Stephen King - End of Watch

Cling-clong goes the doorbell and she listens for her husband’s footsteps above her, but there’s nothing. On the monitor, the old man in the ratty parka – he looks like one of those bums you see standing at intersections, holding up signs that say things like HUNGRY, NO JOB, ARMY VETERAN, PLEASE HELP – just stands there.

‘Dammit,’ she mutters, and pauses the treadmill. She climbs the stairs, opens the door to the back hallway, and shouts, ‘ Felix! It’s your weirdo friend! That Al! ’

No response. He’s in his study again, possibly looking at the game-thing he seems to have fallen in love with. The first few times she mentioned Felix’s strange new obsession to her friends at the country club, it was a joke. It doesn’t seem so funny now. He’s sixty-three, too old for kids’ computer games and too young to have gotten so forgetful, and she’s begun to wonder if he might not be suffering early-onset Alzheimer’s. It has also crossed her mind that Felix’s weirdo friend is some kind of drug pusher, but isn’t the guy awfully old for that? And if her husband wants drugs, he can certainly supply himself; according to him, half the doctors at Kiner are high at least half the time.

Cling-clong , goes the doorbell.

‘Jesus on a pony,’ she says, and goes to the door herself, growing more irritated with each long stride. She’s a tall, gaunt woman whose female shape has been exercised nearly to oblivion. Her golf tan remains even in the depths of winter, only turning a pale shade of yellow that makes her look as if she’s suffering chronic liver disease.

She opens the door. The January night rushes in, chilling her sweaty face and arms. ‘I think I would like to know who you are,’ she says, ‘and what you and my husband are up to together. Would that be too much to ask?’

‘Not at all, Mrs Babineau,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I’m Al. Sometimes I’m Z-Boy. Tonight I’m Brady, and boy oh boy, it’s nice to be out, even on such a cold night.’

She looks down at his hand. ‘What’s in that jar?’

‘The end of all your troubles,’ says the man in the mended parka, and there’s a muffled bang. The bottom of the soda bottle blows out in shards, along with scorched threads from the steel wool. They float in the air like milkweed fluff.

Cora feels something hit her just below her shrunken left breast and thinks, This weirdo son of a bitch just punched me. She tries to take a breath and at first can’t. Her chest feels strangely dead; warmth is pooling above the elastic top of her tracksuit pants. She looks down, still trying to take that all-important breath, and sees a stain spreading on the blue nylon.

She raises her eyes to stare at the geezer in the doorway. He’s holding out the remains of the bottle as if it’s a present, a little gift to make up for showing up unannounced at eight in the evening. What’s left of the steel wool pokes out of the bottom like a charred boutonniere. She finally manages a breath, but it’s mostly liquid. She coughs, and sprays blood.

The man in the parka steps into her house and sweeps the door shut behind him. He drops the bottle. Then he pushes her. She staggers back, knocking a decorative vase from the end table by the coathooks, and goes down. The vase shatters on the hardwood floor like a bomb. She drags in another of those liquid breaths – I’m drowning, she thinks, drowning right here in my front hall – and coughs out another spray of red.

‘Cora?’ Babineau calls from somewhere deep in the house. He sounds as if he’s just woken up. ‘Cora, are you okay?’

Brady raises Library Al’s foot and carefully brings Library Al’s heavy black workshoe down on the straining tendons of Cora Babineau’s scrawny throat. More blood bursts from her mouth; her sun-cured cheeks are now stippled with it. He steps down hard. There’s a crackling sound as stuff breaks inside her. Her eyes bulge… bulge… and then they glaze over.

‘You were a tough one,’ Brady remarks, almost affectionately.

A door opens. Slippered feet come running, and then Babineau is there. He’s wearing a dressing gown over ridiculous Hugh Hefner-style silk pajamas. His silver hair, usually his pride, is in wild disarray. The stubble on his cheeks has become an incipient beard. In his hand is a green Zappit console from which the little Fishin’ Hole tune tinkles: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea . He stares at his wife lying on the hall floor.

‘No more workouts for her,’ Brady says in that same affectionate tone.

‘ What did you DO? ’ Babineau screams, as if it isn’t obvious. He runs to Cora and tries to fall to his knees beside her, but Brady hooks him under the armpit and hauls him back up. Library Al is by no means Charles Atlas, but he is ever so much stronger than the wasted body in Room 217.

‘No time for that,’ Brady says. ‘The Robinson girl is alive, which necessitates a change of plan.’

Babineau stares at him, trying to gather his thoughts, but they elude him. His mind, once so sharp, has been blunted. And it’s this man’s fault.

‘Look at the fish,’ Brady says. ‘You look at yours and I’ll look at mine. We’ll both feel better.’

‘No,’ Babineau says. He wants to look at the fish, he always wants to look at them now, but he’s afraid to. Brady wants to pour his mind into Babineau’s head like some strange water, and each time that happens, less of his essential self remains afterward.

‘Yes,’ Brady says. ‘Tonight you need to be Dr Z.’

‘I refuse!’

‘You’re in no position to refuse. This is coming unraveled. Soon the police will be at your door. Or Hodges, and that would be even worse. He won’t read you your rights, he’ll just hit you with that homemade sap of his. Because he’s a mean motherfucker. And because you were right. He knows .’

‘I won’t… I can’t…’ Babineau looks down at his wife. Ah God, her eyes. Her bulging eyes. ‘The police would never believe… I’m a respected doctor! We’ve been married for thirty-five years!’

‘Hodges will. And when Hodges gets the bit in his teeth, he turns into Wyatt fucking Earp. He’ll show the Robinson girl your picture. She’ll look at it and say oh wow, yes, that’s the man who gave me the Zappit at the mall. And if you gave her a Zappit, you probably gave one to Janice Ellerton. Oops! And there’s Scapelli.’

Babineau stares, trying to comprehend this disaster.

‘Then there’s the drugs you fed me. Hodges may know about them already, because he’s a fast man with a bribe and most of the nurses in the Bucket know. It’s an open secret, because you never tried to hide it.’ Brady gives Library Al’s head a sad shake. ‘Your arrogance.’

‘Vitamins!’ It’s all Babineau can manage.

‘Even the cops won’t believe that if they subpoena your files and search your computers.’ Brady glances down at Cora Babineau’s sprawled body. ‘And there’s your wife, of course. How are you going to explain her?’

‘I wish you’d died before they brought you in,’ Babineau says. His voice is rising, becoming a whine. ‘Or on the operating table. You’re a Frankenstein !’

‘Don’t confuse the monster with the creator,’ Brady says, although he doesn’t actually give Babineau much credit in the creation department. Dr B.’s experimental drug may have something to do with his new abilities, but it had little or nothing to do with his recovery. He’s positive that was his own doing. An act of sheer willpower. ‘Meanwhile, we have a visit to make, and we don’t want to be late.’

‘To the man-woman.’ There’s a word for that, Babineau used to know it, but now it’s gone. Like the name that goes with it. Or what he ate for dinner. Each time Brady comes into his head, he takes a little more when he leaves. Babineau’s memory. His knowledge. His self .