End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(94)

Brady was on high alert now, sitting as close to bolt upright in his chair as he could manage, eyes shining. Could he legitimately claim those two? He believed he could, which meant his City Center score had just gone up from eight to ten. Still shy of a dozen, but hey! Not bad.

Correspondent Frank Denton, also wearing his best Oh Shit expression, went blah-de-blah for awhile, and then the picture switched to the Countryman chick’s pore ole daddy, who read the suicide note the couple had left. He blubbered through most of it, but Brady caught the gist. They’d had a beautiful vision of the afterlife, where their wounds would be healed, the burden of their pain would be lifted, and they could be married in perfect health by their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

‘Boy, that’s sad,’ the male anchor opined at the end of the story. ‘So sad.’

‘It sure is, Ken,’ Betty said. Then the screen behind them flashed a picture showing a bunch of idiots in wedding clothes standing in a swimming pool, and her sad face clicked off and the happy one came back on. ‘But this should cheer you up – twenty couples decided to get married in a swimming pool in Cleveland, where it’s only twenty degrees!’

‘I hope they had a hunka-hunka burning love,’ Ken said, showing his perfectly capped teeth in a grin. ‘Brrrr! Here’s Patty Newfield with the details.’

How many more could I get? Brady wondered. He was on fire. I’ve got nine augmented Zappits, plus the two my drones have and the one in my drawer. Who says I have to be done with those job-hunting assholes?

Who says I can’t run up the score?

Brady continued to keep track of Zappit, Inc. during his fallow period, sending Z-Boy to check the Google alert once or twice weekly. The chatter about the hypnotic effect of the Fishin’ Hole screen (and the lesser effect of the Whistling Birds demo) died down and was replaced by speculation about just when the company would go under – it was no longer a matter of if. When Sunrise Solutions bought Zappit out, a blogger who called himself Electric Whirlwind wrote, ‘Wow! This is like a couple of cancer patients with six weeks to live deciding to elope.’

Babineau’s shadow personality was now well established, and it was Dr Z who began to research the survivors of the City Center Massacre on Brady’s behalf, making a list of the ones most badly injured, and thus most vulnerable to suicidal thoughts. A couple of them, like Daniel Starr and Judith Loma, were still wheelchair-bound. Loma might get out of hers; Starr, never. Then there was Martine Stover, paralyzed from the neck down and living with her mother over in Ridgedale.

I’d be doing them a favor, Brady thought. Really I would.

He decided Stover’s mommy would make a good start. His first idea was to have Z-Boy mail her a Zappit (‘A Free Gift for You!’), but how could he be sure she wouldn’t just throw it away? He only had nine, and didn’t want to risk wasting one. Juicing them up had cost him (well, Babineau) quite a lot of money. It might be better to send Babineau on a personal mission. In one of his tailored suits, set off by a sober dark tie, he looked a lot more trustworthy than Z-Boy in his rumpled green Dickies, and he was the sort of older guy that chicks like Stover’s mother had a tendency to dig. All Brady had to do was work up a believable story. Something about test marketing, maybe? Possibly a book club? A prize competition?

He was still sifting scenarios – there was no hurry – when his Google alert announced an expected death: Sunrise Solutions had gone bye-bye. This was in early April. A trustee had been appointed to sell off the assets, and a list of so-called ‘real goods’ would soon appear in the usual sell-sites. For those who couldn’t wait, a list of all Sunrise Solutions’ unsaleable crapola could be found in the bankruptcy filing. Brady thought this was interesting, but not interesting enough to have Dr Z look up the list of assets. There were probably crates of Zappits among them, but he had nine of his own, and surely that would be enough to play with.

A month later he changed his mind about that.

One of News at Noon’s most popular features was called ‘Just A Word From Jack.’ Jack O’Malley was a fat old dinosaur who had probably started in the biz when TV was still black-and-white, and he bumbled on for five minutes or so at the end of every newscast about whatever was on what remained of his mind. He wore huge black-rimmed glasses, and his jowls quivered like Jell-O when he talked. Ordinarily Brady found him quite entertaining, a bit of comic relief, but there was nothing amusing about that day’s Word From Jack. It opened whole new vistas.

‘The families of Krista Countryman and Keith Frias have been flooded with condolences as a result of a story this station ran not long ago,’ Jack said in his grouchy Andy Rooney voice. ‘Their decision to terminate their lives when they could no longer live with unending and unmitigated pain has reignited the debate on the ethics of suicide. It also reminded us – unfortunately – of the coward who caused that unending, unmitigated pain, a monster named Brady Wilson Hartsfield.’

That’s me, Brady thought happily. When they even give your middle name, you know you’re an authentic boogeyman.

‘If there is a life after this one,’ Jack said (out-of-control Andy Rooney brows drawing together, jowls flapping), ‘Brady Wilson Hartsfield will pay the full price for his crimes when he gets there. In the meantime, let us consider the silver lining in this dark cloud of woe, because there really is one.