Mr. Mercedes

by Stephen King

  He eats slowly, thinking of all the times he brought home takeout from the Chicken Coop, and how his mother always asked for a Clucker with double slaw. He has ordered her meal without even thinking about it. This brings tears, and he wipes them away with a paper napkin. Poor Mom!

  Sunshine is nice, but its benefits are ephemeral. Brady considers the more lasting benefits darkness will provide. No more listening to Freddi Linklatter's lesbo-feminist rants. No more listening to Tones Frobisher explain why he can't go out on service calls because of his RESPONSIBILITY TO THE STORE, when it's really because he wouldn't know a hard drive crash if it bit him on the dick. No more feeling his kidneys turning to ice as he drives around in the Mr. Tastey truck in August with the freezers on high. No more whapping the Subaru's dashboard when the radio cuts out. No more thinking about his mother's lacy panties and long, long thighs. No more fury at being ignored and taken for granted. No more headaches. And no more sleepless nights, because after today it will be all sleep, all the time.

  With no dreams.

  When he's finished his meal (he eats every bite), Brady buses his table, wipes up a splatter of gravy with another napkin, and dumps his trash. The girl at the counter asks him if everything was all right. Brady says it was, wondering how much of the chicken and gravy and biscuits and coleslaw will have a chance to digest before the explosion rips his stomach open and sprays what's left everywhere.

  They'll remember me, he thinks as he stands at the edge of the highway, waiting for a break in traffic so he can go back to the motel. Highest score ever. I'll go down in history. He's glad now that he didn't kill the fat ex-cop. Hodges should be alive for what's coming tonight. He should have to remember. He should have to live with it.

  Back in the room, he looks at the wheelchair and the explosives-stuffed urine bag lying on the explosives-stuffed ASS PARKING cushion. He wants to get to the MAC early (but not too early; the last thing he wants is to stand out more than he will just by being male and older than thirteen), but there's still a little time. He's brought his laptop, not for any particular reason but just out of habit, and now he's glad. He opens it, connects to the motel's WiFi, and goes to Debbie's Blue Umbrella. There he leaves one final message--a kind of insurance policy.

  With that attended to, he walks back to the airport's long-term parking lot and retrieves his Subaru.

  19

  Hodges and his two apprentice detectives arrive on Harper Road shortly before three-thirty. Holly shoots a cursory glance around, then totes the late Mrs. Hartsfield's laptop into the kitchen and powers it up. Jerome and Hodges stand by, both hoping there will be no password screen . . . but there is.

  "Try her name," Jerome says.

  Holly does. The Mac shakes its screen: no.

  "Okay, try Debbie," Jerome says. "Both the -ie one and the one that ends with an i."

  Holly brushes a clump of mouse-brown hair out of her eyes so he can see her annoyance clearly. "Find something to do, Jerome, okay? I don't want you looking over my shoulder. I hate that." She shifts her attention to Hodges. "Can I smoke in here? I hope I can. It helps me think. Cigarettes help me think."

  Hodges gets her a saucer. "Smoking lamp's lit. Jerome and I will be in my study. Give a holler if you find something."

  Small chance of that, he thinks. Small chance of anything, really.

  Holly pays no attention. She's lighting up. She's left the revival-preacher voice behind and returned to mumbling. "Hope she left a hint. I have hint-hope. Hint-hope is what Holly has."

  Oh boy, Hodges thinks.

  In the study, he asks Jerome if he has any idea what kind of hint she's talking about.

  "After three tries, some computers will give you a password hint. To jog your memory in case you forget. But only if one has been programmed."

  From the kitchen there comes a hearty, non-mumbled cry: "Shit! Double shit! Triple shit!"

  Hodges and Jerome look at each other.

  "Guess not," Jerome says.

  20

  Hodges turns his own computer on and tells Jerome what he wants: a list of all public gatherings for the next seven days.

  "I can do that," Jerome says, "but you might want to check this out first."

  "What?"

  "It's a message. Under the Blue Umbrella."

  "Click it." Hodges's hands are clenched into fists, but as he reads merckill's latest communique, they slowly open. The message is short, and although it's of no immediate help, it contains a ray of hope.

  So long, SUCKER.

  PS: Enjoy your Weekend, I know I will.

  Jerome says, "I think you just got a Dear John, Bill."

  Hodges thinks so, too, but he doesn't care. He's focused on the PS. He knows it might be a red herring, but if it's not, they have some time.

  From the kitchen comes a waft of cigarette smoke and another hearty cry of shit.

  "Bill? I just had a bad thought."

  "What's that?"

  "The concert tonight. That boy band, 'Round Here. At the Mingo. My sister and my mother are going to be there."

  Hodges considers this. Mingo Auditorium seats four thousand, but tonight's attendees will be eighty percent female--mommies and their preteen daughters. There will be men in attendance, but almost every one of them will be chaperoning their daughters and their daughters' friends. Brady Hartsfield is a good-looking guy of about thirty, and if he tries going to that concert by himself, he'll stick out like a sore thumb. In twenty-first-century America, any single man at an event primarily aimed at little girls attracts notice and suspicion.

  Also: Enjoy your Weekend, I know I will.

  "Do you think I should call Mom and tell her to keep the girls home?" Jerome looks dismayed at the prospect. "Barb'll probably never speak to me again. Plus there's her friend Hilda and a couple of others . . ."

  From the kitchen: "Oh, you damn thing! Give it up!"

  Before Hodges can reply, Jerome says, "On the other hand, it sure sounds like he has something planned for the weekend, and this is only Thursday. Or is that just what he wants us to think?"

  Hodges tends to think the taunt is real. "Find that Cyber Patrol picture of Hartsfield again, would you? The one you get when you click on MEET THE EXPERTS."

  While Jerome does that, Hodges calls Marlo Everett in Police Records.

  "Hey, Marlo, Bill Hodges again. I . . . yeah, lot of excitement in Lowtown, I heard about it from Pete. Half the force is down there, right? . . . uh-huh . . . well, I won't keep you long. Do you know if Larry Windom is still head of security at the MAC? Yeah, that's right, Romper-Stomper. Sure, I'll hold."

  While he does, he tells Jerome that Larry Windom took early retirement because the MAC offered him the job at twice the salary he was making as a detective. He doesn't say that wasn't the only reason Windom pulled the pin after twenty. Then Marlo is back. Yes, Larry's still at the MAC. She even has the number of the MAC's security office. Before he can say goodbye, she asks him if there's a problem. "Because there's a big concert there tonight. My niece is going. She's crazy about those twerps."

  "It's fine, Marls. Just some old business."

  "Tell Larry we could use him today," Marlo says. "The squadroom is dead empty. Nary a detective in sight."

  "I'll do that."

  Hodges calls MAC Security, identifies himself as Detective Bill Hodges, and asks for Windom. While he waits, he stares at Brady Hartsfield. Jerome has enlarged the photo so it fills the whole screen. Hodges is fascinated by the eyes. In the smaller version, and in a line with the two I-T colleagues, those eyes seemed pleasant enough. With the picture filling the screen, however, that changes. The mouth is smiling; the eyes aren't. The eyes are flat and distant. Almost dead.

  Bullshit, Hodges tells himself (scolds himself). This is a classic case of seeing something that's not there based on recently acquired knowledge--like a bank-robbery witness saying I thought he looked shifty even before he pulled out that gun.

  Sounds good, sounds professional, but Hodge
s doesn't believe it. He thinks the eyes looking out of the screen are the eyes of a toad hiding under a rock. Or under a cast-off blue umbrella.

  Then Windom's on the line. He has the kind of booming voice that makes you want to hold the phone two inches from your ear while you talk to him, and he's the same old yapper. He wants to know all about the big bust that afternoon. Hodges tells him it's a mega-bust, all right, but beyond that he knows from nothing. He reminds Larry that he's retired.

  But.

  "With all that going on," he says, "Pete Huntley kind of drafted me to call you. Hope you don't mind."

  "Jesus, no. I'd like to have a drink with you, Billy. Talk over old times now that we're both out. You know, hash and trash."

  "That would be good." Pure hell is what it would be.

  "How can I help?"

  "You've got a concert there tonight, Pete says. Some hot boy band. The kind all the little girls love."

  "Iy-yi-yi, do they ever. They're already lining up. And tuning up. Someone'll shout out one of those kids' names, and they all scream. Even if they're still coming in from the parking lot they scream. It's like Beatlemania back in the day, only from what I hear, this crew ain't the Beatles. You got a bomb threat or something? Tell me you don't. The chicks'll tear me apart and the mommies will eat the leftovers."

  "What I've got is a tip that you may have a child molester on your hands tonight. This is a bad, bad boy, Larry."

  "Name and description?" Hard and fast, no bullshit. The guy who left the force because he was a bit too quick with his fists. Anger issues, in the language of the department shrink. Romper-Stomper, in the language of his colleagues.

  "His name is Brady Hartsfield. I'll email you his picture." Hodges glances at Jerome, who nods and makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger. "He's approximately thirty years old. If you see him, call me first, then grab him. Use caution. If he tries to resist, subdue the motherfucker."

  "With pleasure, Billy. I'll pass this along to my guys. Any chance he'll be with a . . . I don't know . . . a beard? A teenage girl or someone even younger?"

  "Unlikely but not impossible. If you spot him in a crowd, Lar, you gotta take him by surprise. He could be armed."

  "How good are the chances he's going to be at the show?" He actually sounds hopeful, which is typical Larry Windom.

  "Not very." Hodges absolutely believes this, and it's not just the Blue Umbrella hint Hartsfield dropped about the weekend. He has to know that in a girls-night-out audience, he'd have no way of being unobtrusive. "In any case, you understand why the department can't send cops, right? With all that's going on in Lowtown?"

  "Don't need them," Windom says. "I've got thirty-five guys tonight, most of the regulars retired po-po. We know what we're doing."

  "I know you do," Hodges says. "Remember, call me first. Us retired guys don't get much action, and we have to protect what we do get."

  Windom laughs. "I hear you on that. Email me the picture." He recites an e-address which Hodges jots down and hands to Jerome. "If we see him, we grab him. After that, it's your bust . . . Uncle Bill."

  "Fuck you, Uncle Larry," Hodges says. He hangs up, turns to Jerome.

  "The pic just went out to him," Jerome says.

  "Good." Then Hodges says something that will haunt him for the rest of his life. "If Hartsfield's as clever as I think he is, he won't be anywhere near the Mingo tonight. I think your mom and sis are good to go. If he does try crashing the concert, Larry's guys will have him before he gets in the door."

  Jerome smiles. "Great."

  "See what else you can find. Concentrate on Saturday and Sunday, but don't neglect next week. Don't neglect tomorrow, either, because--"

  "Because the weekend starts on Friday. Gotcha."

  Jerome gets busy. Hodges walks out to the kitchen to check on how Holly's doing. What he sees stops him cold. Lying next to the borrowed laptop is a red wallet. Deborah Hartsfield's ID, credit cards, and receipts are scattered across the table. Holly, already on her third cigarette, is holding up a MasterCard and studying it through a haze of blue smoke. She gives him a look that's both frightened and defiant.

  "I'm just trying to find her diddly-dang password! Her purse was hanging over the back of her office chair, and her billfold was right there on top, so I put it in my pocket. Because sometimes people keep their passwords in their billfolds. Women especially. I didn't want her money, Mr. Hodges. I have my own money. I get an allowance."

  An allowance, Hodges thinks. Oh, Holly.

  Her eyes are brimming with tears and she's biting her lips again. "I'd never steal."

  "Okay," he says. He thinks of patting her hand and decides it might be a bad idea just now. "I understand."

  And Jesus-God, what's the BFD? On top of all the shit he's pulled since that goddam letter dropped through his mail slot, lifting a dead woman's wallet is chump-change. When all this comes out--as it surely will--Hodges will say he took it himself.

  Holly, meanwhile, is not finished.

  "I have my own credit card, and I have money. I even have a checking account. I buy video games and apps for my iPad. I buy clothes. Also earrings, which I like. I have fifty-six pairs. And I buy my own cigarettes, although they're very expensive now. It might interest you to know that in New York City, a pack of cigarettes now costs eleven dollars. I try not to be a burden because I can't work and she says I'm not but I know I am--"

  "Holly, stop. You need to save that stuff for your shrink, if you have one."

  "Of course I have one." She flashes a grim grin at the stubborn password screen of Mrs. Hartsfield's laptop. "I'm fucked up, didn't you notice?"

  Hodges chooses to ignore this.

  "I was looking for a slip of paper with the password on it," she says, "but there wasn't one. So I tried her Social Security number, first forwards and then backwards. Same deal with her credit cards. I even tried the credit card security codes."

  "Any other ideas?"

  "A couple. Leave me alone." As he leaves the room, she calls: "I'm sorry about the smoke, but it really does help me think."

  21

  With Holly crunching in the kitchen and Jerome doing likewise in his study, Hodges settles into the living room La-Z-Boy, staring at the blank TV. It's a bad place to be, maybe the worst place. The logical part of his mind understands that everything which has happened is Brady Hartsfield's fault, but sitting in the La-Z-Boy where he spent so many vapid, TV-soaked afternoons, feeling useless and out of touch with the essential self he took for granted during his working life, logic loses its power. What creeps in to take its place is a terrifying idea: he, Kermit William Hodges, has committed the crime of shoddy police work, and has aided and abetted Mr. Mercedes by so doing. They are the stars of a reality TV show called Bill and Brady Kill Some Ladies. Because when Hodges looks back, so many of the victims seem to be women: Janey, Olivia Trelawney, Janice Cray and her daughter Patricia . . . plus Deborah Hartsfield, who might have been poisoned instead of poisoning herself. And, he thinks, I haven't even added Holly, who'll likely come out of this even more grandly fucked up than she was going in, if she can't find that password . . . or if she does find it and there's nothing on Mom's computer that can help us to find Sonny Boy. And really, how likely is that?

  Sitting here in this chair--knowing he should get up but as yet unable to move--Hodges thinks his own destructive record with women stretches back even further. His ex-wife is his ex for a reason. Years of near-alcoholic drinking were part of it, but for Corinne (who liked a drink or three herself and probably still does), not the major part. It was the coldness that first stole through the cracks in the marriage and finally froze it solid. It was how he shut her out, telling himself it was for her own good, because so much of what he did was nasty and depressing. How he made it clear in a dozen ways--some large, some small--that in a race between her and the job, Corinne Hodges always came in second. As for his daughter . . . well. Jeez. Allie never misses sending him birthday and Christmas cards (alt
hough the Valentine's Day cards stopped about ten years ago), and she hardly ever misses the Saturday-evening duty-call, but she hasn't been to see him in a couple of years. Which really says all that needs saying about how he bitched up that relationship.

  His mind drifts to how beautiful she was as a kid, with those freckles and that mop of red hair--his little carrot-top. She'd pelt down the hall to him when he came home and jump fearlessly, knowing he'd drop whatever he was holding and catch her. Janey mentioned being crazy about the Bay City Rollers, and Allie'd had her own faves, her own bubble-gum boy-toys. She bought their records with her own allowance, little ones with the big hole in the center. Who was on them? He can't remember, only that one of the songs went on and on about every move you make and every step you take. Was that Bananarama or the Thompson Twins? He doesn't know, but he does know he never took her to a concert, although Corrie might have taken her to see Cyndi Lauper.

  Thinking about Allie and her love of pop music rings in a new thought, one that makes him sit up straight, eyes wide, hands clutching the La-Z-Boy's padded arms.

  Would he have let Allie go to that concert tonight?

  The answer is absolutely not. No way.

  Hodges checks his watch and sees it's closing in on four o'clock. He gets up, meaning to go into the study and tell Jerome to call his moms and tell her to keep those girls away from the MAC no matter how much they piss and moan. He's called Larry Windom and taken precautions, but precautions be damned. He would never have put Allie's life in Romper-Stomper's hands. Never.

  Before he can get two steps toward the study, Jerome calls out: "Bill! Holly! Come here! I think I found something!"

  22

  They stand behind Jerome, Hodges looking over his left shoulder and Holly over his right. On the screen of Hodges's computer is a press release.