Stephen King - End of Watch

He gets out of bed, walks slowly to the bathroom, and takes the giant economy size bottle of Gelusil out of the medicine cabinet, careful not to look at himself in the mirror. He chugalugs four big swallows, then leans over, waiting to see if his stomach will accept it or hit the ejector button, as it did with the chicken soup.

It stays down and the pain actually begins to recede. Sometimes Gelusil does that. Not always.

He thinks about going back to bed, but he’s afraid that dull throb will return as soon as he’s horizontal. He shuffles into his office instead and turns on his computer. He knows this is the very worst time to start checking out the possible causes for his symptoms, but he can no longer resist. His desktop wallpaper comes up (another picture of Allie as a kid). He mouses down to the bottom of the screen, meaning to open Firefox, then freezes. There’s something new in the dock. Between the balloon icon for text messaging and the camera icon for FaceTime, there’s a blue umbrella with a red 1 sitting above it.

‘A message on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella,’ he says. ‘I’ll be damned.’

A much younger Jerome Robinson downloaded the Blue Umbrella app to his computer almost six years ago. Brady Hartsfield, aka Mr Mercedes, wanted to converse with the cop who had failed to catch him, and, although retired, Hodges was very willing to talk. Because once you got dirtbags like Mr Mercedes talking (there weren’t very many like him, and thank God for that), they were only a step or two from being caught. This was especially true of the arrogant ones, and Hartsfield had been arrogance personified.

They both had their reasons for communicating on a secure, supposedly untraceable chat site with servers located someplace in deepest, darkest Eastern Europe. Hodges wanted to goad the perpetrator of the City Center Massacre into making a mistake that would help identify him. Mr Mercedes wanted to goad Hodges into killing himself. He had succeeded with Olivia Trelawney, after all.

What kind of life do you have?he had written in his first communication to Hodges – the one that had arrived by snail-mail. What kind, now that the ‘thrill of the hunt’ is behind you? And then: Want to get in touch with me? Try Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. I even got you a username: ‘kermitfrog19.’

With plenty of help from Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney, Hodges tracked Brady down, and Holly clobbered him. Jerome and Holly got free city services for ten years; Hodges got a pacemaker. There were sorrows and loss Hodges doesn’t want to think about – not even now, all these years later – but you’d have to say that for the city, and especially for those who had been attending the concert at the Mingo that night, all ended well.

At some point between 2010 and now, the blue umbrella icon disappeared from the dock at the bottom of his screen. If Hodges ever wondered what happened to it (he can’t remember that he ever did), he probably assumed either Jerome or Holly dumped it in the trash on one of their visits to fix whatever current outrage he had perpetrated on his defenseless Macintosh. Instead, one of them must have tucked it into the apps folder, where the blue umbrella has remained, just out of sight, all these years. Hell, maybe he even did the dragging himself and has forgotten. Memory has a way of slipping a few gears after sixty-five, when people round the third turn start down the home stretch.

He mouses to the blue umbrella, hesitates, then clicks. His desktop screen is replaced by a young couple on a magic carpet floating over an endless sea. Silver rain is falling, but the couple is safe and dry beneath a protective blue umbrella.

Ah, such memories this brings back.

He enters kermitfrog19as both his username and his password – isn’t that how he did it before, as per Hartsfield’s instructions? He can’t remember for sure, but there’s one way to find out. He bangs the return key.

The machine thinks for a second or two (it seems longer), and then, presto, he’s in. He frowns at what he sees. Brady Hartsfield used merckillas his handle, short for Mercedes Killer – Hodges has no trouble remembering that – but this is someone else. Which shouldn’t surprise him, since Holly turned Hartsfield’s fucked-up brain to oatmeal, but somehow it still does.

Z-Boy wants to chat with you!

Do you want to chat with Z-Boy?

Y N

Hodges hits Y, and a moment later a message appears. Just a single sentence, half a dozen words, but Hodges reads them over and over again, feeling not fear but excitement. He is onto something here. He doesn’t know what it is, but it feels big.

Z-Boy: He’s not done with you yet.

Hodges stares at it, frowning. At last he sits forward in his chair and types:

kermitfrogl9: Who’s not done with me? Who is this?

There’s no answer.

Hodges and Holly get together with Pete and Isabelle at Dave’s Diner, a greasy spoon a block down from the morning madhouse known as Starbucks. With the early breakfast rush over, they have their pick of tables and settle at one in the back. In the kitchen a Badfinger song is playing on the radio and waitresses are laughing.

‘All I’ve got is half an hour,’ Hodges says. ‘Then I have to run to the doctor’s.’

Pete leans forward, looking concerned. ‘Nothing serious, I hope.’

‘Nope. I feel fine.’ This morning he actually does – like forty-five again. That message on his computer, cryptic and sinister though it was, seems to have been better medicine than the Gelusil. ‘Let’s get to what we’ve found. Holly, they’ll want Exhibit A and Exhibit B. Hand em over.’

Holly has brought her small tartan briefcase to the meeting. From it (and not without reluctance) she brings the Zappit Commander and the lens cap from the garage at 1588. Both are in plastic bags, although the lens cap is still wrapped in tissues.

‘What have you two been up to?’ Pete asks. He’s striving for humorous, but Hodges can hear a touch of accusation there, as well.

‘Investigating,’ Holly says, and although she isn’t ordinarily one for eye contact, she shoots a brief look at Izzy Jaynes, as if to say Get the point?

‘Explain,’ Izzy says.

Hodges does so while Holly sits beside him with her eyes cast down, her decaf – all she drinks – untouched. Her jaws are moving, though, and Hodges knows she’s back on the Nicorette.

‘Unbelievable,’ Izzy says when Hodges has finished. She pokes at the bag with the Zappit inside. ‘You just took this. Wrapped it up in newspaper like a piece of salmon from the fish market and carried it out of the house.’

Holly appears to shrink in her chair. Her hands are so tightly clasped in her lap that the knuckles are white.

Hodges usually likes Isabelle well enough, even though she once nearly tripped him up in an interrogation room (this during the Mr Mercedes thing, when he had been hip-deep in an unauthorized investigation), but he doesn’t like her much now. He can’t like anyone who makes Holly shrink like that.

‘Be reasonable, Iz. Think it through. If Holly hadn’t found that thing – and purely by accident – it would still be there. You guys weren’t going to search the house.’

‘You probably weren’t going to call the housekeeper, either,’ Holly says, and although she still won’t look up, there’s metal in her voice. Hodges is glad to hear it.

‘We would have gotten to the Alderson woman in time,’ Izzy says, but those misty gray eyes of hers flick up and to the left as she says it. It’s a classic liar’s tell, and Hodges knows when he sees it that she and Pete haven’t even discussed the housekeeper yet, although they probably would have gotten around to her eventually. Pete Huntley may be a bit of a plodder, but plodders are usually thorough, you had to give them that.