Free Mr. Mercedes: A Novel by Stephen King

Wearhouse sportcoat. He digs out his phone, looks at it, and says, “I gotta take this.”
    Hodges makes a be-my-guest gesture.
    “Hello?” Pete listens. His eyes grow wide, and he stands up so fast his chair almost falls over. “What?”
    Other diners stop eating and look around. Hodges watches with interest.
    “Yeah . . . yeah! I’ll be right there. What? Yeah, yeah, okay. Don’t wait, just go.”
    He snaps the phone closed and sits down again. All his lights are suddenly on, and in that moment Hodges envies him bitterly.
    “I should eat with you more often, Billy. You’re my lucky charm, always were. We talk about it, and it happens.”
    “What?” Thinking, It’s Mr. Mercedes. The thought that follows is both ridiculous and forlorn: He was supposed to be mine.
    “That was Izzy. She just got a call from a State Police colonel out in Victory County. A game warden spotted some bones in an old gravel pit about an hour ago. The pit’s less than two miles from Donnie Davis’s summer place on the lake, and guess what? The bones appear to be wearing the remains of a dress.”
    He raises his hand over the table. Hodges high-fives it.
    Pete returns the phone to its sagging pocket and brings out his wallet. Hodges shakes his head, not even kidding himself about what he feels: relief. Enormous relief. “No, this is my treat. You’re meeting Isabelle out there, right?”
    “Right.”
    “Then roll.”
    “Okay. Thanks for lunch.”
    “One other thing—hear anything about Turnpike Joe?”
    “That’s State,” Pete says. “And the Feebles now. They’re welcome to it. What I hear is they’ve got nothing. Just waiting for him to do it again and hoping to get lucky.” He glances at his watch.
    “Go, go.”
    Pete starts out, stops, returns to the table, and puts a big kiss on Hodges’s forehead. “Great to see you, sweetheart.”
    “Get lost,” Hodges tells him. “People will say we’re in love.”
    Pete scrams with a big grin on his face, and Hodges thinks of what they sometimes used to call themselves: the Hounds of Heaven.
    He wonders how sharp his own nose is these days.
    13
    The waiter returns to ask if there will be anything else. Hodges starts to say no, then orders another cup of coffee. He just wants to sit here awhile, savoring double happiness: it wasn’t Mr. Mercedes and it was Donnie Davis, the sanctimonious cocksucker who killed his wife and then had his lawyer set up a reward fund for information leading to her whereabouts. Because, oh Jesus, he loved her so much and all he wanted was for her to come home so they could start over.
    He also wants to think about Olivia Trelawney, and Olivia Trelawney’s stolen Mercedes. That it was stolen no one doubts. But in spite of all her protests to the contrary, no one doubts that she enabled the thief.
    Hodges remembers a case that Isabelle Jaynes, then freshly arrived from San Diego, told them about after they brought her up to speed on Mrs. Trelawney’s inadvertent part in the City Center Massacre. In Isabelle’s story it was a gun. She said she and her partner had been called to a home where a nine-year-old boy had shot and killed his four-year-old sister. They had been playing with an automatic pistol their father had left on his bureau.
    “The father wasn’t charged, but he’ll carry that for the rest of his life,” she said. “This will turn out to be the same kind of thing, wait and see.”
    That was a month before the Trelawney woman swallowed the pills, maybe less, and nobody on the Mercedes Killer case had given much of a shit. To them—and him—Mrs. T. had just been a self-pitying rich lady who refused to accept her part in what had happened.
    The Mercedes SL was downtown when it was stolen, but Mrs. Trelawney, a widow who lost her wealthy husband to a heart attack, lived in Sugar Heights, a suburb as rich as its name where lots of gated drives led up to fourteen- and twenty-room McMansions. Hodges grew up in Atlanta, and whenever