From behind the wheel of his little Mr Tastey truck, which is covered with happy kid decals and jingles with happy recorded bells, Brady waves. The niggerkid waves back and smiles. Sure he does.

Everybody likes the ice cream man.

UNDER DEBBIE’S BLUE UMBRELLA

1

Brady Hartsfield cruises the tangle of West Side streets until seven-thirty, when dusk starts to drain the blue from the late spring sky. His first wave of customers, between three and six P.M., consists of after-school kids wearing backpacks and waving crumpled dollar bills. Most don’t even look at him. They’re too busy blabbing to their buddies or talking into the cell phones they see not as accessories but as necessities every bit as vital as food and air. A few of them say thank you, but most don’t bother. Brady doesn’t mind. He doesn’t want to be looked at and he doesn’t want to be remembered. To these brats he’s just the sugar-pusher in the white uniform, and that’s the way he likes it.

From six to seven is dead time, while the little animals go in for their dinners. Maybe a few – the ones who say thank you – even talk to their parents. Most probably go right on poking the buttons of their phones while Mommy and Daddy yak to each other about their jobs or watch the evening news so they can find out all about the big world out there, where movers and shakers are actually doing shit.

During his last half hour, business picks up again. This time it’s the parents as well as the kids who approach the jingling Mr Tastey truck, buying ice cream treats they’ll eat with their asses (mostly fat ones) snugged down in backyard lawnchairs. He almost pities them. They are people of little vision, as stupid as ants crawling around their hill. A mass killer is serving them ice cream, and they have no idea.

From time to time, Brady has wondered how hard it would be to poison a truckload of treats: the vanilla, the chocolate, the Berry Good, the Flavor of the Day, the Tastey Frosteys, the Brownie Delites, even the Freeze-Stix and Whistle Pops. He has gone so far as to research this on the Internet. He has done what Anthony ‘Tones’ Frobisher, his boss at Discount Electronix, would probably call a ‘feasibility study,’ and concluded that, while it would be possible, it would also be stupid. It’s not that he’s averse to taking a risk; he got away with the Mercedes Massacre when the odds of being caught were better than those of getting away clean. But he doesn’t want to be caught now. He’s got work to do. His work this late spring and early summer is the fat ex-cop, K. William Hodges.

He might cruise his West Side route with a truckload of poisoned ice cream after the ex-cop gets tired of playing with the gun he keeps beside his living room chair and actually uses it. But not until. The fat ex-cop bugs Brady Hartsfield. Bugs him bad. Hodges retired with full honors, they even threw him a party, and how was that right when he had failed to catch the most notorious criminal this city had ever seen?

2

On his last circuit of the day, he cruises by the house on Teaberry Lane where Jerome Robinson, Hodges’s hired boy, lives with his mother, father, and kid sister. Jerome Robinson also bugs Brady. Robinson is good-looking, he works for the ex-cop, and he goes out every weekend with different girls. All of the girls are pretty. Some are even white. That’s wrong. It’s against nature.

‘Hey!’ Robinson cries. ‘Mr Ice Cream Man! Wait up!’

He sprints lightly across his lawn with his dog, a big Irish setter, running at his heels. Behind them comes the kid sister, who is about nine.

‘Get me a chocolate, Jerry!’ she cries. ‘Pleeeease?’

He even has a white kid’s name. Jerome. Jerry. It’s offensive. Why can’t he be Traymore? Or Devon? Or Leroy? Why can’t he be fucking Kunta Kinte?

Jerome’s feet are sockless in his moccasins, his ankles still green from cutting the ex-cop’s lawn. He’s got a big smile on his undeniably handsome face, and when he flashes it at his weekend dates, Brady just bets those girls drop their pants and hold out their arms. Come on in, Jerry.

Brady himself has never been with a girl.

‘How you doin, man?’ Jerome asks.

Brady, who has left the wheel and now stands at the service window, grins. ‘I’m fine. It’s almost quitting time, and that always makes me fine.’

‘You have any chocolate left? The Little Mermaid there wants some.’

Brady gives him a thumbs-up, still grinning. It’s pretty much the same grin he was wearing under the clown mask when he tore into the crowd of sad-sack job-seekers at City Center with the accelerator pedal pushed to the mat. ‘It’s a big ten-four on the chocolate, my friend.’

The little sister arrives, eyes sparkling, braids bouncing. ‘Don’t you call me Little Mermaid, Jere, I hate that!’

She’s nine or so, and also has a ridiculously white name: Barbara. Brady finds the idea of a black child named Barbara so surreal it’s not even offensive. The only one in the family with a nigger name is the dog, standing on his hind legs with his paws planted on the side of the truck and his tail wagging.

‘Down, Odell!’ Jerome says, and the dog sits, panting and looking cheerful.

‘What about you?’ Brady asks Jerome. ‘Something for you?’

‘A vanilla soft-serve, please.’

Vanilla’s what you’d like to be, Brady thinks, and gets them their orders.

He likes to keep an eye on Jerome, he likes to know about Jerome, because these days Jerome seems to be the only person who spends any time with the Det-Ret, and in the last two months Brady has observed them together enough to see that Hodges treats the kid as a friend as well as a part-time employee. Brady has never had friends himself, friends are dangerous, but he knows what they are: sops to the ego. Emotional safety nets. When you’re feeling bad, who do you turn to? Your friends, of course, and your friends say stuff like aw gee and cheer up and we’re with you and let’s go out for a drink. Jerome is only seventeen, not yet old enough to go out with Hodges for a drink (unless it’s soda), but he can always say cheer up and I’m with you. So he bears watching.

Mrs Trelawney didn’t have any friends. No husband, either. Just her old sick mommy. Which made her easy meat, especially after the cops started working her over. Why, they had done half of Brady’s work for him. The rest he did for himself, pretty much right under the scrawny bitch’s nose.

‘Here you go,’ Brady says, handing Jerome ice cream treats he wishes were spiked with arsenic. Or maybe warfarin. Load them up with that and they’d bleed out from their eyes and ears and mouths. Not to mention their assholes. He imagines all the kids on the West Side dropping their packs and their precious cell phones while the blood poured from every orifice. What a disaster movie that would make!

Jerome gives him a ten, and along with his change, Brady hands back a dog biscuit. ‘For Odell,’ he says.

‘Thanks, mister!’ Barbara says, and licks her chocolate cone. ‘This is good!’

‘Enjoy it, honey.’

He drives the Mr Tastey truck, and he frequently drives a Cyber Patrol VW on out-calls, but his real job this summer is Detective K. William Hodges (Ret.). And making sure Detective Hodges (Ret.) uses that gun.

Brady heads back toward Loeb’s Ice Cream Factory to turn in his truck and change into his street clothes. He keeps to the speed limit the whole way.

Always safe, never sorry.

3

After leaving DeMasio’s – with a side-trip to deal with the bullies hassling the little kid beneath the turnpike extension overpass – Hodges simply drives, piloting his Toyota through the city streets without any destination in mind. Or so he thinks until he realizes he is on Lilac Drive in the posh lakeside suburb of Sugar Heights. There he pulls over and parks across the street from a gated drive with a plaque reading 729 on one of the fieldstone posts.