End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3) - Stephen King Page 0,153

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