Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

At quarter to eight she’s in the bathroom with her shirt off, washing her armpits (she doesn’t use deodorant; aluminum chlorohydrate is supposed to be safe but she has her doubts), when her phone rings. She takes two deep breaths, sends up the briefest of prayers— God help me not to frack up —and answers.

Her phone’s screen says UNKNOWN. Holly isn’t surprised. He’s calling on his personal phone or maybe a burner.

“This is Chet Ondowsky, to whom am I speaking?” The voice is smooth, friendly, and controlled. A veteran TV reporter’s voice.

“My name is Holly. That’s all you need to know for now.” She thinks she sounds okay so far. She punches her Fitbit. Pulse is 98.

“What’s this about, Holly?” Interested. Inviting confidences. This isn’t the man who reported on the bloody horror in Pineborough Township; this is Chet on Guard, wanting to know how the guy who paved your driveway shafted you on the price or how much the power company stiffed you for kilowatts you didn’t burn.

“I think you know,” she says, “but let’s make sure. I’m going to send you some pictures. Give me your email address.”

“If you check the Chet on Guard webpage, Holly, you’ll find—”

“Your personal email address. Because you don’t want anyone seeing this. You really don’t.”

There’s a pause, long enough for Holly to think she might have lost him, but then he gives her the address. She jots it on a sheet of Embassy Suites notepaper.

“I’m sending it right away,” she says. “Pay special attention to the spectrographic analysis and the picture of Philip Hannigan. Call me back in fifteen minutes.”

“Holly, this is very unusu—”

“ You’re very unusual, Mr. Ondowsky. Aren’t you? Call me back in fifteen minutes, or I’ll take what I know public. Your time starts as soon as my email goes through.”

“Holly—”

She ends the call, drops the phone on the rug, and bends over, head between her knees and face in her hands. Don’t faint, she tells herself. Don’t you fracking do it.

When she feels okay again—as okay as she can be under the circumstances, which are very stressful—she opens her laptop and sends off the material Brad Bell gave her. She doesn’t bother adding a message. The pictures are the message.

Then she waits.

Eleven minutes later her phone lights up. She grabs it at once but lets it ring four times before taking the call.

He doesn’t bother with hello. “These prove nothing.” It’s still the perfectly modulated tone of the veteran TV personality, but all the warmth has gone out of it. “You know that, right?”

Holly says, “Wait until people compare the picture of you as Philip Hannigan with the one of you standing outside the school with that package in your hands. The false mustache will fool nobody. Wait until they compare the spectrogram of Philip Hannigan’s voice to the spectrogram of Chet Ondowsky’s voice.”

“Who is this they you’re referring to, Holly? The police? They’d laugh you right out of the station.”

“Oh no, not the police,” Holly said. “I can do better than that. If TMZ isn’t interested, Gossip Glutton will be. Or DeepDive. And the Drudge Report, they always like the strange stuff. On TV there’s Inside Edition and Celeb . But do you know where I’d go first?”

Silence from the other end. But she can hear him breathing.

It breathing.

“ Inside View ,” she says. “They ran with the Night Flier story for over a year, Slender Man for two. They wrung those stories dry. They’ve still got a circulation of over three million, and they’ll eat this up.”

“Nobody believes that shit.”

This isn’t true, and they both know it.

“They’ll believe this. I’ve got a lot of information, Mr. Ondowsky, what I believe you reporters call deep background, and when it comes out—if it comes out—people will start digging into your past. All your pasts. Your cover won’t just come apart, it will explode.” Like the bomb you planted to kill those children, she thinks.

Nothing.

Holly chews on her knuckles and waits him out. It’s very hard, but she does it.

At last he asks, “Where did you get those pictures? Who gave them to you?”

Holly knew this was coming, and knows she has to give him something. “A man who’s been onto you for a long time. You don’t know him and you’ll never find him, but you also don’t have to worry about him. He’s very old. What you have to worry about is me.”

There’s another long pause. Now one of Holly’s knuckles is bleeding. At last the question she’s been waiting for arrives: “What do you want?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. You’re going to meet me at noon.”

“I have an assignment—”

“Cancel it,” commands the woman who once scuttled through life with her head down and her shoulders hunched. “This is your assignment now, and I don’t think you want to blow it.”

“Where?”

Holly is ready for this. She’s done her research. “The food court of the Monroeville Mall. That’s less than fifteen miles from your TV station, so it should be convenient for you and safe for me. Go to Sbarro, look around, you’ll see me. I’ll be wearing a brown leather jacket open over a pink sweater with a turtleneck collar. I’ll have a slice of pizza and coffee in a Starbucks cup. If you’re not there by five past noon, I’ll leave and start shopping my merchandise.”

“You’re a kook and no one will believe you.” He doesn’t sound confident, but he doesn’t sound afraid, either. He sounds angry. That’s all right, Holly thinks, I can work with that.

“Who are you trying to convince, Mr. Ondowsky? Me, or yourself?”

“You’re a piece of work, lady. You know that?”

“I’ll have a friend watching,” she says. Not true, but Ondowsky won’t know that. “He doesn’t know what it’s about, don’t worry about that, but he’ll be keeping an eye on me.” She pauses. “And on you.”

“What do you want?” he asks again.

“Tomorrow,” Holly says, and ends the call.

Later, after she’s made arrangements to fly to Pittsburgh the following morning, she lies in bed, hoping for sleep but not expecting much. She wonders—as she did when she conceived this plan—if she really needs to meet him face to face. She thinks she does. She thinks she’s convinced him that she’s got the goods on him (as Bill would say). Now she has to look him in the eye and give him a way out. Has to convince him that she’s willing to make a deal. And what kind of deal? Her first wild idea was to tell him she wants to be like him, that she wants to live… maybe not forever, that seems too extreme, but for hundreds of years. Would he believe that, or would he think she was conning him? Too risky.

Money, then. Has to be.

That he will believe, because he has been watching the human parade for a long time. And looking down on it. Ondowsky believes that for lesser beings, for the herd he sometimes thins, it always comes down to money.

Sometime after midnight, Holly finally drops off. She dreams of a cave in Texas. She dreams of a thing that looked like a man until she hit it with a sock loaded with ball bearings and the head collapsed like the false front it was.

She cries in her sleep.

As an honor roll senior at Houghton High, Barbara Robinson is pretty much free to go as she lists during her free period, which runs from 9:00 to 9:50. When the bell rings releasing her from her Early English Writers class, she wanders down to the art room, which is deserted at this hour. She takes her phone from her hip pocket and calls Jerome. From the sound of his voice, she’s pretty sure she woke him up. Oh for the life of a writer, she thinks.