Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Not just an artist but another cop, Holly thinks. First Bill, then Pete, then Ralph, and now him. She once more thinks of how some force, invisible but strong, seems to be pulling her into this, quietly insisting on parallels and continuations.

“My grandfather was a mill-owning capitalist, but since then we’ve all been blue. Dad was police, and I followed in his footsteps. As my son followed in mine. Brad’s father, I’m speaking of. He died in a crash while chasing a man, probably drunk, driving a stolen car. That man lived. May be living today, for all I know.”

“I’m very sorry,” Holly says.

Dan ignores her effort at condolence. “Even Brad’s mother was in the family trade. Well, in a way. She was a court stenographer. When she died, I took the boy in. I don’t care if he’s gay or not, nor does the police department. Although he doesn’t work for them full-time. With him it’s more of a hobby. Mostly he does… this.” He waves his deformed hand at the computer equipment.

“I design audio for games,” Brad says quietly. “The music, the effects, the mix.” He has returned with a whole roll of paper towels. Holly takes two and spreads them on her lap.

Dan goes on, seemingly lost in the past. “After my radio car days were over—I never rose to detective, never wanted to—I worked mostly in dispatch. Some cops don’t like riding a desk, but I never minded, because I had another job as well, one that kept me busy long after retirement. You could say that’s one side of the coin. What Brad does, when they call him in, is the other side. Between the two of us, Holly, we nailed this, pardon my French, this shitbag . He’s been in our sights for years.”

Holly has finally taken a bite of her turnover, but now opens her mouth, allowing an unsightly shower of crumbs to fall to the plate and paper towels in her lap. “Years?”

“Yes,” Dan says. “Brad’s known since he was in his twenties. He’s worked on this with me since 2005 or so. Isn’t that right, Brad?”

“A little later,” Brad says, after swallowing a bite of his own turnover.

Dan shrugs. It looks painful. “It all starts to melt together when you’re my age,” he says, then turns what’s almost a glare on Holly. His bushy eyebrows (no faking there) draw together. “But not with Ondowsky, as he’s now calling himself. On him I’m crystal clear. Right back to the beginning… or at least to where I came in. We’ve arranged quite a show for you, Holly. Brad, is that first video cued up?”

“All ready, Grampa.” Brad grabs his iPad and uses a remote to turn on the big TV. It’s currently showing nothing but a bluescreen and the word READY.

Holly hopes she is.

“I was thirty-one when I first saw him,” Dan says. “I know that because my wife and boy had a little birthday party for me just a week before. It seems like a long time ago and it seems like no time at all. I was still on radio cars then. Marcel Duchamp and I were parked just off Marginal Way, behind a snowbank and waiting for speeders, not very likely on a weekday morning. Eating crullers, drinking coffee. I remember Marcel was ribbing me about some paperback cover I’d done, asking how my wife liked me painting pictures of hot women in their undies. I think I was just telling him that his wife had posed for that one when the guy ran up to the car and knocked on the driver’s side window.” He pauses. Shakes his head. “You always remember where you were when you get bad news, don’t you?”

Holly thinks of the day she found out that Bill Hodges was gone. Jerome made that call, and she was pretty sure he’d been choking back tears.

“Marcel rolled his window down and asked the guy if he needed help. He said no. He had a transistor radio—that was what we had instead of iPods and cell phones back in those days—and asked if we’d heard about what just happened in New York.”

Dan pauses to straighten his cannula and adjust the flow of oxygen from the tank on the side of his chair.

“We hadn’t heard anything except for what was on the police radio, so Marcel turned that off and turned on the regular one. Found the news. This is what the jogger was talking about. Go ahead and run the first one, Brad.”

Dan’s grandson has his electronic tablet on his lap. He pokes at it and says to Holly, “I’m going to mirror this to the big screen. One second… okay, here we go.”

On the screen, to somber music, comes the title card of an old-time newsreel. WORST AIR CRASH IN HISTORY, it reads. What follows is crisp black-and-white footage of a city street that looks like a bomb hit it.

“The terrible aftermath of the worst air disaster in history!” the announcer intones. “In a Brooklyn street lies the shattered remnant of a jet transport that collided with another airliner in murky New York skies.” On the tail of the plane—or what remains of it—Holly can read UNIT. “The United Airlines aircraft plummeted into a brownstone residential section, killing six on the ground as well as eighty-four passengers and the crew.”

Now Holly sees firemen in old-fashioned helmets rushing through the wreckage. Some are carrying stretchers to which are strapped blanket-covered bodies.

“Normally,” the announcer continues, “this United flight and the Trans World Airlines flight it collided with would have been separated by miles, but the TWA plane—Flight 266, carrying forty-four passengers and crew—was far off course. It crashed on Staten Island.”

More covered bodies on more stretchers. A huge airplane wheel, the rubber shredded and still smoking. The camera pans the wreckage of 266, and Holly sees Christmas presents wrapped in gay paper scattered everywhere. The camera zooms in on one, to show a little Santa Claus attached to the bow. Santa is smoldering and blackened with soot.

“You can stop it there,” Dan says. Brad pokes his tablet and the big TV returns to bluescreen.

Dan turns to Holly.

“A hundred and thirty-four dead in all. And when did it happen? December sixteenth, 1960. Sixty years ago to this very day.”

Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same, and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard. The confluence of dates could be a coincidence, but can she say that about all that’s brought her here to this house in Portland, Maine? No. There’s a chain going all the way back to another monster named Brady Hartsfield. Brady, who allowed her to believe in the first place.

“There was one survivor,” Dan Bell says, startling her out of her reverie.

Holly points at the bluescreen, as if the newsreel were still playing there. “Someone survived that ?”

“Only for a day,” Brad says. “The newspapers called him the Boy Who Fell from the Sky.”

“But it was someone else who coined the phrase,” Dan says. “Back then in the New York metro area, there were three or four independent TV stations as well as the networks. One of them was WLPT. Long gone now, of course, but if something was filmed or taped, chances are good that you can find it on the Internet. Prepare yourself for a shock, young lady.” He nods at Brad, who begins poking at his tablet again.

Holly learned at her mother’s knee (and with her father’s tacit approval) that overt displays of emotion weren’t just embarrassing and unpleasant but shameful. Even after years of work with Allie Winters, she usually keeps her feelings bottled up and tightly capped, even among friends. These are strangers, but when the next clip starts on the big screen, she screams. She can’t help it.

“That’s him! That’s Ondowsky!”