Freddi Linklatter

Freddi Linklatter is a six-foot-two-or-three employee of Discount Electronix whose forthright manner and account of resisting anti-gay prejudice contrast sharply with the murderous secrecy of her coworker Brady Hartsfield. In their workplace exchanges, she is more than background conversation: her willingness to challenge a stranger and her hope for dialogue expose a human openness that Brady can hear but barely attend to, even as he considers how to manipulate K. William Hodges.

Identity and Appearance

Freddi works at Discount Electronix and towers over Brady, who is described as looking about as much like Vin Diesel as she looks like a girl. Her appearance is deliberately at odds with conventional feminine expectations: she wears straight-leg 501s, motorcycle skids, and a plain white T-shirt that hangs straight, keeps her dark blond hair cropped to a quarter inch, and wears neither earrings nor makeup. The description stresses her height and unadorned presentation without suggesting that either makes her an object of concern to herself.

At work she wears a Discount Electronix jacket and a DE cap, setting them aside together during a break on the loading dock. The jacket and cap are ordinary markers of her job, but the scene also shows her speaking on her own terms rather than performing a customer-facing role. Her blunt, talkative voice gives her a presence that Brady can tune out but cannot erase from the scene.

The Loading-Dock Conversation

The morning after Brady falls asleep, Freddi sits on the loading dock edge smoking a Marlboro and tells him about a man who gave her grief. She recounts how he handed her a religious tract depicting two gay men facing a cave of flames and the devil. Rather than accept his claim that homosexuality was learned behavior that could be unlearned, she answered by pointing to herself and challenging him to look at her as a man. Her account makes her response concrete: she confronts the stranger’s certainty with her own embodied experience and refuses to let his pamphlet define her.

Freddi says she had thought the man wanted a dialogue. She corrects his reference to the Book of Leviticus as the Book of LaBitticus, then describes how the exchange continued. She complains that people give her hassle, and that religious believers tend to get angry when someone pushes back against their ideas. Yet she distinguishes this particular encounter: the man listened, and the two eventually went to Hosseni’s Bakery for coffee, where they had something approaching a dialogue. The encounter does not make her optimistic about humanity, but it gives her a small, qualified exception to her low expectations.

Brady as Listener and Counterpoint

Freddi tells her story on break because Brady is a good listener. In fact, his attention is partial: he follows her until the Leviticus reference and then mostly loses the thread, responding with occasional affirmations. Her monologue soothes him like the LCD Soundsystem he sometimes plays on his iPod to fall asleep. The gap between her candid account and his disengagement establishes an unsettling asymmetry: she offers a personal story of confronting hostility, while he treats it as calming background noise.

As Freddi talks, Brady thinks about the anonymous letter he sent to the retired cop, whether the recipient will contact him through Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, and whether his invented writing style will conceal him. He believes the letter will initially energize Hodges, then make the eventual failure to find him more dispiriting; the Blue Umbrella, he thinks, will provide another opportunity to draw the detective in. His attention drifts between Freddi’s story and his plan, so her ordinary workplace confidence shares the scene with his concealed criminal purpose.

That contrast sharpens when Brady considers telling her that he is the Mercedes Killer or that he has nine pounds of homemade plastic explosive in his basement closet. He does neither. Instead, when she asks whether he is listening, he smiles and admits that he drifted away for a minute. The honest, casual answer lets him maintain the appearance of an ordinary coworker without revealing what his thoughts have concealed. Freddi’s openness is therefore set against Brady’s practiced compartmentalization, not because she knows his secret, but because the reader does.

Work and the Service Call

Freddi’s next recorded workplace task is an out-call: an older customer reports that her screen has frozen. Her manager hands Freddi a pink work invoice, and she rises, salutes, and takes the call-sheet, answering with an exaggeratedly obedient flourish. The detail places her conversation about prejudice within the routine machinery of retail work: the break ends, and she is sent out to help a customer with a computer problem.

The manager’s instructions turn that ordinary assignment into another small confrontation over how Freddi is expected to present herself. He tells her to tuck in her shirt, put on her cap so the customer will not be disgusted by her haircut, avoid speeding because another ticket could end her Cyber Patrol work, and pick up her cigarette butts. The passage records the instructions rather than Freddi’s response to them; her salute and playful reply are her visible answer before she leaves. Her interactions at work thus range from the prejudice she challenges in her story to the appearance policing she faces from management.

Narrative Role

Freddi’s brief scenes place an unguarded, socially perceptive voice beside Brady’s hidden violence. She recounts a hostile encounter without reducing it to a simple victory: the man’s initial prejudice is real, but so is his eventual willingness to listen over coffee. That qualified outcome differs from Brady’s instrumental view of other people, whom he considers in terms of risk, concealment, and how to provoke them.

Her function in these passages is limited but distinctive. Freddi does not uncover Brady’s identity, and the narrative supplies no indication that she suspects him. Instead, the dramatic irony rests on the distance between what she shares with a coworker and what the reader knows he is concealing. Her ordinary workday—smoking on the loading dock, talking through a personal encounter, accepting a service call—provides the social surface beneath which Brady’s plans continue.