Stephen King - End of Watch

She says, ‘The last big storm was December nineteenth. The weather service reported eleven inches in Government Square, thirteen in Branson Park. Not exactly huge, but the only other one so far this winter dropped just four inches.’

‘Six days before Christmas. Around the same time Janice Ellerton was given the Zappit, according to Alderson’s recollection.’

‘Do you think the man who gave it to her was the same one looking at that house?’

Hodges snares a piece of broccoli. It’s supposed to be good for you, like all veggies that taste bad. ‘I don’t think Ellerton would have accepted anything from a guy wearing a parka mended with masking tape. I’m not counting the possibility out, but it seems unlikely.’

‘Eat your lunch, Bill. If I get any further ahead of you, I’ll look like a pig.’

Hodges eats, although he has very little appetite these days even when his stomach isn’t giving him the devil. When a bite sticks in his throat, he washes it down with tea. Maybe a good idea, since tea seems to help. He thinks about those test results he is yet to see. It occurs to him that his problem could be worse than an ulcer, that an ulcer might actually be the best-case scenario. There’s medicine for ulcers. Other things, not so much.

When he can see the middle of his plate (but Jesus, so much food left around the edges), he sets his chopsticks aside and says, ‘I found something out while you were hunting down Nancy Alderson.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I was reading about those Zappits. Amazing how these computer-based companies pop up, then disappear. They’re like dandelions in June. The Commander didn’t exactly corner the market. Too simple, too expensive, too much sophisticated competition. Zappit Inc. stock went down and they got bought out by a company called Sunrise Solutions. Two years ago that company declared bankruptcy and went dark. Which means Zappit is long gone and the guy giving out Commander consoles had to be running some kind of scam.’

Holly is quick to see where that leads. ‘So the questionnaire was bullpoop just to add a little whatdoyoucallit, verisimilitude. But the guy didn’t try to get money out of her, did he?’

‘No. At least not that we know of.’

‘Something weird is going on here, Bill. Are you going to tell Detective Huntley and Miss Pretty Gray Eyes?’

Hodges has picked up the smallest piece of lamb left on his plate, and here is an excuse to drop it. ‘Why don’t you like her, Holly?’

‘Well, she thinks I’m crazy,’ Holly says matter-of-factly. ‘There’s that.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t—’

‘Yes. She does. She probably thinks I’m dangerous, too, because of the way I whopped Brady Hartsfield at the ’Round Here concert. But I don’t care. I’d do it again. A thousand times!’

He puts a hand over hers. The chopsticks she’s holding in her fist vibrate like a tuning fork. ‘I know you would, and you’d be right every time. You saved a thousand lives, and that’s a conservative estimate.’

She slides her hand from beneath his and starts picking up grains of rice. ‘Oh, I can deal with her thinking I’m crazy. I’ve been dealing with people thinking that all my life, starting with my parents. But there’s something else. Isabelle only sees what she sees, and she doesn’t like people who see more, or at least look for more. She feels the same way about you, Bill. She’s jealous of you. Over Pete.’

Hodges says nothing. He’s never considered such a possibility.

She puts down her chopsticks. ‘You didn’t answer my question. Are you going to tell them what we’ve learned so far?’

‘Not quite yet. There’s something I want to do first, if you’ll hold down the office this afternoon.’

Holly smiles down at the remainder of her chow mein. ‘I always do.’

Bill Hodges isn’t the only one who took an instant dislike to Becky Helmington’s replacement. The nurses and orderlies who work in the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic call it the Bucket, as in Brain Bucket, and before long Ruth Scapelli has become known as Nurse Ratched. By the end of her third month, she has gotten three nurses transferred for various small infractions, and one orderly fired for smoking in a supply closet. She has banned certain colorful uniforms as ‘too distracting’ or ‘too suggestive.’

The doctors like her, though. They find her swift and competent. With the patients she is also swift and competent, but she’s cold, and there’s an undertone of contempt there, as well. She will not allow even the most cataclysmically injured of them to be called a gork or a burn or a wipeout, at least not in her hearing, but she has a certain attitude .

‘She knows her stuff,’ one nurse said to another in the break room not long after Scapelli took up her duties. ‘No argument about that, but there’s something missing.’

The other nurse was a thirty-year veteran who had seen it all. She considered, then said one word… but it was le mot juste . ‘Mercy.’

Scapelli never exhibits coldness or contempt when she accompanies Felix Babineau, the head of Neuro, on his rounds, and he probably wouldn’t notice if she did. Some of the other doctors have noticed, but few pay any mind; the doings of such lesser beings as nurses – even head nurses – are far below their lordly gaze.

It is as if Scapelli feels that, no matter what is wrong with them, the patients of the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic must bear part of the responsibility for their current condition, and if they only tried harder, they would surely regain at least some of their faculties. She does her job, though, and for the most part she does it well, perhaps better than Becky Helmington, who was far better liked. If told this, Scapelli would have said she was not here to be liked. She was here to care for her patients, end of story, full stop.

There is, however, one long-term patient in the Bucket whom she hates. That patient is Brady Hartsfield. It isn’t because she had a friend or relative who was hurt or killed at City Center; it’s because she thinks he’s shamming. Avoiding the punishment he so richly deserves. Mostly she stays away and lets other staff members deal with him, because just seeing him often infuses her with a daylong rage that the system should be so easily gamed by this vile creature. She stays away for another reason, too: she doesn’t entirely trust herself when she’s in his room. On two occasions she has done something. The kind of thing that, were it discovered, might result in her being the one fired. But on this early January afternoon, just as Hodges and Holly are finishing their lunch, she is drawn down to Room 217 as if by an invisible cable. Only this morning she was forced to go in there, because Dr Babineau insists she accompany him on rounds, and Brady is his star patient. He marvels at how far Brady has come.

‘He should never have emerged from his coma at all,’ Babineau told her shortly after she came on staff at the Bucket. He’s a cold fish, but when he speaks of Brady he becomes almost jolly. ‘And look at him now! He’s able to walk short distances – with help, I grant you – he can feed himself, and he can respond either verbally or with signs to simple questions.’

He’s also prone to poking himself in the eye with his fork, Ruth Scapelli could have added (but doesn’t), and his verbal responses all sound like wah-wah and gub-gub to me. Then there’s the matter of waste. Put a Depends on him and he holds it. Take it off, and he urinates in his bed, regular as clockwork. Defecates in it, if he can. It’s as if he knows. She believes he does know.

Something else he knows – of this there can be no doubt – is that Scapelli doesn’t like him. This very morning, after the exam was finished and Dr Babineau was washing his hands in the en suite bathroom, Brady raised his head to look at her and lifted one hand to his chest. He curled it into a loose, trembling fist. From it his middle finger slowly extended.