بخش 03 - فصل 21

21

Brady leaves Hillbilly Heaven and drives north toward the airport. There’s a Home Depot in the Birch Hill Mall where he could almost certainly get what he wants, but he makes the Skyway Shopping Complex his destination instead. What he’s doing is risky, reckless, and unnecessary. He won’t make matters worse by doing it in a store only one corridor

over from DE. You don’t shit where you eat. Brady does his business at Skyway’s Garden World and sees at once that he’s made the right choice. The store is huge, and on this midday late-spring Saturday, it’s crammed with shoppers. In the pesticide aisle, Brady adds two cans of Gopher-Go to a shopping cart already loaded with camouflage

items: fertilizer, mulch, seeds, and a short-handled gardening claw. He knows it’s madness to be buying poison in person when he’s already ordered some which will come to his safe mail-drop in another few days, but he can’t wait. Absolutely cannot. He probably won’t be able to actually poison the nigger family’s dog until Monday–and it might even

be Tuesday or Wednesday– but he has to be doing something. He needs to feel he’s . . . how did Shakespeare put it? Taking arms against a sea of troubles. He stands in line with his shopping cart, telling himself that if the checkout girl (another greaseball, the city is drowning in them) says anything about the Gopher-

Go, even something completely innocuous like This stuff really works, he’ll drop the whole thing. Too great a chance of being remembered and identified: Oh yes, he was being the nervous young man with the garden claw and the gopher poison. He thinks, Maybe I should have worn sunglasses. It’s not

like I’d stand out, half the men in here are wearing them. Too late now. He left his Ray-Bans back at Birch Hill, in his Subaru. All he can do is stand here in the checkout line and tell himself not to sweat. Which is like telling someone not to think of a blue polar bear. I was noticing him because he was having the sweat, the

greaseball checkout girl (a relative of Batool the Baker, for all Brady knows) will tell the police. Also because he was buying the gopher poison. The kind having the strychnine. For a moment he almost flees, but now there are people behind him as well as ahead of him, and if he breaks from the line, won’t people notice that? Won’t they wonder–

A nudge from behind him. “You’re up, buddy.” Out of options, Brady rolls his cart forward. The cans of Gopher-Go are a screaming yellow in the bottom of his shopping cart; to Brady they seem the very color of insanity, and that’s just as it should be. Being here is insane. Then a comforting thought comes to him, one that’s as

soothing as a cool hand on a fevered brow: Driving into those people at City Center was even more insane . . . but I got away with it, didn’t I? Yes, and he gets away with this. The greaseball runs his purchases under the scanner without so much as a glance at him. Nor does she look up when she asks him if it will be cash or credit.

Brady pays cash. He’s not that insane. Back in the VW (he’s parked it between two trucks, where its fluorescent green hardly shows at all), he sits behind the wheel, taking deep breaths until his heartbeat is steady again. He thinks about the immediate road ahead, and that calms him even more.

First, Odell. The mutt will die a miserable death, and the fat ex-cop will know it’s his own fault, even if the Robinsons do not. (From a purely scientific standpoint, Brady will be interested to see if the Det-Ret owns up. He thinks Hodges won’t.) Second, the man himself. Brady will give him a few days to marinate in his guilt, and who

knows? He may opt for suicide after all. Probably not, though. So Brady will kill him, method yet to be determined. And third . . . A grand gesture. Something that will be remembered for a hundred years. The question is, what might that grand gesture be? Brady keys the ignition and tunes the Beetle’s shitty radio

to BAM-100, where every weekend is a rock-block weekend. He catches the end of a ZZ Top block and is about to punch the button for KISS-92 when his hand freezes. Instead of switching the station, he turns the volume up. Fate is speaking to him. The deejay informs Brady that the hottest boy band in the country is coming to town

for one gig only–that’s right, ‘Round Here will be playing the MAC next Thursday. “The show’s already almost sold out, children, but the BAM-100 Good Guys are holding on to a dozen tickets, and we’ll be giving em out in pairs starting on Monday, so listen for the cue to call in and–” Brady switches the radio off. His eyes are distant, hazy,

contemplative. The MAC is what people in the city call the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex. It takes up a whole city block and has a gigantic auditorium. He thinks, What a way to go out. Oh my God, what a way that would be. He wonders what exactly the capacity of the MAC’s Mingo Auditorium might be.

Three thousand? Maybe four? He’ll go online tonight and check it out.