End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(121)

‘Couldn’t break up the band before the final reunion concert, could we?’ Jerome says. ‘Let’s get you in the—’

There comes an animal sound from their left, a guttural groan that struggles to be words and can’t make it.

Hodges is more exhausted than ever in his life, but he walks toward that groan anyway. Because … Well, because.

What was the word he used with Holly, on their way out here? Closure, wasn’t it?

Brady’s hijacked body has been laid open to the backbone. His guts are spread out around him like the wings of a red dragon. Pools of steaming blood are sinking into the snow. But his eyes are open and aware, and all at once Hodges can feel those fingers again. This time they’re not just probing lazily. This time they’re frantic, scrabbling for purchase. Hodges ejects them as easily as that floor-mopping orderly once pushed this man’s presence out of his mind.

He spits Brady out like a watermelon seed.

‘Help me,’ Brady whispers. ‘You have to help me.’

‘I think you’re way beyond help,’ Hodges says. ‘You were run down, Brady. Run down by an extremely heavy vehicle. Now you know what that feels like. Don’t you?’

‘Hurts,’ Brady whispers.

‘Yes,’ Hodges says. ‘I imagine it does.’

‘If you can’t help me, shoot me.’

Hodges holds out his hand, and Holly puts the Victory .38 into it like a nurse handing a doctor a scalpel. He rolls the cylinder and dumps out one of the two remaining bullets. Then he closes the gun up again. Although he hurts everywhere now, hurts like hell, Hodges kneels down and puts his father’s gun in Brady’s hand.

‘You do it,’ he says. ‘It’s what you always wanted.’

Jerome stands by, ready in case Brady should decide to use that final round on Hodges instead. But he doesn’t. Brady tries to point the gun at his head. He can’t. His arm twitches, but won’t rise. He groans again. Blood pours over his lower lip and seeps out from between Felix Babineau’s capped teeth. It would almost be possible to feel sorry for him, Hodges thinks, if you didn’t know what he did at City Center, what he tried to do at the Mingo Auditorium, and the suicide machine he’s set in motion today. That machine will slow down and stop now that its prime operative is finished, but it will swallow up a few more sad young people before it does. Hodges is pretty sure of that. Suicide may not be painless, but it is catching.

You could feel sorry for him if he wasn’t a monster, Hodges thinks.

Holly kneels, lifts Brady’s hand, and puts the muzzle of the gun against his temple. ‘Now, Mr Hartsfield,’ she says. ‘You have to do the rest yourself. And may God have mercy on your soul.’

‘I hope not,’ Jerome says. In the glare of the Sno-Cat’s headlights, his face is a stone.

For a long moment the only sounds are the rumble of the snow machine’s big engine and the rising wind of winter storm Eugenie.

Holly says, ‘Oh God. His finger’s not even on the trigger. One of you needs to help me, I don’t think I can—’

Then, a gunshot.

‘Brady’s last trick,’ Jerome says. ‘Jesus.’





36


There’s no way Hodges can make it back to the Expedition, but Jerome is able to muscle him into the cab of the Sno-Cat. Holly sits beside him on the outside. Jerome climbs behind the wheel and throws it into gear. Although he backs up and then circles wide around the remains of Babineau’s body, he tells Holly not to look until they’re at least up the first hill. ‘We’re leaving blood-tracks.’

‘Oough.’

‘Correct,’ Jerome says. ‘Oough is correct.’

‘Thurston told me he had snowmobiles,’ Hodges says. ‘He didn’t mention anything about a Sherman tank.’

‘It’s a Tucker Sno-Cat, and you didn’t offer him your MasterCard as collateral. Not to mention an excellent Jeep Wrangler that got me out here to the williwags just fine, thanks.’

‘Is he really dead?’ Holly asks. Her wan face is turned up to Hodges’s, and the huge knot on her forehead actually seems to be pulsing. ‘Really and for sure?’

You saw him put a bullet in his brain.’

‘Yes, but is he? Really and for sure?’

The answer he won’t give is no, not yet. Not until the trails of slime he’s left in the heads of God knows how many people are washed away by the brain’s remarkable ability to heal itself. But in another week, another month at the outside, Brady will be all gone.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And Holly? Thanks for programming that text alert. The home run boys.’

She smiles. ‘What was it? The text, I mean?’

Hodges struggles his phone out of his coat pocket, checks it, and says, ‘I will be goddamned.’ He begins to laugh. ‘I completely forgot.’

‘What? Show me show me show me!’

He tilts the phone so she can read the text his daughter, Alison, has sent him from California, where the sun is no doubt shining:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DADDY! 70 YEARS OLD AND STILL GOING STRONG! AM RUSHING OUT TO THE MARKET, WILL CALL U LATER. XXX ALLIE

For the first time since Jerome returned from Arizona, Tyrone Feelgood Delight makes an appearance. ‘You is sem’ny years old, Massa Hodges? Laws! You don’t look a day ovah sixty-fi’!’