‘Voice-what?’ Hodges asks.

‘Voice-activated command,’ Jerome tells him. ‘Brady says Milk Duds or underwear and the countdown stops.’

Holly giggles through her fingers, then gives Jerome a timid push on the shoulder. ‘You’re silly,’ she says.

15

They sit at the kitchen table with the back door open to let in fresh air. Hodges has an elbow on one of the placemats and his brow cupped in his palm. Jerome and Holly keep quiet, letting him think it through. At last he raises his head.

‘I’m going to call it in. I don’t want to, and if it was just between Hartsfield and me, I probably wouldn’t. But I’ve got you two to consider—’

‘Don’t do it on my account,’ Jerome says. ‘If you see a way to go on, I’ll stick with you.’

Of course you will, Hodges thinks. You might think you know what you’re risking, but you don’t. When you’re seventeen, the future is strictly theoretical.

As for Holly … previously he would have said she was a kind of human movie screen, with every thought in her head projected large on her face, but at this moment she’s inscrutable.

‘Thanks, Jerome, only …’ Only this is hard. Letting go is hard, and this will be the second time he has to relinquish Mr Mercedes.

But.

‘It’s not just us, see? He could have more explosive, and if he uses it on a crowd …’ He looks directly at Holly. ‘… the way he used your cousin Olivia’s Mercedes on a crowd, it would be on me. I won’t take that chance.’

Speaking carefully, enunciating each word as if to make up for what has probably been a lifetime of mumbling, Holly says, ‘No one can catch him but you.’

‘Thanks, but no,’ he says gently. ‘The police have resources. They’ll start by putting a BOLO out on his car, complete with license plate number. I can’t do that.’

It sounds good but he doesn’t believe it is good. When he’s not taking insane risks like the one he took at City Center, Brady’s one of the smart ones. He will have stashed the car somewhere – maybe in a downtown parking lot, maybe in one of the airport parking lots, maybe in one of those endless mall parking lots. His ride is no Mercedes-Benz; it’s an unobtrusive shit-colored Subaru, and it won’t be found today or tomorrow. They might still be looking for it next week. And if they do find it, Brady won’t be anywhere near it.

‘No one but you,’ she insists. ‘And only with us to help you.’

‘Holly—’

‘How can you give up?’ she cries at him. She balls one hand into a fist and strikes herself in the middle of the forehead with it, leaving a red mark. ‘How can you? Janey liked you! She was even sort of your girlfriend! Now she’s dead! Like the woman upstairs! Both of them, dead!’

She goes to hit herself again and Jerome takes her hand. ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘Please don’t hit yourself. It makes me feel terrible.’

Holly starts to cry. Jerome hugs her clumsily. He’s black and she’s white, he’s seventeen and she’s in her forties, but to Hodges Jerome looks like a father comforting his daughter after she came home from school and said no one invited her to the Spring Dance.

Hodges looks out at the small but neatly kept Hartsfield backyard. He also feels terrible, and not just on Janey’s account, although that is bad enough. He feels terrible for the people at City Center. He feels terrible for Janey’s sister, whom they refused to believe, who was reviled in the press, and who was then driven to suicide by the man who lived in this house. He even feels terrible about his failure to pay heed to Mrs Melbourne. He knows that Pete Huntley would let him off the hook on that one, and that makes it worse. Why? Because Pete isn’t as good at this job as he, Hodges, still is. Pete never will be, not even on his best day. A good enough guy, and a hard worker, but …

But.

But but but.

All that changes nothing. He needs to call it in, even if it feels like dying. When you shove everything else aside, there’s just one thing left: Kermit William Hodges is at a dead end. Brady Hartsfield is in the wind. There might be a lead in the computers – something to indicate where he is now, what his plans might be, or both – but Hodges can’t access them. Nor can he justify continuing to withhold the name and description of the man who perpetrated the City Center Massacre. Maybe Holly’s right, maybe Brady Hartsfield will elude capture and commit some new atrocity, but kermitfrog19 is out of options. The only thing left for him to do is to protect Jerome and Holly if he can. At this point, he may not even be able to manage that. The nosy parker across the street has seen them, after all.

He steps out on the stoop and opens his Nokia, which he has used more today than in all the time since he retired.

He thinks Doesn’t this just suck, and speed-dials Pete Huntley.

16

Pete picks up on the second ring. ‘Partner!’ he shouts exuberantly. There’s a babble of voices in the background, and Hodges’s first thought is that Pete’s in a bar somewhere, half-shot and on his way to totally smashed.

‘Pete, I need to talk to you about—’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll eat all the crow you want, just not right now. Who called you? Izzy?’

‘Huntley!’ someone shouts. ‘Chief’s here in five! With press! Where’s the goddam PIO?’

PIO, Public Information Officer. Pete’s not in a bar and not drunk, Hodges thinks. He’s just over-the-moon fucking happy.

‘No one called me, Pete. What’s going on?’

‘You don’t know?’ Pete laughs. ‘Just the biggest armaments bust in this city’s history. Maybe the biggest in the history of the USA. Hundreds of M2 and HK91 machine guns, rocket launchers, fucking laser cannons, crates of Lahti L-35s in mint condition, Russian AN-9s still in grease … there’s enough stuff here to stock two dozen East European militias. And the ammo! Christ! It’s stacked two stories high! If the fucking pawnshop had caught on fire, all of Lowtown would have gone up!’

Sirens. He hears sirens. More shouts. Someone is bawling for someone else to get those sawhorses up.

‘What pawnshop?’

‘King Virtue Pawn & Loan, south of MLK. You know the place?’

‘Yeah …’

‘And guess who owns it?’ But Pete is far too excited to give him a chance to guess. ‘Alonzo Moretti! Get it?’

Hodges doesn’t.

‘Moretti is Fabrizio Abbascia’s grandson, Bill! Fabby the Nose! Is it starting to come into focus now?’

At first it still doesn’t, because when Pete and Isabelle questioned him, Hodges simply plucked Abbascia’s name out of his mental file of old cases where someone might bear him animus … and there have been several hundred of those over the years.

‘Pete, King Virtue’s black-owned. All the businesses down there are.’

‘The fuck it is. Bertonne Lawrence’s name is on the sign, but the shop’s a lease, Lawrence is a front, and he’s spilling his guts. You know the best part? We own part of the bust, because a couple of patrol cops kicked it off a week or so before the ATF was gonna roll these guys up. Every detective in the department is down here. The Chief’s on his way, and he’s got a press caravan bigger than the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with him. No way are the feds gonna hog this one! No way!’ This time his laugh is positively loonlike.

Every detective in the department, Hodges thinks. Which leaves what for Mr Mercedes? Bupkes is what.

‘Bill, I gotta go. This … man, this is amazing.’

‘Sure, but first tell me what it has to do with me.’

‘What you said. The car-bomb was revenge. Moretti trying to pay off his grandfather’s blood debt. In addition to the rifles, machine guns, grenades, pistols, and other assorted hardware, there’s at least four dozen crates of Hendricks Chemicals Detasheet. Do you know what that is?’

‘Rubberized explosive.’ Now it’s coming into focus.