Stephen King - End of Watch

‘I don’t have to believe it. He got Freddi to do those things.’

‘Not the website,’ a tired voice says.

They look around. Freddi is standing in the doorway.

‘If I’d set it up, I could shut it down. I just got a thumb drive with all the website goodies on it from Dr Z. Plugged it in and uploaded it. But once he was gone, I did a little investigating.’

‘Started with a DNS lookup, right?’ Holly says.

Freddi nods. ‘Girl’s got some skills.’

To Hodges, Holly says, ‘DNS stands for Domain Name Server. It hops from one server to the next, like using stepping-stones to cross a creek, asking “Do you know this site?” It keeps going and keeps asking until it finds the right server.’ Then, to Freddi: ‘But once you found the IP address, you still couldn’t get in?’

‘Nope.’

Holly says, ‘I’m sure Babineau knows a lot about human brains, but I doubt very much if he has the computer smarts to lock up a website like that.’

‘I was just hired help,’ Freddi says. ‘It was Z-Boy who brought me the program for retooling the Zappits, written down like a recipe for coffee cake, or something, and I’d bet you a thousand dollars that all he knows about computers is how to turn them on – assuming he can find the button in back – and navigate to his favorite porn sites.’

Hodges believes her about that much. He’s not sure the police will when they finally catch hold of this thing, but Hodges does. And… Don’t be like Miss Pretty Gray Eyes .

That stung. It stung like hell.

‘Also,’ Freddi says, ‘there was a double dot after each step in the program directions. Brady used to do that. I think he learned it when he was taking computer classes in high school.’

Holly grabs Hodges’s wrists. There’s blood on one of her hands, from patching Freddi’s wound. Along with her other bells and whistles, Holly is a clean-freak, and that she’s neglected to wash the blood off says all that needs to be said about how fiercely she’s working this.

‘Babineau was giving Hartsfield experimental drugs, which was unethical, but that’s all he was doing, because bringing Brady back was all he was interested in.’

‘You don’t know that for sure,’ Hodges says.

She’s still holding him, more with her eyes than her hands. Because she’s ordinarily averse to eye contact, it’s easy to forget how burning that gaze can be when she turns it up to eleven and pulls the knobs off.

‘There’s really just one question,’ Holly says. ‘Who’s the suicide prince in this story? Felix Babineau or Brady Hartsfield?’

Freddi speaks in a dreamy, sing-songy voice. ‘Sometimes Dr Z was just Dr Z and sometimes Z-Boy was just Z-Boy, only then it was like both of them were on drugs. When they were wide awake, though, it wasn’t them. When they were awake, it was Brady inside. Believe what you want, but it was him. It’s not just the double dots or the backslanted printing, it’s everything. I worked with that skeevy motherfucker. I know.’

She steps into the room.

‘And now, if none of you amateur detectives object, I’m going to roll myself another joint.’

On Babineau’s legs, Brady paces the big living room of Heads and Skins, thinking furiously. He wants to go back into the world of the Zappit, wants to pick a new target and repeat the delicious experience of pushing someone over the edge, but he has to be calm and serene to do that, and he’s far from either.

Hodges.

Hodges in Freddi’s apartment.

And will Freddi spill her guts? Friends and neighbors, does the sun rise in the east?

There are two questions, as Brady sees it. The first is whether or not Hodges can take down the website. The second is whether or not Hodges can find him out here in the williwags.

Brady thinks the answer to both questions is yes, but the more suicides he causes in the meantime, the more Hodges will suffer. When he looks at it in that light, he thinks that Hodges finding his way out here could be a good thing. It could be making lemonade from lemons. In any case, he has time. He’s many miles north of the city, and he’s got winter storm Eugenie on his side.

Brady goes back to the laptop and confirms that zeetheend is still up and running. He checks the visitors’ count. Over nine thousand now, and most of them (but by no means all) will be teenagers interested in suicide. That interest peaks in January and February, when dark comes early and it seems spring will never arrive. Plus, he’s got Zappit Zero, and with that he can work on plenty of kids personally. With Zappit Zero, getting to them is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

Pink fish, he thinks, and snickers.

Calmer now that he sees a way of dealing with the old Det-Ret should he try showing up like the cavalry in the last reel of a John Wayne western, Brady picks up the Zappit and turns it on. As he studies the fish, a fragment of some poem read in high school occurs to him, and he speaks it aloud.

‘Oh do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit.’

He closes his eyes. The zipping pink fish become zipping red dots, each one a bygone concertgoer who is at this very moment studying his or her gift Zappit and hoping to win prizes.

Brady picks one, brings it to a halt, and watches it bloom. Like a rose.

‘Sure, there’s a police computer forensics squad,’ Hodges says, in answer to Holly’s question. ‘If you want to call three part-time crunchers a squad, that is. And no, they won’t listen to me. I’m just a civilian these days.’ Nor is that the worst of it. He’s a civilian who used to be a cop, and when retired cops try meddling in police business, they are called uncles. It is not a term of respect.

‘Then call Pete and have him do it,’ Holly says. ‘Because that fracking suicide site has to come down.’

The two of them are back in Freddi Linklatter’s version of Mission Control. Jerome is in the living room with Freddi. Hodges doesn’t think she’s apt to flee – Freddi’s terrified of the probably fictional men posted outside her building – but stoner behavior is difficult to predict. Other than how they usually want to get more stoned, that is.

‘Call Pete and tell him to have one of the computer geeks call me. Any cruncher with half a brain will be able to doss the site and knock it down that way.’

‘Doss it?’

‘Big D, little o, big S. Stands for Denial of Services. The guy needs to connect to a BOT network and…’ She sees Hodges’s mystified expression. ‘Never mind. The idea is to flood the suicide site with requests for services – thousands, millions. Choke the fracking thing and crash the server.’

‘You can do that?’

‘I can’t, and Freddi can’t, but a police department geek freak will be able to tap enough computing power. If he can’t do it from the police computers, he’ll get Homeland Security to do it. Because this is a security issue, right? Lives are at stake.’

They are, and Hodges makes the call, but Pete’s cell goes directly to voicemail. Next he tries his old pal Cassie Sheen, but the desk officer who takes his call tells him Cassie’s mother had some sort of diabetic crisis and Cassie took her to the doctor.

Out of other options, he calls Isabelle.

‘Izzy, it’s Bill Hodges. I tried to get Pete, but—’

‘Pete’s gone. Done. Kaput.’

For one awful moment Hodges thinks she means he’s dead.

‘Left a memo on my desk. It said he was going to go home, turn off his cell, pull the plug on the landline, and sleep for the next twenty-four hours. He further shared that today was his last day as working police. He can do it, too, doesn’t even have to touch his vacation time, of which he has piles. He’s got enough personal days to see him through to retirement. And I think you better scratch that retirement party off your calendar. You and your weirdo partner can hit a movie that night, instead.’