it’s filled with ball bearings (just like the ones in Hodges’s Happy Slapper). Brady slashed the lining to pour them in. It even crossed his mind to ask Ma to sew the slashes up, and that gave him a good laugh as he sealed them shut with duct tape.
My very own suicide vest, he thinks affectionately.
He won’t use it . . . probably won’t use it . . . but this idea also has a certain attraction. It would put an end to everything. No more Discount Electronix, no more Cyber Patrol calls to dig peanut butter or saltine crumbs out of some elderly idiot’s CPU, no more ice cream truck. Also no more crawling snakes in the back of his mind. Or under his belt buckle.
He imagines doing it at a rock concert; he knows Springsteen is going to play Lakefront Arena this June. Or how about the Fourth of July parade down Lake Street, the city’s main drag? Or maybe on opening day of the Summer Sidewalk Art Festival and Street Fair, which happens every year on the first Saturday in August. That would be good, except wouldn’t he look funny, wearing a quilted vest on a hot August afternoon?
True, but such things can always be worked out by the creative mind, he thinks, spreading the disposable phones on his worktable and beginning to remove the SIM cards. Besides, the suicide vest is just a whatdoyoucallit, doomsday scenario. It will probably never be used. Nice to have it handy, though.
Before going upstairs, he sits down at his Number Three, goes online, and checks the Blue Umbrella. Nothing from the fat ex-cop.
Yet.
7
When Hodges uses the intercom outside Mrs. Wharton’s Lake Avenue condo at ten the next morning, he’s wearing a suit for only the second or third time since he retired. It feels good to be in a suit again, even though it’s tight at the waist and under the arms. A man in a suit feels like a working man.
A woman’s voice comes from the speaker. “Yes?”
“It’s Bill Hodges, ma’am. We spoke last night?”
“So we did, and you’re right on time. It’s 19-C, Detective Hodges.”
He starts to tell her that he’s no longer a detective, but the door is buzzing and so he doesn’t bother. Besides, he told her he was retired when they talked on the phone.
Janelle Patterson is waiting for him at the door, just as her sister was on the day of the City Center Massacre, when Hodges and Pete Huntley came to interview her the first time. The resemblance between the two women is enough to give Hodges a powerful sense of déjà vu. But as he makes his way down the short hall from the elevator to the apartment doorway (trying to walk rather than lumber), he sees that the differences outweigh the similarities. Patterson has the same light blue eyes and high cheekbones, but where Olivia Trelawney’s mouth was tight and pinched, the lips often white with a combination of strain and irritation, Janelle Patterson’s seem, even in repose, ready to smile. Or to bestow a kiss. Her lips are shiny with wet-look gloss; they look good enough to eat. And no boatneck tops for this lady. She’s wearing a snug turtleneck that cradles a pair of perfectly round breasts. They are not big, those breasts, but as Hodges’s dear old father used to say, more than a handful is wasted. Is he looking at the work of good foundation garments or a post-divorce enhancement? Enhancement seems more likely to Hodges. Thanks to her sister, she can afford all the bodywork she wants.
She extends her hand and gives him a good no-nonsense shake. “Thank you for coming.” As if it had been at her request.
“Glad you could see me,” he says, following her in.
That same kick-ass view of the lake smacks him in the face. He remembers it well, although they had only the one interview with Mrs. T. here; all the others were either at the big house in Sugar Heights or at the station. She had gone into hysterics during one of those station visits, he remembers. Everybody is blaming me, she said. The suicide had come not much later, only a matter of weeks.
“Would you like coffee, Detective? It’s Jamaican. Very tasty, I think.”
Hodges makes it a habit not to drink coffee in the middle of the morning, because doing so usually gives him savage acid reflux in spite of his Zantac. But he agrees.