End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(55)

25


Holly knows that the Robinsons will be waiting for her in the lobby, so she hurries into the gift shop, lurks behind a display of teddy bears (Holly is an accomplished lurker), and calls Bill. She asks if he knows Barbara’s friend Dinah Scott.

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I know most of her friends. The ones that come to the house, anyway. So do you.’

‘I think you should go to see her.’

‘You mean tonight?’

‘I mean right away. She’s got a Zappit.’ Holly takes a deep breath. ‘They’re dangerous.’ She can’t quite bring herself to say what she is coming to believe: that they are suicide machines.





26


In Room 217, orderlies Norm Richard and Kelly Pelham lift Brady back into bed while Mavis Rainier supervises. Norm picks up the Zappit console from the floor and stares at the swimming fish on the screen.

‘Why doesn’t he just catch pneumonia and die, like the rest of the gorks?’ Kelly asks.

‘This one’s too ornery to die,’ Mavis says, then notices Norm staring down at the swimming fish. His eyes are wide and his mouth is hung ajar.

‘Wake up, splendor in the grass,’ she says, and snatches the gadget away. She pushes the power button and tosses it into the top drawer of Brady’s nightstand. ‘We’ve got miles to go before we sleep.’

‘Huh?’ Norm looks down at his hands, as if expecting to see the Zappit still in them.

Kelly asks Nurse Rainier if maybe she wants to take Hartsfield’s blood pressure. ‘O2 looks a little low,’ he says.

Mavis considers this, then says, ‘Fuck him.’

They leave.





27


In Sugar Heights, the city’s poshest neighborhood, an old Chevy Malibu spotted with primer paint creeps up to a closed gate on Lilac Drive. Artfully scrolled into the wrought iron are the initials Barbara Robinson failed to remember: FB. Z-Boy gets out from behind the wheel, his old parka (a rip in the back and another in the left sleeve thriftily mended with masking tape) flapping around him. He taps the correct code into the keypad, and the gates begin to swing open. He gets back into the car, reaches under the seat, and brings out two items. One is a plastic soda bottle with the neck cut off. The interior has been packed with steel wool. The other is a .32-caliber revolver. Z-Boy slips the muzzle of the .32 into this homemade silencer – another Brady Hartsfield invention – and holds it on his lap. With his free hand he pilots the Malibu up the smooth, curving driveway.

Ahead, the porch-mounted motion lights come on.

Behind, the wrought iron gates swing silently shut.





LIBRARY AL


It didn’t take Brady long to realize he was pretty much finished as a physical being. He was born stupid but didn’t stay that way, as the saying goes.

Yes, there was physical therapy – Dr Babineau decreed it, and Brady was hardly in a position to protest – but there was only so much therapy could accomplish. He was eventually able to shamble thirty feet or so along the corridor some patients called the Torture Highway, but only with the help of Rehab Care Coordinator Ursula Haber, the bull dyke Nazi who ran the place.

‘One more step, Mr Hartsfield,’ Haber would exhort, and when he managed one more step the bitch would ask for one more and one more after that. When Brady was finally allowed to collapse into his wheelchair, trembling and soaked with sweat, he liked to imagine stuffing oil-soaked rags up Haber’s snatch and setting them on fire.

‘Good job!’ she’d cry. ‘Good job, Mr Hartsfield!’

And if he managed to gargle something that bore a passing resemblance to thank you, she would look around at whoever happened to be near, smiling proudly. Look! My pet monkey can talk!

He could talk (more and better than they knew), and he could shamble ten yards up the Torture Highway. On his best days he could eat custard without spilling too much down his front. But he couldn’t dress himself, couldn’t tie his shoes, couldn’t wipe himself after taking a shit, couldn’t even use the remote control (so reminiscent of Thing One and Thing Two back in the good old days) to watch television. He could grasp it, but his motor control wasn’t even close to good enough for him to manipulate the small buttons. If he did manage to hit the power button, he usually ended up staring at nothing but a blank screen and the SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL message. This infuriated him – in the early days of 2012, everything infuriated him – but he was careful not to show it. Angry people were angry for a reason, and gorks weren’t supposed to have reasons for anything.

Sometimes lawyers from the District Attorney’s office dropped by. Babineau protested these visits, telling the lawyers they were setting him back and therefore working against their own long-term interests, but it did no good.

Sometimes cops came with the lawyers from the DA’s office, and once a cop came on his own. He was a fat cocksucker with a crewcut and a cheerful demeanor. Brady was in his chair, so the fat cocksucker sat on Brady’s bed. The fat cocksucker told Brady that his niece had been at the ’Round Here concert. ‘Just thirteen years old and crazy about that band,’ he said, chuckling. Still chuckling, he leaned forward over his big stomach and punched Brady in the balls.

‘A little something from my niece,’ the fat cocksucker said. ‘Did you feel it? Man, I hope so.’