a single man at a concert filled with young girls. After the heads-up he gave Windom, Hartsfield still would have attracted notice and suspicion. And there’s the explosive. Holly and Jerome know about that, but Hodges knows more. There were also steel ball bearings, probably a shitload. Even if he wasn’t collared at the door, how could Hartsfield have gotten all that inside? Is the security here really that bad?
Gallison grabs his left arm, and when he shakes it, Hodges feels the pain all the way up to his temples. “I’ll go myself. Grab the first security guy I see and have him radio for Windom to come down here and talk to you.”
“No,” Hodges says. “You will not do that, sir.”
Holly Gibney is the only one of them seeing clearly. Mr. Mercedes is in. He’s got a bomb, and it’s only by the grace of God that he hasn’t triggered it already. It’s too late for the police and too late for MAC Security. It’s also too late for him.
But.
Hodges sits down on an empty crate. “Jerome. Holly. Get with me.”
They do. Jerome is white-eyed, barely holding back panic. Holly is pale but outwardly calm.
“Going bald wouldn’t have been enough. He had to make himself look harmless. I might know how he did that, and if I’m right, I know his location.”
“Where?” Jerome asks. “Tell us. We’ll get him. We will.”
“It won’t be easy. He’s going to be on red alert right now, always checking his personal perimeter. And he knows you, Jerome. You’ve bought ice cream from that damn Mr. Tastey truck. You told me so.”
“Bill, he’s sold ice cream to thousands of people.”
“Sure, but how many black people on the West Side?”
Jerome is silent, and now he’s the one biting his lips.
“How big a bomb?” Gallison asks. “Maybe I should pull the fire alarm?”
“Only if you want to get a whole shitload of people killed,” Hodges says. It’s becoming progressively difficult to talk. “The minute he senses danger, he’ll blow whatever he’s got. Do you want that?”
Gallison doesn’t reply, and Hodges turns back to the two unlikely associates God—or some whimsical fate—has ordained should be with him tonight.
“We can’t take a chance on you, Jerome, and we certainly can’t take a chance on me. He was stalking me long before I even knew he was alive.”
“I’ll come up from behind,” Jerome says. “Blindside him. In the dark, with nothing but the lights from the stage, he’ll never see me.”
“If he’s where I think he is, your chances of doing that would be fifty-fifty at best. That’s not good enough.”
Hodges turns to the woman with the graying hair and the face of a neurotic teenager. “It’s got to be you, Holly. By now he’ll have his finger on the trigger, and you’re the only one who can get close without being recognized.”
She covers her abused mouth with one hand, but that isn’t enough and she adds the other. Her eyes are huge and wet. God help us, Hodges thinks. It isn’t the first time he has had this thought in relation to Holly Gibney.
“Only if you come with me,” she says through her hands. “Maybe then—”
“I can’t,” Hodges says. “I’m having a heart attack.”
“Oh great,” Gallison moans.
“Mr. Gallison, is there a handicapped area? There must be, right?”
“Sure. Halfway down the auditorium.”
Not only did he get in with his explosives, Hodges thinks, he’s perfectly located to inflict maximum casualties.
He says: “Listen, you two. Don’t make me say this twice.”
35
Thanks to the emcee’s introduction, Brady has relaxed a bit. The carnival crap he saw being offloaded during his reconnaissance trip is either offstage or suspended overhead. The band’s first four or five songs are just warm-ups. Pretty soon the set will roll in either from the sides or drop down from overhead, because the band’s main job, the reason they’re here, is to sell their latest helping of audio shit. When the kids—many of them attending their first pop concert—see those bright blinking lights and the Ferris wheel and the beachy backdrop, they’re going to go out of their teenybop minds. It’s then, right then, that he’ll push the toggle-switch on Thing Two, and ride into the darkness on a golden bubble of all that happiness.
The lead singer, the one with all the hair, is finishing a syrupy ballad on his knees. He holds the last note, head bowed, emoting his faggy ass off. He’s a lousy singer and probably already overdue for a fatal drug overdose, but when he