Mr. Mercedes: A Novel (48 page)

Now there’s just ten wheelchairs between him and the checkpoint. One of the guards—probably the head honcho, since he’s the oldest and the only one wearing a hat—takes a backpack from a young girl who’s as bald as Brady himself. He explains something to her, and gives her a claim-check.

They’re going to catch me, Brady thinks coldly. They are, so get ready to die.

He
is
ready. Has been for some time now.

Eight wheelchairs between him and the checkpoint. Seven. Six. It’s like the countdown on his computers.

Then the singing starts outside, muffled at first.

“The sun, baby, the sun shines when you look at me . . . The moon, baby . . .”

When they hit the chorus, the sound swells to that of a cathedral choir: girls singing at the top of their lungs.

“I WANT TO LOVE YOU MY WAY . . . WE’LL DRIVE THE BEACHSIDE HIGHWAY . . .”

At that moment, the main doors swing open. Some girls cheer; most continue singing, and louder than ever.

“IT’S GONNA BE A NEW DAY . . . I’LL GIVE YOU KISSES ON THE MIDWAY!”

Chicks wearing ’Round Here tops and their first makeup pour in, their parents (mostly mommies) struggling to keep up and stay connected to their brats. The velvet rope between the main part of the corridor and the handicapped zone is knocked over and trampled underfoot. A beefy twelve- or thirteen-year-old with an ass the size of Iowa is shoved into the wheelchair ahead of Brady’s, and the girl inside it, who has a cheerfully pretty face and sticks for legs, is almost knocked over.

“Hey, watch it!” the wheelchair-girl’s mother shouts, but the fat bitch in the double-wide jeans is already gone, waving a ’Round Here pennant in one hand and her ticket in the other. Someone thumps into Brady’s chair, the picture shifts in his lap, and for one cold second he thinks they’re all going to go up in a white flash and a hail of steel bearings. When they don’t, he raises the picture enough to peer underneath, and sees the ready-lamp is still glowing yellow.

Close one, Brady thinks, and grins.

It’s happy confusion in the hallway, and all but one of the security guards who were checking the handicapped concertgoers move to do what they can with this new influx of crazed singing teens and preteens. The one guard who remains on the handicapped side of the corridor is a young woman, and she’s waving the wheelchairs through with barely a glance. As Brady approaches her he spots the guy in charge, Hat Honcho, standing on the far side of the corridor almost directly opposite. At six-three or so, he’s easy to see, because he towers over the girls, and his eyes never stop moving. In one hand he holds a piece of paper, which he glances down at every now and again.

“Show me your tickets and go,” the security woman says to the pretty wheelchair-girl and her mother. “Righthand door.”

Brady sees something interesting. The tall security guy in the hat grabs a guy of twenty or so who looks to be on his own and pulls him out of the scrum.

“Next!” the security woman calls to him. “Don’t hold up the line!”

Brady rolls forward, ready to push Frankie’s picture against the toggle-switch on Thing Two if she shows even a passing interest in the pockets of his wheelchair. The corridor is now wall to wall with pushing, singing girls, and his score will be a lot higher than thirty. If the corridor has to do, that will be fine.

The security woman points at the picture. “Who’s that, hon?”

“My little boy,” Brady says with a game smile. “He was killed in an accident last year. The same one that left me . . .” He indicates the chair. “He loved ’Round Here, but he never got to hear their new album. Now he will.”

She’s harried, but not too harried for sympathy; her eyes soften. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Brady says, thinking: You stupid cunt.

“Go straight ahead, sir, then bear to the right. You’ll find the two handicapped aisles halfway down the auditorium. Great views. If you need help getting down the ramp—it’s pretty steep—look for one of the ushers wearing the yellow armbands.”

“I’ll be okay,” Brady says, smiling at her. “Great brakes on this baby.”

“Good for you. Enjoy the show.”

“Thank you, ma’am, I sure will. Frankie will, too.”

Brady rolls toward the main entrance. Back at the security checkpoint, Larry Windom—known to his police colleagues as Romper-Stomper—releases the young man who decided on the spur of the moment to use his kid sister’s ticket when she came down with mono. He looks nothing like the creep in the photo Bill Hodges sent him.

The auditorium features stadium seating, which delights Brady. The bowl shape will concentrate the explosion. He can imagine the packets of ball bearings taped under his seat fanning out. If he’s lucky, he thinks, he’ll get the band as well as half the audience.

Pop music plays from the overhead speakers, but the girls who are filling the seats and choking the aisles drown it out with their own young and fervent voices. Spotlights swing back and forth over the crowd. Frisbees fly. A couple of oversized beachballs bounce around. The only thing that surprises Brady is that there’s no sign of the Ferris wheel and all that midway shit onstage. Why did they haul it all in, if they weren’t going to use it?

An usher with a yellow armband has just finished placing the pretty girl with the stick legs, and comes up to assist Brady, but Brady waves him off. The usher gives him a grin and a pat on the shoulder as he goes by to help someone else. Brady rolls down to the first of the two sections reserved for the handicapped. He parks next to the pretty girl with the stick legs.

She turns to him with a smile. “Isn’t this exciting?”

Brady smiles back, thinking, You don’t know the half of it, you crippled bitch.

30

Tanya Robinson is looking at the stage and thinking of the first concert she ever went to—it was the Temps—and how Bobby Wilson kissed her right in the middle of “My Girl.” Very romantic.

She’s roused from these thoughts by her daughter, who’s shaking her arm. “Look, Mom, there’s the crippled man. Over there with the other wheelchair-people.” Barbara points to the left and down a couple of rows. Here the seats have been removed to make room for two ranks of wheelchairs.

“I see him, Barb, but it’s not polite to stare.”

“I hope he has a good time, don’t you?”

Tanya smiles at her daughter. “I sure do, honey.”

“Can we have our phones back? We need them for the start of the show.”

To take pictures with is what Tanya Robinson assumes . . . because it’s been a long time since she’s been to a rock show. She opens her purse and doles out the candy-colored phones. For a wonder, the girls just hold them. For the time being, they’re too busy goggling around to call or text. Tanya puts a quick kiss on top of Barb’s head and then sits back, lost in the past, thinking of Bobby Wilson’s kiss. Not quite the first, but the first good one.

She hopes that when the time comes, Barb will be as lucky.

31

“Oh my happy clapping Jesus,” Holly says, and hits her forehead with the heel of her hand. She’s finished with Brady’s Number One—nothing much there—and has moved on to Number Two.

Jerome looks up from Number Five, which seems to have been exclusively dedicated to video games, most of the
Grand Theft Auto
and
Call of Duty
sort. “What?”

“It’s just that every now and then I run across someone even more screwed in the head than me,” she says. “It cheers me up. That’s terrible, I know it is, but I can’t help it.”

Hodges gets up from the stairs with a grunt and comes over to look. The screen is filled with small photos. They appear to be harmless cheesecake, not much different from the kind he and his friends used to moon over in
Adam
and
Spicy Leg Art
back in the late fifties. Holly enlarges three of them and arranges them in a row. Here is Deborah Hartsfield wearing a filmy robe. And Deborah Hartsfield wearing babydoll pajamas. And Deborah Hartsfield in a frilly pink bra-and-panty set.

“My God, it’s his
mother
,” Jerome says. His face is a study in revulsion, amazement, and fascination. “And it looks like she
posed
.”

It looks that way to Hodges, too.

“Yup,” Holly says. “Paging Dr. Freud. Why do you keep rubbing your shoulder, Mr. Hodges?”

“Pulled a muscle,” he says. But he’s starting to wonder about that.

Jerome glances at the desktop screen of Number Three, starts to check out the photos of Brady Hartsfield’s mother again, then does a double-take. “Whoa,” he says. “Look at this, Bill.”

Sitting in the lower lefthand corner of Number Three’s desktop is a Blue Umbrella icon.

“Open it,” Hodges says.

He does, but the file is empty. There’s nothing unsent, and as they now know, all old correspondence on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella goes straight to data heaven.

Jerome sits down at Number Three. “This must be his go-to glowbox, Hols. Almost got to be.”

She joins him. “I think the other ones are mostly for show—so he can pretend he’s on the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise
or something.”

Hodges points to a file marked
2009
. “Let’s look at that one.”

A mouse-click discloses a subfile titled CITY CENTER. Jerome opens it and they stare at a long list of stories about what happened there in April of 2009.

“The asshole’s press clippings,” Hodges says.

“Go through everything on this one,” Holly tells Jerome. “Start with the hard drive.”

Jerome opens it. “Oh man, look at this shit.” He points to a file titled EXPLOSIVES.

“Open it!” Holly says, shaking his shoulder. “Open it, open it, open it!”

Jerome does, and reveals another loaded subfile. Drawers within drawers, Hodges thinks. A computer’s really nothing but a Victorian rolltop desk, complete with secret compartments.

Holly says, “Hey guys, look at this.” She points. “He downloaded the whole
Anarchist Cookbook
from BitTorrent. That’s illegal!”

“Duh,” Jerome says, and she punches him in the arm.

The pain in Hodges’s shoulder is worse. He walks back to the stairs and sits heavily. Jerome and Holly, huddled over Number Three, don’t notice him go. He puts his hands on his thighs (My overweight thighs, he thinks, my
badly
overweight thighs) and begins taking long slow breaths. The only thing that can make this evening worse would be having a heart attack in a house he’s illegally entered with a minor and a woman who is at least a mile from right in the head. A house where a bullshit-crazy killer’s pinup girl is lying dead upstairs.

Please God, no heart attack.
Please
.

He takes more long breaths. He stifles a belch and the pain begins to ease.

With his head lowered, he finds himself looking between the stairs. Something glints there in the light of the overhead fluorescents. Hodges drops to his knees and crawls underneath to see what it is. It turns out to be a stainless steel ball bearing, bigger than the ones in the Happy Slapper, heavy in his palm. He looks at the distorted reflection of his face in its curved side, and an idea starts to grow. Only it doesn’t exactly grow; it
surfaces
, like the bloated body of something drowned.

Farther beneath the stairs is a green garbage bag. Hodges crawls to it with the ball bearing clutched in one hand, feeling the cobwebs that dangle from the undersides of the steps caress his receding hair and growing forehead. Jerome and Holly are chattering excitedly, but he pays no attention.

He grabs the garbage bag with his free hand and begins to back out from beneath the stairs. A drop of sweat runs into his left eye, stinging, and he blinks it away. He sits down on the steps again.

“Open his email,” Holly says.

“God, you’re bossy,” Jerome says.

“Open it, open it, open it!”

Right you are, Hodges thinks, and opens the garbage bag. There are snippets of wire inside, and what appears to be a busted circuit board. They are lying on top of a khaki-colored garment that looks like a shirt. He brushes the bits of wire aside, pulls the garment out, holds it up. Not a shirt but a hiker’s vest, the kind with lots of pockets. The lining has been slashed in half a dozen places. He reaches into one of these cuts, feels around, and pulls out two more ball bearings. It’s
not
a hiker’s vest, at least not anymore. It’s been customized.

Now it’s a suicide vest.

Or was. Brady unloaded it for some reason. Because his plans changed to the Careers Day thing on Saturday? That has to be it. The explosives are probably in his car, unless he’s stolen another one already. He—

“No!” Jerome cries. Then he screams it.
“No! No, no, OH GOD NO!”

“Please don’t let it be,” Holly whimpers. “Don’t let it be that.”

Hodges drops the vest and hurries across to the bank of computers to see what they’re looking at. It’s an email from a site called FanTastic, thanking Mr. Brady Hartsfield for his order.

You may download your printable ticket at once. No bags or backpacks will be allowed at this event. Thank you for ordering from FanTastic, where all the best seats to all the biggest shows are only a click away.

Below this:
’ROUND HERE MINGO AUDITORIUM MIDWEST CULTURE AND ARTS COMPLEX JUNE 3, 2010 7 PM
.

Hodges closes his eyes. It’s the fucking concert after all. We made an understandable mistake . . . but not a forgivable one. Please God, don’t let him get inside. Please God, let Romper-Stomper’s guys catch him at the door.

But even that could be a nightmare, because Larry Windom is under the impression that he’s looking for a child molester, not a mad bomber. If he spots Brady and tries to collar him with his usual heavy-handed lack of grace—

“It’s quarter of seven,” Holly says, pointing to the digital readout on Brady’s Number Three. “He might still be waiting in line, but he’s probably inside already.”

Hodges knows she’s right. With that many kids going, seating will have started no later than six-thirty.