Mr. Mercedes

‘Therapy,’ she says, and then all the strength runs out of her legs. She sits down in the aisle. Her fingers relax on the knotted end of the Happy Slapper, and it drops beside one sneaker.

Onstage, the band plays on.

41

A hand is tugging at his arm.

‘Jerome? Jerome!’

He turns from Holly and the slumped form of Brady Hartsfield to see his little sister, her eyes wide with dismay. His mom is right behind her. In his current hyper state, Jerome isn’t a bit surprised, but at the same time he knows the danger isn’t over.

‘What did you do?’ a girl is shouting. ‘What did you do to him?’

Jerome wheels back the other way and sees the girl sitting one wheelchair in from the aisle reaching for Hartsfield. Jerome shouts, ‘Holly! Don’t let her do that!’

Holly lurches to her feet, stumbles, and almost falls on top of Brady. It surely would have been the last fall of her life, but she manages to keep her feet and grab the wheelchair girl’s hands. There’s hardly any strength in them, and she feels an instant of pity. She bends down close and shouts to be heard. ‘Don’t touch him! He’s got a bomb, and I think it’s hot!’

The wheelchair girl shrinks away. Perhaps she understands; perhaps she’s only afraid of Holly, who’s looking even wilder than usual just now.

Brady’s shivers and twitches are strengthening. Holly doesn’t like that, because she can see something, a dim yellow light, under his shirt. Yellow is the color of trouble.

‘Jerome?’ Tanya says. ‘What are you doing here?’

An usher is approaching. ‘Clear the aisle!’ the usher shouts over the music. ‘You have to clear the aisle, folks!’

Jerome grasps his mother’s shoulders. He pulls her to him until their foreheads are touching. ‘You have to get out of here, Mom. Take the girls and go. Right now. Make the usher go with you. Tell her your daughter is sick. Please don’t ask questions.’

She looks in his eyes and doesn’t ask questions.

‘Mom?’ Barbara begins. ‘What …’ The rest is lost in the crash of the band and the choral accompaniment from the audience. Tanya takes Barbara by the arm and approaches the usher. At the same time she’s motioning for Hilda, Dinah, and Betsy to join her.

Jerome turns back to Holly. She’s bent over Brady, who continues to shudder as cerebral storms rage inside his head. His feet tapdance, as if even in unconsciousness he’s really feeling that goodtime ’Round Here beat. His hands fly aimlessly around, and when one of them approaches the dim yellow light under his tee-shirt, Jerome bats it away like a basketball guard rejecting a shot in the paint.

‘I want to get out of here,’ the wheelchair girl moans. ‘I’m scared.’

Jerome can relate to that – he also wants to get out of here, and he’s scared to death – but for now she has to stay where she is. Brady has her blocked in, and they don’t dare move him. Not yet.

Holly is ahead of Jerome, as she so often is. ‘You have to stay still for now, honey,’ she tells the wheelchair girl. ‘Chill out and enjoy the concert.’ She’s thinking how much simpler this would be if she’d managed to kill him instead of just bashing his sicko brains halfway to Peru. She wonders if Jerome would shoot Hartsfield if she asked him to. Probably not. Too bad. With all this noise, he could probably get away with it.

‘Are you crazy?’ the wheelchair girl asks wonderingly.

‘People keep asking me that,’ Holly says, and – very gingerly – she begins to pull up Brady’s tee-shirt. ‘Hold his hands,’ she tells Jerome.

‘What if I can’t?’

‘Then OJ the motherfucker.’

The sell-out audience is on its feet, swaying and clapping. The beachballs are flying again. Jerome takes one quick glance behind him and sees his mother leading the girls up the aisle to the exit, the usher accompanying them. That’s one for our side, at least, he thinks, then turns back to the business at hand. He grabs Brady’s flying hands and pins them together. The wrists are slippery with sweat. It’s like holding a couple of struggling fish.

‘I don’t know what you’re doing, but do it fast!’ he shouts at Holly.

The yellow light is coming from a plastic gadget that looks like a customized TV remote control. Instead of numbered cha

Brady makes a grunting sound and suddenly there’s an acidic smell. His bladder has let go. Holly looks at the peebag on his lap, but it doesn’t seem to be attached to anything. She grabs it and hands it to the wheelchair girl. ‘Hold this.’

‘Eeuw, it’s pee,’ the wheelchair girl says, and then: ‘It’s not pee. There’s something inside. It looks like clay.’

‘Put it down.’ Jerome has to shout to be heard over the music. ‘Put it on the floor. Gently.’ Then, to Holly: ‘Hurry the hell up!’

Holly is studying the yellow ready-lamp. And the little white nub of the toggle-switch. She could push it forward or back and doesn’t dare do either one, because she doesn’t know which way is off and which way is boom.

She plucks Thing Two from where it was resting on Brady’s stomach. It’s like picking up a snake that’s bloated with poison, and takes all her courage. ‘Hold his hands, Jerome, you just hold his hands.’

‘He’s slippery,’ Jerome grunts.

We already knew that, Holly thinks. One slippery son of a bitch. One slippery motherfucker.

She turns the gadget over, willing her hand not to shake and trying not to think of the four thousand people who don’t even know their lives now depend on poor messed-up Holly Gibney. She looks at the battery cover. Then, holding her breath, she slides it down and lets it drop to the floor.

Inside are two double-A batteries. Holly hooks a fingernail onto the ridge of one and thinks, God, if You’re there, please let this work. For a moment she can’t make her finger move. Then one of Brady’s hands slips free of Jerome’s grip and slaps her upside the head.

Holly jerks and the battery she’s been worrying pops out of the compartment. She waits for the world to explode, and when it doesn’t, she turns the remote control over. The yellow light has gone out. Holly begins to cry. She grabs the master wire and yanks it free of Thing Two.

‘You can let him go n—’ she begins, but Jerome already has. He’s hugging her so tight she can hardly breathe. Holly doesn’t care. She hugs him back.

The audience is cheering wildly.

‘They think they’re cheering for the song, but they’re really cheering for us,’ she manages to whisper in Jerome’s ear. ‘They just don’t know it yet. Now let me go, Jerome. You’re hugging me too tight. Let me go before I pass out.’

42

Hodges is still sitting on the crate in the storage area, and not alone. There’s an elephant sitting on his chest. Something’s happening. Either the world is going away from him or he’s going away from the world. He thinks it’s the latter. It’s like he’s inside a camera and the camera is going backwards on one of those dolly-track things. The world is as bright as ever, but getting smaller, and there’s a growing circle of darkness around it.

He holds on with all the force of his will, waiting for either an explosion or no explosion.

One of the roadies is bending over him and asking if he’s all right. ‘Your lips are turning blue,’ the roadie informs him. Hodges waves him away. He must listen.

Music and cheers and happy screams. Nothing else. At least not yet.

Hold on, he tells himself. Hold on.

‘What?’ the roadie asks, bending down again. ‘What?’

‘I have to hold on,’ Hodges whispers, but now he can hardly breathe at all. The world has shrunk to the size of a fiercely gleaming silver dollar. Then even that is blotted out, not because he’s lost consciousness but because someone is walking toward him. It’s Janey, striding slow and hipshot. She’s wearing his fedora tipped sexily over one eye. Hodges remembers what she said when he asked her how he had been so lucky as to end up in her bed: I have no regrets … Can we leave it at that?