Mr. Mercedes (28 page)

The five of them have a late dinner in the almost deserted Holiday Inn dining room. From the speakers overhead, Herb Alpert toots his horn. Aunt Charlotte has a salad and complains about the dressing, which she has specified should come on the side. “They can put it in a little pitcher, but bottled from the supermarket is still bottled from the supermarket,” she announces.

Her muttering daughter orders something that sounds like
sneezebagel hellbun
. It turns out to be a cheeseburger, well done. Uncle Henry opts for fettuccini alfredo and sucks it down with the efficiency of a high-powered Rinse N Vac, fine droplets of perspiration appearing on his forehead as he approaches the finish line. He sops up the remains of the sauce with a chunk of buttered bread.

Hodges does most of the talking, recounting stories from his days with Vigilant Guard Service. The job is fictional, but the stories are mostly true, adapted from his years as a cop. He tells them about the burglar who got caught trying to squirm through a basement window and lost his pants in his efforts to wriggle free (this earns a small smile from Holly); the twelve-year-old boy who stood behind his bedroom door and cold-cocked a home invader with his baseball bat; the housekeeper who stole several pieces of her employer's jewelry only to have them drop out of her underwear while she served dinner. There are darker stories, many of them, that he keeps to himself.

Over dessert (which Hodges skips, Uncle Henry's unapologetic gluttony serving as a minatory power of example), Janey invites the new arrivals to stay at the house in Sugar Heights starting tomorrow, and the three of them toddle off to their prepaid rooms. Charlotte and Henry seem cheered by the prospect of inspecting at first hand just how the other half lives. As for Holly . . . who knows?

The newcomers' rooms are on the first floor. Janey and Hodges are on the third. As they reach the side-by-side doors, she asks if he will sleep with her.

“No sex,” she says. “I never felt less sexy in my life. Basically, I just don't want to be alone.”

That's okay with Hodges. He doubts if he would be capable of getting up to dickens, anyway. His stomach and leg muscles are still sore from last night . . . and, he reminds himself, last night she did almost all the work. Once they're beneath the coverlet, she snuggles up to him. He can hardly believe the warmth and firmness of her. The
thereness
of her. It's true he feels no desire at the moment, but he's glad the old lady had the courtesy to stroke out after he got his ashes hauled rather than before. Not very nice, but there it is. Corinne, his ex, used to say that men were born with a shitty-bone.

She pillows her head on his shoulder. “I'm so glad you came.”

“Me too.” It's the absolute truth.

“Do you think they know we're in bed together?”

Hodges considers. “Aunt Charlotte knows, but she'd know even if we weren't.”

“And you can be sure of that because you're a trained—”

“Right. Go to sleep, Janey.”

She does, but when he wakes up in the early hours of the morning, needing to use the toilet, she's sitting by the window, looking out at the parking lot and crying. He puts a hand on her shoulder.

She looks up. “I woke you. I'm sorry.”

“Nah, this is my usual three
A.M.
pee-muster. Are you all right?”

“Yes.
Yeah
.” She smiles, then wipes at her eyes with her fisted hands, like a child. “Just hating on myself for shipping Mom off to Sunny Acres.”

“But she wanted to go, you said.”

“Yes. She did. It doesn't seem to change how I feel.” Janey looks at him, eyes bleak and shining with tears. “Also hating on myself for letting Olivia do all the heavy lifting while I stayed in California.”

“As a trained detective, I deduce you were trying to save your marriage.”

She gives him a wan smile. “You're a good guy, Bill. Go on and use the bathroom.”

When he comes back, she's curled up in bed again. He puts his arms around her and they sleep spoons the rest of the night.

25

Early on Sunday morning, before taking her shower, Janey shows him how to use her iPad. Hodges ducks beneath Debbie's Blue Umbrella and finds a new message from Mr. Mercedes. It's short and to the point:
I'm going to fuck you up, Grampa
.

“Yeah, but tell me how you
really
feel,” he says, and surprises himself by laughing.

Janey comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, steam billowing around her like a Hollywood special effect. She asks him what he's laughing about. Hodges shows her the message. She doesn't find it so funny.

“I hope you know what you're doing.”

Hodges hopes so, too. Of one thing he's sure: when he gets back home, he'll take the Glock .40 he carried on the job out of his bedroom safe and start carrying it again. The Happy Slapper is no longer enough.

The phone next to the double bed warbles. Janey answers, converses briefly, hangs up. “That was Aunt Charlotte. She suggests the Fun Crew meet for breakfast in twenty minutes. I think she's anxious to get to Sugar Heights and start checking the silverware.”

“Okay.”

“She also shared that the bed was
much
too hard and she had to take an allergy pill because of the foam pillows.”

“Uh-huh. Janey, is Olivia's computer still at the Sugar Heights house?”

“Sure. In the room she used for her study.”

“Can you lock that room so they can't get in there?”

She pauses in the act of hooking her bra, for a moment frozen in that pose, elbows back, a female archetype. “Hell with that, I'll just tell them to keep out. I am
not
going to be intimidated by that woman. And what about Holly? Can you understand anything she says?”

“I thought she ordered a sneezebagel for dinner,” Hodges admits.

Janey collapses into the chair he awoke to find her crying in last night, only now she's laughing. “Sweetie, you're one bad detective. Which in this sense means good.”

“Once the funeral stuff is over and they're gone—”

“Thursday at the latest,” she says. “If they stay longer, I'll have to kill them.”

“And no jury on earth would convict you. Once they're gone, I want to bring my friend Jerome in to look at that computer. I'd bring him in sooner, but—”

“They'd be all over him. And me.”

Hodges, thinking of Aunt Charlotte's bright and inquisitive eyes, agrees.

“Won't the Blue Umbrella stuff be gone? I thought it disappeared every time you left the site.”

“It's not Debbie's Blue Umbrella I'm interested in. It's the ghosts your sister heard in the night.”

26

As they walk down to the elevator, he asks Janey something that's been troubling him ever since she called yesterday afternoon. “Do you think the questions about Olivia brought on your mother's stroke?”

She shrugs, looking unhappy. “There's no way to tell. She was very old—at least seven years older than Aunt Charlotte, I think—and the constant pain beat her up pretty badly.” Then, reluctantly: “It could have played a part.”

Hodges runs a hand through his hastily combed hair, mussing it again. “Ah, Jesus.”

The elevator dings. They step in. She turns to him and grabs both of his hands. Her voice is swift and urgent. “I'll tell you something, though. If I had to do it over again, I still would. Mom had a long life. Ollie, on the other hand, deserved a few more years. She wasn't terribly happy, but she was doing okay until that bastard got to her. That . . . that
cuckoo
bird. Stealing her car and using it to kill eight people and hurt I don't know how many more wasn't enough for him, was it? Oh, no. He had to steal her
mind
.”

“So we push forward.”

“Goddam right we do.” Her hands tighten on his. “This is
ours
, Bill. Do you get that? This is
ours
.”

He wouldn't have stopped anyway, the bit is in his teeth, but the vehemence of her reply is good to hear.

The elevator doors open. Holly, Aunt Charlotte, and Uncle Henry are waiting in the lobby. Aunt Charlotte regards them with her inquisitive crow's eyes, probably prospecting for what ­Hodges's old partner used to call the freshly fucked look. She asks what took them so long, then, without waiting for an answer, tells them that the breakfast buffet looks very thin. If they were hoping for an omelet to order, they're out of luck.

Hodges thinks that Janey Patterson is in for several very long days.

27

Like the day before, Sunday is brilliant and summery. Like the day before, Brady sells out by four, at least two hours before dinnertime approaches and the parks begin emptying. He thinks about calling home and finding out what his mom wants for supper, then decides to grab takeout from Long John Silver's and surprise her. She loves the Langostino Lobster Bites.

As it turns out, Brady is the one surprised.

He comes into the house from the garage, and his greeting—
Hey, Mom, I'm home!
—dies on his lips. This time she's remembered to turn off the stove, but the smell of the meat she charred for her lunch hangs in the air. From the living room there comes a muffled drumming sound and a strange gurgling cry.

There's a skillet on one of the front burners. He peers into it and sees crumbles of burnt hamburger rising like small volcanic islands from a film of congealed grease. On the counter is a half-empty bottle of Stoli and a jar of mayonnaise, which is all she ever uses to dress her hamburgers.

The grease-spotted takeout bags drop from his hands. Brady doesn't even notice.

No, he thinks. It can't be.

It is, though. He throws open the kitchen refrigerator and there, on the top shelf, is the Baggie of poisoned meat. Only now half of it is gone.

He stares at it stupidly, thinking, She never checks the mini-fridge in the garage.
Never
. That's
mine
.

This is followed by another thought: How do you know what she checks when you're not here? For all you know she's been through all your drawers and looked under your mattress.

That gurgling cry comes again. Brady runs for the living room, kicking one of the Long John Silver's bags under the kitchen table and leaving the refrigerator door open. His mother is sitting bolt upright on the couch. She's in her blue silk lounging pajamas. The shirt is covered with a bib of blood-streaked vomit. Her belly protrudes, straining the buttons; it's the belly of a woman who is seven months pregnant. Her hair stands out from her parchment-pale face in a mad spray. Her nostrils are clotted with blood. Her eyes bulge. She's not seeing him, or so he thinks at first, but then she holds out her hands.

“Mom!
Mom!
”

His initial idea is to thump her on the back, but he looks at the mostly eaten hamburger on the coffee table next to the remains of what must have been a perfectly enormous screwdriver, and knows back-thumps will do no good. The stuff's not lodged in her throat. If only it were.

The drumming sound he heard when he came in recommences as her feet begin to piston up and down. It's as if she's marching in place. Her back arches. Her arms fly straight up. Now she's simultaneously marching and signaling that the field goal is good. One foot shoots out and kicks the coffee table. Her screwdriver glass falls over.

“Mom!”

She throws herself back against the sofa cushions, then forward. Her agonized eyes stare at him. She gurgles a muffled something that might or might not be his name.

What do you do for poisoning victims? Was it raw eggs? Or Coca-Cola? No, Coke's for upset stomachs, and she's gone far beyond that.

Have to stick my fingers down her throat, he thinks. Make her gag it up.

But then her teeth begin doing their own march and he pulls his tentatively extended hand back, pressing the palm over his mouth instead. He sees that she has already bitten her lower lip almost to tatters; that's where the blood on her shirt has come from. Some of it, anyway.

“Brayvie!”
She draws in a hitching breath. What follows is guttural but understandable. “Caw . . . nie . . . wha . . . whan!”

Call 911
.

He goes to the phone and picks it up before realizing he really can't do that. Think of the unanswerable questions that would ensue. He puts it back down and whirls to her.

“Why did you go snooping out there, Mom?
Why?
”

“
Brayvie!
Nie-wha-
whan
!”

“When did you eat it? How long has it been?”

Instead of answering, she begins to march again. Her head snaps up and her bulging eyes regard the ceiling for a second or two before her head snaps forward again. Her back doesn't move at all; it's as if her head is mounted on bearings. The gurgling sounds return—the sound of water trying to go down a partially clogged drain. Her mouth yawns and she belches vomit. It lands in her lap with a wet splat, and oh God, it's half blood.

He thinks of all the times he's wished her dead. But I never wanted it to be like this, he thinks. Never like this.

An idea lights up his mind like a single bright flare over a stormy ocean. He can find out how to treat her online.
Everything's
online.

“I'm going to take care of it,” he says, “but I have to go downstairs for a few minutes. You just . . . you hang in there, Mom. Try . . .”

He almost says
Try to relax
.

He runs into the kitchen, toward the door that leads to his control room. Down there he'll find out how to save her. And even if he can't, he won't have to watch her die.

28

The word to turn on the lights is
control
, but although he speaks it three times, the basement remains in darkness. Brady realizes the voice-recognition program isn't working because he doesn't sound like himself, and is it any wonder? Any fucking wonder at all?