Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

This time it brought the carnage, and if it gets away with it once, it will do it again. Next time the death toll may be much higher, and Holly will not allow that.

She opens her laptop on the room’s chintzy excuse for a desk and finds the email from Brad Bell she was expecting.

Attached is what you requested. Please use the materials wisely, and please keep us out of it. We have done what we can.

Well, Holly thinks, not quite. She downloads the attachment and then calls Dan Bell’s phone. She expects Brad to answer again, but it’s the old man, sounding relatively rejuvenated. There’s nothing like a nap to do that; Holly takes one whenever she can, but these days the opportunity doesn’t come around as often as she’d like.

“Dan, it’s Holly. Can I ask you one more question?”

“Shoot.”

“How does he move from job to job without being discovered? This is the age of social media. I don’t understand how that works.”

For a few seconds there’s only the sound of his heavy, oxygen-assisted breathing. Then he says, “We’ve talked about that, Brad and I. We have some ideas. He… it … wait, Brad wants the damn phone.”

There’s a smatter of talk she can’t pick up, but Holly gets the gist: the old guy doesn’t like being co-opted. Then Brad is on. “You want to know how he keeps getting jobs on TV?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a good question. Really good. We can’t be sure, but we think he jimmies his way in.”

“Jimmies?”

“It’s a broadcast term. Jimmying is how radio personalities and TV reporters move up in big markets. In those places there’s always at least one local TV station. Small. Unaffiliated. Pays peanuts. They mostly do community affairs. Everything from opening a new bridge to charity drives to city council meetings. This guy gets on the air there, does a few months, then applies at one of the big stations, using audition tapes from the little local station. Anybody seeing those tapes would get right away that he’s good at the job. A pro.” Brad gives a short laugh. “He’d have to be, wouldn’t he? He’s been doing it for at least sixty damn years. Practice makes perf—”

The old man interrupts with something. Brad says he’ll tell her, but that isn’t good enough for Holly. She’s suddenly impatient with both of them. It’s been a long day.

“Brad, put the phone on speaker.”

“Huh? Oh, okay, good idea.”

“ I think he was doing it on radio, too! ” Dan bawls. It’s as if he thinks they’re communicating with tin cans on a waxed string. Holly winces and holds the phone away from her ear.

“Grampa, you don’t have to talk so loud.”

Dan lowers his voice, but only slightly. “On the radio, Holly! Even before there was TV! And before there was radio, he might have been covering bloodshed for the newspapers! God knows how long he— it —has been alive.”

“Also,” Brad says, “he must have a rolling file of references. Probably the aspect you call George writes some for Ondowsky, and the one you call Ondowsky has written some for George. You understand?”

Holly does… sort of. It makes her think of a joke Bill told her once, about brokers marooned on a desert island getting rich trading each other’s clothes.

“Let me talk, goddammit,” Dan says. “I understand as well as you do, Bradley. I’m not stupid.”

Brad sighs. Living with Dan Bell can’t be easy, Holly thinks. On the other hand, living with Brad Bell is probably no bed of roses, either.

“Holly, it works because TV talent is a seller’s market at big local affiliates. People move up, some quit the business… and he’s good at the job.”

“ It ,” Brad says. “ It’s good at the job.”

She hears coughing and Brad tells his grandfather to take one of his pills.

“Jesus, will you stop being such an old woman?”

Felix and Oscar, yelling at each other across the generation gap, Holly thinks. It might make a good sitcom, but when it comes to getting information it’s extremely poopy.

“Dan? Brad? Will you stop…” Bickering is the word that comes to mind, but Holly can’t quite bring herself to say it, even though she’s wound tight. “Stop your discussion for a minute?”

They are blessedly quiet.

“I understand what you’re saying, and it makes sense as far as it goes, but what about his work history? Where he went to broadcasting school? Don’t they wonder? Ask questions?”

Dan says gruffly, “He probably tells them he’s been out of the business for awhile and decided to get back in.”

“But we don’t really know,” Brad says. He sounds pissed, either because he can’t answer Holly’s question to her satisfaction (or to his own), or because he’s smarting over being called an old woman. “Listen, there was a kid in Colorado who posed as a doctor for almost four years. Prescribed drugs, even did operations. Maybe you read about it. He was seventeen passing for twenty-five, and didn’t have a college degree in anything , let alone medicine. If he could slip through the cracks, this outsider could.”

“Are you done?” Dan asks.

“Yes, Grampa.” And sighs.

“Good. Because I have a question. Are you going to meet him, Holly?”

“Yes.” Along with the pictures, Brad has included a spectrograph screen grab of Freeman, Ondowsky, and Philip Hannigan—aka George the Bomber. To Holly’s eye, all three look identical.

“When?”

“I hope tomorrow, and I’d like you both to keep completely quiet about this, please. Will you do that?”

“We will,” Brad says. “Of course we will. Won’t we, Grampa?”

“As long as you tell us what happens,” Dan says. “If you can, that is. I used to be a cop, Holly, and Brad works with the cops. We probably don’t have to tell you that meeting him could be dangerous. Will be dangerous.”

“I know,” Holly says in a small voice. “I work with an ex-cop myself.” And worked with an even better one before him, she thinks.

“Will you be careful?”

“I’ll try,” Holly says, but she knows there always comes a point when you have to stop being careful. Jerome talked about a bird that carried evil like a virus. All frowsy and frosty gray, he said. If you wanted to catch it and wring its fracking neck, there came a time when you had to stop being careful. She doesn’t think that will happen tomorrow, but it will soon.

Soon.

Jerome has turned the space over the Robinsons’ garage into a writing room and is using it to work on his book about great-great-Gramps Alton, also known as the Black Owl. He’s beavering away on it this evening when Barbara lets herself in and asks Jerome if she’s interrupting. Jerome tells her he can use a break. They get Cokes from the small refrigerator nestled beneath one sloping eave.

“Where is she?” Barbara asks.

Jerome sighs. “ No how’s your book going, J? No did you find that chocolate Lab, J ? Which I did, by the way. Safe and sound.”

“Good for you. And how’s your book going, J?”

“Up to page 93,” he says, and sweeps a hand through the air. “I’m sailing .”

“That’s good, too. Now where is she?”

Jerome takes his phone out of his pocket and touches an app called WebWatcher. “See for yourself.”

Barbara studies the screen. “The airport in Portland? Portland, Maine ? What’s she doing there?”

“Why don’t you call her and ask?” Jerome says. “Just say ‘Jerome snuck a tracker on your phone, Hollyberry, because we’re worried about you, so what are you up to? Spill it, girl.’ Think she’d like that?”