by Stephen King
"All right," Hodges says. "Thanks for the update."
"It's your final update, Kermit. I have a partner I've worked with quite successfully since you pulled the pin, and I'd like her to be at my retirement party instead of sitting at her desk and sulking over how I preferred you to her right to the bitter end."
Hodges could pursue this, but the hospital is only two stops away now. Also, he discovers, he wants to separate himself from Pete and Izzy and go his own way on this thing. Pete plods, and Izzy actually drags her feet. Hodges wants to run with it, bad pancreas and all.
"I hear you," he says. "Again, thanks."
"Case closed?"
"Finito."
His eyes flick up and to the left.
6
Nineteen blocks from where Hodges is returning his iPhone to his overcoat pocket, there is another world. Not a very nice one. Jerome Robinson's sister is there, and she is in trouble.
Pretty and demure in her Chapel Ridge school uniform (gray wool coat, gray skirt, white kneesocks, red scarf wrapped around her neck), Barbara walks down Martin Luther King Avenue with a yellow Zappit Commander in her gloved hands. On it the Fishin' Hole fish dart and swim, although they are almost invisible in the cold bright light of midday.
MLK is one of two main thoroughfares in the part of the city known as Lowtown, and although the population is predominantly black and Barbara is herself black (make that cafe au lait), she has never been here before, and that single fact makes her feel stupid and worthless. These are her people, their collective ancestors might have toted barges and lifted bales on the same plantation back in the day, for all she knows, and yet she has never been here one single time. She has been warned away not only by her parents but by her brother.
"Lowtown's where they drink the beer and then eat the bottle it came in," he told her once. "No place for a girl like you."
A girl like me, she thinks. A nice upper-middle-class girl like me, who goes to a nice private school and has nice white girlfriends and plenty of nice preppy clothes and an allowance. Why, I even have a bank card! I can withdraw sixty dollars from an ATM anytime I want! Amazeballs!
She walks like a girl in a dream, and it's a little like a dream because it's all so strange and it's less than two miles from home, which happens to be a cozy Cape Cod with an attached two-car garage, mortgage all paid off. She walks past check cashing joints and pawnshops filled with guitars and radios and gleaming pearl-handled straight razors. She walks past bars that smell of beer even with the doors closed against the January cold. She walks past hole-in-the-wall restaurants that smell of grease. Some sell pizza by the slice, some sell Chinese. In the window of one is a propped sign reading HUSH PUPPYS AND COLLARD GREENS LIKE YOUR MOMMA USED TO MAKE.
Not my momma, Barbara thinks. I don't even know what a collard green is. Spinach? Cabbage?
On the corners--every corner, it seems--boys in long shorts and loose jeans are hanging out, sometimes standing close to rusty firebarrels to keep warm, sometimes playing hacky sack, sometimes just jiving in their gigantic sneakers, their jackets hung open in spite of the cold. They shout Yo to their homies and hail passing cars and when one stops they hand small glassine envelopes through the open window. She walks block after block of MLK (nine, ten, maybe a dozen, she's lost count) and each corner is like a drive-thru for drugs instead of for hamburgers or tacos.
She passes shivering women dressed in hotpants, short fake fur jackets, and shiny boots; on their heads they wear amazing wigs of many colors. She passes empty buildings with boarded-up windows. She passes a car that has been stripped to the axles and covered with gang tags. She passes a woman with a dirty bandage over one eye. The woman is dragging a screeching toddler by the arm. She passes a man sitting on a blanket who drinks from a bottle of wine and wiggles his gray tongue at her. It's poor and it's desperate and it's been right here all along and she never did anything about it. Never did anything? Never even thought about it. What she did was her homework. What she did was talk on the phone and text with her BFFs at night. What she did was update her Facebook status and worry about her complexion. She is your basic teen parasite, dining in nice restaurants with her mother and father while her brothers and sisters, right here all along, less than two miles from her nice suburban home, drink wine and take drugs to blot out their terrible lives. She is ashamed of her hair, hanging smoothly to her shoulders. She is ashamed of her clean white kneesocks. She is ashamed of her skin color because it's the same as theirs.
"Hey, blackish!" It's a yell from the other side of the street. "What you doin down here? You got no bi'ness down here!"
Blackish.
It's the name of a TV show, they watch it at home and laugh, but it's also what she is. Not black but blackish. Living a white life in a white neighborhood. She can do that because her parents make lots of money and own a home on a block where people are so screamingly non-prejudiced that they cringe if they hear one of their kids call another one dumbhead. She can live that wonderful white life because she is a threat to no one, she no rock-a da boat. She just goes her way, chattering with her friends about boys and music and boys and clothes and boys and the TV programs they all like and which girl they saw walking with which boy at the Birch Hill Mall.
She is blackish, a word that means the same as useless, and she doesn't deserve to live.
"Maybe you should just end it. Let that be your statement."
The idea is a voice, and it comes to her with a kind of revelatory logic. Emily Dickinson said her poem was her letter to the world that never wrote to her, they read that in school, but Barbara herself has never written a letter at all. Plenty of stupid essays and book reports and emails, but nothing that really matters.
"Maybe it's time that you did."
Not her voice, but the voice of a friend.
She stops outside a shop where fortunes are read and the Tarot is told. In its dirty window she thinks she sees the reflection of someone standing beside her, a white man with a smiling, boyish face and a tumble of blond hair on his forehead. She glances around, but there's no one there. It was just her imagination. She looks back down at the screen of the game console. In the shade of the fortune-telling shop's awning, the swimming fish are bright and clear again. Back and forth they go, every now and then obliterated by a bright blue flash. Barbara looks back the way she came and sees a gleaming black truck rolling toward her along the boulevard, moving fast and weaving from lane to lane. It's the kind with oversized tires, the kind the boys at school call a Bigfoot or a Gangsta Large.
"If you're going to do it, you better get to it."
It's as if someone really is standing beside her. Someone who understands. And the voice is right. Barbara has never considered suicide before, but at this moment the idea seems perfectly rational.
"You don't even need to leave a note," her friend says. She can see his reflection in the window again. Ghostly. "The fact that you did it down here will be your letter to the world."
True.
"You know too much about yourself now to go on living," her friend points out as she returns her gaze to the swimming fish. "You know too much, and all of it is bad." Then it hastens to add, "Which isn't to say you're a horrible person."
She thinks, No, not horrible, just useless.
Blackish.
The truck is coming. The Gangsta Large. As Jerome Robinson's sister steps toward the curb, ready to meet it, her face lights in an eager smile.
7
Dr. Felix Babineau is wearing a thousand-dollar suit beneath the white coat that goes flying out behind him as he strides down the hallway of the Bucket, but he now needs a shave worse than ever and his usually elegant white hair is in disarray. He ignores a cluster of nurses who are standing by the duty desk and talking in low, agitated tones.
Nurse Wilmer approaches him. "Dr. Babineau, have you heard--"
He doesn't even look at her, and Norma has to sidestep quickly to keep from being bowled over. She looks after him in
surprise.
Babineau takes the red DO NOT DISTURB card he always keeps in the pocket of his exam coat, hangs it on the doorknob of Room 217, and goes in. Brady Hartsfield does not look up. All of his attention is fixed on the game console in his lap, where the fish swim back and forth. There is no music; he has muted the sound.
Often when he enters this room, Felix Babineau disappears and Dr. Z takes his place. Not today. Dr. Z is just another version of Brady, after all--a projection--and today Brady is too busy to project.
His memories of trying to blow up the Mingo Auditorium during the 'Round Here concert are still jumbled, but one thing has been clear since he woke up: the face of the last person he saw before the lights went out. It was Barbara Robinson, the sister of Hodges's nigger lawnboy. She was sitting almost directly across the aisle from Brady. Now she's here, swimming with the fish they share on their two screens. Brady got Scapelli, the sadistic cunt who twisted his nipple. Now he will take care of the Robinson bitch. Her death will hurt her big brother, but that's not the most important thing. It will put a dagger in the old detective's heart. That's the most important thing.
The most delicious thing.
He comforts her, tells her she's not a horrible person. It helps to get her moving. Something is coming down MLK, he can't be sure what it is because a down-deep part of her is still fighting him, but it's big. Big enough to do the job.
"Brady, listen to me. Z-Boy called." Z-Boy's actual name is Brooks, but Brady refuses to call him that anymore. "He's been watching, as you instructed. That cop . . . ex-cop, whatever he is--"
"Shut up." Not raising his head, his hair tumbled across his brow. In the strong sunlight he looks closer to twenty than thirty.
Babineau, who is used to being heard and who still has not entirely grasped his new subordinate status, pays no attention. "Hodges was on Hilltop Court yesterday, first at the Ellerton house and then snooping around the one across the street where--"
"I said shut up!"
"Brooks saw him get on a Number 5 bus, which means he's probably coming here! And if he's coming here, he knows!"
Brady looks at him for just a moment, his eyes blazing, then returns his attention to the screen. If he slips now, allows this educated idiot to divert his concentration--
But he won't allow it. He wants to hurt Hodges, he wants to hurt the nigger lawnboy, he owes them, and this is the way to do it. Nor is it just a matter of revenge. She's the first test subject who was at the concert, and she's not like the others, who were easier to control. But he is controlling her, all he needs is ten more seconds, and now he sees what's coming for her. It's a truck. A big black one.
Hey, honey, Brady Hartsfield thinks. Your ride is here.
8
Barbara stands on the curb, watching the truck approach, timing it, but just as she flexes her knees, hands grab her from behind.
"Hey, girl, what's up?"
She struggles, but the grip on her shoulders is strong and the truck passes by in a blare of Ghostface Killah. She whirls around, pulling free, and faces a skinny boy about her own age, wearing a Todhunter High letter jacket. He's tall, maybe six and a half feet, so she has to look up. He has a tight cap of brown curls and a goatee. Around his neck is a thin gold chain. He's smiling. His eyes are green and full of fun.
"You good-lookin, that's a fact as well as a compliment, but not from around here, correct? Not dressed like that, and hey, didn't your mom ever tell you not to jaywalk the block?"
"Leave me alone!" She's not scared; she's furious.
He laughs. "And tough! I like a tough girl. Want a slice and a Coke?"
"I don't want anything from you!"
Her friend has left, probably disgusted with her. It's not my fault, she thinks. It's this boy's fault. This lout.
Lout! A blackish word if ever there was one. She feels her face heat up and drops her gaze to the fish on the Zappit screen. They will comfort her, they always do. To think she almost threw the game console away after that man gave it to her! Before she found the fish! The fish always take her away, and sometimes they bring her friend. But she only gets a momentary look before the console vanishes. Poof! Gone! The lout has got it in his long-fingered hands and is staring down at the screen, fascinated.
"Whoa, this is old-school!"
"It's mine!" Barbara shouts. "Give it back!"
Across the street a woman laughs and yells in a whiskey voice, "Tell im, sister! Bring down that high neck!"
Barbara grabs for the Zappit. Tall Boy holds it over his head, smiling at her.
"Give it back, I said! Stop being a prick!"
More people are watching now, and Tall Boy plays to the audience. He jinks left, then stutter-steps to the right, probably a move he uses all the time on the basketball court, never losing that indulgent smile. His green eyes sparkle and dance. Every girl at Todhunter is probably in love with those eyes, and Barbara is no longer thinking about suicide, or being blackish, or what a socially unconscious bag of waste she is. Right now she's only mad, and him being cute makes her madder. She plays varsity soccer at Chapel Ridge and now she hoicks her best penalty kick into Tall Boy's shin.
He yells in pain (but it's somehow amused pain, which infuriates her even more, because that was a really hard kick), and bends over to grab his ouchy. It brings him down to her level, and Barbara snatches the precious rectangle of yellow plastic. She wheels, skirt flaring, and runs into the street.
"Honey look out!" the whiskey-voiced woman screams.
Barbara hears a shriek of brakes and smells hot rubber. She looks to her left and sees a panel truck bearing down on her, the front end heeling to the left as the driver stamps on the brake. Behind the dirty windshield, his face is all dismayed eyes and open mouth. She throws up her hands, dropping the Zappit. All at once the last thing in the world Barbara Robinson wants is to die, but here she is, in the street after all, and it's too late.
She thinks, My ride is here.
9
Brady shuts down the Zappit and looks up at Babineau with a wide smile. "Got her," he says. His words are clear, not the slightest bit mushy. "Let's see how Hodges and the Harvard jungle bunny like that."
Babineau has a good idea who she is, and he supposes he should care, but he doesn't. What he cares about is his own skin. How did he ever allow Brady to pull him into this? When did he stop having a choice?
"It's Hodges I'm here about. I'm quite sure he's on his way right now. To see you."
"Hodges has been here many times," Brady says, although it's true the old Det.-Ret. hasn't been around for awhile. "He never gets past the catatonic act."
"He's started putting things together. He's not stupid, you said as much yourself. Did he know Z-Boy when he was just Brooks? He must have seen him around here when he came to visit you."
"No idea." Brady is wrung out, sated. What he really wants now is to savor the death of the Robinson girl, then take a nap. There is a lot to be done, great things are afoot, but at the moment he needs rest.
"He can't see you like this," Babineau says. "Your skin is flushed and you're covered with sweat. You look like someone who just ran the City Marathon."
"Then keep him out. You can do that. You're the doctor and he's just another half-bald buzzard on Social Security. These days he doesn't even have the legal authority to ticket a car at an expired parking meter." Brady's wondering how the nigger lawnboy will take the news. Jerome. Will he cry? Will he sink to his knees? Will he rend his garments and beat his breast?
Will he blame Hodges? Unlikely, but that would be best. That would be wonderful.
"All right," Babineau says. "Yes, you're right, I can do that." He's talking to himself as much as to the man who was supposed to be his guinea pig. That turned out to be quite the joke, didn't it? "For now, at least. But he must still have friends on the police, you know. Probably lots of them."
"I'm not afraid of them, and I'm not afraid of him. I just don't want to see him. At least, not now." Brady smiles.
"After he finds out about the girl. Then I'll want to see him. Now get out of here."
Babineau, who is at last beginning to understand who is the boss, leaves Brady's room. As always, it's a relief to do that as himself. Because every time he comes back to Babineau after being Dr. Z, there's a little less Babineau to come back to.
10
Tanya Robinson calls her daughter's cell for the fourth time in the last twenty minutes and for the fourth time gets nothing but Barbara's chirpy voicemail.
"Disregard my other messages," Tanya says after the beep. "I'm still mad, but mostly what I am right now is worried sick. Call me. I need to know you're okay."
She drops her phone on her desk and begins pacing the small confines of her office. She debates calling her husband and decides not to. Not yet. He's apt to go nuclear at the thought of Barbara skipping school, and he'll assume that's what she's doing. Tanya at first made that assumption herself when Mrs. Rossi, the Chapel Ridge attendance officer, called to ask if Barbara was home sick. Barbara has never played hooky before, but there's always a first time for bad behavior, especially with teenagers. Only she never would have skipped alone, and after further consultation with Mrs. Rossi, Tanya has confirmed that all of Barb's close friends are in school today.
Since then her mind has turned to darker thoughts, and one image keeps haunting her: the sign over the Crosstown Expressway the police use for Amber Alerts. She keeps seeing BARBARA ROBINSON on that sign, flashing on and off like some hellish movie marquee.
Her phone chimes the first few notes of "Ode to Joy" and she races to it, thinking Thank God, oh thank God, I'll ground her for the rest of the win--
Only it's not her daughter's smiling face in the window. It's an ID: CITY POLICE DEPT. MAIN BRANCH. Terror rolls through her stomach and her bowels loosen. For a moment she can't even take the call, because her thumb won't move. At last she manages to press the green ACCEPT button and silence the music. Everything in her office, especially the family photo on her desk, is too bright. The phone seems to float up to her ear.
