Read Mr. Mercedes: A Novel for Free Online Page B

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