End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(69)

‘Final payment, as promised.’ The words come from a great distance.

Blackness swallows the world. Freddi falls into it and is gone.





6


Brady stands perfectly still, watching the blood seep from beneath her. He’s listening for someone to pound on her door, wanting to know if everything is all right. He doesn’t expect that will happen, but better safe than sorry.

After ninety seconds or so, he puts the gun back in his overcoat pocket, next to his Zappit. He can’t resist one more look into the computer room before leaving. The signal repeater continues its endless, automated search. He has, against all odds, completed an amazing journey. What the final results will be is impossible to predict, but that there will be some result he is certain. And it will eat into the old Det-Ret like acid. Revenge really is best when eaten cold.

He has the elevator to himself going down. The lobby is similarly empty. He walks around the corner, turning up the collar of Babineau’s expensive overcoat against the wind, and tweets the locks of Babineau’s Beemer. He gets in and starts it up, but only for the heater. Something needs doing before he moves on to his next destination. He doesn’t really want to do it, because, whatever his failings as a human being, Babineau has a gorgeously intelligent mind, and a great deal of it is still intact. Destroying that mind is too much like those dumb and superstitious ISIS fucks hammering irreplaceable treasures of art and culture to rubble. Yet it must be done. No risks can be allowed, because the body is also a treasure. Yes, Babineau has slightly high blood pressure and his hearing has gone downhill in the last few years, but tennis and twice-weekly trips to the hospital gym have kept his muscles in fairly good shape. His heart ticks along at seventy beats a minute, with no misses. He’s not suffering from sciatica, gout, cataracts, or any of the other outrages that affect many men at his age.

Besides, the good doctor is what he’s got, at least for now.

With that in mind, Brady turns inward and finds what remains of Felix Babineau’s core consciousness – the brain within the brain. It has been scarred and ravaged and diminished by Brady’s repeated occupancies, but it is still there, still Babineau, still capable (theoretically at least) of taking back control. It is, however, defenseless, like some armored creature stripped of its shell. It’s not exactly flesh; Babineau’s core self is more like densely packed wires made of light.

Not without regret, Brady seizes them with his phantom hand and tears them apart.





7


Hodges spends the evening slowly eating his yogurt and watching the Weather Channel. The winter storm, ridiculously dubbed Eugenie by the Weather Channel wonks, is still coming and is expected to hit the city sometime late tomorrow.

‘Hard to be more exact as of now,’ the balding, bespectacled wonk says to the knockout blond wonk in the red dress. ‘This one gives new meaning to the term stop-and-go traffic.’

The knockout wonk laughs as if her partner in meteorology has said something outrageously witty, and Hodges uses the remote to turn them off.

The zapper, he thinks, looking at it. That’s what everyone calls these things. Quite the invention, when you stop to think of it. You can access hundreds of different channels by remote control. Never even have to get up. As if you’re inside the television instead of in your chair. Or in both places at the same time. Sort of a miracle, really.

As he goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth, his cell phone buzzes. He looks at the screen and has to laugh, even though it hurts to do it. Now that he’s in the privacy of his own home, with nobody to be bothered by the home run text alert, his old partner calls instead.

‘Hey, Pete, nice to know you still remember my number.’

Pete has no time for banter. ‘I’m going to tell you something, Kermit, and if you decide to run with it, I’m like Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. Remember him?’

‘Sure.’ What Hodges feels in his gut right now isn’t a pain-cramp, but one of excitement. Weird how similar they are. ‘I know nothing.’

‘Right. It has to be that way, because as far as this department is concerned, the murder of Martine Stover and the suicide of her mother is officially a closed case. We are certainly not going to reopen it because of a coincidence, and that’s right from the top. Are we clear on that?’

‘As glass,’ Hodges says. ‘What’s the coincidence?’

‘The head nurse in the Kiner Brain Injury Clinic committed suicide last night. Ruth Scapelli.’

‘I heard,’ Hodges says.

‘While on one of your pilgrimages to visit the delightful Mr Hartsfield, I presume.’

‘Yeah.’ No need to tell Pete that he never got in to see the delightful Mr Hartsfield.

‘Scapelli had one of those game gadgets. A Zappit. She apparently threw it in the trash before she bled out. One of the forensics guys found it.’

‘Huh.’ Hodges goes back into the living room and sits down, wincing when his body folds in the middle. ‘And that’s your idea of a coincidence?’

‘Not necessarily mine,’ Pete says heavily.

‘But?’

‘But I just want to retire in peace, goddammit! If there’s a ball to carry on this one, Izzy can carry it.’

‘But Izzy don’t want to carry no steenkin ball.’