Mr. Mercedes (25 page)

Have a nice night and BTW, why don't you go bother someone else with your fantasies?

Brady vaguely remembers some cartoon character—maybe it was Foghorn Leghorn, the big rooster with the southern accent—who would get so mad first his neck and then his head would turn into a thermometer with the temperature going up and up from BAKE to BROIL to NUKE. Brady can almost feel that happening to him as he reads this arrogant, insulting, infuriating post.

Valet key?

Valet
key?

“What are you talking about?” he says, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a growl. “What the fuck are you
talking
about?”

He gets up and strides around in an unsteady circle on legs like stilts, yanking at his hair so hard his eyes water. His mother is forgotten. The blackened lasagna is forgotten. Everything is forgotten except for this hateful post.

He has even had the nerve to put in a smiley-face!

A
smiley-face
!

Brady kicks his chair, hurting his toes and sending it rolling all the way across the room, where it bangs the wall. Then he turns and runs back to his Number Three computer, hunching over it like a vulture. His first impulse is to reply immediately, to call the fucking cop a liar, an idiot with fat-induced early-onset Alzheimer's, an anal ranger who sucks his nigger yardboy's cock. Then some semblance of rationality—fragile and wavering—reasserts itself. He retrieves his chair and goes to the city paper's website. He doesn't even have to click on BREAKING NEWS in order to see what Hodges has been raving about; it's right there on the front page of tomorrow's paper.

Brady follows local crime news assiduously, and knows both Donald Davis's name and his handsomely chiseled features. He knows the cops have been chasing Davis for the murder of his wife, and Brady has no doubt the man did it. Now the idiot has confessed, but not just to
her
murder. According to the newspaper story, Davis has also confessed to the rape-murders of five
more
women. In short, he's claiming to be Turnpike Joe.

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
kermitfrog19
. 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?”

“Crazi
er.
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 nine-one-one 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?
Not her fault you got caught in a bunch of stupid lies. Got a key out of the glove compartment, did you? That's pretty good, since Olivia Trelawney had both of them. The one missing was the valet key. She kept it in a small magnetic box under the rear bumper. The REAL Mercedes Killer must have scoped it.

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?”