بخش 03 - فصل 11

11

Sometimes when he’s feeling upset, Brady Hartsfield retraces the route of his greatest triumph. It soothes him. On this Friday night he doesn’t go home after turning in the ice cream truck and making the obligatory joke or two with Shirley Orton in the front office. He drives his clunker downtown instead, not liking the front-end shimmy or the

too-loud blat of the engine. Soon he will have to balance off the cost of a new car (a new used car) against the cost of repairs. And his mother’s Honda needs work even more desperately than his Subaru does. Not that she drives the Honda very often these days, and that’s good, considering how much of her time she spends in the bag.

His trip down Memory Lane begins on Lake Avenue, just past the bright lights of downtown, where Mrs. Trelawney always parked her Mercedes on Thursday nights, and wends up Marlborough Street to City Center. Only this evening he gets no farther than the condo. He brakes so suddenly that the car behind almost rear-ends him. The

driver hits his horn in a long, outraged blast, but Brady pays no attention. It might as well have been a foghorn on the other side of the lake. The driver pulls around him, buzzing down his passenger-side window to yell Asshole at the top of his lungs. Brady pays no attention to that, either.

There must be thousands of

Toyota Corollas in the city, and

hundreds of blue Toyota

Corollas, but how many blue

Toyota Corollas with bumper

stickers reading SUPPORT

YOUR LOCAL POLICE?

Brady is betting there’s just

one, and what the hell is the

fat ex-cop doing in the old

lady’s

condominium

apartment? Why is he visiting

Mrs. Trelawney’s sister, who now lives there? The answer seems obvious: Detective Hodges (Ret.) is hunting. Brady is no longer interested in reliving last year’s triumph. He pulls an illegal (and completely out-ofcharacter) U-turn, now heading for the North Side. Heading for home with a

single thought in his head, blinking on and off like a neon sign. You bastard. You bastard. You bastard. Things are not going the way they are supposed to. Things are slipping out of his control. It’s not right. Something needs to be done.