End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(91)

‘He’ll pay you,’ Z-Boy said. ‘Not very much, but …’

‘How much?’

‘Fifty dollars a visit?’

‘Why?’

Z-Boy didn’t know, but in 2013, there was still a fair amount of Al Brooks behind his forehead, and that was the part that understood. ‘I think … because you were a part of his life. You know, when you and him used to go out to fix people’s computers. In the old days.’

Brady didn’t hate Dr Babineau with the same intensity that he hated K. William Hodges, but that didn’t mean Dr B. wasn’t on his shit list. Babineau had used him as a guinea pig, which was bad. He had lost interest in Brady when his experimental drug didn’t seem to be working, which was worse. Worst of all, the shots had resumed once Brady had regained consciousness, and who knew what they were doing? They could kill him, but as a man who had assiduously courted his own death, that wasn’t what kept him awake nights. What did was the possibility that the shots might interfere with his new abilities. Babineau pooh-poohed Brady’s supposed mind-over-matter powers in public, but he actually believed they might exist, even though Brady had been careful never to exhibit his talent to the doctor, despite Babineau’s repeated urgings. He believed any psychokinetic abilities were also a result of what he called Cerebellin.

The CAT scans and MRIs had also resumed. ‘You’re the Eighth Wonder of the World,’ Babineau told him after one of these – in the fall of 2013, this was. He was walking beside Brady as an orderly wheeled him back to Room 217. Babineau was wearing what Brady thought of as his gloaty face. ‘The current protocols have done more than halt the destruction of your brain cells; they have stimulated the growth of new ones. More robust ones. Do you have any idea how remarkable that is?’

You bet, asshole, Brady thought. So keep those scans to yourself. If the DA’s office found out, I’d be in trouble.

Babineau was patting Brady’s shoulder in a proprietary way Brady hated. Like he was patting his pet dog. ‘The human brain is made up of approximately one hundred billion nerve cells. Those in the Broca’s Area of yours were gravely injured, but they have recovered. In fact, they are creating neurons unlike any I’ve ever seen. One of these days you’re going to be famous not as a person who took lives, but as one responsible for saving them.’

If so, Brady thought, it’s a day you won’t be around to see.

Count on it, dickweed.

The creative side was never my forte, Freddi told Z-Boy. True enough, but it was always Brady’s, and as 2013 became 2014, he had plenty of time to think of ways the Fishin’ Hole demo screen might be juiced up and turned into what Freddi had called an eye-trap. Yet none of them seemed quite right.

They did not talk about the Zappit effect during her visits; mostly they reminisced (with Freddi necessarily doing most of the talking) about the old days on the Cyber Patrol. All the crazy people they’d met on their outcalls. And Anthony ‘Tones’ Frobisher, their asshole boss. Freddi went on about him constantly, turning things she should have said into things she had, and right to his face! Freddi’s visits were monotonous but comforting. They balanced his desperate nights, when he felt he might spend the rest of his life in Room 217, at the mercy of Dr Babineau and his ‘vitamin shots.’

I have to stop him, Brady thought. I have to control him.

To do that, the amped-up version of the demo screen had to be just right. If he flubbed his first chance to get into Babineau’s mind, there might not be another.

The TV now played at least four hours a day in Room 217. This was per an edict from Babineau, who told Head Nurse Helmington that he was ‘exposing Mr Hartsfield to external stimuli.’

Mr Hartsfield didn’t mind News at Noon (there was always an exciting explosion or a mass tragedy somewhere in the world), but the rest of the stuff – cooking shows, talk shows, soap operas, bogus medicine men – was drivel. Yet one day, while sitting in his chair by the window and watching Prize Surprise (staring in that direction, at least), he had a revelation. The contestant who had survived to the Bonus Round was given a chance to win a trip to Aruba on a private jet. She was shown an oversized computer screen where big colored dots were shuffling around. Her job was to touch five red ones, which would turn into numbers. If the numbers she touched added up to a total within a five-digit range of 100, she’d win.

Brady watched her wide eyes moving from side to side as she studied the screen, and knew he’d found what he was looking for. The pink fish, he thought. They’re the ones that move the fastest, and besides, red is an angry color. Pink is … what? What was the word? It came, and he smiled. It was the radiant one that made him look nineteen again.

Pink was soothing.

Sometimes when Freddi visited, Z-Boy left his library cart in the hall and joined them. On one of these occasions, during the summer of 2014, he handed Freddi an electronic recipe. It had been written on the library computer, and during one of the increasingly rare occasions when Brady did not just give instructions but slid into the driver’s seat and took over completely. He had to, because this had to be just right. There was no room for error.

Freddi scanned it, got interested, and read it more closely. ‘Say,’ she said, ‘this is pretty clever. And adding subliminal messaging is cool. Nasty, but cool. Did the mysterious Dr Z think this up?’