by Stephen King
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.
<
br /> “Hello?”
She listens.
“Yes, this is she.”
She listens, her free hand rising to cover her mouth and stifle whatever sound wants to come out. She hears herself ask, “Are you sure it’s my daughter? Barbara Rosellen Robinson?”
The policeman who has called to notify her says yes. He’s sure. They found her ID in the street. What he doesn’t tell her is that they had to wipe off the blood to see the name.
11
Hodges knows something’s amiss as soon as he steps out of the skyway that connects Kiner Memorial proper to the Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, where the walls are painted a soothing pink and soft music plays day and night. The usual patterns have been disrupted, and very little work seems to be getting done. Lunch carts stand marooned, filled with congealing plates of noodly stuff that might once have been the cafeteria’s idea of Chinese. Nurses cluster, murmuring in low tones. One appears to be crying. Two interns have their heads together by the water fountain. An orderly is talking on his cell phone, which is technically cause for suspension, but Hodges thinks he’s safe enough; no one is paying him any mind.
At least Ruth Scapelli is nowhere in sight, which might improve his chances of getting in to see Hartsfield. It’s Norma Wilmer at the duty desk, and along with Becky Helmington, Norma was his source for all things Brady before Hodges quit visiting Room 217. The bad news is that Hartsfield’s doctor is also at the duty desk. Hodges has never been able to establish a rapport with him, although God knows he’s tried.
He ambles down to the water fountain, hoping Babineau hasn’t spotted him and will soon be off to look at PET scans or something, leaving Wilmer alone and approachable. He gets a drink (wincing and placing a hand to his side as he straightens up), then speaks to the interns. “Is something going on here? The place seems a little riled up.”
They hesitate and glance at each other.
“Can’t talk about it,” says Intern One. He still has the remains of his adolescent acne, and looks about seventeen. Hodges shudders at the thought of him assisting in a surgery job more difficult than removing a thumb splinter.
“Something with a patient? Hartsfield, maybe? I only ask because I used to be a cop, and I’m sort of responsible for putting him here.”
“Hodges,” says Intern Two. “Is that your name?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“You caught him, right?”
Hodges agrees instantly, although if it had been left up to him, Brady would have bagged a lot more in Mingo Auditorium than he managed to get at City Center. No, it was Holly and Jerome Robinson who stopped Brady before he could detonate his devil’s load of homemade plastic explosive.
The interns exchange another glance and then One says, “Hartsfield’s the same as ever, just gorking along. It’s Nurse Ratched.”
Intern Two gives him an elbow. “Speak no ill of the dead, asshole. Especially when the guy listening might have loose lips.”
Hodges immediately runs a thumbnail across his mouth, as if sealing his dangerous lips shut.
Intern One looks flustered. “Head Nurse Scapelli, I mean. She committed suicide last night.”
All the lights in Hodges’s head come on, and for the first time since yesterday he forgets that he’s probably going to die. “Are you sure?”
“Sliced her arms and wrists and bled out,” says Two. “That’s what I’m hearing, anyway.”
“Did she leave a note?”
They have no idea.
Hodges heads for the duty desk. Babineau is still there, going over files with Wilmer (who looks flustered at her apparent battlefield promotion), but he can’t wait. This is Hartsfield’s dirt. He doesn’t know how that can be, but it has Brady written all over it. The fucking suicide prince.
He almost calls Nurse Wilmer by her first name, but instinct makes him shy from that at the last moment. “Nurse Wilmer, I’m Bill Hodges.” A thing she knows very well. “I worked both the City Center case and the Mingo Auditorium thing. I need to see Mr. Hartsfield.”
She opens her mouth, but Babineau is there ahead of her. “Out of the question. Even if Mr. Hartsfield were allowed visitors, which he is not by order of the District Attorney’s office, he wouldn’t be allowed to see you. He needs peace and calm. Each of your previous unauthorized visits has shattered that.”
“News to me,” Hodges says mildly. “Every time I’ve been to see him, he just sits there. Bland as a bowl of oatmeal.”
Norma Wilmer’s head goes back and forth. She’s like a woman watching a tennis match.
“You don’t see what we see after you’ve left.” Color is rising in Babineau’s stubble-flecked cheeks. And there are dark circles under his eyes. Hodges remembers a cartoon from his Sunday school Living with Jesus workbook, back in the prehistoric era when cars had fins and girls wore bobby sox. Brady’s doc has the same look as the guy in the cartoon, but Hodges doubts if he’s a chronic masturbator. On the other hand, he remembers Becky telling him that the neuro doctors are often crazier than the patients.
“And what would that be?” Hodges asks. “Little psychic tantrums? Do things have a way of falling over after I’m gone? The toilet in his bathroom flushes by itself, maybe?”
“Ridiculous. What you leave is psychic wreckage, Mr. Hodges. He’s not so brain damaged that he doesn’t know you’re obsessed with him. Malevolently so. I want you to leave. We’ve had a tragedy, and many of the patients are upset.”
Hodges sees Wilmer’s eyes widen slightly at this, and knows that the patients capable of cognition—many here in the Bucket are not—have no idea that the head nurse has offed herself.
“I only have a few questions for him, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
Babineau leans forward. The eyes behind his gold-rimmed glasses are threaded with snaps of red. “Listen closely, Mr. Hodges. One, Mr. Hartsfield is not capable of answering your questions. If he could answer questions, he would have been brought to trial for his crimes by now. Two, you have no official standing. Three, if you don’t leave now, I will call security and have you escorted from the premises.”
Hodges says, “Pardon me for asking, but are you all right?”
Babineau draws back as if Hodges has brandished a fist in his face. “Get out!”
The little clusters of medical personnel stop talking and look around.
“Gotcha,” Hodges says. “Going. All good.”
There’s a snack alcove near the entrance to the skyway. Intern Two is leaning there, hands in pockets. “Ooh, baby,” he says. “You been schooled.”
“So it would seem.” Hodges studies the wares in the Nibble-A-Bit machine. He sees nothing in there that won’t set his guts on fire, but that’s okay; he’s not hungry.
“Young man,” he says, without turning around, “if you would like to make fifty dollars for doing a simple errand that will cause you no trouble, then get with me.”
Intern Two, a fellow who looks like he might actually attain adulthood at some point in the not-too-distant future, joins him at the Nibble-A-Bit. “What’s the errand?”
Hodges keeps his pad in his back pocket, just as he did when he was a Detective First Class. He scribbles two words—Call me—and adds his cell number. “Give this to Norma Wilmer once Smaug spreads his wings and flies away.”
Intern Two takes the note and folds it into the breast pocket of his scrubs. Then he looks expectant. Hodges takes out his wallet. Fifty is a lot for delivering a note, but he has discovered at least one good thing about terminal cancer: you can toss your budget out the window.
12
Jerome Robinson is balancing boards on his shoulder under the hot Arizona sun when his cell phone rings. The houses they are building—the first two already framed—are in a low-income but respectable neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Phoenix. He puts the boards across the top of a handy wheelbarrow and plucks his phone from his belt, thinking it will be Hector Alonzo, the job foreman. This morning one of th
e workmen (a workwoman, actually) tripped and fell into a stack of rebar. She broke her collarbone and suffered an ugly facial laceration. Alonzo took her to the St. Luke’s ER, appointing Jerome temporary foreman in his absence.
It’s not Alonzo’s name he sees in the little window, but Holly Gibney’s face. It’s a photo he took himself, catching her in one of her rare smiles.
“Hey, Holly, how are you? I’ll have to call you back in a few, it’s been a crazy morning here, but—”
“I need you to come home,” Holly says. She sounds calm, but Jerome knows her of old, and in just those six words he can sense strong emotions held in check. Fear chief among them. Holly is still a very fearful person. Jerome’s mother, who loves her dearly, once called fear Holly’s default setting.
“Home? Why? What’s wrong?” His own fear suddenly grips him. “Is it my dad? Mom? Is it Barbie?”
“It’s Bill,” she says. “He has cancer. A very bad cancer. Pancreatic. If he doesn’t get treatment he’ll die, he’ll probably die anyway, but he could have time and he told me it was just a little ulcer because … because …” She takes a great ragged breath that makes Jerome wince. “Because of Brady Fracking Hartsfield!”
Jerome has no idea what connection Brady Hartsfield can have to Bill’s terrible diagnosis, but he knows what he’s seeing right now: trouble. On the far side of the building site, two hard-hatted young men—Habitat for Humanity college volunteers like Jerome himself—are giving a beeping, backing cement truck conflicting directions. Disaster looms.
“Holly, give me five minutes and I’ll call you back.”
“But you’ll come, won’t you? Say you’ll come. Because I don’t think I can talk to him about this on my own and he has to get into treatment right away!”
“Five minutes,” he says, and kills the call. His thoughts are spinning so fast that he’s afraid the friction will catch his brains on fire, and the blaring sun isn’t helping. Bill? With cancer? On one hand it doesn’t seem possible, but on the other it seems completely possible. He was in top form during the Pete Saubers business, where Jerome and Holly partnered with him, but he’ll be seventy soon, and the last time Jerome saw him, before leaving for Arizona in October, Bill didn’t look all that well. Too thin. Too pale. But Jerome can’t go anywhere until Hector gets back. It would be like leaving the inmates to run the asylum. And knowing the Phoenix hospitals, where the ERs are overrun twenty-four hours a day, he may be stuck here until quitting time.
