Текст книги "Mr. Mercedes"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Криминальные детективы
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
At first Brady is unable to connect this with the fat ex-cop’s hectoring message. Then it comes to him in a baleful burst of inspiration: while he’s in a breast-baring mood, Donnie Davis also means to confess to the City Center Massacre. May have done so already.
Brady whirls around like a dervish – once, twice, three times. His head is splitting. His pulse is thudding in his chest, his neck, his temples. He can even feel it in his gums and tongue.
Did Davis say something about a valet key? Is that what brought this on?
‘There was no valet key,’ Brady says … only how can he be sure of that? What if there was? And if there was … if they hang this on Donald Davis and snatch away Brady Hartsfield’s great triumph … after the risks he took …
He can no longer hold back. He sits down at his Number Three again and writes a message to kermitfrog 19. Just a short one, but his hands are shaking so badly it takes him almost five minutes. He sends it as soon as he’s done, without bothering to read it over.
YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT YOU ASSHOLE. OK the key wasn’t in the ignition but it was no VALET KEY. It was a spare in the glove complartment and how I uynlocked the car IS FOR YOU TO FIGURE OUT FUCKFACE. Donald Davis did not do this crime. I repeat, DONALD DAVIUS DID NOT DO THIS CRIME. If you tell people he did I will kill you altho it wouldn’tr be killing much as washed up as you are.
Signed,
The REAL Mercedes Killer
PS: Your mother was a whore, she took it up the ass & licked cum out of gutters.
Brady shuts off his computer and goes upstairs, leaving his mother to snore on the couch instead of helping her to bed. He takes three aspirin, adds a fourth, and then lies in his own bed, wide-eyed and shaking, until the first streaks of dawn come up in the east. At last he drops off for two hours, sleep that is thin and dream-haunted and unrestful.
16
Hodges is making scrambled eggs when Janey comes into the kitchen on Saturday morning in her white robe, her hair wet from the shower. With it combed back from her face, she looks younger than ever. He thinks again, Forty-four?
‘I looked for bacon, but didn’t see any. Of course it might still be there. My ex claims that the great majority of American men suffer from the disease of Refrigerator Blindness. I don’t know if there’s a help line for that.’
She points at his midsection.
‘Okay,’ he says. And then, because she seems to like it: ‘Yeah.’
‘And by the way, how’s your cholesterol?’
He smiles and says, ‘Toast? It’s whole grain. As you probably know, since you bought it.’
‘One slice. No butter, just a little jam. What are you going to do today?’
‘Not sure yet.’ Although he’s thinking he’d like to check in with Radney Peeples out in Sugar Heights if Radney’s on duty and being Vigilant. And he needs to talk to Jerome about computers. Endless vistas there.
‘Have you checked the Blue Umbrella?’
‘Wanted to make you breakfast first. And me.’ It’s true. He woke up actually wanting to feed his body rather than trying to plug some empty hole in his head. ‘Also, I don’t know your password.’
‘It’s Janey.’
‘My advice? Change it. Actually it’s the advice of the kid who works for me.’
‘Jerome, right?’
‘That’s the one.’
He has scrambled half a dozen eggs and they eat them all, split right down the middle. It has crossed his mind to ask if she had any regrets about last night, but decides the way she’s going through her breakfast answers the question.
With the dishes in the sink, they go on her computer and sit silently for nearly four minutes, reading and re-reading the latest message from merckill.
‘Holy cow,’ she says at last. ‘You wanted to wind him up, and I’d say he’s fully wound. Do you see all the mistakes?’ She points out complartment and uynlocked. ‘Is that part of his – what did you call it? – stylistic masking?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Hodges is looking at wouldn’tr and smiling. He can’t help smiling. The fish is feeling the hook, and it’s sunk deep. It hurts. It burns. ‘I think that’s the kind of typing you do when you’re mad as hell. The last thing he expected was that he’d have a credibility problem. It’s making him crazy.’
‘Er,’ she says.
‘Huh?’
‘Crazier. Send him another message, Bill. Poke him harder. He deserves it.’
‘All right.’ He thinks, then types.
17
When he’s dressed, she walks down the hall with him and treats him to a lingering kiss at the elevator.
‘I still can’t believe last night happened,’ he tells her.
‘Oh, it did. And if you play your cards right, it might happen again.’ She searches his face with those blue eyes of hers. ‘But no promises or long-term commitments, okay? We take it as it comes. A day at a time.’
‘At my age, I take everything that way.’ The elevator doors open. He steps in.
‘Stay in touch, cowboy.’
‘I will.’ The elevator doors start to close. He stops them with his hand. ‘And remember to BOLO, cowgirl.’
She nods solemnly, but he doesn’t miss the twinkle in her eye. ‘Janey will BOLO her ass off.’
‘Keep your cell phone handy, and it might be wise to program 911 on your speed dial.’
He drops his hand. She blows him a kiss. The doors roll shut before he can blow one back.
His car is where he left it, but the meter must have run out before the free parking kicked in, because there’s a ticket stuck under the windshield wiper. He opens the glove compartment, stuffs the ticket inside, and fishes out his phone. He’s good at giving Janey advice that he doesn’t take himself – since he pulled the pin, he’s always forgetting the damned Nokia, which is pretty prehistoric, as cell phones go. These days hardly anyone calls him anyway, but this morning he has three messages, all from Jerome. Numbers two and three – one at nine-forty last night, the other at ten-forty-five – are impatient inquiries about where he is and why he doesn’t call. They are in Jerome’s normal voice. The original message, left at six-thirty yesterday evening, begins in his exuberant Tyrone Feelgood Delight voice.
‘Massah Hodges, where you at? Ah needs to jaw to y’all!’ Then he becomes Jerome again. ‘I think I know how he did it. How he stole the car. Call me.’
Hodges checks his watch and decides Jerome probably won’t be up quite yet, not on Saturday morning. He decides to drive over there, with a stop at his house first to pick up his notes. He turns on the radio, gets Bob Seger singing ‘Old Time Rock and Roll,’ and bellows along: take those old records off the shelf.
18
Once upon a simpler time, before apps, iPads, Samsung Galaxies, and the world of blazing-fast 4G, weekends were the busiest days of the week at Discount Electronix. Now the kids who used to come in to buy CDs are downloading Vampire Weekend from iTunes, while their elders are surfing eBay or watching the TV shows they missed on Hulu.
This Saturday morning the Birch Hill Mall DE is a wasteland.
Tones is down front, trying to sell an old lady an HDTV that’s already an antique. Freddi Linklatter is out back, chain-smoking Marlboro Reds and probably rehearsing her latest gay rights rant. Brady is sitting at one of the computers in the back row, an ancient Vizio that he’s rigged to leave no keystroke tracks, let alone a history. He’s staring at Hodges’s latest message. One eye, his left, has picked up a rapid, irregular tic.
Quit dumping on my mother, okay? 
I think I’m done writing to you, dickwad. Your Fun Quotient is currently hovering around zero, and I have it on good authority that Donald Davis is going to cop to the City Center killings. Which leaves you where? Just living your shitty little unexciting life, I guess. One other thing before I close this charming correspondence. You threatened to kill me. That’s a felony offense, but guess what? I don’t care. Buddy, you are just another chickenshit asshole. The internet is full of them. Want to come to my house (I know you know where I live) and make that threat in person? No? I thought not. Let me close with two words so simple even a thud like you should be able to understand them.
Go away.
Brady’s rage is so great he feels frozen in place. Yet he’s also still burning. He thinks he will stay this way, hunched over the piece-of-shit Vizio ridiculously sale-priced at eighty-seven dollars and eighty-seven cents, until he either dies of frostbite or goes up in flames or somehow does both at the same time.
But when a shadow rises on the wall, Brady finds he can move after all. He clicks away from the fat ex-cop’s message just before Freddi bends over to peer at the screen. ‘What you looking at, Brades? You moved awful fast to hide it, whatever it was.’
‘A National Geographic documentary. It’s called When Lesbians Attack.’
‘Your humor,’ she says, ‘might be exceeded by your sperm count, but I tend to doubt it.’
Tones Frobisher joins them. ‘Got a service call over on Edgemont,’ he says. ‘Which one of you wants it?’
Freddi says, ‘Given a choice between a service call in Hillbilly Heaven and having a wild weasel stuck up my ass, I’d have to pick the weasel.’
‘I’ll take it,’ Brady says. He’s decided he has an errand to run. One that can’t wait.
19
Jerome’s little sis and a couple of her friends are jumping rope in the Robinson driveway when Hodges arrives. All of them are wearing sparkly tees with silkscreens of some boy band on them. He cuts across the lawn, his case-folder in one hand. Barbara comes over long enough to give him a high-five and a dap, then hurries back to grab her end of the rope. Jerome, dressed in shorts and a City College tee-shirt with the sleeves torn off, is sitting on the porch steps and drinking orange juice. Odell is by his side. He tells Hodges his folks are off Krogering, and he’s got babysitting duty until they get back.
‘Not that she really needs a sitter anymore. She’s a lot hipper than our parents think.’
Hodges sits down beside him. ‘You don’t want to take that for granted. Trust me on this, Jerome.’
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
‘Tell me what you came up with first.’
Instead of answering, Jerome points to Hodges’s car, parked at the curb so as not to interfere with the girls’ game. ‘What year is that?’
‘Oh-four. No show-stopper, but it gets good mileage. Want to buy it?’
‘I’ll pass. Did you lock it?’
‘Yeah.’ Even though this is a good neighborhood and he’s sitting right here looking at it. Force of habit.
‘Give me your keys.’
Hodges digs in his pocket and hands them over. Jerome examines the fob and nods. ‘PKE,’ he says. ‘Started to come into use during the nineteen-nineties, first as an accessory but pretty much standard equipment since the turn of the century. Do you know what it stands for?’
As lead detective on the City Center Massacre (and frequent interviewer of Olivia Trelawney), Hodges certainly does. ‘Passive keyless entry.’
‘Right.’ Jerome pushes one of the two buttons on the fob. At the curb, the parking lights of Hodges’s Toyota flash briefly. ‘Now it’s open.’ He pushes the other button. The lights flash again. ‘Now it’s locked. And you’ve got the key.’ He puts it in Hodges’s palm. ‘All safe and sound, right?’
‘Based on this discussion, maybe not.’
‘I know some guys from the college who have a computer club. I’m not going to tell you their names, so don’t ask.’
‘Wouldn’t think of it.’
‘They’re not bad guys, but they know all the bad tricks – hacking, cloning, info-jacking, stuff like that. They tell me that PKE systems are pretty much a license to steal. When you push the button to lock or unlock your car, the fob emits a low-frequency radio signal. A code. If you could hear it, it would sound like the boops and beeps you get when you speed-dial a fax number. With me?’
‘So far, yeah.’
In the driveway the girls chant Sally-in-the-alley while Barbara Robinson darts deftly in and out of the loop, her sturdy brown legs flashing and her pigtails bouncing.
‘My guys tell me that it’s easy to capture that code, if you have the right gadget. You can modify a garage door opener or a TV remote to do it, only with something like that, you have to be really close. Say within twenty yards. But you can also build one that’s more powerful. All the components are available at your friendly neighborhood electronics store. Total cost, about a hundred bucks. Range up to a hundred yards. You watch for the driver to exit the target vehicle. When she pushes the button to lock her car, you push your button. Your gadget captures the signal and stores it. She walks away, and when she’s gone, you push your button again. The car unlocks, and you’re in.’
Hodges looks at his key, then at Jerome. ‘This works?’
‘Yes indeed. My friends say it’s tougher now – the manufacturers have modified the system so that the signal changes every time you push the button – but not impossible. Any system created by the mind of man can be hacked by the mind of man. You feel me?’
Hodges hardly hears him, let alone feels him. He’s thinking about Mr Mercedes before he became Mr Mercedes. He might have purchased one of the gadgets Jerome has just told him about, but it’s just as likely he built it himself. And was Mrs Trelawney’s Mercedes the first car he ever used it on? Unlikely.
I have to check on car robberies downtown, he thinks. Starting in … let’s say 2007 and going right through until early spring of 2009.
He has a friend in records, Marlo Everett, who owes him one. Hodges is confident Marlo will run an unofficial check for him without a lot of questions. And if she comes up with a bunch of reports where the investigating officer concludes that ‘complainant may have forgotten to lock his vehicle,’ he’ll know.
In his heart he knows already.
‘Mr Hodges?’ Jerome is looking at him a little uncertainly.
‘What is it, Jerome?’
‘When you were working on the City Center case, didn’t you check out this PKE thing with the cops who handle auto theft? I mean, they have to know about it. It’s not new. My friends say it’s even got a name: stealing the peek.’
‘We talked to the head mechanic from the Mercedes dealership, and he told us a key was used,’ Hodges says. To his own ears, the reply sounds weak and defensive. Worse: incompetent. What the head mechanic did – what they all did – was assume a key had been used. One left in the ignition by a ditzy lady none of them liked.
Jerome offers a cynical smile that looks odd and out of place on his young face. ‘There’s stuff that people who work at car dealerships don’t talk about, Mr Hodges. They don’t lie, exactly, they just banish it from their minds. Like how airbag deployment can save your life but also drive your glasses into your eyes and blind you. The high rollover rate of some SUVs. Or how easy it is to steal a PKE signal. But the auto theft guys must be hip, right? I mean, they must.’
The dirty truth is Hodges doesn’t know. He should, but he doesn’t. He and Pete were in the field almost constantly, working double shifts and getting maybe five hours of sleep a night. The paperwork piled up. If there was a memo from auto theft, it will probably be in the case files somewhere. He doesn’t dare ask his old partner about it, but realizes he may have to tell Pete everything soon. If he can’t work it out for himself, that is.
In the meantime, Jerome needs to know everything. Because the guy Hodges is dicking with is crazy.
Barbara comes running up, sweaty and out of breath. ‘Jay, can me n Hilda n Tonya watch Regular Show?’
‘Go for it,’ Jerome says.
She throws her arms around him and presses her cheek to his. ‘Will you make us pancakes, my darling brother?’
‘No.’
She quits hugging and stands back. ‘You’re bad. Also lazy.’
‘Why don’t you go down to Zoney’s and get some Eggos?’
‘No money is why.’
Jerome digs into his pocket and hands her a five. This earns him another hug.
‘Am I still bad?’
‘No, you’re good! Best brother ever!’
‘You can’t go without your homegirls,’ Jerome says.
‘And take Odell,’ Hodges says.
Barbara giggles. ‘We always take Odell.’
Hodges watches the girls bop down the sidewalk in their matching tees (talking a mile a minute and trading Odell’s leash back and forth), with a feeling of deep disquiet. He can hardly put the Robinson family in lockdown, but those three girls look so little.
‘Jerome? If somebody tried to mess with them, would Odell—?’
‘Protect them?’ Jerome is grave now. ‘With his life, Mr H. With his life. What’s on your mind?’
‘Can I continue to count on your discretion?’
‘Yassuh!’
‘Okay, I’m going to put a lot on you. But in return, you have to promise to call me Bill from now on.’
Jerome considers. ‘It’ll take some getting used to, but okay.’
Hodges tells him almost everything (he omits where he spent the night), occasionally referring to the notes on his legal pad. By the time he finishes, Barbara and her friends are returning from the GoMart, tossing a box of Eggos back and forth and laughing. They go inside to eat their mid-morning treat in front of the television.
Brady and Jerome sit on the porch steps and talk about ghosts.
20
Edgemont Avenue looks like a war zone, but being south of Lowbriar, at least it’s a mostly white war zone, populated by the descendants of the Kentucky and Tennessee hillfolk who migrated here to work in the factories after World War II. Now the factories are closed, and a large part of the population consists of drug addicts who switched to brown-tar heroin when Oxy got too expensive. Edgemont is lined with bars, pawnshops, and check-cashing joints, all of them shut up tight on this Saturday morning. The only two stores open for business are a Zoney’s and the site of Brady’s service call, Batool’s Bakery.
Brady parks in front, where he can see anybody trying to break into his Cyber Patrol Beetle, and totes his case inside to the good smells. The greaseball behind the counter is arguing with a Visa-waving customer and pointing to a cardboard sign reading CASH ONLY TIL COMPUTER FIX.
Paki Boy’s computer is suffering the dreaded screen freeze. While continuing to monitor his Beetle at thirty-second intervals, Brady plays the Screen Freeze Boogie, which consists of pushing alt, ctrl, and del at the same time. This brings up the machine’s Task Manager, and Brady sees at once that the Explorer program is currently listed as non-responsive.
‘Bad?’ Paki Boy asks anxiously. ‘Please tell me not bad.’
On another day, Brady would string this out, not because guys like Batool tip – they don’t – but to see him sweat a few extra drops of Crisco. Not today. This is just his excuse to get off the floor and go to the mall, and he wants to finish as soon as possible.
‘Nah, gotcha covered, Mr Batool,’ he says. He highlights END TASK and reboots Paki Boy’s PC. A moment later the cash register function is back up, complete with all four credit card icons.
‘You genius!’ Batool cries. For one awful moment, Brady is afraid the perfume-smelling sonofabitch is going to hug him.
21
Brady leaves Hillbilly Heaven and drives north toward the airport. There’s a Home Depot in the Birch Hill Mall where he could almost certainly get what he wants, but he makes the Skyway Shopping Complex his destination instead. What he’s doing is risky, reckless, and unnecessary. He won’t make matters worse by doing it in a store only one corridor over from DE. You don’t shit where you eat.
Brady does his business at Skyway’s Garden World and sees at once that he’s made the right choice. The store is huge, and on this midday late-spring Saturday, it’s crammed with shoppers. In the pesticide aisle, Brady adds two cans of Gopher-Go to a shopping cart already loaded with camouflage items: fertilizer, mulch, seeds, and a short-handled gardening claw. He knows it’s madness to be buying poison in person when he’s already ordered some which will come to his safe mail-drop in another few days, but he can’t wait. Absolutely cannot. He probably won’t be able to actually poison the nigger family’s dog until Monday – and it might even be Tuesday or Wednesday – but he has to be doing something. He needs to feel he’s … how did Shakespeare put it? Taking arms against a sea of troubles.
He stands in line with his shopping cart, telling himself that if the checkout girl (another greaseball, the city is drowning in them) says anything about the Gopher-Go, even something completely innocuous like This stuff really works, he’ll drop the whole thing. Too great a chance of being remembered and identified: Oh yes, he was being the nervous young man with the garden claw and the gopher poison.
He thinks, Maybe I should have worn sunglasses. It’s not like I’d stand out, half the men in here are wearing them.
Too late now. He left his Ray-Bans back at Birch Hill, in his Subaru. All he can do is stand here in the checkout line and tell himself not to sweat. Which is like telling someone not to think of a blue polar bear.
I was noticing him because he was having the sweat, the greaseball checkout girl (a relative of Batool the Baker, for all Brady knows) will tell the police. Also because he was buying the gopher poison. The kind having the strychnine.
For a moment he almost flees, but now there are people behind him as well as ahead of him, and if he breaks from the line, won’t people notice that? Won’t they wonder—
A nudge from behind him. ‘You’re up, buddy.’
Out of options, Brady rolls his cart forward. The cans of Gopher-Go are a screaming yellow in the bottom of his shopping cart; to Brady they seem the very color of insanity, and that’s just as it should be. Being here is insane.
Then a comforting thought comes to him, one that’s as soothing as a cool hand on a fevered brow: Driving into those people at City Center was even more insane … but I got away with it, didn’t I?
Yes, and he gets away with this. The greaseball runs his purchases under the scanner without so much as a glance at him. Nor does she look up when she asks him if it will be cash or credit.
Brady pays cash.
He’s not that insane.
Back in the VW (he’s parked it between two trucks, where its fluorescent green hardly shows at all), he sits behind the wheel, taking deep breaths until his heartbeat is steady again. He thinks about the immediate road ahead, and that calms him even more.
First, Odell. The mutt will die a miserable death, and the fat ex-cop will know it’s his own fault, even if the Robinsons do not. (From a purely scientific standpoint, Brady will be interested to see if the Det-Ret owns up. He thinks Hodges won’t.) Second, the man himself. Brady will give him a few days to marinate in his guilt, and who knows? He may opt for suicide after all. Probably not, though. So Brady will kill him, method yet to be determined. And third …
A grand gesture. Something that will be remembered for a hundred years. The question is, what might that grand gesture be?
Brady keys the ignition and tunes the Beetle’s shitty radio to BAM-100, where every weekend is a rock-block weekend. He catches the end of a ZZ Top block and is about to punch the button for KISS-92 when his hand freezes. Instead of switching the station, he turns the volume up. Fate is speaking to him.
The deejay informs Brady that the hottest boy band in the country is coming to town for one gig only – that’s right, ’Round Here will be playing the MAC next Thursday. ‘The show’s already almost sold out, children, but the BAM-100 Good Guys are holding on to a dozen tickets, and we’ll be giving em out in pairs starting on Monday, so listen for the cue to call in and—’
Brady switches the radio off. His eyes are distant, hazy, contemplative. The MAC is what people in the city call the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex. It takes up a whole city block and has a gigantic auditorium.
He thinks, What a way to go out. Oh my God, what a way that would be.
He wonders what exactly the capacity of the MAC’s Mingo Auditorium might be. Three thousand? Maybe four? He’ll go online tonight and check it out.
22
Hodges grabs lunch at a nearby deli (a salad instead of the loaded burger his stomach is rooting for) and goes home. His pleasant exertions of the previous night have caught up with him, and although he owes Janey a call – they have business at the late Mrs Trelawney’s Sugar Heights home, it seems – he decides that his next move in the investigation will be a short nap. He checks the answering machine in the living room, but the MESSAGE WAITING window shows zero. He peeks beneath Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and finds nothing new from Mr Mercedes. He lies down and sets his internal alarm for an hour. His last thought before closing his eyes is that he left his cell phone in the glove compartment of his Toyota again.
Ought to go get that, he thinks. I gave her both numbers, but she’s new school instead of old school, and that’s the one she’d call first if she needed me.
Then he’s asleep.
It’s the old school phone that wakes him, and when he rolls over to grab it, he sees that his internal alarm, which never let him down during his years as a cop, has apparently decided it is also retired. He’s slept for almost three hours.
‘Hello?’
‘Do you never check your messages, Bill?’ Janey.
It crosses his mind to tell her the battery in his cell phone died, but lying is no way to start a relationship, even one of the day-at-a-time variety. And that’s not the important thing. Her voice is blurry and hoarse, as if she’s been shouting. Or crying.
He sits up. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘My mother had a stroke this morning. I’m at Warsaw County Memorial Hospital. That’s the one closest to Sunny Acres.’
He swings his feet out onto the floor. ‘Christ, Janey. How bad is it?’
‘Bad. I’ve called my aunt Charlotte in Cincinnati and uncle Henry in Tampa. They’re both coming. Aunt Charlotte will undoubtedly drag my cousin Holly along.’ She laughs, but the sound has no humor in it. ‘Of course they’re coming – it’s that old saying about following the money.’
‘Do you want me to come?’
‘Of course, but I don’t know how I’d explain you to them. I can’t very well introduce you as the man I hopped into bed with almost as soon as I met him, and if I tell them I hired you to investigate Ollie’s death, it’s apt to show up on one of Uncle Henry’s kids’ Facebook pages before midnight. When it comes to gossip, Uncle Henry’s worse than Aunt Charlotte, but neither one of them is exactly a model of discretion. At least Holly’s just weird.’ She takes a deep, watery breath. ‘God, I could sure use a friendly face right now. I haven’t seen Charlotte and Henry in years, neither of them showed up at Ollie’s funeral, and they sure haven’t made any effort to keep up with my life.’
Hodges thinks it over and says, ‘I’m a friend, that’s all. I used to work for the Vigilant security company in Sugar Heights. You met me when you came back to inventory your sister’s things and take care of the will with the lawyer. Chum.’
‘Schron.’ She takes a deep, watery breath. ‘That could work.’
It will. When it comes to spinning stories, no one can do it with a straighter face than a cop. ‘I’m on my way.’
‘But … don’t you have things to take care of in the city? To investigate?’
‘Nothing that won’t wait. It’ll take me an hour to get there. With Saturday traffic, maybe even less.’
‘Thank you, Bill. With all my heart. If I’m not in the lobby—’
‘I’ll find you, I’m a trained detective.’ He’s slipping into his shoes.
‘I think if you’re coming, you better bring a change of clothes. I’ve rented three rooms in the Holiday Inn down the street. I’ll rent one for you as well. The advantages of having money. Not to mention an Amex Platinum Card.’
‘Janey, it’s an easy drive back to the city.’
‘Sure, but she might die. If it happens today or tonight, I’m really going to need a friend. For the … you know, the …’
Tears catch her and she can’t finish. Hodges doesn’t need her to, because he knows what she means. For the arrangements.
Ten minutes later he’s on the road, headed east toward Sunny Acres and Warsaw County Memorial. He expects to find Janey in the ICU waiting room, but she’s outside, sitting on the bumper of a parked ambulance. She gets into his Toyota when he pulls up beside her, and one look at her drawn face and socketed eyes tells him everything he needs to know.
She holds together until he parks in the visitors’ lot, then breaks down. Hodges takes her in his arms. She tells him that Elizabeth Wharton passed from the world at quarter past three, central daylight time.
About the same time I was putting on my shoes, Hodges thinks, and hugs her tighter.
23
Little League season is in full swing, and Brady spends that sunny Saturday afternoon at McGinnis Park, where a full slate of games is being played on three fields. The afternoon is warm and business is brisk. Lots of tweenybop girls have come to watch their little brothers do battle, and as they stand in line waiting for their ice cream, the only thing they seem to be talking about (the only thing Brady hears them talking about, anyway) is the upcoming ’Round Here concert at the MAC. It seems they are all going. Brady has decided that he will go, too. He just needs to dope out a way to get in wearing his special vest – the one loaded with the ball bearings and blocks of plastic explosive.
My final bow, he thinks. A headline for the ages.
The thought improves his mood. So does selling out his entire truckload of goodies – even the JuCee Stix are gone by four o’clock. Back at the ice cream factory, he hands the keys over to Shirley Orton (who never seems to leave) and asks if he can switch with Rudy Stanhope, who’s down for the Sunday afternoon shift. Sundays – always assuming the weather cooperates – are busy days, with Loeb’s three trucks working not just McGinnis but the city’s other four large parks. He accompanies his request with the boyishly winning smile Shirley is a sucker for.
‘In other words,’ Shirley says, ‘you want two afternoons off in a row.’
‘You got it.’ He explains that his mother wants to visit her brother, which means at least one overnight and possibly two. There is no brother, of course, and when it comes to trips, the only one his mother is interested in making these days is the scenic tour that takes her from the couch to the liquor cabinet and back to the couch.
