Mr. Mercedes

In any case, Hodges has done all he can do. The only thing left is to sit here, fighting the pain and trying to get his breath and waiting for an explosion he prays will not come.

37

Holly Gibney has been institutionalized twice in her life, once in her teens and once in her twenties. The shrink she saw later on (in her so-called maturity) labeled these enforced vacations breaks with reality, which were not good but still better than psychotic breaks, from which many people never returned. Holly herself had a simpler name for said breaks. They were her total freakouts, as opposed to the state of low to moderate freakout in which she lived her day-to-day life.

The total freakout in her twenties had been caused by her boss at a Cinci

The cause of her first total freakout was Mike Sturdevant. He was the one who coined the pestiferous nickname Jibba-Jibba.

In those days, as a high school freshman, Holly had wanted nothing except to scurry from place to place with her books clutched to her newly arrived breasts and her hair screening her acne-spotted face. But even then she had problems that went far beyond acne. Anxiety problems. Depression problems. Insomnia problems.

Worst of all, stimming.

Stimming was short for self-stimulation, which sounded like masturbation but wasn’t. It was compulsive movement, often accompanied by fragments of self-directed dialogue. Biting one’s fingernails and chewing one’s lips were mild forms of stimming. More extravagant stimmers waved their hands, slapped at their chests and cheeks, or did curling movements with their arms, as if lifting invisible weights.

Starting at roughly age eight, Holly began wrapping her arms around her shoulders and shivering all over, muttering to herself and making facial grimaces. This would go on for five or ten seconds, and then she would simply continue with whatever she had been doing – reading, sewing, shooting baskets in the driveway with her father. She was hardly aware that she was doing it unless her mother saw her and told her to stop shaking and making faces, people would think she was having a fit.

Mike Sturdevant was one of those behaviorally stunted males who look back on high school as the great lost golden age of their lives. He was a senior, and – very much like Cam Knowles – a boy of godlike good looks: broad shoulders, narrow hips, long legs, and hair so blond it was a kind of halo. He was on the football team (of course) and dated the head cheerleader (of course). He lived on an entirely different level of the high school hierarchy from Holly Gibney, and under ordinary circumstances, she never would have attracted his notice. But notice her he did, because one day, on her way to the caff, she had one of her stimming episodes.

Mike Sturdevant and several of his football-playing buddies happened to be passing. They stopped to stare at her – this girl who was clutching herself, shivering, and making a face that pulled her mouth down and turned her eyes into slits. A series of small, inarticulate sounds – perhaps words, perhaps not – came squeezing through her clenched teeth.

‘What are you gibbering about?’ Mike asked her.

Holly relaxed her grip on her shoulders, staring at him in wild surprise. She didn’t know what he was saying; she only knew he was staring at her. All his friends were staring at her. And gri

She gaped at him. ‘What?’

‘Gibbering!’ Mike shouted. ‘Jibba-jibba-gibbering!’

The others took it up as she ran toward the cafeteria with her head lowered, bumping into people as she went. From then on, Holly Gibney was known to the student body at Walnut Hills High School as Jibba-Jibba, and so she remained until just after the Christmas break. That was when her mother found her curled up naked in the bathtub, saying that she would never go to Walnut Hills again. If her mother tried to make her, she said, she would kill herself.

Voilà! Total freakout!

When she got better (a little), she went to a different school where things were less stressful (a little less). She never had to see Mike Sturdevant again, but she still has dreams in which she’s ru

She’s thinking of those dear old high school days as she and Jerome follow the head custodian through the warren of rooms below the Mingo Auditorium. That’s what Brady Hartsfield will look like, she decides, like Mike Sturdevant, only bald. Which she hopes Mike is, wherever he may now reside. Bald … fat … pre-diabetic … afflicted with a nagging wife and ungrateful children …

Jibba-Jibba, she thinks.

Pay you back, she thinks.

Gallison leads them through the carpentry shop and costume shop, past a cluster of dressing rooms, then down a corridor wide enough to transport flats and completed sets. The corridor ends at a freight elevator with the doors standing open. Happy pop music booms down the shaft. The current song is about love and dancing. Nothing Holly can relate to.

‘You don’t want the elevator,’ Gallison says, ‘it goes backstage and you can’t get to the auditorium from there without walking right through the band. Listen, is that guy really having a heart attack? Are you guys really cops? You don’t look like cops.’ He glances at Jerome. ‘You’re too young.’ Then to Holly, his expression even more doubtful. ‘And you’re …’

‘Too freaky?’ Holly supplies.

‘I wasn’t going to say that.’ Maybe not, but it’s what he’s thinking. Holly knows; a girl once nicknamed Jibba-Jibba always does.

‘I’m calling the cops,’ Gallison says. ‘The real cops. And if this is some kind of joke—’

‘Do what you need to do,’ Jerome says, thinking Why not? Let him call in the National Guard if he wants to. This is going to be over, one way or the other, in the next few minutes. Jerome knows it, and he can see that Holly does, too. The gun Hodges gave him is in his pocket. It feels heavy and weirdly warm. Other than the air rifle he had when he was nine or ten (a birthday present given to him despite his mother’s reservations), he has never carried a gun in his life, and this one feels alive.

Holly points to the left of the elevator. ‘What about that door?’ And when Gallison doesn’t reply immediately: ‘Help us. Please. Maybe we’re not real cops, maybe you’re right about that, but there really is a man in the audience tonight who’s very dangerous.’

She takes a deep breath and says words she can hardly believe, even though she knows they are true. ‘Mister, we’re all you’ve got.’

Gallison thinks it over, then says, ‘The stairs’ll take you to Auditorium Left. It’s a long flight. At the top, there’s two doors. The one on the left goes outside. The one on the right opens on the auditorium, way down by the stage. That close, the music’s apt to bust your eardrums.’

Touching the grip of the pistol in his pocket, Jerome asks, ‘And exactly where’s the handicapped section?’