End of Watch

It’s not pain that wakes Freddi, but her bladder. It feels like it’s bursting. Getting out of bed is a major operation. Her head is banging, and it feels like she’s wearing a plaster cast on her chest. It doesn’t hurt too much, mostly it’s just stiff and so heavy. Each breath is a clean-and-jerk.

The bathroom looks like something out of a slasher movie, and she closes her eyes as soon as she sits on the john so she won’t have to look at all the blood. So lucky to be alive, she thinks as something that feels like ten gallons of pee rushes out of her. Just so goddam lucky. And why am I in the center of this clusterfuck? Because I took him that picture. My mother was right, no good deed goes unpunished.

But if there was ever a time for clear thinking it’s now, and she has to admit to herself that taking Brady the picture wasn’t what has led her to this place, sitting in her bloody bathroom with a knot on her head and a gunshot wound in her chest. It was going back that had done that, and she’d gone back because she was being paid to do so – fifty dollars a visit. Which made her sort of a call girl, she supposed.

You know what all this is about. You could tell yourself you only knew when you peeked at the thumb drive Dr Z brought you, the one that activates the creepy website, but you knew when you were installing updates on all those Zappits, didn’t you? A regular assembly line of them, forty or fifty a day, until all the ones that weren’t defective were loaded landmines. Over five hundred. You knew it was Brady all along, and Brady Hartsfield is crazy.

She yanks up her pants, flushes, and leaves the bathroom. The light coming in the living room window is muted, but it still hurts her eyes. She squints, sees it’s starting to snow, and shuffles to the kitchen, working for every breath. Her fridge is mostly stocked with cartons of leftover Chinese, but there’s a couple of cans of Red Bull in the door shelf. She grabs one, chugs half, and feels a bit better. It’s probably a psychological effect, but she’ll take it.

What am I going to do? What in the name of God? Is there any way out of this mess?

She goes into her computer room, shuffling a little faster now, and refreshes her screen. She googles her way to zeetheend, hoping she’ll get the cartoon man swinging his cartoon pickaxe, and her heart sinks when the picture filling the screen shows a candlelit funeral parlor, instead – exactly what she saw when she booted up the thumb drive and looked at the starter screen, instead of just importing the whole thing blind, as instructed. That dopey Blue Oyster Cult song is playing.

She scrolls past the messages below the coffin, each one swelling and fading like slow heartbeats (AN END TO PAIN, AN END TO FEAR) and clicks on POST A COMMENT. Freddi doesn’t know how long this electronic poison pill has been active, but long enough for it to have generated hundreds of comments already.

Bedarkened77: This dares to speak the truth!

AliceAlways401: I wish I had the guts, things are so bad at home now.

VerbanaThe Monkey: Bear the pain, people, suicide is gutless!!!

KittycatGreeneyes: No, suicide is PAINLESS, it brings on many changes.

Verbana the Monkey isn’t the only naysayer, but Freddi doesn’t have to scroll through all the comments to see that he (or she) is very much in the minority. This is going to spread like the flu, Freddi thinks.

No, more like ebola.

She looks up at the repeater just in time to see 171 FOUND tick up to 172. Word about the number-fish is spreading fast, and by tonight almost all of the rigged Zappits will be active. The demo screen hypnotizes them, makes them receptive. To what? Well, to the idea that they should visit zeetheend, for one thing. Or maybe the Zappit People won’t even have to go there. Maybe they’ll just highside it. Will people obey a hypnotic command to off themselves? Surely not, right?

Right?

Freddi doesn’t dare risk killing the repeater for fear of a return visit from Brady, but the website?

You’re going down, motherfucker,’ she says, and begins to rattle away at her keyboard.

Less than thirty seconds later, she’s staring with disbelief at a message on her screen: THIS FUNCTION IS NOT ALLOWED. She reaches out to try again, then stops. For all she knows, another go at the website may nuke all her stuff – not just her computer equipment, but her credit cards, her bank account, her cell phone, even her fucking driver’s license. If anyone knows how to program such evil shit, it’s Brady.

Fuck. I have to get out of here.

She’ll throw some clothes in a suitcase, call a cab, go to the bank, and draw out everything she’s got. There might be as much as four thousand dollars. (In her heart, she knows it’s more like three.) From the bank to the bus station. The snow swirling outside her window is supposed to be the beginning of a big storm, and that may preclude a quick getaway, but if she has to wait a few hours at the station, she will. Hell, if she has to sleep there, she will. This is all Brady. He’s set up an elaborate Jonestown protocol of which the rigged Zappits are only a part, and she helped him do it. Freddi has no idea if it will work, and she doesn’t intend to wait around to find out. She’s sorry for the people who might be sucked in by the Zappits, or tipped into attempting suicide by that fucking zeetheend website instead of just thinking about it, but she has to take care of numero uno. There’s no one else to do it.

Freddi makes her way back to the bedroom as rapidly as she can. She gets her old Samsonite from the closet, and then oxygen depletion caused by shallow breathing and too much excitement turns her legs to rubber. She makes it to the bed, sits on it, and lowers her head.

Easy does it, she thinks. Get your breath back. One thing at a time.

Only, thanks to her foolish effort to crash the website, she doesn’t know how much time she has, and when ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ begins to play from the top of her dresser, she utters a little scream. Freddi doesn’t want to answer her phone, but gets up, anyway. Sometimes it’s better to know.

The snow remains light until Brady gets off the interstate at Exit 7, but on State Road 79 – he’s out in the boondocks now – it starts to come down a little harder. The tar is still bare and wet, but the snow will start to accumulate on it soon enough, and he’s still forty miles from where he intends to hole up and get busy.

Lake Charles, he thinks. Where the real fun begins.

That’s when Babineau’s laptop awakens and chimes three times – an alert Brady programmed into it. Because safe is always better than sorry. He has no time to pull over, not when he’s racing this goddam storm, but he can’t afford not to. Ahead on the right is a boarded-up building with two metal girls in rusting bikinis on the roof, holding up a sign reading PORNO PALACE and XXX and WE DARE TO BARE. In the middle of the dirt parking lot – which the snow is now starting to sugarcoat – there’s a For Sale sign.

Brady pulls in, shifts to park, and opens the laptop. The message on the screen puts a significant crack right down the middle of his good mood.

He opens the Malibu’s glove compartment and there is Al Brooks’s battered cell phone, right where he always kept it. A good thing, too, because Brady forgot to bring Babineau’s.

So sue me, he thinks. You can’t remember everything, and I’ve been busy.

He doesn’t bother going to Contacts, just dials Freddi’s number from memory. She hasn’t changed it since the old Discount Electronix days.

When Hodges excuses himself to use the bathroom, Jerome waits until he’s out the door, then goes to Holly, who’s standing at the window and watching the snow fall. It’s still light here in the city, the flakes dancing in the air and seeming to defy gravity. Holly once more has her arms crossed over her chest so she can grip her shoulders.

‘How bad is he?’ Jerome asks in a low voice. ‘Because he doesn’t look good.’

‘It’s pancreatic cancer, Jerome. How good does anyone look with that?’

‘Can he get through the day, do you think? Because he wants to, and I really think he could use some closure on this.’

‘Closure on Hartsfield, you mean. Brady fracking Hartsfield. Even though he’s fracking dead.’

‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’

‘I think it’s bad.’ She turns to him and forces herself to meet his eyes, a thing that always makes her feel stripped bare. ‘Do you see the way he keeps putting his hand against his side?’

Jerome nods.

‘He’s been doing that for weeks now and calling it indigestion. He only went to the doctor because I nagged him into it. And when he found out what was wrong, he tried to lie.’

‘You didn’t answer the question. Can he get through the day?’

‘I think so. I hope so. Because you’re right, he needs this. Only we have to stick with him. Both of us.’ She releases one shoulder so she can grip his wrist. ‘Promise me, Jerome. No sending the skinny girl home so the boys can play in the treehouse by themselves.’

He pries her hand loose and gives it a squeeze. ‘Don’t worry, Hollyberry. No one’s breaking up the band.’

‘Hello? Is that you, Dr Z?’

Brady has no time to play games with her. The snow is thickening every second, and Z-Boy’s crappy old Malibu, with no snow tires and over a hundred thousand miles on the clock, will be no match for the storm once it really gets whooping. Under other circumstances, he’d want to know how she’s even alive, but since he has no intention of turning back and rectifying that situation, it’s a moot question.

‘You know who it is, and I know what you tried to do. Try it again and I’ll send in the men who are watching the building. You’re lucky to be alive, Freddi. I wouldn’t tempt fate a second time.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Almost whispering. This is not the fuck-you-and-fuck-your-mother riot grrrl Brady worked with on the Cyber Patrol. Yet she’s not entirely broken, or she wouldn’t have tried messing with the computer gear.

‘Have you told anyone?’

‘No!’ She sounds horrified at the thought. Horrified is good.

‘Will you?’

‘No!’

‘That’s the right answer, because if you do, I’ll know. You’re under surveillance, Freddi. Remember it.’

He ends the call without waiting for a reply, more furious with her for being alive than for what she tried to do. Will she believe that fictitious men are watching the building, even though he left her for dead? He thinks so. She’s had dealings with both Dr Z and Z-Boy; who knows how many other drones he might have at his command?

In any case, there’s nothing else he can do about it now. Brady has a long, long history of blaming others for his problems, and now he blames Freddi for not dying when she was supposed to.

He drops the Malibu’s gearshift into drive and steps on the gas. The tires spin in the thin carpet of snow covering the defunct Porno Palace’s parking lot, but catch once they get on the state road again, where the formerly brown soft shoulders are now turning white. Brady eases Z-Boy’s car up to sixty. That will soon be too fast for conditions, but he’ll hold the needle there as long as he can.

Finders Keepers shares the seventh-floor bathrooms with the travel agency, but right now Hodges has the men’s to himself, for which he is grateful. He’s bent over one of the sinks, right hand gripping the washbasin’s rim, left pressed to his side. His belt is still unbuckled, and his pants are sinking past his hips under the weight of the stuff in his pockets: change, keys, wallet, phone.

He came in here to take a shit, an ordinary excretory function he’s been performing all his life, but when he started to strain, the left half of his midsection went nuclear. It makes his previous pain seem like a bunch of warm-up notes before the full concert begins, and if it’s this bad now, he dreads to think what may lie ahead.

No, he thinks, dread is the wrong word. Terror is the right one. For the first time in my life, I’m terrified of the future, where I see everything that I am or ever was first submerged, then erased. If the pain itself doesn’t do it, the heavier drugs they give me to stifle it will.

Now he understands why pancreatic is called the stealth cancer, and why it’s almost always deadly. It lurks, building up its troops and sending out secret emissaries to the lungs, the lymph nodes, the bones and the brain. Then it blitzkriegs, not understanding, in its stupid rapacity, that victory can only bring its own death.

Hodges thinks, Except maybe that’s what it wants. Maybe it’s self-hating, born with a desire not to murder the host but to kill itself. Which makes cancer the real suicide prince.

He brings up a long, resounding burp, and that makes him feel a little better, who knows why. It won’t last long, but he’ll take any measure of relief he can get. He shakes out three of his painkillers (already they make him think of shooting a popgun at a charging elephant) and swallows them with water from the tap. Then he splashes more cold water on his face, trying to bring up a little color. When that doesn’t work, he slaps himself briskly – two hard ones on each cheek. Holly and Jerome must not know how bad it’s gotten. He was promised this day and he means to take every minute of it. All the way to midnight, if necessary.

He’s leaving the bathroom, reminding himself to straighten up and stop pressing his side, when his phone buzzes. Pete wanting to resume his bitch-a-thon, he thinks, but it’s not. It’s Norma Wilmer.

‘I found that file,’ she says. ‘The one the late great Ruth Scapelli—’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘The visitors list. Who’s on it?’

‘There is no list.’

He leans against the wall and closes his eyes. ‘Ah, sh—’

‘But there is a single memo with Babineau’s letterhead on it. It says, and I quote, “Frederica Linklatter to be admitted both during and after visiting hours. She is aiding in B. Hartsfield’s recovery.” Does that help?’

Some girl with a Marine haircut, Hodges thinks. A ratty chick with a bunch of tats.

It rang no bells at the time, but there was that faint vibration, and now he knows why. He met a skinny girl with buzz-cut hair at Discount Electronix back in 2010, when he, Jerome, and Holly were closing in on Brady. Even six years later he can remember what she said about her co-worker on the Cyber Patrol: It’s something with his mom, betcha anything. He’s freaky about her.

‘Are you still there?’ Norma sounds irritated.

‘Yeah, but I have to go.’

‘Didn’t you say there’d be some extra money if—’

‘Yeah. I’ll take care of you, Norma.’ He ends the call.

The pills are doing their work, and he’s able to manage a medium-fast walk back to the office. Holly and Jerome are at the window overlooking Lower Marlborough Street, and he can tell by their expressions when they turn to the sound of the opening door that they’ve been talking about him, but he has no time to think about that. Or brood on it. What he’s thinking about are those rigged Zappits. The question ever since they started to put things together was how Brady could have had anything to do with modifying them when he was stuck in a hospital room and barely able to walk. But he knew somebody who almost certainly had the skills to do it for him, didn’t he? Someone he used to work with. Somebody who came to visit him in the Bucket, with Babineau’s written approval. A punky chick with a lot of tats and a yard of attitude.

‘Brady’s visitor – his only visitor – was a woman named Frederica Linklatter. She—’

‘Cyber Patrol!’ Holly nearly screams. ‘He worked with her!’

‘Right. There was also a third guy – the boss, I think. Do either of you remember his name?’

Holly and Jerome look at each other, then shake their heads.

‘That was a long time ago, Bill,’ Jerome says. ‘And we were concentrating on Hartsfield by then.’

‘Yeah. I only remember Linklatter because she was sort of unforgettable.’

‘Can I use your computer?’ Jerome asks. ‘Maybe I can find the guy while Holly looks for the girl’s addy.’

‘Sure, go for it.’

Holly is at hers already, sitting bolt upright and clicking away. She’s also talking out loud as she often does when she’s deeply involved in something. ‘Frack. Whitepages doesn’t have a number or address. Long shot, anyway, a lot of single women don’t… wait, hold the fracking phone… here’s her Facebook page…’

‘I’m not really interested in her summer vacation snaps or how many friends she’s got,’ Hodges says.

‘Are you sure about that? Because she’s only got six friends, and one of them is Anthony Frobisher. I’m pretty sure that was the name of the—’

‘Frobisher!’ Jerome yells from Hodges’s office. ‘Anthony Frobisher was the third Cyber Patrol guy!’

‘Beat you, Jerome,’ Holly says. She looks smug. ‘Again.’

Unlike Frederica Linklatter, Anthony Frobisher is listed, both as himself and as Your Computer Guru. Both numbers are the same – his cell, Hodges assumes. He evicts Jerome from his office chair and settles there himself, doing it slowly and carefully. The explosion of pain he felt while sitting on the toilet is still fresh in his mind.

The phone is answered on the first ring. ‘Computer Guru, Tony Frobisher speaking. How can I help you?’

‘Mr Frobisher, this is Bill Hodges. You probably don’t remember me, but—’

‘Oh, I remember you, all right.’ Frobisher sounds wary. ‘What do you want? If it’s about Hartsfield—’

‘It’s about Frederica Linklatter. Do you have a current address for her?’

‘Freddi? Why would I have any address for her? I haven’t seen her since DE closed.’

‘Really? According to her Facebook page, you and she are friends.’

Frobisher laughs incredulously. ‘Who else has she got listed? Kim Jong-un? Charles Manson? Listen, Mr Hodges, that smartmouth bitch has no friends. The closest thing to one was Hartsfield, and I just got a news push on my phone saying he’s dead.’

Hodges has no idea what a news push is, and no desire to learn. He thanks Frobisher and hangs up. He’s guessing that none of Freddi Linklatter’s half dozen Facebook friends are real friends, that she just added them to keep from feeling like a total outcast. Holly might have done that same thing, once upon a time, but now she actually has friends. Lucky for her, and lucky for them. Which begs the question: how does he locate Freddi Linklatter?

The outfit he and Holly runs isn’t called Finders Keepers for nothing, but most of their specialized search engines are constructed to locate bad people with bad friends, long police records, and colorful want sheets. He can find her, in this computerized age few people are able to drop entirely off the grid, but he needs it to happen fast. Every time some kid turns on one of those free Zappits, it’s loading up pink fish, blue flashes, and – based on Jerome’s experience – a subliminal message suggesting that a visit to zeetheend would be in order.

You’re a detective. One with cancer, granted, but still a detective. So let go of the extraneous shit and detect.

It’s hard, though. The thought of all those kids – the ones Brady tried and failed to kill at the ’Round Here concert – keeps getting in the way. Jerome’s sister was one of them, and if not for Dereece Neville, Barbara might be dead now instead of just in a leg cast. Maybe hers was a test model. Maybe the Ellerton woman’s was, too. That makes a degree of sense. But now there are all those other Zappits, a flood of them, and they must have gone somewhere, goddammit.

That finally turns on a lightbulb.

‘Holly! I need a phone number!’

Todd Schneider is in, and affable. ‘I understand you folks are in for quite a storm, Mr Hodges.’

‘So they say.’

‘Having any luck tracking down those defective consoles?’

‘That’s actually why I’m calling. Do you happen to have the address that consignment of Zappit Commanders was sent to?’

‘Of course. Can I call you back with it?’

‘How about if I hang on? It’s rather urgent.’

‘An urgent consumer advocacy issue?’ Schneider sounds bemused. ‘That sounds almost un-American. Let me see what I can do.’

A click and Hodges is on hold, complete with soothing strings that fail to soothe. Holly and Jerome are both in the office now, crowding the desk. Hodges makes an effort not to put his hand to his side. The seconds stretch out and form a minute. Then two. Hodges thinks, Either he’s on another call and forgotten me, or he can’t find it.

The hold music disappears. ‘Mr Hodges? Still there?’

‘Still here.’

‘I have that address. It’s Gamez Unlimited – Gamez with a Z, if you remember – at 442 Maritime Drive. Care of Ms Frederica Linklatter. Does that help?’

‘It sure does. Thank you, Mr Schneider.’ He hangs up and looks at his two associates, one slender and winter-pale, the other bulked up from his house-building stint in Arizona. Along with his daughter Allie, now living on the other side of the country, they are the people he loves most at this end of his life.

He says, ‘Let’s take a ride, kids.’

Brady turns off SR-79 and onto Vale Road at Thurston’s Garage, where a number of local plow-for-pay boys are gassing their trucks, loading up with salted sand, or just standing around, drinking coffee and jabbering. It crosses Brady’s mind to pull in and see if he can get some studded snow tires on Library Al’s Malibu, but given the crowd the storm has brought to the garage, it would probably take all afternoon. He’s close to his destination now, and decides to go for it. If he gets snowed in once he’s there, who gives a shit? Not him. He’s been out to the camp twice already, mostly to scope the place out, but the second time he also laid in some supplies.

There’s a good three inches of snow on Vale Road, and the going is greasy. The Malibu slides several times, once almost all the way to the ditch. He’s sweating heavily, and Babineau’s arthritic fingers are throbbing from Brady’s deathgrip on the steering wheel.

At last he sees the tall red posts that are his final landmark. Brady pumps the brakes and makes the turn at walking pace. The last two miles are on an unnamed, one-lane camp road, but thanks to the overarching trees, the driving here is the easiest he’s had in the last hour. In some places the road is still bare. That won’t last once the main body of the storm arrives, which will happen around eight o’clock tonight, according to the radio.

He comes to a fork where wooden arrows nailed to a huge old-growth fir point in different directions. The one on the right reads BIG BOB’S BEAR CAMP. The one on the left reads HEADS AND SKINS. Ten feet or so above the arrows, already wearing a thin hood of snow, a security camera peers down.

Brady turns left and finally allows his hands to relax. He’s almost there.

In the city, the snow is still light. The streets are clear and traffic is moving well, but the three of them pile into Jerome’s Jeep Wrangler just to be on the safe side. 442 Maritime Drive turns out to be one of the condos that sprang up like mushrooms on the south side of the lake in the go-go eighties. Back then they were a big deal. Now most are half empty. In the foyer, Jerome finds F. LINKLATTER in 6-A. He reaches for the buzzer, but Hodges stops him before he can push it.

‘What?’ Jerome asks.

Holly says primly, ‘Watch and learn, Jerome. This is how we roll.’

Hodges pushes other buttons at random, and gets a male voice in return on the fourth try. ‘Yeah?’

‘FedEx,’ Hodges says.

‘Who’d send me something by FedEx?’ The voice sounds mystified.

‘Couldn’t tell you, buddy. I don’t make the news, I just report it.’

The door to the lobby gives out an ill-tempered rattle. Hodges pushes through and holds it for the others. There are two elevators, one with an out-of-order sign taped to it. On the one that works someone has posted a note that reads, Whoever has the barking dog on 4,I will find you.

‘I find that rather ominous,’ Jerome says.

The elevator door opens and as they get in, Holly begins to rummage in her purse. She finds her box of Nicorette and pops one. When the elevator opens on the sixth floor, Hodges says, ‘If she’s there, let me do the talking.’

6-A is directly across from the elevator. Hodges knocks. When there’s no answer, he raps. When there’s still no answer, he hammers with the side of his fist.

‘Go away.’ The voice on the other side of the door sounds weak and thin. The voice of a little girl with the flu, Hodges thinks.

He hammers again. ‘Open up, Ms Linklatter.’

‘Are you the police?’

He could say yes, it wouldn’t be the first time since retiring from the force that he impersonated a police officer, but instinct tells him not to do it this time.

‘No. My name is Bill Hodges. We met before, briefly, back in 2010. It was when you worked at—’

‘Yeah, I remember.’

One lock turns, then another. A chain falls. The door opens, and the tangy smell of pot wafts into the corridor. The woman in the doorway has got a half-smoked fatty tweezed between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. She’s thin almost to the point of emaciation, and pale as milk. She’s wearing a strappy tee-shirt with BAD BOY BAIL BONDS, BRADENTON FLA on the front. Below this is the motto IN JAIL? WE BAIL!, but that part is hard to read because of the bloodstain.

‘I should have called you,’ Freddi says, and although she’s looking at Hodges, he has an idea it’s really herself she’s speaking to. ‘I would have, if I’d thought of it. You stopped him before, right?’

‘Jesus, lady, what happened?’ Jerome asks.

‘I probably packed too much.’ Freddi gestures at a pair of mismatched suitcases standing behind her in the living room. ‘I should have listened to my mother. She said to always travel light.’

‘I don’t think he’s talking about the suitcases,’ Hodges says, cocking a thumb at the fresh blood on Freddi’s shirt. He steps in, Jerome and Holly right behind him. Holly closes the door.

‘I know what he’s talking about,’ Freddi says. ‘Fucker shot me. Bleeding started again when I hauled the suitcases out of the bedroom.’

‘Let me see,’ Hodges says, but when he steps toward her, Freddi takes a compensatory step back and crosses her arms in front of her, a Holly-esque gesture that touches Hodges’s heart.

‘No. I’m not wearing a bra. Hurts too much.’

Holly pushes past Hodges. ‘Show me where the bathroom is. Let me look.’ She sounds okay to Hodges – calm – but she’s chewing the shit out of that nicotine gum.

Freddi takes Holly by the wrist and leads her past the suitcases, pausing a moment to hit the joint. She lets the smoke out in a series of smoke signals as she talks. ‘The equipment is in the spare room. On your right. Get a good look.’ And then, returning to her original scripture: ‘If I hadn’t packed so much, I’d be gone now.’

Hodges doubts it. He thinks she would have passed out in the elevator.

Heads and Skins isn’t as big as the Babineau McMansion in Sugar Heights, but damned near. It’s long, low, and rambling. Beyond it, the snow-covered ground slopes down to Lake Charles, which has frozen over since Brady’s last visit.

He parks in front and walks carefully around to the west side, Babineau’s expensive loafers sliding in the accumulating snow. The hunting camp is in a clearing, so there’s a lot more snow to slip around in. His ankles are freezing. He wishes he’d thought to bring some boots, and once more reminds himself that you can’t think of everything.

He takes the key to the generator shed from inside the electric meter box, and the keys to the house from inside the shed. The gennie is a top-of-the-line Generac Guardian. It’s silent now, but will probably kick on later. Out here in the boonies, the electricity goes down in almost every storm.

Brady returns to the car for Babineau’s laptop. The camp is WiFi equipped, and the laptop is all he needs to keep him connected to his current project, and abreast of developments. Plus the Zappit, of course.

Good old Zappit Zero.

The house is dark and chilly, and his first acts upon entering are the prosaic ones any returning homeowner might perform: he turns on the lights and boosts the thermostat. The main room is huge and pine-paneled, lit by a chandelier made of polished caribou bones, from back in the days when there were still caribou in these woods. The fieldstone fireplace is a maw, almost big enough to roast a rhino in. Overhead are thick, crisscrossing beams, darkened by years of woodsmoke from the fireplace. Next to one wall stands a cherrywood buffet as long as the room itself, lined with at least fifty liquor bottles, some nearly empty, some with the seals still intact. The furniture is old, mismatched, and plushy – deep easy chairs, and a gigantic sofa where innumerable bimbos have been banged over the years. Plenty of extra-marital fucking has gone on out here in addition to the hunting and fishing. The skin in front of the fireplace belonged to a bear brought down by Dr Elton Marchant, who has now gone to that great operating room in the sky. The mounted heads and stuffed fish are trophies belonging to nearly a dozen other docs, past and present. There’s a particularly fine sixteen-point buck that Babineau himself brought down back when he was really Babineau. Out of season, but what the hell.

Brady puts the laptop on an antique rolltop desk at the far end of the room and fires it up before taking off his coat. First he checks in on the repeater, and is delighted to see it’s now reading 243 FOUND.

He thought he understood the power of the eye-trap, and has seen how addictive that demo screen is even before it’s juiced up, but this is success beyond his wildest expectations. Far beyond. There haven’t been any new warning chimes from zeetheend, but he goes there next anyway, just to see how it’s doing. Once again his expectations are exceeded. Over seven thousand visitors so far, seven thousand, and the number ticks up steadily even as he watches.

He drops his coat and does a nimble little dance on the bearskin rug. It tires him out fast – when he makes his next switch, he’ll be sure to choose someone in their twenties or thirties – but it warms him up nicely.

He snags the TV remote from the buffet and clicks on the enormous flatscreen, one of the camp’s few nods to life in the twenty-first century. The satellite dish pulls in God knows how many channels and the HD picture is to die for, but Brady is more interested in local programming today. He punches the source button on the remote until he’s looking back down the camp road leading to the outside world. He doesn’t expect company, but he has two or three busy days ahead of him, the most important and productive days of his life, and if someone tries to interrupt him, he wants to know about it beforehand.

The gun closet is a walk-in job, the knotty-pine walls lined with rifles and hung with pistols on pegs. The pick of the litter, as far as Brady’s concerned, is the FN SCAR 17S with the pistol grip. Capable of firing six hundred fifty rounds a minute and illegally converted to full auto by a proctologist who is also a gun nut, it is the Rolls-Royce of grease guns. Brady takes it out, along with a few extra clips and several heavy boxes of Winchester .308s, and props it against the wall beside the fireplace. He thinks about starting a fire – seasoned wood is already stacked in the hearth – but he has one other thing to do first. He goes to the site for city breaking news and scrolls down rapidly, looking for suicides. None yet, but he can remedy that.

‘Call it a Zappitizer,’ he says, grinning, and powers up the console. He makes himself comfortable in one of the easy chairs and begins following the pink fish. When he closes his eyes, they’re still there. At first, anyway. Then they become red dots moving on a field of black.

Brady picks one at random and goes to work.

Hodges and Jerome are staring at a digital display reading 244

FOUND when Holly leads Freddi into her computer room.

‘She’s all right,’ Holly says quietly to Hodges. ‘She shouldn’t be, but she is. She’s got a hole in her chest that looks like—’

‘Like what I said it is.’ Freddi sounds a little stronger now. Her eyes are red, but that’s probably from the dope she’s been smoking. ‘He shot me.’

‘She had some mini-pads and I taped one over the wound,’ Holly says. ‘It was too big for a Band-Aid.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘Oough.’

‘Fucker shot me.’ It’s as if Freddi’s still trying to get it straight in her mind.

‘Which fucker would that be?’ Hodges asks. ‘Felix Babineau?’

‘Yeah, him. Fucking Dr Z. Only he’s really Brady. So is the other one. Z-Boy.’

‘Z-Boy?’ Jerome asks. ‘Who the hell is Z-Boy?’

‘Older guy?’ Hodges asks. ‘Older than Babineau? Frizzy white hair? Drives a beater with primer paint on it? Maybe wears a parka with tape over some of the rips?’

‘I don’t know about his car, but I know the parka,’ Freddi says. ‘That’s my boy Z-Boy.’ She sits in front of her desktop Mac – currently spinning out a fractal screensaver – and takes a final drag on her joint before crushing it out in an ashtray full of Marlboro butts. She’s still pale, but some of the fuck-you attitude Hodges remembers from their previous meeting is coming back. ‘Dr Z and his faithful sidekick, Z-Boy. Except they’re both Brady. Fucking matryoshka dolls is what they are.’

‘Ms Linklatter?’ Holly says.

‘Oh, go ahead and call me Freddi. Any chick who sees the teacups I call tits gets to call me Freddi.’

Holly blushes, but goes ahead. When she’s on the scent, she always does. ‘Brady Hartsfield is dead. It was an overdose last night or early this morning.’

‘Elvis has left the building?’ Freddi considers the idea, then shakes her head. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice. If it was true.’

And wouldn’t it be nice I could totally believe she’s crazy, Hodges thinks.

Jerome points at the readout above her jumbo monitor. It’s now flashing 247 FOUND. ‘Is that thing searching or downloading?’

‘Both.’ Freddi’s hand is pressing at the makeshift bandage under her shirt in an automatic gesture that reminds Hodges of himself. ‘It’s a repeater. I can turn it off – at least I think I can – but you have to promise to protect me from the men who are watching the building. The website, though… no good. I’ve got the IP address and the password, but I still couldn’t crash the server.’

Hodges has a thousand questions, but as 247 FOUND clicks up to 248, only two seem of paramount importance. ‘What’s it searching for? And what’s it downloading?’

‘You have to promise me protection first. You have to take me somewhere safe. Witness Protection, or whatever.’

‘He doesn’t have to promise you anything, because I already know,’ Holly says. There’s nothing mean in her tone; if anything, it’s comforting. ‘It’s searching for Zappits, Bill. Each time somebody turns one on, the repeater finds it and upgrades the Fishin’ Hole demo screen.’

‘Turns the pink fish into number-fish and adds the blue flashes,’ Jerome amplifies. He looks at Freddi. ‘That’s what it’s doing, right?’

Now it’s the purple, blood-caked lump on her forehead that her hand goes to. When her fingers touch it, she winces and pulls back. ‘Yeah. Of the eight hundred Zappits that were delivered here, two hundred and eighty were defective. They either froze while they were booting up or went ka-bloosh the first time you tried to open one of the games. The others were okay. I had to install a root kit into each and every one of them. It was a lot of work. Boring work. Like attaching widgets to wadgets on an assembly line.’

‘That means five hundred and twenty were okay,’ Hodges says.

‘The man can subtract, give him a cigar.’ Freddi glances at the readout. ‘And almost half of them have updated already.’ She laughs, a sound with absolutely no humor in it. ‘Brady may be nuts, but he worked this out pretty good, don’t you think?’

Hodges says, ‘Turn it off.’

‘Sure. When you promise to protect me.’

Jerome, who has firsthand experience with how fast the Zappits work and what unpleasant ideas they implant in a person’s mind, has no interest in standing by while Freddi tries to dicker with Bill. The Swiss Army Knife he carried on his belt while in Arizona has been retrieved from his luggage and is now back in his pocket. He unfolds the biggest blade, shoves the repeater off its shelf, and slices the cables mating it to Freddi’s system. It falls to the floor with a moderate crash, and an alarm begins to bong from the CPU under the desk. Holly bends down, pushes something, and the alarm shuts up.

‘There’s a switch, moron!’ Freddi shouts. ‘You didn’t have to do that!’

‘You know what, I did,’ Jerome says. ‘One of those fucking Zappits almost got my sister killed.’ He steps toward her, and Freddi cringes back. ‘Did you have any idea what you were doing? Any fucking idea at all? I think you must have. You look stoned but not stupid.’

Freddi begins to cry. ‘I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to.’

Hodges takes a deep breath, which reawakens the pain. ‘Start from the beginning, Freddi, and take us through it.’

‘And as quickly as you can,’ Holly adds.

Jamie Winters was nine when he attended the ’Round Here concert at the Mac with his mother. Only a few subteen boys were there that night; the group was one of those dismissed by most boys his age as girly stuff. Jamie, however, liked girly stuff. At nine he hadn’t yet been sure that he was gay (wasn’t even sure he knew what that meant). All he knew was that when he saw Cam Knowles, ’Round Here’s lead singer, he felt funny in the pit of his stomach.

Now he’s pushing sixteen and knows exactly what he is. With certain boys at school, he prefers to leave off the last letter of his first name because with those boys he likes to be Jami. His father knows what he is, as well, and treats him like some kind of freak. Lenny Winters – a man’s man if ever there was one – owns a successful building company, but today all four of Winters Construction’s current jobs are shut down because of the impending storm. Lenny is in his home office instead, up to his ears in paperwork and stewing over the spreadsheets covering his computer screen.

‘Dad!’

‘What do you want?’ Lenny growls without looking up. ‘And why aren’t you in school? Was it canceled?’

‘Dad!’

This time Lenny looks around at the boy he sometimes refers to (when he thinks Jamie isn’t in earshot) as ‘the family queer.’ The first thing he’s aware of is that his son is wearing lipstick, rouge, and eye shadow. The second thing is the dress. Lenny recognizes it as one of his wife’s. The kid is too tall for it, and it stops halfway down his thighs.

‘What the fuck!’

Jamie is smiling. Jubilant. ‘It’s how I want to be buried!’

‘What are you—’ Lenny gets up so fast his chair tumbles over. That’s when he sees the gun the boy is holding. He must have taken it from Lenny’s side of the closet in the master bedroom.

‘Watch this, Dad!’ Still smiling. As if about to demonstrate a really cool magic trick. He raises the gun and places the muzzle against his right temple. His finger is curled around the trigger. The nail has been carefully coated with sparkle polish.

‘Put that down, Son! Put it—’

Jamie – or Jami, which is how he has signed his brief suicide note – pulls the trigger. The gun is a .357, and the report is deafening. Blood and brains fly in a fan and decorate the doorframe with gaud. The boy in his mother’s dress and makeup falls forward, the left side of his face pushed out like a balloon.

Lenny Winters gives voice to a series of high, wavering screams. He screams like a girl.

Brady disconnects from Jamie Winters just as the boy puts the gun to his head, afraid – terrified, actually – of what may happen if he’s still in there when the bullet enters the head he’s been messing with. Would he be spit out like a seed, as he was when he was inside the half-hypnotized dumbo mopping the floor in 217, or would he die along with the kid?

For a moment he thinks he’s left it until too late, and the steady chiming he hears is what everyone hears when they exit this life. Then he’s back in the main room of Heads and Skins with the Zappit console in his sagging hand and Babineau’s laptop in front of him. That’s where the chiming is coming from. He looks at the screen and sees two messages. The first reads 248 FOUND. That’s the good news. The second is the bad news:

Freddi, he thinks. I didn’t believe you had the guts. I really didn’t.

You bitch.

His left hand gropes along the desk and closes on a ceramic skull filled with pens and pencils. He brings it up, meaning to smash it into the screen and destroy that infuriating message. What stops him is an idea. A horribly plausible idea.

Maybe she didn’t have the guts. Maybe somebody else killed the repeater. And who could that someone else be? Hodges, of course. The old Det-Ret. His fucking nemesis.

Brady knows he isn’t exactly right in the head, has known that for years now, and understands this could be nothing but paranoia. Yet it makes a degree of sense. Hodges stopped his gloating visits to Room 217 almost a year and a half ago, but he was sniffing around the hospital just yesterday, according to Babineau.

And he always knew I was faking, Brady thinks. He said so, time and time again: I know you’re in there, Brady. Some of the suits from the DA’s office had said the same thing, but with them it had only been wishful thinking; they wanted to put him on trial and have done with him. Hodges, though…

‘He said it with conviction,’ Brady says.

And maybe this isn’t such terrible news, after all. Half of the Zappits Freddi loaded up and Babineau sent out are now active, which means most of those people will be as open to invasion as the little fag he just dealt with. Plus, there’s the website. Once the Zappit people start killing themselves – with a little help from Brady Wilson Hartsfield, granted – the website will push others over the edge: monkey see, monkey do. At first it will be just the ones who were closest to doing it anyway, but they will lead by example and there will be many more. They’ll march off the edge of life like stampeding buffalo going over a cliff.

But still.

Hodges.

Brady remembers a poster he had in his room when he was a boy: If life hands you lemons, make lemonade! Words to live by, especially when you kept in mind that the only way to make them into lemonade was to squeeze the hell out of them.

He grabs Z-Boy’s old but serviceable flip phone and once again dials Freddi’s number from memory.

Freddi gives a small scream when ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ starts tootling away from somewhere in the apartment. Holly puts a gentling hand on her shoulder and looks a question at Hodges. He nods and follows the sound, with Jerome on his heels. Her phone is on top of her dresser, amid a clutter of hand cream, Zig-Zag rolling papers, roach clips, and not one but two good-sized bags of pot.

The screen says Z-BOY, but Z-Boy, once known as Library Al Brooks, is currently in police custody and not likely to be making any calls.

‘Hello?’ Hodges says. ‘Is that you, Dr Babineau?’

Nothing… or almost. Hodges can hear breathing.

‘Or should I call you Dr Z?’

Nothing.

‘How about Brady, will that work?’ He still can’t quite believe this in spite of everything Freddi has told them, but he can believe that Babineau has gone schizo, and actually thinks that’s who he is. ‘Is it you, asshole?’

The sound of the breathing continues for another two or three seconds, then it’s gone. The connection has been broken.

‘It’s possible, you know,’ Holly says. She has joined them in Freddi’s cluttered bedroom. ‘That it really could be Brady, I mean. Personality projection is well documented. In fact, it’s the second-most-common cause of so-called demonic possession. The most common being schizophrenia. I saw a documentary about it on—’

‘No,’ Hodges says. ‘Not possible. Not.’

‘Don’t blind yourself to the idea. Don’t be like Miss Pretty Gray Eyes.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Oh God, now the tendrils of pain are reaching all the way down to his balls.

‘That you shouldn’t turn away from the evidence just because it points in a direction you don’t want to go. You know Brady was different when he regained consciousness. He came back with certain abilities most people don’t have. Telekinesis may only have been one of them.’

‘I never saw him actually moving shit around.’

‘But you believe the nurses who did. Don’t you?’

Hodges is silent, head lowered, thinking.

‘Answer her,’ Jerome says. His tone is mild, but Hodges can hear impatience underneath.

‘Yeah. I believed at least some of them. The levelheaded ones like Becky Helmington. Their stories matched up too well to be fabrications.’

‘Look at me, Bill.’

This request – no, this command – coming from Holly Gibney is so unusual that he raises his head.

‘Do you really believe Babineau reconfigured the Zappits and set up that website?’

‘I don’t have to believe it. He got Freddi to do those things.’

‘Not the website,’ a tired voice says.

They look around. Freddi is standing in the doorway.

‘If I’d set it up, I could shut it down. I just got a thumb drive with all the website goodies on it from Dr Z. Plugged it in and uploaded it. But once he was gone, I did a little investigating.’

‘Started with a DNS lookup, right?’ Holly says.

Freddi nods. ‘Girl’s got some skills.’

To Hodges, Holly says, ‘DNS stands for Domain Name Server. It hops from one server to the next, like using stepping-stones to cross a creek, asking “Do you know this site?” It keeps going and keeps asking until it finds the right server.’ Then, to Freddi: ‘But once you found the IP address, you still couldn’t get in?’

‘Nope.’

Holly says, ‘I’m sure Babineau knows a lot about human brains, but I doubt very much if he has the computer smarts to lock up a website like that.’

‘I was just hired help,’ Freddi says. ‘It was Z-Boy who brought me the program for retooling the Zappits, written down like a recipe for coffee cake, or something, and I’d bet you a thousand dollars that all he knows about computers is how to turn them on – assuming he can find the button in back – and navigate to his favorite porn sites.’

Hodges believes her about that much. He’s not sure the police will when they finally catch hold of this thing, but Hodges does. And… Don’t be like Miss Pretty Gray Eyes.

That stung. It stung like hell.

‘Also,’ Freddi says, ‘there was a double dot after each step in the program directions. Brady used to do that. I think he learned it when he was taking computer classes in high school.’

Holly grabs Hodges’s wrists. There’s blood on one of her hands, from patching Freddi’s wound. Along with her other bells and whistles, Holly is a clean-freak, and that she’s neglected to wash the blood off says all that needs to be said about how fiercely she’s working this.

‘Babineau was giving Hartsfield experimental drugs, which was unethical, but that’s all he was doing, because bringing Brady back was all he was interested in.’

‘You don’t know that for sure,’ Hodges says.

She’s still holding him, more with her eyes than her hands. Because she’s ordinarily averse to eye contact, it’s easy to forget how burning that gaze can be when she turns it up to eleven and pulls the knobs off.

‘There’s really just one question,’ Holly says. ‘Who’s the suicide prince in this story? Felix Babineau or Brady Hartsfield?’

Freddi speaks in a dreamy, sing-songy voice. ‘Sometimes Dr Z was just Dr Z and sometimes Z-Boy was just Z-Boy, only then it was like both of them were on drugs. When they were wide awake, though, it wasn’t them. When they were awake, it was Brady inside. Believe what you want, but it was him. It’s not just the double dots or the backslanted printing, it’s everything. I worked with that skeevy motherfucker. I know.’

She steps into the room.

‘And now, if none of you amateur detectives object, I’m going to roll myself another joint.’

On Babineau’s legs, Brady paces the big living room of Heads and Skins, thinking furiously. He wants to go back into the world of the Zappit, wants to pick a new target and repeat the delicious experience of pushing someone over the edge, but he has to be calm and serene to do that, and he’s far from either.

Hodges.

Hodges in Freddi’s apartment.

And will Freddi spill her guts? Friends and neighbors, does the sun rise in the east?

There are two questions, as Brady sees it. The first is whether or not Hodges can take down the website. The second is whether or not Hodges can find him out here in the williwags.

Brady thinks the answer to both questions is yes, but the more suicides he causes in the meantime, the more Hodges will suffer. When he looks at it in that light, he thinks that Hodges finding his way out here could be a good thing. It could be making lemonade from lemons. In any case, he has time. He’s many miles north of the city, and he’s got winter storm Eugenie on his side.

Brady goes back to the laptop and confirms that zeetheend is still up and running. He checks the visitors’ count. Over nine thousand now, and most of them (but by no means all) will be teenagers interested in suicide. That interest peaks in January and February, when dark comes early and it seems spring will never arrive. Plus, he’s got Zappit Zero, and with that he can work on plenty of kids personally. With Zappit Zero, getting to them is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

Pink fish, he thinks, and snickers.

Calmer now that he sees a way of dealing with the old Det-Ret should he try showing up like the cavalry in the last reel of a John Wayne western, Brady picks up the Zappit and turns it on. As he studies the fish, a fragment of some poem read in high school occurs to him, and he speaks it aloud.

‘Oh do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit.’

He closes his eyes. The zipping pink fish become zipping red dots, each one a bygone concertgoer who is at this very moment studying his or her gift Zappit and hoping to win prizes.

Brady picks one, brings it to a halt, and watches it bloom. Like a rose.

‘Sure, there’s a police computer forensics squad,’ Hodges says, in answer to Holly’s question. ‘If you want to call three part-time crunchers a squad, that is. And no, they won’t listen to me. I’m just a civilian these days.’ Nor is that the worst of it. He’s a civilian who used to be a cop, and when retired cops try meddling in police business, they are called uncles. It is not a term of respect.

‘Then call Pete and have him do it,’ Holly says. ‘Because that fracking suicide site has to come down.’

The two of them are back in Freddi Linklatter’s version of Mission Control. Jerome is in the living room with Freddi. Hodges doesn’t think she’s apt to flee – Freddi’s terrified of the probably fictional men posted outside her building – but stoner behavior is difficult to predict. Other than how they usually want to get more stoned, that is.

‘Call Pete and tell him to have one of the computer geeks call me. Any cruncher with half a brain will be able to doss the site and knock it down that way.’

‘Doss it?’

‘Big D, little o, big S. Stands for Denial of Services. The guy needs to connect to a BOT network and…’ She sees Hodges’s mystified expression. ‘Never mind. The idea is to flood the suicide site with requests for services – thousands, millions. Choke the fracking thing and crash the server.’

‘You can do that?’

‘I can’t, and Freddi can’t, but a police department geek freak will be able to tap enough computing power. If he can’t do it from the police computers, he’ll get Homeland Security to do it. Because this is a security issue, right? Lives are at stake.’

They are, and Hodges makes the call, but Pete’s cell goes directly to voicemail. Next he tries his old pal Cassie Sheen, but the desk officer who takes his call tells him Cassie’s mother had some sort of diabetic crisis and Cassie took her to the doctor.

Out of other options, he calls Isabelle.

‘Izzy, it’s Bill Hodges. I tried to get Pete, but—’

‘Pete’s gone. Done. Kaput.’

For one awful moment Hodges thinks she means he’s dead.

‘Left a memo on my desk. It said he was going to go home, turn off his cell, pull the plug on the landline, and sleep for the next twenty-four hours. He further shared that today was his last day as working police. He can do it, too, doesn’t even have to touch his vacation time, of which he has piles. He’s got enough personal days to see him through to retirement. And I think you better scratch that retirement party off your calendar. You and your weirdo partner can hit a movie that night, instead.’

‘You’re blaming me?’

‘You and your Brady Hartsfield fixation. You infected Pete with it.’

‘No. He wanted to chase the case. You were the one who wanted to hand it off, then duck down in the nearest foxhole. Gotta say I’m kind of on Pete’s side when it comes to that one.’

‘See? See? That’s exactly the attitude I’m talking about. Wake up, Hodges, this is the real world. I’m telling you for the last time to quit sticking your long beak into what isn’t your busi—’

‘And I’m telling you that if you want to have any fucking chance of promotion, you need to get your head out of your ass and listen to me.’

The words are out before he can think better of them. He’s afraid she’ll hang up, and if she does, where will he go then? But there’s only shocked silence.

‘Suicides. Have any been reported since you got back from Sugar Heights?’

‘I don’t kn—’

‘Well, look! Right now!’

He can hear the faint tapping of Izzy’s keyboard for five seconds or so. Then: ‘One just came over the wire. Kid in Lakewood shot himself. Did it in front of his father, who called it in. Hysterical, as you might expect. What’s that got to do with—’

‘Tell the cops on the scene to look for a Zappit game console. Just like the one Holly found at the Ellerton house.’

‘That again? You’re like a broken rec—’

‘They’ll find one. And you may have more Zappit suicides before the day’s over. Possibly a lot more.’

Website! Holly mouths. Tell her about the website!

‘Also, there’s a suicide website called zeetheend. Just went up today. It needs to come down.’

She sighs and speaks as though to a child. ‘There are all kinds of suicide websites. We got a memo about it from Juvenile Services just last year. They pop up on the Net like mushrooms, usually created by kids who wear black tee-shirts and spend all their free time holed up in their bedrooms. There’s a lot of bad poetry and stuff about how to do it painlessly. Along with the usual bitching about how their parents don’t understand them, of course.’

‘This one is different. It could start an avalanche. It’s loaded with subliminal messages. Have someone from computer forensics call Holly Gibney ASAP.’

‘That would be outside of protocol,’ she says coolly. ‘I’ll have a look, then go through channels.’

‘Have one of your rent-a-geeks call Holly in the next five minutes, or when the suicides start cascading – and I’m pretty sure they will – I’ll make it clear to anyone who’ll listen that I went to you and you tied me up in red tape. My listeners will include the daily paper and 8 Alive. The department does not have a lot of friends in either place, especially since those two unis shot an unarmed black kid to death on MLK last summer.’

Silence. Then, in a softer voice – a hurt voice, maybe – she says, ‘You’re supposed to be on our side, Billy. Why are you acting this way?’

Because Holly was right about you, he thinks.

Out loud he says, ‘Because there isn’t much time.’

In the living room, Freddi is rolling another joint. She looks at Jerome over the top of it as she licks the paper closed. ‘You’re a big one, aren’t you?’

Jerome makes no reply.

‘What do you go? Two-ten? Two-twenty?’

Jerome has nothing to say to this, either.

Undeterred, she sparks the joint, inhales, and holds it out to him. Jerome shakes his head.

‘Your loss, big boy. This is pretty good shit. Smells like dog pee, I know, but pretty good shit, just the same.’

Jerome says nothing.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘No. I was thinking about a sociology class I took when I was a high school senior. We did a four-week mod on suicide, and there was one statistic I never forgot. Every teen suicide that makes it onto social media spawns seven attempts, five that are show and two that are go. Maybe you should think about that instead of running the tough-girl act into the ground.’

Freddi’s lower lip trembles. ‘I didn’t know. Not really.’

‘Sure you did.’

She drops her eyes to the joint. It’s her turn to say nothing.

‘My sister heard a voice.’

At that, Freddi looks up. ‘What kind of voice?’

‘One from the Zappit. It told her all sorts of mean things. About how she was trying to live white. About how she was denying her race. About how she was a bad and worthless person.’

‘And that reminds you of someone?’

‘Yes.’ Jerome is thinking of the accusatory shrieks he and Holly heard coming from Olivia Trelawney’s computer long after that unfortunate lady was dead. Shrieks programmed by Brady Hartsfield, and designed to drive Trelawney toward suicide like a cow down a slaughterhouse chute. ‘Actually, it does.’

‘Brady was fascinated by suicide,’ Freddi says. ‘He was always reading about it on the Web. He meant to kill himself with the others at that concert, you know.’

Jerome does know. He was there. ‘Do you really think he got in touch with my sister telepathically? Using the Zappit as… what? A kind of conduit?’

‘If he could take over Babineau and the other guy – and he did, whether you believe it or not – then yeah, I think he could do that.’

‘And the others with updated Zappits? Those two hundred and forty-something others?’

Freddi only looks at him through her veil of smoke.

‘Even if we take down the website… what about them? What about when that voice starts telling them they’re dogshit on the world’s shoe, and the only answer is to take a long walk off a short dock?’

Before she can reply, Hodges does it for her. ‘We have to stop the voice. Which means stopping him. Come on, Jerome. We’re going back to the office.’

‘What about me?’ Freddi asks plaintively.

‘You’re coming. And Freddi?’

‘What?’

‘Pot’s good for pain, isn’t it?’

‘Opinions on that vary, as you might guess, the establishment in this fucked-up country being what it is, so all I can tell you is that for me, it makes that delicate time of the month a lot less delicate.’

‘Bring it along,’ Hodges says. ‘Also the rolling papers.’

They go back to Finders Keepers in Jerome’s Jeep. The back is full of Jerome’s junk, meaning Freddi has to sit on someone’s lap, and it’s not going to be Hodges’s. Not in his current condition. So he drives and Jerome gets Freddi.

‘Hey, this is sort of like getting a date with John Shaft,’ Freddi says with a smirk. ‘The big private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks.’

‘Don’t get used to it,’ Jerome says.

Holly’s cell rings. It’s a guy named Trevor Jeppson, from the police department’s Computer Forensics Squad. Holly is soon speaking in a jargon Hodges doesn’t understand – something about BOTS and the darknet. Whatever she’s getting back from the guy seems to please her, because when she breaks the connection, she’s smiling.

‘He’s never dossed a website before. He’s like a kid on Christmas morning.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘With the password and the IP address already in hand? Not long.’

Hodges parks in one of the thirty-minute spaces in front of the Turner Building. They won’t be here long – if he gets lucky, that is – and given his recent run of bad luck, he considers the universe owes him a good turn.

He goes into his office, closes the door, then hunts through his ratty old address book for Becky Helmington’s number. Holly has offered to program the address book into his phone, but Hodges has kept putting it off. He likes his old address book. Probably never get around to making the changeover now, he thinks. Trent’s Last Case, and all that.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Jesus, for real?’

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

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

‘Where is out there?’

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

‘Will you call her?’

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

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

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

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

The idea surprises him into laughter. It hurts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My Jeep—’ Jerome begins.

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

‘What about me?’ Freddi asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘This is supposed to be Witness Protection?’ Freddi asks. ‘This?’

Hodges says, ‘Since I don’t happen to have a safe house at my disposal, it will have to do. I’ll register you under my name. You go in, you lock the door, you watch TV, you wait until this thing is over.’

‘And change the dressing on that wound,’ Holly says.

Freddi ignores her. She’s focused on Hodges. ‘How much trouble am I going to be in? When it’s over?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t have time to discuss it with you now.’

‘Can I at least order room service?’ There’s a faint gleam in Freddi’s bloodshot eyes. ‘I’m not in so much pain now, and I’ve got a wicked case of the munchies.’

‘Knock yourself out,’ Hodges says.

Jerome adds, ‘Only check the peephole before you let in the waiter. Make sure it isn’t one of Brady Hartsfield’s Men in Black.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Freddi says. ‘Right?’

The hotel lobby is dead empty on this snowy afternoon. Hodges, who feels as if he woke up to Pete’s telephone call approximately three years ago, walks to the desk, does his business there, and comes back to where the others are sitting. Holly is tapping away at something on her iPad, and doesn’t look up. Freddi holds out her hand for the key folder, but Hodges gives it to Jerome, instead.

‘Room 522. Take her up, will you? I want to talk to Holly.’

Jerome raises his eyebrows, and when Hodges doesn’t elaborate, he shrugs and takes Freddi by the arm. ‘John Shaft will now escort you to your suite.’

She pushes his hand away. ‘Be lucky if it even has a minibar.’ But she gets up and walks with him toward the elevators.

‘I found Thurston’s Garage,’ Holly says. ‘It’s fifty-six miles north on 1-47, the direction the storm’s coming from, unfortunately. After that it’s State Road 79. The weather really doesn’t look g—’

‘We’ll be okay,’ Hodges says. ‘Hertz is holding a Ford Expedition for us. It’s a nice heavy vehicle. And you can give me the turn-by-turn later. I want to talk to you about something else.’ Gently, he takes her iPad and turns it off.

Holly looks at him with her hands clasped in her lap, waiting.

Brady comes back from Carbine Street in Hillbilly Heaven refreshed and exhilarated – the Ellsbury fatso was both easy and fun. He wonders how many guys it will take to get her body down from that third-floor apartment. He’s guessing at least four. And think of the coffin! Jumbo size!

When he checks the website and finds it offline, his good mood collapses again. Yes, he expected Hodges would find a way to kill it, but he didn’t expect it to happen so fast. And the phone number on the screen is as infuriating as the fuck-you messages Hodges left on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella during their first go-round. It’s a suicide prevention hotline. He doesn’t even have to check. He knows.

And yes, Hodges will come. Plenty of people at Kiner Memorial know about this place; it’s sort of legendary. But will he come straight in? Brady doesn’t believe that for a minute. For one thing, the Det-Ret will know that many hunters leave their firearms out at camp (although few are as fully stocked with them as Heads and Skins). For another – and this is more important – the Det-Ret is one sly hyena. Six years older than when Brady first encountered him, true, undoubtedly shorter of wind and shakier of limb, but sly. The sort of slinking animal that doesn’t come at you directly but goes for the hamstrings while you’re looking elsewhere.

So I’m Hodges. What do I do?

After giving this due consideration, Brady goes to the closet, and a brief check of Babineau’s memory (what’s left of it) is all it takes for him to choose outerwear that belongs to the body he’s inhabiting. Everything fits perfectly. He adds a pair of gloves to protect his arthritic fingers and goes outside. The snow is only a moderate fall and the branches of the trees are still. All that will change later, but for now it’s pleasant enough to go for a tramp around the property.

He walks to a woodpile whose surface is covered with an old canvas tarp and a few inches of fresh powder. Beyond it are two or three acres of old-growth pines and spruces separating Heads and Skins from Big Bob’s Bear Camp. It’s perfect.

He needs to visit the gun closet. The Scar is fine, but there are other things in there he can use.

Oh, Detective Hodges, Brady thinks, hurrying back the way he came. I’ve got such a surprise. Such a surprise for you.

Jerome listens carefully to what Hodges tells him, then shakes his head. ‘No way, Bill. I need to come.’

‘What you need to do is go home and be with your family,’ Hodges says. ‘You especially need to be with your sister. She had a close call yesterday.’

They are sitting in a corner of the Hilton’s reception area, speaking in low voices although even the desk clerk has retired to the nether regions. Jerome is leaning forward, hands planted on his thighs, his face set in a stubborn frown.

‘If Holly’s going—’

‘It’s different for us,’ Holly says. ‘You must see that, Jerome. I don’t get along with my mother, never have. I see her once or twice a year, at most. I’m always glad to leave, and I’m sure she’s glad to see me go. As for Bill… you know he’ll fight what he’s got, but both of us know what the chances are. Your case is not like ours.’

‘He’s dangerous,’ Hodges says, ‘and we can’t count on the element of surprise. If he doesn’t know I’ll come for him, he’s stupid. That’s one thing he never was.’

‘It was the three of us at the Mingo,’ Jerome says. ‘And after you went into vapor lock, it was just Holly and me. We did okay.’

‘Last time was different,’ Holly says. ‘Last time he wasn’t capable of mind control juju.’

‘I still want to come.’

Hodges nods. ‘I understand, but I’m still the wheeldog, and the wheeldog says no.’

‘But—’

‘There’s another reason,’ Holly says. ‘A bigger reason. The repeater’s offline and the website’s shut down, but that leaves almost two hundred and fifty active Zappits. There’s been at least one suicide already, and we can’t tell the police all of what’s going on. Isabelle Jaynes thinks Bill’s a meddler, and anyone else would think we’re crazy. If anything happens to us, there’s only you. Don’t you understand that?’

‘What I understand is that you’re cutting me out,’ Jerome says. All at once he sounds like the weedy young kid Hodges hired to mow his lawn all those years ago.

‘There’s more,’ Hodges says. ‘I might have to kill him. In fact, I think that’s the most likely outcome.’

‘Jesus, Bill, I know that.’

‘But to the cops and the world at large, the man I killed would be a respected neurosurgeon named Felix Babineau. I’ve wiggled out of some tight legal corners since opening Finders Keepers, but this one could be different. Do you want to risk being charged as an accessory to aggravated manslaughter, defined in this state as the reckless killing of a human being through culpable negligence? Maybe even Murder One?’

Jerome squirms. ‘You’re willing to let Holly risk that.’

Holly says, ‘You’re the one with most of your life still ahead of you.’

Hodges leans forward, even though it hurts to do so, and cups the broad nape of Jerome’s neck. ‘I know you don’t like it. I didn’t expect you would. But it’s the right thing, for all the right reasons.’

Jerome thinks it over, and sighs. ‘I see your point.’

Hodges and Holly wait, both of them knowing this is not quite good enough.

‘Okay,’ Jerome says at last. ‘I hate it, but okay.’

Hodges gets up, hand to his side to hold in the pain. ‘Then let’s snag that SUV. The storm’s coming, and I’d like to get as far up I-47 as possible before we meet it.’

Jerome is leaning against the hood of his Wrangler when they come out of the rental office with the keys to an all-wheel drive Expedition. He hugs Holly and whispers in her ear. ‘Last chance. Take me along.’

She shakes her head against his chest.

He lets her go and turns to Hodges, who’s wearing an old fedora, the brim already white with snow. Hodges puts out a hand. ‘Under other circumstances I’d go with the hug, but right now hugs hurt.’

Jerome settles for a strong grip. There are tears in his eyes. ‘Be careful, man. Stay in touch. And bring back the Hollyberry.’

‘I intend to do that,’ Hodges says.

Jerome watches them get into the Expedition, Bill climbing behind the wheel with obvious discomfort. Jerome knows they’re right – of the three of them, he’s the least expendable. That doesn’t mean he likes it, or feels less like a little kid being sent home to Mommy. He would go after them, he thinks, except for the thing Holly said in that deserted hotel lobby. If anything happens to us, there’s only you.

Jerome gets into his Jeep and heads home. As he merges onto the Crosstown, a strong premonition comes to him: he’s never going to see either one of his friends again. He tries to tell himself that’s superstitious bullshit, but he can’t quite make it work.

By the time Hodges and Holly leave the Crosstown for I-47 North, the snow is no longer just kidding around. Driving into it reminds Hodges of a science fiction movie he saw with Holly – the moment when the Starship Enterprise goes into hyperdrive, or whatever they call it. The speed limit signs are flashing SNOW ALERT and 40 MPH, but he pegs the speedometer at sixty and will hold it there as long as he can, which might be for thirty miles. Perhaps only twenty. A few cars in the travel lane honk at him to slow down, and passing the lumbering eighteen-wheelers, each one dragging a rooster-tail fog of snow behind it, is an exercise in controlled fear.

It’s almost half an hour before Holly breaks the silence. ‘You brought the guns, didn’t you? That’s what’s in the drawstring bag.’

‘Yeah.’

She unbuckles her seatbelt (which makes him nervous) and fishes the bag out of the back seat. ‘Are they loaded?’

‘The Glock is. The .38 you’ll have to load yourself. That one’s yours.’

‘I don’t know how.’

Hodges offered to take her to the shooting range with him once, start the process of getting her qualified to carry concealed, and she refused vehemently. He never offered again, believing she would never need to carry a gun. Believing he would never put her in that position.

‘You’ll figure it out. It’s not hard.’

She examines the Victory, keeping her hands well away from the trigger and the muzzle well away from her face. After a few seconds she succeeds in rolling the barrel.

‘Okay, now the bullets.’

There are two boxes of Winchester .38s – 130-grain, full metal jacket. She opens one, looks at the shells sticking up like mini-warheads, and grimaces. ‘Oough.’

‘Can you do it?’ He’s passing another truck, the Expedition enveloped in snowfog. There are still strips of bare pavement in the travel lane, but this passing lane is now snow-covered, and the truck on their right seems to go on forever. ‘If you can’t, that’s okay.’

‘You don’t mean can I load it,’ she says, sounding angry. ‘I see how to do that, a kid could do it.’

Sometimes they do, Hodges thinks.

‘What you mean is can I shoot him.’

‘It probably won’t come to that, but if it did, could you?’

‘Yes,’ Holly says, and loads the Victory’s six chambers. She pushes the cylinder back into place gingerly, lips turned down and eyes squinted into slits, as if afraid the gun will explode in her hand. ‘Now where’s the safety switch?’

‘There isn’t any. Not on revolvers. The hammer’s down, and that’s all the safety that you need. Put it in your purse. The ammo, too.’

She does as he says, then places the bag between her feet.

‘And stop biting your lips, you’re going to make them bleed.’

‘I’ll try, but this is a very stressful situation, Bill.’

‘I know.’ They’re back in the travel lane again. The mile markers seem to float past with excruciating slowness, and the pain in his side is a hot jellyfish with long tentacles that now seem to reach everywhere, even up into his throat. Once, twenty years ago, he was shot in the leg by a thief cornered in a vacant lot. That pain had been like this, but eventually it had gone away. He doesn’t think this one ever will. The drugs may mute it for awhile, but probably not for long.

‘What if we find this place and he’s not there, Bill? Have you thought about that? Have you?’

He has, and has no idea what the next step would be in that case. ‘Let’s not worry about it unless we have to.’

His phone rings. It’s in his coat pocket, and he hands it to Holly without looking away from the road ahead.

‘Hello, this is Holly.’ She listens, then mouths Miss Pretty Gray Eyes to Hodges. ‘Uh-huh… yes… okay, I understand… no, he can’t, his hands are full right now, but I’ll tell him.’ She listens some more, then says, ‘I could tell you, Izzy, but you wouldn’t believe me.’

She closes his phone with a snap and slips it back into his pocket.

‘Suicides?’ Hodges asks.

‘Three so far, counting the boy who shot himself in front of his father.’

‘Zappits?’

‘At two of the three locations. Responders at the third one haven’t had a chance to look. They were trying to save the kid, but it was too late. He hung himself. Izzy sounds half out of her mind. She wanted to know everything.’

‘If anything happens to us, Jerome will tell Pete, and Pete will tell her. I think she’s almost ready to listen.’

‘We have to stop him before he kills more.’

He’s probably killing more right now, Hodges thinks. ‘We will.’

The miles roll by. Hodges is forced to reduce his speed to fifty, and when he feels the Expedition do a loose little shimmy in the slipstream of a Walmart double box, he drops to forty-five. It’s past three o’clock and the light is starting to drain from this snowy day when Holly speaks again.

‘Thank you.’

He turns his head briefly, looking a question at her.

‘For not making me beg to come along.’

‘I’m only doing what your therapist would want,’ Hodges says. ‘Getting you a bunch of closure.’

‘Is that a joke? I can never tell when you’re joking. You have an extremely dry sense of humor, Bill.’

‘No joke. This is our business, Holly. Nobody else’s.’

A green sign looms out of the white murk.

‘SR-79,’ Holly says. ‘That’s our exit.’

‘Thank God,’ Hodges says. ‘I hate turnpike driving even when the sun’s out.’

Thurston’s Garage is fifteen miles east along the state highway, according to Holly’s iPad, but it takes them half an hour to get there. The Expedition handles the snow-covered road easily, but now the wind is picking up – it will be blowing at gale force by eight o’clock, according to the radio – and when it gusts, throwing sheets of snow across the road, Hodges eases down to fifteen miles an hour until he can see again.

As he turns in at the big yellow Shell sign, Holly’s phone rings. ‘Handle that,’ he says. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

He gets out, yanking his fedora down hard to keep it from blowing away. The wind machine-guns his coat collar against his neck as he tramps through the snow to the garage office. His entire midsection is throbbing; it feels as if he’s swallowed live coals. The gas pumps and the adjacent parking area are empty except for the idling Expedition. The plowboys have departed to spend a long night earning their money as the first big storm of the year rants and raves.

For one eerie moment, Hodges thinks it’s Library Al behind the counter: same green Dickies, same popcorn-white hair exploding around the edges of his John Deere cap.

‘What brings you out on a wild afternoon like this?’ the old guy asks, then peers past Hodges. ‘Or is it night already?’

‘A little of both,’ Hodges says. He has no time for conversation – back in the city kids may be jumping out of apartment building windows and swallowing pills – but it’s how the job is done. ‘Would you be Mr Thurston?’

‘In the flesh. Since you didn’t pull up at the pumps, I’d almost wonder if you came to rob me, but you look a little too prosperous for that. City fella?’

‘I am,’ Hodges says, ‘and in kind of a hurry.’

‘City fellas usually are.’ Thurston puts down the Field & Stream he’s been reading. ‘What is it, then? Directions? Man, I hope it’s somewhere close, the way this one’s shaping up.’

‘I think it is. A hunting camp called Heads and Skins. Ring a bell?’

‘Oh, sure,’ Thurston says. ‘The doctors’ place, right near Big Bob’s Bear Camp. Those fellas usually gas up their Jags and Porsches here, either on their way out or their way back.’ He pronounces Porsches as if he’s talking about the things old folks sit on in the evening to watch the sun go down. ‘Wouldn’t be nobody out there now, though. Hunting season ends December ninth, and I’m talking bow hunting. Gun hunting ends the last day of November, and all those docs use rifles. Big ones. I think they like to pretend they’re in Africa.’

‘Nobody stopped earlier today? Would have been driving an old car with a lot of primer on it?’

‘Nope.’

A young man comes out of the garage bay, wiping his hands on a rag. ‘I saw that car, Granddad. A Chev’alay. I was out front, talking with Spider Willis, when it went by.’ He turns his attention to Hodges. ‘I only noticed because there’s not much the way he was headed, and that car was no snowdog like the one you’ve got out there.’

‘Can you give me directions to the camp?’

‘Easiest thing in the world,’ Thurston says. ‘Or would be on a fair day. You keep on going the way you were heading, about…’ He turns his attention to the younger man. ‘What would you say, Duane? Three miles?’

‘More like four,’ Duane says.

‘Well, split the difference and call it three and a half,’ Thurston says. ‘You’ll be looking for two red posts on your left. They’re tall, six feet or so, but the state plow’s been by twice already, so you want to keep a sharp eye, because there won’t be much of em to see. You’ll have to bull your way through the snowbank, you know. Unless you brought a shovel.’

‘I think what I’m driving will do it,’ Hodges says.

‘Yeah, most likely, and no harm to your SUV, since the snow hasn’t had a chance to pack down. Anyway, you go in a mile, or maybe two, and the road splits. One fork goes to Big Bob’s, the other to Heads and Skins. I can’t remember which one is which, but there used to be arrow signs.’

‘Still are,’ Duane says. ‘Big Bob’s is on the right, Heads and Skins on the left. I ought to know, I reshingled Big Bob Rowan’s roof last October. This must be pretty important, mister. To get you out on a day like this.’

‘Will my SUV make it on that road, do you think?’

‘Sure,’ Duane says. ‘Trees’ll still be holding up most of the snow, and the road runs downhill to the lake. Making it out might be a little trickier.’

Hodges takes his wallet from his back pocket – Christ, even that hurts – and fishes out his police ID with RETIRED stamped on it. To it he adds one of his Finders Keepers business cards, and lays them both on the counter. ‘Can you gentlemen keep a secret?’

They nod, faces bright with curiosity.

‘I’ve got a subpoena to serve, right? It’s a civil case, and the money at stake runs to seven figures. The man you saw go by, the one in the primered-up Chevy, is a doctor named Babineau.’

‘See him every November,’ the elder Thurston says. ‘Got an attitude about him, you know? Like he’s always seein you from under the end of his nose. But he drives a Beemer.’

‘Today he’s driving whatever he could get his hands on,’ Hodges says, ‘and if I don’t serve these papers by midnight, the case goes bye-bye, and an old lady who doesn’t have much won’t get her payday.’

‘Malpractice?’ Duane asks.

‘Don’t like to say, but I’m going in.’

Which you will remember, Hodges thinks. That, and Babineau’s name.

The old man says, ‘There are a couple of snowmobiles out back. I could let you have one, if you want, and the Arctic Cat has a high windshield. It’d still be a chilly ride, but you’d be guaranteed getting back.’

Hodges is touched by the offer, coming as it does to a complete stranger, but shakes his head. Snowmobiles are noisy beasts. He has an idea that the man now in residence at Heads and Skins – be he Brady or Babineau or a weird mixture of the two – knows he’s coming. What Hodges has on his side is that his quarry doesn’t know when.

‘My partner and I will get in,’ he says, ‘and worry about getting out later.’

‘Nice and quiet, huh?’ Duane says, and puts a finger to his lips, which are curved in a smile.

‘That’s the ticket. Is there someone I could call for a ride if I do get stuck?’

‘Call right here.’ Thurston hands him a card from the plastic tray by the cash register. ‘I’ll send either Duane or Spider Willis. It might not be until late tonight, and it’ll cost you forty dollars, but with a case worth millions, I guess you can afford that.’

‘Do cell phones work out here?’

‘Five bars even in dirty weather,’ Duane says. ‘There’s a tower on the south side of the lake.’

‘Good to know. Thank you. Thank you both.’

He turns to go and the old man says, ‘That hat you’re wearing is no good in this weather. Take this.’ He’s holding out a knit hat with a big orange pompom on top. ‘Can’t do nothing about those shoes, though.’

Hodges thanks him, takes the hat, then removes his fedora and puts it on the counter. It feels like bad luck; it feels like exactly the right thing to do. ‘Collateral,’ he says.

Both of them grin, the younger one with quite a few more teeth.

‘Good enough,’ the old man says, ‘but are you a hundred percent sure you want to be driving out to the lake, Mr—’ He glances down at the Finders Keepers business card – ‘Mr Hodges? Because you look a trifle peaky.’

‘It’s a chest cold,’ Hodges says. ‘I get one every damn winter. Thank you, both of you. And if Dr Babineau should by any chance call here…’

‘Wouldn’t give him the time of day,’ Thurston says. ‘He’s a snooty one.’

Hodges starts for the door, and a pain like none he’s ever felt before comes out of nowhere, lancing up from his belly all the way to his jawline. It’s like being shot by a burning arrow, and he staggers.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ the old man asks, starting around the counter.

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ He’s far from that. ‘Leg cramp. From driving. I’ll be back for my hat.’ With luck, he thinks.

‘You were in there a long time,’ Holly says. ‘I hope you gave them a very good story.’

‘Subpoena.’ Hodges doesn’t need to say more; they’ve used the subpoena story more than once. Everyone likes to help, as long as they’re not the ones being served. ‘Who called?’ Thinking it must have been Jerome, to see how they’re doing.

‘Izzy Jaynes. They’ve had two more suicide calls, one attempted and one successful. The attempted was a girl who jumped out of a second-story window. She landed on a snowbank and just broke some bones. The other was a boy who hung himself in his closet. Left a note on his pillow. Just one word, Beth, and a broken heart.’

The Expedition’s wheels spin a little when Hodges drops it into gear and rolls back onto the state road. He has to drive with his low beams on. The brights turn the falling snow into a sparkling white wall.

We have to do this ourselves,’ she says. ‘If it’s Brady, no one will ever believe it. He’ll pretend to be Babineau and spin some story about how he was scared and ran away.’

‘And never called the police himself after Library Al shot his wife?’ Hodges says. ‘I’m not sure that would hold.’

‘Maybe not, but what if he can jump to someone else? If he could jump to Babineau, he could jump to someone else. We have to do this ourselves, even if it means we end up getting arrested for murder. Do you think that could happen, Bill? Do you do you do you?’

‘We’ll worry about it later.’

‘I’m not sure I could shoot a person. Not even Brady Hartsfield, if he looks like someone else.’

He repeats, ‘We’ll worry about it later.’

‘Fine. Where did you get that hat?’

‘Swapped it for my fedora.’

‘The puffball on top is silly, but it looks warm.’

‘Do you want it?’

‘No. But Bill?’

‘Jesus, Holly, what?’

‘You look awful.’

‘Flattery will get you nowhere.’

‘Be sarcastic. Fine. How far is it to where we’re going?’

‘The general consensus back there was three and a half miles on this road. Then a camp road.’

Silence for five minutes as they creep through the blowing snow. And the main body of the storm is still coming, Hodges reminds himself.

‘Bill?’

‘What now?’

‘You have no boots, and I’m all out of Nicorette.’

‘Spark up one of those joints, why don’t you? But keep an eye out for a couple of red posts on the left while you do it. They should be coming up soon.’

Holly doesn’t light a joint, just sits forward, looking to the left. When the Expedition skids again, the rear end flirting first left and then right, she doesn’t appear to notice. A minute later she points. ‘Is that them?’

It is. The passing plows have buried all but the last eighteen inches or so, but that bright red is impossible to miss or mistake. Hodges feathers the brakes, brings the Expedition to a stop, then turns it so it’s facing the snowbank. He tells Holly what he sometimes used to tell his daughter, when he took her on the Wild Cups at Lakewood Amusement Park: ‘Hold onto your false teeth.’

Holly – always the literalist – says, ‘I don’t have any,’ but she does put a bracing hand on the dashboard.

Hodges steps down gently on the gas and rolls at the snowbank. The thud he expected doesn’t come; Thurston was right about the snow not yet having a chance to pack and harden. It explodes away to either side and up onto the windshield, momentarily blinding him. He shoves the wipers into overdrive, and when the glass clears, the Expedition is pointing down a one-lane camp road rapidly filling with snow. Every now and then more flumps down from the overhanging branches. He sees no tracks from a previous car, but that means nothing. By now they’d be gone.

He kills the headlights and advances at a creep. The band of white between the trees is just visible enough to serve as a guide track. The road seems endless – sloping, switching back, then sloping again – but eventually they come to the place where it splits left and right. Hodges doesn’t have to get out and check the arrows. Ahead on the left, through the snow and the trees, he can see a faint glimmer of light. That’s Heads and Skins, and someone is home. He crimps the wheel and begins rolling slowly down the right-hand fork.

Neither of them looks up and sees the video camera, but it sees them.

By the time Hodges and Holly burst through the snowbank left by the plow, Brady is sitting in front of the TV, fully dressed in Babineau’s winter coat and boots. He’s left off the gloves, he wants his hands bare in case he has to use the Scar, but there’s a black balaclava lying across one thigh. When the time comes, he’ll don it to cover Babineau’s face and silver hair. His eyes never leave the television as he nervously stirs the pens and pencils sticking out of the ceramic skull. A sharp lookout is absolutely necessary. When Hodges comes, he’ll kill his headlights.

Will he have the nigger lawnboy with him? Brady wonders. Wouldn’t that be sweet! Two for the price of—

And there he is.

He was afraid the Det-Ret’s vehicle might get by him in the thickening snow, but that was a needless worry. The snow is white; the SUV is a solid black rectangle sliding through it. Brady leans forward, squinting, but can’t tell if there’s only one person in the cabin, or two, or half a fucking dozen. He’s got the Scar, and with it he could wipe out an entire squad if he had to, but that would spoil the fun. He’d like Hodges alive.

To start with, at least.

Only one more question needs to be answered – will he turn left, and bore straight in, or right? Brady is betting K. William Hodges will choose the fork that leads to Big Bob’s, and he’s right. As the SUV disappears into the snow (with a brief flash of the taillights as Hodges negotiates the first turn), Brady puts the skull penholder down next to the TV remote and picks up an item that has been waiting on the end table. A perfectly legal item when used the right way… which it never was by Babineau and his cohorts. They may have been good doctors, but out here in the woods, they were often bad boys. He pulls this valuable piece of equipment over his head, and lets it hang against the front of his coat by the elastic strap. Then he pulls on the balaclava, grabs the Scar, and heads out. His heart is beating fast and hard, and for the time being, at least, the arthritis in Babineau’s fingers seems to be completely gone.

Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back.

Holly doesn’t ask Hodges why he took the right-hand fork. She’s neurotic, but not stupid. He drives at walking pace, looking to his left, measuring the lights to his left. When he’s even with them, he stops the SUV and switches off the engine. It’s full dark now, and when he turns to look at Holly, she has the fleeting impression that his head has been replaced by a skull.

‘Stay here,’ he says in a low voice. ‘Text Jerome, tell him we’re okay. I’m going to cut through those woods and take him.’

‘You don’t mean alive, do you?’

‘Not if I see him with one of those Zappits.’ And probably even if I don’t, he thinks. ‘We can’t take the risk.’

‘Then you believe it’s him. Brady.’

‘Even if it’s Babineau, he’s part of this. Neck-deep in it.’ But yes, at some point he has become convinced that Brady Hartsfield’s mind is now running Babineau’s body. The intuition is too strong to deny, and has gained the weight of fact.

God help me if I kill him and I’m wrong, he thinks. Only how would I know? How could I ever be sure?

He expects Holly to protest, to tell him she has to come along, but all she says is, ‘I don’t think I can drive this thing out of here if something happens to you, Bill.’

He hands her Thurston’s card. ‘If I’m not back in ten minutes – no, make it fifteen – call this guy.’

‘What if I hear shots?’

‘If it’s me, and I’m okay, I’ll honk the horn of Library Al’s car. Two quick beeps. If you don’t hear that, drive the rest of the way to the other camp, Big Bob’s Whatsit. Break in, find somewhere to hide, call Thurston.’

Hodges leans across the center console, and for the first time since he’s known her, kisses her lips. She’s too startled to kiss him back, but she doesn’t pull away. When he does, she looks down in confusion and says the first thing that comes into her mind. ‘Bill, you’re in shoes! You’ll freeze!’

‘There’s not so much snow in the trees, only a couple of inches.’ And really, cold feet are the least of his worries at this point.

He finds the toggle switch that kills the interior lights. As he leaves the Expedition, grunting with suppressed pain, she can hear the rising whisper of the wind in the fir trees. If it were a voice, it would be mourning. Then the door shuts.

Holly sits where she is, watching his dark shape merge with the dark shapes of the trees, and when she can no longer tell which is which, she gets out and follows his tracks. The Victory .38 that Hodges’s father once carried as a beat cop back in the fifties, when Sugar Heights was still woodland, is in her coat pocket.

Hodges makes his way toward the lights of Heads and Skins one plodding step at a time. Snow flicks his face and coats his eyelids. That burning arrow is back, lighting him up inside. Frying him. His face is running with sweat.

At least my feet aren’t hot, he thinks, and that’s when he stumbles over a snow-covered log and goes sprawling. He lands squarely on his left side and buries his face in the arm of his coat to keep from screaming. Hot liquid spills into his crotch.

Wet my pants, he thinks. Wet my pants just like a baby.

When the pain recedes a little, he gathers his legs under him and tries to stand. He can’t do it. The wetness is turning cold. He can actually feel his dick shriveling to get away from it. He grabs a low-hanging branch and tries again to get up. It snaps off. He looks at it stupidly, feeling like a cartoon character – Wile E. Coyote, maybe – and tosses it aside. As he does, a hand hooks into his armpit.

His surprise is so great he almost screams. Then Holly is whispering in his ear. ‘Upsa-daisy, Bill. Come on.’

With her help, he’s finally able to make it to his feet. The lights are close now, no more than forty yards through the screening trees. He can see the snow frosting her hair and lighting on her cheeks. All at once he finds himself remembering the office of an antique bookdealer named Andrew Halliday, and how he, Holly, and Jerome had discovered Halliday lying dead on the floor. He told them to stay back, but—

‘Holly. If I told you to go back, would you do it?’

‘No.’ She’s whispering. They both are. ‘You’ll probably have to shoot him, and you can’t get there without help.’

‘You’re supposed to be my backup, Holly. My insurance policy.’ The sweat is pouring off him like oil. Thank God his coat is a long one. He doesn’t want Holly to know he pissed himself.

‘Jerome is your insurance policy,’ she says. ‘I’m your partner. That’s why you brought me, whether you know it or not. And it’s what I want. It’s all I ever wanted. Now come on. Lean on me. Let’s finish this.’

They move slowly through the remaining trees. Hodges can’t believe how much of his weight she’s taking. They pause at the edge of the clearing that surrounds the house. There are two lighted rooms. Judging by the subdued glow coming from the one closest to them, Hodges thinks it must be the kitchen. A single light on in there, maybe the one over the stove. Coming from the other window he can make out an unsteady flicker that probably means a fireplace.

‘That’s where we’re going,’ he says, pointing, ‘and from here on we’re soldiers on night patrol. Which means we crawl.’

‘Can you?’

‘Yeah.’ It might actually be easier than walking. ‘See the chandelier?’

‘Yes. It looks all bony. Oough.’

‘That’s the living room, and that’s where he’ll probably be. If he’s not, we’ll wait until he shows. If he’s got one of those Zappits, I intend to shoot him. No hands up, no lie down and put your hands behind your back. Do you have a problem with that?’

‘Absolutely not.’

They drop to their hands and knees. Hodges leaves the Glock in his coat pocket, not wanting to dunk it in the snow.

‘Bill.’ Her whisper so low he can barely hear it over the rising wind.

He turns to look at her. She’s holding out one of her gloves.

‘Too small,’ he says, and thinks of Johnnie Cochran saying, If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit. Crazy what goes through a person’s mind at times like this. Only has there ever in his life been a time like this?

‘Force it,’ she whispers. ‘You need to keep your gun hand warm.’

She’s right, and he manages to get it most of the way on. It’s too short to get over all of his hand, but his fingers are covered, and that’s all that matters.

They crawl, Hodges slightly in the lead. The pain is still bad, but now that he’s off his feet, the arrow in his guts is smoldering rather than burning.

Got to save some energy, though, he thinks. Just enough.

It’s forty or fifty feet from the edge of the woods to the window with the chandelier hanging in it, and his uncovered hand has lost all feeling by the time they’re halfway there. He can’t believe he’s brought his best friend to this place and this moment, crawling through the snow like children playing a war game, miles from any help. He had his reasons, and they made sense back in that Airport Hilton. Now, not so much.

He looks left, at the silent hulk of Library Al’s Malibu. He looks right, and sees a snow-covered woodpile. He starts to look ahead again, at the living room window, then snaps his head back to the woodpile, alarm bells ringing just a little too late.

There are tracks in the snow. The angle was wrong to see them from the edge of the woods, but he can see them clearly now. They lead from the back of the house to that stack of fireplace fuel. He came outside through the kitchen door, Hodges thinks. That’s why the light was on in there. I should have guessed. I would have, if I hadn’t been so sick.

He scrabbles for the Glock, but the too-small glove slows his grip, and when he finally gets hold of it and tries to pull it out, the gun snags in the pocket. Meanwhile, a dark shape has risen from behind the woodpile. The shape covers the fifteen feet between it and them in four great looping strides. The face is that of an alien in a horror movie, featureless except for the round, projecting eyes.

‘Holly, look out!’

She lifts her head just as the butt of the Scar comes down to meet it. There’s a sickening crack and she drops face-first into the snow with her arms thrown out to either side: a puppet with its strings cut. Hodges frees the Glock from his coat pocket just as the butt comes down again. Hodges both feels and hears his wrist break; he sees the Glock land in the snow and almost disappear.

Still on his knees, Hodges looks up and sees a tall man – much taller than Brady Hartsfield – standing in front of Holly’s motionless form. He’s wearing a balaclava and night-vision goggles.

He saw us as soon we came out of the trees, Hodges thinks dully. For all I know, he saw us in the trees, while I was pulling on Holly’s glove.

‘Hello, Detective Hodges.’

Hodges doesn’t reply. He wonders if Holly is still alive, and if she’ll ever recover from the blow she’s just been dealt, if she is. But of course, that’s stupid. Brady isn’t going to give her any chance to recover.

‘You’re coming inside with me,’ Brady says. ‘The question is whether or not we bring her, or leave her out here, to turn into a Popsicle.’ And, as if he’s read Hodges’s mind (for all Hodges knows, he can do that): ‘Oh, she’s still alive, at least for now. I can see her back going up and down. Although after a hit that hard, and with her face in the snow, who knows for how long?’

‘I’ll carry her,’ Hodges says, and he will. No matter how much it hurts.

‘Okay.’ No pause to think it over, and Hodges know it’s what Brady expected and what Brady wanted. He’s one step ahead. Has been all along. And whose fault is that?

Mine. Entirely mine. It’s what I get for playing the Lone Ranger yet again… but what else could I do? Who would ever have believed it?

‘Pick her up,’ Brady says. ‘Let’s see if you really can. Because, tell you what, you look mighty shaky to me.’

Hodges gets his arms under Holly. In the woods, he couldn’t make it to his feet after he fell, but now he gathers everything he has left and does a clean-and-jerk with her limp body. He staggers, almost goes down, and finds his balance again. The burning arrow is gone, incinerated in the forest fire it has touched off inside him. But he hugs her to his chest.

‘That’s good.’ Brady sounds genuinely admiring. ‘Now let’s see if you can make it to the house.’

Somehow, Hodges does.

The wood in the fireplace is burning well and throwing a stuporous heat. Gasping for breath, the snow on his borrowed hat melting and running down his face in slushy streams, Hodges gets to the middle of the room and then goes to his knees, having to cradle Holly’s neck in the crook of his elbow because of his broken wrist, which is swelling up like a sausage. He manages to keep her head from banging on the hardwood floor, and that’s good. Her head has taken enough abuse tonight.

Brady has removed his coat, the night-vision goggles, and the balaclava. It’s Babineau’s face and Babineau’s silvery hair (now in unaccustomed disarray), but it’s Brady Hartsfield, all right. Hodges’s last doubts have departed.

‘Has she got a gun?’

‘No.’

The man who looks like Felix Babineau smiles. ‘Well, here’s what I’m going to do, Bill. I’ll search her pockets, and if I do find a gun, I’ll blow her narrow ass into the next state. How’s that for a deal?’

‘It’s a .38,’ Hodges says. ‘She’s right-handed, so if she brought it, it’s probably in the right front pocket of her coat.’

Brady bends, keeping the Scar trained on Hodges as he does so, finger on the trigger and the butt-plate braced against the right side of his chest. He finds the revolver, examines it briefly, then tucks it into his belt at the small of his back. In spite of his pain and despair, Hodges feels a certain sour amusement. Brady’s probably seen badass dudes do that in a hundred TV shows and action movies, but it really only works with automatics, which are flat.

On the hooked rug, Holly makes a snoring sound deep in her throat. One foot gives a spastic jerk, then goes still.

‘What about you?’ Brady asks. ‘Any other weapons? The ever-popular throwdown gun strapped to your ankle, perhaps?’

Hodges shakes his head.

‘Just to be on the safe side, why don’t you hoist up your pantslegs for me?’

Hodges does it, revealing soaked shoes, wet socks, and nothing else.

‘Excellent. Now take off your coat and throw it on the couch.’

Hodges unzips it and manages to keep quiet while he shrugs out of it, but when he tosses it, a bull’s horn gores him from crotch to heart and he groans.

Babineau’s eyes widen. ‘Real pain or fake? Live or Memorex? Judging from a quite striking weight loss, I’m going to say it’s real. What’s up, Detective Hodges? What’s going on with you?’

‘Cancer. Pancreatic.’

‘Oh, goodness, that’s bad. Not even Superman can beat that one. But cheer up, I may be able to shorten your suffering.’

‘Do what you want with me,’ Hodges says. ‘Just let her alone.’

Brady looks at the woman on the floor with great interest. ‘This would not by any chance be the woman who smashed in what used to be my head, is it?’ The locution strikes him funny and he laughs.

‘No.’ The world has become a camera lens, zooming in and out with every beat of his laboring, pacemaker-assisted heart. ‘Holly Gibney was the one who thumped you. She’s gone back to live with her parents in Ohio. That’s Kara Winston, my assistant.’ The name comes to him from nowhere, and there’s no hesitation as he speaks it.

‘An assistant who just decided to come with you on a do-or-die mission? I find that a little hard to believe.’

‘I promised her a bonus. She needs the money.’

‘And where, pray tell, is your nigger lawnboy?’

Hodges briefly considers telling Brady the truth – that Jerome is back in the city, that he knows Brady has probably gone to the hunting camp, that he will pass this information on to the police soon, if he hasn’t already. But will any of those things stop Brady? Of course not.

‘Jerome is in Arizona, building houses. Habitat for Humanity.’

‘How socially conscious of him. I was hoping he’d be with you. How badly hurt is his sister?’

‘Broken leg. She’ll be up and walking in no time.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘She was one of your test cases, wasn’t she?’

‘She got one of the original Zappits, yes. There were twelve of them. Like the twelve Apostles, you might say, going forth to spread the word. Sit in the chair in front of the TV, Detective Hodges.’

‘I’d rather not. All my favorite shows are on Monday.’

Brady smiles politely. ‘Sit.’

Hodges sits, bracing his good hand on the table beside the chair. Going down is agony, but once he actually makes it, sitting is a little better. The TV is off, but he stares at it, anyway.

‘Where’s the camera?’

‘On the signpost where the road splits. Above the arrows. You don’t have to feel bad about missing it. It was covered with snow, nothing sticking out but the lens, and your headlights were off by then.’

‘Is there any Babineau left inside you?’

He shrugs. ‘Bits and pieces. Every now and then there’s a small scream from the part that thinks it’s still alive. It will stop soon.’

‘Jesus,’ Hodges mutters.

Brady drops to one knee, the barrel of the Scar resting on his thigh and still pointing at Hodges. He pulls down the back of Holly’s coat and examines the tag. ‘H. Gibney,’ he says. ‘Printed in indelible ink. Very tidy. Won’t wash off in the laundry. I like a person who takes care of her things.’

Hodges closes his eyes. The pain is very bad, and he would give everything he owns to get away from it, and from what is going to happen next. He would give anything to just sleep, and sleep, and sleep. But he opens them again and forces himself to look at Brady, because you play the game to the end. That’s how it works; play to the end.

‘I have a lot of stuff to do in the next forty-eight or seventy-two hours, Detective Hodges, but I’m going to put it on hold in order to deal with you. Does that make you feel special? It should. Because I owe you so much for fucking me over.’

‘You need to remember that you came to me,’ Hodges says. ‘You were the one who started the ball rolling, with that stupid, bragging letter. Not me. You.’

Babineau’s face – the craggy face of an older character actor – darkens. ‘I suppose you might have a point, but look who’s on top now. Look who wins, Detective Hodges.’

‘If you call getting a bunch of stupid, confused kids to commit suicide winning, I guess you’re the winner. Me, I think doing that is about as challenging as striking out the pitcher.’

‘It’s control! I assert control! You tried to stop me and you couldn’t! You absolutely couldn’t! And neither could she!’ He kicks Holly in the side. Her body rolls a boneless half a turn toward the fireplace, then rolls back again. Her face is ashen, her closed eyes sunk deep in their sockets. ‘She actually made me better! Better than I ever was!’

‘Then for Christ’s sake, stop kicking her!’ Hodges shouts.

Brady’s anger and excitement have caused Babineau’s face to flush. His hands are tight on the assault rifle. He takes a deep, steadying breath, then another. And smiles.

‘Got a soft spot for Ms Gibney, do you?’ He kicks her again, this time in the hip. ‘Are you fucking her? Is that it? She’s not much in the looks department, but I guess a guy your age has to take what he can get. You know what we used to say? Put a flag over her face and fuck her for Old Glory.’

He kicks Holly again, and bares his teeth at Hodges in what he may think is a smile.

‘You used to ask me if I was fucking my mother, remember? All those visits you made to my room, asking if I was fucking the only person who ever cared a damn for me. Talking about how hot she looked, and was she a hoochie mama. Asking if I was faking. Telling me how much you hoped I was suffering. And I just had to sit there and take it.’

He’s getting ready to kick poor Holly again. To distract him, Hodges says, ‘There was a nurse. Sadie MacDonald. Did you nudge her into killing herself? You did, didn’t you? She was the first one.’

Brady likes that, and shows even more of Babineau’s expensive dental work. ‘It was easy. It always is, once you get inside and start pulling the levers.’

‘How do you do that, Brady? How do you get inside? How did you manage to get those Zappits from Sunrise Solutions, and rig them? Oh, and the website, how about that?’

Brady laughs. ‘You’ve read too many of those mystery stories where the clever private eye keeps the insane murderer talking until help arrives. Or until the murderer’s attention wavers and the private eye can grapple with him and get his gun away. I don’t think help is going to arrive, and you don’t look capable of grappling with a goldfish. Besides, you know most of it already. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. Freddi spilled her guts, and – not to sound like Snidely Whiplash – she will pay for that. Eventually.’

‘She claims she didn’t set up the website.’

‘I didn’t need her for that. I did it all by myself, in Babineau’s study, on Babineau’s laptop. During one of my vacations from Room 217.’

‘What about—’

‘Shut up. See that table beside you, Detective Hodges?’

It’s cherrywood, like the buffet, and looks expensive, but there are faded rings all over it, from glasses that were put down without benefit of coasters. The doctors who own this place may be meticulous in operating rooms, but out here they’re slobs. On top of it now is the TV remote and a ceramic skull penholder.

‘Open the drawer.’

Hodges does. Inside is a pink Zappit Commander sitting on top of an ancient TV Guide with Hugh Laurie on the cover.

‘Take it out and turn it on.’

‘No.’

‘All right, fine. I’ll just take care of Ms Gibney, then.’ He lowers the barrel of the Scar and points it at the back of Holly’s neck. ‘On full auto, this will rip her head right off. Will it fly into the fireplace? Let’s find out.’

‘Okay,’ Hodges says. ‘Okay, okay, okay. Stop.’

He takes the Zappit and finds the button at the top of the console. The welcome screen lights up; the diagonal downstroke of the red Z fills the screen. He is invited to swipe and access the games. He does so without being prompted by Brady. Sweat pours down his face. He has never been so hot. His broken wrist throbs and pulses.

‘Do you see the Fishin’ Hole icon?’

‘Yes.’

Opening Fishin’ Hole is the last thing he wants to do, but when the alternative is just sitting here with his broken wrist and his swollen, pulsing gut and watching a stream of high-caliber bullets divide Holly’s head from her slight body? Not an option. And besides, he has read a person can’t be hypnotized against his will. It’s true that Dinah Scott’s console almost put him under, but then he didn’t know what was happening. Now he does. And if Brady thinks he’s tranced out and he’s not, then maybe… just maybe…

‘I’m sure you know the drill by now,’ Brady says. His eyes are bright and lively, the eyes of a boy who is about to set a spiderweb on fire so he can see what the spider will do. Will it scurry around its flaming web, looking for a way to escape, or will it just burn? ‘Tap the icon. The fish will swim and the music will play. Tap the pink fish and add up the numbers. In order to win the game, you have to score one hundred and twenty points in one hundred and twenty seconds. If you succeed, I’ll let Ms Gibney live. If you fail, we’ll see what this fine automatic weapon can do. Babineau saw it demolish a stack of concrete blocks once, so just imagine what it will do to flesh.’

‘You’re not going to let her live even if I score five thousand,’ Hodges says. ‘I don’t believe that for a second.’

Babineau’s blue eyes widen in mock outrage. ‘But you should! All that I am, I owe to this bitch sprawled out in front of me! The least I can do is spare her life. Assuming she isn’t suffering a brain bleed and dying already, that is. Now stop playing for time. Play the game instead. Your one hundred and twenty seconds start as soon as your finger taps the icon.’

With no other recourse, Hodges taps it. The screen blanks. There’s a blue flash so bright it makes him squint, and then the fish are there, swimming back and forth, up and down, crisscrossing, sending up silvery trails of bubbles. The music begins to tinkle: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea…

Only it isn’t just music. There are words mixed in. And there are words in the blue flashes, too.

‘Ten seconds gone,’ Brady says. ‘Tick-tock, tick-tock.’

Hodges taps at one of the pink fish and misses. He’s right hand-dominant, and each tap makes the throbbing in his wrist that much worse, but the pain there is nothing compared to the pain now roasting him from groin to throat. On his third try he gets a pinky – that’s how he thinks of them, as pinkies – and the fish turns into a number 5. He says it out loud.

‘Only five points in twenty seconds?’ Brady says. ‘Better step it up, Detective.’

Hodges taps faster, eyes moving left and right, up and down. He no longer has to squint when the blue flashes come, because he’s used to them. And it’s getting easier. The fish seem bigger now, also a little slower. The music seems less tinkly. Fuller, somehow. You and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be. Is that Brady’s voice, singing along with the music, or just his imagination? Live or Memorex? No time to think about it now. Tempus is fugiting.

He gets a seven-fish, then a four, and then – jackpot! – one turns into a twelve. He says, ‘I’m up to twenty-seven.’ But is that right? He’s losing count.

Brady doesn’t tell him, Brady only says, ‘Eighty seconds to go,’ and now his voice seems to have picked up a slight echo, as if it’s coming to Hodges from the far end of a long hallway. Meanwhile, a marvelous thing is happening: the pain in his gut is starting to recede.

Whoa, he thinks. The AMA should know about this.

He gets another pinky. It turns into a 2. Not so good, but there are plenty more. Plenty, plenty more.

That’s when he starts to feel something like fingers fluttering delicately inside his head, and it’s not his imagination. He’s being invaded. It was easy, Brady said of Nurse MacDonald. It always is, once you get inside and start pulling the levers.

And when Brady gets to his levers?

He’ll jump inside me the way he jumped inside Babineau, Hodges thinks… although this realization is now like the voice and the music, coming from the far end of a long hallway. At the end of that hallway is the door to Room 217, and the door is standing open.

Why would he want to do that? Why would he want to inhabit a body that’s turned into a cancer factory? Because he wants me to kill Holly. Not with the gun, though, he’d never trust me with that. He’ll use my hands to choke her, broken wrist and all. Then he’ll leave me to face what I’ve done.

‘You’re getting better, Detective Hodges, and you still have a minute to go. Just relax and keep tapping. It’s easier when you relax.’

The voice is no longer echoing down a hallway; even though Brady is now standing right in front of him, it’s coming from a galaxy far, far away. Brady bends down and stares eagerly into Hodges’s face. Only there are fish swimming between them. Pinkies and blueies and reddies. Because Hodges is in the Fishin’ Hole now. Except it’s really an aquarium, and he’s the fish. Soon he will be eaten. Eaten alive. ‘Come on, Billy-boy, tap those pink fish!’

I can’t let him inside me, Hodges thinks, but I can’t keep him out.

He taps a pink fish, it turns into a 9, and it isn’t just fingers he feels now but another consciousness spilling into his mind. It’s spreading like ink in water. Hodges tries to fight and knows he will lose. The strength of that invading personality is incredible.

I’m going to drown. Drown in the Fishin’ Hole. Drown in Brady Hartsfield.

By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful s—

A pane of glass shatters close by. It’s followed by a jubilant chorus of boys shouting, ‘That’s a HOME RUN!’

The bond binding Hodges to Hartsfield is broken by the pure, unexpected surprise of the thing. Hodges jerks back in the chair and looks up as Brady wheels toward the couch, eyes wide and mouth open in startlement. The Victory .38, held against the small of his back only by its short barrel (the cylinder won’t allow it to go deeper), falls out of his belt and thumps to the bearskin rug.

Hodges doesn’t hesitate. He throws the Zappit into the fireplace.

‘Don’t you do that!’ Brady bellows, turning back. He raises the Scar. ‘Don’t you fucking da—’

Hodges grasps the nearest thing to hand, not the .38 but the ceramic penholder. There’s nothing wrong with his left wrist, and the range is short. He throws it at the face Brady has stolen, he throws it hard, and connects dead center. The ceramic skull shatters. Brady screams – pain, yes, but mostly shock – and his nose begins to gush blood. When he tries to bring up the Scar, Hodges pistons out his feet, enduring another deep gore of that bull’s horn, and smashes them into Brady’s chest. Brady back-pedals, almost catches his balance, then trips over a hassock and sprawls on the bearskin rug.

Hodges tries to launch himself out of the chair and only succeeds in overturning the end table. He goes to his knees as Brady sits up, bringing the Scar around. There’s a gunshot before he can level it on Hodges, and Brady screams again. This time it’s all pain. He looks unbelievingly at his shoulder, where blood is pouring through a hole in his shirt.

Holly is sitting up. There’s a grotesque bruise over her left eye, in almost the same place as the one on Freddi’s forehead. That left eye is red, filled with blood, but the other is bright and aware. She’s holding the Victory .38 in both hands.

‘Shoot him again!’ Hodges roars. ‘Shoot him again, Holly!’

As Brady lurches to his feet – one hand clapped to the wound in his shoulder, the other holding the Scar, face slack with disbelief – Holly fires again. This bullet goes way high, ricocheting off the fieldstone chimney above the roaring fire.

‘Stop that!’ Brady shouts, ducking. At the same time he’s struggling to raise the Scar. ‘Stop doing that, you bi—’

Holly fires a third time. The sleeve of Brady’s shirt twitches, and he yelps. Hodges isn’t sure she’s winged him again, but she at least grooved him.

Hodges gets to his feet and tries to run at Brady, who is making another effort to raise the automatic rifle. The best he can manage is a slow plod.

‘You’re in the way!’ Holly cries. ‘Bill, you’re in the fracking way!’

Hodges drops to his knees and tucks his head. Brady turns and runs. The .38 bangs. Wood splinters fly from the doorframe a foot to Brady’s right. Then he’s gone. The front door opens. Cold air rushes in, making the fire do an excited shimmy.

‘I missed him!’ Holly shouts, agonized. ‘Stupid and useless! Stupid and useless!’ She drops the Victory and slaps herself across the face.

Hodges catches her hand before she can do it again, and kneels beside her. ‘No, you got him at least once, maybe twice. You’re the reason we’re still alive.’

But for how long? Brady held onto that goddam grease gun, he may have an extra clip or two, and Hodges knows he wasn’t lying about the SCAR 17S’s ability to demolish concrete blocks. He has seen a similar assault rifle, the HK 416, do exactly that, at a private shooting facility in the wilds of Victory County. He went there with Pete, and on the way back they joked about how the HK should be standard police issue.

‘What do we do?’ Holly asks. ‘What do we do now?’

Hodges picks up the .38 and rolls the barrel. Two rounds left, and the .38 is only good at short range, anyway. Holly has a concussion at the very least, and he’s almost incapacitated. The bitter truth is this: they had a chance, and Brady got away.

He hugs her and says, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe we should hide.’

‘I don’t think that would work,’ he says, but doesn’t say why and is relieved when she doesn’t ask. It’s because there’s still a little of Brady left inside of him. It probably won’t last long, but for the time being, at least, Hodges suspects it’s as good as a homing beacon.

Brady staggers through shin-deep snow, eyes wide with disbelief, Babineau’s sixty-three-year-old heart banging away in his chest. There’s a metallic taste on his tongue, his shoulder is burning, and the thought running through his head on a constant loop is That bitch, that bitch, that dirty sneaking bitch, why didn’t I kill her while I had the chance?

The Zappit is gone, too. Good old Zappit Zero, and it’s the only one he brought. Without it, he has no way to reach the minds of those with active Zappits. He stands panting in front of Heads and Skins, coatless in the rising wind and driving snow. The keys to Z-Boy’s car are in his pocket, along with another clip for the Scar, but what good are the keys? That shitbox wouldn’t make it halfway up the first hill before it got stuck.

I have to take them, he thinks, and not just because they owe me. The SUV Hodges drove down here is the only way out of here, and either he or the bitch probably has the keys. It’s possible they left them in the vehicle, but that’s a chance I can’t afford to take.

Besides, it would mean leaving them alive.

He knows what he has to do, and switches the fire control to FULL AUTO. He socks the butt of the Scar against his good shoulder, and starts shooting, raking the barrel from left to right but concentrating on the great room, where he left them.

Gunfire lights up the night, turning the fast-falling snow into a series of flash photographs. The sound of the overlapping reports is deafening. Windows explode inward. Clapboards rise from the façade like bats. The front door, left half-open in his escape, flies all the way back, rebounds, and is driven back again. Babineau’s face is twisted in an expression of joyful hate that is all Brady Hartsfield, and he doesn’t hear the growl of an approaching engine or the clatter of steel treads from behind him.

‘Down!’ Hodges shouts. ‘Holly, down!’

He doesn’t wait to see if she’ll obey on her own, just lands on top of her and covers her body with his. Above them, the living room is a storm of flying splinters, broken glass, and chips of rock from the chimney. An elk’s head falls off the wall and lands on the hearth. One glass eye has been shattered by a Winchester slug, and it looks like it’s winking at them. Holly screams. Half a dozen bottles on the buffet explode, releasing the stench of bourbon and gin. A slug strikes a burning log in the fireplace, busting it in two and sending up a storm of sparks.

Please let him have just the one clip, Hodges thinks. And if he aims low, let him hit me instead of Holly. Only a .308 Winchester slug that hits him will go through them both, and he knows it.

The gunfire stops. Is he reloading, or is he out? Live or Memorex?

‘Bill, get off me, I can’t breathe.’

‘Better not,’ he says. ‘I—’

‘What’s that? What’s that sound?’ And then, answering her own question, ‘Someone’s coming!’

Now that his ears are clearing a little, Hodges can hear it, too. At first he thinks it must be Thurston’s grandson, on one of the snowmobiles the old man mentioned, and about to be slaughtered for trying to play Good Samaritan. But maybe not. The approaching engine sounds too heavy for a snowmobile.

Bright yellow-white light floods in through the shattered windows like the spotlights from a police helicopter. Only this is no helicopter.

Brady is ramming his extra clip home when he finally registers the growl-and-clank of the approaching vehicle. He whirls, wounded shoulder throbbing like an infected tooth, just as a huge silhouette appears at the end of the camp road. The headlamps dazzle him. His shadow leaps out long on the sparkling snow as the whatever-it-is comes rolling toward the shot-up house, throwing gouts of snow behind its clanking treads. And it’s not just coming at the house. It’s coming at him.

He depresses the trigger and the Scar resumes its thunder. Now he can see it’s some kind of snow machine with a bright orange cabin sitting high above the churning treads. The windshield explodes just as someone dives for safety from the open driver’s side door.

The monstrosity keeps coming. Brady tries to run, and Babineau’s expensive loafers slip. He flails, staring at those oncoming headlights, and goes down on his back. The orange invader rises above him. He sees a steel tread whirring toward him. He tries to push it away, as he sometimes pushed objects in his room – the blinds, the bedclothes, the door to the bathroom – but it’s like trying to beat off a charging lion with a toothbrush. He raises a hand and draws in breath to scream. Before he can, the left tread of the Tucker Sno-Cat rolls over his midsection and chews it open.

Holly has zero doubt concerning the identity of their rescuer, and doesn’t hesitate. She runs through the bullet-pocked foyer and out the front door, crying his name over and over. Jerome looks as if he’s been dusted in powdered sugar when he picks himself up. She’s sobbing and laughing as she throws herself into his arms.

‘How did you know? How did you know to come?’

‘I didn’t,’ he says. ‘It was Barbara. When I called to say I was coming home, she told me I had to go after you or Brady would kill you… only she called him the Voice. She was half crazy.’

Hodges is making his way toward the two of them at a slow stagger, but he’s close enough to overhear this, and remembers that Barbara told Holly some of that suicide-voice was still inside her. Like a trail of slime, she said. Hodges knows what she was talking about, because he’s got some of that disgusting thought-shot in his own head, at least for the time being. Maybe Barbara had just enough of a connection to know that Brady was lying in wait.

Or hell, maybe it was pure woman’s intuition. Hodges actually believes in such a thing. He’s old-school.

‘Jerome,’ he says. The word comes out in a dusty croak. ‘My man.’ His knees unlock. He’s going down.

Jerome frees himself from Holly’s deathgrip and puts an arm around Hodges before he can. ‘Are you all right? I mean… I know you’re not all right, but are you shot?’

‘No.’ Hodges puts his own arm around Holly. ‘And I should have known you’d come. Neither one of you minds worth a tinker’s damn.’

‘Couldn’t break up the band before the final reunion concert, could we?’ Jerome says. ‘Let’s get you in the—’

There comes an animal sound from their left, a guttural groan that struggles to be words and can’t make it.

Hodges is more exhausted than ever in his life, but he walks toward that groan anyway. Because… Well, because.

What was the word he used with Holly, on their way out here? Closure, wasn’t it?

Brady’s hijacked body has been laid open to the backbone. His guts are spread out around him like the wings of a red dragon. Pools of steaming blood are sinking into the snow. But his eyes are open and aware, and all at once Hodges can feel those fingers again. This time they’re not just probing lazily. This time they’re frantic, scrabbling for purchase. Hodges ejects them as easily as that floor-mopping orderly once pushed this man’s presence out of his mind.

He spits Brady out like a watermelon seed.

‘Help me,’ Brady whispers. ‘You have to help me.’

‘I think you’re way beyond help,’ Hodges says. ‘You were run down, Brady. Run down by an extremely heavy vehicle. Now you know what that feels like. Don’t you?’

‘Hurts,’ Brady whispers.

‘Yes,’ Hodges says. ‘I imagine it does.’

‘If you can’t help me, shoot me.’

Hodges holds out his hand, and Holly puts the Victory .38 into it like a nurse handing a doctor a scalpel. He rolls the cylinder and dumps out one of the two remaining bullets. Then he closes the gun up again. Although he hurts everywhere now, hurts like hell, Hodges kneels down and puts his father’s gun in Brady’s hand.

‘You do it,’ he says. ‘It’s what you always wanted.’

Jerome stands by, ready in case Brady should decide to use that final round on Hodges instead. But he doesn’t. Brady tries to point the gun at his head. He can’t. His arm twitches, but won’t rise. He groans again. Blood pours over his lower lip and seeps out from between Felix Babineau’s capped teeth. It would almost be possible to feel sorry for him, Hodges thinks, if you didn’t know what he did at City Center, what he tried to do at the Mingo Auditorium, and the suicide machine he’s set in motion today. That machine will slow down and stop now that its prime operative is finished, but it will swallow up a few more sad young people before it does. Hodges is pretty sure of that. Suicide may not be painless, but it is catching.

You could feel sorry for him if he wasn’t a monster, Hodges thinks.

Holly kneels, lifts Brady’s hand, and puts the muzzle of the gun against his temple. ‘Now, Mr Hartsfield,’ she says. ‘You have to do the rest yourself. And may God have mercy on your soul.’

‘I hope not,’ Jerome says. In the glare of the Sno-Cat’s headlights, his face is a stone.

For a long moment the only sounds are the rumble of the snow machine’s big engine and the rising wind of winter storm Eugenie.

Holly says, ‘Oh God. His finger’s not even on the trigger. One of you needs to help me, I don’t think I can—’

Then, a gunshot.

‘Brady’s last trick,’ Jerome says. ‘Jesus.’

There’s no way Hodges can make it back to the Expedition, but Jerome is able to muscle him into the cab of the Sno-Cat. Holly sits beside him on the outside. Jerome climbs behind the wheel and throws it into gear. Although he backs up and then circles wide around the remains of Babineau’s body, he tells Holly not to look until they’re at least up the first hill. ‘We’re leaving blood-tracks.’

‘Oough.’

‘Correct,’ Jerome says. ‘Oough is correct.’

‘Thurston told me he had snowmobiles,’ Hodges says. ‘He didn’t mention anything about a Sherman tank.’

‘It’s a Tucker Sno-Cat, and you didn’t offer him your MasterCard as collateral. Not to mention an excellent Jeep Wrangler that got me out here to the williwags just fine, thanks.’

‘Is he really dead?’ Holly asks. Her wan face is turned up to Hodges’s, and the huge knot on her forehead actually seems to be pulsing. ‘Really and for sure?’

You saw him put a bullet in his brain.’

‘Yes, but is he? Really and for sure?’

The answer he won’t give is no, not yet. Not until the trails of slime he’s left in the heads of God knows how many people are washed away by the brain’s remarkable ability to heal itself. But in another week, another month at the outside, Brady will be all gone.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And Holly? Thanks for programming that text alert. The home run boys.’

She smiles. ‘What was it? The text, I mean?’

Hodges struggles his phone out of his coat pocket, checks it, and says, ‘I will be goddamned.’ He begins to laugh. ‘I completely forgot.’

‘What? Show me show me show me!’

He tilts the phone so she can read the text his daughter, Alison, has sent him from California, where the sun is no doubt shining:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DADDY! 70 YEARS OLD AND STILL GOING STRONG! AM RUSHING OUT TO THE MARKET, WILL CALL U LATER. XXX ALLIE

For the first time since Jerome returned from Arizona, Tyrone Feelgood Delight makes an appearance. ‘You is sem’ny years old, Massa Hodges? Laws! You don’t look a day ovah sixty-fi’!’

‘Stop it, Jerome,’ Holly says. ‘I know it amuses you, but that sort of talk sounds very ignorant and silly.’

Hodges laughs. It hurts to laugh, but he can’t help it. He holds onto consciousness all the way back to Thurston’s Garage; is even able to take a few shallow tokes on the joint Holly lights and passes to him. Then the dark begins to slip in.

This could be it, he thinks.

Happy birthday to me, he thinks.

Then he’s gone.

AFTER

Four Days Later

Pete Huntley is far less familiar with Kiner Memorial than his old partner, who made many pilgrimages here to visit a longterm resident who has now passed away. It takes Pete two stops – one at the main desk and one in Oncology – before he locates Hodges’s room, and when he gets there, it’s empty. A cluster of balloons with HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD on them are tethered to one of the siderails and floating near the ceiling.

A nurse pokes her head in, sees him looking at the empty bed, and gives him a smile. ‘The solarium at the end of the hall. They’ve been having a little party. I think you’re still in time.’

Pete walks down. The solarium is skylighted and filled with plants, maybe to cheer up the patients, maybe to provide them with a little extra oxygen, maybe both. Near one wall, a party of four people is playing cards. Two of them are bald, and one has an IV drip running into his arm. Hodges is seated directly under the skylight, doling out slices of cake to his posse: Holly, Jerome, and Barbara. Kermit seems to be growing a beard, it’s coming in snow-white, and Pete has a brief memory of going to the mall with his own kids to see Santa Claus.

‘Pete!’ Hodges says, smiling. He starts to get up and Pete waves him back into his seat. ‘Sit down, have some cake. Allie brought it from Batool’s Bakery. It was always her favorite place to go when she was growing up.’

‘Where is she?’ Pete asks, dragging a chair over and placing it next to Holly. She’s sporting a bandage on the left side of her forehead, and Barbara has a cast on her leg. Only Jerome looks hale and hearty, and Pete knows the kid barely escaped getting turned into hamburger out at that hunting camp.

‘She went back to the Coast this morning. Two days off was all she could manage. She’s got three weeks’ vacation coming in March, and says she’ll be back. If I need her, that is.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Not bad,’ Hodges says. His eyes flick up and to the left, but only for a second. ‘I’ve got three cancer docs on my case, and the first tests came back looking good.’

‘That’s fantastic.’ Pete takes the piece of cake Hodges is holding out. ‘This is too big.’

‘Man up and chow down,’ Hodges says. ‘Listen, about you and Izzy—’

‘We worked it out,’ Pete says. He takes a bite. ‘Hey, nice. There’s nothing like carrot cake with cream cheese frosting to cheer up your blood sugar.’

‘So the retirement party is…?’

‘Back on. Officially, it was never off. I’m still counting on you to give the first toast. And remember—’

‘Yeah, yeah, ex-wife and current squeeze both there, nothing too off-color. Got it, got it.’

‘Just as long as we’re clear on that.’ The too-big slice of cake is getting smaller. Barbara watches the rapid intake with fascination.

‘Are we in trouble?’ Holly asks. ‘Are we, Pete, are we?’

‘Nope,’ Pete says. ‘Completely in the clear. That’s mostly what I came to tell you.’

Holly sits back with a sigh of relief that blows the graying bangs off her forehead.

‘Bet they’ve got Babineau carrying the can for everything,’ Jerome says.

Pete points his plastic fork at Jerome. ‘Truth you speak, young Jedi warrior.’

‘You might be interested to know that the famous puppeteer Frank Oz did Yoda’s voice,’ Holly says. She looks around. ‘Well, I find it interesting.’

‘I find this cake interesting,’ Pete says. ‘Could I have a little more? Maybe just a sliver?’

Barbara does the honors, and it’s far more than a sliver, but Pete doesn’t object. He takes a bite and asks how she’s doing.

‘Good,’ Jerome says before she can answer. ‘She’s got a boyfriend. Kid named Dereece Neville. Big basketball star.’

‘Shut up, Jerome, he is not my boyfriend.’

‘He sure visits like a boyfriend,’ Jerome says. ‘I’m talking every day since you broke your leg.’

‘We have a lot to talk about,’ Barbara says in a dignified tone of voice.

Pete says, ‘Going back to Babineau, hospital administration has some security footage of him coming in through a back entrance on the night his wife was murdered. He changed into maintenance-worker duds. Probably raided a locker. He leaves, comes back fifteen or twenty minutes later, changes back into the clothes he came in, leaves for good.’

‘No other footage?’ Hodges asks. ‘Like in the Bucket?’

‘Yeah, some, but you can’t see his face in that stuff, because he’s wearing a Groundhogs cap, and you don’t see him go into Hartsfield’s room. A defense lawyer might be able to make something of that stuff, but since Babineau’s never going to stand trial—’

‘No one gives much of a shit,’ Hodges finishes.

‘Correct. City and state cops are delighted to let him carry the weight. Izzy’s happy, and so am I. I could ask you – just between us chickens – if it was actually Babineau who died out there in the woods, but I don’t really want to know.’

‘So how does Library Al fit into this scenario?’ Hodges asks.

‘He doesn’t.’ Pete puts his paper plate aside. ‘Alvin Brooks killed himself last night.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Hodges says. ‘While he was in County?’

‘Yes.’

‘They didn’t have him on suicide watch? After all this?’

‘They did, and none of the inmates are supposed to have anything capable of cutting or stabbing, but he got hold of a ballpoint pen somehow. Might have been a guard who gave it to him, but it was probably another inmate. He drew Zs all over the walls, all over his bunk, and all over himself. Then he took the pen’s metal cartridge out of the barrel and used it to—’

‘Stop,’ Barbara says. She looks very pale in the winterlight falling on them from above. ‘We get the idea.’

Hodges says, ‘So the thinking is… what? He was Babineau’s accomplice?’

‘Fell under his influence,’ Pete says. ‘Or maybe both of them fell under someone else’s influence, but let’s not go there, okay? The thing to concentrate on now is that the three of you are in the clear. There won’t be any citations this time, or city freebies—’

‘It’s okay,’ Jerome says. ‘Me n Holly have still got at least four years left on our bus passes, anyway.’

‘Not that you ever use yours now that you’re hardly ever here,’ Barbara says. ‘You should give it to me.’

‘It’s non-transferrable,’ Jerome says smugly. ‘I better hold onto it. Wouldn’t want you to get in any trouble with the law. Besides, soon you’ll be going places with Dereece. Just don’t go too far, if you know what I mean.’

‘You’re being childish.’ Barbara turns to Pete. ‘How many suicides were there in all?’

Pete sighs. ‘Fourteen over the last five days. Nine of them had Zappits, which are now as dead as their owners. The oldest was twenty-four, the youngest thirteen. One was a boy from a family that was, according to the neighbors, fairly weird about religion – the kind that makes fundamentalist Christians look liberal. He took his parents and kid brother with him. Shotgun.’

The five of them fall silent for a moment. At the table on the left, the card players burst into howls of laughter over something.

Pete breaks the silence. ‘And there have been over forty attempts.’

Jerome whistles.

‘Yeah, I know. It’s not in the papers, and the TV stations are sitting on it, even Murder and Mayhem.’ This is a police nickname for WKMM, an indie station that has taken If it bleeds, it leads as an article of faith. ‘But of course a lot of those attempts – maybe even most of them – end up getting blabbed about on the social media sites, and that breeds still more. I hate those sites. But this will settle. Suicide clusters always do.’

‘Eventually,’ Hodges says. ‘But with social media or without it, with Brady or without him, suicide is a fact of life.’

He looks over at the card players as he says this, especially the two baldies. One looks good (as Hodges himself looks good), but the other is cadaverous and hollow-eyed. One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, Hodges’s father would have said. And the thought that comes to him is too complicated – too fraught with a terrible mixture of anger and sorrow – to be articulated. It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.

‘More cake?’ Barbara asks.

‘Nope. Gotta split. But I will sign your cast, if I may.’

‘Please,’ Barbara says. ‘And write something witty.’

‘That’s far beyond Pete’s pay grade,’ Hodges says.

‘Watch your mouth, Kermit.’ Pete drops to one knee, like a swain about to propose, and begins writing carefully on Barbara’s cast. When he’s finished, he stands up and looks at Hodges. ‘Now tell me the truth about how you’re feeling.’

‘Damn good. I’ve got a patch that controls the pain a lot better than the pills, and they’re kicking me loose tomorrow. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.’ He pauses, then says: ‘I’m going to beat this thing.’

Pete’s waiting for the elevator when Holly catches up to him. ‘It meant a lot to Bill,’ she says. ‘That you came, and that you still want him to give that toast.’

‘It’s not so good, is it?’ Pete says.

‘No.’ He reaches out to hug her, but Holly steps back. She does allow him to take her hand and give it a brief squeeze. ‘Not so good.’

‘Crap.’

‘Yes, crap. Crap is right. He doesn’t deserve this. But since he’s stuck with it, he needs his friends to stand by him. You will, won’t you?’

‘Of course I will. And don’t count him out yet, Holly. Where there’s life, there’s hope. I know it’s a cliché, but…’ He shrugs.

‘I do have hope. I have Holly hope.’

You can’t say she’s as weird as ever, Pete thinks, but she’s still peculiar. He sort of likes it, actually. ‘Just make sure he keeps that toast relatively clean, okay?’

‘I will.’

‘And hey – he outlived Hartsfield. No matter what else happens, he’s got that.’

‘We’ll always have Paris, kid,’ Holly says in a Bogart drawl.

Yes, she’s still peculiar. One of a kind, actually.

‘Listen, Gibney, you need to take care of yourself, too. No matter what happens. He’d hate it if you didn’t.’

‘I know,’ Holly says, and goes back to the solarium, where she and Jerome will clean up the remains of the birthday party. She tells herself that it isn’t necessarily the last one, and tries to convince herself of that. She doesn’t entirely succeed, but she continues to have Holly hope.

Eight Months Later

When Jerome shows up at Fairlawn, two days after the funeral and at ten on the dot, as promised, Holly is already there, on her knees at the head of the grave. She’s not praying; she’s planting a chrysanthemum. She doesn’t look up when his shadow falls over her. She knows who it is. This was the arrangement they made after she told him she didn’t know if she could make it all the way through the funeral. ‘I’ll try,’ she said, ‘but I’m not good with those fracking things. I may have to book.’

‘You plant these in the fall,’ she says now. ‘I don’t know much about plants, so I got a how-to guide. The writing was only so-so, but the directions are easy to follow.’

‘That’s good.’ Jerome sits down crosslegged at the end of the plot, where the grass begins.

Holly scoops dirt carefully with her hands, still not looking at him. ‘I told you I might have to book. They all stared at me when I left, but I just couldn’t stay. If I had, they would have wanted me to stand up there in front of the coffin and talk about him and I couldn’t. Not in front of all those people. I bet his daughter is mad.’

‘Probably not,’ Jerome says.

‘I hate funerals. I came to this city for one, did you know that?’

Jerome does, but says nothing. Just lets her finish.

‘My aunt died. She was Olivia Trelawney’s mother. That’s where I met Bill, at that funeral. I ran out of that one, too. I was sitting behind the funeral parlor, smoking a cigarette, feeling terrible, and that’s where he found me. Do you understand?’ At last she looks up at him. ‘He found me.’

‘I get it, Holly. I do.’

‘He opened a door for me. One into the world. He gave me something to do that made a difference.’

‘Same here.’

She wipes her eyes almost angrily. ‘This is just so fracking poopy.’

‘Got that right, but he wouldn’t want you to go backward. That’s the last thing he’d want.’

‘I won’t,’ she says. ‘You know he left me the company, right? The insurance money and everything else went to Allie, but the company is mine. I can’t run it by myself, so I asked Pete if he’d like to work for me. Just part-time.’

‘And he said…?’

‘He said yes, because retirement sucked already. It should be okay. I’ll run down the skippers and deadbeats on my computer, and he’ll go out and get them. Or serve the subpoenas, if that’s the job. But it won’t be like it was. Working for Bill… working with Bill… those were the happiest days of my life.’ She thinks that over. ‘I guess the only happy days of my life. I felt… I don’t know…’

‘Valued?’ Jerome suggests.

‘Yes! Valued.’

‘You should have felt that way,’ Jerome says, ‘because you were very valuable. And still are.’

She gives the plant a final critical look, dusts dirt from her hands and the knees of her pants, and sits down next to him. ‘He was brave, wasn’t he? At the end, I mean.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah.’ She smiles a little. ‘That’s what Bill would have said – not yes, but yeah.’

‘Yeah,’ he agrees.

‘Jerome? Would you put your arm around me?’ He does.

‘The first time I met you – when we found the stealth program Brady loaded into my cousin Olivia’s computer – I was afraid of you.’

‘I know,’ Jerome says.

‘Not because you were black—’

‘Black is whack,’ Jerome says, smiling. ‘I think we agreed on that much right from the jump.’

‘—but because you were a stranger. You were from outside. I was scared of outside people and outside things. I still am, but not as much as I was then.’

‘I know.’

‘I loved him,’ Holly says, looking at the chrysanthemum. It is a brilliant orange-red below the gray gravestone, which bears a simple message: KERMIT WILLIAM HODGES, and, below the dates, END OF WATCH. ‘I loved him so much.’

‘Yeah,’ Jerome says. ‘So did I.’

She looks up at him, her face timid and hopeful – beneath the graying bangs, it is almost the face of a child. ‘You’ll always be my friend, won’t you?’

‘Always.’ He squeezes her shoulders, which are heartbreakingly thin. During Hodges’s final two months, she lost ten pounds she couldn’t afford to lose. He knows his mother and Barbara are just waiting to feed her up. ‘Always, Holly.’

‘I know,’ she says.

‘Then why did you ask?’

‘Because it’s so good to hear you say it.’

End of Watch, Jerome thinks. He hates the sound of that, but it’s right. It’s right. And this is better than the funeral. Being here with Holly on this sunny late summer morning is much better.

‘Jerome? I’m not smoking.’

‘That’s good.’

They sit quiet for a little while, looking at the chrysanthemum burning its colors at the base of the headstone.

‘Jerome?’

‘What, Holly?’

‘Would you like to go to a movie with me?’

‘Yes,’ he says, then corrects himself. ‘Yeah.’

‘We’ll leave a seat empty between us. Just to put our popcorn in.’

‘Okay.’

‘Because I hate putting it on the floor where there are probably roaches and maybe even rats.’

‘I hate it, too. What do you want to see?’

‘Something that will make us laugh and laugh.’

‘Works for me.’

He smiles at her. Holly smiles back. They leave Fairlawn and walk back out into the world together.