End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(102)

‘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.





12


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.