Stephen King - End of Watch

‘Eat some breakfast.’

‘I will.’

He ends the call, and looks longingly at the fresh pot of coffee. The smell is wonderful. He turns it down the sink and gets dressed. He does not eat breakfast.

Finders Keepers seems very empty without Holly at her desk in the reception area, but at least the seventh floor of the Turner Building is quiet; the noisy crew from the travel agency down the hall won’t start to arrive for at least another hour.

Hodges thinks best with a yellow pad in front of him, jotting down ideas as they come, trying to tease out the connections and form a coherent picture. It’s the way he worked when he was on the cops, and he was capable of making those connections more often than not. He won a lot of citations over the years, but they’re piled helter-skelter on a shelf in his closet instead of hanging on a wall. The citations never mattered to him. The reward was the flash of light that came with the connections. He found himself unable to give it up. Hence Finders Keepers instead of retirement.

This morning there are no notes, only doodles of stick men climbing a hill, and cyclones, and flying saucers. He’s pretty sure most of the pieces to this puzzle are now on the table and all he has to do is figure out how to put them together, but Brady Hartsfield’s death is like a pileup on his personal information highway, blocking all traffic. Every time he glances at his watch, another five minutes have gone by. Soon enough he’ll have to call Schneider. By the time he gets off the phone with him, the noisy travel agency crew will be arriving. After them, Barbara and Jerome. Any chance of quiet thought will be gone.

Think of the connections , Holly said. They all go back to him. And the concert he tried to blow up .

Yes; yes they do. Because the only ones eligible to receive free Zappits from that website were people – young girls then, for the most part, teenagers now – who could prove they were at the ’Round Here show, and the website is now defunct. Like Brady, badconcert.com is a gone goose, a toasty turkey, a baked buzzard, and we all say hooray.

At last he prints two words amid the doodles, and circles them. One is Concert . The other is Residue .

He calls Kiner Memorial, and is transferred to the Bucket. Yes, he’s told, Norma Wilmer is in, but she’s busy and can’t come to the phone. Hodges guesses she’s very busy this morning, and hopes her hangover isn’t too bad. He leaves a message asking that she call him back as soon as she can, and emphasizes that it’s urgent.

He continues doodling until eight twenty-five (now it’s Zappits he’s drawing, possibly because he’s got Dinah Scott’s in his coat pocket), then calls Todd Schneider, who answers the phone personally.

Hodges identifies himself as a volunteer consumer advocate working with the Better Business Bureau, and says he’s been tasked with investigating some Zappit consoles that have shown up in the city. He keeps his tone easy, almost casual. ‘This is no big deal, especially since the Zappits were given away, but it seems that some of the recipients are downloading books from something called the Sunrise Readers Circle, and they’re coming through garbled.’

‘Sunrise Readers Circle?’ Schneider sounds bemused. No sign he’s getting ready to put up a shield of legalese, and that’s the way Hodges wants to keep it. ‘As in Sunrise Solutions?’

‘Well, yes, that’s what prompted the call. According to my information, Sunrise Solutions bought out Zappit, Inc., before going bankrupt.’

‘That’s true, but I’ve got a ton of paperwork on Sunrise Solutions, and I don’t recall anything about a Sunrise Readers Circle. And it would have stood out like a sore thumb. Sunrise was basically involved in gobbling up small electronics companies, looking for that one big hit. Which they never found, unfortunately.’

‘What about the Zappit Club? Ring any bells?’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Or a website called zeetheend.com?’ As he asks this question, Hodges smacks himself in the forehead. He should have checked that site for himself instead of filling a page with dumb doodles.

‘Nope, never heard of that, either.’ Now comes a tiny rattle of the legal shield. ‘Is this a consumer fraud issue? Because bankruptcy laws are very clear on the subject, and—’

‘Nothing like that,’ Hodges soothes. ‘Only reason we’re even involved is because of the jumbled downloads. And at least one of the Zappits was dead on arrival. The recipient wants to send it back, maybe get a new one.’

‘Not surprised someone got a dead console if it was from the last batch,’ Schneider says. ‘There were a lot of defectives, maybe thirty percent of the final run.’

‘As a matter of personal curiosity, how many were in that final run?’

‘I’d have to look up the number to be sure, but I think around forty thousand units. Zappit sued the manufacturer, even though suing Chinese companies is pretty much a fool’s game, but by then they were desperate to stay afloat. I’m only giving you this information because the whole business is done and dusted.’

‘Understood.’

‘Well, the manufacturing company – Yicheng Electronics – came back with all guns blazing. Probably not because of the money at stake, but because they were worried about their reputation. Can’t blame them there, can you?’

‘No.’ Hodges can’t wait any longer for pain relief. He takes out his bottle of pills, shakes out two, then reluctantly puts one back. He puts it under his tongue to melt, hoping it will work faster that way. ‘I guess you can’t.’

‘Yicheng claimed the defective units were damaged in shipping, probably by water. They said if it had been a software problem, all the games would have been defective. Makes a degree of sense to me, but I’m no electronics genius. Anyway, Zappit went under, and Sunrise Solutions elected not to proceed with the suit. They had bigger problems by then. Creditors snapping at their heels. Investors jumping ship.’

‘What happened to that final shipment?’

‘Well, they were an asset, of course, but not a very valuable one, due to the defect issue. I held onto them for awhile, and we advertised in the trades to retail companies that specialize in discounted items. Chains like the Dollar Store and Economy Wizard. Are you familiar with those?’

‘Yeah.’ Hodges had bought a pair of factory-second loafers at the local Dollar Store. They cost more than a buck, but they weren’t bad. Wore well.

‘Of course we had to make it clear that as many as three in every ten Zappit Commanders – that’s what the last iteration was called – might be defective, which meant each one would have to be checked. That killed any chance for selling the whole shipment. Checking the units one by one would have been too labor intensive.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘So, as bankruptcy trustee, I decided to have them destroyed and claim a tax credit, which would have amounted to… well, quite a lot. Not by General Motors standards, but mid-six figures. Clear the books, you understand.’

‘Right, makes sense.’

‘But before I could do that, I got a call from a fellow at a company called Gamez Unlimited, right there in your city. That’s games with a Z on the end. Called himself the CEO. Probably CEO of a three-man operation working out of two rooms or a garage.’ Schneider chuckles a big business New York chuckle. ‘Since the computer revolution really got rolling, these outfits pop up like weeds, although I never heard of any of them actually giving product away. It smells a trifle scammy, don’t you think?’

‘Yeah,’ Hodges says. The dissolving pill is exceedingly bitter, but the relief is sweet. He thinks that’s the case with a great many things in life. A Reader’s Digest insight, but that doesn’t make it invalid. ‘It does, actually.’