‘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. ‘You, 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 hear your voice, Billy.’

Hodges hangs up and look at the teeth-bared smile-face some more. It fills his computer screen.

10

He sits in his La-Z-Boy that night, watching the eleven o’clock news. In his white pajamas he looks like an overweight ghost. His scalp gleams mellowly through his thinning hair. The big story is the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico where the oil is still gushing. The newsreader says the bluefin tuna are endangered, and the Louisiana shellfish industry may be destroyed for a generation. In Iceland, a billowing volcano (with a name the newsreader mangles to something like Eeja-fill-kull) is still screwing up transatlantic air travel. In California, police are saying they may have finally gotten a break in the Grim Sleeper serial killer case. No names, but the suspect (the perk, Hodges thinks) is described as ‘a well-groomed and well-spoken African-American.’ Hodges thinks, Now if only someone would bag Turnpike Joe. Not to mention Osama bin Laden.

The weather comes on. Warm temperatures and sunny skies, the weather girl promises. Time to break out the bathing suits.

‘I’d like to see you in a bathing suit, my dear,’ Hodges says, and uses the remote to turn off the TV.

He takes his father’s .38 out of the drawer, unloads it as he walks into the bedroom, and puts it in the safe with his Glock. He has spent a lot of time during the last two or three months obsessing about the Victory .38, but tonight it hardly crosses his mind as he locks it away. He’s thinking about Turnpike Joe, but not really; these days Joe is someone else’s problem. Like the Grim Sleeper, that well-spoken African-American.

Is Mr Mercedes also African-American? It’s technically possible – no one saw anything but the pullover clown mask, a long-sleeved shirt, and yellow gloves on the steering wheel – but Hodges thinks not. God knows there are plenty of black people capable of murder in this city, but there’s the weapon to consider. The neighborhood where Mrs Trelawney’s mother lived is predominantly wealthy and predominantly white. A black man hanging around a parked Mercedes SL500 would have been noticed.

Well. Probably. People can be stunningly unobservant. But experience has led Hodges to believe rich people tend to be slightly more observant than the general run of Americans, especially when it comes to their expensive toys. He doesn’t want to say they’re paranoid, but …

The fuck they’re not. Rich people can be generous, even the ones with bloodcurdling political views can be generous, but most believe in generosity on their own terms, and underneath (not so deep, either), they’re always afraid someone is going to steal their presents and eat their birthday cake.

How about neat and well-spoken, then?

Yes, Hodges decides. No hard evidence, but the letter suggests he is. Mr Mercedes may dress in suits and work in an office, or he may dress in jeans and Carhartt shirts and balance tires in a garage, but he’s no slob. He may not talk a lot – such creatures are careful in all aspects of their lives, and that includes promiscuous blabbing – but when he does talk, he’s probably direct and clear. If you were lost and needed directions, he’d give you good ones.

As he’s brushing his teeth, Hodges thinks: DeMasio’s. Pete wants to have lunch at DeMasio’s.

That’s okay for Pete, who still carries the badge and gun, and it seemed okay to Hodges when they were talking on the phone, because then Hodges had been thinking like a cop instead of a retiree who’s thirty pounds overweight. It probably would be okay – broad daylight and all – but DeMasio’s is on the edge of Lowtown, which is not a vacation community. A block west of the restaurant, beyond the turnpike spur overpass, the city turns into a wasteland of vacant lots and abandoned tenements. Drugs are sold openly on streetcorners, there’s a burgeoning trade in illegal weaponry, and arson is the neighborhood sport. If you can call Lowtown a neighborhood, that is. The restaurant itself – a really terrific Italian joint – is safe, though. The owner is connected, and that makes it like Free Parking in Monopoly.

Hodges rinses his mouth, goes back into the bedroom, and – still thinking of DeMasio’s – looks doubtfully at the closet where the safe is hidden behind the hanging pants, shirts, and the sportcoats he no longer wears (he’s now too big for all but two of them).

Take the Glock? The Victory, maybe? The Victory’s smaller.

No to both. His carry-concealed license is still in good standing, but he’s not going strapped to a lunch with his old partner. It would make him self-conscious, and he’s already self-conscious about the digging he plans to do. He goes to his dresser instead, lifts up a pile of underwear, and looks underneath. The Happy Slapper is still there, has been there since his retirement party.