Stephen King - End of Watch

‘You’re blaming me?’

‘You and your Brady Hartsfield fixation. You infected Pete with it.’

‘No. He wanted to chase the case. You were the one who wanted to hand it off, then duck down in the nearest foxhole. Gotta say I’m kind of on Pete’s side when it comes to that one.’

‘See? See? That’s exactly the attitude I’m talking about. Wake up, Hodges, this is the real world. I’m telling you for the last time to quit sticking your long beak into what isn’t your busi—’

‘And I’m telling you that if you want to have any fucking chance of promotion, you need to get your head out of your ass and listen to me.’

The words are out before he can think better of them. He’s afraid she’ll hang up, and if she does, where will he go then? But there’s only shocked silence.

‘Suicides. Have any been reported since you got back from Sugar Heights?’

‘I don’t kn—’

‘Well, look! Right now!’

He can hear the faint tapping of Izzy’s keyboard for five seconds or so. Then: ‘One just came over the wire. Kid in Lakewood shot himself. Did it in front of his father, who called it in. Hysterical, as you might expect. What’s that got to do with—’

‘Tell the cops on the scene to look for a Zappit game console. Just like the one Holly found at the Ellerton house.’

‘That again? You’re like a broken rec—’

‘They’ll find one. And you may have more Zappit suicides before the day’s over. Possibly a lot more.’

Website! Holly mouths. Tell her about the website!

‘Also, there’s a suicide website called zeetheend. Just went up today. It needs to come down.’

She sighs and speaks as though to a child. ‘There are all kinds of suicide websites. We got a memo about it from Juvenile Services just last year. They pop up on the Net like mushrooms, usually created by kids who wear black tee-shirts and spend all their free time holed up in their bedrooms. There’s a lot of bad poetry and stuff about how to do it painlessly. Along with the usual bitching about how their parents don’t understand them, of course.’

‘This one is different. It could start an avalanche. It’s loaded with subliminal messages. Have someone from computer forensics call Holly Gibney ASAP.’

‘That would be outside of protocol,’ she says coolly. ‘I’ll have a look, then go through channels.’

‘Have one of your rent-a-geeks call Holly in the next five minutes, or when the suicides start cascading – and I’m pretty sure they will – I’ll make it clear to anyone who’ll listen that I went to you and you tied me up in red tape. My listeners will include the daily paper and 8 Alive . The department does not have a lot of friends in either place, especially since those two unis shot an unarmed black kid to death on MLK last summer.’

Silence. Then, in a softer voice – a hurt voice, maybe – she says, ‘You’re supposed to be on our side, Billy. Why are you acting this way?’

Because Holly was right about you, he thinks.

Out loud he says, ‘Because there isn’t much time.’

In the living room, Freddi is rolling another joint. She looks at Jerome over the top of it as she licks the paper closed. ‘You’re a big one, aren’t you?’

Jerome makes no reply.

‘What do you go? Two-ten? Two-twenty?’

Jerome has nothing to say to this, either.

Undeterred, she sparks the joint, inhales, and holds it out to him. Jerome shakes his head.

‘Your loss, big boy. This is pretty good shit. Smells like dog pee, I know, but pretty good shit, just the same.’

Jerome says nothing.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘No. I was thinking about a sociology class I took when I was a high school senior. We did a four-week mod on suicide, and there was one statistic I never forgot. Every teen suicide that makes it onto social media spawns seven attempts, five that are show and two that are go. Maybe you should think about that instead of running the tough-girl act into the ground.’

Freddi’s lower lip trembles. ‘I didn’t know. Not really.’

‘Sure you did.’

She drops her eyes to the joint. It’s her turn to say nothing.

‘My sister heard a voice.’

At that, Freddi looks up. ‘What kind of voice?’

‘One from the Zappit. It told her all sorts of mean things. About how she was trying to live white. About how she was denying her race. About how she was a bad and worthless person.’

‘And that reminds you of someone?’

‘Yes.’ Jerome is thinking of the accusatory shrieks he and Holly heard coming from Olivia Trelawney’s computer long after that unfortunate lady was dead. Shrieks programmed by Brady Hartsfield, and designed to drive Trelawney toward suicide like a cow down a slaughterhouse chute. ‘Actually, it does.’

‘Brady was fascinated by suicide,’ Freddi says. ‘He was always reading about it on the Web. He meant to kill himself with the others at that concert, you know.’

Jerome does know. He was there. ‘Do you really think he got in touch with my sister telepathically? Using the Zappit as… what? A kind of conduit?’

‘If he could take over Babineau and the other guy – and he did, whether you believe it or not – then yeah, I think he could do that.’

‘And the others with updated Zappits? Those two hundred and forty-something others?’

Freddi only looks at him through her veil of smoke.

‘Even if we take down the website… what about them? What about when that voice starts telling them they’re dogshit on the world’s shoe, and the only answer is to take a long walk off a short dock?’

Before she can reply, Hodges does it for her. ‘We have to stop the voice. Which means stopping him . Come on, Jerome. We’re going back to the office.’

‘What about me?’ Freddi asks plaintively.

‘You’re coming. And Freddi?’

‘What?’

‘Pot’s good for pain, isn’t it?’

‘Opinions on that vary, as you might guess, the establishment in this fucked-up country being what it is, so all I can tell you is that for me, it makes that delicate time of the month a lot less delicate.’

‘Bring it along,’ Hodges says. ‘Also the rolling papers.’

They go back to Finders Keepers in Jerome’s Jeep. The back is full of Jerome’s junk, meaning Freddi has to sit on someone’s lap, and it’s not going to be Hodges’s. Not in his current condition. So he drives and Jerome gets Freddi.

‘Hey, this is sort of like getting a date with John Shaft,’ Freddi says with a smirk. ‘The big private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks.’

‘Don’t get used to it,’ Jerome says.

Holly’s cell rings. It’s a guy named Trevor Jeppson, from the police department’s Computer Forensics Squad. Holly is soon speaking in a jargon Hodges doesn’t understand – something about BOTS and the darknet. Whatever she’s getting back from the guy seems to please her, because when she breaks the connection, she’s smiling.

‘He’s never dossed a website before. He’s like a kid on Christmas morning.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘With the password and the IP address already in hand? Not long.’

Hodges parks in one of the thirty-minute spaces in front of the Turner Building. They won’t be here long – if he gets lucky, that is – and given his recent run of bad luck, he considers the universe owes him a good turn.

He goes into his office, closes the door, then hunts through his ratty old address book for Becky Helmington’s number. Holly has offered to program the address book into his phone, but Hodges has kept putting it off. He likes his old address book. Probably never get around to making the changeover now, he thinks. Trent’s Last Case, and all that.