Mr. Mercedes

  He grabs his phone again, dials Directory Assistance, and asks the robot on the other end if it has a number for Janelle Patterson. He's not hopeful; now that she is the Seven Million Dollar Woman, and newly divorced in the bargain, Mrs. Trelawney's sister has probably got an unlisted number.

  But the robot coughs it up. Hodges is so surprised he has to fumble for a pencil and then punch 2 for a repeat. He drums his fingers some more, thinking how he wants to approach her. It will probably come to nothing, but it would be his next step if he were still on the cops. Since he's not, it will take a little extra finesse.

  He is amused to discover how eagerly he welcomes this challenge.

  5

  Brady calls ahead to Sammy's Pizza on his way home and picks up a small pepperoni and mushroom pie. If he thought his mother would eat a couple of slices, he would have gotten a bigger one, but he knows better.

  Maybe if it was pepperoni and Popov, he thinks. If they sold that, I'd have to skip the medium and go straight to a large.

  There are tract houses on the city's North Side. They were built between Korea and Vietnam, which means they all look the same and they're all turning to shit. Most still have plastic toys on the crabgrassy lawns, although it's now full dark. Chaz Hartsfield is at 49 Elm Street, where there are no elms and probably never were. It's just that all the streets in this area of the city--known, reasonably enough, as Northfield--are named for trees.

  Brady parks behind Ma's rustbucket Honda, which needs a new exhaust system, new points, and new plugs. Not to mention an inspection sticker.

  Let her take care of it, Brady thinks, but she won't. He will. He'll have to. The way he takes care of everything.

  The way I took care of Frankie, he thinks. Back when the basement was just the basement instead of my control center.

  Brady and Deborah Ann Hartsfield don't talk about Frankie.

  The door is locked. At least he's taught her that much, although God knows it hasn't been easy. She's the kind of person who thinks okay solves all of life's problems. Tell her Put the half-and-half back in the fridge after you use it, she says okay. Then you come home and there it sits on the counter, going sour. You say Please do a wash so I can have a clean uni for the ice cream truck tomorrow, she says okay. But when you poke your head into the laundry room, everything's still there in the basket.

  The cackle of the TV greets him. Something about an immunity challenge, so it's Survivor. He has tried to tell her it's all fake, a set-up. She says yes, okay, she knows, but she still never misses it.

  "I'm home, Ma!"

  "Hi, honey!" Only a moderate slur, which is good for this hour of the evening. If I was her liver, Brady thinks, I'd jump out of her mouth some night while she's snoring and run the fuck away.

  He nonetheless feels that little flicker of anticipation as he goes into the living room, the flicker he hates. She's sitting on the couch in the white silk robe he got her for Christmas, and he can see more white where it splits apart high up on her thighs. Her underwear. He refuses to think the word panties in connection with his mother, it's too sexy, but it's down there in his mind, just the same: a snake hiding in poison sumac. Also, he can see the small round shadows of her nipples. It's not right that such things should turn him on--she's pushing fifty, she's starting to flab out around the middle, she's his mother, for God's sake--but . . .

  But.

  "I brought pizza," he says, holding up the box and thinking, I already ate.

  "I already ate," she says. Probably she did. A few lettuce leaves and a teensy tub of yogurt. It's how she keeps what's left of her figure.

  "It's your favorite," he says, thinking, You enjoy it, honey.

  "You enjoy it, sweetie," she says. She lifts her glass and takes a ladylike sip. Gulping comes later, after he's gone to bed and she thinks he's asleep. "Get yourself a Coke and come sit beside me." She pats the couch. Her robe opens a little more. White robe, white panties.

  Underwear, he reminds himself. Underwear, that's all, she's my mother, she's Ma, and when it's your ma it's just underwear.

  She sees him looking and smiles. She does not adjust the robe. "The survivors are on Fiji this year." She frowns. "I think it's Fiji. One of those islands, anyway. Come and watch with me."

  "Nah, I guess I'll go downstairs and work for awhile."

  "What project is this, honey?"

  "A new kind of router." She wouldn't know a router from a grouter, so that's safe enough.

  "One of these days you'll invent something that will make us rich," she says. "I know you will. Then, goodbye electronics store. And goodbye to that ice cream truck." She looks at him with wide eyes that are only a little watery from the vodka. He doesn't know how much she puts down in the course of an ordinary day, and counting empty bottles doesn't work because she ditches them somewhere, but he knows her capacity is staggering.

  "Thanks," he says. Feeling flattered in spite of himself. Feeling other stuff, too. Very much in spite of himself.

  "Come give your Ma a kiss, honeyboy."

  He approaches the couch, careful not to look down the front of the gaping robe and trying to ignore that crawling sensation just below his belt buckle. She turns her face to one side, but when he bends to kiss her cheek, she turns back and presses her damp half-open mouth to his. He tastes booze and smells the perfume she always dabs behind her ears. She dabs it other places, as well.

  She places a palm on the nape of his neck and ruffles his hair with the tips of her fingers, sending a shiver all the way down to the small of his back. She touches his upper lip with the tip of her tongue, just a flick, there and gone, then pulls back and gives him the wide-eyed starlet stare.

  "My honeyboy," she breathes, like the heroine of some romantic chick-flick--the kind where the men wave swords and the women wear low-cut dresses with their cakes pushed up into shimmery globes.

  He pulls away hastily. She smiles at him, then looks back at the TV, where good-looking young people in bathing suits are running along a beach. He opens the pizza box with hands that are shaking slightly, takes out a slice, and drops it in her salad bowl.

  "Eat that," he says. "It'll sop up the booze. Some of it."

  "Don't be mean to Mommy," she says, but with no rancor and certainly no hurt. She pulls her robe closed, doing it absently, already lost in the world of the survivors again, intent on discovering who will be voted off the island this week. "And don't forget about my car, Brady. It needs a sticker."

  "It needs a lot more than that," he says, and goes into the kitchen. He grabs a Coke from the fridge, then opens the door to the basement. He stands there in the dark for a moment, then speaks a single word: "Control." Below him, the fluorescents (he installed them himself, just as he remodeled the basement himself) flash on.

  At the foot of the stairs, he thinks of Frankie. He almost always does when he stands in the place where Frankie died. The only time he didn't think of Frankie was when he was preparing to make his run at City Center. During those weeks everything else left his mind, and what a relief that was.

  Brady, Frankie said. His last word on Planet Earth. Gurgles and gasps didn't count.

  He puts his pizza and his soda on the worktable in the middle of the room, then goes into the closet-sized bathroom and drops trou. He won't be able to eat, won't be able to work on his new project (which is certainly not a router), he won't be able to think, until he takes care of some urgent business.

  In his letter to the fat ex-cop, he stated he was so sexually excited when he crashed into the job-seekers at City Center that he was wearing a condom. He further stated that he masturbates while reliving the event. If that were true, it would give a whole new meaning to the term autoerotic, but it isn't. He lied a lot in that letter, each lie calculated to wind Hodges up a little more, and his bogus sex-fantasies weren't the greatest of them.

  He actually doesn't have much interest in girls, and girls sense it. It's probably why he gets along so well with Freddi Linklatter, his cyber-dyke
colleague at Discount Electronix. For all Brady knows, she might think he's gay. But he's not gay, either. He's largely a mystery to himself--an occluded front--but one thing he knows for sure: he's not asexual, or not completely. He and his mother share a gothic rainbow of a secret, a thing not to be thought of unless it is absolutely necessary. When it does become necessary, it must be dealt with and put away again.

  Ma, I see your panties, he thinks, and takes care of his business as fast as he can. There's Vaseline in the medicine cabinet, but he doesn't use it. He wants it to burn.

  6

  Back in his roomy basement workspace, Brady speaks another word. This one is chaos.

  On the far side of the control room is a long shelf about three feet above the floor. Ranged along it are seven laptop computers with their darkened screens flipped up. There's also a chair on casters, so he can roll rapidly from one to another. When Brady speaks the magic word, all seven come to life. The number 20 appears on each screen, then 19, then 18. If he allows this countdown to reach zero, a suicide program will kick in, scrubbing his hard discs clean and overwriting them with gibberish.

  "Darkness," he says, and the big countdown numbers disappear, replaced by desktop images that show scenes from The Wild Bunch, his favorite movie.

  He tried apocalypse and Armageddon, much better start-up words in his opinion, full of ringing finality, but the word-recognition program has problems with them, and the last thing he wants is having to replace all his files because of a stupid glitch. Two-syllable words are safer. Not that there's much on six of the seven computers. Number Three is the only one with what the fat ex-cop would call "incriminating information," but he likes to look at that awesome array of computing power, all lit up as it is now. It makes the basement room feel like a real command center.

  Brady considers himself a creator as well as a destroyer, but knows that so far he hasn't managed to create anything that will exactly set the world on fire, and he's haunted by the possibility that he never will. That he has, at best, a second-rate creative mind.

  Take the Rolla, for instance. That had come to him in a flash of inspiration one night when he'd been vacuuming the living room (like using the washing machine, such a chore is usually beneath his mother). He had sketched a device that looked like a footstool on bearings, with a motor and a short hose attachment on the underside. With the addition of a simple computer program, Brady reckoned the device could be designed to move around a room, vacuuming as it went. If it hit an obstacle--a chair, say, or a wall--it would turn on its own and start off in a new direction.

  He had actually begun building a prototype when he saw a version of his Rolla trundling busily around the window display of an upscale appliance store downtown. The name was even similar; it was called a Roomba. Someone had beaten him to it, and that someone was probably making millions. It wasn't fair, but what is? Life is a crap carnival with shit prizes.

  He has blue-boxed the TVs in the house, which means Brady and his ma are getting not just basic cable but all the premium channels (including a few exotic add-ins like Al Jazeera) for free, and there's not a damn thing Time Warner, Comcast, or XFINITY can do about it. He has hacked the DVD player so it will run not just American discs but those from every region of the world. It's easy--three or four quick steps with the remote, plus a six-digit recognition code. Great in theory, but does it get used? Not at 49 Elm Street, it doesn't. Ma won't watch anything that isn't spoon-fed to her by the four major networks, and Brady himself is mostly working one of his two jobs or down here in the control room, where he does his actual work.

  The blue boxes are great, but they're also illegal. For all he knows, the DVD hacks are illegal, too. Not to mention his Redbox and Netflix hacks. All his best ideas are illegal. Take Thing One and Thing Two.

  Thing One had been on the passenger seat of Mrs. Trelawney's Mercedes when he left City Center on that foggy morning the previous April, with blood dripping from the bent grille and stippling the windshield. The idea came to him during the murky period three years ago, after he had decided to kill a whole bunch of people--what he then thought of as his terrorist run--but before he had decided just how, when, or where to do it. He had been full of ideas then, jittery, not sleeping much. In those days he always felt as though he had just swallowed a whole Thermos of black coffee laced with amphetamines.

  Thing One was a modified TV remote with a microchip for a brain and a battery pack to boost its range . . . although the range was still pretty short. If you pointed it at a traffic light twenty or thirty yards away, you could change red to yellow with one tap, red to blinking yellow with two taps, and red to green with three.

  Brady was delighted with it, and had used it several times (always while sitting parked in his old Subaru; the ice cream truck was far too conspicuous) at busy intersections. After several near misses, he had finally caused an actual accident. Just a fender-bender, but it had been fun to watch the two men arguing about whose fault it had been. For awhile it had looked like they might actually come to blows.

  Thing Two came shortly afterward, but it was Thing One that settled Brady on his target, because it radically upped the chances of a successful getaway. The distance between City Center and the abandoned warehouse he had picked as a dumping spot for Mrs. Trelawney's gray Mercedes was exactly 1.9 miles. There were eight traffic lights along the route he planned to take, and with his splendid gadget, he wouldn't have to worry about any of them. But on that morning--Jesus Christ, wouldn't you know it?--every one of those lights had been green. Brady understood the early hour had something to do with it, but it was still infuriating.

  If I hadn't had it, he thinks as he goes to the closet at the far end of the basement, at least four of those lights would have been red. That's the way my life works.

  Thing Two was the only one of his gadgets that turned out to be an actual moneymaker. Not big money, but as everyone knew, money isn't everything. Besides, without Thing Two there would have been no Mercedes. And with no Mercedes, no City Center Massacre.

  Good old Thing Two.

  A big Yale padlock hangs from the hasp of the closet door. Brady opens it with a key on his ring. The lights inside--more new fluorescents--are already on. The closet is small and made even smaller by the plain board shelves. On one of them are nine shoeboxes. Inside each box is a pound of homemade plastic explosive. Brady has tested some of this stuff at an abandoned gravel pit far out in the country, and it works just fine.

  If I was over there in Afghanistan, he thinks, dressed in a head-rag and one of those funky bathrobes, I could have quite a career blowing up troop carriers.

  On another shelf, in another shoebox, are five cell phones. They're the disposable kind the Lowtown drug dealers call burners. The phones, available at fine drugstores and convenience stores everywhere, are Brady's project for tonight. They have to be modified so that a single number will ring all of them, creating the proper spark needed to detonate the boom-clay in the shoeboxes at the same time. He hasn't actually decided to use the plastic, but part of him wants to. Yes indeed. He told the fat ex-cop he has no urge to replicate his masterpiece, but that was another lie. A lot depends on the fat ex-cop himself. If he does what Brady wants--as Mrs. Trelawney did what Brady wanted--he's sure the urge will go away, at least for awhile.

  If not . . . well . . .

  He grabs the box of phones, starts out of the closet, then pauses and looks back. On one of the other shelves is a quilted woodman's vest from L.L.Bean. If Brady were really going out in the woods, a Medium would suit him fine--he's slim--but this one is an XL. On the breast is a smile decal, the one wearing dark glasses and showing its teeth. The vest holds four more one-pound blocks of plastic explosive, two in the outside pockets, two in the slash pockets on the inside. The body of the vest bulges, because it's filled with ball bearings (just like the ones in Hodges's Happy Slapper). Brady slashed the lining to pour them in. It even crossed his mind to ask Ma to sew the slashes up, and that gave him a
good laugh as he sealed them shut with duct tape.

  My very own suicide vest, he thinks affectionately.

  He won't use it . . . probably won't use it . . . but this idea also has a certain attraction. It would put an end to everything. No more Discount Electronix, no more Cyber Patrol calls to dig peanut butter or saltine crumbs out of some elderly idiot's CPU, no more ice cream truck. Also no more crawling snakes in the back of his mind. Or under his belt buckle.

  He imagines doing it at a rock concert; he knows Springsteen is going to play Lakefront Arena this June. Or how about the Fourth of July parade down Lake Street, the city's main drag? Or maybe on opening day of the Summer Sidewalk Art Festival and Street Fair, which happens every year on the first Saturday in August. That would be good, except wouldn't he look funny, wearing a quilted vest on a hot August afternoon?

  True, but such things can always be worked out by the creative mind, he thinks, spreading the disposable phones on his worktable and beginning to remove the SIM cards. Besides, the suicide vest is just a whatdoyoucallit, doomsday scenario. It will probably never be used. Nice to have it handy, though.

  Before going upstairs, he sits down at his Number Three, goes online, and checks the Blue Umbrella. Nothing from the fat ex-cop.

  Yet.

  7

  When Hodges uses the intercom outside Mrs. Wharton's Lake Avenue condo at ten the next morning, he's wearing a suit for only the second or third time since he retired. It feels good to be in a suit again, even though it's tight at the waist and under the arms. A man in a suit feels like a working man.

  A woman's voice comes from the speaker. "Yes?"

  "It's Bill Hodges, ma'am. We spoke last night?"

  "So we did, and you're right on time. It's 19-C, Detective Hodges."

  He starts to tell her that he's no longer a detective, but the door is buzzing and so he doesn't bother. Besides, he told her he was retired when they talked on the phone.