Stephen King - End of Watch

Becky reminds him she doesn’t work in the Bucket any longer. ‘Maybe you forgot that?’

‘I didn’t forget. You know about Babineau?’

Her voice drops. ‘God, yes. I heard that Al Brooks – Library Al – killed Babineau’s wife and might have killed him. I can hardly believe it.’

I could tell you lots of stuff you’d hardly believe, Hodges thinks.

‘Don’t count Babineau out yet, Becky. I think he might be on the run. He was giving Brady Hartsfield experimental drugs of some kind, and they may have played a part in Hartsfield’s death.’

‘Jesus, for real?’

‘For real. But he can’t be too far, not with this storm coming in. Can you think of anyplace he might have gone? Does Babineau own a summer cottage, anything like that?’

She doesn’t even need to think about it. ‘Not a cottage, a hunting camp. It isn’t just him, though. Four or maybe five docs co-own the place.’ Her voice drops to that confidential pitch again. ‘I hear they do more than hunt out there. If you know what I mean.’

‘Where is out there?’

‘Lake Charles. The camp has some cutesy-horrible name. I can’t remember it offhand, but I bet Violet Tranh would know. She spent a weekend there once. Said it was the drunkest forty-eight hours of her life, and she came back with chlamydia.’

‘Will you call her?’

‘Sure. But if he’s on the run, he might be on a plane, you know. Maybe to California or even overseas. The flights were still taking off and landing this morning.’

‘I don’t think he would have dared to try the airport with the police looking for him. Thanks, Becky. Call me back.’

He goes to the safe and punches in the combination. The sock filled with ball bearings – his Happy Slapper – is back home, but both of his handguns are here. One is the Glock.40 he carried on the job. The other is a .38, the Victory model. It was his father’s. He takes a canvas sack from the top shelf of the safe, puts the guns and four boxes of ammunition into it, then gives the drawstring a hard yank.

No heart attack to stop me this time, Brady, he thinks. This time it’s just cancer, and I can live with that.

The idea surprises him into laughter. It hurts.

From the other room comes the sound of three people applauding. Hodges is pretty sure he knows what it means, and he’s not wrong. The message on Holly’s computer reads ZEETHEEND IS EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. Below is this: CALL 1-800-273-TALK.

‘It was that guy Jeppson’s idea,’ Holly says, not looking up from what she’s doing. ‘It’s the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.’

‘Good one,’ Hodges says. ‘And those are good, too. You’re a woman with hidden talents.’ In front of Holly is a line of joints. The one she adds makes an even dozen.

‘She’s fast,’ Freddi says admiringly. ‘And look how neat they are. Like they came out of a machine.’

Holly gives Hodges a defiant look. ‘My therapist says an occasional marijuana cigarette is perfectly okay. As long as I don’t go overboard, that is. The way some people do.’ Her eyes glide to Freddi, then back to Hodges. ‘Besides, these aren’t for me. They’re for you, Bill. If you need them.’

Hodges thanks her, and has a moment to reflect on how far the two of them have come, and how pleasant, by and large, the trip has been. But too short. Far too short. Then his phone rings. It’s Becky.

‘The name of the place is Heads and Skins. I told you it was cutesy-horrible. Vi doesn’t remember how to get there – I’m guessing she had more than a few shots on the ride, just to get her motor running – but she does remember they went north on the turnpike for quite a ways, and stopped for gas at a place called Thurston’s Garage after they got off. Does that help?’

‘Yeah, a ton. Thanks, Becky.’ He ends the call. ‘Holly, I need you to find Thurston’s Garage, north of the city. Then I want you to call Hertz at the airport and rent the biggest four-wheel drive they’ve got left. We’re going on a road trip.’

‘My Jeep—’ Jerome begins.

‘Is small, light, and old,’ Hodges says… although these are not the only reasons he wants a different vehicle built to go in the snow. ‘It’ll be fine to get us out to the airport, though.’

‘What about me?’ Freddi asks.

‘WITSEC,’ Hodges says, ‘as promised. It’ll be like a dream come true.’

Jane Ellsbury was a perfectly normal baby – at six pounds, nine ounces, a little underweight, in fact – but by the time she was seven, she weighed ninety pounds and was familiar with the chant that sometimes haunts her dreams to this day: Fatty fatty, two by four, can’t get through the bathroom door, so she does it on the floor . In June of 2010, when her mother took her to the ’Round Here concert as a fifteenth birthday present, she weighed two hundred and ten. She could still get through the bathroom door with no problem, but it had become difficult for her to tie her shoes. Now she’s twenty, her weight has risen to three hundred and twenty, and when the voice begins to speak to her from the free Zappit she got in the mail, everything it says makes perfect sense to her. The voice is low, calm, and reasonable. It tells her that nobody likes her and everybody laughs at her. It points out that she can’t stop eating – even now, with tears running down her face, she’s snarfing her way through a bag of chocolate pinwheel cookies, the kind with lots of gooey marshmallow inside. Like a more kindly version of the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who pointed out certain home truths to Ebenezer Scrooge, it sketches in a future which boils down to fat, fatter, fattest. The laughter along Carbine Street in Hillbilly Heaven, where she and her parents live in a walk-up apartment. The looks of disgust. The jibes, like Here comes the Goodyear Blimp and Look out, don’t let her fall on you! The voice explains, logically and reasonably, that she will never have a date, will never be hired for a good job now that political correctness has rendered the circus fat lady extinct, that by the age of forty she will have to sleep sitting up because her enormous breasts will make it impossible for her lungs to do their work, and before she dies of a heart attack at fifty, she’ll be using a DustBuster to get the crumbs out of the deepest creases in her rolls of fat. When she tries to suggest to the voice that she could lose some weight – go to one of those clinics, maybe – it doesn’t laugh. It only asks her, softly and sympathetically, where the money will come from, when the combined incomes of her mother and father are barely enough to satisfy an appetite that is basically insatiable. When the voice suggests they’d be better off without her, she can only agree.

Jane – known to the denizens of Carbine Street as Fat Jane – lumbers into the bathroom and takes the bottle of OxyContin pills her father has for his bad back. She counts them. There are thirty, which should be more than enough. She takes them five at a time, with milk, eating a chocolate marshmallow cookie after each swallow. She begins to float away. I’m going on a diet, she thinks. I’m going on a long, long diet.

That’s right, the voice from the Zappit tells her. And you’ll never cheat on this one, Jane – will you?

She takes the last five Oxys. She tries to pick up the Zappit, but her fingers will no longer close on the slim console. And what does it matter? She could never catch the speedy pink fish in this condition, anyway. Better to look out the window, where the snow is burying the world in clean linen.

No more fatty-fatty-two-by-four, she thinks, and when she slips into unconsciousness, she goes with relief.

Before going to Hertz, Hodges swings Jerome’s Jeep into the turnaround in front of the Airport Hilton.