Stephen King - End of Watch

NO MORE DOUBT

NO MORE STRUGGLE

PEACE

PEACE

PEACE

Then a stuttering series of blue flashes. Embedded in them are words. Or call them what they really are, Hodges thinks. Drops of poison.

‘Turn it off, Holly.’ Hodges doesn’t like the way she’s looking at the screen – that wide-eyed stare, so much like Jerome’s a few minutes ago.

She moves too slowly to suit Jerome. He reaches over her shoulder and crashes her computer.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she says reproachfully. ‘I could lose data.’

‘That’s exactly what the fucking website is for,’ Jerome says. ‘To make you lose data. To make you lose your shit . I could read the last one, Bill. In the blue flash. It said do it now .’

Holly nods. ‘There was another one that said tell your friends .’

‘Does the Zappit direct them to that… that thing?’ Hodges asks.

‘It doesn’t have to,’ Jerome says. ‘Because the ones who find it – and plenty will, including kids who never got a free Zappit – will spread the word on Facebook and all the rest.’

‘He wanted a suicide epidemic,’ Holly says. ‘He set it in motion somehow, then killed himself.’

‘Probably to get there ahead of them,’ Jerome says. ‘So he can meet them at the door.’

Hodges says, ‘Am I supposed to believe a rock song and a picture of a funeral is going to get kids to kill themselves? The Zappits, I can accept that. I’ve seen how they work. But this?’

Holly and Jerome exchange a glance, one that Hodges can read easily: How do we explain this to him? How do you explain a robin to someone who’s never seen a bird? The glance alone is almost enough to convince him.

‘Teenagers are vulnerable to stuff like this,’ Holly says. ‘Not all of them, no, but plenty. I would have been when I was seventeen.’

‘And it’s catching,’ Jerome says. ‘Once it starts… if it starts…’ He finishes with a shrug.

‘We need to find that repeater gadget and turn it off,’ Hodges says. ‘Limit the damage.’

‘Maybe it’s at Babineau’s house,’ Holly says. ‘Call Pete. Find out if there’s any computer stuff there. If there is, make him pull all the plugs.’

‘If he’s with Izzy, he’ll let it go to voicemail,’ Hodges says, but he makes the call and Pete picks up on the first ring. He tells Hodges that Izzy has gone back to the station with the SKIDs to await the first forensics reports. Library Al Brooks is already gone, taken into custody by the first responding cops, who will get partial credit for the bust.

Pete sounds tired.

‘We had a blow-up. Me and Izzy. Big one. I tried to tell her what you told me when we started working together – how the case is the boss, and you go where it leads you. No ducking, no handing it off, just pick it up and follow the red thread all the way home. She stood there listening with her arms folded, nodding her head every now and then. I actually thought I was getting through to her. Then you know what she asked me? If I knew the last time there was a woman in the top echelon of the city police. I said I didn’t, and she said that was because the answer was never. She said the first one was going to be her. Man, I thought I knew her.’ Pete utters what may be the most humorless laugh Hodges has ever heard. ‘I thought she was police .’

Hodges will commiserate later, if he gets a chance. Right now there’s no time. He asks about the computer gear.

‘We found nothing except an iPad with a dead battery,’ Pete says. ‘Everly, the housekeeper, says he had a laptop in his study, almost brand new, but it’s gone.’

‘Like Babineau,’ Hodges says. ‘Maybe it’s with him.’

‘Maybe. Remember, if I can help, Kermit—’

‘I’ll call, believe me.’

Right now he’ll take all the help he can get.

The result with the girl named Ellen is infuriating – like the Robinson bitch all over again – but at last Brady calms down. It worked, that’s what he needs to focus on. The shortness of the drop combined with the snowbank was just bad luck. There will be plenty of others. He has a lot of work ahead of him, a lot of matches to light, but once the fire is burning, he can sit back and watch.

It will burn until it burns itself out.

He starts Z-Boy’s car and pulls out of the rest area. As he merges with the scant traffic headed north on 1-47, the first flakes spin out of the white sky and hit the Malibu’s windshield. Brady drives faster. Z-Boy’s piece of crap isn’t equipped for a snowstorm, and once he leaves the turnpike, the roads will grow progressively worse. He needs to beat the weather.

Oh, I’ll beat it, all right, Brady thinks, and grins as a wonderful idea hits him. Maybe Ellen is paralyzed from the neck down, a head on a stick, like the Stover bitch. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, a pleasant daydream with which to while away the miles.

He turns on the radio, finds some Judas Priest, and lets it blast. Like Hodges, he enjoys the hard stuff.

Brady won many victories in Room 217, but necessarily had to keep them to himself. Coming back from the living death of coma; discovering that he could – because of the drug Babineau had administered, or because of some fundamental alteration in his brainwaves, or perhaps due to a combination of the two – move small objects simply by thinking about them; inhabiting Library Al’s brain and creating inside him a secondary personality, Z-Boy. And mustn’t forget getting back at the fat cop who hit him in the balls when he couldn’t defend himself. Yet the best, the absolute best, was nudging Sadie MacDonald into committing suicide. That was power.

He wanted to do it again.

The question that desire raised was a simple one: who next? It would be easy to make Al Brooks jump from a bridge overpass or swallow drain cleaner, but Z-Boy would go with him, and without Z-Boy, Brady would be stuck in Room 217, which was really nothing more than a prison cell with a parking garage view. No, he needed Brooks just where he was. And as he was.

More important was the question of what to do about the bastard responsible for putting him here. Ursula Haber, the Nazi who ran the PT department, said rehab patients needed GTG: goals to grow. Well, he was growing, all right, and revenge against Hodges was a worthy goal, but how to get it? Inducing Hodges to commit suicide wasn’t the answer, even if there was a way to try it. He’d played the suicide game already with Hodges. And lost.

When Freddi Linklatter appeared with the picture of him and his mother, Brady was still over a year and a half from realizing how he could finish his business with Hodges, but seeing Freddi gave him a badly needed jump-start. He would need to be careful, though. Very careful.

A step at a time, he told himself as he lay awake in the small hours of the night. Just one step at a time. I have great obstacles, but I also have extraordinary weapons.

Step one was having Al Brooks remove the remaining Zappits from the hospital library. He took them to his brother’s house, where he lived in an apartment over the garage. That was easy, because no one wanted them, anyway. Brady thought of them as ammo. Eventually he would find a gun that could use it.

Brooks took the Zappits on his own, although operating under commands – thoughtfish – that Brady implanted in the shallow but useful Z-Boy persona. He had become wary of entering Brooks completely and taking him over, because it burned through the old fellow’s brains too fast. He had to ration those times of total immersion, and use them wisely. It was a shame, he enjoyed his vacations outside the hospital, but people were starting to notice that Library Al had become a trifle foggy upstairs. If he became too foggy, he would be forced out of his volunteer job. Worse, Hodges might notice. That would not be good. Let the old Det-Ret vacuum up all the rumors about telekinesis he wanted, Brady was fine with that, but he didn’t want Hodges to catch even a whiff of what was really going on.