End of Watch

Cora Babineau wipes the back of her neck with a monogrammed towel and frowns at the monitor in the basement exercise room. She has done only four of her six miles on the treadmill, she hates to be interrupted, and the weirdo is back.

Cling-clong goes the doorbell and she listens for her husband’s footsteps above her, but there’s nothing. On the monitor, the old man in the ratty parka – he looks like one of those bums you see standing at intersections, holding up signs that say things like HUNGRY, NO JOB, ARMY VETERAN, PLEASE HELP – just stands there.

‘Dammit,’ she mutters, and pauses the treadmill. She climbs the stairs, opens the door to the back hallway, and shouts, ‘Felix! It’s your weirdo friend! That Al!’

No response. He’s in his study again, possibly looking at the game-thing he seems to have fallen in love with. The first few times she mentioned Felix’s strange new obsession to her friends at the country club, it was a joke. It doesn’t seem so funny now. He’s sixty-three, too old for kids’ computer games and too young to have gotten so forgetful, and she’s begun to wonder if he might not be suffering early-onset Alzheimer’s. It has also crossed her mind that Felix’s weirdo friend is some kind of drug pusher, but isn’t the guy awfully old for that? And if her husband wants drugs, he can certainly supply himself; according to him, half the doctors at Kiner are high at least half the time.

Cling-clong, goes the doorbell.

‘Jesus on a pony,’ she says, and goes to the door herself, growing more irritated with each long stride. She’s a tall, gaunt woman whose female shape has been exercised nearly to oblivion. Her golf tan remains even in the depths of winter, only turning a pale shade of yellow that makes her look as if she’s suffering chronic liver disease.

She opens the door. The January night rushes in, chilling her sweaty face and arms. ‘I think I would like to know who you are,’ she says, ‘and what you and my husband are up to together. Would that be too much to ask?’

‘Not at all, Mrs Babineau,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I’m Al. Sometimes I’m Z-Boy. Tonight I’m Brady, and boy oh boy, it’s nice to be out, even on such a cold night.’

She looks down at his hand. ‘What’s in that jar?’

‘The end of all your troubles,’ says the man in the mended parka, and there’s a muffled bang. The bottom of the soda bottle blows out in shards, along with scorched threads from the steel wool. They float in the air like milkweed fluff.

Cora feels something hit her just below her shrunken left breast and thinks, This weirdo son of a bitch just punched me. She tries to take a breath and at first can’t. Her chest feels strangely dead; warmth is pooling above the elastic top of her tracksuit pants. She looks down, still trying to take that all-important breath, and sees a stain spreading on the blue nylon.

She raises her eyes to stare at the geezer in the doorway. He’s holding out the remains of the bottle as if it’s a present, a little gift to make up for showing up unannounced at eight in the evening. What’s left of the steel wool pokes out of the bottom like a charred boutonniere. She finally manages a breath, but it’s mostly liquid. She coughs, and sprays blood.

The man in the parka steps into her house and sweeps the door shut behind him. He drops the bottle. Then he pushes her. She staggers back, knocking a decorative vase from the end table by the coathooks, and goes down. The vase shatters on the hardwood floor like a bomb. She drags in another of those liquid breaths – I’m drowning, she thinks, drowning right here in my front hall – and coughs out another spray of red.

‘Cora?’ Babineau calls from somewhere deep in the house. He sounds as if he’s just woken up. ‘Cora, are you okay?’

Brady raises Library Al’s foot and carefully brings Library Al’s heavy black workshoe down on the straining tendons of Cora Babineau’s scrawny throat. More blood bursts from her mouth; her sun-cured cheeks are now stippled with it. He steps down hard. There’s a crackling sound as stuff breaks inside her. Her eyes bulge… bulge… and then they glaze over.

‘You were a tough one,’ Brady remarks, almost affectionately.

A door opens. Slippered feet come running, and then Babineau is there. He’s wearing a dressing gown over ridiculous Hugh Hefner-style silk pajamas. His silver hair, usually his pride, is in wild disarray. The stubble on his cheeks has become an incipient beard. In his hand is a green Zappit console from which the little Fishin’ Hole tune tinkles: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea. He stares at his wife lying on the hall floor.

‘No more workouts for her,’ Brady says in that same affectionate tone.

‘What did you DO?’ Babineau screams, as if it isn’t obvious. He runs to Cora and tries to fall to his knees beside her, but Brady hooks him under the armpit and hauls him back up. Library Al is by no means Charles Atlas, but he is ever so much stronger than the wasted body in Room 217.

‘No time for that,’ Brady says. ‘The Robinson girl is alive, which necessitates a change of plan.’

Babineau stares at him, trying to gather his thoughts, but they elude him. His mind, once so sharp, has been blunted. And it’s this man’s fault.

‘Look at the fish,’ Brady says. ‘You look at yours and I’ll look at mine. We’ll both feel better.’

‘No,’ Babineau says. He wants to look at the fish, he always wants to look at them now, but he’s afraid to. Brady wants to pour his mind into Babineau’s head like some strange water, and each time that happens, less of his essential self remains afterward.

‘Yes,’ Brady says. ‘Tonight you need to be Dr Z.’

‘I refuse!’

‘You’re in no position to refuse. This is coming unraveled. Soon the police will be at your door. Or Hodges, and that would be even worse. He won’t read you your rights, he’ll just hit you with that homemade sap of his. Because he’s a mean motherfucker. And because you were right. He knows.’

‘I won’t… I can’t…’ Babineau looks down at his wife. Ah God, her eyes. Her bulging eyes. ‘The police would never believe… I’m a respected doctor! We’ve been married for thirty-five years!’

‘Hodges will. And when Hodges gets the bit in his teeth, he turns into Wyatt fucking Earp. He’ll show the Robinson girl your picture. She’ll look at it and say oh wow, yes, that’s the man who gave me the Zappit at the mall. And if you gave her a Zappit, you probably gave one to Janice Ellerton. Oops! And there’s Scapelli.’

Babineau stares, trying to comprehend this disaster.

‘Then there’s the drugs you fed me. Hodges may know about them already, because he’s a fast man with a bribe and most of the nurses in the Bucket know. It’s an open secret, because you never tried to hide it.’ Brady gives Library Al’s head a sad shake. ‘Your arrogance.’

‘Vitamins!’ It’s all Babineau can manage.

‘Even the cops won’t believe that if they subpoena your files and search your computers.’ Brady glances down at Cora Babineau’s sprawled body. ‘And there’s your wife, of course. How are you going to explain her?’

‘I wish you’d died before they brought you in,’ Babineau says. His voice is rising, becoming a whine. ‘Or on the operating table. You’re a Frankenstein!’

‘Don’t confuse the monster with the creator,’ Brady says, although he doesn’t actually give Babineau much credit in the creation department. Dr B.’s experimental drug may have something to do with his new abilities, but it had little or nothing to do with his recovery. He’s positive that was his own doing. An act of sheer willpower. ‘Meanwhile, we have a visit to make, and we don’t want to be late.’

‘To the man-woman.’ There’s a word for that, Babineau used to know it, but now it’s gone. Like the name that goes with it. Or what he ate for dinner. Each time Brady comes into his head, he takes a little more when he leaves. Babineau’s memory. His knowledge. His self.

‘That’s right, the man-woman. Or, to give her sexual preference its scientific name, Ruggus munchus.’

‘No.’ The whine has become a whisper. ‘I’m going to stay right here.’

Brady raises the gun, the barrel now visible within the blown-out remains of the makeshift silencer. ‘If you think I really need you, you’re making the worst mistake of your life. And the last one.’

Babineau says nothing. This is a nightmare, and soon he will wake up.

‘Do it, or tomorrow the housekeeper will find you lying dead next to your wife, unfortunate victims of a home invasion. I would rather finish my business as Dr Z – your body is ten years younger than Brooks’s, and not in bad shape – but I’ll do what I have to. Besides, leaving you to face Kermit Hodges would be mean of me. He’s a nasty man, Felix. You have no idea.’

Babineau looks at the elderly fellow in the mended parka and sees Hartsfield looking out of Library Al’s watery blue eyes. Babineau’s lips are trembling and wet with spittle. His eyes are rimmed with tears. Brady thinks that with his white hair standing up around his head as it is now, the Babster looks like Albert Einstein in that photo where the famous physicist is sticking his tongue out.

‘How did I get into this?’ he moans.

‘The way everybody gets into everything,’ Brady says gently. ‘One step at a time.’

‘Why did you have to go after the girl?’ Babineau bursts out.

‘It was a mistake,’ Brady says. Easier to admit that than the whole truth: he couldn’t wait. He wanted the nigger lawnboy’s sister to go before anyone else blotted out her importance. ‘Now stop fucking around and look at the fishies. You know you want to.’

And he does. That’s the worst part. In spite of everything Babineau now knows, he does.

He looks at the fish.

He listens to the tune.

After awhile he goes into the bedroom to dress and get money out of the safe. He makes one more stop before leaving. The bathroom medicine cabinet is well stocked, on both her side and his.

He takes Babineau’s BMW, leaving the old Malibu where it is for the time being. He also leaves Library Al, who has gone to sleep on the sofa.

Around the time Cora Babineau is opening her front door for the last time, Hodges is sitting down in the living room of the Scott family’s home on Allgood Place, just one block over from Teaberry Lane, where the Robinsons live. He swallowed a couple of painkillers before getting out of the car, and isn’t feeling bad, all things considered.

Dinah Scott is on the sofa, flanked by her parents. She looks quite a bit older than fifteen tonight, because she’s recently back from a rehearsal at North Side High School, where the Drama Club will soon be putting on The Fantasticks. She has the role of Luisa, Angie Scott has told Hodges, a real plum. (This causes Dinah to roll her eyes.) Hodges is across from them in a La-Z-Boy very much like the one in his own living room. From the deep divot in the seat, he deduces it is Carl Scott’s normal evening roost.

On the coffee table in front of the sofa is a bright green Zappit. Dinah brought it down from her room right away, which allows Hodges to further deduce that it wasn’t buried under sports gear in her closet, or left under the bed with the dust bunnies. It wasn’t sitting forgotten in her locker at school. No, it was where she could lay her hands on it at once. Which means she’s been using it, old-school or not.

‘I’m here at the request of Barbara Robinson,’ he tells them. ‘She was struck by a truck today—’

‘Omigod,’ Dinah says, a hand going to her mouth.

‘She’s okay,’ Hodges says. ‘Broken leg is all. They’re keeping her overnight for observation, but she’ll be home tomorrow and probably back in school next week. You can sign her cast, if kids still do that.’

Angie puts an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. ‘What does that have to do with Dinah’s game?’

‘Well, Barbara had one, and it gave her a shock.’ Based on what Holly told Hodges while he was driving over here, that’s no lie. ‘She was crossing a street at the time, lost her bearings for a minute, and bammo. A boy pushed her clear, or it would have been much worse.’

‘Jesus,’ Carl says.

Hodges leans forward, looking at Dinah. ‘I don’t know how many of these gadgets are defective, but it’s clear from what happened to Barb, and a couple of other incidents we know of, that at least some of them are.’

‘Let this be a lesson to you,’ Carl says to his daughter. ‘The next time someone tells you a thing’s free, be on your guard.’

This prompts another eye-roll of the perfect teenage variety.

‘The thing I’m curious about,’ Hodges says, ‘is how you came by yours in the first place. It’s kind of a mystery, because the Zappit company didn’t sell many. They were bought out by another company when it flopped, and that company went bankrupt in April two years ago. You’d think the Zappit consoles would have been held for resale, to help pay the bills—’

‘Or destroyed,’ Carl says. ‘That’s what they do with unsold paperbacks, you know.’

‘I’m actually aware of that,’ Hodges says. ‘So tell me, Dinah, how did you get it?’

‘I went on the website,’ she says. ‘I’m not in trouble, am I? I mean, I didn’t know, but Daddy always says ignorance of the law is no excuse.’

‘You’re in zero trouble,’ Hodges assures her. ‘What website was this?’

‘It was called badconcert.com. I looked for it on my phone when Mom called me at rehearsal and said you were coming over, but it’s gone. I guess they gave away all the ones they had.’

‘Or found out the things were dangerous, and folded their tents without warning anyone,’ Angie Scott says, looking grim.

‘How bad could the shock be, though?’ Carl asks. ‘I opened up the back when Dee brought it down from her room. There’s nothing in there but four rechargeable double As.’

‘I don’t know about that stuff,’ Hodges says. His stomach is starting to hurt again in spite of the dope. Not that his stomach is actually the problem; it’s an adjacent organ only six inches long. He took a moment after his meeting with Norma Wilmer to check the survival rate of patients with pancreatic cancer. Only six percent of them manage to live five years. Not what you’d call cheery news. ‘So far I haven’t even managed to re-program my iPhone’s text message alert so it doesn’t scare innocent bystanders.’

‘I can do that for you,’ Dinah says. ‘Easy-peasy. I have Crazy Frog on mine.’

‘Tell me about the website first.’

‘There was a tweet, okay? Someone at school told me about it. It got picked up on lots of social media sites. Facebook… Pinterest… Google Plus… you know the ones I’m talking about.’

Hodges doesn’t, but nods.

‘I can’t remember the tweet exactly, but pretty close. Because they can only be a hundred and forty characters long. You know that, right?’

‘Sure,’ Hodges says, although he barely grasps what a tweet is. His left hand is trying to sneak its way to the pain in his side. He makes it stay put.

‘This one said something like…’ Dinah closes her eyes. It’s rather theatrical, but of course she just did come from a Drama Club rehearsal. ‘“Bad news, some nut got the ’Round Here concert canceled. Want some good news? Maybe even a free gift? Go to badconcert.com.”’ She opens her eyes. ‘That’s probably not exact, but you get the idea.’

‘I do, yeah.’ He jots the website name in his notebook. ‘So you went there…’

‘Sure. Lots of kids went there. It was kind of funny, too. There was a Vine of ’Round Here singing their big song from a few of years ago, “Kisses on the Midway,” it was called, and after about twenty seconds there’s an explosion sound and this quacky voice saying, “Oh damn, show canceled.”’

‘I don’t think that’s so funny,’ Angie says. ‘You all could have been killed.’

‘There must have been more to it than that,’ Hodges says.

‘Sure. It said that there were like two thousand kids there, a lot of them at their first concert, and they got screwed out of the experience of a lifetime. Although, um, screwed wasn’t the word they used.’

‘I think we can fill in that blank, dear one,’ Carl says.

‘And then it said that ’Round Here’s corporate sponsor had received a whole bunch of Zappit game consoles, and they wanted to give them away. To, you know, kind of make up for the concert.’

‘Even though that was almost six years ago?’ Angie looks incredulous.

‘Yeah. Kind of weird, when you think of it.’

‘But you didn’t,’ Carl said. ‘Think of it.’

Dinah shrugs, looking petulant. ‘I did, but it seemed okay.’

‘Famous last words,’ her father says.

‘So you just… what?’ Hodges asks. ‘Emailed in your name and address and got that’ – he points to the Zappit – ‘in the mail?’

‘There was a little more to it than that,’ Dinah says. ‘You had to, like, be able to prove you were actually there. So I went to see Barb’s mom. You know, Tanya.’

‘Why?’

‘For the pictures. I think I have mine somewhere, but I couldn’t find them.’

‘Her room,’ Angie says, and this time she’s the one with the eye-roll.

Hodges’s side has picked up a slow, steady throb. ‘What pictures, Dinah?’

‘Okay, it was Tanya – she doesn’t mind if we call her that – who took us to the concert, see? There was Barb, me, Hilda Carver, and Betsy.’

‘Betsy would be…?’

‘Betsy DeWitt,’ Angie says. ‘The deal was, the moms drew straws to see who would take the girls. Tanya lost. She took Ginny Carver’s van, because it was the biggest.’

Hodges nods his understanding.

‘So anyway, when we got there,’ Dinah says, ‘Tanya took pictures of us. We had to have pictures. Sounds stupid, I guess, but we were just little kids. I’m into Mendoza Line and Raveonettes now, but back then ’Round Here was a really big deal to us. Especially Cam, the lead singer. Tanya used our phones. Or maybe she used her own, I can’t exactly remember. But she made sure we all had copies, only I couldn’t find mine.’

‘You had to send a picture to the website as proof of attendance.’

‘Right, by email. I was afraid the pics would only show us standing in front of Mrs Carver’s van and that wouldn’t be enough, but there were two that showed the Mingo Auditorium in the background, with all the people lined up. I thought even that might not be good enough, because it didn’t show the sign with the band’s name on it, but it was, and I got the Zappit in the mail just a week later. It came in a big padded envelope.’

‘Was there a return address?’

‘Uh-huh. I can’t remember the box number, but the name was Sunrise Solutions. I guess they were the tour sponsors.’

It’s possible that they were, Hodges thinks, the company wouldn’t have been bankrupt back then, but he doubts it. ‘Was it mailed from here in the city?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘I’m pretty sure it was,’ Angie says. ‘I picked the envelope up off the floor and tossed it in the trash. I’m the French maid around here, you know.’ She shoots her daughter a look.

‘Soh-ree,’ Dinah says.

In his notebook, Hodges writes Sunrise Solutions based NYC, but pkg mailed from here.

‘When did all this go down, Dinah?’

‘I heard about the tweet and went to the website last year. I can’t remember exactly, but I know it was before the Thanksgiving break. And like I said, it came lickety-split. I was really surprised.’

‘So you’ve had it for two months, give or take.’

‘Yes.’

‘And no shocks?’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘Have you ever had any experiences where you were playing with it – let’s say with the Fishin’ Hole game – and you kind of lost track of your surroundings?’

Mr and Mrs Scott look alarmed at this, but Dinah gives him an indulgent smile. ‘You mean like being hypnotized? Eenie-meenie, chili-beanie?’

‘I don’t know what I mean, exactly, but okay, say that.’

‘Nope,’ Dinah says cheerily. ‘Besides, Fishin’ Hole is really dumb. It’s for little kids. You use the joystick thingie beside the keypad to operate Fisherman Joe’s net, see? And you get points for the fish you catch. But it’s too easy. Only reason I check back on that one is to see if the pink fish are showing numbers yet.’

‘Numbers?’

‘Yes. The letter that came with the game explained about them. I tacked it on my bulletin board, because I’d really like to win that moped. Want to see it?’

‘I sure would.’

When she bounces upstairs to get it, Hodges asks if he can use the bathroom. Once in there, he unbuttons his shirt and looks at his throbbing left side. It seems a little swollen and feels a little hot to the touch, but he supposes both of those things could be his imagination. He flushes the toilet and takes two more of the white pills. Okay? he asks his throbbing side. Can you just shut up awhile and let me finish here?

Dinah has scrubbed off most of her stage makeup, and now it’s easy for Hodges to imagine her and the other three girls at nine or ten, going to their first concert and as excited as Mexican jumping beans in a microwave. She hands him the letter that came with the game.

At the top of the sheet is a rising sun, with the words SUNRISE SOLUTIONS bent over it in an arc, pretty much what you’d expect, only it doesn’t look like any corporate logo Hodges has ever seen. It’s strangely amateurish, as if the original was drawn by hand. It’s a form letter with the girl’s name plugged in to give it a more personal feel. Not that anybody’s apt to be fooled by that in this day and age, Hodges thinks, when even mass mailings from insurance companies and ambulance chasing lawyers come personalized.

There was an unreadable signature, hardly more than a scribble. Below that:

‘You actually believed this bullshit?’ Carl Scott asks.

Although the question is delivered with a smile, Dinah tears up. ‘All right, I’m stupid, so shoot me.’

Carl hugs her, kisses her temple. ‘Know what? I would have swallowed it at your age, too.’

‘Have you been checking the pink fish, Dinah?’ Hodges asks.

‘Yes, once or twice a day. That’s actually harder than the game, because the pink ones are fast. You have to concentrate.’

Of course you do, Hodges thinks. He likes this less and less. ‘But no numbers, huh?’

‘Not so far.’

‘Can I take that?’ he asks, pointing to the Zappit. He thinks about telling her he’ll give it back later, but doesn’t. He doubts if he will. ‘And the letter?’

‘On one condition,’ she says.

Hodges, pain now subsiding, is able to smile. ‘Name it, kiddo.’

‘Keep checking the pink fish, and if one of my numbers comes up, I get the prize.’

‘It’s a deal,’ Hodges says, thinking, Someone wants to give you a prize, Dinah, but I doubt very much if it’s a moped or a cinema gift certificate. He takes the Zappit and the letter, and stands up. ‘I want to thank you all very much for your time.’

‘Welcome,’ Carl says. ‘And when you figure out just what the hell this is all about, will you tell us?’

‘You got it,’ Hodges says. ‘One more question, Dinah, and if I sound stupid, remember that I’m pushing seventy.’

She smiles. ‘At school, Mr Morton says the only stupid question—’

‘Is the one you don’t ask, yeah. I’ve always felt that way myself, so here it comes. Everybody at North Side High knows about this, right? The free consoles, the number-fish, and the prizes?’

‘Not just our school, all the other ones, too. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Yik Yak… that’s how they work.’

‘And if you were at the concert and you could prove it, you were eligible to get one of these.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘What about Betsy DeWitt? Did she get one?’

Dinah frowns. ‘No, and that’s kind of funny, because she still had her pictures from that night, and she sent one to the website. But she didn’t do it as soon as I did, she’s an awful procrastinator, so maybe they were all out. If you snooze, you lose type of thing.’

Hodges thanks the Scotts again for their time, wishes Dinah good luck with the play, and goes back down the walk to his car. When he slides behind the wheel, it’s cold enough inside to see his breath. The pain surfaces again: four hard pulses. He waits them out, teeth clamped, trying to tell himself these new, sharper pains are psychosomatic, because he now knows what’s wrong with him, but the idea won’t quite wash. Two more days suddenly seems like a long time to wait for treatment, but he will wait. Has to, because an awful idea is rising in his mind. Pete Huntley wouldn’t believe it, and Izzy Jaynes would probably think he needed a quick ambulance ride to the nearest funny farm. Hodges doesn’t quite believe it himself, but the pieces are coming together, and although the picture that’s being revealed is a crazy one, it also has a certain nasty logic.

He starts his Prius and points it toward home, where he will call Holly and ask her to try and find out if Sunrise Solutions ever sponsored a ’Round Here tour. After that he will watch TV. When he can no longer pretend that what’s on interests him, he’ll go to bed and lie awake and wait for morning.

Only he’s curious about the green Zappit.

Too curious, it turns out, to wait. Halfway between Allgood Place and Harper Road, he pulls into a strip mall, parks in front of a dry cleaning shop that’s closed for the night, and powers the gadget up. It flashes bright white, and then a red Z appears, growing closer and bigger until the slant of the Z colors the whole screen red. A moment later it flashes white again, and a message appears: WELCOME TO ZAPPIT! WE LOVE TO PLAY! HIT ANY KEY TO BEGIN, OR JUST SWIPE THE SCREEN!

Hodges swipes, and game icons appear in neat rows. Some are console versions of ones he watched Allie play at the mall when she was a little girl: Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and that little yellow devil’s main squeeze, Ms Pac-Man. There are also the various solitaire games Janice Ellerton had been hooked on, and plenty of other stuff Hodges has never heard of. He swipes again, and there it is, between SpellTower and Barbie’s Fashion Walk: Fishin’ Hole. He takes a deep breath and taps the icon.

THINKING ABOUT FISHIN’ HOLE, the screen advises. A little worry-circle goes around for ten seconds or so (it seems longer), and then the demo screen appears. Fish swim back and forth, or do loop-the-loops, or shoot up and down on diagonals. Bubbles rise from their mouths and flipping tails. The water is greenish at the top, shading to blue farther down. A little tune plays, not one Hodges recognizes. He watches and waits to feel something – sleepy seems the most likely.

The fish are red, green, blue, gold, yellow. They’re probably supposed to be tropical fish, but they have none of the hyper-reality Hodges has seen in Xbox and PlayStation commercials on TV. These fish are basically cartoons, and primitive ones, at that. No wonder the Zappit flopped, he thinks, but yeah, okay, there’s something mildly hypnotic about the way the fish move, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, every now and then in a rainbow school of half a dozen.

And jackpot, here comes a pink one. He taps at it, but it’s moving just a mite too fast, and he misses. Hodges mutters ‘Shit!’ under his breath. He looks up at the darkened dry cleaning store’s window for a moment, because he really is feeling a trifle dozy. He lightly smacks first his left cheek and then his right with the hand not holding the game, and looks back down. There are more fish now, weaving back and forth in complicated patterns.

Here comes another pink one, and this time he succeeds in tapping it before it whisks off the left side of the screen. It blinks (almost as if to say Okay, Bill, you got me that time) but no number appears. He waits, watches, and when another pink one appears, he taps again. Still no number, just a pink fish that has no counterpart in the real world.

The tune seems louder now, and at the same time slower. Hodges thinks, It really is having some kind of effect. It’s mild, and probably completely accidental, but it’s there, all right.

He pushs the power button. The screen flashes THANKS FOR PLAYING SEE YOU SOON and goes dark. He looks at the dashboard clock and is astonished to see he has been sitting here looking at the Zappit for over ten minutes. It felt more like two or three. Five, at the very most. Dinah didn’t talk about losing time while looking at the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, but he hadn’t asked about that, had he? On the other hand, he’s on two fairly heavy-duty painkillers, and that probably played a part in what just happened. If anything actually did, that is.

No numbers, though.

The pink fish had just been pink fish.

Hodges slips the Zappit into his coat pocket along with his phone and drives home.

Freddi Linklatter – once a computer-repair colleague of Brady’s before the world discovered Brady Hartsfield was a monster – sits at her kitchen table, spinning a silver flask with one finger as she waits for the man with the fancy briefcase.

Dr Z is what he calls himself, but Freddi is no fool. She knows the name that goes with the briefcase initials: Felix Babineau, head of neurology at Kiner Memorial.

Does he know that she knows? She’s guessing he does, and doesn’t care. But it’s weird. Very. He’s in his sixties, an authentic golden oldie, but he reminds her of somebody much younger. Someone who is, in fact, this Dr Babineau’s most famous (infamous, really) patient.

Around and around goes the flask. Etched on the side is GH & FL, 4Ever. Well, 4Ever lasted just about two years, and Gloria Hollis has been gone for quite awhile now. Babineau – or Dr Z, as he styles himself, like the villain in a comic book – was part of the reason why.

‘He’s creepy,’ Gloria said. ‘The older guy is, too. And the money’s creepy. It’s too much. I don’t know what they got you into, Fred, but sooner or later it’s going to blow up in your face, and I don’t want to be part of the collateral damage.’

Of course Gloria had also met someone else – someone quite a bit better-looking than Freddi, with her angular body and lantern jaw and pitted cheeks – but she didn’t want to talk about that part of it, oh no.

Around and around goes the flask.

It all seemed so simple at first, and how could she refuse the money? She never saved much when she worked on the Discount Electronix Cyber Patrol, and the work she’d been able to find as an independent IT when the store closed had barely been enough to keep her off the street. It might have been different if she’d had what Anthony Frobisher, her old boss, liked to call ‘people skills,’ but those had never been her forte. When the old geezer who called himself Z-Boy made his offer (and dear God, that was really a comic book handle), it had been like a gift from God. She had been living in a shitty apartment on the South Side, in the part of town commonly referred to as Hillbilly Heaven, and a month behind on the rent in spite of the cash the guy had already given her. What was she supposed to do? Refuse five thousand dollars? Get real.

Around and around goes the flask.

The guy is late, maybe he’s not coming at all, and that might be for the best.

She remembers the geezer casting his eyes around the two-room apartment, most of her possessions in paper bags with handles (all too easy to see those bags gathered around her as she tried to sleep beneath a Crosstown Expressway underpass). ‘You’ll need a bigger place,’ he said.

‘Yeah, and the farmers in California need rain.’ She remembers peering into the envelope he handed her. Remembers riffling the fifties, and what a comfy sound they made. ‘This is nice, but by the time I get square with all the people I owe, there won’t be much left.’ She could stiff most of those people, but the geezer didn’t need to know that.

‘There’ll be more, and my boss will take care of getting you an apartment where you may be asked to accept certain shipments.’

That started alarm bells ringing. ‘If you’re thinking about drugs, let’s just forget the whole thing.’ She held out the cash-stuffed envelope to him, much as it hurt to do that.

He pushed it back with a little grimace of contempt. ‘No drugs. You’ll not be asked to sign for anything even slightly illegal.’

So here she is, in a condo close to the lakeshore. Not that there’s much of a lake view from only six stories up, and not that the place is a palace. Far from it, especially in the winter. You can only catch a wink of the water between the newer, nicer highrises, but the wind finds its way through just fine, thanks, and in January, that wind is cold. She has the joke thermostat cranked to eighty, and is still wearing three shirts and longjohns under her carpenter jeans. Hillbilly Heaven is in the rearview mirror, though, that’s something, but the question remains: is it enough?

Around and around goes the silver flask. GH & FL, 4Ever. Only nothing is 4Ever.

The lobby buzzer goes, making her jump. She picks up the flask – her one souvenir of the glorious Gloria days – and heads to the intercom. She quashes an urge to do her Russian spy accent again. Whether he calls himself Dr Babineau or Dr Z, the guy is a little scary. Not Hillbilly-Heaven, crystal-meth-dope-dealer scary, but in a different way. Better to play this straight, get it over with, and hope to Christ she doesn’t find herself in too much trouble if the deal blows up in her face.

‘Is this the famous Dr Z?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘You’re late.’

‘Am I keeping you from something important, Freddi?’

No, nothing important. Nothing she does is particularly important these days.

‘You brought the money?’

‘Of course.’ Sounding impatient. The old geezer with whom she had commenced this nutty business had the same impatient way of speaking. He and Dr Z looked nothing alike, but they sounded alike, enough to make her wonder if they weren’t brothers. Only they also sounded like that someone else, the old colleague she used to work with. The one who turned out to be Mr Mercedes.

Freddi doesn’t want to think about that any more than she wants to think about the various hacks she’s done on Dr Z’s behalf. She hits the buzzer beside the intercom.

She goes to her door to wait for him, taking a nip of Scotch to fortify herself. She tucks the flask into the breast pocket of her middle shirt, then reaches into the pocket of the one beneath, where she keeps her breath mints. She doesn’t believe Dr Z would give Shit One if he smelled booze on her breath, but she always used to pop a mint after a nip when she was working at Discount Electronix, and old habits are strong habits. She takes her Marlboros from the pocket of her top shirt and lights one. It will further mask the smell of the booze, and calm her a little more, and if he doesn’t like her secondhand smoke, tough titty.

‘This guy has set you up in a pretty nice apartment and paid you almost thirty thousand dollars over the last eighteen months or so,’ Gloria had said. ‘Tall tickets for something any hacker worth her salt could do in her sleep, at least according to you. So why you? And why so much?’

More stuff Freddi doesn’t want to think about.

It all started with the picture of Brady and his mom. She found it in the junk room at Discount Electronix, shortly after the staff had been told the Birch Hill Mall store was closing. Their boss, Anthony ‘Tones’ Frobisher, must have taken it out of Brady’s work cubby and tossed it back there after the world found out that Brady was the infamous Mercedes Killer. Freddi had no great love for Brady (although they did have a few meaningful conversations about gender identity, back in the day). Wrapping the picture and taking it to the hospital was pure impulse. And the few times she’d visited him afterwards had been pure curiosity, plus a little pride at the way Brady had reacted to her. He smiled.

‘He responds to you,’ the new head nurse – Scapelli – said after one of Freddi’s visits. ‘That’s very unusual.’

By the time Scapelli replaced Becky Helmington, Freddi knew that the mysterious Dr Z who took over supplying her with cash was in reality Dr Felix Babineau. She didn’t think about that, either. Or about the cartons that eventually began arriving from Terre Haute via UPS. Or the hacks. She became an expert in not thinking, because once you started doing that, certain connections became obvious. And all because of that damn picture. Freddi wishes now she’d resisted the impulse, but her mother had a saying: Too late always comes too early.

She hears his footsteps coming down the hall. She opens the door before he can ring the bell, and the question is out of her mouth before she knows she is going to ask it.

‘Tell me the truth, Dr Z – are you Brady?’

Hodges is barely inside his front door and still taking off his coat when his cell rings. ‘Hey, Holly.’

‘Are you all right?’

He can see a lot of calls from her starting with this exact same greeting. Well, it’s better than Drop dead, motherfucker. ‘Yeah, I’m good.’

‘One more day, and then you start treatments. And once you start, you don’t stop. Whatever the doctors say, you do.’

‘Stop worrying. A deal is a deal.’

‘I’ll stop worrying when you’re cancer free.’

Don’t, Holly, he thinks, and closes his eyes against the unexpected sting of tears. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

‘Jerome is coming tonight. He called from his plane to ask about Barbara, and I told him everything she told me. He’ll be in at eleven o’clock. A good thing he left when he did, because a storm is coming. It’s supposed to be a bad one. I offered to rent him a car the way I do for you when you go out of town, it’s very easy now that we have the corporate account—’

‘That you lobbied for until I gave in. Believe me, I know.’

‘But he doesn’t need a car. His father is picking him up. They’ll go in to see Barbara at eight tomorrow, and bring her home if the doctor says she can go. Jerome said he can be at our office by ten, if that’s okay.’

‘Sounds fine,’ Hodges says, wiping his eyes. He doesn’t know how much Jerome can help, but he knows it will be very good to see him. ‘Anything more he can find out from her about that damn gadget—’

‘I asked him to do that. Did you get Dinah’s?’

‘Yeah. And tried it. There’s something up with the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, all right. It makes you sleepy if you look at it too long. Purely accidental, I think, and I don’t see how most kids would be affected, because they’d want to go right to the game.’

He fills her in on the rest of what he learned from Dinah.

Holly says, ‘So Dinah didn’t get her Zappit the same way as Barbara and the Ellerton woman.’

‘No.’

‘And don’t forget Hilda Carver. The man calling himself Myron Zakim gave her one, too. Only hers didn’t work. Barb said it just gave a single blue flash and died. Did you see any blue flashes?’

‘Nope.’ Hodges is peering at the scant contents of his refrigerator for something his stomach might accept, and settles on a carton of banana-flavored yogurt. ‘And there were pink fish, but when I succeeded in tapping a couple – which ain’t easy – no numbers appeared.’

‘I bet they did on Mrs Ellerton’s.’

Hodges thinks so, too. It’s early to generalize, but he’s starting to think the number-fish only show up on the Zappits that were handed out by the man with the briefcase, Myron Zakim. Hodges also thinks someone is playing games with the letter Z, and along with a morbid interest in suicide, games were part of Brady Hartsfield’s modus operandi. Except Brady is stuck in his room at Kiner Memorial, goddammit. Hodges keeps coming up against that irrefutable fact. If Brady Hartsfield has stooges to do his dirt, and it’s starting to seem that he does, how is he running them? And why would they run for him, anyway?

‘Holly, I need you to heat up your computer and check something out. Not a biggie, just a t that needs to be crossed.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I want to know if Sunrise Solutions sponsored the ’Round Here tour in 2010, when Hartsfield tried to blow up the Mingo Auditorium. Or any ’Round Here tour.’

‘I can do that. Did you have supper?’

‘Taking care of that right now.’

‘Good. What are you having?’

‘Steak, shoestring potatoes, and a salad,’ Hodges says, looking at the carton of yogurt with a mixture of distaste and resignation. ‘Got a leftover apple tart for dessert.’

‘Heat it up in the microwave and put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. Yummy!’

‘I’ll take that under consideration.’

He shouldn’t be amazed when she calls back five minutes later with the information he requested, it’s just Holly being Holly, but he still is. ‘Jesus, Holly, already?’

With no idea that she is echoing Freddi Linklatter almost word for word, Holly says, ‘Ask for something hard next time. You might like to know that ’Round Here broke up in 2013. Those boy bands don’t seem to last very long.’

‘No,’ Hodges says, ‘once they start having to shave, the little girls lose interest.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Holly says. ‘I was always a Billy Joel fan. Also Michael Bolton.’

Oh, Holly, Hodges mourns. And not for the first time.

‘Between 2007 and 2012, the group did six nationwide tours. The first four were sponsored by Sharp Cereals, which gave out free samples at their concerts. The last two, including the one at the Mingo, were sponsored by PepsiCo.’

‘No Sunrise Solutions.’

‘No.’

‘Thanks, Holly. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Yes. Are you eating your dinner?’

‘Sitting down to it now.’

‘All right. And try to see Barbara before you start your treatments. She needs friendly faces, because whatever was wrong with her hasn’t worn off yet. She said it was like it left a trail of slime inside her head.’

‘I’ll make sure of it,’ Hodges says, but that is a promise he’s not able to keep.

Are you Brady?

Felix Babineau, who sometimes calls himself Myron Zakim and sometimes Dr Z, smiles at the question. It wrinkles his unshaven cheeks in a decidedly creepy way. Tonight he’s wearing a furry ushanka instead of his trilby, and his white hair kind of squishes out around the bottom. Freddi wishes she hadn’t asked the question, wishes she didn’t have to let him in, wishes she’d never heard of him. If he is Brady, he’s a walking haunted house.

‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,’ he says.

She wants to let it go and can’t. ‘Because you sound like him. And that hack the other one brought me after the boxes came… that was a Brady hack if I ever saw one. Good as a signature.’

‘Brady Hartsfield is a semi-catatonic who can barely walk, let alone write a hack to be used on a bunch of obsolete game consoles. Some of which have proved to be defective as well as obsolete. I did not get my money’s worth from those Sunrise Solutions motherfuckers, which pisses me off to the max.’

Pisses me off to the max. A phrase Brady used all the time back in their Cyber Patrol days, usually about their boss or some idiot customer who managed to spill a mocha latte into his CPU.

‘You’ve been very well paid, Freddi, and you’re almost done. Why don’t we leave it at that?’

He brushes past her without waiting for a reply, puts his briefcase on the table, and snaps it open. He takes out an envelope with her initials, FL, printed on it. The letters slant backward. During her years on the Discount Electronix Cyber Patrol, she saw similar backslanted printing on hundreds of work orders. Those were the ones Brady filled out.

‘Ten thousand,’ Dr Z says. ‘Final payment. Now go to work.’

Freddi reaches for the envelope. ‘You don’t need to hang around if you don’t want to. The rest is basically automatic. It’s like setting an alarm clock.’

And if you’re really Brady, she thinks, you could do it yourself. I’m good at this stuff, but you were better.

He lets her fingers touch the envelope, then pulls it back. ‘I’ll stay. Not that I don’t trust you.’

Right, Freddi thinks. As if.

His cheeks once more wrinkle in that unsettling smile. ‘And who knows? We might get lucky and see the first hit.’

‘I’ll bet most of the people who got those Zappits have already thrown them away. It’s a fucking toy, and some of them don’t even work. Like you said.’

‘Let me worry about that,’ says Dr Z. Once again his cheeks wrinkle and pull back. His eyes are red, as if he’s been smoking the rock. She thinks of asking him what, exactly, they are doing, and what he hopes to accomplish… but she already has an idea, and does she want to be sure? Besides, if this is Brady, what harm can it do? He had hundreds of ideas, all of them crackpot.

Well.

Most of them.

She leads the way into what was meant to be a spare bedroom and has now become her workstation, the sort of electronic refuge she always dreamed of and could never afford – a hidey-hole that Gloria, with her good looks, infectious laugh, and ‘people skills,’ could never understand. In here the baseboard heaters hardly work at all, and it’s five degrees colder than the rest of the apartment. The computers don’t mind. They like it.

‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Do it.’

She sits down at the top-of-the-line desktop Mac with its twenty-seven-inch screen, refreshes it, and types in her password – a random collection of numbers. There’s a file simply marked Z, which she opens with another password. The subfiles are marked Z-1 and Z-2. She uses a third password to open Z-2, then begins to rapidly click away at her keyboard. Dr Z stands by her left shoulder. He’s a disturbing negative presence at first, but then she gets lost in what she’s doing, as she always does.

Not that it takes long; Dr Z has given her the program, and executing it is child’s play. To the right of her computer, sitting on a high shelf, is a Motorola signal repeater. When she finishes by simultaneously hitting COMMAND and the Z key, the repeater comes to life. A single word appears in yellow dots: SEARCHING. It blinks like a traffic light at a deserted intersection.

They wait, and Freddi becomes aware that she’s holding her breath. She lets it go in a whoosh, momentarily puffing out her thin cheeks. She starts to get up, and Dr Z puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘Let’s give it a little longer.’

They give it five minutes, the only sound the soft hum of her equipment and the keening of the wind off the frozen lake. SEARCHING blinks on and on.

‘All right,’ he says at last. ‘I knew it was too much to hope for. All things in good time, Freddi. Let’s go back into the other room. I’ll give you your final payment and then be on my wa—’

SEARCHING in yellow suddenly turns to FOUND in green.

‘There!’ he shouts, making her jump. ‘There, Freddi! There’s the first one!’

Her final doubts are swept away and she knows for sure. All it takes is that shout of triumph. It’s Brady, all right. He’s become a living Russian nesting doll, which goes perfectly with his furry Russian hat. Look inside Babineau and there’s Dr Z. Look inside Dr Z, and there, pulling all the levers, is Brady Hartsfield. God knows how it can be, but it is.

FOUND in green is replaced with LOADING in red. After mere seconds, LOADING is replaced with TASK COMPLETE. After that, the repeater begins to search again.

‘All right,’ he says, ‘I’m satisfied. Time for me to go. It’s been a busy night, and I’m not done yet.’

She follows him into the main room, shutting the door to her electronic hideaway behind her. She has come to a decision that’s probably long overdue. As soon as he’s gone, she’s going to kill the repeater and delete the final program. Once that’s done, she’ll pack a suitcase and go to a motel. Tomorrow she’s getting the fuck out of this city and heading south to Florida. She’s had it with Dr Z, and his Z-Boy sidekick, and winter in the Midwest.

Dr Z puts on his coat, but drifts to the window instead of going to the door. ‘Not much of a view. Too many highrises in the way.’

‘Yeah, it sucks the big one.’

‘Still, it’s better than mine,’ he says, not turning. ‘All I’ve had to look at for the last five and a half years is a parking garage.’

Suddenly she’s at her limit. If he’s still in the same room with her sixty seconds from now, she’ll go into hysterics. ‘Give me my money. Give it to me and then get the fuck out. We’re done.’

He turns. In his hand is the short-barreled pistol he used on Babineau’s wife. ‘You’re right, Freddi. We are.’

She reacts instantly, knocking the pistol from his hand, kicking him in the groin, karate-chopping him like Lucy Liu when he doubles over, and running out the door while screaming her head off. This mental film-clip plays out in full color and Dolby sound as she stands rooted to the spot. The gun goes bang. She staggers back two steps, collides with the easy chair where she sits to watch TV, collapses across it, and rolls to the floor, coming down headfirst. The world begins to darken and draw away. Her last sensation is warmth above as she begins to bleed and below as her bladder lets loose.

‘Final payment, as promised.’ The words come from a great distance.

Blackness swallows the world. Freddi falls into it and is gone.

Brady stands perfectly still, watching the blood seep from beneath her. He’s listening for someone to pound on her door, wanting to know if everything is all right. He doesn’t expect that will happen, but better safe than sorry.

After ninety seconds or so, he puts the gun back in his overcoat pocket, next to his Zappit. He can’t resist one more look into the computer room before leaving. The signal repeater continues its endless, automated search. He has, against all odds, completed an amazing journey. What the final results will be is impossible to predict, but that there will be some result he is certain. And it will eat into the old Det-Ret like acid. Revenge really is best when eaten cold.

He has the elevator to himself going down. The lobby is similarly empty. He walks around the corner, turning up the collar of Babineau’s expensive overcoat against the wind, and tweets the locks of Babineau’s Beemer. He gets in and starts it up, but only for the heater. Something needs doing before he moves on to his next destination. He doesn’t really want to do it, because, whatever his failings as a human being, Babineau has a gorgeously intelligent mind, and a great deal of it is still intact. Destroying that mind is too much like those dumb and superstitious ISIS fucks hammering irreplaceable treasures of art and culture to rubble. Yet it must be done. No risks can be allowed, because the body is also a treasure. Yes, Babineau has slightly high blood pressure and his hearing has gone downhill in the last few years, but tennis and twice-weekly trips to the hospital gym have kept his muscles in fairly good shape. His heart ticks along at seventy beats a minute, with no misses. He’s not suffering from sciatica, gout, cataracts, or any of the other outrages that affect many men at his age.

Besides, the good doctor is what he’s got, at least for now.

With that in mind, Brady turns inward and finds what remains of Felix Babineau’s core consciousness – the brain within the brain. It has been scarred and ravaged and diminished by Brady’s repeated occupancies, but it is still there, still Babineau, still capable (theoretically at least) of taking back control. It is, however, defenseless, like some armored creature stripped of its shell. It’s not exactly flesh; Babineau’s core self is more like densely packed wires made of light.

Not without regret, Brady seizes them with his phantom hand and tears them apart.

Hodges spends the evening slowly eating his yogurt and watching the Weather Channel. The winter storm, ridiculously dubbed Eugenie by the Weather Channel wonks, is still coming and is expected to hit the city sometime late tomorrow.

‘Hard to be more exact as of now,’ the balding, bespectacled wonk says to the knockout blond wonk in the red dress. ‘This one gives new meaning to the term stop-and-go traffic.’

The knockout wonk laughs as if her partner in meteorology has said something outrageously witty, and Hodges uses the remote to turn them off.

The zapper, he thinks, looking at it. That’s what everyone calls these things. Quite the invention, when you stop to think of it. You can access hundreds of different channels by remote control. Never even have to get up. As if you’re inside the television instead of in your chair. Or in both places at the same time. Sort of a miracle, really.

As he goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth, his cell phone buzzes. He looks at the screen and has to laugh, even though it hurts to do it. Now that he’s in the privacy of his own home, with nobody to be bothered by the home run text alert, his old partner calls instead.

‘Hey, Pete, nice to know you still remember my number.’

Pete has no time for banter. ‘I’m going to tell you something, Kermit, and if you decide to run with it, I’m like Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. Remember him?’

‘Sure.’ What Hodges feels in his gut right now isn’t a pain-cramp, but one of excitement. Weird how similar they are. ‘I know nothing.’

‘Right. It has to be that way, because as far as this department is concerned, the murder of Martine Stover and the suicide of her mother is officially a closed case. We are certainly not going to reopen it because of a coincidence, and that’s right from the top. Are we clear on that?’

‘As glass,’ Hodges says. ‘What’s the coincidence?’

‘The head nurse in the Kiner Brain Injury Clinic committed suicide last night. Ruth Scapelli.’

‘I heard,’ Hodges says.

‘While on one of your pilgrimages to visit the delightful Mr Hartsfield, I presume.’

‘Yeah.’ No need to tell Pete that he never got in to see the delightful Mr Hartsfield.

‘Scapelli had one of those game gadgets. A Zappit. She apparently threw it in the trash before she bled out. One of the forensics guys found it.’

‘Huh.’ Hodges goes back into the living room and sits down, wincing when his body folds in the middle. ‘And that’s your idea of a coincidence?’

‘Not necessarily mine,’ Pete says heavily.

‘But?’

‘But I just want to retire in peace, goddammit! If there’s a ball to carry on this one, Izzy can carry it.’

‘But Izzy don’t want to carry no steenkin ball.’

‘No. Neither does the captain, or the commish.’

Hearing this, Hodges is forced to slightly revise his opinion of his old partner as a burnt-out case. ‘You actually spoke to them? Tried to keep this thing alive?’

‘To the captain. Over Izzy Jaynes’s objections, may I add. Her strident objections. The captain talked to the commish. Late this evening I got the word to drop it, and you know why.’

‘Yeah. Because it connects to Brady two ways. Martine Stover was one of his City Center victims. Ruth Scapelli was his nurse. It would take a moderately bright reporter about six minutes to put those things together and stir up a nice fat scare story. That’s what you got from Captain Pedersen?’

‘That’s what I got. No one in police administration wants the spotlight back on Hartsfield, not when he’s still judged incompetent to assist in his own defense and thus unable to stand trial. Hell, no one in city government wants it.’

Hodges is silent, thinking hard – maybe as hard as ever in his life. He learned the phrase to cross the Rubicon way back in high school, and grasped its meaning without Mrs Bradley’s explanation: to make an irrevocable decision. What he learned later, sometimes to his sorrow, is that one comes upon most Rubicons unprepared. If he tells Pete that Barbara Robinson also had a Zappit and may also have had suicide on her mind when she left school and went to Lowtown, Pete will almost have to go back to Pedersen. Two Zappit-related suicides can be written off as coincidence, but three? And okay, Barbara didn’t actually succeed, thank God, but she’s another person with a connection to Brady. She was at the ’Round Here concert, after all. Along with Hilda Carver and Dinah Scott, who also received Zappits. But are the police capable of believing what he’s starting to believe? It’s an important question, because Hodges loves Barbara Robinson and does not want to see her privacy violated without some concrete result to show for it.

‘Kermit? Are you there?’

‘Yeah. Just thinking. Did the Scapelli woman have any visitors last night?’

‘Can’t tell you, because the neighbors haven’t been interviewed. It was a suicide, not a murder.’

‘Olivia Trelawney also committed suicide,’ Hodges says. ‘Remember?’

It’s Pete’s turn to be silent. Of course he remembers, and he also remembers it was an assisted suicide. Hartsfield planted a nasty malware worm in her computer, made her think she was being haunted by the ghost of a young mother killed at City Center. It helped that most people in the city had come to believe Olivia Trelawney’s carelessness with her ignition key was partially responsible for the massacre.

‘Brady always enjoyed—’

‘I know what he always enjoyed,’ Pete says. ‘No need to belabor the point. I’ve got one other scrap for you, if you want it.’

‘Hit me.’

‘I spoke to Nancy Alderson around five this afternoon.’

Good for you, Pete, Hodges thinks. Doing a little more than punching the clock in your last few weeks.

‘She said that Mrs Ellerton already bought her daughter a new computer. For her online class. Said it’s under the basement stairs, still in the carton. Ellerton was going to give it to Martine for her birthday next month.’

‘Planning for the future, in other words. Not the act of a suicidal woman, is it?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say so. I have to go, Kerm. The ball is in your court. Play it or let it lie. Up to you.’

‘Thanks, Pete. I appreciate the heads-up.’

‘I wish it was like the old days,’ Pete says. ‘We would have gone after this thing and let the chips fall.’

‘But it’s not.’ Hodges is rubbing his side again.

‘No. It’s not. You take care of yourself. Put on some goddam weight.’

‘I’ll give it my best shot,’ Hodges says, but he’s talking to no one. Pete is gone.

He brushes his teeth, takes a painkiller, and climbs slowly into his pajamas. Then he goes to bed and stares up into the darkness, waiting for sleep or morning, whichever comes first.

Brady was careful to take Babineau’s ID badge from the top of his bureau after donning Babineau’s clothes, because the magnetic strip on the back turns it into an all-access pass. At ten-thirty that night, around the time Hodges is finally getting a bellyful of the Weather Channel, he uses it for the first time, to enter the gated employees’ parking lot behind the main hospital building. The lot is loaded in the daytime, but at this hour he has his pick of spaces. He chooses one as far from the pervasive glare of the arc-sodiums as he can get. He tilts back the seat of Dr B.’s luxury ride and kills the engine.

He drifts into sleep and finds himself cruising through a light fog of disconnected memories, all that remains of Felix Babineau. He tastes the peppermint lipstick of the first girl he ever kissed, Marjorie Patterson at East Junior High, in Joplin, Missouri. He sees a basketball with the word VOIT printed on it in fading black letters. He feels warmth in his training pants as he pees himself while coloring behind his gammer’s sofa, a huge dinosaur covered in faded green velour.

Childhood memories are apparently the last things to go.

Shortly after two A.M. he flinches from a brilliant recollection of his father slapping him for playing with matches in the attic of their house and starts awake with a gasp in the Beemer’s bucket seat. For a moment the clearest detail of that memory lingers: a vein pulsing in his father’s flushed neck, just above the collar of his blue Izod golf shirt.

Then he’s Brady again, wearing a Babineau skin-suit.

While mostly confined to Room 217, and to a body that no longer works, Brady has had months to plan, to revise those plans, and revise the revisions. He has made mistakes along the way (he wishes he’d never used Z-Boy to send Hodges a message using the Blue Umbrella site, for instance, and he should have waited before going after Barbara Robinson), yet he has persevered, and here he is, on the verge of success.

He has mentally rehearsed this part of the operation dozens of times, and now moves ahead confidently. A swipe of Babineau’s card gets him in the door marked MAINTENANCE A. On the floors above, the machines that run the hospital are heard as a muted hum, if they are heard at all. Down here they’re a steady thunder, and the tile hallway is stiflingly hot. But it’s deserted, as he expected. A city hospital never falls into a deep sleep, but in the early hours of the morning it shuts its eyes and dozes.

The maintenance crew’s break room is also deserted, as is the shower and changing area beyond it. Padlocks secure some of the lockers, but the majority of them are open. He tries one after the other, checking sizes, until he finds a gray shirt and a pair of workpants that are Babineau’s approximate size. He takes off Babineau’s clothes and puts on the maintenance worker’s stuff, not neglecting to transfer the bottle of pills he took from Babineau’s bathroom. It’s a potent his ’n hers mixture. On one of the hooks by the showers he sees the final touch: a red-and-blue Groundhogs baseball cap. He takes it, adjusts the plastic band in back, and pulls it low over his forehead, making sure to get all of Babineau’s silver hair covered up.

He walks the length of Maintenance A and turns right into the hospital laundry, which is humid as well as hot. Two housekeepers are sitting in plastic contour chairs between two rows of gigantic Foshan dryers. Both are fast asleep, one with an overturned box of animal crackers spilling into the lap of her green nylon skirt. Further down, past the washing machines, two laundry carts are parked against the cinderblock wall. One is filled with hospital johnnies, the other piled high with fresh bedlinens. Brady takes a handful of johnnies, puts them on top of the neatly folded sheets, and rolls the cart on down the hall.

It takes a change of elevators and a walk across the skyway to reach the Bucket, and he sees exactly four people on the journey. Two are nurses whispering together outside a med supply closet; two are interns in the doctors’ lounge, laughing quietly over something on a laptop computer. None of them notice the graveyard-shift maintenance man, head down as he pushes an overloaded cart of laundry.

The point where he’s most apt to be noticed – and perhaps recognized – is the nurses’ station in the middle of the Bucket. But one of the nurses is playing solitaire on her computer, and the other is writing notes, propping her head up with her free hand. That one catches movement out of the corner of her eye and without raising her head asks how he’s doing.

‘Yeah, good,’ Brady says. ‘Cold night, though.’

‘Uh-huh, and I heard there’s snow coming.’ She yawns and goes back to her notes.

Brady rolls his basket down the hall, stopping just short of 217. One of the Bucket’s little secrets is that here the patient rooms have two doors, one marked and one unmarked. The unmarked ones open into the closets, making it possible to restock linens and other necessaries at night without disturbing the patients’ rest… or their disturbed minds. Brady grabs a few of the johnnies, takes a quick look around to make sure he is still unobserved, and slips through this unmarked door. A moment later he’s looking down at himself. For years he has fooled everyone into believing that Brady Hartsfield is what the staff calls (only among themselves) a gork, a ding, or a LOBNH: lights are on but nobody’s home. Now he really is one.

He bends and strokes one lightly stubbled cheek. Runs the pad of his thumb over one closed lid, feeling the raised curve of eyeball beneath. Lifts one hand, turns it over, and lays it gently palm-up on the coverlet. From the pocket of the borrowed gray trousers he takes the bottle of pills and spills half a dozen in the upturned palm. Take, eat, he thinks. This is my body, broken for you.

He enters that broken body one final time. He doesn’t need to use the Zappit to do this now, nor does he have to worry that Babineau will seize control and run away like the Gingerbread Man. With Brady’s mind gone, Babineau is the gork. Nothing left in there but a memory of his father’s golf shirt.

Brady looks around the inside of his head like a man giving a hotel room one last check after a long-term stay. Anything hanging forgotten in the closet? A tube of toothpaste left in the bathroom? Maybe a cufflink under the bed?

No. Everything is packed and the room is empty. He closes his hand, hating the draggy way the fingers move, as if the joints are filled with sludge. He opens his mouth, lifts the pills, and drops them in. He chews. The taste is bitter. Babineau, meanwhile, has collapsed bonelessly to the floor. Brady swallows once. And again. There. It’s done. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, he’s staring beneath the bed at a pair of slippers Brady Hartsfield will never wear again.

He gets to Babineau’s feet, brushes himself off, and takes one more look at the body that carried him around for almost thirty years. The one that stopped being of any use to him the second time he was smashed in the head at Mingo Auditorium, just before he could trigger the plastic explosive strapped to the underside of his wheelchair. Once he might have worried that this drastic step would backfire on him, that his consciousness and all his grand plans would die along with his body. No more. The umbilical cord has been severed. He has crossed the Rubicon.

So long, Brady, he thinks, it was good to know you.

This time when he pushes the laundry cart past the nurses’ station, the one who was playing solitaire is gone, probably to the bathroom. The other is asleep on her notes.

But it’s quarter to four now, and there’s so much more to do.

After changing back into Babineau’s clothes, Brady leaves the hospital the same way he entered and drives toward Sugar Heights. Because Z-Boy’s homemade silencer is kaput and an unmuffled gunshot is likely to be reported in the town’s ritziest neighborhood (where rent-a-cops from Vigilant Guard Service are never more than a block or two away), he stops at Valley Plaza, which is on the way. He checks the empty lot for cop cars, sees none, and drives around to the loading area of Discount Home Furnishings.

God, it’s so good to be out! Fucking wonderful!

Walking to the front of the Beemer, he breathes deeply of the cold winter air, wrapping the sleeve of Babineau’s expensive topcoat around the .32’s short barrel as he goes. It won’t be as good as Z-Boy’s silencer, and he knows it’s a risk, but not a big one. Just the one shot. He looks up first, wanting to see the stars, but clouds have blanked out the sky. Oh, well, there will be other nights. Many of them. Possibly thousands. He is not limited to Babineau’s body, after all.

He aims and fires. A small round hole appears in the Beemer’s windshield. Now comes another risk, driving the last mile to Sugar Heights with a bullet hole in the glass just above the steering wheel, but this is the time of night when the suburban streets are at their emptiest and the cops also doze, especially in the better neighborhoods.

Twice headlights approach him and he holds his breath, but both times they pass by without slowing. January air comes in through the bullet hole, making a thin wheezing sound. He makes it back to Babineau’s McMansion without incident. No need to tap the code this time; he just hits the gate opener clipped to the visor. When he reaches the top of the drive, he veers onto the snow-covered lawn, bounces over a hard crust of plowed snow, clips a bush, and stops.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.

Only problem is, he neglected to bring a knife. He could get one in the house, he has another piece of business in there, but he doesn’t want to make two trips. He has miles to go before he sleeps, and he’s anxious to start rolling them. He opens the center console and paws through it. Surely a dandy like Babineau will keep spare grooming implements, even a fingernail clipper will do… but there’s nothing. He tries the glove compartment, and in the folder containing the Beemer’s documents (leather, of course) he finds an Allstate insurance card laminated in plastic. It will serve. They are, after all, the Good Hands people.

Brady pushes back the sleeve of Babineau’s cashmere overcoat and the shirt beneath, then drags a corner of the laminated card over his forearm. It produces nothing but a thin red line. He goes again, bearing down much harder, lips pulled back in a grimace. This time the skin splits and blood flows. He gets out of the car holding his arm up, then leans back in. He tips a spatter of droplets first onto the seat and then onto the bottom arc of the steering wheel. There’s not much, but it won’t take much. Not when combined with the bullet hole in the windshield.

He bounds up the porch steps, each springy leap a small orgasm. Cora is lying beneath the hall coathooks, just as dead as ever. Library Al is still asleep on the couch. Brady shakes him, and when he only gets a few muffled grunts, he grabs Al with both hands and rolls him onto the floor. Al’s eyes creak open.

‘Huh? Wha?’

The stare is dazed but not completely blank. There’s probably no Al Brooks left inside that plundered head, but there’s still a bit of the alter ego Brady has created. Enough.

‘Hey there, Z-Boy,’ Brady says, squatting down.

‘Hey,’ Z-Boy croaks, struggling to sit up. ‘Hey there, Dr Z. I’m watching that house, just like you told me. The woman – the one who can still walk – she uses that Zappit all the time. I watch her from the g’rage across the street.’

‘You don’t have to do that anymore.’

‘No? Say, where are we?’

‘My house,’ Brady says. ‘You killed my wife.’

Z-Boy stares at the white-haired man in the overcoat, his mouth hung open. His breath is awful, but Brady doesn’t draw away. Slowly, Z-Boy’s face begins to crumple. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. ‘Kill?… did not!’

‘Yes.’

‘No! Never would!’

‘You did, though. But only because I told you to.’

‘Are you sure? I don’t remember.’

Brady takes him by the shoulder. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You were hypnotized.’

Z-Boy’s face brightens. ‘By Fishin’ Hole!’

‘Yes, by Fishin’ Hole. And while you were, I told you to kill Mrs Babineau.’

Z-Boy looks at him with doubt and woe. ‘If I did, it wasn’t my fault. I was hypnotized and can’t even remember.’

‘Take this.’

Brady hands Z-Boy the gun. Z-Boy holds it up, frowning as if at some exotic artifact.

‘Put it in your pocket, and give me your car keys.’

Z-Boy stuffs the .32 absently into his pants pocket and Brady winces, expecting the gun to go off and put a bullet in the poor sap’s leg. At last Z-Boy holds out his keyring. Brady pockets it, stands up, and crosses the living room.

‘Where are you going, Dr Z?’

‘I won’t be long. Why don’t you sit on the couch until I get back?’

‘I’ll sit on the couch until you get back,’ Z-Boy says.

‘Good idea.’

Brady goes into Dr Babineau’s study. There’s an ego wall crammed with framed photos, including one of a younger Felix Babineau shaking hands with the second President Bush, both of them grinning like idiots. Brady ignores the pictures; he’s seen them many times before, during the months when he was learning how to be in another person’s body, what he now thinks of as his student driver days. Nor is he interested in the desktop computer. What he wants is the MacBook Air sitting on the credenza. He opens it, powers it up, and types in Babineau’s password, which happens to be CEREBELLIN.

‘Your drug didn’t do shit,’ Brady says as the main screen comes up. He’s actually not sure of this, but it’s what he chooses to believe.

His fingers rattle the keyboard with a practiced speed of which Babineau would have been incapable, and a hidden program, one Brady installed himself on a previous visit to the good doctor’s head, pops up. It’s labeled FISHIN’ HOLE. He types again, and the program reaches out to the repeater in Freddi Linklatter’s computer hideaway.

WORKING, the laptop’s screen says, and below this: 3 FOUND.

Three found! Three already!

Brady is delighted but not really surprised, even though it’s the graveyard of the morning. There are a few insomniacs in every crowd, and that includes the crowd that has received free Zappits from badconcert.com. What better way to while away the sleepless hours before dawn than with a handy game console? And before playing solitaire or Angry Birds, why not check those pink fish on the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, and see if they’ve finally been programmed to turn into numbers when tapped? A combination of the right ones will win prizes, but at four in the morning, that may not be the prime motivator. Four in the morning is usually an unhappy time to be awake. It’s when unpleasant thoughts and pessimistic ideas come to the fore, and the demo screen is soothing. It’s also addictive. Al Brooks knew that before he became Z-Boy; Brady knew from the moment he saw it. Just a lucky coincidence, but what Brady has done since – what he has prepared – is no coincidence. It’s the result of long and careful planning in the prison of his hospital room and his wasted body.

He shuts down the laptop, tucks it under his arm, and starts to leave the study. At the doorway he has an idea and goes back to Babineau’s desk. He opens the center drawer and finds exactly what he wants – he doesn’t even have to rummage. When your luck is running, it’s running.

Brady returns to the living room. Z-Boy is sitting on the sofa, head lowered, shoulders slumped, hands dangling between his thighs. He looks unutterably weary.

‘I have to go now,’ Brady says.

‘Where?’

‘Not your business.’

‘Not my business.’

‘Exactly right. You should go back to sleep.’

‘Here on the couch?’

‘Or in one of the bedrooms upstairs. But you need to do something first.’ He hands Z-Boy the felt-tip pen he found in Babineau’s desk. ‘Make your mark, Z-Boy, just like when you were in Mrs Ellerton’s house.’

‘They were alive when I was watching from the g’rage, I know that much, but they might be dead now.’

‘They probably are, yes.’

‘I didn’t kill them, too, did I? Because it seems like I was in the bathroom, at least. And drawed a Z there.’

‘No, no, nothing like th—’

‘I looked for the Zappit like you asked me to, I’m sure of that. I looked hard, but I didn’t find it anywhere. I think maybe she throwed it away.’

‘That doesn’t matter anymore. Just make your mark here, okay? Make it in at least ten places.’ A thought occurs. ‘Can you still count to ten?’

‘One… two… three…’

Brady glances at Babineau’s Rolex. Quarter past four. Morning rounds in the Bucket begin at five. Time is fleeting on wingéd feet. ‘That’s great. Make your mark in at least ten places. Then you can go back to sleep.’

‘Okay. I’ll make my mark in at least ten places, then I’ll sleep, then I’ll drive over to that house you want me to watch. Or should I stop doing that now that they’re dead?’

‘I think you can stop now. Let’s review, okay? Who killed my wife?’

‘I did, but it wasn’t my fault. I was hypnotized, and I can’t even remember.’ Z-Boy begins to cry. ‘Will you come back, Dr Z?’

Brady smiles, exposing Babineau’s expensive dental work. ‘Sure.’ His eyes move up and to the left as he says it.

He watches the old guy shuffle to the huge God-I’m-rich television mounted on the wall and draw a large Z on the screen. Zs all over the murder scene aren’t absolutely necessary, but Brady thinks it will be a nice touch, especially when the police ask the former Library Al for his name and he tells them it’s Z-Boy. Just a bit of extra filigree on a finely crafted piece of jewelry.

Brady goes to the front door, stepping over Cora again on the way. He bops down the porch steps and does a dance move at the bottom, snapping Babineau’s fingers. That hurts a little, just a touch of incipient arthritis, but so what? Brady knows what real pain is, and a few twinges in the old phalanges ain’t it.

He jogs to Al’s Malibu. Not much of a ride compared to the late Dr Babineau’s BMW, but it will get him where he needs to go. He starts it and frowns when classical shit comes pouring out of the dashboard speaker. He switches to BAM-100 and finds some Black Sabbath from back when Ozzy was still cool. He takes a final look at the Beemer parked askew on the lawn, then gets rolling.

Miles to go before he sleeps, and then the final touch, the cherry on top of the sundae. He won’t need Freddi Linklatter for that, only Dr B.’s MacBook. He’s running without a leash now.

He’s free.

Around the time Z-Boy is proving that he can still count to ten, Freddi Linklatter’s blood-caked lashes come unstuck from her blood-caked cheeks. She finds herself looking into a gaping brown eye. It takes her several long moments to decide it isn’t really an eye, only a swirl of woodgrain that looks like an eye. She is lying on the floor and suffering the worst hangover of her life, even worse than after that cataclysmic party to celebrate her twenty-first, when she mixed crystal meth with Ronrico. She thought later that she was lucky to have survived that little experiment. Now she almost wishes she hadn’t, because this is worse. It’s not only her head; her chest feels like Marshawn Lynch has been using her for a tackling dummy.

She tells her hands to move and they reluctantly answer the call. She places them in push-up position and shoves. She comes up, but her top shirt stays down, stuck to the floor in a pool of what looks like blood and smells suspiciously like Scotch. So that’s what she was drinking, and fell over her own stupid feet. Smacked her head. But dear God, how much did she put away?

It wasn’t like that, she thinks. Someone came, and you know who it was.

It’s a simple process of deduction. Lately she’s only had two visitors here, the Z-Dudes, and the one who wears the ratty parka hasn’t been around for awhile.

She tries to get to her feet, and can’t make it at first. Nor can she take more than shallow breaths. Deeper ones hurt her above her left breast. It feels like something is sticking in there.

My flask?

I was spinning it while I waited for him to show up. To give me the final payment and get out of my life.

‘Shot me,’ she croaks. ‘Fucking Dr Z shot me.’

She staggers into the bathroom and is hardly able to believe the train wreck she sees in the mirror. The left side of her face is covered with blood, and there’s a purple knob rising from a gash above her left temple, but that’s not the worst. Her blue chambray shirt is also matted with blood – mostly from the head wound, she hopes, head wounds bleed like crazy – and there’s a round black hole in the left breast pocket. He shot her, all right. Now she remembers the bang and the smell of gunsmoke just before she passed out.

She tweezes her shaking fingers into the breast pocket, still taking those shallow breaths, and pulls out her pack of Marlboro Lights. There’s the bullet hole right through the middle of the M. She drops the cigarettes into the basin, works at the buttons of the shirt, and lets it fall to the floor. The smell of Scotch is stronger now. The shirt beneath is khaki, with big flap pockets. When she tries to pull the flask from the one on the left, she utters a low mewl of agony – all she can manage without taking a deeper breath – but when she gets it free, the pain in her chest lessens a little. The bullet also went through the flask, and the prongs on the side closest to her skin are bright with blood. She drops the ruined flask on top of the Marlboros, and goes to work on the khaki shirt’s buttons. This takes longer, but eventually it also falls to the floor. Beneath it is an American Giant tee, the kind that also has a pocket. She reaches into it and takes out a tin of Altoids. There’s a hole in this, too. The tee has no buttons, so she works her pinky finger into the bullet hole in the pocket and pulls. The shirt tears, and at last she’s looking at her own skin, freckled with blood.

There’s a hole just where the scant swell of her breast begins, and in it she can see a black thing. It looks like a dead bug. She tears the rip in the shirt wider, using three fingers now, then reaches in and grasps the bug. She wiggles it like a loose tooth.

‘Oooo… ooooh… ooooh, FUCK…’

It comes free, not a bug but a slug. She looks at it, then drops it into the sink with the other stuff. In spite of her aching head and the throbbing in her chest, Freddi realizes how absurdly fortunate she has been. It was just a little gun, but at such close range, even a little gun should have done the job. It would have, too, if not for a one-in-a-thousand lucky break. First through the cigarettes, then through the flask – which had been the real stopper – then through the Altoids tin, then into her. How close to her heart? An inch? Less?

Her stomach clenches, wanting to puke. She won’t let it, can’t let it. The hole in her chest will start bleeding again, but that’s not the main thing. Her head will explode. That’s the main thing.

Her breathing is a little easier now that she’s removed the flask with its nasty (but lifesaving) prongs of metal. She plods back into her living room and stares at the puddle of blood and Scotch on the floor. If he had bent over and put the muzzle of the gun to the back of her neck… just to make sure…

Freddi closes her eyes and fights to retain consciousness as waves of faintness and nausea float through her. When it’s a little better, she goes to her chair and sits down very slowly. Like an old lady with a bad back, she thinks. She stares at the ceiling. What now?

Her first thought is to call 911, get an ambulance over here and go to the hospital, but what will she tell them? That a man claiming to be a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness knocked on her door, and when she opened it, he shot her? Shot her why? For what? And why would she, a woman living alone, open her door to a stranger at ten thirty in the evening?

That isn’t all. The police will come. In her bedroom is an ounce of pot and an eightball of coke. She could get rid of that shit, but what about the shit in her computer room? She’s got half a dozen illegal hacks going on, plus a ton of expensive equipment that she didn’t exactly buy. The cops will want to know if just perchance, Ms Linklatter, the man who shot you had something to do with said electronic gear. Maybe you owed him money for it? Maybe you were working with him, stealing credit card numbers and other personal info? And they can hardly miss the repeater, blinking away like a Las Vegas slot machine as it sends out its endless signal via WiFi, delivering a customized malware worm every time it finds a live Zappit.

What’s this, Ms Linklatter? What exactly does it do?

And what will she tell them?

She looks around, hoping to see the envelope of cash lying on the floor or the couch, but of course he took it with him. If there was ever cash in there at all, and not just cut-up strips of newspaper. She’s here, she’s shot, she’s had a concussion (please God not a fracture) and she’s low on dough. What to do?

Turn off the repeater, that’s the first thing. Dr Z has got Brady Hartsfield inside him, and Brady is a bad motorcycle. Whatever the repeater’s doing is nasty shit. She was going to turn it off anyway, wasn’t she? It’s all a little vague, but wasn’t that the plan? To turn it off and exit stage left? She doesn’t have that final payment to help finance her flight, but despite her loose habits with cash, there’s still a few thousand in the bank, and Corn Trust opens at nine. Plus, there’s her ATM card. So turn off the repeater, nip that creepy zeetheend site in the bud, wash the gore off her face, and get the fuck out of Dodge. Not by plane, these days airport security areas are like baited traps, but by any bus or train headed into the golden west. Isn’t that the best idea?

She’s up and shuffling toward the door of the computer room when the obvious reason why it is not the best idea hits her. Brady is gone, but he wouldn’t leave if he couldn’t monitor his projects from a distance, especially the repeater, and doing that is the easiest thing in the world. He’s smart about computers – brilliant, actually, although it pisses her off to admit it – and he’s almost certainly left himself a back door into her setup. If so, he can check in any time he wants; all it will take is a laptop. If she shuts his shit down, he’ll know, and he’ll know she’s still alive.

He’ll come back.

‘So what do I do?’ Freddi whispers. She trudges to her window, shivering – it’s so fucking cold in this apartment once winter comes – and looks out into the dark. ‘What do I do now?’

Hodges is dreaming of Bowser, the feisty little mongrel he had when he was a kid. His father hauled Bowser to the vet and had him put down, over Hodges’s weeping protests, after ole Bowse bit the newspaper boy badly enough to require stitches. In this dream Bowser is biting him, biting him in the side. He won’t let go even when young Billy Hodges offers him the best treat in the treat bag, and the pain is excruciating. The doorbell is ringing and he thinks, That’s the paperboy, go bite him, you’re supposed to bite him.

Only as he swims up from this dream and back into the real world, he realizes it isn’t the doorbell, it’s the phone by his bed. The landline. He gropes for it, drops it, picks it up off the duvet, and manages a furry approximation of hello.

‘Figured you’d have your cell on do not disturb,’ Pete Huntley says. He sounds wide awake and weirdly jovial. Hodges squints at the bedside clock but can’t read it. His bottle of painkillers, already half empty, is blocking the digital readout. Jesus, how many did he take yesterday?

‘I don’t know how to do that, either.’ Hodges struggles to a sitting position. He can’t believe the pain has gotten so bad so fast. It’s as if it was just waiting to be identified before pouncing with all its claws out.

‘You need to get a life, Kerm.’

A little late for that, he thinks, swinging his legs out of bed.

‘Why are you calling at…’ He moves the bottle of pills. ‘At twenty to seven in the morning?’

‘Couldn’t wait to give you the good news,’ Pete says. ‘Brady Hartsfield is dead. A nurse discovered him on morning rounds.’

Hodges shoots to his feet, producing a stab of pain he hardly feels. ‘What? How?’

‘There’ll be an autopsy later today, but the doctor who examined him is leaning toward suicide. There’s a residue of something on his tongue and gums. The doc on call took a sample, and a guy from the ME’s office is taking another as we speak. They’re going to rush the analysis, Hartsfield being such a rock star and all.’

‘Suicide,’ Hodges says, running a hand through his already crazed hair. The news is simple enough, but he still can’t seem to take it in. ‘Suicide?’

‘He was always a fan,’ Pete says. ‘I believe you might have said that yourself, and more than once.’

‘Yeah, but…’

But what? Pete’s right, Brady was a fan of suicide, and not just the other guy’s. He had been ready to die at the City Center Job Fair in 2009, if things worked out that way, and a year later he rolled a wheelchair into Mingo Auditorium with three pounds of plastic explosive strapped to the seat. Which put his ass at ground zero. Only that was then, and things have changed. Haven’t they?

‘But what?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hodges says.

‘I do. He finally found a way to do it. Simple as that. In any case, if you thought Hartsfield was somehow involved in the deaths of Ellerton, Stover, and Scapelli – and I have to tell you I had my own thoughts along that line – you can stop worrying. He’s a gone goose, a toasty turkey, a baked buzzard, and we all say hooray.’

‘Pete, I need to process this a little.’

‘No doubt,’ Pete says. ‘You had quite the history with him. Meanwhile, I have to call Izzy. Get her day started on the good foot.’

‘Will you call me when you get back the analysis of whatever he swallowed?’

‘Indeed I will. Meanwhile, sayonara Mr Mercedes, right?’

‘Right, right.’

Hodges hangs up the phone, walks into the kitchen, and puts on a pot of coffee. He should have tea, coffee will burn the shit out of his poor struggling innards, but right now he doesn’t care. And he won’t take any pills, not for awhile. He needs to be as clearheaded about this as he possibly can.

He snatches his mobile off the charger and calls Holly. She answers at once, and he wonders briefly what time she gets up. Five? Even earlier? Maybe some questions are best left unanswered. He tells her what Pete just told him, and for once in her life, Holly Gibney does not gild her profanity.

‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!’

‘Not unless Pete was kidding, and I don’t think he was. He doesn’t try joking until mid-afternoon, and he’s not very good at it then.’

Silence for a moment, and then Holly asks, ‘Do you believe it?’

‘That he’s dead, yes. It could hardly be a case of mistaken identity. That he committed suicide? To me that seems…’ He fishes for the right phrase, can’t find it, and repeats what he said to his old partner not five minutes before. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it over?’

‘Maybe not.’

‘That’s what I think, too. We have to find out what happened to the Zappits that were left over after the company went broke. I don’t understand how Brady Hartsfield could have had anything to do with them, but so many of the connections go back to him. And to the concert he tried to blow up.’

‘I know.’ Hodges is again picturing a web with a big old spider at the center of it, one full of poison. Only the spider is dead.

And we all say hooray, he thinks.

‘Holly, can you be at the hospital when the Robinsons come to pick up Barbara?’

‘I can do that.’ After a pause she adds, ‘I’d like to do that. I’ll call Tanya to make sure it’s okay, but I’m sure it is. Why?’

‘I want you to show Barb a six-pack. Five elderly white guys in suits, plus Dr Felix Babineau.’

‘You think Myron Zakim was Hartsfield’s doctor? That he was the one who gave Barbara and Hilda those Zappits?’

‘At this point it’s just a hunch.’

But that’s modest. It’s actually a bit more. Babineau gave Hodges a cock-and-bull story to keep him out of Brady’s room, then nearly blew a gasket when Hodges asked if he was all right. And Norma Wilmer claims he’s been conducting unauthorized experiments on Brady. Investigate Babineau, she said in Bar Bar Black Sheep. Get him in trouble. I dare you. As a man who probably has only months to live, that doesn’t seem like much of a dare.

‘Okay. I respect your hunches, Bill. And I’m sure I can find a society-page picture of Dr Babineau from one of those charity events they’re always having for the hospital.’

‘Good. Now refresh me on the name of the bankruptcy trustee guy.’

‘Todd Schneider. You should call him at eight thirty. If I’m with the Robinsons, I won’t be in until later. I’ll bring Jerome with me.’

‘Yeah, good. Have you got Schneider’s number?’

‘I emailed it to you. You remember how to access your email, don’t you?’

‘It’s cancer, Holly, not Alzheimer’s.’

‘Today is your last day. Remember that, too.’

How can he forget? They’ll put him in the hospital where Brady died, and that will be that, Hodges’s last case left hanging fire. He hates the idea, but there’s no way around it. This is going fast.

‘Eat some breakfast.’

‘I will.’

He ends the call, and looks longingly at the fresh pot of coffee. The smell is wonderful. He turns it down the sink and gets dressed. He does not eat breakfast.

Finders Keepers seems very empty without Holly at her desk in the reception area, but at least the seventh floor of the Turner Building is quiet; the noisy crew from the travel agency down the hall won’t start to arrive for at least another hour.

Hodges thinks best with a yellow pad in front of him, jotting down ideas as they come, trying to tease out the connections and form a coherent picture. It’s the way he worked when he was on the cops, and he was capable of making those connections more often than not. He won a lot of citations over the years, but they’re piled helter-skelter on a shelf in his closet instead of hanging on a wall. The citations never mattered to him. The reward was the flash of light that came with the connections. He found himself unable to give it up. Hence Finders Keepers instead of retirement.

This morning there are no notes, only doodles of stick men climbing a hill, and cyclones, and flying saucers. He’s pretty sure most of the pieces to this puzzle are now on the table and all he has to do is figure out how to put them together, but Brady Hartsfield’s death is like a pileup on his personal information highway, blocking all traffic. Every time he glances at his watch, another five minutes have gone by. Soon enough he’ll have to call Schneider. By the time he gets off the phone with him, the noisy travel agency crew will be arriving. After them, Barbara and Jerome. Any chance of quiet thought will be gone.

Think of the connections, Holly said. They all go back to him. And the concert he tried to blow up.

Yes; yes they do. Because the only ones eligible to receive free Zappits from that website were people – young girls then, for the most part, teenagers now – who could prove they were at the ’Round Here show, and the website is now defunct. Like Brady, badconcert.com is a gone goose, a toasty turkey, a baked buzzard, and we all say hooray.

At last he prints two words amid the doodles, and circles them. One is Concert. The other is Residue.

He calls Kiner Memorial, and is transferred to the Bucket. Yes, he’s told, Norma Wilmer is in, but she’s busy and can’t come to the phone. Hodges guesses she’s very busy this morning, and hopes her hangover isn’t too bad. He leaves a message asking that she call him back as soon as she can, and emphasizes that it’s urgent.

He continues doodling until eight twenty-five (now it’s Zappits he’s drawing, possibly because he’s got Dinah Scott’s in his coat pocket), then calls Todd Schneider, who answers the phone personally.

Hodges identifies himself as a volunteer consumer advocate working with the Better Business Bureau, and says he’s been tasked with investigating some Zappit consoles that have shown up in the city. He keeps his tone easy, almost casual. ‘This is no big deal, especially since the Zappits were given away, but it seems that some of the recipients are downloading books from something called the Sunrise Readers Circle, and they’re coming through garbled.’

‘Sunrise Readers Circle?’ Schneider sounds bemused. No sign he’s getting ready to put up a shield of legalese, and that’s the way Hodges wants to keep it. ‘As in Sunrise Solutions?’

‘Well, yes, that’s what prompted the call. According to my information, Sunrise Solutions bought out Zappit, Inc., before going bankrupt.’

‘That’s true, but I’ve got a ton of paperwork on Sunrise Solutions, and I don’t recall anything about a Sunrise Readers Circle. And it would have stood out like a sore thumb. Sunrise was basically involved in gobbling up small electronics companies, looking for that one big hit. Which they never found, unfortunately.’

‘What about the Zappit Club? Ring any bells?’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Or a website called zeetheend.com?’ As he asks this question, Hodges smacks himself in the forehead. He should have checked that site for himself instead of filling a page with dumb doodles.

‘Nope, never heard of that, either.’ Now comes a tiny rattle of the legal shield. ‘Is this a consumer fraud issue? Because bankruptcy laws are very clear on the subject, and—’

‘Nothing like that,’ Hodges soothes. ‘Only reason we’re even involved is because of the jumbled downloads. And at least one of the Zappits was dead on arrival. The recipient wants to send it back, maybe get a new one.’

‘Not surprised someone got a dead console if it was from the last batch,’ Schneider says. ‘There were a lot of defectives, maybe thirty percent of the final run.’

‘As a matter of personal curiosity, how many were in that final run?’

‘I’d have to look up the number to be sure, but I think around forty thousand units. Zappit sued the manufacturer, even though suing Chinese companies is pretty much a fool’s game, but by then they were desperate to stay afloat. I’m only giving you this information because the whole business is done and dusted.’

‘Understood.’

‘Well, the manufacturing company – Yicheng Electronics – came back with all guns blazing. Probably not because of the money at stake, but because they were worried about their reputation. Can’t blame them there, can you?’

‘No.’ Hodges can’t wait any longer for pain relief. He takes out his bottle of pills, shakes out two, then reluctantly puts one back. He puts it under his tongue to melt, hoping it will work faster that way. ‘I guess you can’t.’

‘Yicheng claimed the defective units were damaged in shipping, probably by water. They said if it had been a software problem, all the games would have been defective. Makes a degree of sense to me, but I’m no electronics genius. Anyway, Zappit went under, and Sunrise Solutions elected not to proceed with the suit. They had bigger problems by then. Creditors snapping at their heels. Investors jumping ship.’

‘What happened to that final shipment?’

‘Well, they were an asset, of course, but not a very valuable one, due to the defect issue. I held onto them for awhile, and we advertised in the trades to retail companies that specialize in discounted items. Chains like the Dollar Store and Economy Wizard. Are you familiar with those?’

‘Yeah.’ Hodges had bought a pair of factory-second loafers at the local Dollar Store. They cost more than a buck, but they weren’t bad. Wore well.

‘Of course we had to make it clear that as many as three in every ten Zappit Commanders – that’s what the last iteration was called – might be defective, which meant each one would have to be checked. That killed any chance for selling the whole shipment. Checking the units one by one would have been too labor intensive.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘So, as bankruptcy trustee, I decided to have them destroyed and claim a tax credit, which would have amounted to… well, quite a lot. Not by General Motors standards, but mid-six figures. Clear the books, you understand.’

‘Right, makes sense.’

‘But before I could do that, I got a call from a fellow at a company called Gamez Unlimited, right there in your city. That’s games with a Z on the end. Called himself the CEO. Probably CEO of a three-man operation working out of two rooms or a garage.’ Schneider chuckles a big business New York chuckle. ‘Since the computer revolution really got rolling, these outfits pop up like weeds, although I never heard of any of them actually giving product away. It smells a trifle scammy, don’t you think?’

‘Yeah,’ Hodges says. The dissolving pill is exceedingly bitter, but the relief is sweet. He thinks that’s the case with a great many things in life. A Reader’s Digest insight, but that doesn’t make it invalid. ‘It does, actually.’

The legal shield has gone bye-bye. Schneider is animated now, wrapped up in his own story. ‘The guy offered to buy eight hundred Zappits at eighty dollars apiece, which was roughly a hundred dollars cheaper than the suggested retail. We dickered a bit and settled on a hundred.’

‘Per unit.’

‘Yes.’

‘Comes to eighty thousand dollars,’ Hodges says. He’s thinking of Brady, who had been hit with God only knew how many civil suits, for sums mounting into the tens of millions of dollars. Brady, who’d had – if Hodges’s memory serves him right – about eleven hundred dollars in the bank. ‘And you got a check for that amount?’

He’s not sure he’ll get an answer to the question – many lawyers would close the discussion off at this point – but he does. Probably because the Sunrise Solutions bankruptcy is all tied up in a nice legal bow. For Schneider, this is like a postgame interview. ‘Correct. Drawn on the Gamez Unlimited account.’

‘Cleared okay?’

Todd Schneider chuckles his big business chuckle. ‘If it hadn’t, those eight hundred Zappit consoles would have been recycled into new computer goodies along with the rest.’

Hodges scribbles some quick math on his doodle-decorated pad. If thirty percent of the eight hundred units were defective, that leaves five hundred and sixty working consoles. Or maybe not that many. Hilda Carver got one that had presumably been vetted – why else give it to her? – but according to Barbara, it had given a single blue flash and then died.

‘So off they went.’

‘Yes, via UPS from a warehouse in Terre Haute. A very small recoupment, but something. We do what we can for our clients, Mr Hodges.’

‘I’m sure you do.’ And we all say hooray, Hodges thinks. ‘Do you recall the address those eight hundred Zappits went to?’

‘No, but it will be in the files. Give me your email and I’ll be happy to send it to you, on condition you call me back and tell me what sort of scam these Gamez people have been working.’

‘Happy to do that, Mr Schneider.’ It’ll be a box number, Hodges thinks, and the box holder will be long gone. Still, it will need to be checked out. Holly can do it while he’s in the hospital, getting treatment for something that almost certainly can’t be cured. ‘You’ve been very helpful, Mr Schneider. One more question, and I’ll let you go. Do you happen to remember the name of the Gamez Unlimited CEO?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Schneider says. ‘I assumed that’s why the company was Gamez with a Z instead of an S.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘The CEO’s name was Myron Zakim.’

Hodges hangs up and opens Firefox. He types in zeetheend and finds himself looking at a cartoon man swinging a cartoon pickaxe. Clouds of dirt fly up, forming the same message over and over.

Another idea worthy of Reader’s Digest, Hodges thinks, and goes to his window. Morning traffic on Lower Marlborough is moving briskly. He realizes, with wonder and gratitude, that the pain in his side has entirely disappeared for the first time in days. He could almost believe nothing is wrong with him, but the bitter taste in his mouth contradicts that.

The bitter taste, he thinks. The residue.

His cell rings. It’s Norma Wilmer, her voice pitched so low he has to strain to hear. ‘If this is about the so-called visitors list, I haven’t had a chance to look for it yet. This place is crawling with police and cheap suits from the district attorney’s office. You’d think Hartsfield escaped instead of died.’

‘It’s not about the list, although I still need that info, and if you can get it to me today, it’s worth another fifty dollars. Get it to me before noon, and I’ll make it a hundred.’

‘Jesus, what’s the big deal with this? I asked Georgia Frederick – she’s been bouncing back and forth between Ortho and the Bucket for the last ten years – and she says the only person she ever saw visiting Hartsfield besides you was some ratty chick with tattoos and a Marine haircut.’

This rings no bells with Hodges, but there is a faint vibration. Which he doesn’t trust. He wants to put this thing together too badly, and that means he must step with special care.

‘What do you want, Bill? I’m in a fucking linen closet, it’s hot, and I’ve got a headache.’

‘My old partner called and told me Brady swallowed some shit and killed himself. What that says to me is he must have stockpiled enough dope over time to do it. Is that possible?’

‘It is. It’s also possible I could land a 767 jumbo jet if the whole flight crew died of food poisoning, but both things are very fucking unlikely. I’ll tell you what I told the cops and the two most annoying yappers from the DA’s office. Brady got Anaprox-DS on PE days, one pill with food before, one late in the day if he asked, which he rarely did. Anaprox isn’t really much more powerful when it comes to controlling pain than Advil, which you can buy OTC. He also had Extra Strength Tylenol on his chart, but only asked for it on a few occasions.’

‘How did the DA guys react to that?’

‘Right now they’re operating under the theory that he swallowed a shitload of Anaprox.’

‘But you don’t buy it?’

‘Of course I don’t! Where would he hide that many pills, up his bony bedsored ass? I have to go. I’ll get back to you on the visitors list. If there ever was one, that is.’

‘Thank you, Norma. Try some Anaprox for that headache of yours.’

‘Fuck you, Bill.’ But she says it with a laugh.

The first thought to cross Hodges’s mind when Jerome walks in is Holy shit, kiddo, you grew up!

When Jerome Robinson came to work for him – first as the kid who cut his grass, then as an all-around handyman, finally as the tech angel who kept his computer up and running – he was a weedy teenager, going about five-eight and a hundred and forty pounds. The young giant in the doorway is six-two if he’s an inch, and at least a hundred and ninety. He was always good-looking, but now he’s movie star good-looking and all muscled out.

The subject in question breaks into a grin, strides quickly across the office, and embraces Hodges. He squeezes, but lets go in a hurry when he sees Hodges wince. ‘Jesus, sorry.’

‘You didn’t hurt me, just happy to see you, my man.’ His vision is a little blurry and he wipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes.’

‘You too. How you feeling?’

‘Right now, good. I’ve got pills for pain, but you’re better medicine.’

Holly is standing in the doorway, sensible winter coat unzipped, small hands linked at her waist. She’s watching them with an unhappy smile. Hodges wouldn’t have believed there was such a thing, but apparently there is.

‘Come on over, Holly,’ he says. ‘No group hug, I promise. Have you filled Jerome in on this business?’

‘He knows about Barbara’s part, but I thought I’d better let you tell the rest.’

Jerome briefly cups the back of Hodges’s neck with a big warm hand. ‘Holly says you’re going into the hospital tomorrow for more tests and a treatment plan, and if you try to argue, I’m supposed to tell you to shut up.’

‘Not shut up,’ Holly says, looking at Jerome severely. ‘I never used that phrase.’

Jerome grins. ‘You had be quiet on your lips, but shut up in your eyes.’

‘Fool,’ she says, but the smile returns. Happy we’re together, Hodges thinks, sad because of the reason why. He breaks up this strangely pleasant sibling rivalry by asking how Barbara is.

‘Okay. Fractures of the tibia and fibula, mid-shaft. Could have happened on the soccer field or skiing on a bunny slope. Supposed to heal with no problem. She’s got a cast and is already complaining about how it itches underneath. Mom went out to get her a scratcher thing.’

‘Holly, did you show her the six-pack?’

‘I did, and she picked out Dr Babineau. Never even hesitated.’

I have a few questions for you, Doc, Hodges thinks, and I intend to get some answers before my last day is over. If I have to squeeze you to get them, make your eyes pop out a little, that will be just fine.

Jerome settles on one corner of Hodges’s desk, his usual perch. ‘Run through the whole thing for me, from the beginning. I might see something new.’

Hodges does most of the talking. Holly goes to the window and looks out on Lower Marlborough, arms crossed, hands cupping her shoulders. She adds something from time to time, but mostly she just listens.

When Hodges is done, Jerome asks, ‘How sure are you about this mind-over-matter thing?’

Hodges considers. ‘Eighty percent. Maybe more. It’s wild, but there are too many stories to discount it.’

‘If he could do it, it’s my fault,’ Holly says without turning from the window. ‘When I hit him with your Happy Slapper, Bill, it could have rearranged his brains somehow. Given him access to the ninety percent of gray matter we never use.’

‘Maybe,’ Hodges says, ‘but if you hadn’t clobbered him, you and Jerome would be dead.’

‘Along with a lot of other people,’ Jerome says. ‘And the hit might not have had anything to do with it. Whatever Babineau was feeding him could have done more than bring him out of his coma. Experimental drugs sometimes have unexpected effects, you know.’

‘Or it could have been a combination of the two,’ Hodges says. He can’t believe they’re having this conversation, but not to have it would fly in the face of rule one in the detective biz: you go where the facts lead you.

‘He hated you, Bill,’ Jerome says. ‘Instead of killing yourself, which is what he wanted, you came after him.’

‘And turned his own weapon against him,’ Holly adds, still without turning and still hugging herself. ‘You used Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to force him into the open. It was him who sent you that message two nights ago, I know it was. Brady Hartsfield, calling himself Z-Boy.’ Now she turns. ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face. You stopped him at the Mingo—’

‘No, I was downstairs having a heart attack. You were the one who stopped him, Holly.’

She shakes her head fiercely. ‘He doesn’t know that, because he never saw me. Do you think I could forget what happened that night? I’ll never forget it. Barbara was sitting across the aisle a few rows up, and it was her he was looking at, not me. I shouted something at him, and hit him as soon as he started to turn his head. Then I hit him again. Oh God, I hit him so hard.’

Jerome starts toward her, but she motions him back. Eye contact is hard for her, but now she’s looking straight at Hodges, and her eyes are blazing.

‘You goaded him out into the open, you were the one who figured out his password so we could crack his computer and find out what he was going to do. You were the one he always blamed. I know that. And then you kept going to his room, sitting there and talking to him.’

‘And you think that’s why he did this, whatever this is?’

‘No!’ She nearly shrieks it. ‘He did it because he was fracking crazy!’ There’s a pause, and then in a meek voice she says she’s sorry for raising her voice.

‘Don’t apologize, Hollyberry,’ Jerome says. ‘You thrill me when you’re masterful.’

She makes a face at him. Jerome snorts a laugh and asks Hodges about Dinah Scott’s Zappit. ‘I’d like a look at it.’

‘My coat pocket,’ Hodges says, ‘but watch out for the Fishin’ Hole demo.’

Jerome rummages in Hodges’s coat, rejects a roll of Tums and the ever-present detective’s notebook, and brings out Dinah’s green Zappit. ‘Holy joe. I thought these things went out with VCRs and dial-up modems.’

‘They pretty much did,’ Holly says, ‘and the price didn’t help. I checked. A hundred and eighty-nine dollars, suggested retail, back in 2012. Ridiculous.’

Jerome tosses the Zappit from hand to hand. His face is grim, and he looks tired. Well, sure, Hodges thinks. He was building houses in Arizona yesterday. Had to rush home because his normally cheerful sister tried to kill herself.

Maybe Jerome sees some of this on Hodges’s face. ‘Barb’s leg will be fine. It’s her mind I’m a little worried about. She talks about blue flashes, and a voice she heard. Coming from the game.’

‘She says it’s still in her head,’ Holly adds. ‘Like some piece of music that turns into an earworm. It will probably pass in time, now that her game is broken, but what about the others who got the consoles?’

‘With the badconcert website down, is there any way of finding out how many others did?’

Holly and Jerome look at each other, then give identical head shakes.

‘Shit,’ Hodges says. ‘I mean I’m not all that surprised, but still… shit.’

‘Does this one give out blue flashes?’ Jerome still hasn’t turned the Zappit on, just keeps playing hot potato with it.

‘Nope, and the pink fish don’t turn into numbers. Try it for yourself.’

Instead of doing that, Jerome turns it over and opens the battery compartment. ‘Plain old double As,’ he says. ‘The rechargeable kind. No magic there. But the Fishin’ Hole demo really makes you sleepy?’

‘It did me,’ Hodges says. He does not add that he was medicated up the wazoo at the time. ‘Right now I’m more interested in Babineau. He’s part of this. I don’t understand how that partnership came about, but if he’s still alive, he’s going to tell us. And there’s someone else involved, too.’

‘The man the housekeeper saw,’ Holly says. ‘The one who drives an old car with the primer spots. Do you want to know what I think?’

‘Hit me.’

‘One of them, either Dr Babineau or the man with the old car, paid a visit to the nurse, Ruth Scapelli. Hartsfield must have had something against her.’

‘How could he send anyone anywhere?’ Jerome asks, sliding the battery cover back into place with a click. ‘Mind control? According to you, Bill, the most he could do with his telekiwhatzis was turn on the water in his bathroom, and it’s hard for me to accept even that. It could be just so much talk. A hospital legend instead of an urban one.’

‘It has to be the games,’ Hodges muses. ‘He did something to the games. Amped them up, somehow.’

‘From his hospital room?’ Jerome gives him a look that says be serious.

‘I know, it doesn’t make sense, not even if you add in the telekinesis. But it has to be the games. Has to be.’

‘Babineau will know,’ Holly says.

‘She’s a poet and don’t know it,’ Jerome says moodily. He’s still tossing the console back and forth. Hodges has a feeling that he’s resisting an impulse to throw it on the floor and stomp on it, and that’s sort of reasonable. After all, one just like it almost got his sister killed.

No, Hodges thinks. Not just like it. The Fishin’ Hole demo on Dinah’s Zappit generates a mild hypnotic effect, but nothing else. And it’s probably…

He straightens suddenly, provoking a twinge of pain in his side. ‘Holly, have you searched for Fishin’ Hole info on the Net?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I never thought of it.’

‘Would you do it now? What I want to know—’

‘If there’s chatter about the demo screen. I should have thought of that myself. I’ll do it now.’ She hurries into the outer office.

‘What I don’t understand,’ Hodges says, ‘is why Brady would kill himself before seeing how it all came out.’

‘You mean before seeing how many kids he could get to off themselves,’ Jerome says. ‘Kids who were at that fucking concert. Because that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ Hodges says. ‘There are too many blank spots, Jerome. Far too many. I don’t even know how he killed himself. If he actually did.’

Jerome presses the heels of his hands to his temples as if to keep his brain from swelling. ‘Please don’t tell me you think he’s still alive.’

‘No, he’s dead, all right. Pete wouldn’t make a mistake about that. What I’m saying is maybe somebody murdered him. Based on what we know, Babineau would be the prime suspect.’

‘Holy poop!’ Holly cries from the other room.

Hodges and Jerome happen to be looking at each other when she says it, and there is a moment of divine harmony as they both struggle against laughter.

‘What?’ Hodges calls. It’s all he can manage without bursting into mad brays of hilarity, which would hurt his side as well as Holly’s feelings.

‘I found a site called Fishin’ Hole Hypnosis! The start-page warns parents not to let their kids look at the demo screen too long! It was first noticed in the arcade game version back in 2005! The Game Boy fixed it, but the Zappit… wait a sec… they said they did, but they didn’t! There’s a whole big long thread!’

Hodges looks at Jerome.

‘She means an online conversation,’ Jerome says.

‘A kid in Des Moines passed out, hit his head on the edge of his desk, and fractured his skull!’ She sounds almost gleeful as she gets up and rushes back to them. Her cheeks are flushed and rosy. ‘There would have been lawsuits! I bet that’s one of the reasons the Zappit company went out of business! It might even have been one of the reasons why Sunrise Solutions—’

The phone on her desk begins to ring.

‘Oh, frack,’ she says, turning toward it.

‘Tell whoever it is that we’re closed today.’

But after saying Hello, you’ve reached Finders Keepers, Holly just listens. Then she turns, holding out the handset.

‘It’s Pete Huntley. He says he has to talk to you right away, and he sounds… funny. Like he’s sad or mad or something.’

Hodges goes into the outer office to find out what’s got Pete sounding sad or mad or something.

Behind him, Jerome finally powers up Dinah Scott’s Zappit.

In Freddi Linklatter’s computer nest (Freddi herself has taken four Excedrin and gone to sleep in her bedroom), 44 FOUND changes to 45 FOUND. The repeater flashes LOADING.

Then it flashes TASK COMPLETE.

Pete doesn’t say hello. What he says is, ‘Take it, Kerm. Take it and beat it until the truth falls out. Bitch is in the house with a couple of SKIDs, and I’m out back in a whatever-it-is. Potting shed, I think, and it’s cold as hell.’

Hodges is at first too surprised to answer, and not because a pair of SKIDs – the city cops’ acronym for State Criminal Investigation Division detectives – is on some scene Pete is working. He’s surprised (in truth almost flabbergasted) because in all their long association he’s only heard Pete use the b-word in connection with an actual woman a single time. That was when speaking of his mother-in-law, who urged Pete’s wife to leave, and took her in, along with the children, when she finally did. The bitch he’s talking about this time can only be his partner, aka Miss Pretty Gray Eyes.

‘Kermit? Are you there?’

‘I’m here,’ Hodges says. ‘Where are you?’

‘Sugar Heights. Dr Felix Babineau’s house on scenic Lilac Drive. Hell, his fucking estate. You know who Babineau is, I know you do. No one kept closer tabs on Brady Hartsfield than you. For awhile there he was your fucking hobby.’

‘Who you’re talking about, yes. What you’re talking about, no.’

‘This whole thing is going to blow up, partner, and Izzy doesn’t want to get hit with the shrapnel when it does. She’s got ambitions, see? Chief of Detectives in ten years, maybe Chief of Police in fifteen. I get it, but that doesn’t mean I like it. She called Chief Horgan behind my back, and Horgan called the SKIDs. If it’s not officially their case now, it will be by noon. They’ve got their perp, but the shit’s not right. I know it, and Izzy does, too. She just doesn’t give a rat’s ass.’

‘You need to slow down, Pete. Tell me what’s going on.’

Holly is hovering anxiously. Hodges shrugs his shoulders and raises a finger: wait.

‘Housekeeper gets here at seven thirty, okay? Nora Everly by name. And at the top of the drive she sees Babineau’s BMW on the lawn, with a bullet hole in the windshield. She looks inside, sees blood on the steering wheel and the seat, calls 911. There’s a cop car five minutes away – in the Heights there’s always one five minutes away – and when it arrives, Everly’s sitting in her car with all the doors locked, shaking like a leaf. The unis tell her to stay put, and go to the door. The place is unlocked. Mrs Babineau – Cora – is lying dead in the hall, and I’m sure the bullet the ME digs out of her will match the one forensics dug out of the Beemer. On her forehead – are you ready for this? – there’s the letter Z in black ink. More all around the downstairs, including one on the TV screen. Just like the one at the Ellerton place, and I think it was right about then my partner decided she wanted no part of this particular tarbaby.’

Hodges says, ‘Yeah, probably,’ just to keep Pete talking. He grabs the pad beside Holly’s computer and prints BABINEAU’S WIFE MURDERED in big block letters, like a newspaper headline. Her hand flies to her mouth.

‘While one of the cops is calling Division, the other one hears snores coming from upstairs. Like a chainsaw on idle, he said. So they go up, guns drawn, and in one of the three guest bedrooms, count em, three, the place is fucking huge, they find an old fart fast asleep. They wake him up and he gives his name as Alvin Brooks.’

‘Library Al!’ Hodges shouts. ‘From the hospital! The first Zappit I ever saw was one he showed me!’

‘Yeah, that’s the guy. He had a Kiner ID badge in his shirt pocket. And without prompting, he says he killed Mrs Babineau. Claims he did it while he was hypnotized. So they cuff him, take him downstairs, and sit him on the couch. That’s where Izzy and me found him when we entered the scene half an hour or so later. I don’t know what’s wrong with the guy, whether he had a nervous breakdown or what, but he’s on Planet Purple. He keeps going off on tangents, spouting all sorts of weird shit.’

Hodges recollects something Al said to him on one of his last visits to Brady’s room – right around Labor Day weekend of 2014, that would have been. ‘Never so good as what you don’t see.’

‘Yeah.’ Pete sounds surprised. ‘Like that. And when Izzy asked who hypnotized him, he said it was the fish. The ones by the beautiful sea.’

To Hodges, this now makes sense.

‘On further questioning – I did it, by then Izzy must have been in the kitchen, busy ditching the whole thing without asking for my input – he said Dr Z told him to, I quote, “make his mark.” Ten times, he said, and sure enough, there are ten Zs, including the one on the deceased’s forehead. I asked him if Dr Z was Dr Babineau, and he said no, Dr Z was Brady Hartsfield. Crazy, see?’

‘Yeah,’ Hodges says.

‘I asked him if he shot Dr Babineau, too. He just shook his head and said he wanted to go back to sleep. Right around then Izzy comes tripping back from the kitchen and says Chief Horgan called the SKIDs, on account of Dr B. is a high-profile guy and this is going to be a high-profile case, and besides, a pair of them happened to be right here in the city, waiting to be called to testify in a case, isn’t that convenient. She won’t meet my eye, she’s all flushed, and when I start pointing around at all the Zs, asking her if they don’t look familiar, she won’t talk about it.’

Hodges has never heard such anger and frustration in his old partner’s voice.

‘So then my cell rings, and… you remember when I reached out to you this morning I said the doc on call took a sample of the residue in Hartsfield’s mouth? Before the ME guy even got there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, the phone call was from that doc. Simonson, his name is. The ME’s analysis won’t be back for two days at the soonest, but Simonson did one right away. The stuff in Hartsfield’s mouth was a combination of Vicodin and Ambien. Hartsfield wasn’t prescribed either one, and he could hardly dance his way down to the nearest med locker and score some, could he?’

Hodges, who already knows what Brady was taking for pain, agrees that that would be unlikely.

‘Right now Izzy’s in the house, probably watching from the background and keeping her mouth shut while the SKIDs question this Brooks guy, who honest-to-God can’t remember his own name unless he’s prompted. Otherwise he calls himself Z-Boy. Like something out of a Marvel comic book.’

Clutching the pen in his hand almost hard enough to snap it in two, Hodges prints more headline caps on the pad, with Holly bending over to read as he writes: LIBRARY AL LEFT THE MESSAGE ON DEBBIE’S BLUE UMBRELLA.

Holly stares at him with wide eyes.

‘Just before the SKIDs arrived – man, they didn’t take long – I asked Brooks if he also killed Brady Hartsfield. Izzy says to him, “Don’t answer that!”’

‘She said what?’ Hodges exclaims. He doesn’t have much room in his head right now to worry about Pete’s deteriorating relationship with his partner, but he’s still amazed. Izzy’s a police detective, after all, not Library Al’s defense attorney.

‘You heard me. Then she looks at me and says, “You haven’t given him the words.” So I turn to one of the uniforms and ask, “Did you guys Mirandize this gentleman?” And of course they say yeah. I look at Izzy and she’s redder in the face than ever, but she won’t back down. She says, “If we fuck this up, it won’t come back on you, you’re done in another couple of weeks, but it’ll come back on me, and hard.”’

‘So the state boys turn up…’

‘Yeah, and now I’m out here in the late Mrs Babineau’s potting shed, or whatever the fuck it is, freezing my ass off. The richest part of the city, Kerm, and I’m in a shack colder than a welldigger’s belt buckle. I bet Izzy knows I’m calling you, too. Tattling to my dear old Uncle Kermit.’

Pete is probably right about that. But if Miss Pretty Gray Eyes is as set on climbing the ladder as Pete believes, she’s probably thinking of an uglier word: snitching.

‘This Brooks guy is out of whatever little mind he’s got left, which makes him the perfect donkey to pin the tail on when this hits the media. You know how they’re going to lay it out?’

Hodges does, but lets Pete say it.

‘Brooks got it in his head that he was some avenger of justice called Z-Boy. He came here, he killed Mrs Babineau when she opened the door, then killed the doc himself when Babineau got in his Beemer and tried to flee. Brooks then drove to the hospital and fed Hartsfield a bunch of pills from the Babineaus’ private stash. I don’t doubt that part, because they had a fucking pharmacy in their medicine cabinet. And sure, he could have gotten up to the Brain Injury Clinic without any problem, he’s got an ID card, and he’s been a hospital fixture for the last six or seven years, but why? And what did he do with Babineau’s body? Because it’s not here.’

‘Good question.’

Pete plunges on. ‘They’ll say Brooks loaded it into his own car and ditched it somewhere, probably in a ravine or a culvert, and probably when he was coming back from feeding Hartsfield those pills, but why do that when he left the woman’s body lying right there in the hall? And why come back here in the first place?’

‘They’ll say—’

‘Yeah, that he’s crazy! Sure they will! Perfect answer for anything that doesn’t make sense! And if Ellerton and Stover come up at all – which they probably won’t – they’ll say he killed them, too!’

If they do, Hodges thinks, Nancy Alderson will backstop the story, at least to a degree. Because it was undoubtedly Library Al that she saw watching the house on Hilltop Court.

‘They’ll hang Brooks out to dry, wade through the press coverage, and call it good. But there’s more to it, Kerm. Got to be. If you know anything, if you’ve got even a single thread to pull, pull it. Promise me you will.’

I have more than one, Hodges thinks, but Babineau’s the key, and Babineau has disappeared.

‘How much blood was in the car, Pete?’

‘Not a lot, but forensics has already confirmed it’s Babineau’s type. That’s not conclusive, but… shit. I gotta go. Izzy and one of the SKID guys just came out the back door. They’re looking for me.’

‘All right.’

‘Call me. And if you need anything I can access, let me know.’

‘I will.’

Hodges ends the call and looks up, wanting to fill Holly in, but Holly is no longer beside him.

‘Bill.’ Her voice is low. ‘Come in here.’

Puzzled, he walks to the door of his office, where he stops dead. Jerome is behind the desk, sitting in Hodges’s swivel chair. His long legs are splayed out and he’s looking at Dinah Scott’s Zappit. His eyes are wide open but empty. His mouth hangs ajar. There are fine drops of spittle on his lower lip. A tune is tinkling from the gadget’s tiny speaker, but not the same tune as last night – Hodges is sure of it.

‘Jerome?’ He takes a step forward, but before he can take another, Holly grabs him by the belt. Her grip is surprisingly strong.

‘No,’ she says in the same low voice. ‘You shouldn’t startle him. Not when he’s like that.’

‘What, then?’

‘I had a year of hypnotherapy when I was in my thirties. I was having problems with… well, never mind what I was having problems with. Let me try.’

‘Are you sure?’

She looks at him, her face now pale, her eyes fearful. ‘No, but we can’t leave him like that. Not after what happened to Barbara.’

The Zappit in Jerome’s limp hands gives off a bright blue flash. Jerome doesn’t react, doesn’t blink, only continues staring at the screen while the music tinkles.

Holly takes a step forward, then another. ‘Jerome?’

No answer.

‘Jerome, can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ Jerome says, not looking up from the screen.

‘Jerome, where are you?’

And Jerome says, ‘At my funeral. Everyone is there. It’s beautiful.’

Brady became fascinated with suicide at the age of twelve, while reading Raven, a true-crime book about the mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana. There, more than nine hundred people – a third of them children – died after drinking fruit juice laced with cyanide. What interested Brady, aside from the thrillingly high body count, was the lead-up to the final orgy. Long before the day when whole families swallowed the poison together and nurses (actual nurses!) used hypodermics to squirt death down the throats of squalling infants, Jim Jones was preparing his followers for their apotheosis with fiery sermons and suicide rehearsals he called White Nights. He first filled them with paranoia, then hypnotized them with the glamour of death.

As a senior, Brady wrote his only A paper, for a half-assed sociology class called American Life. The paper was called ‘American Deathways: A Brief Study of Suicide in the US’. In it he cited the statistics for 1999, then the most recent year for which they were available. More than forty thousand people had killed themselves during that year, usually with guns (the most reliable go-to method), but with pills running a close second. They also hung themselves, drowned themselves, bled out, stuck their heads in gas ovens, set themselves on fire, and rammed their cars into bridge abutments. One inventive fellow (this Brady did not put into his report; even then he was careful not to be branded an oddity) stuck a 220-volt line up his rectum and electrocuted himself. In 1999, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death in America, and if you added in the ones that were reported as accidents or ‘natural causes,’ it would undoubtedly be right up there with heart disease, cancer, and car crashes. Most likely still behind them, but not far behind.

Brady quoted Albert Camus, who said, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’

He also quoted a famous psychiatrist named Raymond Katz, who stated flatly, ‘Every human being is born with the suicide gene.’ Brady did not bother to add the second part of Katz’s statement, because he felt it took some of the drama out of it: ‘In most of us, it remains dormant.’

In the ten years between his graduation from high school and that disabling moment in the Mingo Auditorium, Brady’s fascination with suicide – including his own, always seen as part of some grand and historic gesture – continued.

This seed has now, against all the odds, fully blossomed.

He will be the Jim Jones of the twenty-first century.

Forty miles north of the city, he can wait no longer. Brady pulls into a rest area on 1-47, kills the laboring engine of Z-Boy’s Malibu, and powers up Babineau’s laptop. There’s no WiFi here, as there is at some rest areas, but thanks to Big Momma Verizon, there’s a cell tower not four miles away, standing tall against the thickening clouds. Using Babineau’s MacBook Air, he can go anywhere he wants and never have to leave this nearly deserted parking lot. He thinks (and not for the first time) that a touch of telekinesis is nothing compared to the power of the Internet. He’s sure thousands of suicides have incubated in the potent soup of its social media sites, where the trolls run free and the bullying goes on endlessly. That’s real mind over matter.

He’s not able to type as fast as he’d like to – the damp air pushing in with the coming storm has worsened the arthritis in Babineau’s fingers – but eventually the laptop is mated to the high-powered gear back in Freddi Linklatter’s computer room. He won’t have to stay mated to it for long. He clicks on a hidden file he placed on the laptop during one of his previous visits inside Babineau’s head.

He centers the cursor on Y, hits the return key, then waits. The worry-circle goes around and around and around. Just as he’s begun to wonder if something has gone wrong, the laptop flashes the message he’s been waiting for:

Good. Zeetheend is just a little icing on the cake. He has been able to disseminate only a limited number of Zappits – and a significant portion of his shipment was defective, for Christ’s sake – but teenagers are herd creatures, and herd creatures are in mental and emotional lockstep. It’s why fish school and bees swarm. It’s why the swallows come back each year to Capistrano. In human behavior, it’s why ‘the wave’ goes around at football and baseball stadiums, and why individuals will lose themselves in a crowd simply because the crowd is there.

Teenage boys have a tendency to wear the same baggy shorts and grow the same scruff on their faces, lest they be excluded from the herd. Teenage girls adopt the same styles of dress and go crazy for the same musical groups. It’s We R Your Bruthas this year; not so long ago it was ’Round Here and One Direction. Back in the day it was New Kids on the Block. Fads sweep through teenagers like a measles epidemic, and from time to time, one of those fads is suicide. In southern Wales, dozens of teens hung themselves between 2007 and 2009, with messages on social networking sites stoking the craze. Even the goodbyes they left were couched in Netspeak: Me2 and CU L8er.

Wildfires vast enough to burn millions of acres can be started by a single match thrown into dry brush. The Zappits Brady has distributed through his human drones are hundreds of matches. Not all of them will light, and some of those that do won’t stay lit. Brady knows this, but he has zeetheend.com to serve as both backstop and accelerant. Will it work? He’s far from sure, but time is too short for extensive tests.

And if it does?

Teen suicides all over the state, maybe all over the Midwest. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. How would you like that, ex-Detective Hodges? Would that improve your retirement, you meddlesome old fuck?

He swaps Babineau’s laptop for Z-Boy’s game console. It’s fitting to use this one. He thinks of it as Zappit Zero, because it’s the first one he ever saw, on the day Al Brooks brought it into his room, thinking Brady might like it. Which he did. Oh yes, very much.

The extra program, with the number-fish and the subliminal messages, hasn’t been added to this one, because Brady doesn’t need it. Those things are strictly for the targets. He watches the fish swim back and forth, using them to settle and focus, then closes his eyes. At first there’s only darkness, but after a few moments red lights begin to appear – more than fifty now. They are like dots on a computer map, except they don’t remain stationary. They swim back and forth, left to right, up and down, crisscrossing. He settles on one at random, his eyes rolling beneath his closed lids as he follows its progress. It begins to slow, and slow, and slow. It stills, then starts growing bigger. It opens like a flower.

He’s in a bedroom. There’s a girl, staring fixedly down at the fish on her own Zappit, which she received free from badconcert.com. She’s in her bed because she didn’t go to school today. Maybe she said she was sick.

‘What’s your name?’ Brady asks.

Sometimes they just hear a voice coming from the game console, but the ones who are most susceptible actually see him, like some kind of avatar in a video game. This girl is one of the latter, an auspicious beginning. But they always respond better to their names, so he’ll keep saying it. She looks without surprise at the young man sitting beside her on the bed. Her face is pale. Her eyes are dazed.

‘I’m Ellen,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for the right numbers.’

Of course you are, he thinks, and slips into her. She’s forty miles south of him, but once the demo screen has opened them, distance doesn’t matter. He could control her, turn her into one of his drones, but he doesn’t want to do that any more than he wanted to slip into Mrs Trelawney’s house some dark night and cut her throat. Murder isn’t control; murder is just murder.

Suicide is control.

‘Are you happy, Ellen?’

‘I used to be,’ she says. ‘I could be again, if I find the right numbers.’

Brady gives her a smile that’s both sad and charming. ‘Yes, but the numbers are like life,’ he says. ‘Nothing adds up, Ellen. Isn’t that true?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Tell me something, Ellen – what are you worried about?’ He could find it himself, but it will be better if she tells him. He knows there’s something, because everyone worries, and teenagers worry most of all.

‘Right now? The SAT.’

Ah-ha, he thinks, the infamous Scholastic Assessment Test, where the Department of Academic Husbandry separates the sheep from the goats.

‘I’m so bad at math,’ she says. ‘I reek.’

‘Bad at the numbers,’ he says, nodding sympathetically.

‘If I don’t score at least six-fifty, I won’t get into a good school.’

‘And you’ll be lucky to score four hundred,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that the truth, Ellen?’

‘Yes.’ Tears well in her eyes and begin to roll down her cheeks.

‘And then you’ll do badly on the English, too,’ Brady says. He’s opening her up, and this is the best part. It’s like reaching into an animal that’s stunned but still alive, and digging its guts out. ‘You’ll freeze up.’

‘I’ll probably freeze up,’ Ellen says. She’s sobbing audibly now. Brady checks her short-term memory and finds that her parents have gone to work and her little brother is at school. So crying is all right. Let the bitch make all the noise she wants.

‘Not probably. You will freeze up, Ellen. Because you can’t handle the pressure.’

She sobs.

‘Say it, Ellen.’

‘I can’t handle the pressure. I’ll freeze, and if I don’t get into a good school, my dad will be disappointed and my mother will be mad.’

‘What if you can’t get into any school? What if the only job you can get is cleaning houses or folding clothes in a laundromat?’

‘My mother will hate me!’

‘She hates you already, doesn’t she, Ellen?’

‘I don’t… I don’t think…’

‘Yes she does, she hates you. Say it, Ellen. Say “My mother hates me.”’

‘My mother hates me. Oh God, I’m so scared and my life is so awful!’

This is the great gift bestowed by a combination of Zappit-induced hypnosis and Brady’s own ability to invade minds once they are in that open and suggestible state. Ordinary fears, the ones kids like this live with as a kind of unpleasant background noise, can be turned into ravening monsters. Small balloons of paranoia can be inflated until they are as big as floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

‘You could stop being scared,’ Brady says. ‘And you could make your mother very, very sorry.’

Ellen smiles through her tears.

‘You could leave all this behind.’

‘I could. I could leave it behind.’

‘You could be at peace.’

‘Peace,’ she says, and sighs.

How wonderful this is. It took weeks with Martine Stover’s mother, who was always leaving the demo screen to play her goddam solitaire, and days with Barbara Robinson. With Ruth Scapelli and this pimple-faced crybaby in her poofy-pink girl’s bedroom? Mere minutes. But then, Brady thinks, I always had a steep learning curve.

‘Do you have your phone, Ellen?’

‘Here.’ She reaches under a decorative throw pillow. Her phone is also poofy-pink.

‘You should post on Facebook and Twitter. So all your friends can read it.’

‘What should I post?’

‘Say “I am at peace now. You can be, too. Go to zeetheend.com.”’

She does it, but at an oozingly slow speed. When they’re in this state, it’s like they’re underwater. Brady reminds himself of how well this is going and tries not to become impatient. When she’s done and the messages are sent – more matches flicked into dry tinder – he suggests that she go to the window. ‘I think you could use some fresh air. It might clear your head.’

‘I could use some fresh air,’ she says, throwing back the duvet and swinging her bare feet out of bed.

‘Don’t forget your Zappit,’ he says.

She takes it and walks to the window.

‘Before you open the window, go to the main screen, where the icons are. Can you do that, Ellen?’

‘Yes…’ A long pause. The bitch is slower than cold molasses. ‘Okay, I see the icons.’

‘Great. Now go to Wipe Words. It’s the blackboard-and-eraser icon.’

‘I see it.’

‘Tap it twice, Ellen.’

She does so, and the Zappit gives an acknowledging blue flash. If anyone tries to use this particular game console again, it will give a final blue flash and drop dead.

‘Now you can open the window.’

Cold air rushes in, blowing her hair back. She wavers, seems on the edge of waking, and for a moment Brady feels her slipping away. Control is still hard to maintain at a distance, even when they’re in a hypnotic state, but he’s sure he’ll hone his technique to a nice sharp point. Practice makes perfect.

‘Jump,’ Brady whispers. ‘Jump, and you won’t have to take the SAT. Your mother won’t hate you. She’ll be sorry. Jump and all the numbers will come right. You’ll get the best prize. The prize is sleep.’

‘The prize is sleep,’ Ellen agrees.

‘Do it now,’ Brady murmurs as he sits behind the wheel of Al Brooks’s old car with his eyes closed.

Forty miles south, Ellen jumps from her bedroom window. It’s not a long drop, and there’s banked snow against the house. It’s old and crusty, but it still cushions her fall to a degree, so instead of dying, she only breaks a collarbone and three ribs. She begins to scream in pain, and Brady is blown out of her head like a pilot strapped to an F-111 ejection seat.

‘Shit!’ he screams, and pounds the steering wheel. Babineau’s arthritis flares all the way up his arm, and that makes him angrier still. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

In the pleasantly upscale neighborhood of Branson Park, Ellen Murphy struggles to her feet. The last thing she remembers is telling her mother she was too sick to go to school – a lie so she could tap pink fish and hunt for prizes on the pleasantly addictive Fishin’ Hole demo. Her Zappit is lying nearby, the screen cracked. It no longer interests her. She leaves it and begins staggering toward the front door on bare feet. Each breath she takes is a stab in the side.

But I’m alive, she thinks. At least I’m alive. What was I thinking? What in God’s name was I thinking?

Brady’s voice is still with her: the slimy taste of something awful that she swallowed while it was still alive.

‘Jerome?’ Holly asks. ‘Can you still hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want you to turn off the Zappit and put it on Bill’s desk.’ And then, because she’s always been a belt-and-suspenders kind of girl, she adds: ‘Facedown.’

A frown creases his broad brow. ‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes. Right now. And without looking at the damn thing.’

Before Jerome can follow this order, Hodges catches one final glimpse of the fish swimming, and one more bright blue flash. A momentary dizziness – perhaps caused by his pain pills, perhaps not – sweeps through him. Then Jerome pushes the button on top of the console, and the fish disappear.

What Hodges feels isn’t relief but disappointment. Maybe that’s crazy, but given his current medical problem, maybe it’s not. He’s seen hypnosis used from time to time to help witnesses achieve better recall, but has never grasped its full power until now. He has an idea, probably blasphemous in this situation, that the Zappit fish might be better medicine for pain than the stuff Dr Stamos prescribed.

Holly says, ‘I’m going to count down from ten to one, Jerome. Each time you hear a number, you’ll be a little more awake. Okay?’

For several seconds Jerome says nothing. He sits calmly, peacefully, touring some other reality and perhaps trying to decide if he would like to live there permanently. Holly, on the other hand, is vibrating like a tuning fork, and Hodges can feel his fingernails biting into his palms as he clenches his fists.

At last Jerome says, ‘Okay, I guess. Since it’s you, Hollyberry.’

‘Here we go. Ten… nine… eight… you’re coming back… seven… six… five… waking up…’

Jerome raises his head. His eyes are aimed at Hodges, but Hodges isn’t sure the boy is seeing him.

‘Four… three… almost there… two… one… wake up!’ She claps her hands together.

Jerome gives a hard jerk. One hand brushes Dinah’s Zappit and knocks it to the floor. Jerome looks at Holly with an expression of surprise so exaggerated it would be funny under other circumstances.

‘What just happened? Did I go to sleep?’

Holly collapses into the chair ordinarily reserved for clients. She takes a deep breath and wipes her cheeks, which are damp with sweat.

In a way,’ Hodges says. ‘The game hypnotized you. Like it hypnotized your sister.’

‘Are you sure?’ Jerome asks, then looks at his watch. ‘I guess you are. I just lost fifteen minutes.’

‘Closer to twenty. What do you remember?’

‘Tapping the pink fish and turning them into numbers. It’s surprisingly hard to do. You have to watch closely, really concentrate, and the blue flashes don’t help.’

Hodges picks the Zappit up off the floor.

‘I wouldn’t turn that on,’ Holly says sharply.

‘Not going to. But I did last night, and I can tell you there were no blue flashes, and you could tap pink fish until your finger went numb without getting any numbers. Also, the tune is different now. Not much, but a little.’

Holly sings, pitch perfect: ‘“By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea, you and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be!”’ My mother used to sing it to me when I was little.’

Jerome is staring at her with more intensity than she can deal with, and she looks away, flustered. ‘What? What is it?’

‘There were words,’ he says, ‘but not those.’

Hodges heard no words, only the tune, but doesn’t say so. Holly asks Jerome if he can remember them.

His pitch isn’t as good as hers, but it’s close enough for them to be sure that yes, it’s the tune they heard. ‘“You can sleep, you can sleep, it’s a beautiful sleep…”’ He stops. ‘That’s all I can remember. If I’m not just making it up, that is.’

Holly says, ‘Now we know for sure. Someone amped the Fishin’ Hole screen.’

‘Shot it full of ’roids,’ Jerome adds.

‘What does that even mean?’ Hodges asks.

Jerome nods to Holly and she says, ‘Someone loaded a stealth program into the demo, which is mildly hypnotic to begin with. The program was dormant when Dinah had the Zappit, and still dormant when you looked at it last night, Bill – which was lucky for you – but someone turned it on after that.’

‘Babineau?’

‘Him or someone else, if the police are right and Babineau is dead.’

‘It could have been a preset,’ Jerome says to Holly. Then, to Hodges: ‘You know, like an alarm clock.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Hodges says. ‘The program was in there all along, and only became active once Dinah’s Zappit was turned on today?’

‘Yes,’ Holly says. ‘There’s probably a repeater at work, don’t you think, Jerome?’

‘Yeah. A computer program that pumps out the update constantly, waiting for some schlub – me, in this case – to turn on a Zappit and activate the WiFi.’

‘This could happen with all of them?’

‘If the stealth program is in all of them, sure,’ Jerome says. ‘Brady set this up.’ Hodges begins to pace, hand going to his side as if to contain the pain and hold it in. ‘Brady fucking Hartsfield.’

‘How?’ Holly asks.

‘I don’t know, but it’s the only thing that fits. He tries to blow up the Mingo during that concert. We stop him. The audience, most of them young girls, is saved.’

‘By you, Holly,’ Jerome says.

‘Be quiet, Jerome. Let him tell it.’ Her eyes suggest she knows where Hodges is going.

‘Six years pass. Those young girls, most of them in elementary or middle school in 2010, are in high school. Maybe in college. ’Round Here is long gone and the girls are young women now, they’ve moved on to other kinds of music, but then they get an offer they can’t refuse. A free game console, and all they have to do is be able to prove they were at the ’Round Here show that night. The console probably looks as out-of-date to them as a black-and-white TV, but what the hell, it’s free.’

‘Yes!’ Holly says. ‘Brady was still after them. This is his revenge, but not just on them. It’s his revenge on you, Bill.’

Which makes me responsible, Hodges thinks bleakly. Except what else could I do? What else could any of us do? He was going to bomb the place.

‘Babineau, going under the name of Myron Zakim, bought eight hundred of those consoles. It had to be him, because he’s loaded. Brady was broke and I doubt Library Al could have fronted even twenty thousand dollars from his retirement savings. Those consoles are out there now. And if they all get this amped-up program once they’re turned on…’

‘Hold it, go back,’ Jerome says. ‘Are you really saying that a respected neurosurgeon got involved in this shit?’

‘That’s what I’m saying, yeah. Your sister ID’d him, and we already know the respected neurosurgeon was using Brady Hartsfield as a lab rat.’

‘But now Hartsfield’s dead,’ Holly says. ‘Which leaves Babineau, who may also be dead.’

‘Or not,’ Hodges says. ‘There was blood in his car, but no body. Wouldn’t be the first time some doer tried to fake his own death.’

‘I’ve got to check something on my computer,’ Holly says. ‘If those free Zappits are getting a new program as of today, then maybe…’ She hurries out.

Jerome begins, ‘I don’t understand how any of this can be, but—’

‘Babineau will be able to tell us,’ Hodges says. ‘If he’s still alive.’

‘Yes, but wait a minute. Barb talked about hearing a voice, telling her all sorts of awful things. I didn’t hear any voice, and I sure don’t feel like offing myself.’

‘Maybe you’re immune.’

‘I’m not. That screen got me, Bill, I mean I was gone. I heard words in the little tune, and I think there were words in the blue flashes, too. Like subliminal messages. But… no voice.’

There could be all sorts of reasons for that, Hodges thinks, and just because Jerome didn’t hear the suicide voice, it doesn’t mean that most of the kids who got those free games won’t.

‘Let’s say this repeater gadget was only turned on during the last fourteen hours,’ Hodges says. ‘We know it can’t have been earlier than when I tried out Dinah’s game, or I would have seen the number-fish and the blue flashes. So here’s a question: can those demo screens be amped up even if the gadgets are off?’

‘No way,’ Jerome says. ‘They have to be turned on. But once they are…’

‘It’s active!’ Holly shouts. ‘That fracking zeetheend site is active!’

Jerome rushes to her desk in the outer office. Hodges follows more slowly.

Holly turns up the volume on her computer, and music fills the offices of Finders Keepers. Not ‘By the Beautiful Sea’ this time, but ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper.’ As it spools out – forty thousand men and women every day, another forty thousand coming every day – Hodges sees a candlelit funeral parlor and a coffin buried in flowers. Above it, smiling young men and women come and go, moving side to side, crisscrossing, fading, reappearing. Some of them wave; some flash the peace sign. Below the coffin is a series of messages in letters that swell and contract like a slowly beating heart.

Then a stuttering series of blue flashes. Embedded in them are words. Or call them what they really are, Hodges thinks. Drops of poison.

‘Turn it off, Holly.’ Hodges doesn’t like the way she’s looking at the screen – that wide-eyed stare, so much like Jerome’s a few minutes ago.

She moves too slowly to suit Jerome. He reaches over her shoulder and crashes her computer.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she says reproachfully. ‘I could lose data.’

‘That’s exactly what the fucking website is for,’ Jerome says. ‘To make you lose data. To make you lose your shit. I could read the last one, Bill. In the blue flash. It said do it now.’

Holly nods. ‘There was another one that said tell your friends.’

‘Does the Zappit direct them to that… that thing?’ Hodges asks.

‘It doesn’t have to,’ Jerome says. ‘Because the ones who find it – and plenty will, including kids who never got a free Zappit – will spread the word on Facebook and all the rest.’

‘He wanted a suicide epidemic,’ Holly says. ‘He set it in motion somehow, then killed himself.’

‘Probably to get there ahead of them,’ Jerome says. ‘So he can meet them at the door.’

Hodges says, ‘Am I supposed to believe a rock song and a picture of a funeral is going to get kids to kill themselves? The Zappits, I can accept that. I’ve seen how they work. But this?’

Holly and Jerome exchange a glance, one that Hodges can read easily: How do we explain this to him? How do you explain a robin to someone who’s never seen a bird? The glance alone is almost enough to convince him.

‘Teenagers are vulnerable to stuff like this,’ Holly says. ‘Not all of them, no, but plenty. I would have been when I was seventeen.’

‘And it’s catching,’ Jerome says. ‘Once it starts… if it starts…’ He finishes with a shrug.

‘We need to find that repeater gadget and turn it off,’ Hodges says. ‘Limit the damage.’

‘Maybe it’s at Babineau’s house,’ Holly says. ‘Call Pete. Find out if there’s any computer stuff there. If there is, make him pull all the plugs.’

‘If he’s with Izzy, he’ll let it go to voicemail,’ Hodges says, but he makes the call and Pete picks up on the first ring. He tells Hodges that Izzy has gone back to the station with the SKIDs to await the first forensics reports. Library Al Brooks is already gone, taken into custody by the first responding cops, who will get partial credit for the bust.

Pete sounds tired.

‘We had a blow-up. Me and Izzy. Big one. I tried to tell her what you told me when we started working together – how the case is the boss, and you go where it leads you. No ducking, no handing it off, just pick it up and follow the red thread all the way home. She stood there listening with her arms folded, nodding her head every now and then. I actually thought I was getting through to her. Then you know what she asked me? If I knew the last time there was a woman in the top echelon of the city police. I said I didn’t, and she said that was because the answer was never. She said the first one was going to be her. Man, I thought I knew her.’ Pete utters what may be the most humorless laugh Hodges has ever heard. ‘I thought she was police.’

Hodges will commiserate later, if he gets a chance. Right now there’s no time. He asks about the computer gear.

‘We found nothing except an iPad with a dead battery,’ Pete says. ‘Everly, the housekeeper, says he had a laptop in his study, almost brand new, but it’s gone.’

‘Like Babineau,’ Hodges says. ‘Maybe it’s with him.’

‘Maybe. Remember, if I can help, Kermit—’

‘I’ll call, believe me.’

Right now he’ll take all the help he can get.

The result with the girl named Ellen is infuriating – like the Robinson bitch all over again – but at last Brady calms down. It worked, that’s what he needs to focus on. The shortness of the drop combined with the snowbank was just bad luck. There will be plenty of others. He has a lot of work ahead of him, a lot of matches to light, but once the fire is burning, he can sit back and watch.

It will burn until it burns itself out.

He starts Z-Boy’s car and pulls out of the rest area. As he merges with the scant traffic headed north on 1-47, the first flakes spin out of the white sky and hit the Malibu’s windshield. Brady drives faster. Z-Boy’s piece of crap isn’t equipped for a snowstorm, and once he leaves the turnpike, the roads will grow progressively worse. He needs to beat the weather.

Oh, I’ll beat it, all right, Brady thinks, and grins as a wonderful idea hits him. Maybe Ellen is paralyzed from the neck down, a head on a stick, like the Stover bitch. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, a pleasant daydream with which to while away the miles.

He turns on the radio, finds some Judas Priest, and lets it blast. Like Hodges, he enjoys the hard stuff.

THE SUICIDE PRINCE

Brady won many victories in Room 217, but necessarily had to keep them to himself. Coming back from the living death of coma; discovering that he could – because of the drug Babineau had administered, or because of some fundamental alteration in his brainwaves, or perhaps due to a combination of the two – move small objects simply by thinking about them; inhabiting Library Al’s brain and creating inside him a secondary personality, Z-Boy. And mustn’t forget getting back at the fat cop who hit him in the balls when he couldn’t defend himself. Yet the best, the absolute best, was nudging Sadie MacDonald into committing suicide. That was power.

He wanted to do it again.

The question that desire raised was a simple one: who next? It would be easy to make Al Brooks jump from a bridge overpass or swallow drain cleaner, but Z-Boy would go with him, and without Z-Boy, Brady would be stuck in Room 217, which was really nothing more than a prison cell with a parking garage view. No, he needed Brooks just where he was. And as he was.

More important was the question of what to do about the bastard responsible for putting him here. Ursula Haber, the Nazi who ran the PT department, said rehab patients needed GTG: goals to grow. Well, he was growing, all right, and revenge against Hodges was a worthy goal, but how to get it? Inducing Hodges to commit suicide wasn’t the answer, even if there was a way to try it. He’d played the suicide game already with Hodges. And lost.

When Freddi Linklatter appeared with the picture of him and his mother, Brady was still over a year and a half from realizing how he could finish his business with Hodges, but seeing Freddi gave him a badly needed jump-start. He would need to be careful, though. Very careful.

A step at a time, he told himself as he lay awake in the small hours of the night. Just one step at a time. I have great obstacles, but I also have extraordinary weapons.

Step one was having Al Brooks remove the remaining Zappits from the hospital library. He took them to his brother’s house, where he lived in an apartment over the garage. That was easy, because no one wanted them, anyway. Brady thought of them as ammo. Eventually he would find a gun that could use it.

Brooks took the Zappits on his own, although operating under commands – thoughtfish – that Brady implanted in the shallow but useful Z-Boy persona. He had become wary of entering Brooks completely and taking him over, because it burned through the old fellow’s brains too fast. He had to ration those times of total immersion, and use them wisely. It was a shame, he enjoyed his vacations outside the hospital, but people were starting to notice that Library Al had become a trifle foggy upstairs. If he became too foggy, he would be forced out of his volunteer job. Worse, Hodges might notice. That would not be good. Let the old Det-Ret vacuum up all the rumors about telekinesis he wanted, Brady was fine with that, but he didn’t want Hodges to catch even a whiff of what was really going on.

Despite the risk of mental depletion, Brady took complete command of Brooks in the spring of 2013, because he needed the library computer. Looking at it could be done without total immersion, but using it was another thing. And it was a short visit. All he wanted to do was set up a Google alert, using the keywords Zappit and Fishin’ Hole.

Every two or three days he sent Z-Boy to check the alert and report back. His instructions were to switch to the ESPN site if someone wandered over to see what he was surfing (they rarely did; the library was really not much more than a closet, and the few visitors were usually looking for the chapel next door).

The alerts were interesting and informative. It seemed a great many people had experienced either semi-hypnosis or actual seizure activity after looking at the Fishin’ Hole demo screen for too long. That effect was more powerful than Brady would have believed. There was even an article about it in the New York Times business section, and the company was in trouble because of it.

Trouble it didn’t need, because it was already tottering. You didn’t have to be a genius (which Brady believed he was) to know that Zappit, Inc. would soon either go bankrupt or be swallowed up by a larger company. Brady was betting on bankruptcy. What company would be stupid enough to pick up an outfit making game consoles that were hopelessly out of date and ridiculously expensive, especially when one of the games was dangerously defective?

Meanwhile, there was the problem of how to jigger the ones he had (they were stored in the closet of Z-Boy’s apartment, but Brady considered them his property) so that people would look at them longer. He was stuck on that when Freddi made her visit. When she was gone, her Christian duty done (not that Frederica Bimmel Linklatter was or ever had been a Christian), Brady thought long and hard.

Then, in late August of 2013, after a particularly aggravating visit from the Det-Ret, he sent Z-Boy to her apartment.

Freddi counted the money, then studied the old fellow in the green Dickies standing slump-shouldered in the middle of what passed for her living room. The money had come from Al Brooks’s account at Midwest Federal. The first withdrawal from his meager savings, but far from the last.

‘Two hundred bucks for a few questions? Yeah, I can do that. But if what you really came for is a blowjob, you need to go somewhere else, old-timer. I’m a dyke.’

‘Just questions,’ Z-Boy said. He handed her a Zappit and told her to look at the Fishin’ Hole demo screen. ‘But you shouldn’t look longer than thirty seconds or so. It’s, um, weird.’

‘Weird, huh?’ She gave him an indulgent smile and turned her attention to the swimming fish. Thirty seconds became forty. That was allowable according to the directives Brady had given him before sending him on this mission (he always called them missions, having discovered that Brooks associated the word with heroism). But after forty-five, he grabbed it back.

Freddi looked up, blinking. ‘Whoo. It messes with your brain, doesn’t it?’

‘Yeah. It kinda does.’

‘I read in Gamer Programming that the Star Smash arcade game does something like that, but you have to play it for like, half an hour before the effect kicks in. This is a lot faster. Do people know about it?’

Z-Boy ignored the question. ‘My boss wants to know how you would fix this so people would look at the demo screen longer, and not go right to the game. Which doesn’t have the same effect.’

Freddi adopted her fake Russian accent for the first time. ‘Who is fearless leader, Z-Boy? You be good fellow and tell Comrade X, da?’

Z-Boy’s brow wrinkled. ‘Huh?’

Freddi sighed. ‘Who’s your boss, handsome?’

‘Dr Z.’ Brady had anticipated the question – he knew Freddi of old – and this was another directive. Brady had plans for Felix Babineau, but as yet they were vague. He was still feeling his way. Flying on instruments.

‘Dr Z and his sidekick Z-Boy,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. ‘On the path to world domination. My, my. Does that make me Z-Girl?’

This wasn’t part of his directives, so he stayed silent.

‘Never mind, I get it,’ she said, chuffing out smoke. ‘Your boss wants an eye-trap. The way to do it is to turn the demo screen itself into a game. Gotta be simple, though. Can’t get bogged down in a lot of complex programming.’ She held up the Zappit, now turned off. ‘This thing is pretty brainless.’

‘What kind of game?’

‘Don’t ask me, bro. That’s the creative side. Never was my forte. Tell your boss to figure it out. Anyway, once this thing is powered up and getting a good WiFi signal, you need to install a root kit. Want me to write this down?’

‘No.’ Brady had allocated a bit of Al Brooks’s rapidly diminishing memory storage space for this very task. Besides, when the job needed to be done, Freddi would be the one doing it.

‘Once the kit’s in, source code can be downloaded from another computer.’ She adopted the Russian accent again. ‘From secret Base Zero under polar ice-kep.’

‘Should I tell him that part?’

‘No. Just tell him root kit plus source code. Got it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Brady Hartsfield wants you to come visit him again.’

Freddi’s eyebrows shot up almost to her crewcut. ‘He talks to you?’

‘Yes. It’s hard to understand him at first, but after awhile you can.’

Freddi looked around her living room – dim, cluttered, smelling of last night’s take-out Chinese – as if it interested her. She was finding this conversation increasingly creepy.

‘I don’t know, man. I did my good deed, and I was never even a Girl Scout.’

‘He’ll pay you,’ Z-Boy said. ‘Not very much, but…’

‘How much?’

‘Fifty dollars a visit?’

‘Why?’

Z-Boy didn’t know, but in 2013, there was still a fair amount of Al Brooks behind his forehead, and that was the part that understood. ‘I think… because you were a part of his life. You know, when you and him used to go out to fix people’s computers. In the old days.’

Brady didn’t hate Dr Babineau with the same intensity that he hated K. William Hodges, but that didn’t mean Dr B. wasn’t on his shit list. Babineau had used him as a guinea pig, which was bad. He had lost interest in Brady when his experimental drug didn’t seem to be working, which was worse. Worst of all, the shots had resumed once Brady had regained consciousness, and who knew what they were doing? They could kill him, but as a man who had assiduously courted his own death, that wasn’t what kept him awake nights. What did was the possibility that the shots might interfere with his new abilities. Babineau pooh-poohed Brady’s supposed mind-over-matter powers in public, but he actually believed they might exist, even though Brady had been careful never to exhibit his talent to the doctor, despite Babineau’s repeated urgings. He believed any psychokinetic abilities were also a result of what he called Cerebellin.

The CAT scans and MRIs had also resumed. ‘You’re the Eighth Wonder of the World,’ Babineau told him after one of these – in the fall of 2013, this was. He was walking beside Brady as an orderly wheeled him back to Room 217. Babineau was wearing what Brady thought of as his gloaty face. ‘The current protocols have done more than halt the destruction of your brain cells; they have stimulated the growth of new ones. More robust ones. Do you have any idea how remarkable that is?’

You bet, asshole, Brady thought. So keep those scans to yourself. If the DA’s office found out, I’d be in trouble.

Babineau was patting Brady’s shoulder in a proprietary way Brady hated. Like he was patting his pet dog. ‘The human brain is made up of approximately one hundred billion nerve cells. Those in the Broca’s Area of yours were gravely injured, but they have recovered. In fact, they are creating neurons unlike any I’ve ever seen. One of these days you’re going to be famous not as a person who took lives, but as one responsible for saving them.’

If so, Brady thought, it’s a day you won’t be around to see.

Count on it, dickweed.

The creative side was never my forte, Freddi told Z-Boy. True enough, but it was always Brady’s, and as 2013 became 2014, he had plenty of time to think of ways the Fishin’ Hole demo screen might be juiced up and turned into what Freddi had called an eye-trap. Yet none of them seemed quite right.

They did not talk about the Zappit effect during her visits; mostly they reminisced (with Freddi necessarily doing most of the talking) about the old days on the Cyber Patrol. All the crazy people they’d met on their outcalls. And Anthony ‘Tones’ Frobisher, their asshole boss. Freddi went on about him constantly, turning things she should have said into things she had, and right to his face! Freddi’s visits were monotonous but comforting. They balanced his desperate nights, when he felt he might spend the rest of his life in Room 217, at the mercy of Dr Babineau and his ‘vitamin shots.’

I have to stop him, Brady thought. I have to control him.

To do that, the amped-up version of the demo screen had to be just right. If he flubbed his first chance to get into Babineau’s mind, there might not be another.

The TV now played at least four hours a day in Room 217. This was per an edict from Babineau, who told Head Nurse Helmington that he was ‘exposing Mr Hartsfield to external stimuli.’

Mr Hartsfield didn’t mind News at Noon (there was always an exciting explosion or a mass tragedy somewhere in the world), but the rest of the stuff – cooking shows, talk shows, soap operas, bogus medicine men – was drivel. Yet one day, while sitting in his chair by the window and watching Prize Surprise (staring in that direction, at least), he had a revelation. The contestant who had survived to the Bonus Round was given a chance to win a trip to Aruba on a private jet. She was shown an oversized computer screen where big colored dots were shuffling around. Her job was to touch five red ones, which would turn into numbers. If the numbers she touched added up to a total within a five-digit range of 100, she’d win.

Brady watched her wide eyes moving from side to side as she studied the screen, and knew he’d found what he was looking for. The pink fish, he thought. They’re the ones that move the fastest, and besides, red is an angry color. Pink is… what? What was the word? It came, and he smiled. It was the radiant one that made him look nineteen again.

Pink was soothing.

Sometimes when Freddi visited, Z-Boy left his library cart in the hall and joined them. On one of these occasions, during the summer of 2014, he handed Freddi an electronic recipe. It had been written on the library computer, and during one of the increasingly rare occasions when Brady did not just give instructions but slid into the driver’s seat and took over completely. He had to, because this had to be just right. There was no room for error.

Freddi scanned it, got interested, and read it more closely. ‘Say,’ she said, ‘this is pretty clever. And adding subliminal messaging is cool. Nasty, but cool. Did the mysterious Dr Z think this up?’

‘Yeah,’ Z-Boy said.

Freddi switched her attention to Brady. ‘Do you know who this Dr Z is?’

Brady shook his head slowly back and forth.

‘Sure it’s not you? Because this looks like your work.’

Brady only stared at her vacantly until she looked away. He had let her see more of him than Hodges or anyone on the nursing or PT staff, but he had no intention of letting her see into him. Not at this point, at least. Too much chance she might talk. Besides, he still didn’t know exactly what he was doing. They said that the world would beat a path to your door if you built a better mousetrap, but since he did not as yet know if this one would catch mice, it was best to keep quiet. And Dr Z didn’t exist yet.

But he would.

On an afternoon not long after Freddi received the electronic recipe explaining just how to jigger the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, Z-Boy visited Felix Babineau in his office. The doctor spent an hour there most days he was in the hospital, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. There was an indoor putting green by the window (no parking garage view for Babineau), where he sometimes practiced his short game. That was where he was when Z-Boy came in without knocking.

Babineau looked at him coldly. ‘Can I help you? Are you lost?’

Z-Boy held out Zappit Zero, which Freddi had upgraded (after buying several new computer components paid for out of Al Brooks’s rapidly shrinking savings account). ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what to do.’

‘You need to leave,’ Babineau said. ‘I don’t know what kind of bee you have in your bonnet, but this is my private space and my private time. Or do you want me to call security?’

‘Look at it, or you’ll be seeing yourself on the evening news. “Doctor performs experiments with untested South American drug on accused mass murderer Brady Hartsfield.”’

Babineau stared at him with his mouth open, at that moment looking very much as he would after Brady began to whittle away his core consciousness. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m talking about Cerebellin. Years away from FDA approval, if ever. I accessed your file and took two dozen photos with my phone. I also took photos of the brain scans you’ve been keeping to yourself. You broke lots of laws, Doc. Look at the game and it stays between us. Refuse, and your career is over. I’ll give you five seconds to decide.’

Babineau took the game and looked at the swimming fish. The little tune tinkled. Every now and then there was a flash of blue light.

‘Start tapping the pink ones, doctor. They’ll turn into numbers. Add them up in your head.’

‘How long do I have to do this for?’

‘You’ll know.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘You lock your office when you’re not here, which is smart, but there are lots of all-access security cards floating around this place. And you left your computer on, which seems kind of crazy to me. Look at the fish. Tap the pink ones. Add up the numbers. That’s all you have to do, and I’ll leave you alone.’

‘This is blackmail.’

‘No, blackmail is for money. This is just a trade. Look at the fish. I won’t ask you again.’

Babineau looked at the fish. He tapped at a pink one and missed. He tapped again, missed again. Muttered ‘Fuck!’ under his breath. It was quite a bit harder than it looked, and he began to get interested. The blue flashes should have been annoying, but they weren’t. They actually seemed to help him focus. Alarm at what this geezer knew started to fade into the background of his thoughts.

He succeeded in tapping one of the pink fish before it could shoot off the left side of the screen and got a nine. That was good. A good start. He forgot why he was doing this. Catching the pink fish was the important thing.

The tune played.

One floor up, in Room 217, Brady stared at his own Zappit, and felt his breathing slow. He closed his eyes and looked at a single red dot. That was Z-Boy. He waited… waited… and then, just as he was beginning to think his target might be immune, a second dot appeared. It was faint at first, but gradually grew bright and clear.

Like watching a rose blossom, Brady thought.

The two dots began to swim playfully back and forth. He settled his concentration on the one that was Babineau. It slowed and became stationary.

Gotcha, Brady thought.

But he had to be careful. This was a stealth mission.

The eyes he opened were Babineau’s. The doctor was still staring at the fish, but he had ceased to tap them. He had become… what was the word they used? A gork. He had become a gork.

Brady did not linger on that first occasion, but it didn’t take long to understand the wonders to which he’d gained access. Al Brooks was a piggy bank. Felix Babineau was a vault. Brady had access to his memories, his stored knowledge, his abilities. While in Al, he could have rewired an electrical circuit. In Babineau, he could have performed a craniotomy and rewired a human brain. Further, he had proof of something he had only theorized about and hoped for: he could take possession of others at a distance. All it took was that state of Zappit-induced hypnosis to open them up. The Zappit Freddi had modified made for a very efficient eye-trap, and good God, it worked so fast.

He couldn’t wait to use it on Hodges.

Before leaving, Brady released a few thoughtfish into Babineau’s brain, but only a few. He intended to move very carefully with the doctor. Babineau needed to be thoroughly habituated to the screen – which was now what those specializing in hypnosis called an inducement device – before Brady announced himself. One of that day’s thoughtfish was the idea that the CAT scans on Brady weren’t producing anything of real interest, and ought to cease. The Cerebellin shots should also cease.

Because Brady’s not making sufficient progress. Because I’m a dead end. Also, I might be caught.

‘Getting caught would be bad,’ Babineau murmured.

‘Yes,’ Z-Boy said. ‘Getting caught would be bad for both of us.’

Babineau had dropped his putter. Z-Boy picked it up and put it in his hand.

As that hot summer morphed into a cold and rainy fall, Brady strengthened his hold on Babineau. He released thoughtfish carefully, like a game warden stocking a pond with trout. Babineau began to feel an urge to get touchy-feely with a few of the younger nurses, risking a sexual harassment complaint. Babineau occasionally stole pain medication from the Bucket’s Pyxis Med Station, using the ID card of a fictional doctor – a fiddle Brady set up via Freddi Linklatter. Babineau did this even though he was bound to be caught if he kept on, and had other, safer ways of getting pills. He stole a Rolex watch from the Neuro lounge one day (although he had one of his own) and put it in the bottom drawer of his office desk, where he promptly forgot it. Little by little, Brady Hartsfield – who could barely walk – took possession of the doctor who had presumed to take possession of him, and put him in a guilt-trap that had many teeth. If he did something foolish, like trying to tell someone what was going on, the trap would snap shut.

At the same time he began sculpting the Dr Z personality, doing it much more carefully than he had with Library Al. For one thing, he was better at it now. For another, he had finer materials to work with. In October of that year, with hundreds of thoughtfish now swimming in Babineau’s brain, he began assuming control of the doctor’s body as well as his mind, taking it on longer and longer trips. Once he drove all the way to the Ohio state line in Babineau’s BMW, just to see if his hold would weaken with distance. It didn’t. It seemed that once you were in, you were in. And it was a fine trip. He stopped at a roadside restaurant and pigged out on onion rings.

Tasty!

As the 2014 holiday season approached, Brady found himself in a state he hadn’t known since earliest childhood. It was so foreign to him that the Christmas decorations had been taken down and Valentine’s Day was approaching before he realized what it was.

He felt contented.

Part of him fought this feeling, labeling it a little death, but part of him wanted to accept it. Embrace it, even. And why not? It wasn’t as though he were stuck in Room 217, or even in his own body. He could leave whenever he wanted, either as a passenger or as a driver. He had to be careful not to be in the driver’s seat too much or stay too long, that was all. Core consciousness, it seemed, was a limited resource. When it was gone, it was gone.

Too bad.

If Hodges had continued to make his visits, Brady would have had another of those goals to grow – getting him to look at the Zappit in his drawer, entering him, and planting suicidal thoughtfish. It would have been like using Debbie’s Blue Umbrella all over again, only this time with suggestions that were much more powerful. Not really suggestions at all, but commands.

The only problem with the plan was that Hodges had stopped coming. He had appeared just after Labor Day, spouting all his usual bullshit – I know you’re in there, Brady, I hope you’re suffering, Brady, can you really move things around without touching them, Brady, if you can let me see you do it – but not since. Brady surmised that Hodges’s disappearance from his life was the real source of this unusual and not entirely welcome contentment. Hodges had been a burr under his saddle, infuriating him and making him gallop. Now the burr was gone, and he was free to graze, if he wanted to.

He sort of did.

With access to Dr Babineau’s bank account and investment portfolio as well as his mind, Brady went on a computer spending spree. The Babster withdrew the money and made the purchases; Z-Boy delivered the equipment to Freddi Linklatter’s cheesedog of a crib.

She really deserves an apartment upgrade, Brady thought. I ought to do something about that.

Z-Boy also brought her the rest of the Zappits he’d pilfered from the library, and Freddi amped the Fishin’ Hole demos in all of them… for a price, of course. And although the price was high, Brady paid it without a qualm. It was the doc’s money, after all, the dough of Babineau. As to what he might do with the juiced-up consoles, Brady had no idea. Eventually he might want another drone or two, he supposed, but he saw no reason to trade up right away. He began to understand what contentment actually was: the emotional version of the horse latitudes, where all the winds died away and one simply drifted.

It ensued when one ran out of goals to grow.

This state of affairs continued until February 13th of 2015, when Brady’s attention was caught by an item on News at Noon. The anchors, who had been laughing it up over the antics of a couple of baby pandas, put on their Oh Shit This Is So Awful faces when the chyron behind them changed from the pandas to a broken-heart logo.

‘It’s going to be a sad Valentine’s Day in the suburb of Sewickley,’ said the female half of the duo.

‘That’s right, Betty,’ said the male half. ‘Two survivors of the City Center Massacre, twenty-six-year-old Krista Countryman and twenty-four-year-old Keith Frias, have committed suicide in the Countryman woman’s home.’

It was Betty’s turn. ‘Ken, the shocked parents say the couple was hoping to be married in May of this year, but both were badly injured in the attack perpetrated by Brady Hartsfield, and the continuing physical and mental pain was apparently too much for them. Here’s Frank Denton, with more.’

Brady was on high alert now, sitting as close to bolt upright in his chair as he could manage, eyes shining. Could he legitimately claim those two? He believed he could, which meant his City Center score had just gone up from eight to ten. Still shy of a dozen, but hey! Not bad.

Correspondent Frank Denton, also wearing his best Oh Shit expression, went blah-de-blah for awhile, and then the picture switched to the Countryman chick’s pore ole daddy, who read the suicide note the couple had left. He blubbered through most of it, but Brady caught the gist. They’d had a beautiful vision of the afterlife, where their wounds would be healed, the burden of their pain would be lifted, and they could be married in perfect health by their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

‘Boy, that’s sad,’ the male anchor opined at the end of the story. ‘So sad.’

‘It sure is, Ken,’ Betty said. Then the screen behind them flashed a picture showing a bunch of idiots in wedding clothes standing in a swimming pool, and her sad face clicked off and the happy one came back on. ‘But this should cheer you up – twenty couples decided to get married in a swimming pool in Cleveland, where it’s only twenty degrees!’

‘I hope they had a hunka-hunka burning love,’ Ken said, showing his perfectly capped teeth in a grin. ‘Brrrr! Here’s Patty Newfield with the details.’

How many more could I get? Brady wondered. He was on fire. I’ve got nine augmented Zappits, plus the two my drones have and the one in my drawer. Who says I have to be done with those job-hunting assholes?

Who says I can’t run up the score?

Brady continued to keep track of Zappit, Inc. during his fallow period, sending Z-Boy to check the Google alert once or twice weekly. The chatter about the hypnotic effect of the Fishin’ Hole screen (and the lesser effect of the Whistling Birds demo) died down and was replaced by speculation about just when the company would go under – it was no longer a matter of if. When Sunrise Solutions bought Zappit out, a blogger who called himself Electric Whirlwind wrote, ‘Wow! This is like a couple of cancer patients with six weeks to live deciding to elope.’

Babineau’s shadow personality was now well established, and it was Dr Z who began to research the survivors of the City Center Massacre on Brady’s behalf, making a list of the ones most badly injured, and thus most vulnerable to suicidal thoughts. A couple of them, like Daniel Starr and Judith Loma, were still wheelchair-bound. Loma might get out of hers; Starr, never. Then there was Martine Stover, paralyzed from the neck down and living with her mother over in Ridgedale.

I’d be doing them a favor, Brady thought. Really I would.

He decided Stover’s mommy would make a good start. His first idea was to have Z-Boy mail her a Zappit (‘A Free Gift for You!’), but how could he be sure she wouldn’t just throw it away? He only had nine, and didn’t want to risk wasting one. Juicing them up had cost him (well, Babineau) quite a lot of money. It might be better to send Babineau on a personal mission. In one of his tailored suits, set off by a sober dark tie, he looked a lot more trustworthy than Z-Boy in his rumpled green Dickies, and he was the sort of older guy that chicks like Stover’s mother had a tendency to dig. All Brady had to do was work up a believable story. Something about test marketing, maybe? Possibly a book club? A prize competition?

He was still sifting scenarios – there was no hurry – when his Google alert announced an expected death: Sunrise Solutions had gone bye-bye. This was in early April. A trustee had been appointed to sell off the assets, and a list of so-called ‘real goods’ would soon appear in the usual sell-sites. For those who couldn’t wait, a list of all Sunrise Solutions’ unsaleable crapola could be found in the bankruptcy filing. Brady thought this was interesting, but not interesting enough to have Dr Z look up the list of assets. There were probably crates of Zappits among them, but he had nine of his own, and surely that would be enough to play with.

A month later he changed his mind about that.

One of News at Noon’s most popular features was called ‘Just A Word From Jack.’ Jack O’Malley was a fat old dinosaur who had probably started in the biz when TV was still black-and-white, and he bumbled on for five minutes or so at the end of every newscast about whatever was on what remained of his mind. He wore huge black-rimmed glasses, and his jowls quivered like Jell-O when he talked. Ordinarily Brady found him quite entertaining, a bit of comic relief, but there was nothing amusing about that day’s Word From Jack. It opened whole new vistas.

‘The families of Krista Countryman and Keith Frias have been flooded with condolences as a result of a story this station ran not long ago,’ Jack said in his grouchy Andy Rooney voice. ‘Their decision to terminate their lives when they could no longer live with unending and unmitigated pain has reignited the debate on the ethics of suicide. It also reminded us – unfortunately – of the coward who caused that unending, unmitigated pain, a monster named Brady Wilson Hartsfield.’

That’s me, Brady thought happily. When they even give your middle name, you know you’re an authentic boogeyman.

‘If there is a life after this one,’ Jack said (out-of-control Andy Rooney brows drawing together, jowls flapping), ‘Brady Wilson Hartsfield will pay the full price for his crimes when he gets there. In the meantime, let us consider the silver lining in this dark cloud of woe, because there really is one.

‘A year after his cowardly killing spree at City Center, Brady Wilson Hartsfield attempted an even more heinous crime. He smuggled a large quantity of plastic explosive into a concert at Mingo Auditorium, with the intent to murder thousands of teens who were there to have a good time. In this he was thwarted by retired detective William Hodges and a brave woman named Holly Gibney, who smashed the homicidal loser’s skull before he could detonate…’

Here Brady lost the thread. Some woman named Holly Gibney had been the one to smash him in the head and almost kill him? Who the fuck was Holly Gibney? And why had no one ever told him this in the five years since she’d turned his lights out and landed him in this room? How was that possible?

Very easily, he decided. When the coverage was fresh, he’d been in a coma. Later on, he thought, I just assumed it was either Hodges or his nigger lawnboy.

He would look Gibney up on the Web when he got a chance, but she wasn’t the important thing. She was part of the past. The future was a splendid idea that had come to him as his best inventions always had: whole and complete, needing only a few modifications along the way to make it perfect.

He powered up his Zappit, found Z-Boy (currently handing out magazines to patients waiting in OB/GYN), and sent him to the library computer. Once he was seated in front of the screen, Brady shoved him out of the driver’s seat and took control, hunched over and squinting at the monitor with Al Brooks’s nearsighted eyes. On a website called Bankruptcy Assets 2015, he found the list of all the stuff Sunrise Solutions had left behind. There was junk from a dozen different companies, listed alphabetically. Zappit was the last, but as far as Brady was concerned, far from least. Heading the list of their assets was 45,872 (Zappit Commanders, suggested retail price $189.99. They were being sold in lots of four hundred, eight hundred, and one thousand. Below, in red, was the caveat that part of the shipment was defective, ‘but most are in perfect working condition.’

Brady’s excitement had Library Al’s old heart laboring. His hands left the keyboard and curled into fists. Getting more of the City Center survivors to commit suicide paled in comparison to the grand idea that now possessed him: finishing what he had tried to do that night at the Mingo. He could see himself writing to Hodges from beneath the Blue Umbrella: You think you stopped me? Think again.

How wonderful that would be!

He was pretty sure Babineau had more than enough money to buy a Zappit console for everyone who had been there that night, but since Brady would have to handle his targets one at a time, it wouldn’t do to go overboard.

He had Z-Boy bring Babineau to him. Babineau didn’t want to come. He was afraid of Brady now, which Brady found delicious.

‘You’re going to be buying some goods,’ Brady said.

‘Buying some goods.’ Docile. No longer afraid. Babineau had entered Room 217, but it was now Dr Z standing slump-shouldered in front of Brady’s chair.

‘Yes. You’ll want to put money in a new account. I think we’ll call it Gamez Unlimited. That’s Gamez with a Z.’

‘With a Z. Like me.’ The head of the Kiner Neurology Department managed a small, vacuous smile.

‘Very good. Let’s say a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You’ll also be setting Freddi Linklatter up in a new and bigger apartment. So she can receive the goods you buy, and then work on them. She’s going to be a busy girl.’

‘I’ll be setting her up in a new and bigger apartment so—’

‘Just shut up and listen. She’ll be needing some more equipment, too.’

Brady leaned forward. He could see a bright future ahead, one where Brady Wilson Hartsfield was crowned the winner years after the Det-Ret thought the game had ended.

‘The most important piece of equipment is called a repeater.’