by Stephen King
Brady knew this.
He knew because he was inside her.
He went a little deeper and realized he could see her thoughts. It was amazing. He could actually watch them flashing back and forth, hither and thither, high and low, sometimes crossing paths in a dark green medium that was—perhaps, he’d have to think about this, and very carefully to be sure—her core consciousness. Her basic Sadie-ness. He tried to go deeper, to identify some of the thoughtfish, although Christ, they went by so fast! Still …
Something about the muffins she had at home in her apartment.
Something about a cat she had seen in a pet shop window: black with a cunning white bib.
Something about … rocks? Was it rocks?
Something about her father, and that fish was red, the color of anger. Or shame. Or both.
As she turned from the window and headed for the closet, Brady felt a moment of tumbling vertigo. It passed, and he was back inside himself, looking out through his own eyes. She had ejected him without even knowing he was there.
When she lifted him to put two foam pillows with freshly laundered cases behind his head, Brady let his eyes remain in their fixed and half-lidded stare. He did not speak, after all.
He really did need to think about this.
• • •
During the next four days, Brady tried several times to get inside the heads of those who visited his room. He had a degree of success only once, with a young orderly who came in to mop the floor. The kid wasn’t a Mongolian idiot (his mother’s term for those with Down syndrome), but he wasn’t a Mensa candidate, either. He was looking down at the wet stripes his mop left on the linoleum, watching the brightness of each one fade, and that opened him up just enough. Brady’s visit was brief and uninteresting. The kid was wondering if they would have tacos in the caff that evening—big deal.
Then the vertigo, the sense of tumbling. The kid had spit him out like a watermelon seed, never once slowing the pendulum swings of his mop.
With the others who poked into his room from time to time, he had no success at all, and this failure was a lot more frustrating than being unable to scratch his face when it itched. Brady had taken an inventory of himself, and what he had found was dismaying. His constantly aching head sat on top of a skeletal body. He could move, he wasn’t paralyzed, but his muscles had atrophied and even sliding a leg two or three inches one way or another took a herculean effort. Being inside Nurse MacDonald, on the other hand, had been like riding on a magic carpet.
But he’d only gotten in because MacDonald had some form of epilepsy. Not much, just enough to briefly open a door. Others seemed to have natural defenses. He hadn’t even managed to stay inside the orderly for more than a few seconds, and if that ass-munch had been a dwarf, he would have been named Dopey.
Which made him remember a joke. Stranger in New York City asks a beatnik, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Beatnik replies, “Practice, man, practice.”
That’s what I need to do, Brady thought. Practice and get stronger. Because Kermit William Hodges is out there someplace, and the old Det.-Ret. thinks he won. I can’t allow that. I won’t allow that.
And so on that rain-soaked evening in mid-November of 2011, Brady opened his eyes, said his head hurt, and asked for his mother. There was no scream. It was Sadie MacDonald’s night off, and Norma Wilmer, the nurse on duty, was made of tougher stuff. Nevertheless, she gave a little cry of surprise, and ran to see if Dr. Babineau was still in the doctors’ lounge.
Brady thought, Now the rest of my life begins.
Brady thought, Practice, man, practice.
BLACKISH
1
Although Hodges has officially made Holly a full partner in Finders Keepers, and there’s a spare office (small, but with a street view), she has elected to remain based in the reception area. She’s seated there, peering at the screen of her computer, when Hodges comes in at quarter to eleven. And although she’s quick to sweep something into the wide drawer above the kneehole of her desk, Hodges’s olfactories are still in good working order (unlike some of his malfunctioning equipment further south), and he catches an unmistakable whiff of half-eaten Twinkie.
“What’s the story, Hollyberry?”
“You picked that up from Jerome, and you know I hate it. Call me Hollyberry again and I’ll go see my mother for a week. She keeps asking me to visit.”
As if, Hodges thinks. You can’t stand her, and besides, you’re on the scent, my dear. As hooked as a heroin addict.
“Sorry, sorry.” He looks over her shoulder and sees an article from Bloomberg Business dated April of 2014. The headline reads ZAPPIT ZAPPED. “Yeah, the company screwed the pooch and stepped out the door. Thought I told you that yesterday.”
“You did. What’s interesting, to me at least, is the inventory.”
“What do you mean?”
“Thousands of unsold Zappits, maybe tens of thousands. I wanted to know what happened to them.”
“And did you find out?”
“Not yet.”
“Maybe they got shipped to the poor children in China, along with all the vegetables I refused to eat as a child.”
“Starving children are not funny,” she says, looking severe.
“No, of course not.”
Hodges straightens up. He filled a prescription for painkillers on his way back from Stamos’s office—heavy-duty, but not as heavy as the stuff he may be taking soon—and he feels almost okay. There’s even a faint stirring of hunger in his belly, which is a welcome change. “They were probably destroyed. That’s what they do with unsold paperback books, I think.”
“That’s a lot of inventory to destroy,” she says, “considering the gadgets are loaded with games and still work. The top of the line, the Commanders, even came equipped with WiFi. Now tell me about your tests.”
Hodges manufactures a smile he hopes will look both modest and happy. “Good news, actually. It’s an ulcer, but just a little one. I’ll have to take a bunch of pills and be careful about my diet. Dr. Stamos says if I do that, it should heal on its own.”
She gives him a radiant smile that makes Hodges feel good about this outrageous lie. Of course, it also makes him feel like dogshit on an old shoe.
“Thank God! You’ll do what he says, won’t you?”
“You bet.” More dogshit; all the bland food in the world won’t cure what ails him. Hodges is not a giver-upper, and under other circumstances he would be in the office of gastroenterologist Henry Yip right now, no matter how bad the odds of beating pancreatic cancer. The message he received on the Blue Umbrella site has changed things, however.
“Well, that’s fine. Because I don’t know what I’d do without you, Bill. I just don’t.”
“Holly—”
“Actually, I do. I’d go back home. And that would be bad for me.”
No shit, Hodges thinks. The first time I met you, in town for your aunt Elizabeth’s funeral, your mom was practically leading you around like a mutt on a leash. Do this, Holly, do that, Holly, and for Christ’s sake don’t do anything embarrassing.
“Now tell me,” she says. “Tell me the something new. Tell me tell me tell me!”
“Give me fifteen minutes, then I’ll spill everything. In the meantime, see if you can find out what happened to all those Commander consoles. It’s probably not important, but it might be.”
“Okay. Wonderful news about your tests, Bill.”
“Yeah.”
He goes into his office. Holly swivels her chair to look after him for a moment, because he rarely closes the door when he’s in there. Still, it’s not unheard of. She returns to her computer.
2
“He’s not done with you yet.”
Holly repeats it in a soft voice. She puts her half-eaten veggie burger down on its paper plate. Hodges has already demolished his, talking between bites. He doesn’t mention waking with pain; in this version he discovered the message because he got up to net-surf whe
n he couldn’t sleep.
“That’s what it said, all right.”
“From Z-Boy.”
“Yeah. Sounds like some superhero’s sidekick, doesn’t it? ‘Follow the adventures of Z-Man and Z-Boy, as they keep the streets of Gotham City safe from crime!’”
“That’s Batman and Robin. They’re the ones who patrol Gotham City.”
“I know that, I was reading Batman comics before you were born. I was just saying.”
She picks up her veggie burger, extracts a shred of lettuce, puts it down again. “When is the last time you visited Brady Hartsfield?”
Right to the heart of the matter, Hodges thinks admiringly. That’s my Holly.
“I went to see him just after the business with the Saubers family, and once more later on. Midsummer, that would have been. Then you and Jerome cornered me and said I had to stop. So I did.”
“We did it for your own good.”
“I know that, Holly. Now eat your sandwich.”
She takes a bite, dabs mayo from the corner of her mouth, and asks him how Hartsfield seemed on his last visit.
“The same … mostly. Just sitting there, looking out at the parking garage. I talk, I ask him questions, he says nothing. He gives Academy Award brain damage, no doubt about that. But there have been stories about him. That he has some kind of mind-power. That he can turn the water on and off in his bathroom, and does it sometimes to scare the staff. I’d call it bullshit, but when Becky Helmington was the head nurse, she said she’d actually seen stuff on a couple of occasions—rattling blinds, the TV going on by itself, the bottles on his IV stand swinging back and forth. And she’s what I’d call a credible witness. I know it’s hard to believe—”
“Not so hard. Telekinesis, sometimes called psychokinesis, is a documented phenomenon. You never saw anything like that yourself during any of your visits?”
“Well …” He pauses, remembering. “Something did happen on my second-to-last visit. There was a picture on the table beside his bed—him and his mother with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. On vacation somewhere. There was a bigger version in the house on Elm Street. You probably remember it.”
“Of course I do. I remember everything we saw in that house, including some of the cheesecake photos of her he had on his computer.” She crosses her arms over her small bosom and makes a moue of distaste. “That was a very unnatural relationship.”
“Tell me about it. I don’t know if he ever actually had sex with her—”
“Oough!”
“—but I think he probably wanted to, and at the very least she enabled his fantasies. Anyway, I grabbed the picture and talked some smack about her, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to get him to respond. Because he’s in there, Holly, and I mean all present and accounted for. I was sure of it then and I’m sure of it now. He just sits there, but inside he’s the same human wasp that killed those people at City Center and tried to kill a whole lot more at Mingo Auditorium.”
“And he used Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to talk with you, don’t forget that.”
“After last night I’m not likely to.”
“Tell me the rest of what happened that time.”
“For just a second he stopped looking out his window at the parking garage across the way. His eyes … they rolled in their sockets, and he looked at me. Every hair on the nape of my neck stood up at attention, and the air felt … I don’t know … electric.” He forces himself to say the rest. It’s like pushing a big rock up a steep hill. “I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers—one was a mother who killed her three-year-old for insurance that didn’t amount to a hill of beans—but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.”
“I believe you,” she says in a voice so small it’s barely a whisper.
“And he had a Zappit. That’s the connection I was trying to make. If it is a connection, and not just a coincidence. There was a guy, I don’t know his last name, everyone just called him Library Al, who used to hand Zappits out along with Kindles and paperbacks when he made his rounds. I don’t know if Al was an orderly or a volunteer. Hell, he might even have been one of the janitors, doing a little good deed on the side. I think the only reason I didn’t pick up on that right away was the Zappit you found at the Ellerton house was pink. The one in Brady’s room was blue.”
“How could what happened to Janice Ellerton and her daughter have anything to do with Brady Hartsfield? Unless … has anyone reported any telekinetic activity outside of his room? Have there been rumors of that?”
“Nope, but right around the time the Saubers business finished up, a nurse committed suicide in the Brain Injury Clinic. Sliced her wrists in a bathroom right down the hall from Hartsfield’s room. Her name was Sadie MacDonald.”
“Are you thinking …”
She’s picking at her sandwich again, shredding the lettuce and dropping it onto her plate. Waiting for him.
“Go on, Holly. I’m not going to say it for you.”
“You’re thinking Brady talked her into it somehow? I don’t see how that could be possible.”
“I don’t, either, but we know Brady has a fascination with suicide.”
“This Sadie MacDonald … did she happen to have one of those Zappit things?”
“God knows.”
“How … how did …”
This time he does help. “With a scalpel she filched from one of the surgical suites. I got that from the ME’s assistant. Slipped her a gift card to DeMasio’s, the Italian joint.”
Holly shreds more lettuce. Her plate is starting to look like confetti at a leprechaun birthday party. It’s driving Hodges a little nuts, but he doesn’t stop her. She’s working her way up to saying it. And finally does. “You’re going to see Hartsfield.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Do you really think you’ll get anything out of him? You never have before.”
“I know a little more now.” But what, really, does he know? He’s not even sure what he suspects. But maybe Hartsfield isn’t a human wasp, after all. Maybe he’s a spider, and Room 217 at the Bucket is the center of his web, where he sits spinning.
Or maybe it’s all coincidence. Maybe the cancer is already eating into my brain, sparking a lot of paranoid ideas.
That’s what Pete would think, and his partner—hard to stop thinking of her as Miss Pretty Gray Eyes, now that it’s in his head—would say it right out loud.
He stands up. “No time like the present.”
She drops her sandwich onto the pile of mangled lettuce so she can grasp his arm. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Guard your thoughts. I know how crazy that sounds, but I am crazy, at least some of the time, so I can say it. If you should have any ideas about … well, harming yourself … call me. Call me right away.”
“Okay.”
She crosses her arms and grasps her shoulders—that old fretful gesture he sees less often now. “I wish Jerome was here.” Jerome Robinson is in Arizona, taking a semester off from college, building houses as part of a Habitat for Humanity crew. Once, when Hodges used the phrase garnishing his resume in relation to this activity, Holly scolded him, telling him Jerome was doing it because he was a good person. With that, Hodges has to agree—Jerome really is a good person.
“I’m going to be fine. And this is probably nothing. We’re like kids worrying that the empty house on the corner is haunted. If we said anything about it to Pete, he’d have us both committed.”
Holly, who actually has been committed (twice), believes some empty houses really might be haunted. She removes one small and ringless hand from one shoulder long enough to grasp his arm again, this time by the sleeve of his overcoat. “Call me when you get there, and call me again when you leave. Don’t
forget, because I’ll be worrying and I can’t call you because—”
“No cell phones allowed in the Bucket, yeah, I know. I’ll do it, Holly. In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of things for you.” He sees her hand dart toward a notepad and shakes his head. “No, you don’t need to write this down. It’s simple. First, go on eBay or wherever you go to buy stuff that’s no longer available retail and order one of those Zappit Commanders. Can you do that?”
“Easy. What’s the other thing?”
“Sunrise Solutions bought out Zappit, then went bankrupt. Someone will be serving as the trustee in bankruptcy. The trustee hires lawyers, accountants, and liquidators to help squeeze every cent out of the company. Get a name and I’ll make a call later today or tomorrow. I want to know what happened to all those unsold Zappit consoles, because somebody gave one to Janice Ellerton a long time after both companies were out of business.”
She lights up. “That’s fracking brilliant!”
Not brilliant, just police work, he thinks. I may have terminal cancer, but I still remember how the job is done, and that’s something.
That’s something good.
3
As he exits the Turner Building and heads for the bus stop (the Number 5 is a quicker and easier way to get across town than retrieving his Prius and driving himself), Hodges is a deeply preoccupied man. He is thinking about how he should approach Brady—how he can open him up. He was an ace in the interrogation room when he was on the job, so there has to be a way. Previously he has only gone to Brady to goad him and confirm his gut belief that Brady is faking his semi-catatonic state. Now he has some real questions, and there must be some way he can get Brady to answer them.
I have to poke the spider, he thinks.
Interfering with his efforts to plan the forthcoming confrontation are thoughts of the diagnosis he’s just received, and the inevitable fears that go with it. For his life, yes. But there are also questions of how much he may suffer a bit farther down the line, and how he will inform those who need to know. Corinne and Allie will be shaken up by the news but basically okay. The same goes for the Robinson family, although he knows Jerome and Barbara, his kid sister (not such a kid now; she’ll turn sixteen in a few months), will take it hard. Mostly, though, it’s Holly he worries about. She isn’t crazy, despite what she said in the office, but she’s fragile. Very. She’s had two breakdowns in her past, one in high school and one in her early twenties. She’s stronger now, but her main sources of support over these last few years have been him and the little company they run together. If they go, she’ll be at risk. He can’t afford to kid himself about that.
