8
Hodges thinks that the Birch Hill Mall Discount Electronix looks like an enterprise with about three months to live. Many of the shelves are empty, and the stock that’s left has a disconsolate, neglected look. Almost all of the browsers are in the Home Entertainment department, where fluorescent pink signs proclaim WOW! DVD BLOWOUT! ALL DISCS 50% OFF! EVEN BLU-RAY! Although there are ten checkout lines, only three are open, staffed by women in blue dusters with the yellow DE logo on them. Two of these women are looking out the window; the third is reading Twilight. A couple of other employees are wandering the aisles, doing a lot of nothing much.
Hodges doesn’t want any of them, but he sees two of the three he does want. Anthony Frobisher, he of the John Lennon specs, is talking to a customer who has a shopping basket full of discounted DVDs in one hand and a clutch of coupons in the other. Frobisher’s tie suggests that he might be the store manager as well as a Cyber Patrolman. The narrow-faced girl with the dirty-blond hair is at the back of the store, seated at a computer. There’s a cigarette parked behind one ear.
Hodges strolls up the center aisle of the DVD BLOWOUT. Frobisher looks at him and raises a finger to say Be with you soon. Hodges smiles and gives him a little I’m okay wave. Frobisher returns to the customer with the coupons. No recognition there. Hodges walks on to the back of the store.
The dirty blond looks up at him, then back at the screen of the computer she’s using. No recognition from her, either. She’s not wearing a Discount Electronix shirt; hers says WHEN I WANT MY OPINION, I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU. He sees she’s playing an updated version of Pitfall!, a cruder version of which fascinated his daughter Alison a quarter of a century before. Everything that goes around comes around, Hodges thinks. A Zen concept for sure.
“Unless you’ve got a computer question, talk to Tones,” she says. “I only do crunchers.”
“Tones would be Anthony Frobisher?”
“Yeah. Mr. Spiffy in the tie.”
“You’d be Freddi Linklatter. Of the Cyber Patrol.”
“Yeah.” She pauses Pitfall Harry in mid-jump over a coiled snake in order to give him a closer inspection. What she sees is Hodges’s police ID, with his thumb strategically placed to hide its year of expiration.
“Oooh,” she says, and holds out her hands with the twig-thin wrists together. “I’m a bad, bad girl and handcuffs are what I deserve. Whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks.”
Hodges gives a brief smile and tucks his ID away. “Isn’t Brady Hartsfield the third member of your happy band? I don’t see him.”
“Out with the flu. He says. Want my best guess?”
“Hit me.”
“I think maybe he finally had to put dear old Mom in rehab. He says she drinks and he has to take care of her most of the time. Which is probably why he’s never had a gee-eff. You know what that is, right?”
“I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
She examines him with bright and mordant interest. “Is Brady in trouble? I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s a little on the, you know, peekee-yoolier side.”
“I just need to speak to him.”
Anthony Frobisher—Tones—joins them. “May I help you, sir?”
“It’s five-oh,” Freddi says. She gives Frobisher a wide smile that exposes small teeth badly in need of cleaning. “He found out about the meth lab in the back.”
“Can it, Freddi.”
She makes an extravagant lip-zipping gesture, finishing with the twist of an invisible key, but doesn’t go back to her game.
In Hodges’s pocket, his cell phone rings. He silences it with his thumb.
“I’m Detective Bill Hodges, Mr. Frobisher. I have a few questions for Brady Hartsfield.”
“He’s out with the flu. What did he do?”
“Tones is a poet and don’t know it,” Freddi Linklatter observes. “Although his feet show it, because they’re Longfel—”
“Shut up, Freddi. For the last time.”
“Can I have his address, please?”
“Of course. I’ll get it for you.”
“Can I un-shut for a minute?” Freddi asks.
Hodges nods. She punches a key on her computer. Pitfall Harry is replaced by a spread-sheet headed STORE PERSONNEL.
“Presto,” she says. “Forty-nine Elm Street. That’s on the—”
“North Side, yeah,” Hodges says. “Thank you both. You’ve been very helpful.”
As he leaves, Freddi Linklatter calls after him, “It’s something with his mom, betcha anything. He’s freaky about her.”
9
Hodges has no more than stepped out into the bright sunshine when Jerome almost tackles him. Holly lurks just behind. She’s stopped biting her lips and gone to her fingernails, which look badly abused. “I called you,” Jerome says. “Why didn’t you pick up?”
“I was asking questions. What’s got you all white-eyed?”
“Is Hartsfield in there?”
Hodges is too surprised to reply.
“Oh, it’s him,” Jerome says. “Got to be. You were right about him watching you, and I know how. It’s like that Hawthorne story about the purloined letter. Hide in plain sight.”
Holly stops munching her fingernails long enough to say, “Poe wrote that story. Don’t they teach you kids anything?”
Hodges says, “Slow down, Jerome.”
Jerome takes a deep breath. “He’s got two jobs, Bill. Two. He must only work here until mid-afternoon or something. After that he works for Loeb’s.”
“Loeb’s? Is that the—”
“Yeah, the ice cream company. He drives the Mr. Tastey truck. The one with the bells. I’ve bought stuff from him, my sister has, too. All the kids do. He’s on our side of town a lot. Brady Hartsfield is the ice cream man!”
Hodges realizes he’s heard those cheerful, tinkling bells more than a lot lately. In the spring of his depression, crashed out in his La-Z-Boy, watching afternoon TV (and sometimes playing with the gun now riding against his ribs), it seems he heard them every day. Heard them and ignored them, because only kids pay actual attention to the ice cream man. Except some deeper part of his mind didn’t completely ignore them. It was the deep part that kept coming back to Bowfinger, and his satiric comment about Mrs. Melbourne.
She thinks they walk among us, Mr. Bowfinger said, but it hadn’t been space aliens Mrs. Melbourne had been concerned about on the day Hodges had done his canvass; it had been black SUVs, and chiropractors, and the people on Hanover Street who played loud music late at night.
Also, the Mr. Tastey man.
That one looks suspicious, she had said.
This spring it seems like he’s always around, she had said.
A terrible question surfaces in his mind, like one of the snakes always lying in wait for Pitfall Harry: if he had paid attention to Mrs. Melbourne instead of dismissing her as a harmless crank (the way he and Pete dismissed Olivia Trelawney), would Janey still be alive? He doesn’t think so, but he’s never going to know for sure, and he has an idea that the question will haunt a great many sleepless nights in the weeks and months to come.
Maybe the years.
He looks out at the parking lot . . . and there he sees a ghost. A gray one.
He turns back to Jerome and Holly, now standing side by side, and doesn’t even have to ask.
“Yeah,” Jerome says. “Holly drove it here.”
“The registration and the sticker decal on the license plate are both a tiny bit expired,” Holly says. “Please don’t be mad at me, okay? I had to come. I wanted to help, but I knew if I just called you, you’d say no.”
“I’m not mad,” Hodges says. In fact, he doesn’t know what he is. He feels like he’s entered a dreamworld where all the clocks run backward.
“What do we do now?” Jerome asks. “Call the cops?”
But Hodges is still not ready to let go. The young man in the picture may have a cauldron of crazy boiling away behind his bland face, but Hodges has met his share of psychopaths and knows that when they’re taken by surprise, most collapse like puffballs. They’re only dangerous to the unarmed and unsuspecting, like the broke folks waiting to apply for jobs on that April morning in 2009.
“Let’s you and I take a ride to Mr. Hartsfield’s place of residence,” Hodges says. “And let’s go in that.” He points to the gray Mercedes.
“But . . . if he sees us pull up, won’t he recognize it?”
Hodges smiles a sharklike smile Jerome Robinson has never seen before. “I certainly hope so.” He holds out his hand. “May I have the key, Holly?”
Her abused lips tighten. “Yes, but I’m going.”
“No way,” Hodges says. “Too dangerous.”
“If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for you.” She won’t look directly at him and her eyes keep skipping past his face, but her voice is firm. “You can make me stay, but if you do, I’ll call the police and give them Brady Hartsfield’s address just as soon as you’re gone.”
“You don’t have it,” Hodges says. This sounds feeble even to him.
Holly doesn’t reply, which is a form of courtesy. She won’t even need to go inside Discount Electronix and ask the dirty blonde; now that they have the name, she can probably suss out the Hartsfield address from her devilish iPad.
Fuck.
“All right, you can come. But I drive, and when we get there, you and Jerome are going to stay in the car. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No, Mr. Hodges.”
This time her eyes go to his face and stay there for three whole seconds. It might be a step forward. With Holly, he thinks, who knows.
10
Because of drastic budget cuts that kicked in the previous year, most city patrol cars are solo rides. This isn’t the case in Lowtown. In Lowtown every shop holds a deuce, the ideal deuce containing at least one person of color, because in Lowtown the minorities are the majority. At just past noon on June third, Officers Laverty and Rosario are cruising Lowbriar Avenue about half a mile beyond the overpass where Bill Hodges once stopped a couple of trolls from robbing a shorty. Laverty is white. Rosario is Latina. Because their shop is CPC 54, they are known in the department as Toody and Muldoon, after the cops in an ancient sitcom called Car 54, Where Are You? Amarilis Rosario sometimes amuses her fellow blue knights at roll call by saying, “Ooh, ooh, Toody, I got an idea!” It sounds extremely cute in her Dominican accent, and always gets a laugh.
On patrol, however, she’s Ms. Taking Care of Business. They both are. In Lowtown you have to be.
“The cornerboys remind me of the Blue Angels in this air show I saw once,” she says now.
“Yeah?”
“They see us coming, they peel off like they’re in formation. Look, there goes another one.”
As they approach the intersection of Lowbriar and Strike, a kid in a Cleveland Cavaliers warmup jacket (oversized and totally superfluous on this day) suddenly decamps from the corner where he’s been jiving around and heads down Strike at a trot. He looks about thirteen.
“Maybe he just remembered it’s a schoolday,” Laverty says.
Rosario laughs. “As if, esse.”
Now they are approaching the corner of Lowbriar and Martin Luther King Avenue. MLK is the ghetto’s other large thoroughfare, and this time half a dozen cornerboys decide they have business elsewhere.
“That’s formation flying, all right,” Laverty says. He laughs, although it’s not really funny. “Listen, where do you want to eat?”
“Let’s see if that wagon’s on Randolph,” she says. “I’m in a taco state of mind.”
“Se?or Taco it is,” he says, “but lay off the beans, okay? We’ve got another four hours in this . . . huh. Check it, Rosie. That’s weird.”
Up ahead, a man is coming out of a storefront with a long flower box. It’s weird because the storefront isn’t a florist’s; it’s King Virtue Pawn & Loan. It’s also weird because the man looks Caucasian and they are now in the blackest part of Lowtown. He’s approaching a dirty white Econoline van that’s standing on a yellow curb: a twenty-dollar fine. Laverty and Rosario are hungry, though, they’ve got their faces fixed for tacos with that nice hot picante sauce Se?or Taco keeps on the counter, and they might have let it go. Probably would have.
But.
With David Berkowitz, it was a parking ticket. With Ted Bundy, it was a busted taillight. Today a florist’s box with badly folded flaps is all it takes to change the world. As the guy fumbles for the keys to his old van (not even Emperor Ming of Mongo would leave his vehicle unlocked in Lowtown), the box tilts downward. The end comes open and something slides partway out.
The guy catches it and shoves it back in before it can fall into the street, but Jason Laverty spent two tours in Iraq and he knows an RPG launcher when he sees it. He flips on the blues and hooks in behind the guy, who looks around with a startled expression.
“Sidearm!” he snaps at his partner. “Get it out!”
They fly out the doors, double-fisted Glocks pointing at the sky.
“Drop the box, sir!” Laverty shouts. “Drop the box and put your hands on the van! Lean forward. Do it now!”
For a moment the guy—he’s about forty, olive-skinned, round-shouldered—hugs the florist’s box tighter against his chest, like a baby. But when Rosie Rosario lowers her gun and points it at his chest, he drops the box. It splits wide open and reveals what Laverty tentatively identifies as a Russian-made Hashim antitank grenade launcher.
“Holy shit!” Rosario says, and then: “Toody, Toody, I got an id—”
“Officers, lower your weapons.”
Laverty keeps his focus on Grenade Launcher Guy, but Rosario turns and sees a gray-haired Cauc in a blue jacket. He’s wearing an earpiece and has his own Glock. Before she can ask him anything, the street is full of men in blue jackets, all running for King Virtue Pawn & Loan. One is carrying a Stinger battering ram, the kind cops call a baby doorbuster. She sees ATF on the backs of the jackets, and all at once she has that unmistakable I-stepped-in-shit feeling.
“Officers, lower your weapons. Agent James Kosinsky, ATF.”
Laverty says, “Maybe you’d like one of us to cuff him first? Just asking.”
ATF agents are piling into the pawnshop like Christmas shoppers into Walmart on Black Friday. A crowd is gathering across the street, as yet too stunned by the size of the strike force to start casting aspersions. Or stones, for that matter.
Kosinsky sighs. “You may as well,” he says. “The horse has left the barn.”
“We didn’t know you had anything going,” Laverty says. Meanwhile, Grenade Launcher Guy already has his hands off the van and behind him with the wrists pressed together. It’s pretty clear this isn’t his first rodeo. “He was unlocking his van and I saw that poking out of the end of the box. What was I supposed to do?”
“What you did, of course.” From inside the pawnshop there comes the sound of breaking glass, shouts, and then the boom of the doorbuster being put to work. “Tell you what, now that you’re here, why don’t you throw Mr. Cavelli there in the back of your car and come on inside. See what we’ve got.”
While Laverty and Rosario are escorting their prisoner to the cruiser, Kosinsky notes the number.
“So,” he says. “Which one of you is Toody and which one is Muldoon?”