End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(104)

‘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.’





16


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.