Mr. Mercedes (26 page)

“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.

Hodges 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.