End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(118)

‘Okay,’ Hodges says. ‘Okay, okay, okay. Stop.’

He takes the Zappit and finds the button at the top of the console. The welcome screen lights up; the diagonal downstroke of the red Z fills the screen. He is invited to swipe and access the games. He does so without being prompted by Brady. Sweat pours down his face. He has never been so hot. His broken wrist throbs and pulses.

‘Do you see the Fishin’ Hole icon?’

‘Yes.’

Opening Fishin’ Hole is the last thing he wants to do, but when the alternative is just sitting here with his broken wrist and his swollen, pulsing gut and watching a stream of high-caliber bullets divide Holly’s head from her slight body? Not an option. And besides, he has read a person can’t be hypnotized against his will. It’s true that Dinah Scott’s console almost put him under, but then he didn’t know what was happening. Now he does. And if Brady thinks he’s tranced out and he’s not, then maybe … just maybe …

‘I’m sure you know the drill by now,’ Brady says. His eyes are bright and lively, the eyes of a boy who is about to set a spiderweb on fire so he can see what the spider will do. Will it scurry around its flaming web, looking for a way to escape, or will it just burn? ‘Tap the icon. The fish will swim and the music will play. Tap the pink fish and add up the numbers. In order to win the game, you have to score one hundred and twenty points in one hundred and twenty seconds. If you succeed, I’ll let Ms Gibney live. If you fail, we’ll see what this fine automatic weapon can do. Babineau saw it demolish a stack of concrete blocks once, so just imagine what it will do to flesh.’

‘You’re not going to let her live even if I score five thousand,’ Hodges says. ‘I don’t believe that for a second.’

Babineau’s blue eyes widen in mock outrage. ‘But you should! All that I am, I owe to this bitch sprawled out in front of me! The least I can do is spare her life. Assuming she isn’t suffering a brain bleed and dying already, that is. Now stop playing for time. Play the game instead. Your one hundred and twenty seconds start as soon as your finger taps the icon.’

With no other recourse, Hodges taps it. The screen blanks. There’s a blue flash so bright it makes him squint, and then the fish are there, swimming back and forth, up and down, crisscrossing, sending up silvery trails of bubbles. The music begins to tinkle: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea …

Only it isn’t just music. There are words mixed in. And there are words in the blue flashes, too.

‘Ten seconds gone,’ Brady says. ‘Tick-tock, tick-tock.’

Hodges taps at one of the pink fish and misses. He’s right hand-dominant, and each tap makes the throbbing in his wrist that much worse, but the pain there is nothing compared to the pain now roasting him from groin to throat. On his third try he gets a pinky – that’s how he thinks of them, as pinkies – and the fish turns into a number 5. He says it out loud.

‘Only five points in twenty seconds?’ Brady says. ‘Better step it up, Detective.’

Hodges taps faster, eyes moving left and right, up and down. He no longer has to squint when the blue flashes come, because he’s used to them. And it’s getting easier. The fish seem bigger now, also a little slower. The music seems less tinkly. Fuller, somehow. You and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be. Is that Brady’s voice, singing along with the music, or just his imagination? Live or Memorex? No time to think about it now. Tempus is fugiting.

He gets a seven-fish, then a four, and then – jackpot! – one turns into a twelve. He says, ‘I’m up to twenty-seven.’ But is that right? He’s losing count.

Brady doesn’t tell him, Brady only says, ‘Eighty seconds to go,’ and now his voice seems to have picked up a slight echo, as if it’s coming to Hodges from the far end of a long hallway. Meanwhile, a marvelous thing is happening: the pain in his gut is starting to recede.

Whoa, he thinks. The AMA should know about this.

He gets another pinky. It turns into a 2. Not so good, but there are plenty more. Plenty, plenty more.

That’s when he starts to feel something like fingers fluttering delicately inside his head, and it’s not his imagination. He’s being invaded. It was easy, Brady said of Nurse MacDonald. It always is, once you get inside and start pulling the levers.

And when Brady gets to his levers?

He’ll jump inside me the way he jumped inside Babineau, Hodges thinks … although this realization is now like the voice and the music, coming from the far end of a long hallway. At the end of that hallway is the door to Room 217, and the door is standing open.

Why would he want to do that? Why would he want to inhabit a body that’s turned into a cancer factory? Because he wants me to kill Holly. Not with the gun, though, he’d never trust me with that. He’ll use my hands to choke her, broken wrist and all. Then he’ll leave me to face what I’ve done.

‘You’re getting better, Detective Hodges, and you still have a minute to go. Just relax and keep tapping. It’s easier when you relax.’

The voice is no longer echoing down a hallway; even though Brady is now standing right in front of him, it’s coming from a galaxy far, far away. Brady bends down and stares eagerly into Hodges’s face. Only there are fish swimming between them. Pinkies and blueies and reddies. Because Hodges is in the Fishin’ Hole now. Except it’s really an aquarium, and he’s the fish. Soon he will be eaten. Eaten alive. ‘Come on, Billy-boy, tap those pink fish!’