Mr. Mercedes: A Novel (35 page)

If he’s late, she’ll kill him.

16

He’s not late, and he’s wearing the hat. Janey tells him he looks nice. He tells her she looks better than that. She smiles and kisses him.

“Let’s get this done,” he says.

Janey wrinkles her nose and says,
“Yeah.”

They drive to the funeral parlor, where they are once more the first to arrive. Hodges escorts her into the Eternal Rest parlor. She looks around and nods her approval. Programs for the service have been laid out on the seats of the folding chairs. The coffin is gone, replaced by a vaguely altarish table with sprays of spring flowers on it. Brahms, turned down almost too low to hear, is playing through the parlor’s sound system.

“Okay?” Hodges asks.

“It’ll do.” She takes a deep breath and repeats what he said twenty minutes before: “Let’s get this done.”

It’s basically the same bunch as yesterday. Janey meets them at the door. While she shakes hands and gives hugs and says all the right things, Hodges stands nearby, scanning the passing traffic. He sees nothing that raises a red flag, including a certain mud-colored Subaru that trundles by without slowing.

A rental Chevy with a Hertz sticker on the side of the windshield swings around back to the parking lot. Soon Uncle Henry appears, preceded by his gently swinging executive belly. Aunt Charlotte and Holly follow him, Charlotte with one white-gloved hand clamped just above her daughter’s elbow. To Hodges, Auntie C looks like a matron escorting a prisoner—probably a drug addict—into county lockup. Holly is even paler than she was yesterday, if that is possible. She’s wearing the same shapeless brown gunnysack, and has already bitten off most of her lipstick.

She gives Hodges a tremulous smile. Hodges offers his hand, and she seizes it with panicky tightness until Charlotte pulls her into the Hall of the Dead.

A young clergyman, from the church Mrs. Wharton attended until she was too unwell to go out on Sundays, serves as master of ceremonies. He reads the predictable passage from Proverbs, the one about the virtuous woman. Hodges is willing to stipulate that the deceased may have been worth more than rubies, but has his doubts about whether she spent any time working with wool and flax. Still, it’s poetical, and tears are flowing by the time the clergyman is finished. The guy may be young, but he’s smart enough not to try eulogizing someone he hardly knew. Instead of that, he invites those with “precious memories” of the late Elizabeth to come forward. Several do, beginning with Althea Greene, the nurse, and ending with the surviving daughter. Janey is calm and brief and simple.

“I wish we’d had more time,” she finishes.

17

Brady parks around the corner at five past ten and is careful to feed the meter until the green flag with MAX on it pops up. After all, it just took a parking ticket to catch Son of Sam in the end. From the back seat he takes a cloth carry-bag. Printed on the side is KROGER and REUSE ME! SAVE A TREE! Inside is Thing Two, resting on top of the Mephisto shoebox.

He turns the corner and strides briskly past the Soames Funeral Home, just some citizen on a morning errand. His face is calm, but his heart is hammering like a steam-drill. He sees no one outside the funeral parlor, and the doors are shut, but there’s still a possibility the fat ex-cop isn’t with the other mourners. He could be in a back room, watching for suspicious characters. Watching for
him
, in other words. Brady knows this.

No risk, no reward, honeyboy, his mother murmurs. It’s true. Also, he judges that the risk is minimal. If Hodges is pronging the blond bitch (or hoping to), he won’t leave her side.

Brady does an about-face at the far corner, strolls back, and turns in to the funeral home drive without hesitation. He can hear faint music, some kind of classical shit. He spots Hodges’s Toyota parked against the rear fence, nose-out for a quick getaway once the festivities are over. The old Det-Ret’s last ride, Brady thinks. It’s going to be a short one, pal.

He walks behind the larger of the two hearses, and once it blocks him from the view of anyone looking out the rear windows of the funeral parlor, he takes Thing Two out of the shopping bag and pulls up the antenna. His heart is driving harder than ever. There were times—only a few—when his gadget didn’t work. The green light would flash, but the car’s locks wouldn’t pop. Some random glitch in the program or the microchip.

If it doesn’t work, just slide the shoebox under the car, his mother advises him.

Of course. That would work just as well, or
almost
as well, but it wouldn’t be so elegant.

He pushes the toggle. The green light flashes. So do the Toyota’s headlights. Success!

He goes to the fat ex-cop’s car as if he has every right to be there. He opens the rear door, takes the shoebox out of the carry-bag, turns on the phone, and puts the box on the floor behind the driver’s seat. He closes the door and starts for the street, forcing himself to walk slowly and steadily.

As he’s rounding the corner of the building, Deborah Ann Hartsfield speaks again. Didn’t you forget something, honeyboy?

He stops. Thinks it over. Then goes back to the corner of the building and points Thing Two’s stub of an antenna at Hodges’s car.

The lights flash as the locks re-engage.

18

After the remembrances and a moment of silent reflection (“to use as you wish”), the clergyman asks the Lord to bless them and keep them and give them peace. Clothes rustle; programs are stowed in purses and jacket pockets. Holly seems fine until she’s halfway up the aisle, but then her knees buckle. Hodges darts forward with surprising speed for a big man and catches her beneath her arms before she can go down. Her eyes roll up and for a moment she’s on the verge of a full-fledged swoon. Then they come back into place and into focus. She sees Hodges and smiles weakly.

“Holly, stop that!” her mother says sternly, as if her daughter has uttered some jocose and inappropriate profanity instead of almost fainting. Hodges thinks what a pleasure it would be to backhand Auntie C right across her thickly powdered chops. Might wake her up, he thinks.

“I’m okay, Mother,” Holly says. Then, to Hodges: “Thank you.”

He says, “Did you eat any breakfast, Holly?”

“She had oatmeal,” Aunt Charlotte announces. “With butter and brown sugar. I made it myself. You’re quite the attention-getter sometimes, aren’t you, Holly?” She turns to Janey. “Please don’t linger, dear. Henry’s useless at things like this, and I can’t hostess all these people on my own.”

Janey takes Hodges’s arm. “I’d never expect you to.”

Aunt Charlotte gives her a pinched smile. Janey’s smile in return is brilliant, and Hodges decides that her decision to turn over half of her inherited loot is equally brilliant. Once that happens, she will never have to see this unpleasant woman again. She won’t even have to take her calls.

The mourners emerge into the sunshine. On the front walk there’s chatter of the wasn’t-it-a-lovely-service sort, and then people begin walking around to the parking lot in back. Uncle Henry and Aunt Charlotte do so with Holly between them. Hodges and Janey follow along. As they reach the back of the mortuary, Holly suddenly slips free of her minders and wheels around to Hodges and Janey.

“Let me ride with you. I want to ride with you.”

Aunt Charlotte, lips thinned almost to nothing, looms up behind her daughter. “I’ve had just about enough of your gasps and vapors for one day, miss.”

Holly ignores her. She seizes one of Hodges’s hands in a grip that’s icy. “Please.
Please
.”

“It’s fine with me,” Hodges says, “if Janey doesn’t m—”

Aunt Charlotte begins to sob. The sound is unlovely, the hoarse cries of a crow in a cornfield. Hodges remembers her bending over Mrs. Wharton, kissing her cold lips, and a sudden unpleasant possibility comes to him. He misjudged Olivia; he may have misjudged Charlotte Gibney as well. There’s more to people than their surfaces, after all.

“Holly, you don’t even
know
this man!”

Janey puts a much warmer hand on Hodges’s wrist. “Why don’t you go with Charlotte and Henry, Bill? There’s plenty of room. You can ride in back with Holly.” She shifts her attention to her cousin. “Would that be all right?”

“Yes!” Holly is still gripping Hodges’s hand. “That would be good!”

Janey turns to her uncle. “Okay with you?”

“Sure.” He gives Holly a jovial pat on the shoulder. “The more the merrier.”

“That’s right, give her plenty of attention,” Aunt Charlotte says. “It’s what she likes. Isn’t it, Holly?” She starts for the parking lot without waiting for a reply, heels clacking a Morse code message of outrage.

Hodges looks at Janey. “What about my car?”

“I’ll drive it. Hand over the keys.” And when he does: “There’s just one other thing I need.”

“Yeah?”

She plucks the fedora from his head, puts it on her own, and gives it the correct insouciant dip over her left eyebrow. She wrinkles her nose at him and says,
“Yeah.”

19

Brady has parked up the street from the funeral parlor, his heart beating harder than ever. He’s holding a cell phone. The number of the burner attached to the bomb in the Toyota’s back seat is inked on his wrist.

He watches the mourners stand around on the walk. The fat ex-cop is impossible to miss; in his black suit he looks as big as a house. Or a hearse. On his head is a ridiculously old-fashioned hat, the kind you saw cops wearing in black-and-white detective movies from the nineteen-fifties.

People are starting around to the back, and after awhile, Hodges and the blond bitch head that way. Brady supposes the blond bitch will be with him when the car blows. Which will make it a clean sweep—the mother and both daughters. It has the elegance of an equation where all the variables have been solved.

Cars start pulling out, all moving in his direction because that’s the way you go if you’re heading to Sugar Heights. The sun glares on the windshields, which isn’t helpful, but there’s no mistaking the fat ex-cop’s Toyota when it appears at the head of the funeral home driveway, pauses briefly, then turns toward him.

Brady doesn’t even glance at Uncle Henry’s rental Chevy when it passes him. All his attention is focused on the fat ex-cop’s ride. When it goes by, he feels a moment’s disappointment. The blond bitch must have gone with her relatives, because there’s no one in the Toyota but the driver. Brady only gets a glimpse, but even with the sunglare, the fat ex-cop’s stupid hat is unmistakable.

Brady keys in a number. “I said you wouldn’t see me coming. Didn’t I say that, asshole?”

He pushes SEND.

20

As Janey reaches to turn on the radio, a cell phone begins to ring. The last sound she makes on earth—everyone should be so lucky—is a laugh. Idiot, she thinks affectionately, you went and left it again. She reaches for the glove compartment. There’s a second ring.

That’s not coming from the glove compartment, that’s coming from behi—

There’s no sound, at least not that she hears, only the momentary sensation of a strong hand pushing the driver’s seat. Then the world turns white.

21

Holly Gibney, also known as Holly the Mumbler, may have mental problems, but neither the psychotropic drugs she takes nor the cigarettes she smokes on the sneak have slowed her down physically. Uncle Henry slams on the brakes and she bolts from the rental Chevy while the explosion is still reverberating.

Hodges is right behind her, running hard. There’s a stab of pain in his chest and he thinks he might be having a heart attack. Part of him actually hopes for this, but the pain goes away. The pedestrians are behaving as they always do when an act of violence punches a hole in the world they have previously taken for granted. Some drop to the sidewalk and cover their heads. Others are frozen in place, like statues. A few cars stop; most speed up and exit the vicinity immediately. One of these is a mud-colored Subaru.

As Hodges pounds after Janey’s mentally unstable cousin, the last message from Mr. Mercedes beats in his head like a ceremonial drum:
I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming. I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming. I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming
.

He rounds the corner, skidding on the slick soles of his seldom-worn dress shoes, and almost runs into Holly, who has stopped dead with her shoulders slumped and her purse dangling from one hand. She’s staring at what remains of Hodges’s Toyota. Its body has been blown clean off the axles and is burning furiously in a litter of glass. The back seat lies on its side twenty feet away, its torn upholstery on fire. A man staggers drunkenly across the street, holding his bleeding head. A woman is sitting on the curb outside a card-and-gift shop with a smashed-in show window, and for one wild moment he thinks it’s Janey, but this woman is wearing a green dress and she has gray hair and of course it isn’t Janey, it can’t be Janey.

He thinks, This is my fault. If I’d used my father’s gun two weeks ago, she’d be alive.

There’s still enough cop inside him to push the idea aside (although it doesn’t go easily). A cold shocked clarity flows in to replace it. This is
not
his fault. It’s the fault of the son of a bitch who planted the bomb. The same son of a bitch who drove a stolen car into a crowd of job-seekers at City Center.

Hodges sees a single black high-heeled shoe lying in a pool of blood, he sees a severed arm in a smoldering sleeve lying in the gutter like someone’s cast-off garbage, and his mind clicks into gear. Uncle Henry and Aunt Charlotte will be here shortly, and that means there isn’t much time.

He seizes Holly by the shoulders and turns her around. Her hair has come loose from its Princess Leia rolls and hangs against her cheeks. Her wide eyes look right through him. His mind—colder than ever—knows she’s no good to him as she is now. He slaps first one cheek, then the other. Not hard slaps, but enough to make her eyelids flutter.

People are screaming. Horns are honking, and a couple of car alarms are blatting. He can smell gasoline, burning rubber, melting plastic.