Mr. Mercedes

  Only there are four public high schools in the city and God knows how many private ones. Not to mention prep schools, junior colleges, City College, and St. Jude's Catholic University. Plenty of haystacks for a poisoned needle to hide in. If he even went to school here at all, and not in Miami or Phoenix.

  Plus, he's a sly dog. The letter is full of false fingerprints--the capitalized phrases like Lead Boots and Note of Concern, the phrases in quotation marks, the extravagant use of exclamation points, the punchy one-sentence paragraphs. If asked to provide a writing sample, Mr. Mercedes would include none of those stylistic devices. Hodges knows that as well as he knows his own unfortunate first name: Kermit, as in kermitfrog19.

  But.

  This asshole isn't quite as smart as he thinks. The letter almost certainly contains two real fingerprints, one smudged and one crystal clear.

  The smudged print is his persistent use of numbers instead of the words for numbers: 27, not twenty-seven; 40 instead of forty. Det. 1st Grade instead of Det. First Grade. There are a few exceptions (he has written one regret instead of 1 regret), but Hodges thinks they are the ones that prove the general rule. The numbers might only be more camouflage, he knows that, but the chances are good Mr. Mercedes is genuinely unaware of it.

  If I could get him in IR4 and tell him to write Forty thieves stole eighty wedding rings . . . ?

  Only K. William Hodges is never going to be in an interview room again, including IR4, which had been his favorite--his lucky IR, he always thought it. Unless he gets caught fooling with this shit, that is, and then he's apt to be on the wrong side of the metal table.

  All right, then. Pete gets the guy in an IR. Pete or Isabelle or both of them. They get him to write 40 thieves stole 80 wedding rings. What then?

  Then they ask him to write The cops caught the perp hiding in the alley. Only they'd want to slur the perp part. Because, for all his writing skill, Mr. Mercedes thinks the word for a criminal doer is perk. Maybe he also thinks the word for a special privilege is a perp, as in Traveling 1st class was one of the CEO's perps.

  Hodges wouldn't be surprised. Until college, he himself had thought that the fellow who threw the ball in a baseball game, the thing you poured water out of, and the framed objects you hung on the wall to decorate your apartment were all spelled the same. He had seen the word picture in all sorts of books, but his mind somehow refused to record it. His mother said straighten that pitcher, Kerm, it's crooked, his father sometimes gave him money for the pitcher show, and it had simply stuck in his head.

  I'll know you when I find you, honeybunch, Hodges thinks. He prints the word and circles it again and again, hemming it in. You'll be the asshole who calls a perp a perk.

  8

  He takes a walk around the block to clear his head, saying hello to people he hasn't said hello to in a long time. Weeks, in some cases. Mrs. Melbourne is working in her garden, and when she sees him, she invites him in for a piece of her coffee cake.

  "I've been worried about you," she says when they're settled in the kitchen. She has the bright, inquisitive gaze of a crow with its eye on a freshly squashed chipmunk.

  "Getting used to retirement has been hard." He takes a sip of her coffee. It's lousy, but plenty hot.

  "Some people never get used to it at all," she says, measuring him with those bright eyes. She wouldn't be too shabby in IR4, Hodges thinks. "Especially ones who had high-pressure jobs."

  "I was a little at loose ends to start with, but I'm doing better now."

  "I'm glad to hear it. Does that nice Negro boy still work for you?"

  "Jerome? Yes." Hodges smiles, wondering how Jerome would react if he knew someone in the neighborhood thinks of him as that nice Negro boy. Probably he would bare his teeth in a grin and exclaim, I sho is! Jerome and his chos fo hos. Already with his eye on Harvard. Princeton as a fallback.

  "He's slacking off," she says. "Your lawn's gotten rather shaggy. More coffee?"

  Hodges declines with a smile. Hot can only do so much for bad coffee.

  9

  Back home again. Legs tingling, head filled with fresh air, mouth tasting like newspaper in a birdcage, but brain buzzing with caffeine.

  He logs on to the city newspaper site and calls up several stories about the slaughter at City Center. What he wants isn't in the first story, published under scare headlines on April eleventh of '09, or the much longer piece in the Sunday edition of April twelfth. It's in the Monday paper: a picture of the abandoned kill-car's steering wheel. The indignant caption: HE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY. In the center of the wheel, pasted over the Mercedes emblem, is a yellow smile-face. The kind that wears sunglasses and shows its teeth.

  There was a lot of police anger about that photo, because the detectives in charge--Hodges and Huntley--had asked the news media to hold back the smile icon. The editor, Hodges remembers, had been fawningly apologetic. A missed communication, he said. Won't happen again. Promise. Scout's honor.

  "Mistake, my ass," he remembers Pete fuming. "They had a picture that'd shoot a few steroids into their saggy-ass circulation, and they fucking used it."

  Hodges enlarges the news photo until that grinning yellow face fills the computer screen. The mark of the beast, he thinks, twenty-first-century style.

  This time the number he speed-dials isn't PD Reception but Pete's cell. His old partner picks up on the second ring. "Yo, you ole hossy-hoss. How's retirement treating you?" He sounds really pleased, and that makes Hodges smile. It also makes him feel guilty, yet the thought of backing off never crosses his mind.

  "I'm good," he says, "but I miss your fat and hypertensive face."

  "Sure you do. And we won in Iraq."

  "Swear to God, Peter. How about we have lunch and catch up a little? You pick the place and I'll buy."

  "Sounds good, but I already ate today. How about tomorrow?"

  "My schedule is jammed, Obama was coming by for my advice on the budget, but I suppose I could rearrange a few things. Seeing's how it's you."

  "Go fuck yourself, Kermit."

  "When you do it so much better?" The banter is an old tune with simple lyrics.

  "How about DeMasio's? You always liked that place."

  "DeMasio's is fine. Noon?"

  "That works."

  "And you're sure you've got time for an old whore like me?"

  "Billy, you don't even need to ask. Want me to bring Isabelle?"

  He doesn't, but says: "If you want."

  Some of the old telepathy must still be working, because after a brief pause Pete says, "Maybe we'll make it a stag party this time."

  "Whatever," Hodges says, relieved. "Looking forward."

  "Me too. Good to hear your voice, Billy."

  Hodges hangs up and looks at the teeth-bared smile-face some more. It fills his computer screen.

  10

  He sits in his La-Z-Boy that night, watching the eleven o'clock news. In his white pajamas he looks like an overweight ghost. His scalp gleams mellowly through his thinning hair. The big story is the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico where the oil is still gushing. The newsreader says the bluefin tuna are endangered, and the Louisiana shellfish industry may be destroyed for a generation. In Iceland, a billowing volcano (with a name the newsreader mangles to something like Eeja-fill-kull) is still screwing up transatlantic air travel. In California, police are saying they may have finally gotten a break in the Grim Sleeper serial killer case. No names, but the suspect (the perk, Hodges thinks) is described as "a well-groomed and well-spoken African-American." Hodges thinks, Now if only someone would bag Turnpike Joe. Not to mention Osama bin Laden.

  The weather comes on. Warm temperatures and sunny skies, the weather girl promises. Time to break out the bathing suits.

  "I'd like to see you in a bathing suit, my dear," Hodges says, and uses the remote to turn off the TV.

  He takes his father's .38 out of the drawer, unloads it as he walks into the bedroom, and puts it in the safe with his Glock. He has
spent a lot of time during the last two or three months obsessing about the Victory .38, but tonight it hardly crosses his mind as he locks it away. He's thinking about Turnpike Joe, but not really; these days Joe is someone else's problem. Like the Grim Sleeper, that well-spoken African-American.

  Is Mr. Mercedes also African-American? It's technically possible--no one saw anything but the pullover clown mask, a long-sleeved shirt, and yellow gloves on the steering wheel--but Hodges thinks not. God knows there are plenty of black people capable of murder in this city, but there's the weapon to consider. The neighborhood where Mrs. Trelawney's mother lived is predominantly wealthy and predominantly white. A black man hanging around a parked Mercedes SL500 would have been noticed.

  Well. Probably. People can be stunningly unobservant. But experience has led Hodges to believe rich people tend to be slightly more observant than the general run of Americans, especially when it comes to their expensive toys. He doesn't want to say they're paranoid, but . . .

  The fuck they're not. Rich people can be generous, even the ones with bloodcurdling political views can be generous, but most believe in generosity on their own terms, and underneath (not so deep, either), they're always afraid someone is going to steal their presents and eat their birthday cake.

  How about neat and well spoken, then?

  Yes, Hodges decides. No hard evidence, but the letter suggests he is. Mr. Mercedes may dress in suits and work in an office, or he may dress in jeans and Carhartt shirts and balance tires in a garage, but he's no slob. He may not talk a lot--such creatures are careful in all aspects of their lives, and that includes promiscuous blabbing--but when he does talk, he's probably direct and clear. If you were lost and needed directions, he'd give you good ones.

  As he's brushing his teeth, Hodges thinks: DeMasio's. Pete wants to have lunch at DeMasio's.

  That's okay for Pete, who still carries the badge and gun, and it seemed okay to Hodges when they were talking on the phone, because then Hodges had been thinking like a cop instead of a retiree who's thirty pounds overweight. It probably would be okay--broad daylight and all--but DeMasio's is on the edge of Lowtown, which is not a vacation community. A block west of the restaurant, beyond the turnpike spur overpass, the city turns into a wasteland of vacant lots and abandoned tenements. Drugs are sold openly on streetcorners, there's a burgeoning trade in illegal weaponry, and arson is the neighborhood sport. If you can call Lowtown a neighborhood, that is. The restaurant itself--a really terrific Italian joint--is safe, though. The owner is connected, and that makes it like Free Parking in Monopoly.

  Hodges rinses his mouth, goes back into the bedroom, and--still thinking of DeMasio's--looks doubtfully at the closet where the safe is hidden behind the hanging pants, shirts, and the sportcoats he no longer wears (he's now too big for all but two of them).

  Take the Glock? The Victory, maybe? The Victory's smaller.

  No to both. His carry-concealed license is still in good standing, but he's not going strapped to a lunch with his old partner. It would make him self-conscious, and he's already self-conscious about the digging he plans to do. He goes to his dresser instead, lifts up a pile of underwear, and looks underneath. The Happy Slapper is still there, has been there since his retirement party.

  The Slapper will do. Just a little insurance in a high-risk part of town.

  Satisfied, he goes to bed and turns out the light. He puts his hands into the mystic cool pocket under the pillow and thinks of Turnpike Joe. Joe has been lucky so far, but eventually he'll be caught. Not just because he keeps hitting those highway rest areas but because he can't stop killing. He thinks of Mr. Mercedes writing, That is not true in my case, because I have absolutely no urge to do it again.

  Telling the truth, or lying the way he was lying with his CAPITALIZED PHRASES and MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS and ONE-SENTENCE PARAGRAPHS?

  Hodges thinks he's lying--perhaps to himself as well as to K. William Hodges, Det. Ret.--but right now, as Hodges lies here with sleep coming on, he doesn't care. What matters is the guy thinks he's safe. He's positively smug about it. He doesn't seem to realize the vulnerability he has exposed by writing a letter to the man who was, until his retirement, the lead detective on the City Center case.

  You need to talk about it, don't you? Yes you do, honeybunch, don't lie to your old uncle Billy. And unless that Debbie's Blue Umbrella site is another red herring, like all those quotation marks, you've even opened a conduit into your life. You want to talk. You need to talk. And if you could goad me into something, that would just be the cherry on top of a sundae, wouldn't it?

  In the dark, Hodges says: "I'm willing to listen. I've got plenty of time. I'm retired, after all."

  Smiling, he falls asleep.

  11

  The following morning, Freddi Linklatter is sitting on the edge of the loading dock and smoking a Marlboro. Her Discount Electronix jacket is folded neatly beside her with her DE gimme cap placed on top of it. She's talking about some Jesus-jumper who gave her hassle. People are always giving her hassle, and she tells Brady all about it on break. She gives him chapter and verse, because Brady is a good listener.

  "So he says to me, he goes, All homosexuals are going to hell, and this tract explains all about it. So I take it, right? There's a picture on the front of these two narrow-ass gay guys--in leisure suits, I swear to God--holding hands and staring into a cave filled with flames. Plus the devil! With a pitchfork! I am not shitting you. Still, I try to discuss it with him. I'm under the impression that he wants to have a dialogue. So I say, I go, You ought to get your face out of the Book of LaBitticus or whatever it is long enough to read a few scientific studies. Gays are born gay, I mean, hello? He goes, That is simply not true. Homosexuality is learned behavior and can be unlearned. So I can't believe it, right? I mean, you have got to be shitting me. But I don't say that. What I say is, Look at me, dude, take a real good look. Don't be shy, go top to bottom. What do you see? And before he can toss some more of his bullshit, I go, You see a guy, is what you see. Only God got distracted before he could slap a dick on me and went on to the next in line. So then he goes . . ."

  Brady sticks with her--more or less--until Freddi gets to the Book of LaBitticus (she means Leviticus, but Brady doesn't care enough to correct her), and then mostly loses her, keeping track just enough to throw in the occasional uh-huh. He doesn't really mind the monologue. It's soothing, like the LCD Soundsystem he sometimes listens to on his iPod when he goes to sleep. Freddi Linklatter is way tall for a girl, at six-two or -three she towers over Brady, and what she's saying is true: she looks like a girl about as much as Brady Hartsfield looks like Vin Diesel. She's togged out in straight-leg 501s, motorcycle skids, and a plain white tee that hangs dead straight, without even a touch of tits. Her dark blond hair is butched to a quarter inch. She wears no earrings and no makeup. She probably thinks Max Factor is a statement about what some guy did to some girl out behind old Dad's barn.

  He says yeah and uh-huh and right, all the time wondering what the old cop made of his letter, and if the old cop will try to get in touch at the Blue Umbrella. He knows that sending the letter was a risk, but not a very big one. He made up a prose style that's completely different from his own. The chances of the old cop picking up anything useful from the letter are slim to nonexistent.

  Debbie's Blue Umbrella is a slightly bigger risk, but if the old cop thinks he can trace him down that way, he's in for a big surprise. Debbie's servers are in Eastern Europe, and in Eastern Europe computer privacy is like cleanliness in America: next to godliness.

  "So he goes, I swear this is true, he goes, There are plenty of young Christian women in our church who could show you how to fix yourself up, and if you grew your hair out, you'd look quite pretty. Do you believe it? So I tell him, With a little lipum-stickum, you'd look darn pretty yourself. Put on a leather jacket and a dog collar and you might luck into a hot date at the Corral. Get your first squirt on the Tower of Power. So that buzzes him bigtime and he go
es, If you're going to get personal about this . . ."

  Anyway, if the old cop wants to follow the computer trail, he'll have to turn the letter over to the cops in the technical section, and Brady doesn't think he'll do that. Not right away, at least. He's got to be bored sitting there with nothing but the TV for company. And the revolver, of course, the one he keeps beside him with his beer and magazines. Can't forget the revolver. Brady has never seen him actually stick it in his mouth, but several times he's seen him holding it. Shiny happy people don't hold guns in their laps that way.

  "So I tell him, I go, Don't get mad. Somebody pushes back against your precious ideas, you guys always get mad. Have you noticed that about the Christers?"

  He hasn't but says he has.

  "Only this one listened. He actually did. And we ended up going down to Hosseni's Bakery and having coffee. Where, I know this is hard to believe, we actually did have something approaching a dialogue. I don't hold out much hope for the human race, but every now and then . . ."

  Brady is pretty sure his letter will pep the old cop up, at least to start with. He didn't get all those citations for being stupid, and he'll see right through the veiled suggestion that he commit suicide the way Mrs. Trelawney did. Veiled? Not very. It's pretty much right out front. Brady believes the old cop will go all gung ho, at least for awhile. But when he fails to get anywhere, it will make the fall even more jarring. Then, assuming the old cop takes the Blue Umbrella bait, Brady can really go to work.

  The old cop is thinking, If I can get you talking, I can goad you.

  Only Brady is betting the old cop never read Nietzsche; Brady's betting the old cop is more of a John Grisham man. If he reads at all. When you gaze into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss also gazes into you.

  I am the abyss, old boy. Me.

  The old cop is certainly a bigger challenge than poor guilt-ridden Olivia Trelawney . . . but getting to her was such a hot hit to the nervous system that Brady can't help wanting to try it again. In some ways prodding Sweet Livvy into high-siding it was a bigger thrill than cutting a bloody swath through that pack of job-hunting assholes at City Center. Because it took brains. It took dedication. It took planning. And a little bit of help from the cops didn't hurt, either. Did they guess their faulty deductions were partly to blame for Sweet Livvy's suicide? Probably not Huntley, such a possibility would never cross his plodder's mind. Ah, but Hodges. He might have his doubts. A few little mice nibbling at the wires back there in his smart-cop brain. Brady hopes so. If not, he may get a chance to tell him. On the Blue Umbrella.