End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(20)

‘You take it right. There’s nothing to protect.’

Hodges steps into a rectangle with bare wood walls and a poured concrete floor. There are boot prints visible on the concrete. Hodges can see his breath, and he can see something else, as well. In front of the left overhead door is a chair. Someone sat here, looking out.

Hodges has been feeling a growing discomfort on the left side of his midsection, one that’s putting out tentacles that curl around to his lower back, but this sort of pain is almost an old friend by now, and it’s temporarily overshadowed by excitement.

Someone sat here looking out at 1601, he thinks. I’d bet the farm on it, if I had a farm.

He walks to the front of the garage and sits where the watcher sat. There are three windows running horizontally across the middle of the door, and the one on the far right has been wiped clean of dust. The view is a straight shot to the big living room window of 1601.

‘Hey, Bill,’ Tom says. ‘Something under the chair.’

Hodges bends to look, although doing so turns up the heat in his gut. What he sees is a black disc, maybe three inches across. He picks it up by the edges. Embossed on it in gold is a single word: STEINER.

‘Is it from a camera?’ Tom asks.

‘From a pair of binoculars. Police departments with fat budgets use Steiner binocs.’

With a good pair of Steiners – and as far as Hodges knows, there’s no such thing as a bad pair – the watcher could have put himself right into the Ellerton-Stover living room, assuming the blinds were up … and they had been when he and Holly were in that room this morning. Hell, if the women had been watching CNN, the watcher could have read the news crawl at the bottom of the screen.

Hodges doesn’t have an evidence Baggie, but there’s a travel-sized pack of Kleenex in his coat pocket. He takes out two, carefully wraps the lens cap, and slips it into the inside pocket of his coat. He rises from the chair (provoking another twinge; the pain is bad this afternoon), then spies something else. Someone has carved a single letter into the wood upright between the two overhead doors, perhaps using a pocketknife.

It’s the letter Z.





12


They are almost back to the driveway when Hodges is visited by something new: a searing bolt of agony behind his left knee. It feels as if he’s been stabbed. He cries out as much in surprise as from the pain and bends over, kneading at the throbbing knot, trying to make it let go. To loosen up a little, at least.

Tom bends down next to him, and thus neither of them sees the elderly Chevrolet cruising slowly along Hilltop Court. Its fading blue paint is dappled with spots of red primer. The old gent behind the wheel slows down even more, so he can stare at the two men. Then the Chevrolet speeds up, sending a puff of blue exhaust from its tailpipe, and passes the Ellerton-Stover house, headed for the buttonhook turnaround at the end of the street.

‘What is it?’ Tom asks. ‘What happened?’

‘Cramp,’ Hodges says through gritted teeth.

‘Rub it.’

Hodges gives him a look of pained humor through his tumbled hair. ‘What do you think I’m doing?’

‘Let me.’

Tom Saubers, a physical therapy veteran thanks to his attendance at a certain job fair six years ago, pushes Hodges’s hand aside. He removes one of his gloves and digs in with his fingers. Hard.

‘Ow! Jesus! That fucking hurts!’

‘I know,’ Tom says. ‘Can’t be helped. Move as much of your weight to your good leg as you can.’

Hodges does so. The Malibu with its patches of dull red primer paint cruises slowly by once more, this time headed back down the hill. The driver helps himself to another long look, then speeds up again.

‘It’s letting go,’ Hodges says. ‘Thank God for small favors.’ It is, but his stomach is on fire and his lower back feels like he wrenched it.

Tom is looking at him with concern. ‘You sure you’re all right?’

‘Yeah. Just a charley horse.’

‘Or maybe a deep vein thrombosis. You’re no kid anymore, Bill. You ought to get that checked out. If anything happened to you while you were with me, Pete would never forgive me. His sister, either. We owe you a lot.’

‘All taken care of, got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow,’ Hodges says. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s freezing.’

He limps the first two or three steps, but then the pain behind his knee lets go entirely and he’s able to walk normally. More normally than Tom. Thanks to his encounter with Brady Hartsfield in April of 2009, Tom Saubers will limp for the rest of his life.





13


When Hodges gets home, his stomach is better but he’s dog tired. He tires easily these days and tells himself it’s because his appetite has gotten so lousy, but he wonders if that’s really it. He’s heard the pane of breaking glass and the boys giving their home run cheer twice on his way back from Ridgedale, but he never looks at his phone while driving, partly because it’s dangerous (not to mention illegal in this state), mostly because he refuses to become a slave to it.

Besides, he doesn’t need to be a mind reader to know from whom at least one of those texts came. He waits until he’s hung his coat in the front hall closet, briefly touching the inside pocket to make sure the lens cap is still safe and sound.