End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(85)

And if it does?

Teen suicides all over the state, maybe all over the Midwest. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. How would you like that, ex-Detective Hodges? Would that improve your retirement, you meddlesome old fuck?

He swaps Babineau’s laptop for Z-Boy’s game console. It’s fitting to use this one. He thinks of it as Zappit Zero, because it’s the first one he ever saw, on the day Al Brooks brought it into his room, thinking Brady might like it. Which he did. Oh yes, very much.

The extra program, with the number-fish and the subliminal messages, hasn’t been added to this one, because Brady doesn’t need it. Those things are strictly for the targets. He watches the fish swim back and forth, using them to settle and focus, then closes his eyes. At first there’s only darkness, but after a few moments red lights begin to appear – more than fifty now. They are like dots on a computer map, except they don’t remain stationary. They swim back and forth, left to right, up and down, crisscrossing. He settles on one at random, his eyes rolling beneath his closed lids as he follows its progress. It begins to slow, and slow, and slow. It stills, then starts growing bigger. It opens like a flower.

He’s in a bedroom. There’s a girl, staring fixedly down at the fish on her own Zappit, which she received free from badconcert.com. She’s in her bed because she didn’t go to school today. Maybe she said she was sick.

‘What’s your name?’ Brady asks.

Sometimes they just hear a voice coming from the game console, but the ones who are most susceptible actually see him, like some kind of avatar in a video game. This girl is one of the latter, an auspicious beginning. But they always respond better to their names, so he’ll keep saying it. She looks without surprise at the young man sitting beside her on the bed. Her face is pale. Her eyes are dazed.

‘I’m Ellen,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for the right numbers.’

Of course you are, he thinks, and slips into her. She’s forty miles south of him, but once the demo screen has opened them, distance doesn’t matter. He could control her, turn her into one of his drones, but he doesn’t want to do that any more than he wanted to slip into Mrs Trelawney’s house some dark night and cut her throat. Murder isn’t control; murder is just murder.

Suicide is control.

‘Are you happy, Ellen?’

‘I used to be,’ she says. ‘I could be again, if I find the right numbers.’

Brady gives her a smile that’s both sad and charming. ‘Yes, but the numbers are like life,’ he says. ‘Nothing adds up, Ellen. Isn’t that true?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Tell me something, Ellen – what are you worried about?’ He could find it himself, but it will be better if she tells him. He knows there’s something, because everyone worries, and teenagers worry most of all.

‘Right now? The SAT.’

Ah-ha, he thinks, the infamous Scholastic Assessment Test, where the Department of Academic Husbandry separates the sheep from the goats.

‘I’m so bad at math,’ she says. ‘I reek.’

‘Bad at the numbers,’ he says, nodding sympathetically.

‘If I don’t score at least six-fifty, I won’t get into a good school.’

‘And you’ll be lucky to score four hundred,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that the truth, Ellen?’

‘Yes.’ Tears well in her eyes and begin to roll down her cheeks.

‘And then you’ll do badly on the English, too,’ Brady says. He’s opening her up, and this is the best part. It’s like reaching into an animal that’s stunned but still alive, and digging its guts out. ‘You’ll freeze up.’

‘I’ll probably freeze up,’ Ellen says. She’s sobbing audibly now. Brady checks her short-term memory and finds that her parents have gone to work and her little brother is at school. So crying is all right. Let the bitch make all the noise she wants.

‘Not probably. You will freeze up, Ellen. Because you can’t handle the pressure.’

She sobs.

‘Say it, Ellen.’

‘I can’t handle the pressure. I’ll freeze, and if I don’t get into a good school, my dad will be disappointed and my mother will be mad.’

‘What if you can’t get into any school? What if the only job you can get is cleaning houses or folding clothes in a laundromat?’

‘My mother will hate me!’

‘She hates you already, doesn’t she, Ellen?’

‘I don’t … I don’t think …’

‘Yes she does, she hates you. Say it, Ellen. Say “My mother hates me.”’

‘My mother hates me. Oh God, I’m so scared and my life is so awful!’

This is the great gift bestowed by a combination of Zappit-induced hypnosis and Brady’s own ability to invade minds once they are in that open and suggestible state. Ordinary fears, the ones kids like this live with as a kind of unpleasant background noise, can be turned into ravening monsters. Small balloons of paranoia can be inflated until they are as big as floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

‘You could stop being scared,’ Brady says. ‘And you could make your mother very, very sorry.’

Ellen smiles through her tears.

‘You could leave all this behind.’