by Stephen King
“You’ve been very well paid, Freddi, and you’re almost done. Why don’t we leave it at that?”
He brushes past her without waiting for a reply, puts his briefcase on the table, and snaps it open. He takes out an envelope with her initials, FL, printed on it. The letters slant backward. During her years on the Discount Electronix Cyber Patrol, she saw similar backslanted printing on hundreds of work orders. Those were the ones Brady filled out.
“Ten thousand,” Dr. Z says. “Final payment. Now go to work.”
Freddi reaches for the envelope. “You don’t need to hang around if you don’t want to. The rest is basically automatic. It’s like setting an alarm clock.”
And if you’re really Brady, she thinks, you could do it yourself. I’m good at this stuff, but you were better.
He lets her fingers touch the envelope, then pulls it back. “I’ll stay. Not that I don’t trust you.”
Right, Freddi thinks. As if.
His cheeks once more wrinkle in that unsettling smile. “And who knows? We might get lucky and see the first hit.”
“I’ll bet most of the people who got those Zappits have already thrown them away. It’s a fucking toy, and some of them don’t even work. Like you said.”
“Let me worry about that,” says Dr. Z. Once again his cheeks wrinkle and pull back. His eyes are red, as if he’s been smoking the rock. She thinks of asking him what, exactly, they are doing, and what he hopes to accomplish … but she already has an idea, and does she want to be sure? Besides, if this is Brady, what harm can it do? He had hundreds of ideas, all of them crackpot.
Well.
Most of them.
She leads the way into what was meant to be a spare bedroom and has now become her workstation, the sort of electronic refuge she always dreamed of and could never afford—a hidey-hole that Gloria, with her good looks, infectious laugh, and “people skills,” could never understand. In here the baseboard heaters hardly work at all, and it’s five degrees colder than the rest of the apartment. The computers don’t mind. They like it.
“Go on,” he says. “Do it.”
She sits down at the top-of-the-line desktop Mac with its twenty-seven-inch screen, refreshes it, and types in her password—a random collection of numbers. There’s a file simply marked Z, which she opens with another password. The subfiles are marked Z-1 and Z-2. She uses a third password to open Z-2, then begins to rapidly click away at her keyboard. Dr. Z stands by her left shoulder. He’s a disturbing negative presence at first, but then she gets lost in what she’s doing, as she always does.
Not that it takes long; Dr. Z has given her the program, and executing it is child’s play. To the right of her computer, sitting on a high shelf, is a Motorola signal repeater. When she finishes by simultaneously hitting COMMAND and the Z key, the repeater comes to life. A single word appears in yellow dots: SEARCHING. It blinks like a traffic light at a deserted intersection.
They wait, and Freddi becomes aware that she’s holding her breath. She lets it go in a whoosh, momentarily puffing out her thin cheeks. She starts to get up, and Dr. Z puts a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s give it a little longer.”
They give it five minutes, the only sound the soft hum of her equipment and the keening of the wind off the frozen lake. SEARCHING blinks on and on.
“All right,” he says at last. “I knew it was too much to hope for. All things in good time, Freddi. Let’s go back into the other room. I’ll give you your final payment and then be on my wa—”
SEARCHING in yellow suddenly turns to FOUND in green.
“There!” he shouts, making her jump. “There, Freddi! There’s the first one!”
Her final doubts are swept away and she knows for sure. All it takes is that shout of triumph. It’s Brady, all right. He’s become a living Russian nesting doll, which goes perfectly with his furry Russian hat. Look inside Babineau and there’s Dr. Z. Look inside Dr. Z, and there, pulling all the levers, is Brady Hartsfield. God knows how it can be, but it is.
FOUND in green is replaced with LOADING in red. After mere seconds, LOADING is replaced with TASK COMPLETE. After that, the repeater begins to search again.
“All right,” he says, “I’m satisfied. Time for me to go. It’s been a busy night, and I’m not done yet.”
She follows him into the main room, shutting the door to her electronic hideaway behind her. She has come to a decision that’s probably long overdue. As soon as he’s gone, she’s going to kill the repeater and delete the final program. Once that’s done, she’ll pack a suitcase and go to a motel. Tomorrow she’s getting the fuck out of this city and heading south to Florida. She’s had it with Dr. Z, and his Z-Boy sidekick, and winter in the Midwest.
Dr. Z puts on his coat, but drifts to the window instead of going to the door. “Not much of a view. Too many highrises in the way.”
“Yeah, it sucks the big one.”
“Still, it’s better than mine,” he says, not turning. “All I’ve had to look at for the last five and a half years is a parking garage.”
Suddenly she’s at her limit. If he’s still in the same room with her sixty seconds from now, she’ll go into hysterics. “Give me my money. Give it to me and then get the fuck out. We’re done.”
He turns. In his hand is the short-barreled pistol he used on Babineau’s wife. “You’re right, Freddi. We are.”
She reacts instantly, knocking the pistol from his hand, kicking him in the groin, karate-chopping him like Lucy Liu when he doubles over, and running out the door while screaming her head off. This mental film-clip plays out in full color and Dolby sound as she stands rooted to the spot. The gun goes bang. She staggers back two steps, collides with the easy chair where she sits to watch TV, collapses across it, and rolls to the floor, coming down headfirst. The world begins to darken and draw away. Her last sensation is warmth above as she begins to bleed and below as her bladder lets loose.
“Final payment, as promised.” The words come from a great distance.
Blackness swallows the world. Freddi falls into it and is gone.
6
Brady stands perfectly still, watching the blood seep from beneath her. He’s listening for someone to pound on her door, wanting to know if everything is all right. He doesn’t expect that will happen, but better safe than sorry.
After ninety seconds or so, he puts the gun back in his overcoat pocket, next to his Zappit. He can’t resist one more look into the computer room before leaving. The signal repeater continues its endless, automated search. He has, against all odds, completed an amazing journey. What the final results will be is impossible to predict, but that there will be some result he is certain. And it will eat into the old Det.-Ret. like acid. Revenge really is best when eaten cold.
He has the elevator to himself going down. The lobby is similarly empty. He walks around the corner, turning up the collar of Babineau’s expensive overcoat against the wind, and tweets the locks of Babineau’s Beemer. He gets in and starts it up, but only for the heater. Something needs doing before he moves on to his next destination. He doesn’t really want to do it, because, whatever his failings as a human being, Babineau has a gorgeously intelligent mind, and a great deal of it is still intact. Destroying that mind is too much like those dumb and superstitious ISIS fucks hammering irreplaceable treasures of art and culture to rubble. Yet it must be done. No risks can be allowed, because the body is also a treasure. Yes, Babineau has slightly high blood pressure and his hearing has gone downhill in the last few years, but tennis and twice-weekly trips to the hospital gym have kept his muscles in fairly good shape. His heart ticks along at seventy beats a minute, with no misses. He’s not suffering from sciatica, gout, cataracts, or any of the other outrages that affect many men at his age.
Besides, the good doctor is what he’s got, at least for now.
With that in mind, Brady turns inward and finds what remains of Felix Babineau’s core consciousness—the brain within the brain. It has been scarred a
nd ravaged and diminished by Brady’s repeated occupancies, but it is still there, still Babineau, still capable (theoretically at least) of taking back control. It is, however, defenseless, like some armored creature stripped of its shell. It’s not exactly flesh; Babineau’s core self is more like densely packed wires made of light.
Not without regret, Brady seizes them with his phantom hand and tears them apart.
7
Hodges spends the evening slowly eating his yogurt and watching the Weather Channel. The winter storm, ridiculously dubbed Eugenie by the Weather Channel wonks, is still coming and is expected to hit the city sometime late tomorrow.
“Hard to be more exact as of now,” the balding, bespectacled wonk says to the knockout blond wonk in the red dress. “This one gives new meaning to the term stop-and-go traffic.”
The knockout wonk laughs as if her partner in meteorology has said something outrageously witty, and Hodges uses the remote to turn them off.
The zapper, he thinks, looking at it. That’s what everyone calls these things. Quite the invention, when you stop to think of it. You can access hundreds of different channels by remote control. Never even have to get up. As if you’re inside the television instead of in your chair. Or in both places at the same time. Sort of a miracle, really.
As he goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth, his cell phone buzzes. He looks at the screen and has to laugh, even though it hurts to do it. Now that he’s in the privacy of his own home, with nobody to be bothered by the home run text alert, his old partner calls instead.
“Hey, Pete, nice to know you still remember my number.”
Pete has no time for banter. “I’m going to tell you something, Kermit, and if you decide to run with it, I’m like Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. Remember him?”
“Sure.” What Hodges feels in his gut right now isn’t a pain-cramp, but one of excitement. Weird how similar they are. “I know nothing.”
“Right. It has to be that way, because as far as this department is concerned, the murder of Martine Stover and the suicide of her mother is officially a closed case. We are certainly not going to reopen it because of a coincidence, and that’s right from the top. Are we clear on that?”
“As glass,” Hodges says. “What’s the coincidence?”
“The head nurse in the Kiner Brain Injury Clinic committed suicide last night. Ruth Scapelli.”
“I heard,” Hodges says.
“While on one of your pilgrimages to visit the delightful Mr. Hartsfield, I presume.”
“Yeah.” No need to tell Pete that he never got in to see the delightful Mr. Hartsfield.
“Scapelli had one of those game gadgets. A Zappit. She apparently threw it in the trash before she bled out. One of the forensics guys found it.”
“Huh.” Hodges goes back into the living room and sits down, wincing when his body folds in the middle. “And that’s your idea of a coincidence?”
“Not necessarily mine,” Pete says heavily.
“But?”
“But I just want to retire in peace, goddammit! If there’s a ball to carry on this one, Izzy can carry it.”
“But Izzy don’t want to carry no steenkin ball.”
“No. Neither does the captain, or the commish.”
Hearing this, Hodges is forced to slightly revise his opinion of his old partner as a burnt-out case. “You actually spoke to them? Tried to keep this thing alive?”
“To the captain. Over Izzy Jaynes’s objections, may I add. Her strident objections. The captain talked to the commish. Late this evening I got the word to drop it, and you know why.”
“Yeah. Because it connects to Brady two ways. Martine Stover was one of his City Center victims. Ruth Scapelli was his nurse. It would take a moderately bright reporter about six minutes to put those things together and stir up a nice fat scare story. That’s what you got from Captain Pedersen?”
“That’s what I got. No one in police administration wants the spotlight back on Hartsfield, not when he’s still judged incompetent to assist in his own defense and thus unable to stand trial. Hell, no one in city government wants it.”
Hodges is silent, thinking hard—maybe as hard as ever in his life. He learned the phrase to cross the Rubicon way back in high school, and grasped its meaning without Mrs. Bradley’s explanation: to make an irrevocable decision. What he learned later, sometimes to his sorrow, is that one comes upon most Rubicons unprepared. If he tells Pete that Barbara Robinson also had a Zappit and may also have had suicide on her mind when she left school and went to Lowtown, Pete will almost have to go back to Pedersen. Two Zappit-related suicides can be written off as coincidence, but three? And okay, Barbara didn’t actually succeed, thank God, but she’s another person with a connection to Brady. She was at the ’Round Here concert, after all. Along with Hilda Carver and Dinah Scott, who also received Zappits. But are the police capable of believing what he’s starting to believe? It’s an important question, because Hodges loves Barbara Robinson and does not want to see her privacy violated without some concrete result to show for it.
“Kermit? Are you there?”
“Yeah. Just thinking. Did the Scapelli woman have any visitors last night?”
“Can’t tell you, because the neighbors haven’t been interviewed. It was a suicide, not a murder.”
“Olivia Trelawney also committed suicide,” Hodges says. “Remember?”
It’s Pete’s turn to be silent. Of course he remembers, and he also remembers it was an assisted suicide. Hartsfield planted a nasty malware worm in her computer, made her think she was being haunted by the ghost of a young mother killed at City Center. It helped that most people in the city had come to believe Olivia Trelawney’s carelessness with her ignition key was partially responsible for the massacre.
“Brady always enjoyed—”
“I know what he always enjoyed,” Pete says. “No need to belabor the point. I’ve got one other scrap for you, if you want it.”
“Hit me.”
“I spoke to Nancy Alderson around five this afternoon.”
Good for you, Pete, Hodges thinks. Doing a little more than punching the clock in your last few weeks.
“She said that Mrs. Ellerton already bought her daughter a new computer. For her online class. Said it’s under the basement stairs, still in the carton. Ellerton was going to give it to Martine for her birthday next month.”
“Planning for the future, in other words. Not the act of a suicidal woman, is it?”
“No, I wouldn’t say so. I have to go, Kerm. The ball is in your court. Play it or let it lie. Up to you.”
“Thanks, Pete. I appreciate the heads-up.”
“I wish it was like the old days,” Pete says. “We would have gone after this thing and let the chips fall.”
“But it’s not.” Hodges is rubbing his side again.
“No. It’s not. You take care of yourself. Put on some goddam weight.”
“I’ll give it my best shot,” Hodges says, but he’s talking to no one. Pete is gone.
He brushes his teeth, takes a painkiller, and climbs slowly into his pajamas. Then he goes to bed and stares up into the darkness, waiting for sleep or morning, whichever comes first.
8
Brady was careful to take Babineau’s ID badge from the top of his bureau after donning Babineau’s clothes, because the magnetic strip on the back turns it into an all-access pass. At 10:30 that night, around the time Hodges is finally getting a bellyful of the Weather Channel, he uses it for the first time, to enter the gated employees’ parking lot behind the main hospital building. The lot is loaded in the daytime, but at this hour he has his pick of spaces. He chooses one as far from the pervasive glare of the arc-sodiums as he can get. He tilts back the seat of Dr. B.’s luxury ride and kills the engine.
He drifts into sleep and finds himself cruising through a light fog of disconnected memories, all that remains of Felix Babineau. He tastes the peppermint lipstick of the first girl he
ever kissed, Marjorie Patterson at East Junior High, in Joplin, Missouri. He sees a basketball with the word VOIT printed on it in fading black letters. He feels warmth in his training pants as he pees himself while coloring behind his gammer’s sofa, a huge dinosaur covered in faded green velour.
Childhood memories are apparently the last things to go.
Shortly after two AM he flinches from a brilliant recollection of his father slapping him for playing with matches in the attic of their house and starts awake with a gasp in the Beemer’s bucket seat. For a moment the clearest detail of that memory lingers: a vein pulsing in his father’s flushed neck, just above the collar of his blue Izod golf shirt.
Then he’s Brady again, wearing a Babineau skin-suit.
9
While mostly confined to Room 217, and to a body that no longer works, Brady has had months to plan, to revise those plans, and revise the revisions. He has made mistakes along the way (he wishes he’d never used Z-Boy to send Hodges a message using the Blue Umbrella site, for instance, and he should have waited before going after Barbara Robinson), yet he has persevered, and here he is, on the verge of success.
He has mentally rehearsed this part of the operation dozens of times, and now moves ahead confidently. A swipe of Babineau’s card gets him in the door marked MAINTENANCE A. On the floors above, the machines that run the hospital are heard as a muted hum, if they are heard at all. Down here they’re a steady thunder, and the tile hallway is stiflingly hot. But it’s deserted, as he expected. A city hospital never falls into a deep sleep, but in the early hours of the morning it shuts its eyes and dozes.
The maintenance crew’s break room is also deserted, as is the shower and changing area beyond it. Padlocks secure some of the lockers, but the majority of them are open. He tries one after the other, checking sizes, until he finds a gray shirt and a pair of workpants that are Babineau’s approximate size. He takes off Babineau’s clothes and puts on the maintenance worker’s stuff, not neglecting to transfer the bottle of pills he took from Babineau’s bathroom. It’s a potent his ’n hers mixture. On one of the hooks by the showers he sees the final touch: a red-and-blue Groundhogs baseball cap. He takes it, adjusts the plastic band in back, and pulls it low over his forehead, making sure to get all of Babineau’s silver hair covered up.
