Stephen King - End of Watch

‘You did. What’s interesting, to me at least, is the inventory.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Thousands of unsold Zappits, maybe tens of thousands. I wanted to know what happened to them.’

‘And did you find out?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Maybe they got shipped to the poor children in China, along with all the vegetables I refused to eat as a child.’

‘Starving children are not funny,’ she says, looking severe.

‘No, of course not.’

Hodges straightens up. He filled a prescription for painkillers on his way back from Stamos’s office – heavy-duty, but not as heavy as the stuff he may be taking soon – and he feels almost okay. There’s even a faint stirring of hunger in his belly, which is a welcome change. ‘They were probably destroyed. That’s what they do with unsold paperback books, I think.’

‘That’s a lot of inventory to destroy,’ she says, ‘considering the gadgets are loaded with games and still work. The top of the line, the Commanders, even came equipped with WiFi. Now tell me about your tests.’

Hodges manufactures a smile he hopes will look both modest and happy. ‘Good news, actually. It’s an ulcer, but just a little one. I’ll have to take a bunch of pills and be careful about my diet. Dr Stamos says if I do that, it should heal on its own.’

She gives him a radiant smile that makes Hodges feel good about this outrageous lie. Of course, it also makes him feel like dogshit on an old shoe.

‘Thank God! You’ll do what he says, won’t you?’

‘You bet.’ More dogshit; all the bland food in the world won’t cure what ails him. Hodges is not a giver-upper, and under other circumstances he would be in the office of gastroenterologist Henry Yip right now, no matter how bad the odds of beating pancreatic cancer. The message he received on the Blue Umbrella site has changed things, however.

‘Well, that’s fine. Because I don’t know what I’d do without you, Bill. I just don’t.’

‘Holly—’

‘Actually, I do. I’d go back home. And that would be bad for me.’

No shit, Hodges thinks. The first time I met you, in town for your aunt Elizabeth’s funeral, your mom was practically leading you around like a mutt on a leash. Do this, Holly, do that, Holly, and for Christ’s sake don’t do anything embarrassing.

‘Now tell me,’ she says. ‘Tell me the something new. Tell me tell me tell me!’

‘Give me fifteen minutes, then I’ll spill everything. In the meantime, see if you can find out what happened to all those Commander consoles. It’s probably not important, but it might be.’

‘Okay. Wonderful news about your tests, Bill.’

‘Yeah.’

He goes into his office. Holly swivels her chair to look after him for a moment, because he rarely closes the door when he’s in there. Still, it’s not unheard of. She returns to her computer.

‘He’s not done with you yet.’

Holly repeats it in a soft voice. She puts her half-eaten veggie burger down on its paper plate. Hodges has already demolished his, talking between bites. He doesn’t mention waking with pain; in this version he discovered the message because he got up to net-surf when he couldn’t sleep.

‘That’s what it said, all right.’

‘From Z-Boy.’

‘Yeah. Sounds like some superhero’s sidekick, doesn’t it? “Follow the adventures of Z-Man and Z-Boy, as they keep the streets of Gotham City safe from crime!”’

‘That’s Batman and Robin. They’re the ones who patrol Gotham City.’

‘I know that, I was reading Batman comics before you were born. I was just saying.’

She picks up her veggie burger, extracts a shred of lettuce, puts it down again. ‘When is the last time you visited Brady Hartsfield?’

Right to the heart of the matter, Hodges thinks admiringly. That’s my Holly.

‘I went to see him just after the business with the Saubers family, and once more later on. Midsummer, that would have been. Then you and Jerome cornered me and said I had to stop. So I did.’

‘We did it for your own good.’

‘I know that, Holly. Now eat your sandwich.’

She takes a bite, dabs mayo from the corner of her mouth, and asks him how Hartsfield seemed on his last visit.

‘The same… mostly. Just sitting there, looking out at the parking garage. I talk, I ask him questions, he says nothing. He gives Academy Award brain damage, no doubt about that. But there have been stories about him. That he has some kind of mind-power. That he can turn the water on and off in his bathroom, and does it sometimes to scare the staff. I’d call it bullshit, but when Becky Helmington was the head nurse, she said she’d actually seen stuff on a couple of occasions – rattling blinds, the TV going on by itself, the bottles on his IV stand swinging back and forth. And she’s what I’d call a credible witness. I know it’s hard to believe—’

‘Not so hard. Telekinesis, sometimes called psychokinesis, is a documented phenomenon. You never saw anything like that yourself during any of your visits?’

‘Well…’ He pauses, remembering. ‘Something did happen on my second-to-last visit. There was a picture on the table beside his bed – him and his mother with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. On vacation somewhere. There was a bigger version in the house on Elm Street. You probably remember it.’

‘Of course I do. I remember everything we saw in that house, including some of the cheesecake photos of her he had on his computer.’ She crosses her arms over her small bosom and makes a moue of distaste. ‘That was a very unnatural relationship.’

‘Tell me about it. I don’t know if he ever actually had sex with her—’

‘Oough!’

‘—but I think he probably wanted to, and at the very least she enabled his fantasies. Anyway, I grabbed the picture and talked some smack about her, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to get him to respond. Because he’s in there, Holly, and I mean all present and accounted for. I was sure of it then and I’m sure of it now. He just sits there, but inside he’s the same human wasp that killed those people at City Center and tried to kill a whole lot more at Mingo Auditorium.’

‘And he used Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to talk with you, don’t forget that.’

‘After last night I’m not likely to.’

‘Tell me the rest of what happened that time.’

‘For just a second he stopped looking out his window at the parking garage across the way. His eyes… they rolled in their sockets, and he looked at me. Every hair on the nape of my neck stood up at attention, and the air felt… I don’t know… electric .’ He forces himself to say the rest. It’s like pushing a big rock up a steep hill. ‘I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers – one was a mother who killed her three-year-old for insurance that didn’t amount to a hill of beans – but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.’

‘I believe you,’ she says in a voice so small it’s barely a whisper.

‘And he had a Zappit. That’s the connection I was trying to make. If it is a connection, and not just a coincidence. There was a guy, I don’t know his last name, everyone just called him Library Al, who used to hand Zappits out along with Kindles and paperbacks when he made his rounds. I don’t know if Al was an orderly or a volunteer. Hell, he might even have been one of the janitors, doing a little good deed on the side. I think the only reason I didn’t pick up on that right away was the Zappit you found at the Ellerton house was pink. The one in Brady’s room was blue.’