by Stephen King
He sprints for the cement truck, bawling “Hold up! Hold UP, for Jesus’ sake!” at the top of his lungs.
He gets the clueless volunteers to halt the cement truck they’ve been misdirecting less than three feet from a freshly dug drainage ditch, and he’s bending over to catch his breath when his phone rings again.
Holly, I love you, Jerome thinks, pulling it from his belt once more, but sometimes you drive me absolutely bugfuck.
Only this time it’s not Holly’s picture he sees. It’s his mother’s.
Tanya is crying. “You have to come home,” she says, and Jerome has just long enough to think of something his grandfather used to say: bad luck keeps bad company.
It’s Barbie after all.
13
Hodges is in the lobby and headed for the door when his phone vibrates. It’s Norma Wilmer.
“Is he gone?” Hodges asks.
Norma doesn’t have to ask who he’s talking about. “Yes. Now that he’s seen his prize patient, he can relax and do the rest of his rounds.”
“I was sorry to hear about Nurse Scapelli.” It’s true. He didn’t care for her, but it’s still true.
“I was, too. She ran the nursing staff like Captain Bligh ran the Bounty, but I hate to think of anyone doing … that. You get the news and your first reaction is oh no, not her, never. It’s the shock of it. Your second reaction is oh yes, that makes perfect sense. Never married, no close friends—not that I knew of, anyway—nothing but the job. Where everybody sort of loathed her.”
“All the lonely people,” Hodges says, stepping out into the cold and turning toward the bus stop. He buttons his coat one-handed and then begins to massage his side.
“Yes. There are a lot of them. What can I do for you, Mr. Hodges?”
“I have a few questions. Could you meet me for a drink?”
There’s a long pause. Hodges thinks she’s going to tell him no. Then she says, “I don’t suppose your questions could lead to trouble for Dr. Babineau?”
“Anything is possible, Norma.”
“That would be nice, but I guess I owe you one, regardless. For not letting on to him that we know each other from back in the Becky Helmington days. There’s a watering hole on Revere Avenue. Got a clever name, Bar Bar Black Sheep, and most of the staff drinks closer to the hospital. Can you find it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m off at five. Meet me there at five thirty. I like a nice cold vodka martini.”
“It’ll be waiting.”
“Just don’t expect me to get you in to see Hartsfield. It would mean my job. Babineau was always intense, but these days he’s downright weird. I tried to tell him about Ruth, and he blew right past me. Not that he’s apt to care when he finds out.”
“Got a lot of love for him, don’t you?”
She laughs. “For that you owe me two drinks.”
“Two it is.”
He’s slipping his phone back into his coat pocket when it buzzes again. He sees the call is from Tanya Robinson and his thoughts immediately flash to Jerome, building houses out there in Arizona. A lot of things can go wrong on building sites.
He takes the call. Tanya is crying, at first too hard for him to understand what she’s saying, only that Jim is in Pittsburgh and she doesn’t want to call him until she knows more. Hodges stands at the curb, one palm plastered against his non-phone ear to muffle the sound of traffic.
“Slow down. Tanya, slow down. Is it Jerome? Did something happen to Jerome?”
“No, Jerome’s fine. Him I did call. It’s Barbara. She was in Lowtown—”
“What in God’s name was she doing in Lowtown, and on a school day?”
“I don’t know! All I know is that some boy pushed her into the street and a truck hit her! They’re taking her to Kiner Memorial. I’m on my way there now!”
“Are you driving?”
“Yes, what does that have to do with—”
“Get off the phone, Tanya. And slow down. I’m at Kiner now. I’ll meet you in the ER.”
He hangs up and heads back to the hospital, breaking into a clumsy trot. He thinks, This goddam place is like the Mafia. Every time I think I’m out, it pulls me back in.
14
An ambulance with its lights flashing is just backing into one of the ER bays. Hodges goes to meet it, pulling out the police ID he still keeps in his wallet. When the paramedic and the EMT pull the stretcher out of the back, he flashes the ID with his thumb placed over the red RETIRED stamp. Technically speaking this is a felony crime—impersonating an officer—and consequently it’s a fiddle he uses sparingly, but this time it seems absolutely appropriate.
Barbara is medicated but conscious. When she sees Hodges, she grasps his hand tightly. “Bill? How did you get here so fast? Did Mom call you?”
“Yeah. How are you?”
“I’m okay. They gave me something for the pain. I have … they say I have a broken leg. I’m going to miss the basketball season and I guess it doesn’t matter because Mom will ground me until I’m, like, twenty-five.” Tears begin to leak from her eyes.
He doesn’t have long with her, so questions about what she was doing on MLK Ave, where there are sometimes as many as four drive-by shootings a week, will have to wait. There’s something more important.
“Barb, do you know the name of the boy who pushed you in front of the truck?”
Her eyes widen.
“Or get a good look at him? Could you describe him?”
“Pushed … ? Oh, no, Bill! No, that’s wrong!”
“Officer, we gotta go,” the paramedic says. “You can question her later.”
“Wait!” Barbara shouts, and tries to sit up. The EMT pushes her gently back down, and she’s grimacing with pain, but Hodges is heartened by that shout. It was good and strong.
“What is it, Barb?”
“He only pushed me after I ran into the street! He pushed me out of the way! I think he might have saved my life, and I’m glad.” She’s crying hard now, but Hodges doesn’t believe for a minute it’s because of her broken leg. “I don’t want to die, after all. I don’t know what was wrong with me!”
“We really have to get her in an exam room, Chief,” the paramedic says. “She needs an X-ray.”
“Don’t let them do anything to that boy!” Barbara calls as the ambo guys roll her through the double doors. “He’s tall! He’s got green eyes and a goatee! He goes to Todhunter—”
She’s gone, the doors clapping back and forth behind her.
Hodges walks outside, where he can use his cell phone without being scolded, and calls Tanya back. “I don’t know where you are, but slow down and don’t run any red lights getting here. They just took her in, and she’s wide awake. She has a broken leg.”
“That’s all? Thank God! What about internal injuries?”
“That’s for the doctors to say, but she was pretty lively. I think maybe the truck just grazed her.”
“I need to call Jerome. I’m sure I scared the hell out of him. And Jim needs to know.”
“Call them when you get here. For now, get off your phone.”
“You can call them, Bill.”
“No, Tanya, I can’t. I have to call someone else.”
He stands there, breathing out plumes of white vapor, the tips of his ears going numb. He doesn’t want the someone else to be Pete, because Pete is a tad pissed at him right now, and that goes double for Izzy Jaynes. He thinks about his other choices, but there’s only one: Cassandra Sheen. He partnered up with her several times when Pete was on vacation, and on one occasion when Pete took six weeks of unexplained personal time. That was shortly after Pete’s divorce, and Hodges surmised he was in a spin-dry center, but never asked and Pete never volunteered the information.
He doesn’t have Cassie’s cell number, so he calls Detective Division and asks to be connected, hoping she’s not in the field. He’s in luck. After less than ten seconds of McGruff the Crime Dog, she’s in his ear.
> “Is this Cassie Sheen, the Botox Queen?”
“Billy Hodges, you old whore! I thought you were dead!”
Soon enough, Cassie, he thinks.
“I’d love to bullshit with you, hon, but I need a favor. They haven’t closed the Strike Avenue station yet, have they?”
“Nope. It’s on the docket for next year, though. Which makes perfect sense. Crime in Lowtown? What crime, right?”
“Yeah, safest part of the city. They may have a kid in for booking, and if my information is right, he deserves a medal instead.”
“Got a name?”
“No, but I know what he looks like. Tall, green eyes, goatee.” He replays what Barbara said and adds, “He could be wearing a Todhunter High jacket. The arresting officers probably have him for pushing a girl in front of a truck. He actually pushed her out of the way, so she only got clipped instead of mashed.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“Yeah.” This isn’t quite the truth, but he believes Barbara. “Find out his name and ask the cops to hold him, okay? I want to talk to him.”
“I think I can do that.”
“Thanks, Cassie. I owe you one.”
He ends the call and looks at his watch. If he means to talk to the Todhunter kid and still keep his appointment with Norma, time is too tight to be messing around with the city bus service.
One thing Barbara said keeps replaying in his mind: I don’t want to die, after all. I don’t know what was wrong with me!
He calls Holly.
15
She’s standing outside the 7-Eleven near the office, holding a pack of Winstons in one hand and plucking at the cellophane with the other. She hasn’t had a cigarette in almost five months, a new record, and she doesn’t want to start again now, but what she saw on Bill’s computer has torn a hole in the middle of a life she has spent the last five years mending. Bill Hodges is her touchstone, the way she measures her ability to interact with the world. Which is only another way of saying that he is the way she measures her sanity. Trying to imagine her life with him gone is like standing on top of a skyscraper and looking at the sidewalk sixty stories below.
Just as she begins to pull the strip on the cellophane, her phone rings. She drops the Winstons into her purse and fishes it out. It’s him.
Holly doesn’t say hello. She told Jerome she didn’t think she could talk to him on her own about what she’s discovered, but now—standing on this windy city sidewalk and shivering inside her good winter coat—she has no choice. It just spills out. “I looked on your computer and I know that snooping’s a lousy thing to do but I’m not sorry. I had to because I thought you were lying about it just being an ulcer and you can fire me if you want, I don’t care, just as long as you let them fix what’s wrong with you.”
Silence at the other end. She wants to ask if he’s still there, but her mouth feels frozen and her heart is beating so hard she can feel it all over her body.
At last he says, “Hols, I don’t think it can be fixed.”
“At least let them try!”
“I love you,” he says. She hears the heaviness in his voice. The resignation. “You know that, right?”
“Don’t be stupid, of course I know.” She starts to cry.
“I’ll try the treatments, sure. But I need a couple of days before I check into the hospital. And right now I need you. Can you come and pick me up?”
“Okay.” Crying harder than ever, because she knows he’s telling the truth about needing her. And being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing. “Where are you?”
He tells her, then says, “Something else.”
“What?”
“I can’t fire you, Holly. You’re not an employee, you’re my partner. Try to remember that.”
“Bill?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not smoking.”
“That’s good, Holly. Now come on over here. I’ll be waiting in the lobby. It’s freezing outside.”
“I’ll come as fast as I can while still obeying the speed limit.”
She hurries to the corner lot where she parks her car. On the way, she drops the unopened pack of cigarettes into a litter basket.
16
Hodges sketches in his visit to the Bucket for Holly on the ride to the Strike Avenue police station, beginning with the news of Ruth Scapelli’s suicide and ending with the odd thing Barbara said before they wheeled her away.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Holly says, “because I’m thinking it, too. That it all leads back to Brady Hartsfield.”
“The suicide prince.” Hodges has helped himself to another couple of painkillers while waiting for Holly, and he feels pretty much okay. “That’s what I’m calling him. Got a ring to it, don’t you think?”
“I guess so. But you told me something once.” She’s sitting bolt upright behind the wheel of her Prius, eyes darting everywhere as they drive deeper into Lowtown. She swerves to avoid a shopping cart someone has abandoned in the middle of the street. “You said coincidence doesn’t equal conspiracy. Do you remember saying that?”
“Yeah.” It’s one of his faves. He has quite a few.
“You said you can investigate a conspiracy forever and come up with nothing if it’s actually just a bunch of coincidences all strung together. If you can’t find something concrete in the next two days—if we can’t—you need to give up and start those treatments. Promise me you will.”
“It might take a little longer to—”
She cuts him off. “Jerome will be back, and he’ll help. It will be like the old days.”
Hodges flashes on the title of an old mystery novel, Trent’s Last Case, and smiles a little. She catches it from the corner of her eye, takes it for acquiescence, and smiles back, relieved.
“Four days,” he says.
“Three. No more. Because every day you don’t do something about what’s going on inside you, the odds get longer. And they’re long already. So don’t start your poopy bargaining stuff, Bill. You’re too good at it.”
“Okay,” he says. “Three days. If Jerome will help.”
Holly says, “He will. And let’s try to make it two.”
17
The Strike Avenue cop shop looks like a medieval castle in a country where the king has fallen and anarchy rules. The windows are heavily barred; the motor pool is protected by chain-link fencing and concrete barriers. Cameras bristle in every direction, covering all angles of approach, and still the gray stone building has been gang-tagged, and one of the globes hanging over the main doors has been shattered.
Hodges and Holly empty the contents of their pockets and Holly’s purse into plastic baskets and go through a metal detector that beeps reproachfully at Hodges’s metal watchband. Holly sits on a bench in the main lobby (which is also being scanned by multiple cameras) and opens her iPad. Hodges goes to the desk, states his business, and after a few moments is met by a slim, gray-haired detective who looks a little like Lester Freamon on The Wire—the only cop show Hodges can watch without wanting to throw up.
“Jack Higgins,” the detective says, offering his hand. “Like the book-writer, only not white.”
Hodges shakes with him and introduces Holly, who gives a little wave and her usual muttered hello before returning her attention to her iPad.
“I think I remember you,” Hodges says. “You used to be at Marlborough Street station, didn’t you? When you were in uniform?”
“A long time ago, when I was young and randy. I remember you, too. You caught the guy who killed those two women in McCarron Park.”
“That was a group effort, Detective Higgins.”
“Make it Jack. Cassie Sheen called. We’ve got your guy in an interview room. His name is Dereece Neville.” Higgins spells the first name. “We were going to turn him loose, anyway. Several people who saw the incident corroborate his story—he was jiving around with the girl, she took offense and ran into the street. Neville saw the truck coming, ran aft
er her, tried to push her out of the way, mostly succeeded. Plus, practically everyone down here knows this kid. He’s a star on the Todhunter basketball team, probably going to get an athletic scholarship to a Division I school. Great grades, honor student.”
“What was Mr. Great Grades doing on the street in the middle of a school day?”
“Ah, they were all out. Heating system at the high school shit the bed again. Third time this winter, and it’s only January. The mayor says everything’s cool down here in the Low, lots of jobs, lots of prosperity, shiny happy people. We’ll see him when he runs for reelection. Riding in that armored SUV of his.”
“Was the Neville kid hurt?”
“Scraped palms and nothing else. According to a lady across the street—she was closest to the scene—he pushed the girl and then, I quote, ‘Went flyin over the top of her like a bigass bird.’”
“Does he understand he’s free to go?”
“He does, and agreed to stay. Wants to know if the girl’s okay. Come on. Have your little chat with him, and then we’ll send him on his way. Unless you see some reason not to.”
Hodges smiles. “I’m just following up for Miss Robinson. Let me ask him a couple of questions, and we’re both out of your hair.”
18
The interview room is small and stifling hot, the overhead heating pipes clanking away. Still, it’s probably the nicest one they’ve got, because there’s a little sofa and no perp table with a cuff-bolt sticking out of it like a steel knuckle. The sofa has been mended with tape in a couple of places, and that makes Hodges think of the man Nancy Alderson says she saw on Hilltop Court, the one with the mended coat.
