval. Programs for the service have been laid out on the seats of the folding chairs. The coffin is gone, replaced by a vaguely altarish table with sprays of spring flowers on it. Brahms, turned down almost too low to hear, is playing through the parlor’s sound system.

“Okay?” Hodges asks.

“It’ll do.” She takes a deep breath and repeats what he said twenty minutes before: “Let’s get this done.”

It’s basically the same bunch as yesterday. Janey meets them at the door. While she shakes hands and gives hugs and says all the right things, Hodges stands nearby, scanning the passing traffic. He sees nothing that raises a red flag, including a certain mud-colored Subaru that trundles by without slowing.

A rental Chevy with a Hertz sticker on the side of the windshield swings around back to the parking lot. Soon Uncle Henry appears, preceded by his gently swinging executive belly. Aunt Charlotte and Holly follow him, Charlotte with one white-gloved hand clamped just above her daughter’s elbow. To Hodges, Auntie C looks like a matron escorting a prisoner—probably a drug addict—into county lockup. Holly is even paler than she was yesterday, if that is possible. She’s wearing the same shapeless brown gunnysack, and has already bitten off most of her lipstick.

She gives Hodges a tremulous smile. Hodges offers his hand, and she seizes it with panicky tightness until Charlotte pulls her into the Hall of the Dead.

A young clergyman, from the church Mrs. Wharton attended until she was too unwell to go out on Sundays, serves as master of ceremonies. He reads the predictable passage from Proverbs, the one about the virtuous woman. Hodges is willing to stipulate that the deceased may have been worth more than rubies, but has his doubts about whether she spent any time working with wool and flax. Still, it’s poetical, and tears are flowing by the time the clergyman is finished. The guy may be young, but he’s smart enough not to try eulogizing someone he hardly knew. Instead of that, he invites those with “precious memories” of the late Elizabeth to come forward. Several do, beginning with Althea Greene, the nurse, and ending with the surviving daughter. Janey is calm and brief and simple.

“I wish we’d had more time,” she finishes.

17

Brady parks around the corner at five past ten and is careful to feed the meter until the green flag with MAX on it pops up. After all, it just took a parking ticket to catch Son of Sam in the end. From the back seat he takes a cloth carry-bag. Printed on the side is KROGER and REUSE ME! SAVE A TREE! Inside is Thing Two, resting on top of the Mephisto shoebox.

He turns the corner and strides briskly past the Soames Funeral Home, just some citizen on a morning errand. His face is calm, but his heart is hammering like a steam-drill. He sees no one outside the funeral parlor, and the doors are shut, but there’s still a possibility the fat ex-cop isn’t with the other mourners. He could be in a back room, watching for suspicious characters. Watching for him, in other words. Brady knows this.

No risk, no reward, honeyboy, his mother murmurs. It’s true. Also, he judges that the risk is minimal. If Hodges is pronging the blond bitch (or hoping to), he won’t leave her side.

Brady does an about-face at the far corner, strolls back, and turns in to the funeral home drive without hesitation. He can hear faint music, some kind of classical shit. He spots Hodges’s Toyota parked against the rear fence, nose-out for a quick getaway once the festivities are over. The old Det-Ret’s last ride, Brady thinks. It’s going to be a short one, pal.

He walks behind the larger of the two hearses, and once it blocks him from the view of anyone looking out the rear windows of the funeral parlor, he takes Thing Two out of the shopping bag and pulls up the antenna. His heart is driving harder than ever. There were times—only a few—when his gadget didn’t work. The green light would flash, but the car’s locks wouldn’t pop. Some random glitch in the program or the microchip.

If it doesn’t work, just slide the shoebox under the car, his mother advises him.

Of course. That would work just as well, or almost as well, but it wouldn’t be so elegant.

He pushes the toggle. The green light flashes. So do the Toyota’s headlights. Success!

He goes to the fat ex-cop’s car as if he has every right to be there. He opens the rear door, takes the shoebox out of the carry-bag, turns on the phone, and puts the box on the floor behind the driver’s seat. He closes the door and starts for the street, forcing himself to walk slowly and steadily.

As he’s rounding the corner of the building, Deborah Ann Hartsfield speaks again. Didn’t you forget something, honeyboy?

He stops. Thinks it over. Then goes back to the corner of the building and points Thing Two’s stub of an antenna at Hodges’s car.

The lights flash as the locks re-engage.

18

After the remembrances and a moment of silent reflection (“to use as you wish”), the clergyman asks the Lord to bless them and keep them and give them peace. Clothes rustle; programs are stowed in purses and jacket pockets. Holly seems fine until she’s halfway up the aisle, but then her knees buckle. Hodges darts forward with surprising speed for a big man and catches her beneath her arms before she can go down. Her eyes roll up and for a moment she’s on the verge of a full-fledged swoon. Then they come back into place and into focus. She sees Hodges and smiles weakly.

“Holly, stop that!” her mother says sternly, as if her daughter has uttered some jocose and inappropriate profanity instead of almost fainting. Hodges thinks what a pleasure it would be to backhand Auntie C right across her thickly powdered chops. Might wake her up, he thinks.

“I’m okay, Mother,” Holly says. Then, to Hodges: “Thank you.”

He says, “Did you eat any breakfast, Holly?”

“She had oatmeal,” Aunt Charlotte announces. “With butter and brown sugar. I made it myself. You’re quite the attention-getter sometimes, aren’t you, Holly?” She turns to Janey. “Please don’t linger, dear. Henry’s useless at things like this, and I can’t hostess all these people on my own.”

Janey takes Hodges’s arm. “I’d never expect you to.”

Aunt Charlotte gives her a pinched smile. Janey’s smile in return is brilliant, and Hodges decides that her decision to turn over half of her inherited loot is equally brilliant. Once that happens, she will never have to see this unpleasant woman again. She won’t even have to take her calls.

The mourners emerge into the sunshine. On the front walk there’s chatter of the wasn’t-it-a-lovely-service sort, and then people begin walking around to the parking lot in back. Uncle Henry and Aunt Charlotte do so with Holly between them. Hodges and Janey follow along. As they reach the back of the mortuary, Holly suddenly slips free of her minders and wheels around to Hodges and Janey.

“Let me ride with you. I want to ride with you.”

Aunt Charlotte, lips thinned almost to nothing, looms up behind her daughter. “I’ve had just about enough of your gasps and vapors for one day, miss.”

Holly ignores her. She seizes one of Hodges’s hands in a grip that’s icy. “Please. Please.”

“It’s fine with me,” Hodges says, “if Janey doesn’t m—”

Aunt Charlotte begins to sob. The sound is unlovely, the hoarse cries of a crow in a cornfield. Hodges remembers her bending over Mrs. Wharton, kissing her cold lips, and a sudden unpleasant possibility comes to him. He misjudged Olivia; he may have misjudged Charlotte Gibney as well. There’s more to people than their surfaces, after all.

“Holly, you don’t even know this man!”

Janey puts a much warmer hand on Hodges’s wrist. “Why don’t you go with Charlotte and Henry, Bill? There’s plenty of room. You can ride in back with Holly.” She shifts her attention to her cousin. “Would that be all right?”

“Yes!” Holly is still gripping Hodges’s hand. “That would be good!”

Janey turns to her uncle. “Okay with you?”

“Sure.” He gives Holly a jovial pat on the shoulder. “The more the merrier.”

“That’s right, give her plenty of attention,” Aunt Charlotte says. “It’s what she likes. Isn’t it, Holly?” She starts for the parking lot without waiting for a reply, heels clacking a Morse code message of outrage.

Hodges looks at Janey. “What about my car?”

“I’ll drive it. Hand over the keys.” And when he does: “There’s just one other thing I need.”

“Yeah?”

She plucks the fedora from his head, puts it on her own, and gives it the correct insouciant dip over her left eyebrow. She wrinkles her nose at him and says, “Yeah.”

19

Brady has parked up the street from the funeral parlor, his heart beating harder than ever. He’s holding a cell phone. The number of the burner attached to the bomb in the Toyota’s back seat is inked on his wrist.

He watches the mourners stand around on the walk. The fat ex-cop is impossible to miss; in his black suit he looks as big as a house. Or a hearse. On his head is a ridiculously old-fashioned hat, the kind you saw cops wearing in black-and-white detective movies from the nineteen-fifties.

People are starting around to the back, and after awhile, Hodges and the blond bitch head that way. Brady supposes the blond bitch will be with him when the car blows. Which will make it a clean sweep—the mother and both daughters. It has the elegance of an equation where all the variables have been solved.

Cars start pulling out, all moving in his direction because that’s the way you go if you’re heading to Sugar Heights. The sun glares on the windshields, which isn’t helpful, but there’s no mistaking the fat ex-cop’s Toyota when it appears at the head of the funeral home driveway, pauses briefly, then turns toward him.

Brady doesn’t even glance at Uncle Henry’s rental Chevy when it passes him. All his attention is focused on the fat ex-cop’s ride. When it goes by, he feels a moment’s disappointment. The blond bitch must have gone with her relatives, because there’s no one in the Toyota but the driver. Brady only gets a glimpse, but even with the sunglare, the fat ex-cop’s stupid hat is unmistakable.

Brady keys in a number. “I said you wouldn’t see me coming. Didn’t I say that, asshole?”

He pushes SEND.

20

As Janey reaches to turn on the radio, a cell phone begins to ring. The last sound she makes on earth—everyone should be so lucky—is a laugh. Idiot, she thinks affectionately, you went and left it again. She reaches for the glove compartment. There’s a second ring.

That’s not coming from the glove compartment, that’s coming from behi—

There’s no sound, at least not that she hears, only the momentary sensation of a strong hand pushing the driver’s seat. Then the world turns white.

21

Holly Gibney, also known as Holly the Mumbler, may have mental problems, but neither the psychotropic drugs she takes nor the cigarettes she smokes on the sneak have slowed her down physically. Uncle Henry slams on the brakes and she bolts from the rental Chevy while the explosion is still reverberating.

Hodges is right behind her, running hard. There’s a stab of pain in his chest and he thinks he might be having a heart attack. Part of him actually hopes for this, but the pain goes away. The pedestrians are behaving as they always do when an act of violence punches a hole in the world they have previously taken for granted. Some drop to the sidewalk and cover their heads. Others are frozen in place, like statues. A few cars stop; most speed up and exit the vicinity immediately. One of these is a mud-colored Subaru.

As Hodges pounds after Janey’s mentally unstable cousin, the last message from Mr. Mercedes beats in his head like a ceremonial drum: I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming. I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming. I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming.

He rounds the corner, skidding on the slick soles of his seldom-worn dress shoes, and almost runs into Holly, who has stopped dead with her shoulders slumped and her purse dangling from one hand. She’s staring at what remains of Hodges’s Toyota. Its body has been blown clean off the axles and is burning furiously in a litter of glass. The back seat lies on its side twenty feet away, its torn upholstery on fire. A man staggers drunkenly across the street, holding his bleeding head. A woman is sitting on the curb outside a card-and-gift shop with a smashed-in show window, and for one wild moment he thinks it’s Janey, but this woman is wearing a green dress and she has gray hair and of course it isn’t Janey, it can’t be Janey.

He thinks, This is my fault. If I’d used my father’s gun two weeks ago, she’d be alive.

There’s still enough cop inside him to push the idea aside (although it doesn’t go easily). A cold shocked clarity flows in to replace it. This is not his fault. It’s the fault of the son of a bitch who planted the bomb. The same son of a bitch who drove a stolen car into a crowd of job-seekers at City Center.

Hodges sees a single black high-heeled shoe lying in a pool of blood, he sees a severed arm in a smoldering sleeve lying in the gutter like someone’s cast-off garbage, and his mind clicks into gear. Uncle Henry and Aunt Charlotte will be here shortly, and that means there isn’t much time.

He seizes Holly by the shoulders and turns her around. Her hair has come loose from its Princess Leia rolls and hangs against her cheeks. Her wide eyes look right through him. His mind—colder than ever—knows she’s no good to him as she is now. He slaps first one cheek, then the other. Not hard slaps, but enough to make her eyelids flutter.

People are screaming. Horns are honking, and a couple of car alarms are blatting. He can smell gasoline, burning rubber, melting plastic.

“Holly. Holly. Listen to me.”

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

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

She nods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Say it, then. Say you’ll help me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s also a phone number.

22

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

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

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

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

“Listening,” Jerome says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerome says, “Give it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

23

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

“Hear what?”

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

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

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

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

“Tell your mum I said hello.”

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

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

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

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

The eyes glare up at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One thing he is sure of: this house is no longer safe. Hodges is probably gaming him about being close, but he might not be. He knows about Thing Two. He knows about the car burglaries. He says he knows other stuff, too. And—

See you soon, mama’s boy.

He has to get out of here. Soon. Something to do first, though.

Brady goes back upstairs and into his mother’s bedroom, barely glancing at the shape under the coverlet. He goes into her bathroom and rummages in the drawers of her vanity until he finds her Lady Schick. Then he goes to work.

24

Hodges is in Interrogation Room 4 again—IR4, his lucky room—but this time he’s on the wrong side of the table, facing Pete Huntley and Pete’s new partner, a stunner with long red hair and eyes of misty gray. The interrogation is collegial, but that doesn’t change the basic facts: his car has been blown up and a woman has been killed. Another fact is that an interrogation is an interrogation.

“Did it have anything to do with the Mercedes Killer?” Pete asks. “What do you think, Billy? I mean, that’s the most likely, wouldn’t you say? Given the vic was Olivia Trelawney’s sister?”

There it is: the vic. The woman he slept with after he’d come to a point in his life where he thought he’d never sleep with any woman again. The woman who made him laugh and gave him comfort, the woman who was his partner in this last investigation as much as Pete Huntley ever was. The woman who wrinkled her nose at him and mocked his yeah.

Don’t you ever let me hear you call them the vics, Frank Sledge told him, back in the old days… but right now he has to take it.

“I don’t see how it can,” he says mildly. “I know how it looks, but sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.”

“How did you—” Isabelle Jaynes begins, then shakes her head. “That’s the wrong question. Why did you meet her? Were you investigating the City Center thing on your own?” Playing the uncle on a grand scale is what she doesn’t say, perhaps in deference to Pete. After all, it’s Pete’s old running buddy they’re questioning, this chunky man in rumpled suit pants and a blood-spotted white shirt, the tie he put on this morning now pulled halfway down his big chest.

“Could I have a drink of water before we get started? I’m still shook up. She was a nice lady.”

Janey was a hell of a lot more than that, but the cold part of his mind, which is—for the time being—keeping the hot part in a cage, tells him this is the right way to go, the route that will lead into the rest of his story the way a narrow entrance ramp leads to a four-lane highway. Pete gets up and goes out. Isabelle says nothing until he gets back, just regards Hodges with those misty gray eyes.

Hodges drinks half the paper cup in a swallow, then says, “Okay. It goes back to that lunch we had at DeMasio’s, Pete. Remember?”

“Sure.”

“I asked you about all the cases we were working—the big ones, I mean—when I retired, but the one I was really interested in was the City Center Massacre. I think you knew that.”

Pete says nothing, but smiles slightly.

“Do you remember me asking if you ever wondered about Mrs. Trelawney? Specifically if she was telling the truth about not having an extra key?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What I was really wondering was if we gave her a fair shake. If we were wearing blinders because of how she was.”

“What do you mean, how she was?” Isabelle asks.

“A pain in the ass. Twitchy and haughty and quick to take offense. To get a little perspective, turn it around a minute and think of all the people who believed Donald Davis when he claimed he was innocent. Why? Because he wasn’t twitchy and haughty and quick to take offense. He could really put that grief-stricken haunted-husband thing across, and he was good-looking. I saw him on Channel Six once, and that pretty blond anchor’s thighs were practically squeezing together.”

“That’s disgusting,” Isabelle says, but she says it with a smile.

“Yeah, but true. He was a charmer. Olivia Trelawney, on the other hand, was an anti-charmer. So I started to wonder if we ever gave her story a fair shot.”

“We did.” Pete says it flatly.

“Maybe we did. Anyway, there I am, retired, with time on my hands. Too much time. And one day—just before I asked you to lunch, Pete—I say to myself, Assume she was telling the truth. If so, where was that second key? And then—this was right after our lunch—I went on the Internet and started to do some research. And do you know what I came across? A techno-fiddle called ‘stealing the peek.’”

“What’s that?” Isabelle asks.

“Oh, man,” Pete says. “You really think some computer genius stole her key-signal? Then just happened to find her spare key stowed in the glove compartment or under the seat? Her spare key that she forgot? That’s pretty far-fetched, Bill. Especially when you add in that the woman’s picture could have been next to Type A in the dictionary.”

Calmly, as if he had not used his jacket to cover the severed arm of a woman he loved not three hours before, Hodges summarizes what Jerome found out about stealing the peek, representing it as his own research. He tells them that he went to the Lake Avenue condo to interview Olivia Trelawney’s mother (“If she was still alive—I didn’t know for sure”) and found Olivia’s sister, Janelle, living there. He leaves out his visit to the mansion in Sugar Heights and his conversation with Radney Peeples, the Vigilant security guard, because that might lead to questions he’d be hard-pressed to answer. They’ll find out in time, but he’s close to Mr. Mercedes now, he knows he is. A little time is all he needs.

He hopes.

“Ms. Patterson told me her mother was in a nursing home about thirty miles from here—Sunny Acres. She offered to go up there with me and make the introduction. So I could ask a few questions.”

“Why would she do that?” Isabelle asks.

“Because she thought we might have jammed her sister up, and that caused her suicide.”

“Bullshit,” Pete says.

“I’m not going to argue with you about it, but you can understand the thinking, right? And the hope of clearing her sister of negligence?”

Pete gestures for him to go on. Hodges does, after finishing his water. He wants to get out of here. Mr. Mercedes could have read Jerome’s message by now. If so, he may run. That would be fine with Hodges. A running man is easier to spot than a hiding man.

“I questioned the old lady and got nothing. All I managed to do was upset her. She had a stroke and died soon after.” He sighs. “Ms. Patterson—Janelle—was heartbroken.”

“Was she also pissed at you?” Isabelle asks.

“No. Because she was for the idea, too. Then, when her mother died, she didn’t know anyone in the city except her mother’s nurse, who’s pretty long in the tooth herself. I’d given her my number, and she called me. She said she needed help, especially with a bunch of relatives flying in that she hardly knew, and I was willing to give it. Janelle wrote the obituary. I made the other arrangements.”

“Why was she in your car when it blew?”

Hodges explains about Holly’s meltdown. He doesn’t mention Janey appropriating his new hat at the last moment, not because it will destabilize his story but because it hurts too much.

“Okay,” Isabelle says. “You meet Olivia Trelawney’s sister, who you like well enough to call by her first name. The sister facilitates a Q-and-A with the mom. Mom strokes out and dies, maybe because reliving it all again got her too excited. The sister is blown up after the funeral—in your car—and you still don’t see a connection to the Mercedes Killer?”

Hodges spreads his hands. “How would this guy know I was asking questions? I didn’t take out an ad in the paper.” He turns to Pete. “I didn’t talk to anyone about it, not even you.”

Pete, clearly still brooding over the idea that their personal feelings about Olivia Trelawney might have colored the investigation, is looking dour. Hodges doesn’t much care, because that’s exactly what happened. “No, you just sounded me out about it at lunch.”

Hodges gives him a big grin. It makes his stomach fold in on itself like origami. “Hey,” he says, “it was my treat, wasn’t it?”

“Who else could have wanted to bomb you to kingdom come?” Isabelle asks. “You on Santa’s naughty list?”

“If I had to guess, I’d put my money on the Abbascia Family. How many of those shitbags did we put away on that gun thing back in ’04, Pete?”

“A dozen or more, but—”

“Yeah, and RICO’d twice as many a year later. We smashed them to pieces, and Fabby the Nose said they’d get us both.”

“Billy, the Abbascias can’t get anyone. Fabrizio is dead, his brother is in a mental asylum where he thinks he’s Napoleon or someone, and the rest are in jail.”

Hodges just gives him the look.

“Okay,” Pete says, “so you never catch all the cockroaches, but it’s still crazy. All due respect, pal, but you’re just a retired flatfoot. Out to pasture.”

“Right. Which means they could go after me without creating a firestorm. You, on the other hand, still have a gold shield pinned to your wallet.”

“The idea is ridiculous,” Isabelle says, and folds her arms beneath her breasts as if to say That ends the matter.

Hodges shrugs. “Somebody tried to blow me up, and I can’t believe the Mercedes Killer somehow got an ESP vibe that I was looking into the Case of the Missing Key. Even if he did, why would he come after me? How could that lead to him?”

“Well, he’s crazy,” Pete says. “How about that for a start?”

“Sure, but I repeat—how would he know?”

“No idea. Listen, Billy, are you holding anything back? Anything at all?”

“No.”

“I think you are,” Isabelle says. She cocks her head. “Hey, you weren’t sleeping with her, were you?”

Hodges shifts his gaze to her. “What do you think, Izzy? Look at me.”

She holds his eyes for a moment, then drops them. Hodges can’t believe how close she just came. Women’s intuition, he thinks, and then, Probably a good thing I haven’t lost any more weight, or put that Just For Men shit in my hair.

“Look, Pete, I want to shake. Go home and have a beer and try to get my head around this.”

“You swear you’re not holding anything back? This is you and me, now.”

Hodges passes up his last chance to come clean without a qualm. “Not a thing.”

Pete tells him to stay in touch; they’ll want him in tomorrow or Friday for a formal statement.

“Not a problem. And Pete? In the immediate future I’d give my car a once-over before driving it, if I were you.”

At the door, Pete puts an arm over Hodges’s shoulders and gives him a hug. “I’m sorry about this,” he says. “Sorry about what happened and about all the questions.”

“It’s okay. You’re doing the job.”

Pete tightens his grip and whispers in Hodges’s ear. “You are holding back. You think I’ve been taking stupid pills?”

For a moment Hodges rethinks his options. Then he remembers Janey saying He’s ours.

He takes Pete by the arms, looks him full in the face, and says, “I’m just as mystified about this as you are. Trust me.”

25

Hodges crosses the Detective Division bullpen, fielding the curious glances and leading questions with a stone face that only breaks once. Cassie Sheen, with whom he worked most often when Pete was on vacation, says, “Look at you. Still alive and uglier than ever.”

He smiles. “If it isn’t Cassie Sheen, the Botox Queen.” He lifts an arm in mock defense when she picks a paperweight up off her desk and brandishes it. It all feels both fake and real at the same time. Like one of those girl-fights on afternoon TV.

In the hall, there’s a line of chairs near the snack and soda machines. Sitting in two of the chairs are Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Henry. Holly isn’t with them, and Hodges instinctively touches the glasses case in his pants pocket. He asks Uncle Henry if he’s feeling better. Uncle Henry says he is, and thanks him. He turns to Aunt Charlotte and asks how she’s doing.

“I’m fine. It’s Holly I’m worried about. I think she blames herself, because she’s the reason… you know.”

Hodges knows. The reason Janey was driving his car. Of course Janey would have been in it anyway, but he doubts if that changes the way Holly feels.

“I wish you’d talk to her. You bonded with her, somehow.” Her eyes take on an unpleasant gleam. “The way you bonded with Janelle. You must have a way about you.”

“I’ll do that,” Hodges says, and he will, but Jerome is going to talk to her first. Assuming the number on the glasses case works, that is. For all he knows, that number rings a landline in… where was it? Cincinnati? Cleveland?

“I hope we’re not supposed to identify her,” Uncle Henry says. In one hand he holds a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He’s hardly touched it, and Hodges isn’t surprised. The police department coffee is notorious. “How can we? She was blown to bits.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Aunt Charlotte says. “They don’t want us to do that. They can’t.”

Hodges says, “If she’s ever been fingerprinted—most people have—they’ll do it that way. They may show you photographs of her clothes, or personal pieces of jewelry.”

“How would we know about her jewelry?” Aunt Charlotte cries. A cop getting a soda turns to look at her. “And I hardly noticed what she was wearing!”

Hodges guesses she priced out every stitch, but doesn’t comment. “They may have other questions.” Some about him. “It shouldn’t take long.”

There’s an elevator, but Hodges chooses the stairs. On the landing one flight down, he leans against the wall, eyes closed, and takes half a dozen big, shuddering breaths. The tears come now. He swipes them away with his sleeve. Aunt Charlotte expressed concern about Holly—a concern Hodges shares—but no sorrow about her blown-to-bits niece. He guesses that Aunt Charlotte’s biggest interest in Janey right now is what happens to all the lovely dosh Janey inherited from her sister.

I hope she left it to a fucking dog hospital, he thinks.

Hodges sits down with an out-of-breath grunt. Using one of the stairs as a makeshift desk, he lays out the sunglasses case and, from his wallet, a creased sheet of notepaper with two sets of numbers on it.

26

“Hello?” The voice is soft, tentative. “Hello, who is this?”

“My name’s Jerome Robinson, ma’am. I believe Bill Hodges said I might call you.”

Silence.

“Ma’am?” Jerome is sitting by his computer, holding his Android almost tightly enough to crack the casing. “Ms. Gibney?”

“I’m here.” It’s almost a sigh. “He said he wants to catch the person who killed my cousin. There was a terrible explosion.”

“I know,” Jerome says. Down the hall, Barb starts playing her new ’Round Here record for the thousandth time. Kisses on the Midway, it’s called. It hasn’t driven him crazy yet, but crazy gets closer with every play.

Meanwhile, the woman on the other end of the line has started to cry.

“Ma’am? Ms. Gibney? I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“I hardly knew her, but she was my cousin, and she was nice to me. So was Mr. Hodges. Do you know what he asked me?”

“No, uh-uh.”

“If I’d eaten breakfast. Wasn’t that considerate?”

“It sure was,” Jerome says. He still can’t believe the lively, vital lady he had dinner with is dead. He remembers how her eyes sparkled when she laughed and how she mocked Bill’s way of saying yeah. Now he’s on the phone with a woman he’s never met, a very odd woman, from the sound of her. Talking to her feels like defusing a bomb. “Ma’am, Bill asked me to come out there.”

“Will he come with you?”

“He can’t right now. He’s got other things he has to do.”

There’s more silence, and then, in a voice so low and timid he can barely hear it, Holly asks, “Are you safe? Because I worry about people, you know. I worry very much.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m safe.”

“I want to help Mr. Hodges. I want to help catch the man who did it. He must be crazy, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Jerome says. Down the hall another song starts and two little girls—Barbara and her friend Hilda—emit joyous shrieks almost high enough to shatter glass. He thinks of three or four thousand Barbs and Hildas all shrieking in unison tomorrow night, and thanks God his mother is pulling that duty.

“You could come, but I don’t know how to let you in,” she says. “My uncle Henry set the burglar alarm when he went out, and I don’t know the code. I think he shut the gate, too.”

“I’ve got all that covered,” Jerome says.

“When will you come?”

“I can be there in half an hour.”

“If you talk to Mr. Hodges, will you tell him something for me?”

“Sure.”

“Tell him I’m sad, too.” She pauses. “And that I’m taking my Lexapro.”

27

Late that Wednesday afternoon, Brady checks in to a gigantic Motel 6 near the airport, using one of his Ralph Jones credit cards. He has a suitcase and a knapsack. In the knapsack is a single change of clothes, which is all he’ll need for the few dozen hours of life that still remain to him. In the suitcase is the ASS PARKING cushion, the Urinesta peebag, a framed picture, several homemade detonator switches (he only expects to need one, but you can never have enough backup), Thing Two, several Glad storage bags filled with ball bearings, and enough homemade explosive to blow both the motel and the adjacent parking lot sky-high. He goes back to his Subaru, pulls out a larger item (with some effort; it barely fits), carries it into his room, and leans it against the wall.

He lies down on his bed. His head feels strange against the pillow. Naked. And sort of sexy, somehow.

He thinks, I’ve had a run of bad luck, but I’ve ridden it out and I’m still standing.

He closes his eyes. Soon he’s snoring.

28

Jerome parks his Wrangler with the nose almost touching the closed gate at 729 Lilac Drive, gets out, and pushes the call button. He has a reason to be here if someone from the Sugar Heights security patrol should stop and query him, but it will only work if the woman inside confirms him, and he’s not sure he can count on that. His earlier conversation with the lady has suggested that she’s got one wheel on the road at most. In any case, he’s not challenged, and after a moment or two of standing there and trying to look as if he belongs—this is one of those occasions when he feels especially black—Holly answers.

“Yes? Who is it?”

“Jerome, Ms. Gibney. Bill Hodges’s friend?”

A pause so long he’s about to push the button again when she says, “You have the gate code?”

“Yes.”

“All right. And if you’re a friend of Mr. Hodges, I guess you can call me Holly.”

He pushes the code and the gate opens. He drives through and watches it close behind him. So far, so good.

Holly is at the front door, peering at him through one of the side windows like a prisoner in a high-security visitation area. She’s wearing a housecoat over pajamas, and her hair is a mess. A brief nightmare scenario crosses Jerome’s mind: she pushes the panic button on the burglar alarm panel (almost certainly right next to where she’s standing), and when the security guys arrive, she accuses him of being a burglar. Or a would-be rapist with a flannel-pajama fetish.

The door is locked. He points to it. For a moment Holly just stands there like a robot with a dead battery. Then she turns the deadbolt. A shrill peeping sound commences when Jerome opens the door and she takes several steps backward, covering her mouth with both hands.

“Don’t let me get in trouble! I don’t want to get in trouble!”

She’s twice as nervous as he is, and this eases Jerome’s mind. He punches the code into the burglar alarm and hits ALL SECURE. The peeping stops.

Holly collapses into an ornately carved chair that looks like it might have cost enough to pay for a year at a good college (although maybe not Harvard), her hair hanging around her face in dank wings. “Oh, this has been the worst day of my life,” she says. “Poor Janey. Poor poor Janey.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But at least it’s not my fault.” She looks up at him with thin and pitiable defiance. “No one can say it was. I didn’t do anything.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Jerome says.

It comes out sounding stilted, but she smiles a little, so maybe it’s okay. “Is Mr. Hodges all right? He’s a very, very, very nice man. Even though my mother doesn’t like him.” She shrugs. “But who does she like?”

“He’s fine,” Jerome says, although he doubts if that’s true.

“You’re black,” she says, looking at him, wide-eyed.

Jerome looks down at his hands. “I am, aren’t I?”

She bursts into peals of shrill laughter. “I’m sorry. That was rude. It’s fine that you’re black.”

“Black is whack,” Jerome says.

“Of course it is. Totally whack.” She stands up, gnaws at her lower lip, then pistons out her hand with an obvious effort of will. “Put it there, Jerome.”

He shakes. Her hand is clammy. It’s like shaking the paw of a small and timid animal.

“We have to hurry. If my mother and Uncle Henry come back and catch you in here, I’m in trouble.”

You? Jerome thinks. What about the black kid?

“The woman who used to live here was also your cousin, right?”

“Yes. Olivia Trelawney. I haven’t seen her since I was in college. She and my mother never got along.” She looks at him solemnly. “I had to drop out of college. I had issues.”

Jerome bets she did. And does. Still, there’s something about her he likes. God knows what. It’s surely not that fingernails-on-a-blackboard laugh.

“Do you know where her computer is?”

“Yes. I’ll show you. Can you be quick?”

I better be, Jerome thinks.

29

The late Olivia Trelawney’s computer is password-protected, which is silly, because when he turns over the keyboard, he finds OTRELAW written there with a Sharpie.

Holly, standing in the doorway and flipping the collar of her housecoat nervously up and down, mutters something he doesn’t catch.

“Huh?”

“I asked what you’re looking for.”

“You’ll know it if I find it.” He opens the finder and types CRYING BABY into the search field. No result. He tries WEEPING INFANT. Nothing. He tries SCREAMING WOMAN. Nothing.

“It could be hidden.” This time he hears her clearly because her voice is right next to his ear. He jumps a little, but Holly doesn’t notice. She’s bent over with her hands on her housecoated knees, staring at Olivia’s monitor. “Try AUDIO FILE.”

That’s a pretty good idea, so he does. But there’s nothing.

“Okay,” she says, “go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES and look at SOUND.”

“Holly, all that does is control the input and output. Stuff like that.”

“Well duh. Try it anyway.” She’s stopped biting her lips.

Jerome does. Under output, the menu lists SOUND STICKS, HEADPHONES, and LOG ME IN SOUND DRIVER. Under input, there’s INTERNAL MICROPHONE and LINE IN. Nothing he didn’t expect.

“Any other ideas?” he asks her.

“Open SOUND EFFECTS. Over there on the left.”

He turns to her. “Hey, you know this stuff, don’t you?”

“I took a computer course. From home. On Skype. It was interesting. Go on, look at SOUND EFFECTS.”

Jerome does, and blinks at what he sees. In addition to FROG, GLASS, PING, POP, and PURR—the usual suspects—there’s an item listed as SPOOKS.

“Never seen that one before.”

“Me, either.” She still won’t look directly at his face, but her affect has changed remarkably otherwise. She pulls up a chair and sits beside him, tucking her lank hair behind her ears. “And I know Mac programs inside and out.”

“Go with your bad self,” Jerome says, and holds up a hand.

Still looking at the screen, Holly slaps him five. “Play it, Sam.”

He grins. “Casablanca.”

“Yes. I’ve seen that movie seventy-three times. I have a Movie Book. I write down everything I see. My mother says that’s OCD.”

“Life is OCD,” Jerome says.

Unsmiling, Holly replies, “Go with your bad self.”

Jerome highlights SPOOKS and bangs the return key. From the stereo sound sticks on either side of Olivia’s computer, a baby begins to wail. Holly is okay with that; she doesn’t clutch Jerome’s shoulder until the woman shrieks, “Why did you let him murder my baby?”

“Fuck!” Jerome cries, and grabs Holly’s hand. He doesn’t even think about it, and she doesn’t draw away. They stare at the computer as if it has grown teeth and bitten them.

There’s a moment of silence, then the baby starts crying again. The woman screams again. The program cycles a third time, then stops.

Holly finally looks directly at him, her eyes so wide they seem in danger of falling out of her head. “Did you know that was going to happen?”

“Jesus, no.” Maybe something, or Bill wouldn’t have sent him here, but that? “Can you find out anything about the program, Holly? Like when it was installed? If you can’t, that’s all ri—”

“Push over.”

Jerome is good with computers, but Holly plays the keyboard like a Steinway. After a few minutes of hunting around, she says, “Looks like it was installed on July first of last year. A whole bunch of stuff was installed that day.”

“It could have been programmed to play at certain times, right? Cycle three times and then quit?”

She gives him an impatient glance. “Of course.”

“Then how come it’s not still playing? I mean, you guys have been staying here. You would have heard it.”

She clicks the mouse like crazy and shows him something else. “I saw this already. It’s a slave program, hidden in her Mail Contacts. I bet Olivia didn’t know it was here. It’s called Looking Glass. You can’t use it to turn on a computer—at least I don’t think so—but if it is on, you can run everything from your own computer. Open files, read emails, look at search histories… or deactivate programs.”

“Like after she was dead,” Jerome says.

“Oough.” Holly grimaces.

“Why would the guy who installed this leave it? Why not erase it completely?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he just forgot. I forget stuff all the time. My mother says I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached to my neck.”

“Yeah, mine says that, too. But who’s he? Who are we talking about?”

She thinks it over. They both do. And after perhaps five seconds, they speak at the same time.

“Her I-T guy,” Jerome says, just as Holly says, “Her geek freak.”

Jerome starts going through the drawers of Olivia’s computer station, looking for a computer-service invoice, a bill stamped PAID, or a business card. There ought to be at least one of those, but there’s nothing. He gets on his knees and crawls into the kneehole under the desk. Nothing there, either.

“Look on the fridge,” he says. “Sometimes people put shit there, under little magnets.”

“There are plenty of magnets,” Holly says, “but nothing on the fridge except for a real estate agent’s card and one from the Vigilant security company. I think Janey must have taken down everything else. Probably threw it away.”

“Is there a safe?”

“Probably, but why would my cousin put her I-T guy’s business card in her safe? It’s not like it’s worth money, or anything.”

“True-dat,” Jerome says.

“If it was here, it would be by her computer. She wouldn’t hide it. I mean, she wrote her password right under her goshdarn keyboard.”

“Pretty dumb,” Jerome says.

“Totally.” Holly suddenly seems to realize how close they are. She gets up and goes back to the doorway. She starts flipping the collar of her housecoat again. “What are you going to do now?”

“I guess I better call Bill.”

He takes out his cell phone, but before he can make the call, she says his name. Jerome looks at her, standing there in the doorway, looking lost in her flappy comfort-clothes.

“There must be, like, a zillion I-T guys in this city,” she says.

Nowhere near that many, but a lot. He knows it and Hodges knows it, too, because it was Jerome who told him.

30

Hodges listens carefully to everything Jerome has to say. He’s pleased by Jerome’s praise of Holly (and hopes Holly will be pleased, too, if she’s listening), but bitterly disappointed that there’s no link to the Computer Jack who worked on Olivia’s machine. Jerome thinks it must be because Janey threw Computer Jack’s business card away. Hodges, who has a mind trained to be suspicious, thinks Mr. Mercedes might have made damned sure Olivia didn’t have a card. Only that doesn’t track. Wouldn’t you ask for one, if the guy did good work? And keep it handy? Unless, that is…

He asks Jerome to put Holly on.

“Hello?” So faint he has to strain to hear her.

“Holly, is there an address book on Olivia’s computer?”

“Just a minute.” He hears faint clicking. When she comes back, her voice is puzzled. “No.”

“Does that strike you as weird?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Could the guy who planted the spook sounds have deleted her address book?”

“Oh, sure. Easy. I’m taking my Lexapro, Mr. Hodges.”

“That’s great, Holly. Can you tell how much Olivia used her computer?”

“Sure.”

“Let me talk to Jerome while you look.”

Jerome comes on and says he’s sorry they haven’t been able to find more.

“No, no, you’ve done great. When you tossed her desk, you didn’t find a physical address book?”

“Uh-uh, but lots of people don’t bother with them anymore—they keep all their contacts on their computers and phones. You know that, right?”

Hodges supposes he should know it, but the world is moving too fast for him these days. He doesn’t even know how to program his DVR.

“Hang on, Holly wants to talk to you again.”

“You and Holly are getting along pretty well, huh?”

“We’re cool. Here she is.”

“Olivia had all kinds of programs and website faves,” Holly says. “She was big on Hulu and Huffpo. And her search history… it looks to me like she spent even more time browsing than I do, and I’m online a lot.”

“Holly, why would a person who really depends on her computer not have a service card handy?”

“Because the guy snuck in and took it after she was dead,” Holly says promptly.

“Maybe, but think of the risk—especially with the neighborhood security service keeping an eye on things. He’d have to know the gate code, the burglar alarm code… and even then he’d need a housekey…” He trails off.

“Mr. Hodges? Are you still there?”

“Yes. And go ahead and call me Bill.”

But she won’t. Maybe she can’t. “Mr. Hodges, is he a master criminal? Like in James Bond?”

“I think just crazy.” And because he’s crazy, the risk might not matter to him. Look at the risk he took at City Center, plowing into that crowd of people.

It still doesn’t ring right.

“Give me Jerome again, will you?”

She does, and Hodges tells him it’s time to get out before Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Henry come back and catch him computer-canoodling with Holly.

“What are you going to do, Bill?”

He looks out at the street, where twilight has started to deepen the colors of the day. It’s close to seven o’clock. “Sleep on it,” he says.

31

Before going to bed, Hodges spends four hours in front of the TV, watching shows that go in his eyes just fine but disintegrate before reaching his brain. He tries to think about nothing, because that’s how you open the door so the right idea can come in. The right idea always arrives as a result of the right connection, and there is a connection waiting to be made; he feels it. Maybe more than one. He will not let Janey into his thoughts. Later, yes, but for now all she can do is jam his gears.

Olivia Trelawney’s computer is the crux of the matter. It was rigged with spook sounds, and the most likely suspect is her I-T guy. So why didn’t she have his card? He could delete her computer address book at long distance—and Hodges is betting he did—but did he break into her house to steal a fucking business card after she was dead?

He gets a call from a newspaper reporter. Then from a Channel Six guy. After the third call from someone in the media, Hodges shuts his phone down. He doesn’t know who spilled his cell number, but he hopes the person was well paid for the info.

Something else keeps coming into his mind, something that has nothing to do with anything: She thinks they walk among us.

A refresher glance through his notes allows him to put his finger on who said that to him: Mr. Bowfinger, the greeting-card writer. He and Bowfinger were sitting in lawn chairs, and Hodges remembers being grateful for the shade. This was while he was doing his canvass, looking for anyone who might have seen a suspicious vehicle cruising the street.

She thinks they walk among us.

Bowfinger was talking about Mrs. Melbourne across the street. Mrs. Melbourne who belongs to an organization of UFO nuts called NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.

Hodges decides it’s just one of those echoes, like a snatch of pop music, that can start resounding in an overstressed brain. He gets undressed and goes to bed and Janey comes, Janey wrinkling her nose and saying yeah, and for the first time since childhood, he actually cries himself to sleep.

He wakes up in the small hours of Thursday morning, takes a leak, starts back to bed, and stops, eyes widening. What he’s been looking for—the connection—is suddenly there, big as life.

You didn’t bother keeping a business card if you didn’t need one.

Say the guy wasn’t an independent, running a little business out of his house, but someone who worked for a company. If that was the case, you could call the company number any time you needed him, because it would be something easy to remember, like 555-9999, or whatever the numbers were that spelled out COMPUTE.

If he worked for a company, he’d make his repair calls in a company car.

Hodges goes back to bed, sure that sleep will elude him this time, but it doesn’t.

He thinks, If he had enough explosive to blow up my car, he must have more.

Then he’s under again.

He dreams about Janey.