Mr. Mercedes: A Novel (53 page)

BLUE MERCEDES

1

On a warm and sunny day in late October of 2010, a Mercedes sedan pulls into the nearly empty lot at McGinnis Park, where Brady Hartsfield not so long ago sold ice cream to Little Leaguers. It snuggles up to a tidy little Prius. The Mercedes, once gray, has now been painted baby blue, and a second round of bodywork has removed a long scrape from the driver’s side, inflicted when Jerome drove into the loading area behind the Mingo Auditorium before the gate was fully opened.

Holly’s behind the wheel today. She looks ten years younger. Her long hair—formerly graying and untidy—is now a glossy black cap, courtesy of a visit to a Class A beauty salon, recommended to her by Tanya Robinson. She waves to the owner of the Prius, who’s sitting at a table in the picnic area not far from the Little League fields.

Jerome gets out of the Mercedes, opens the trunk, and hauls out a picnic basket. “Jesus Christ, Holly,” he says. “What have you got in here? Thanksgiving dinner?”

“I wanted to make sure there was plenty for everybody.”

“You know he’s on a strict diet, right?”

“You’re not,” she says. “You’re a growing boy. Also, there’s a bottle of champagne, so don’t drop it.”

From her pocket, Holly takes a box of Nicorette and pops a piece into her mouth.

“How’s that going?” Jerome asks as they walk down the slope.

“I’m getting there,” she says. “The hypnosis helps more than the gum.”

“What if the guy tells you you’re a chicken and gets you to run around his office, clucking?”

“First of all, my therapist is a she. Second of all, she wouldn’t do that.”

“How would
you
know?” Jerome asks. “You’d be, like, hypnotized.”

“You’re an idiot, Jerome. Only an idiot would want to take the
bus
down here with all this
food
.”

“Thanks to the proclamation, we ride free. I like free.”

Hodges, still wearing the suit he put on that morning (although the tie is now in his pocket), comes to meet them, moving slowly. He can’t feel the pacemaker ticking away in his chest—he’s been told they’re very small now—but he senses it in there, doing its work. Sometimes he imagines it, and in his mind’s eye it always looks like a smaller version of Hartsfield’s gadget. Only his is supposed to stop an explosion instead of causing one.

“Kids,” he says. Holly is no kid, but she’s almost two decades younger than he is, and to Hodges that almost makes her one. He reaches for the picnic basket, but Jerome holds it away from him.

“Nuh-uh,” he says. “I’ll carry it. Your heart.”

“My heart’s fine,” Hodges says, and according to his last checkup this is true, but he still can’t quite believe it. He has an idea that anyone who’s suffered a coronary feels the same way.

“And you look good,” Jerome says.

“Yes,” Holly agrees. “Thank God you got some new clothes. You looked like a scarecrow the last time I saw you. How much weight have you lost?”

“Thirty-five pounds,” Hodges says, and the thought that follows, I wish Janey could see me now, sends a pang through his electronically regulated heart.

“Enough with the Weight Watchers,” Jerome says. “Hols brought champagne. I want to know if we have a reason to drink it. How did it go this morning?”

“The DA isn’t going to prosecute anything. All charges dropped. Billy Hodges is good to go.”

Holly throws herself into his arms and gives him a hug. Hodges hugs her back and kisses her cheek. With her short hair and her face fully revealed—for the first time since her childhood, although he doesn’t know this—he can see her resemblance to Janey. This hurts and feels fine at the same time.

Jerome feels moved to call on Tyrone Feelgood Delight. “Massa Hodges, you free at last! Free at last! Great God A’mighty, you is free at last!”

“Stop talking like that, Jerome,” Holly says. “It’s juvenile.” She takes the bottle of champagne from the picnic basket, along with a trio of plastic glasses.

“The district attorney escorted me into the chambers of Judge Daniel Silver, a guy who heard my testimony a great many times in my cop days,” Hodges says. “He gave me a ten-minute tongue-lashing and told me that my reckless behavior had put four thousand lives at risk.”

Jerome is indignant. “That’s outrageous! You’re the reason those people are still alive.”

“No,” Hodges says quietly. “You and Holly are the reason for that.”

“If Hartsfield hadn’t gotten in touch with you in the first place, the cops still wouldn’t know him from Adam. And those people would be
dead
.”

This may or may not be true, but in his own mind, Hodges is okay with how things turned out at the Mingo. What he’s not okay with—and will never be—is Janey. Silver accused him of playing “a pivotal role” in her death, and he thinks that might be so. But he has no doubt that Hartsfield would have gone on to kill more, if not at the concert or the Careers Day at Embassy Suites, then somewhere else. He’d gotten a taste for it. So there’s a rough equation here: Janey’s life in exchange for the lives of all those hypothetical others. And if it
had
been the concert in that alternate (but very possible) reality, two of the victims would have been Jerome’s mother and sister.

“What did you say back?” Holly asks. “What did you say back to him?”

“Nothing. When you’re taken to the woodshed, the best thing you can do is wait out the whipping and shut up.”

“That’s why you weren’t with us to get a medal, isn’t it?” she asks. “And why you weren’t on the proclamation. Those poops were punishing you.”

“I imagine,” Hodges says, although if the powers that be thought that was a punishment, they were wrong. The last thing in the world he wanted was to have a medal hung over his neck and to be presented with a key to the city. He was a cop for forty years.
That’s
his key to the city.

“A shame,” Jerome says. “You’ll never get to ride the bus free.”

“How are things on Lake Avenue, Holly? Settling down?”

“Better,” Holly says. She’s easing the cork out of the champagne bottle with all the delicacy of a surgeon. “I’m sleeping through the night again. Also seeing Dr. Leibowitz twice a week. She’s helping a lot.”

“And how are things with your mother?” This, he knows, is a touchy subject, but he feels he has to touch, just this once. “She still calling you five times a day, begging you to come back to Cincinnati?”

“She’s down to twice a day,” Holly says. “First thing in the morning, last thing at night. She’s lonely. And I think more afraid for herself than she is for me. It’s hard to change your life when you’re old.”

Tell me about it, Hodges thinks. “That’s a very important insight, Holly.”

“Dr. Leibowitz says habits are hard to break. It’s hard for me to give up smoking, and it’s hard for Mom to get used to living alone. Also to realize I don’t have to be that fourteen-year-old-girl curled up in the bathtub for the rest of my life.”

They’re silent for awhile. A crow takes possession of the pitcher’s rubber on Little League Field 3 and caws triumphantly.

Holly’s partition from her mother was made possible by Janelle Patterson’s will. The bulk of her estate—which came to Janey courtesy of another of Brady Hartsfield’s victims—went to Uncle Henry Sirois and Aunt Charlotte Gibney, but Janey also left half a million dollars to Holly. It was in a trust fund to be administered by Mr. George Schron, the lawyer Janey had inherited from Olivia. Hodges has no idea when Janey did it. Or why she did it. He doesn’t believe in premonitions, but . . .

But.

Charlotte had been dead set against Holly moving, claiming her daughter was not ready to live on her own. Given that Holly was closing in on fifty, that was tantamount to saying she would never be ready. Holly believed she was, and with Hodges’s help, she had convinced Schron that she would be fine.

Being a heroine who had been interviewed on all the major networks no doubt helped with Schron. It didn’t with her mother; in some ways it was Holly’s status as heroine that dismayed that lady the most. Charlotte would never be entirely able to accept the idea that her precariously balanced daughter had played a crucial role (maybe
the
crucial role) in preventing a mass slaughter of the innocents.

By the terms of Janey’s will, the condo apartment with its fabulous lake view is now owned jointly by Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Henry. When Holly asked if she could live there, at least to start with, Charlotte had refused instantly and adamantly. Her brother could not convince her to change her mind. It was Holly herself who had done that, saying she intended to stay in the city, and if her mother would not give in on the apartment, she’d find one in Lowtown.

“In the very worst part of Lowtown,” she said. “Where I’ll buy everything with cash. Which I will flash around ostentatiously.”

That did it.

Holly’s time in the city—the first extended period she has ever spent away from her mother—hasn’t been easy, but her shrink gives her plenty of support, and Hodges visits her frequently. Far more important, Jerome visits frequently, and Holly is an even more frequent guest at the Robinson home on Teaberry Lane. Hodges believes that’s where the real healing is taking place, not on Dr. Leibowitz’s couch. Barbara has taken to calling her Aunt Holly.

“What about you, Bill?” Jerome asks. “Any plans?”

“Well,” he says, smiling, “I was offered a job with Vigilant Guard Service, how about that?”

Holly clasps her hands together and bounces up and down on the picnic bench like a child. “Are you going to take it?”

“Can’t,” Hodges says.

“Heart?” Jerome asks.

“Nope. You have to be bonded, and Judge Silver shared with me this morning that my chances of being bonded and the chances of the Jews and Palestinians uniting to build the first interfaith space station are roughly equal. My dreams of getting a private investigator’s license are equally kaput. However, a bail bondsman I’ve known for years has offered me a part-time job as a skip-tracer, and for that I don’t need to be bonded. I can do it mostly from home, on my computer.”

“I could help you,” Holly says. “With the computer part, that is. I don’t want to actually chase anybody. Once was enough.”

“What about Hartsfield?” Jerome asks. “Anything new, or just the same?”

“Just the same,” Hodges says.

“I don’t care,” Holly says. She sounds defiant, but for the first time since arriving at McGinnis Park, she’s biting her lips. “I’d do it again.” She clenches her fists. “Again again again!”

Hodges takes one of those fists and soothes it open. Jerome does the same with the other.

“Of course you would,” Hodges says. “That’s why the mayor gave you a medal.”

“Not to mention free bus rides and trips to the museum,” Jerome adds.

She relaxes, a little at a time. “Why should I ride the bus, Jerome? I have lots of money in trust, and I have Cousin Olivia’s Mercedes. It’s a wonderful car. And such low mileage!”

“No ghosts?” Hodges asks. He’s not joking about this; he’s honestly curious.

For a long time she doesn’t reply, just looks up at the big German sedan parked beside Hodges’s tidy Japanese import. At least she’s stopped biting her lips.

“There were at first,” she says, “and I thought I might sell it. I had it painted instead. That was
my
idea, not Dr. Leibowitz’s.” She looks at them proudly. “I didn’t even ask her.”

“And now?” Jerome is still holding her hand. He has come to love Holly, difficult as she sometimes is. They have both come to love her.

“Blue is the color of forgetting,” she says. “I read that in a poem once.” She pauses. “Bill, why are you crying? Are you thinking about Janey?”

Yes. No. Both.

“I’m crying because we’re here,” he says. “On a beautiful fall day that feels like summer.”

“Dr. Leibowitz says crying is good,” Holly says matter-of-factly. “She says tears wash the emotions.”

“She could be right about that.” Hodges is thinking about how Janey wore his hat. How she gave it just the right tilt. “Now are we going to have some of that champagne or not?”

Jerome holds the bottle while Holly pours. They hold up their glasses.

“To us,” Hodges says.

They echo it. And drink.

2

On a rain-soaked evening in November of 2011, a nurse hurries down the corridor of the Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, an adjunct to John M. Kiner Memorial, the city’s premier hospital. There are half a dozen charity cases at the TBI, including one who is infamous . . . although his infamy has already begun to fade with the passage of time.

The nurse is afraid the clinic’s chief neurologist will have left, but he’s still in the doctor’s lounge, going through case files.

“You may want to come, Dr. Babineau,” she says. “It’s Mr. Hartsfield. He’s awake.” This only makes him look up, but what the nurse says next gets him to his feet. “He spoke to me.”

“After seventeen months? Extraordinary. Are you sure?”

The nurse is flushed with excitement. “Yes, Doctor, absolutely.”

“What did he say?”

“He says he has a headache. And he’s asking for his mother.”

September 14, 2013

AUTHOR’S NOTE

While there is indeed such a thing as “stealing the peek” (as in PKE), it would be impossible to do so with any of the cars identified in the book, including the Mercedes-Benz SL500s made during the passive keyless entry age. SL500s, like all Benzes, are high-performance cars with high-performance security features.

Thanks are due to Russ Dorr and Dave Higgins, who provided research assistance. Also to my wife, Tabitha, who knows more about cell phones than I do, and to my son, the novelist Joe Hill, who helped me solve the problems Tabby pointed out. If I got it right, thank my support crew. If I got it wrong, chalk it up to my failure to understand.

Nan Graham of Scribner did her usual sterling editorial job, and my son Owen followed up with a valuable second pass. My agent, Chuck Verrill, is a Yankees fan, but I love him anyway.