Stephen King - End of Watch

‘Jerome is coming tonight. He called from his plane to ask about Barbara, and I told him everything she told me. He’ll be in at eleven o’clock. A good thing he left when he did, because a storm is coming. It’s supposed to be a bad one. I offered to rent him a car the way I do for you when you go out of town, it’s very easy now that we have the corporate account—’

‘That you lobbied for until I gave in. Believe me, I know.’

‘But he doesn’t need a car. His father is picking him up. They’ll go in to see Barbara at eight tomorrow, and bring her home if the doctor says she can go. Jerome said he can be at our office by ten, if that’s okay.’

‘Sounds fine,’ Hodges says, wiping his eyes. He doesn’t know how much Jerome can help, but he knows it will be very good to see him. ‘Anything more he can find out from her about that damn gadget—’

‘I asked him to do that. Did you get Dinah’s?’

‘Yeah. And tried it. There’s something up with the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, all right. It makes you sleepy if you look at it too long. Purely accidental, I think, and I don’t see how most kids would be affected, because they’d want to go right to the game.’

He fills her in on the rest of what he learned from Dinah.

Holly says, ‘So Dinah didn’t get her Zappit the same way as Barbara and the Ellerton woman.’

‘No.’

‘And don’t forget Hilda Carver. The man calling himself Myron Zakim gave her one, too. Only hers didn’t work. Barb said it just gave a single blue flash and died. Did you see any blue flashes?’

‘Nope.’ Hodges is peering at the scant contents of his refrigerator for something his stomach might accept, and settles on a carton of banana-flavored yogurt. ‘And there were pink fish, but when I succeeded in tapping a couple – which ain’t easy – no numbers appeared.’

‘I bet they did on Mrs Ellerton’s.’

Hodges thinks so, too. It’s early to generalize, but he’s starting to think the number-fish only show up on the Zappits that were handed out by the man with the briefcase, Myron Zakim. Hodges also thinks someone is playing games with the letter Z, and along with a morbid interest in suicide, games were part of Brady Hartsfield’s modus operandi. Except Brady is stuck in his room at Kiner Memorial, goddammit. Hodges keeps coming up against that irrefutable fact. If Brady Hartsfield has stooges to do his dirt, and it’s starting to seem that he does, how is he running them? And why would they run for him, anyway?

‘Holly, I need you to heat up your computer and check something out. Not a biggie, just a t that needs to be crossed.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I want to know if Sunrise Solutions sponsored the ’Round Here tour in 2010, when Hartsfield tried to blow up the Mingo Auditorium. Or any ’Round Here tour.’

‘I can do that. Did you have supper?’

‘Taking care of that right now.’

‘Good. What are you having?’

‘Steak, shoestring potatoes, and a salad,’ Hodges says, looking at the carton of yogurt with a mixture of distaste and resignation. ‘Got a leftover apple tart for dessert.’

‘Heat it up in the microwave and put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. Yummy!’

‘I’ll take that under consideration.’

He shouldn’t be amazed when she calls back five minutes later with the information he requested, it’s just Holly being Holly, but he still is. ‘Jesus, Holly, already?’

With no idea that she is echoing Freddi Linklatter almost word for word, Holly says, ‘Ask for something hard next time. You might like to know that ’Round Here broke up in 2013. Those boy bands don’t seem to last very long.’

‘No,’ Hodges says, ‘once they start having to shave, the little girls lose interest.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Holly says. ‘I was always a Billy Joel fan. Also Michael Bolton.’

Oh, Holly, Hodges mourns. And not for the first time.

‘Between 2007 and 2012, the group did six nationwide tours. The first four were sponsored by Sharp Cereals, which gave out free samples at their concerts. The last two, including the one at the Mingo, were sponsored by PepsiCo.’

‘No Sunrise Solutions.’

‘No.’

‘Thanks, Holly. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Yes. Are you eating your dinner?’

‘Sitting down to it now.’

‘All right. And try to see Barbara before you start your treatments. She needs friendly faces, because whatever was wrong with her hasn’t worn off yet. She said it was like it left a trail of slime inside her head.’

‘I’ll make sure of it,’ Hodges says, but that is a promise he’s not able to keep.

Are you Brady?

Felix Babineau, who sometimes calls himself Myron Zakim and sometimes Dr Z, smiles at the question. It wrinkles his unshaven cheeks in a decidedly creepy way. Tonight he’s wearing a furry ushanka instead of his trilby, and his white hair kind of squishes out around the bottom. Freddi wishes she hadn’t asked the question, wishes she didn’t have to let him in, wishes she’d never heard of him. If he is Brady, he’s a walking haunted house.

‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,’ he says.

She wants to let it go and can’t. ‘Because you sound like him. And that hack the other one brought me after the boxes came… that was a Brady hack if I ever saw one. Good as a signature.’

‘Brady Hartsfield is a semi-catatonic who can barely walk, let alone write a hack to be used on a bunch of obsolete game consoles. Some of which have proved to be defective as well as obsolete. I did not get my money’s worth from those Sunrise Solutions motherfuckers, which pisses me off to the max.’

Pisses me off to the max . A phrase Brady used all the time back in their Cyber Patrol days, usually about their boss or some idiot customer who managed to spill a mocha latte into his CPU.

‘You’ve been very well paid, Freddi, and you’re almost done. Why don’t we leave it at that?’

He brushes past her without waiting for a reply, puts his briefcase on the table, and snaps it open. He takes out an envelope with her initials, FL, printed on it. The letters slant backward. During her years on the Discount Electronix Cyber Patrol, she saw similar backslanted printing on hundreds of work orders. Those were the ones Brady filled out.

‘Ten thousand,’ Dr Z says. ‘Final payment. Now go to work.’

Freddi reaches for the envelope. ‘You don’t need to hang around if you don’t want to. The rest is basically automatic. It’s like setting an alarm clock.’

And if you’re really Brady, she thinks, you could do it yourself. I’m good at this stuff, but you were better.

He lets her fingers touch the envelope, then pulls it back. ‘I’ll stay. Not that I don’t trust you.’

Right, Freddi thinks. As if.

His cheeks once more wrinkle in that unsettling smile. ‘And who knows? We might get lucky and see the first hit.’

‘I’ll bet most of the people who got those Zappits have already thrown them away. It’s a fucking toy , and some of them don’t even work. Like you said.’

‘Let me worry about that,’ says Dr Z. Once again his cheeks wrinkle and pull back. His eyes are red, as if he’s been smoking the rock. She thinks of asking him what, exactly, they are doing, and what he hopes to accomplish… but she already has an idea, and does she want to be sure? Besides, if this is Brady, what harm can it do? He had hundreds of ideas, all of them crackpot.

Well.

Most of them.

She leads the way into what was meant to be a spare bedroom and has now become her workstation, the sort of electronic refuge she always dreamed of and could never afford – a hidey-hole that Gloria, with her good looks, infectious laugh, and ‘people skills,’ could never understand. In here the baseboard heaters hardly work at all, and it’s five degrees colder than the rest of the apartment. The computers don’t mind. They like it.