Mr. Mercedes: A Novel by Stephen King Page B

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?
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    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