Stephen King - End of Watch

‘He’s creepy,’ Gloria said. ‘The older guy is, too. And the money’s creepy. It’s too much. I don’t know what they got you into, Fred, but sooner or later it’s going to blow up in your face, and I don’t want to be part of the collateral damage.’

Of course Gloria had also met someone else – someone quite a bit better-looking than Freddi, with her angular body and lantern jaw and pitted cheeks – but she didn’t want to talk about that part of it, oh no.

Around and around goes the flask.

It all seemed so simple at first, and how could she refuse the money? She never saved much when she worked on the Discount Electronix Cyber Patrol, and the work she’d been able to find as an independent IT when the store closed had barely been enough to keep her off the street. It might have been different if she’d had what Anthony Frobisher, her old boss, liked to call ‘people skills,’ but those had never been her forte. When the old geezer who called himself Z-Boy made his offer (and dear God, that was really a comic book handle), it had been like a gift from God. She had been living in a shitty apartment on the South Side, in the part of town commonly referred to as Hillbilly Heaven, and a month behind on the rent in spite of the cash the guy had already given her. What was she supposed to do? Refuse five thousand dollars? Get real.

Around and around goes the flask.

The guy is late, maybe he’s not coming at all, and that might be for the best.

She remembers the geezer casting his eyes around the two-room apartment, most of her possessions in paper bags with handles (all too easy to see those bags gathered around her as she tried to sleep beneath a Crosstown Expressway underpass). ‘You’ll need a bigger place,’ he said.

‘Yeah, and the farmers in California need rain.’ She remembers peering into the envelope he handed her. Remembers riffling the fifties, and what a comfy sound they made. ‘This is nice, but by the time I get square with all the people I owe, there won’t be much left.’ She could stiff most of those people, but the geezer didn’t need to know that.

‘There’ll be more, and my boss will take care of getting you an apartment where you may be asked to accept certain shipments.’

That started alarm bells ringing. ‘If you’re thinking about drugs, let’s just forget the whole thing.’ She held out the cash-stuffed envelope to him, much as it hurt to do that.

He pushed it back with a little grimace of contempt. ‘No drugs. You’ll not be asked to sign for anything even slightly illegal.’

So here she is, in a condo close to the lakeshore. Not that there’s much of a lake view from only six stories up, and not that the place is a palace. Far from it, especially in the winter. You can only catch a wink of the water between the newer, nicer highrises, but the wind finds its way through just fine, thanks, and in January, that wind is cold. She has the joke thermostat cranked to eighty, and is still wearing three shirts and longjohns under her carpenter jeans. Hillbilly Heaven is in the rearview mirror, though, that’s something, but the question remains: is it enough?

Around and around goes the silver flask. GH & FL, 4Ever . Only nothing is 4Ever.

The lobby buzzer goes, making her jump. She picks up the flask – her one souvenir of the glorious Gloria days – and heads to the intercom. She quashes an urge to do her Russian spy accent again. Whether he calls himself Dr Babineau or Dr Z, the guy is a little scary. Not Hillbilly-Heaven, crystal-meth-dope-dealer scary, but in a different way. Better to play this straight, get it over with, and hope to Christ she doesn’t find herself in too much trouble if the deal blows up in her face.

‘Is this the famous Dr Z?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘You’re late.’

‘Am I keeping you from something important, Freddi?’

No, nothing important. Nothing she does is particularly important these days.

‘You brought the money?’

‘Of course.’ Sounding impatient. The old geezer with whom she had commenced this nutty business had the same impatient way of speaking. He and Dr Z looked nothing alike, but they sounded alike, enough to make her wonder if they weren’t brothers. Only they also sounded like that someone else, the old colleague she used to work with. The one who turned out to be Mr Mercedes.

Freddi doesn’t want to think about that any more than she wants to think about the various hacks she’s done on Dr Z’s behalf. She hits the buzzer beside the intercom.

She goes to her door to wait for him, taking a nip of Scotch to fortify herself. She tucks the flask into the breast pocket of her middle shirt, then reaches into the pocket of the one beneath, where she keeps her breath mints. She doesn’t believe Dr Z would give Shit One if he smelled booze on her breath, but she always used to pop a mint after a nip when she was working at Discount Electronix, and old habits are strong habits. She takes her Marlboros from the pocket of her top shirt and lights one. It will further mask the smell of the booze, and calm her a little more, and if he doesn’t like her secondhand smoke, tough titty.

‘This guy has set you up in a pretty nice apartment and paid you almost thirty thousand dollars over the last eighteen months or so,’ Gloria had said. ‘Tall tickets for something any hacker worth her salt could do in her sleep, at least according to you. So why you? And why so much?’

More stuff Freddi doesn’t want to think about.

It all started with the picture of Brady and his mom. She found it in the junk room at Discount Electronix, shortly after the staff had been told the Birch Hill Mall store was closing. Their boss, Anthony ‘Tones’ Frobisher, must have taken it out of Brady’s work cubby and tossed it back there after the world found out that Brady was the infamous Mercedes Killer. Freddi had no great love for Brady (although they did have a few meaningful conversations about gender identity, back in the day). Wrapping the picture and taking it to the hospital was pure impulse. And the few times she’d visited him afterwards had been pure curiosity, plus a little pride at the way Brady had reacted to her. He smiled .

‘He responds to you,’ the new head nurse – Scapelli – said after one of Freddi’s visits. ‘That’s very unusual.’

By the time Scapelli replaced Becky Helmington, Freddi knew that the mysterious Dr Z who took over supplying her with cash was in reality Dr Felix Babineau. She didn’t think about that, either. Or about the cartons that eventually began arriving from Terre Haute via UPS. Or the hacks. She became an expert in not thinking, because once you started doing that, certain connections became obvious. And all because of that damn picture. Freddi wishes now she’d resisted the impulse, but her mother had a saying: Too late always comes too early.

She hears his footsteps coming down the hall. She opens the door before he can ring the bell, and the question is out of her mouth before she knows she is going to ask it.

‘Tell me the truth, Dr Z – are you Brady?’

Hodges is barely inside his front door and still taking off his coat when his cell rings. ‘Hey, Holly.’

‘Are you all right?’

He can see a lot of calls from her starting with this exact same greeting. Well, it’s better than Drop dead, motherfucker. ‘Yeah, I’m good.’

‘One more day, and then you start treatments. And once you start, you don’t stop. Whatever the doctors say, you do.’

‘Stop worrying. A deal is a deal.’

‘I’ll stop worrying when you’re cancer free.’

Don’t, Holly, he thinks, and closes his eyes against the unexpected sting of tears. Don’t, don’t, don’t.