Mr. Mercedes (13 page)

The blue boxes are great, but they're also illegal. For all he knows, the DVD hacks are illegal, too. Not to mention his Redbox and Netflix hacks.
All
his best ideas are illegal. Take Thing One and Thing Two.

Thing One had been on the passenger seat of Mrs. Trelawney's Mercedes when he left City Center on that foggy morning the previous April, with blood dripping from the bent grille and stippling the windshield. The idea came to him during the murky period three years ago, after he had decided to kill a whole bunch of people—what he then thought of as his
terrorist run
—but before he had decided just how, when, or where to do it. He had been full of ideas then, jittery, not sleeping much. In those days he always felt as though he had just swallowed a whole Thermos of black coffee laced with amphetamines.

Thing One was a modified TV remote with a microchip for a brain and a battery pack to boost its range . . . although the range was still pretty short. If you pointed it at a traffic light twenty or thirty yards away, you could change red to yellow with one tap, red to blinking yellow with two taps, and red to green with three.

Brady was delighted with it, and had used it several times (always while sitting parked in his old Subaru; the ice cream truck was far too conspicuous) at busy intersections. After several near misses, he had finally caused an actual accident. Just a fender-bender, but it had been fun to watch the two men arguing about whose fault it had been. For awhile it had looked like they might actually come to blows.

Thing Two came shortly afterward, but it was Thing One that settled Brady on his target, because it radically upped the chances of a successful getaway. The distance between City Center and the abandoned warehouse he had picked as a dumping spot for Mrs. Trelawney's gray Mercedes was exactly 1.9 miles. There were eight traffic lights along the route he planned to take, and with his splendid gadget, he wouldn't have to worry about any of them. But on that morning—Jesus Christ, wouldn't you know it?—every one of those lights had been green. Brady understood the early hour had something to do with it, but it was still infuriating.

If I hadn't had it, he thinks as he goes to the closet at the far end of the basement, at least four of those lights would have been red. That's the way my life works.

Thing Two was the only one of his gadgets that turned out to be an actual moneymaker. Not big money, but as everyone knew, money isn't everything. Besides, without Thing Two there would have been no Mercedes. And with no Mercedes, no City Center Massacre.

Good old Thing Two.

A big Yale padlock hangs from the hasp of the closet door. Brady opens it with a key on his ring. The lights inside—more new fluorescents—are already on. The closet is small and made even smaller by the plain board shelves. On one of them are nine shoeboxes. Inside each box is a pound of homemade plastic explosive. Brady has tested some of this stuff at an abandoned gravel pit far out in the country, and it works just fine.

If I was over there in Afghanistan, he thinks, dressed in a head-rag and one of those funky bathrobes, I could have quite a career blowing up troop carriers.

On another shelf, in another shoebox, are five cell phones. They're the disposable kind the Lowtown drug dealers call burners. The phones, available at fine drugstores and convenience stores everywhere, are Brady's project for tonight. They have to be modified so that a single number will ring all of them, creating the proper spark needed to detonate the boom-clay in the shoeboxes at the same time. He hasn't actually decided to use the plastic, but part of him wants to. Yes indeed. He told the fat ex-cop he has no urge to replicate his masterpiece, but that was another lie. A lot depends on the fat ex-cop himself. If he does what Brady wants—as Mrs. Trelawney did what Brady wanted—he's sure the urge will go away, at least for awhile.

If not . . . well . . .

He grabs the box of phones, starts out of the closet, then pauses and looks back. On one of the other shelves is a quilted woodman's vest from L.L.Bean. If Brady were really going out in the woods, a Medium would suit him fine—he's slim—but this one is an XL. On the breast is a smile decal, the one wearing dark glasses and showing its teeth. The vest holds four more one-pound blocks of plastic explosive, two in the outside pockets, two in the slash pockets on the inside. The body of the vest bulges, because it's filled with ball bearings (just like the ones in Hodges's Happy Slapper). Brady slashed the lining to pour them in. It even crossed his mind to ask Ma to sew the slashes up, and that gave him a good laugh as he sealed them shut with duct tape.

My very own suicide vest, he thinks affectionately.

He won't use it . . .
probably
won't use it . . . but this idea also has a certain attraction. It would put an end to everything. No more Discount Electronix, no more Cyber Patrol calls to dig peanut butter or saltine crumbs out of some elderly idiot's CPU, no more ice cream truck. Also no more crawling snakes in the back of his mind. Or under his belt buckle.

He imagines doing it at a rock concert; he knows Springsteen is going to play Lakefront Arena this June. Or how about the Fourth of July parade down Lake Street, the city's main drag? Or maybe on opening day of the Summer Sidewalk Art Festival and Street Fair, which happens every year on the first Saturday in August. That would be good, except wouldn't he look funny, wearing a quilted vest on a hot August afternoon?

True, but such things can always be worked out by the creative mind, he thinks, spreading the disposable phones on his worktable and beginning to remove the SIM cards. Besides, the suicide vest is just a whatdoyoucallit, doomsday scenario. It will probably never be used. Nice to have it handy, though.

Before going upstairs, he sits down at his Number Three, goes online, and checks the Blue Umbrella. Nothing from the fat ­ex-cop.

Yet.

7

When Hodges uses the intercom outside Mrs. Wharton's Lake Avenue condo at ten the next morning, he's wearing a suit for only the second or third time since he retired. It feels good to be in a suit again, even though it's tight at the waist and under the arms. A man in a suit feels like a working man.

A woman's voice comes from the speaker. “Yes?”

“It's Bill Hodges, ma'am. We spoke last night?”

“So we did, and you're right on time. It's 19-C, Detective Hodges.”

He starts to tell her that he's no longer a detective, but the door is buzzing and so he doesn't bother. Besides, he told her he was retired when they talked on the phone.

Janelle Patterson is waiting for him at the door, just as her sister was on the day of the City Center Massacre, when Hodges and Pete Huntley came to interview her the first time. The resemblance between the two women is enough to give Hodges a powerful sense of déjà vu. But as he makes his way down the short hall from the elevator to the apartment doorway (trying to walk rather than lumber), he sees that the differences outweigh the similarities. Patterson has the same light blue eyes and high cheekbones, but where Olivia Trelawney's mouth was tight and pinched, the lips often white with a combination of strain and irritation, Janelle Patterson's seem, even in repose, ready to smile. Or to bestow a kiss. Her lips are shiny with wet-look gloss; they look good enough to eat. And no boatneck tops for this lady. She's wearing a snug turtleneck that cradles a pair of perfectly round breasts. They are not big, those breasts, but as Hodges's dear old father used to say, more than a handful is wasted. Is he looking at the work of good foundation garments or a post-divorce enhancement? Enhancement seems more likely to Hodges. Thanks to her sister, she can afford all the bodywork she wants.

She extends her hand and gives him a good no-nonsense shake. “Thank you for coming.” As if it had been at her request.

“Glad you could see me,” he says, following her in.

That same kick-ass view of the lake smacks him in the face. He remembers it well, although they had only the one interview with Mrs. T. here; all the others were either at the big house in Sugar Heights or at the station. She had gone into hysterics during one of those station visits, he remembers.
Everybody is blaming me
, she said. The suicide had come not much later, only a matter of weeks.

“Would you like coffee, Detective? It's Jamaican. Very tasty, I think.”

Hodges makes it a habit not to drink coffee in the middle of the morning, because doing so usually gives him savage acid reflux in spite of his Zantac. But he agrees.

He sits in one of the sling chairs by the wide living room window while he waits for her to come back from the kitchen. The day is warm and clear; on the lake, sailboats are zipping and curving like skaters. When she returns he stands up to take the silver tray she's carrying, but Janelle smiles, shakes her head no, and sets it on the low coffee table with a graceful dip of her knees. Almost a curtsey.

Hodges has considered every possible twist and turn their conversation might take, but his forethought turns out to be irrelevant. It is as if, after carefully planning a seduction, the object of his desire has met him at the door in a shortie nightgown and fuck-me shoes.

“I want to find out who drove my sister to suicide,” she says as she pours their coffee into stout china mugs, “but I didn't know how I should proceed. Your call was like a message from God. After our conversation, I think you're the man for the job.”

Hodges is too dumbfounded to speak.

She offers him a mug. “If you want cream, you'll have to pour it yourself. When it comes to additives, I take no responsibility.”

“Black is fine.”

She smiles. Her teeth are either perfect or perfectly capped. “A man after my own heart.”

He sips, mostly to buy time, but the coffee is delicious. He clears his throat and says, “As I told you when we talked last night, Mrs. Patterson, I'm no longer a police detective. On November twentieth of last year, I became just another private citizen. We need to have that up front.”

She regards him over the rim of her cup. Hodges wonders if the moist gloss on her lips leaves an imprint, or if lipstick technology has rendered that sort of thing obsolete. It's a crazy thing to be wondering, but she's a pretty lady. Also, he doesn't get out much these days.

“As far as I'm concerned,” Janelle Patterson says, “there are only two words that matter in what you just said. One is
private
and the other is
detective
. I want to know who meddled with her, who
toyed
with her until she killed herself, and nobody in the police department cares. They'd like to catch the man who used her car to kill those people, oh yes, but about my sister—may I be vulgar?—they don't give a shit.”

Hodges may be retired, but he still has his loyalties. “That isn't necessarily true.”

“I understand why you'd say that, Detective—”

“Mister, please. Just Mr. Hodges. Or Bill, if you like.”

“Bill, then. And it
is
true. There's a connection between those murders and my sister's suicide, because the man who used the car is also the man who wrote the letter. And those other things. Those Blue Umbrella things.”

Easy, Hodges cautions himself. Don't blow it.

“What letter are we talking about, Mrs. Patterson?”

“Janey. If you're Bill, I'm Janey. Wait here. I'll show you.”

She gets up and leaves the room. Hodges's heart is beating hard—much harder than when he took on the trolls beneath the underpass—but he still appreciates that the view of Janey Patterson going away is as good as the one from the front.

Easy, boy, he tells himself again, and sips more coffee. Philip Marlowe you ain't. His mug is already half empty, and no acid. Not a trace of it. Miracle coffee, he thinks.

She comes back holding two pieces of paper by the corners and with an expression of distaste. “I found it when I was going through the papers in Ollie's desk. Her lawyer, Mr. Schron, was with me—she named him the executor of her will, so he had to be—but he was in the kitchen, getting himself a glass of water. He never saw this. I hid it.” She says it matter-of-factly, with no shame or defiance. “I knew what it was right away. Because of
that
. The guy left one on the steering wheel of her car. I guess you could call it his calling-card.”

She taps the sunglasses-wearing smile-face partway down the first page of the letter. Hodges has already noted it. He has also noted the letter's font, which he has identified from his own word processing program as American Typewriter.

“When did you find it?”

She thinks back, calculating the passage of time. “I came for the funeral, which was near the end of November. I discovered that I was Ollie's sole beneficiary when the will was read. That would have been the first week of December. I asked Mr. Schron if we could put off the inventory of Ollie's assets and possessions until January, because I had some business to take care of back in L.A. He agreed.” She looks at Hodges, a level stare from blue eyes with a bright sparkle in them. “The business I had to take care of was divorcing my husband, who was—may I be vulgar again?—a philandering, coke-snorting asshole.”

Hodges has no desire to go down this sidetrack. “You returned to Sugar Heights in January?”

“Yes.”

“And found the letter then?”

“Yes.”

“Have the police seen it?” He knows the answer, January was over four months ago, but the question has to be asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I already told you! Because I don't trust them!” That bright sparkle in her eyes overspills as she begins to cry.

8

She asks if he will excuse her. Hodges tells her of course. She disappears, presumably to get control of herself and repair her face. Hodges picks up the letter and reads it, taking small sips of coffee as he does so. The coffee really is delicious. Now, if he just had a cookie or two to go with it . . .