End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(89)

Pete sounds tired.

‘We had a blow-up. Me and Izzy. Big one. I tried to tell her what you told me when we started working together – how the case is the boss, and you go where it leads you. No ducking, no handing it off, just pick it up and follow the red thread all the way home. She stood there listening with her arms folded, nodding her head every now and then. I actually thought I was getting through to her. Then you know what she asked me? If I knew the last time there was a woman in the top echelon of the city police. I said I didn’t, and she said that was because the answer was never. She said the first one was going to be her. Man, I thought I knew her.’ Pete utters what may be the most humorless laugh Hodges has ever heard. ‘I thought she was police.’

Hodges will commiserate later, if he gets a chance. Right now there’s no time. He asks about the computer gear.

‘We found nothing except an iPad with a dead battery,’ Pete says. ‘Everly, the housekeeper, says he had a laptop in his study, almost brand new, but it’s gone.’

‘Like Babineau,’ Hodges says. ‘Maybe it’s with him.’

‘Maybe. Remember, if I can help, Kermit—’

‘I’ll call, believe me.’

Right now he’ll take all the help he can get.





21


The result with the girl named Ellen is infuriating – like the Robinson bitch all over again – but at last Brady calms down. It worked, that’s what he needs to focus on. The shortness of the drop combined with the snowbank was just bad luck. There will be plenty of others. He has a lot of work ahead of him, a lot of matches to light, but once the fire is burning, he can sit back and watch.

It will burn until it burns itself out.

He starts Z-Boy’s car and pulls out of the rest area. As he merges with the scant traffic headed north on 1-47, the first flakes spin out of the white sky and hit the Malibu’s windshield. Brady drives faster. Z-Boy’s piece of crap isn’t equipped for a snowstorm, and once he leaves the turnpike, the roads will grow progressively worse. He needs to beat the weather.

Oh, I’ll beat it, all right, Brady thinks, and grins as a wonderful idea hits him. Maybe Ellen is paralyzed from the neck down, a head on a stick, like the Stover bitch. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, a pleasant daydream with which to while away the miles.

He turns on the radio, finds some Judas Priest, and lets it blast. Like Hodges, he enjoys the hard stuff.





THE SUICIDE PRINCE


Brady won many victories in Room 217, but necessarily had to keep them to himself. Coming back from the living death of coma; discovering that he could – because of the drug Babineau had administered, or because of some fundamental alteration in his brainwaves, or perhaps due to a combination of the two – move small objects simply by thinking about them; inhabiting Library Al’s brain and creating inside him a secondary personality, Z-Boy. And mustn’t forget getting back at the fat cop who hit him in the balls when he couldn’t defend himself. Yet the best, the absolute best, was nudging Sadie MacDonald into committing suicide. That was power.

He wanted to do it again.

The question that desire raised was a simple one: who next? It would be easy to make Al Brooks jump from a bridge overpass or swallow drain cleaner, but Z-Boy would go with him, and without Z-Boy, Brady would be stuck in Room 217, which was really nothing more than a prison cell with a parking garage view. No, he needed Brooks just where he was. And as he was.

More important was the question of what to do about the bastard responsible for putting him here. Ursula Haber, the Nazi who ran the PT department, said rehab patients needed GTG: goals to grow. Well, he was growing, all right, and revenge against Hodges was a worthy goal, but how to get it? Inducing Hodges to commit suicide wasn’t the answer, even if there was a way to try it. He’d played the suicide game already with Hodges. And lost.

When Freddi Linklatter appeared with the picture of him and his mother, Brady was still over a year and a half from realizing how he could finish his business with Hodges, but seeing Freddi gave him a badly needed jump-start. He would need to be careful, though. Very careful.

A step at a time, he told himself as he lay awake in the small hours of the night. Just one step at a time. I have great obstacles, but I also have extraordinary weapons.

Step one was having Al Brooks remove the remaining Zappits from the hospital library. He took them to his brother’s house, where he lived in an apartment over the garage. That was easy, because no one wanted them, anyway. Brady thought of them as ammo. Eventually he would find a gun that could use it.

Brooks took the Zappits on his own, although operating under commands – thoughtfish – that Brady implanted in the shallow but useful Z-Boy persona. He had become wary of entering Brooks completely and taking him over, because it burned through the old fellow’s brains too fast. He had to ration those times of total immersion, and use them wisely. It was a shame, he enjoyed his vacations outside the hospital, but people were starting to notice that Library Al had become a trifle foggy upstairs. If he became too foggy, he would be forced out of his volunteer job. Worse, Hodges might notice. That would not be good. Let the old Det-Ret vacuum up all the rumors about telekinesis he wanted, Brady was fine with that, but he didn’t want Hodges to catch even a whiff of what was really going on.

Despite the risk of mental depletion, Brady took complete command of Brooks in the spring of 2013, because he needed the library computer. Looking at it could be done without total immersion, but using it was another thing. And it was a short visit. All he wanted to do was set up a Google alert, using the keywords Zappit and Fishin’ Hole.