End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(108)

‘Is small, light, and old,’ Hodges says … although these are not the only reasons he wants a different vehicle built to go in the snow. ‘It’ll be fine to get us out to the airport, though.’

‘What about me?’ Freddi asks.

‘WITSEC,’ Hodges says, ‘as promised. It’ll be like a dream come true.’





20


Jane Ellsbury was a perfectly normal baby – at six pounds, nine ounces, a little underweight, in fact – but by the time she was seven, she weighed ninety pounds and was familiar with the chant that sometimes haunts her dreams to this day: Fatty fatty, two by four, can’t get through the bathroom door, so she does it on the floor. In June of 2010, when her mother took her to the ’Round Here concert as a fifteenth birthday present, she weighed two hundred and ten. She could still get through the bathroom door with no problem, but it had become difficult for her to tie her shoes. Now she’s twenty, her weight has risen to three hundred and twenty, and when the voice begins to speak to her from the free Zappit she got in the mail, everything it says makes perfect sense to her. The voice is low, calm, and reasonable. It tells her that nobody likes her and everybody laughs at her. It points out that she can’t stop eating – even now, with tears running down her face, she’s snarfing her way through a bag of chocolate pinwheel cookies, the kind with lots of gooey marshmallow inside. Like a more kindly version of the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who pointed out certain home truths to Ebenezer Scrooge, it sketches in a future which boils down to fat, fatter, fattest. The laughter along Carbine Street in Hillbilly Heaven, where she and her parents live in a walk-up apartment. The looks of disgust. The jibes, like Here comes the Goodyear Blimp and Look out, don’t let her fall on you! The voice explains, logically and reasonably, that she will never have a date, will never be hired for a good job now that political correctness has rendered the circus fat lady extinct, that by the age of forty she will have to sleep sitting up because her enormous breasts will make it impossible for her lungs to do their work, and before she dies of a heart attack at fifty, she’ll be using a DustBuster to get the crumbs out of the deepest creases in her rolls of fat. When she tries to suggest to the voice that she could lose some weight – go to one of those clinics, maybe – it doesn’t laugh. It only asks her, softly and sympathetically, where the money will come from, when the combined incomes of her mother and father are barely enough to satisfy an appetite that is basically insatiable. When the voice suggests they’d be better off without her, she can only agree.

Jane – known to the denizens of Carbine Street as Fat Jane – lumbers into the bathroom and takes the bottle of OxyContin pills her father has for his bad back. She counts them. There are thirty, which should be more than enough. She takes them five at a time, with milk, eating a chocolate marshmallow cookie after each swallow. She begins to float away. I’m going on a diet, she thinks. I’m going on a long, long diet.

That’s right, the voice from the Zappit tells her. And you’ll never cheat on this one, Jane – will you?

She takes the last five Oxys. She tries to pick up the Zappit, but her fingers will no longer close on the slim console. And what does it matter? She could never catch the speedy pink fish in this condition, anyway. Better to look out the window, where the snow is burying the world in clean linen.

No more fatty-fatty-two-by-four, she thinks, and when she slips into unconsciousness, she goes with relief.





21


Before going to Hertz, Hodges swings Jerome’s Jeep into the turnaround in front of the Airport Hilton.

‘This is supposed to be Witness Protection?’ Freddi asks. ‘This?’

Hodges says, ‘Since I don’t happen to have a safe house at my disposal, it will have to do. I’ll register you under my name. You go in, you lock the door, you watch TV, you wait until this thing is over.’

‘And change the dressing on that wound,’ Holly says.

Freddi ignores her. She’s focused on Hodges. ‘How much trouble am I going to be in? When it’s over?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t have time to discuss it with you now.’

‘Can I at least order room service?’ There’s a faint gleam in Freddi’s bloodshot eyes. ‘I’m not in so much pain now, and I’ve got a wicked case of the munchies.’

‘Knock yourself out,’ Hodges says.

Jerome adds, ‘Only check the peephole before you let in the waiter. Make sure it isn’t one of Brady Hartsfield’s Men in Black.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Freddi says. ‘Right?’

The hotel lobby is dead empty on this snowy afternoon. Hodges, who feels as if he woke up to Pete’s telephone call approximately three years ago, walks to the desk, does his business there, and comes back to where the others are sitting. Holly is tapping away at something on her iPad, and doesn’t look up. Freddi holds out her hand for the key folder, but Hodges gives it to Jerome, instead.

‘Room 522. Take her up, will you? I want to talk to Holly.’

Jerome raises his eyebrows, and when Hodges doesn’t elaborate, he shrugs and takes Freddi by the arm. ‘John Shaft will now escort you to your suite.’

She pushes his hand away. ‘Be lucky if it even has a minibar.’ But she gets up and walks with him toward the elevators.