‘Let me ride with you. I want to ride with you.’

Aunt Charlotte, lips thinned almost to nothing, looms up behind her daughter. ‘I’ve had just about enough of your gasps and vapors for one day, miss.’

Holly ignores her. She seizes one of Hodges’s hands in a grip that’s icy. ‘Please. Please.’

‘It’s fine with me,’ Hodges says, ‘if Janey doesn’t m—’

Aunt Charlotte begins to sob. The sound is unlovely, the hoarse cries of a crow in a cornfield. Hodges remembers her bending over Mrs Wharton, kissing her cold lips, and a sudden unpleasant posssibility comes to him. He misjudged Olivia; he may have misjudged Charlotte Gibney as well. There’s more to people than their surfaces, after all.

‘Holly, you don’t even know this man!’

Janey puts a much warmer hand on Hodges’s wrist. ‘Why don’t you go with Charlotte and Henry, Bill? There’s plenty of room. You can ride in back with Holly.’ She shifts her attention to her cousin. ‘Would that be all right?’

‘Yes!’ Holly is still gripping Hodges’s hand. ‘That would be good!’

Janey turns to her uncle. ‘Okay with you?’

‘Sure.’ He gives Holly a jovial pat on the shoulder. ‘The more the merrier.’

‘That’s right, give her plenty of attention,’ Aunt Charlotte says. ‘It’s what she likes. Isn’t it, Holly?’ She starts for the parking lot without waiting for a reply, heels clacking a Morse code message of outrage.

Hodges looks at Janey. ‘What about my car?’

‘I’ll drive it. Hand over the keys.’ And when he does: ‘There’s just one other thing I need.’

‘Yeah?’

She plucks the fedora from his head, puts it on her own, and gives it the correct insouciant dip over her left eyebrow. She wrinkles her nose at him and says, ‘Yeah.’

19

Brady has parked up the street from the funeral parlor, his heart beating harder than ever. He’s holding a cell phone. The number of the burner attached to the bomb in the Toyota’s back seat is inked on his wrist.

He watches the mourners stand around on the walk. The fat ex-cop is impossible to miss; in his black suit he looks as big as a house. Or a hearse. On his head is a ridiculously old-fashioned hat, the kind you saw cops wearing in black-and-white detective movies from the nineteen-fifties.

People are starting around to the back, and after a while, Hodges and the blond bitch head that way. Brady supposes the blond bitch will be with him when the car blows. Which will make it a clean sweep – the mother and both daughters. It has the elegance of an equation where all the variables have been solved.

Cars start pulling out, all moving in his direction because that’s the way you go if you’re heading to Sugar Heights. The sun glares on the windshields, which isn’t helpful, but there’s no mistaking the fat ex-cop’s Toyota when it appears at the head of the funeral home driveway, pauses briefly, then turns toward him.

Brady doesn’t even glance at Uncle Henry’s rental Chevy when it passes him. All his attention is focused on the fat ex-cop’s ride. When it goes by, he feels a moment’s disappointment. The blond bitch must have gone with her relatives, because there’s no one in the Toyota but the driver. Brady only gets a glimpse, but even with the sunglare, the fat ex-cop’s stupid hat is unmistakable.

Brady keys in a number. ‘I said you wouldn’t see me coming. Didn’t I say that, asshole?’

He pushes SEND.

20

As Janey reaches to turn on the radio, a cell phone begins to ring. The last sound she makes on earth – everyone should be so lucky – is a laugh. Idiot, she thinks affectionately, you went and left it again. She reaches for the glove compartment. There’s a second ring.

That’s not coming from the glove compartment, that’s coming from behi—

There’s no sound, at least not that she hears, only the momentary sensation of a strong hand pushing the driver’s seat. Then the world turns white.

21

Holly Gibney, also known as Holly the Mumbler, may have mental problems, but neither the psychotropic drugs she takes not the cigarettes she smokes on the sneak have slowed her down physically. Uncle Henry slams on the brakes and she bolts from the rental Chevy while the explosion is still reverberating.

Hodges is right behind her, running hard. There’s a stab of pain in his chest and he thinks he might be having a heart attack. Part of him actually hopes for this, but the pain goes away. The pedestrians are behaving as they always do when an act of violence punches a hole in the world they have previously taken for granted. Some drop to the sidewalk and cover their heads. Others are frozen in place, like statues. A few cars stop; most speed up and exit the vicinity immediately. One of these is a mud-colored Subaru.

As Hodges pounds after Janey’s mentally unstable cousin, the last message from Mr Mercedes beats in his head like a ceremonial drum: I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming. I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming. I’m going to kill you. You won’t see me coming.

He rounds the corner, skidding on the slick soles of his seldom-worn dress shoes, and almost runs into Holly, who has stopped dead with her shoulders slumped and her purse dangling from one hand. She’s staring at what remains of Hodges’s Toyota. Its body has been blown clean off the axles and is burning furiously in a litter of glass. The back seat lies on its side twenty feet away, its torn upholstery on fire. A man staggers drunkenly across the street, holding his bleeding head. A woman is sitting on the curb outside a card-and-gift shop with a smashed-in show window, and for one wild moment he thinks it’s Janey, but this woman is wearing a green dress and she has gray hair and of course it isn’t Janey, it can’t be Janey.

He thinks, This is my fault. If I’d used my father’s gun two weeks ago, she’d be alive.

There’s still enough cop inside him to push the idea aside (although it doesn’t go easily). A cold shocked clarity flows in to replace it. This is not his fault. It’s the fault of the son of a bitch who planted the bomb. The same son of a bitch who drove a stolen car into a crowd of job-seekers at City Center.

Hodges sees a single black high-heeled shoe lying in a pool of blood, he sees a severed arm in a smoldering sleeve lying in the gutter like someone’s cast-off garbage, and his mind clicks into gear. Uncle Henry and Aunt Charlotte will be here shortly, and that means there isn’t much time.

He seizes Holly by the shoulders and turns her around. Her hair has come loose from its Princess Leia rolls and hangs against her cheeks. Her wide eyes look right through him. His mind – colder than ever – knows she’s no good to him as she is now. He slaps first one cheek, then the other. Not hard slaps, but enough to make her eyelids flutter.

People are screaming. Horns are honking, and a couple of car alarms are blatting. He can smell gasoline, burning rubber, melting plastic.

‘Holly. Holly. Listen to me.’

She’s looking, but is she listening? He doesn’t know, and there’s no time.

‘I loved her, but you can’t tell anyone. You can’t tell anyone I loved her. Maybe later, but not now. Do you understand?’

She nods.

‘I need your cell number. And I may need you.’ His cold mind hopes he won’t, that the house in Sugar Heights will be empty this afternoon, but he doesn’t think it will be. Holly’s mother and uncle will have to leave, at least for a while, but Charlotte won’t want her daughter to go with them. Because Holly has mental problems. Holly is delicate. Hodges wonders just how many breakdowns she’s had, and if there have been suicide attempts. These thoughts zip across his mind like shooting stars, there at one moment, gone the next. He has no time for Holly’s delicate mental condition.

‘When your mother and uncle go to the police station, tell them you don’t need anyone to stay with you. Tell them you’re okay by yourself. Can you do that?’