Mr. Mercedes (51 page)

“I can't,” Hodges says. “I'm having a heart attack.”

“Oh
great
,” Gallison moans.

“Mr. Gallison, is there a handicapped area? There must be, right?”

“Sure. Halfway down the auditorium.”

Not only did he get in with his explosives, Hodges thinks, he's perfectly located to inflict maximum casualties.

He says: “Listen, you two. Don't make me say this twice.”

35

Thanks to the emcee's introduction, Brady has relaxed a bit. The carnival crap he saw being offloaded during his reconnaissance trip is either offstage or suspended overhead. The band's first four or five songs are just warm-ups. Pretty soon the set will roll in either from the sides or drop down from overhead, because the band's main job, the reason they're here, is to sell their latest helping of audio shit. When the kids—many of them attending their first pop concert—see those bright blinking lights and the Ferris wheel and the beachy backdrop, they're going to go out of their teenybop minds. It's then, right
then
, that he'll push the toggle-switch on Thing Two, and ride into the darkness on a golden bubble of all that happiness.

The lead singer, the one with all the hair, is finishing a syrupy ballad on his knees. He holds the last note, head bowed, emoting his faggy ass off. He's a lousy singer and probably already overdue for a fatal drug overdose, but when he raises his head and blares,
“How ya feelin out there?”
the audience goes predictably batshit.

Brady looks around, as he has every few seconds—checking his perimeter, just as Hodges said he would—and his eyes fix on a little black girl sitting a couple of rows up to his right.

Do I know her?

“Who are you looking for?” the pretty girl with the stick legs shouts over the intro to the next song. He can barely hear her. She's grinning at him, and Brady thinks how ridiculous it is for a girl with stick legs to grin at anything. The world has fucked her royally, up the ying-yang and out the wazoo, and how does that deserve even a small smile, let alone such a cheek-stretching moony grin? He thinks, She's probably stoned.

“Friend of mine!” Brady shouts back.

Thinking, As if I had any.

As if.

36

Gallison leads Holly and Jerome away to . . . well, to somewhere. Hodges sits on the crate with his head lowered and his hands planted on his thighs. One of the roadies approaches hesitantly and offers to call an ambulance for him. Hodges thanks him but refuses. He doesn't believe Brady could hear the warble of an approaching ambulance (or anything else) over the din 'Round Here is producing, but he won't take the chance. Taking chances is what brought them to this pass, with everyone in the Mingo Auditorium, including Jerome's mother and sister, at risk. He'd rather die than take another chance, and rather hopes he will before he has to explain this shit-coated clusterfuck.

Only . . . Janey. When he thinks of Janey, laughing and tipping his borrowed fedora at just the right insouciant angle, he knows that if he had it to do over again, he'd likely do it the same way.

Well . . . most of it. Given a do-over, he might have listened a little more closely to Mrs. Melbourne.

She thinks they walk among us,
Bowfinger had said, and the two of them had had a manly chuckle over that, but the joke was on them, wasn't it? Because Mrs. Melbourne was right. Brady Hartsfield really
is
an alien, and he was among them all the time, fixing computers and selling ice cream.

Holly and Jerome are gone, Jerome carrying the .38 that belonged to Hodges's father. Hodges has grave doubts about sending the boy into a crowded auditorium with a loaded gun. Under ordinary circumstances he's a beautifully levelheaded kid, but he's not apt to be so levelheaded with his mom and sis in danger. Holly needs to be protected, though.
Remember you're just the backup,
Hodges told the boy before Gallison led them away, but Jerome made no acknowledgement. He's not sure Jerome even heard him.

In any case, Hodges has done all he can do. The only thing left is to sit here, fighting the pain and trying to get his breath and waiting for an explosion he prays will not come.

37

Holly Gibney has been institutionalized twice in her life, once in her teens and once in her twenties. The shrink she saw later on (in her so-called
maturity
) labeled these enforced vacations
breaks with reality
, which were not good but still better than
psychotic breaks
, from which many people never returned. Holly herself had a simpler name for said breaks. They were her
total freakouts
, as opposed to the state of low to moderate freakout in which she lived her day-to-day life.

The total freakout in her twenties had been caused by her boss at a Cincinnati real estate firm called Frank Mitchell Fine Homes and Estates. Her boss was Frank Mitchell, Jr., a sharp dresser with the face of an intelligent trout. He insisted her work was substandard, that her co-workers loathed her, and the only way she could be assured of remaining with the company would be if he continued to cover for her. Which he would do if she slept with him. Holly didn't want to sleep with Frank Mitchell, Jr., and she didn't want to lose her job. If she lost her job, she would lose her apartment, and have to go back home to live with her milquetoast father and overbearing mother. She finally resolved the conflict by coming in early one day and trashing Frank Mitchell, Jr.'s, office. She was found in her own cubicle, curled up in a corner. The tips of her fingers were bloody. She had chewed at them like an animal trying to escape a trap.

The cause of her first total freakout was Mike Sturdevant. He was the one who coined the pestiferous nickname Jibba-Jibba.

In those days, as a high school freshman, Holly had wanted nothing except to scurry from place to place with her books clutched to her newly arrived breasts and her hair screening her acne-spotted face. But even then she had problems that went far beyond acne. Anxiety problems. Depression problems. Insomnia problems.

Worst of all, stimming.

Stimming was short for self-stimulation, which sounded like masturbation but wasn't. It was compulsive movement, often accompanied by fragments of self-directed dialogue. Biting one's fingernails and chewing one's lips were mild forms of stimming. More extravagant stimmers waved their hands, slapped at their chests and cheeks, or did curling movements with their arms, as if lifting invisible weights.

Starting at roughly age eight, Holly began wrapping her arms around her shoulders and shivering all over, muttering to herself and making facial grimaces. This would go on for five or ten seconds, and then she would simply continue with whatever she had been doing—reading, sewing, shooting baskets in the driveway with her father. She was hardly aware that she was doing it unless her mother saw her and told her to stop shaking and making faces, people would think she was having a fit.

Mike Sturdevant was one of those behaviorally stunted males who look back on high school as the great lost golden age of their lives. He was a senior, and—very much like Cam Knowles—a boy of godlike good looks: broad shoulders, narrow hips, long legs, and hair so blond it was a kind of halo. He was on the football team (of course) and dated the head cheerleader (of course). He lived on an entirely different level of the high school hierarchy from Holly Gibney, and under ordinary circumstances, she never would have attracted his notice. But notice her he did, because one day, on her way to the caff, she had one of her stimming episodes.

Mike Sturdevant and several of his football-playing buddies happened to be passing. They stopped to stare at her—this girl who was clutching herself, shivering, and making a face that pulled her mouth down and turned her eyes into slits. A series of small, inarticulate sounds—perhaps words, perhaps not—came squeezing through her clenched teeth.

“What are you gibbering about?” Mike asked her.

Holly relaxed her grip on her shoulders, staring at him in wild surprise. She didn't know what he was saying; she only knew he was staring at her. All his friends were staring at her. And grinning.

She gaped at him. “What?”

“Gibbering!” Mike shouted. “Jibba-jibba-gibbering!”

The others took it up as she ran toward the cafeteria with her head lowered, bumping into people as she went. From then on, Holly Gibney was known to the student body at Walnut Hills High School as Jibba-Jibba, and so she remained until just after the Christmas break. That was when her mother found her curled up naked in the bathtub, saying that she would never go to Walnut Hills again. If her mother tried to make her, she said, she would kill herself.

Voilà! Total freakout!

When she got better (a little), she went to a different school where things were less stressful (a little less). She never had to see Mike Sturdevant again, but she still has dreams in which she's running down an endless high school corridor—sometimes dressed only in her underwear—while people laugh at her, and point at her, and call her Jibba-Jibba.

She's thinking of those dear old high school days as she and Jerome follow the head custodian through the warren of rooms below the Mingo Auditorium. That's what Brady Hartsfield will look like, she decides, like Mike Sturdevant, only bald. Which she hopes Mike is, wherever he may now reside. Bald . . . fat . . . pre-diabetic . . . afflicted with a nagging wife and ungrateful children . . .

Jibba-Jibba, she thinks.

Pay you back, she thinks.

Gallison leads them through the carpentry shop and costume shop, past a cluster of dressing rooms, then down a corridor wide enough to transport flats and completed sets. The corridor ends at a freight elevator with the doors standing open. Happy pop music booms down the shaft. The current song is about love and dancing. Nothing Holly can relate to.

“You don't want the elevator,” Gallison says, “it goes backstage and you can't get to the auditorium from there without walking right through the band. Listen, is that guy really having a heart attack? Are you guys really cops? You don't look like cops.” He glances at Jerome. “You're too young.” Then to Holly, his expression even more doubtful. “And you're . . .”

“Too freaky?” Holly supplies.

“I wasn't going to say that.” Maybe not, but it's what he's thinking. Holly knows; a girl once nicknamed Jibba-Jibba always does.

“I'm calling the cops,” Gallison says. “The
real
cops. And if this is some kind of joke—”

“Do what you need to do,” Jerome says, thinking Why not? Let him call in the National Guard if he wants to. This is going to be over, one way or the other, in the next few minutes. Jerome knows it, and he can see that Holly does, too. The gun Hodges gave him is in his pocket. It feels heavy and weirdly warm. Other than the air rifle he had when he was nine or ten (a birthday present given to him despite his mother's reservations), he has never carried a gun in his life, and this one feels
alive
.

Holly points to the left of the elevator. “What about that door?” And when Gallison doesn't reply immediately: “Help us. Please. Maybe we're not real cops, maybe you're right about that, but there really is a man in the audience tonight who's very dangerous.”

She takes a deep breath and says words she can hardly believe, even though she knows they are true. “Mister, we're all you've got.”

Gallison thinks it over, then says, “The stairs'll take you to Auditorium Left. It's a long flight. At the top, there's two doors. The one on the left goes outside. The one on the right opens on the auditorium, way down by the stage. That close, the music's apt to bust your eardrums.”

Touching the grip of the pistol in his pocket, Jerome asks, “And exactly where's the handicapped section?”

38

Brady
does
know her. He
does
.

At first he can't get it, it's like a word that's stuck on the tip of your tongue. Then, as the band starts some song about making love on the dancefloor, it comes to him. The house on Teaberry Lane, the one where Hodges's pet boy lives with his family, a nest of niggers with white names. Except for the dog, that is. He's named O'dell, a nigger name for sure, and Brady meant to kill him . . . only he ended up killing his mother instead.

Brady remembers the day the niggerboy came running to the Mr. Tastey truck, his ankles still green from cutting the fat ex-cop's lawn. And his sister shouting,
Get me a chocolate! Pleeeease?

The sister's name is Barbara, and that's her, big as life and twice as ugly. She's sitting two rows up to the right with her friends and a woman who has to be her mother. Jerome isn't with them, and Brady is savagely glad. Let Jerome live, that's fine.

But without his sister.

Or his mother.

Let him see what
that
feels like.

Still looking at Barbara Robinson, his finger creeps beneath Frankie's picture and finds Thing Two's toggle-switch. He caresses it through the thin fabric of the tee-shirt the way he was allowed—on a few fortunate occasions only—to caress his mother's nipples. Onstage, the lead singer of 'Round Here does a split that must just about crush his balls (always supposing he has any) in those tight jeans he's wearing, then springs to his feet and approaches the edge of the stage. Chicks scream. Chicks reach out as if to touch him, their hands waving, their fingernails—painted in every girlish color of the rainbow—gleaming in the footlights.

“Hey, do you guys like an amusement park?”
Cam hollers.

They scream that they do.

“Do you guys like a carnival?”

They scream that they
love
a carnival.

“Have you ever been kissed on the midway?”