Mostly, though, it was him. Brady Hartsfield. Credit where credit is due. City Center was a sledgehammer. On Olivia Trelawney, he used a scalpel.

‘Are you listening to me?’ Freddi asks.

He smiles. ‘Guess I drifted away there for a minute.’

Never tell a lie when you can tell the truth. The truth isn’t always the safest course, but mostly it is. He wonders idly what she’d say if he told her, Freddi, I am the Mercedes Killer. Or if he said, Freddi, there are nine pounds of homemade plastic explosive in my basement closet.

She is looking at him as if she can read these thoughts, and Brady has a moment of unease. Then she says, ‘It’s working two jobs, pal. That’ll wear you down.’

‘Yes, but I’d like to get back to college, and nobody’s going to pay for it but me. Also there’s my mother.’

‘The wino.’

He smiles. ‘My mother is actually more of a vodka-o.’

‘Invite me over,’ Freddi says grimly. ‘I’ll drag her to a fucking AA meeting.’

‘Wouldn’t work. You know what Dorothy Parker said, right? You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.’

Freddi considers this for a moment, then throws back her head and voices a Marlboro-raspy laugh. ‘I don’t know who Dorothy Parker is, but I’m gonna save that one.’ She sobers. ‘Seriously, why don’t you just ask Frobisher for more hours? That other job of yours is strictly rinky-dink.’

‘I’ll tell you why he doesn’t ask Frobisher for more hours,’ Frobisher says, stepping out onto the loading platform. Anthony Frobisher is young and geekily bespectacled. In this he is like most of the Discount Electronix employees. Brady is also young, but better-looking than Tones Frobisher. Not that this makes him handsome. Which is okay. Brady is willing to settle for nondescript.

‘Lay it on us,’ Freddi says, and mashes her cigarette out. Across the loading zone behind the big-box store, which anchors the south end of the Birch Hill Mall, are the employees’ cars (mostly old beaters) and three VW Beetles painted bright green. These are always kept spotless, and late-spring sun twinkles on their windshields. On the sides, in blue, is COMPUTER PROBLEMS? CALL THE DISCOUNT ELECTRONIX CYBER PATROL!

‘Circuit City is gone and Best Buy is tottering,’ Frobisher says in a schoolteacherly voice. ‘Discount Electronix is also tottering, along with several other businesses that are on life support thanks to the computer revolution: newspapers, book publishers, record stores, and the United States Postal Service. Just to mention a few.’

‘Record stores?’ Freddi asks, lighting another cigarette. ‘What are record stores?’

‘That’s a real gut-buster,’ Frobisher says. ‘I have a friend who claims dykes lack a sense of humor, but—’

‘You have friends?’ Freddi asks. ‘Wow. Who knew?’

‘—but you obviously prove him wrong. You guys don’t have more hours because the company is now surviving on computers alone. Mostly cheap ones made in China and the Philippines. The great majority of our customers no longer want the other shit we sell.’ Brady thinks only Tones Frobisher would say the great majority. ‘This is partly because of the technological revolution, but it’s also because—’

Together, Freddi and Brady chant, ‘—Barack Obama is the worst mistake this country ever made!’

Frobisher regards them sourly for a moment, then says, ‘At least you listen. Brady, you’re off at two, is that correct?’

‘Yes. My other gig starts at three.’

Frobisher wrinkles the overlarge schnozzola in the middle of his face to show what he thinks of Brady’s other job. ‘Did I hear you say something about returning to school?’

Brady doesn’t reply to this, because anything he says might be the wrong thing. Anthony ‘Tones’ Frobisher must not know that Brady hates him. Fucking loathes him. Brady hates everybody, including his drunk mother, but it’s like that old country song says: no one has to know right now.

‘You’re twenty-eight, Brady. Old enough so you no longer have to rely on shitty pool coverage to insure your automobile – which is good – but a little too old to be training for a career in electrical engineering. Or computer programming, for that matter.’

‘Don’t be a turd,’ Freddi says. ‘Don’t be a Tones Turd.’

‘If telling the truth makes a man a turd, then a turd I shall be.’

‘Yeah,’ Freddi says. ‘You’ll go down in history. Tones the Truth-Telling Turd. Kids will learn about you in school.’

‘I don’t mind a little truth,’ Brady says quietly.

‘Good. You can don’t-mind all the time you’re cataloguing and stickering DVDs. Starting now.’

Brady nods good-naturedly, stands up, and dusts the seat of his pants. The Discount Electronix fifty-percent-off sale starts the following week; management in New Jersey has mandated that DE must be out of the digital-versatile-disc business by January of 2011. That once profitable line of merchandise has been strangled by Netflix and Redbox. Soon there will be nothing in the store but home computers (made in China and the Philippines) and flat-screen TVs, which in this deep recession few can afford to buy.

‘You,’ Frobisher says, turning to Freddi, ‘have an out-call.’ He hands her a pink work invoice. ‘Old lady with a screen freeze. That’s what she says it is, anyway.’

‘Yes, mon capitan. I live to serve.’ She stands up, salutes, and takes the call-sheet he holds out.

‘Tuck your shirt in. Put on your cap so your customer doesn’t have to be disgusted by that weird haircut. Don’t drive too fast. Get another ticket and life as you know it on the Cyber Patrol is over. Also, pick up your fucking cigarette butts before you go.’

He disappears inside before she can return his serve.

‘DVD stickers for you, an old lady with a CPU probably full of graham cracker crumbs for me,’ Freddi says, jumping down and putting her hat on. She gives the bill a gangsta twist and starts across to the VWs without even glancing at her cigarette butts. She does pause long enough to look back at Brady, hands on her nonexistent boy hips. ‘This is not the life I pictured for myself when I was in the fifth grade.’

‘Me, either,’ Brady says quietly.

He watches her putt away, on a mission to rescue an old lady who’s probably going crazy because she can’t download her favorite mock-apple pie recipe. This time Brady wonders what Freddi would say if he told her what life was like for him when he was a kid. That was when he killed his brother. And his mother covered it up.

Why would she not?

After all, it had sort of been her idea.

12

As Brady is slapping yellow 50% OFF stickers on old Quentin Tarantino movies and Freddi is helping out elderly Mrs Vera Willkins on the West Side (it’s her keyboard that’s full of crumbs, it turns out), Bill Hodges is turning off Lowbriar, the four-lane street that bisects the city and gives Lowtown its name, and in to the parking lot beside DeMasio’s Italian Ristorante. He doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know Pete got here first. Hodges parks next to a plain gray Chevrolet sedan with blackwall tires that just about scream city police and gets out of his old Toyota, a car that just about screams old retired fella. He touches the hood of the Chevrolet. Warm. Pete has not beaten him by much.

He pauses for a moment, enjoying this almost-noon morning with its bright sunshine and sharp shadows, looking at the overpass a block down. It’s been gang-tagged up the old wazoo, and although it’s empty now (noon is breakfast time for the younger denizens of Lowtown), he knows that if he walked under there, he would smell the sour reek of cheap wine and whiskey. His feet would grate on the shards of broken bottles. In the gutters, more bottles. The little brown kind.

No longer his problem. Besides, the darkness beneath the overpass is empty, and Pete is waiting for him. Hodges goes in and is pleased when Elaine at the hostess stand smiles and greets him by name, although he hasn’t been here for months. Maybe even a year. Of course Pete is in one of the booths, already raising a hand to him, and Pete might have refreshed her memory, as the lawyers say.