by Stephen King
I won’t let her break, Hodges thinks. He walks with his head down and his hands stuffed in his pockets, blowing out white vapor. I can’t let that happen.
Deep in these thoughts, he misses the primer-spotted Chevy Malibu for the third time in two days. It’s parked up the street, opposite the building where Holly is now hunting down the Sunrise Solutions bankruptcy trustee. Standing on the sidewalk next to it is an elderly man in an old Army surplus parka that has been mended with masking tape. He watches Hodges get on the bus, then takes a cell phone from his coat pocket and makes a call.
4
Holly watches her boss—who happens to be the person she loves most in the world—walk to the bus stop on the corner. He looks so slight now, almost a shadow of the burly man she first met six years ago. And he has his hand pressed to his side as he walks. He does that a lot lately, and she doesn’t think he’s even aware of it.
Nothing but a small ulcer, he said. She’d like to believe that—would like to believe him—but she’s not sure she does.
The bus comes and Bill gets on. Holly stands by the window watching it go, gnawing at her fingernails, wishing for a cigarette. She has Nicorette gum, plenty of it, but sometimes only a cigarette will do.
Quit wasting time, she tells herself. If you really mean to be a rotten dirty sneak, there’s no time like the present.
So she goes into his office.
His computer is dark, but he never turns it off until he goes home at night; all she has to do is refresh the screen. Before she can, her eye is caught by the yellow legal pad beside the keyboard. He always has one handy, usually covered with notes and doodles. It’s how he thinks.
Written at the top of this one is a line she knows well, one that has resonated with her ever since she first heard the song on the radio: All the lonely people. He has underlined it. Beneath are names she knows.
Olivia Trelawney (Widowed)
Martine Stover (Unmarried, housekeeper called her “spinster”)
Janice Ellerton (Widowed)
Nancy Alderson (Widowed)
And others. Her own, of course; she is also a spinster. Pete Huntley, who’s divorced. And Hodges himself, also divorced.
Single people are twice as likely to commit suicide. Divorced people, four times as likely.
“Brady Hartsfield enjoyed suicide,” she murmurs. “It was his hobby.”
Below the names, circled, is a jotted note she doesn’t understand: Visitors list? What visitors?
She hits a random key and Bill’s computer lights up, showing his desktop screen with all his files scattered helter-skelter across it. She has scolded him about this time and again, has told him it’s like leaving the door of your house unlocked and your valuables all laid out on the dining room table with a sign on them saying PLEASE STEAL ME, and he always says he will do better, and he never does. Not that it would have changed things in Holly’s case, because she also has his password. He gave it to her himself. In case something ever happened to him, he said. Now she’s afraid something has.
One look at the screen is enough to tell her the something is no ulcer. There’s a new file folder there, one with a scary title. Holly clicks on it. The terrible gothic letters at the top are enough to confirm that the document is indeed the last will and testament of one Kermit William Hodges. She closes it at once. She has absolutely no desire to paw through his bequests. Knowing that such a document exists and that he has been reviewing it this very day is enough. Too much, actually.
She stands there clutching at her shoulders and nibbling her lips. The next step would be worse than snooping. It would be prying. It would be burglary.
You’ve come this far, so go ahead.
“Yes, I have to,” Holly whispers, and clicks on the postage stamp icon that opens his email, telling herself there will probably be nothing. Only there is. The most recent message likely came in while they were talking about what he found early this morning under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. It’s from the doctor he went to see. Stamos, his name is. She opens the email and reads: Here is a copy of your most recent test results, for your files.
Holly uses the password in the email to open the attachment, sits in Bill’s chair, and leans forward, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. By the time she scrolls down to the second of the eight pages, she is crying.
5
Hodges has no more than settled in his seat at the back of the Number 5 when glass breaks in his coat pocket and the boys cheer the home run that just broke Mrs. O’Leary’s living room window. A man in a business suit lowers his Wall Street Journal and looks disapprovingly at Hodges over the top of it.
“Sorry, sorry,” Hodges says. “Keep meaning to change it.”
“You should make it a priority,” the businessman says, and raises his paper again.
The text is from his old partner. Again. Feeling a strong sense of déjà vu, Hodges calls him.
“Pete,” he says, “what’s with all the texts? It isn’t as if you don’t have my number on speed dial.”
“Figured Holly probably programmed your phone for you and put on some crazy ringtone,” Pete says. “That’d be her idea of a real knee-slapper. Also figured you’d have it turned up to max volume, you deaf sonofabitch.”
“The text alert’s the one on max,” Hodges says. “When I get a call, the phone just has a mini-orgasm against my leg.”
“Change the alert, then.”
Hours ago he found out he has only months to live. Now he’s discussing the volume of his cell phone.
“I’ll absolutely do that. Now tell me why you called.”
“Got a guy in computer forensics who landed on that game gadget like a fly on shit. He loved it, called it retro. Can you believe that? Gadget was probably manufactured all of five years ago and now it’s retro.”
“The world is speeding up.”
“It’s sure doing something. Anyway, the Zappit is zapped. When our guy plugged in fresh batteries, it popped half a dozen bright blue flashes, then died.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Some kind of virus is technically possible, the thing supposedly has WiFi and that’s mostly how those bugs get downloaded, but he says it’s more likely a bad chip or a fried circuit. The point is, it means nothing. Ellerton couldn’t have used it.”
“Then why did she keep the charger cord for it plugged in right there in her daughter’s bathroom?”
That silences Pete for a moment. Then he says, “Okay, so maybe it worked for awhile and then the chip died. Or whatever they do.”
It worked, all right, Hodges thinks. She played solitaire on it at the kitchen table. Lots of different kinds, like Klondike and Pyramid and Picture. Which you would know, Peter my dear, if you’d talked to Nancy Alderson. That must still be on your bucket list.
“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 Fishi
n’ 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 café 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—
