End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(28)

‘I have to go,’ Hodges says, and grabs for his wallet. ‘Missed my appointment yesterday. Can’t miss another one.’

‘We’ll pick up the check,’ Izzy says. ‘After you brought us all this valuable evidence, it’s the least we can do.’

Holly mutters something else under her breath. This time Hodges can’t be sure, even with his trained Holly-ear, but he thinks it might have been bitch.





20


On the sidewalk, Holly jams an unfashionable but somehow charming plaid hunting cap down to her ears and then thrusts her hands into her coat pockets. She won’t look at him, only starts walking toward the office a block away. Hodges’s car is parked outside Dave’s, but he hurries after her.

‘Holly.’

‘You see how she is.’ Walking faster. Still not looking at him.

The pain in his gut is creeping back, and he’s losing his breath. ‘Holly, wait. I can’t keep up.’

She turns to him, and he’s alarmed to see her eyes are swimming with tears.

‘There’s more to it! More more more! But they’re just going to sweep it under the rug and they didn’t even say the real reason which is so Pete can have a nice retirement party without this hanging over his head the way you had to retire with the Mercedes Killer hanging over yours and so the papers don’t make a big deal of it and you know there’s more to it I know you do and I know you have to get your test results I want you to get them because I’m so worried, but those poor women … I just don’t think … they don’t deserve to … to just be shoveled under!’

She halts at last, trembling. The tears are already freezing on her cheeks. He tilts her face to look at him, knowing she would shrink away if anyone else tried to touch her that way – yes, even Jerome Robinson, and she loves Jerome, probably has since the day the two of them discovered the ghost-program Brady left in Olivia Trelawney’s computer, the one that finally pushed her over the edge and caused her to take her own overdose.

‘Holly, we’re not done with this. In fact I think we might just be getting started.’

She looks him squarely in the face, another thing she will do with no one else. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Something new has come up, something I didn’t want to tell Pete and Izzy. I don’t know what the hell to make of it. There’s no time to tell you now, but when I get back from the doctor’s, I’ll tell you everything.’

‘All right, that’s fine. Go on, now. And although I don’t believe in God, I’ll say a prayer for your test results. Because a little prayer can’t hurt, can it?’

‘No.’

He gives her a quick hug – long hugs don’t work with Holly – and starts back to his car, once more thinking of that thing she said yesterday, about Brady Hartsfield being an architect of suicide. A pretty turn of phrase from a woman who writes poetry in her spare time (not that Hodges has ever seen any, or is likely to), but Brady would probably sneer at it, consider it a mile short of the mark. Brady would consider himself a prince of suicide.

Hodges climbs into the Prius Holly nagged him into buying and heads for Dr Stamos’s office. He’s doing a little praying himself: Let it be an ulcer. Even the bleeding kind that needs surgery to sew it up.

Just an ulcer.

Please nothing worse than that.





21


He doesn’t have to spend time cooling his heels in the waiting room today. Although he’s five minutes early and the room is as full as it was on Monday, Marlee the cheerleader receptionist sends him in before he even has a chance to sit down.

Belinda Jensen, Stamos’s nurse, usually greets him at his yearly physicals with smiling good cheer, but she’s not smiling this morning, and as Hodges steps on the scale, he remembers his yearly physical is a bit overdue. By four months. Actually closer to five.

The armature on the old-fashioned scale balances at 165. When he retired from the cops in ’09, he weighed 230 at the mandatory exit physical. Belinda takes his blood pressure, pokes something in his ear to get his current temperature, then leads him past the exam rooms and directly to Dr Stamos’s office at the end of the corridor. She knocks a knuckle on the door, and when Stamos says ‘Please come in,’ she leaves Hodges at once. Usually voluble, full of tales about her fractious children and bumptious husband, she has today spoken hardly a word.

Can’t be good, Hodges thinks, but maybe it’s not too bad. Please God, not too bad. Another ten years wouldn’t be a lot to ask for, would it? Or if You can’t do that, how about five?

Wendell Stamos is a fiftysomething with a fast-receding hairline and the broad-shouldered, trim-waisted build of a pro jock who’s stayed in shape after retirement. He looks at Hodges gravely and invites him to sit down. Hodges does so.

‘How bad?’

‘Bad,’ Dr Stamos says, then hastens to add, ‘but not hopeless.’

‘Don’t skate around it, just tell me.’

‘It’s pancreatic cancer, and I’m afraid we caught it … well … rather late in the game. Your liver is involved.’

Hodges finds himself fighting a strong and dismaying urge to laugh. No, more than laugh, to just throw back his head and yodel like Heidi’s fucking grandfather. He thinks it was Stamos saying bad but not hopeless. It makes him remember an old joke. Doctor tells his patient there’s good news and bad news; which does the patient want first? Hit me with the bad news, says the patient. Well, says the doctor, you have an inoperable brain tumor. The patient starts to blubber and asks what the good news can possibly be after learning a thing like that. The doctor leans forward, smiling confidentially, and says, I’m fucking my receptionist, and she’s gorgeous.