End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3) - Stephen King Page 0,80

Barbie’s Fashion Walk: Fishin’ Hole. He takes a deep breath and taps the icon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No numbers, though.

The pink fish had just been pink fish.

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around and around goes the flask.

It all seemed so simple at first, and how could she refuse the money? She never