End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3) - Stephen King Page 0,87

to see her privacy violated without some concrete result to show for it.

‘Kermit? Are you there?’

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

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

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

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

‘Brady always enjoyed—’

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

‘Hit me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8

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

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

Childhood memories are apparently the last things to go.

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

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

9

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

He has mentally rehearsed this part of the operation dozens of times, and now moves ahead confidently. A swipe of Babineau’s card gets him in the door marked MAINTENANCE A. On the floors above, the machines that run the hospital are heard as a muted hum, if they are heard at all. Down here they’re a steady thunder, and the tile hallway