by Stephen King
He walks the length of Maintenance A and turns right into the hospital laundry, which is humid as well as hot. Two housekeepers are sitting in plastic contour chairs between two rows of gigantic Foshan dryers. Both are fast asleep, one with an overturned box of animal crackers spilling into the lap of her green nylon skirt. Farther down, past the washing machines, two laundry carts are parked against the cinderblock wall. One is filled with hospital johnnies, the other piled high with fresh bedlinens. Brady takes a handful of johnnies, puts them on top of the neatly folded sheets, and rolls the cart on down the hall.
It takes a change of elevators and a walk across the skyway to reach the Bucket, and he sees exactly four people on the journey. Two are nurses whispering together outside a med supply closet; two are interns in the doctors’ lounge, laughing quietly over something on a laptop computer. None of them notice the graveyard-shift maintenance man, head down as he pushes an overloaded cart of laundry.
The point where he’s most apt to be noticed—and perhaps recognized—is the nurses’ station in the middle of the Bucket. But one of the nurses is playing solitaire on her computer, and the other is writing notes, propping her head up with her free hand. That one catches movement out of the corner of her eye and without raising her head asks how he’s doing.
“Yeah, good,” Brady says. “Cold night, though.”
“Uh-huh, and I heard there’s snow coming.” She yawns and goes back to her notes.
Brady rolls his basket down the hall, stopping just short of 217. One of the Bucket’s little secrets is that here the patient rooms have two doors, one marked and one unmarked. The unmarked ones open into the closets, making it possible to restock linens and other necessaries at night without disturbing the patients’ rest … or their disturbed minds. Brady grabs a few of the johnnies, takes a quick look around to make sure he is still unobserved, and slips through this unmarked door. A moment later he’s looking down at himself. For years he has fooled everyone into believing that Brady Hartsfield is what the staff calls (only among themselves) a gork, a ding, or a LOBNH: lights are on but nobody’s home. Now he really is one.
He bends and strokes one lightly stubbled cheek. Runs the pad of his thumb over one closed lid, feeling the raised curve of eyeball beneath. Lifts one hand, turns it over, and lays it gently palm-up on the coverlet. From the pocket of the borrowed gray trousers he takes the bottle of pills and spills half a dozen in the upturned palm. Take, eat, he thinks. This is my body, broken for you.
He enters that broken body one final time. He doesn’t need to use the Zappit to do this now, nor does he have to worry that Babineau will seize control and run away like the Gingerbread Man. With Brady’s mind gone, Babineau is the gork. Nothing left in there but a memory of his father’s golf shirt.
Brady looks around the inside of his head like a man giving a hotel room one last check after a long-term stay. Anything hanging forgotten in the closet? A tube of toothpaste left in the bathroom? Maybe a cufflink under the bed?
No. Everything is packed and the room is empty. He closes his hand, hating the draggy way the fingers move, as if the joints are filled with sludge. He opens his mouth, lifts the pills, and drops them in. He chews. The taste is bitter. Babineau, meanwhile, has collapsed bonelessly to the floor. Brady swallows once. And again. There. It’s done. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, he’s staring beneath the bed at a pair of slippers Brady Hartsfield will never wear again.
He gets to Babineau’s feet, brushes himself off, and takes one more look at the body that carried him around for almost thirty years. The one that stopped being of any use to him the second time he was smashed in the head at Mingo Auditorium, just before he could trigger the plastic explosive strapped to the underside of his wheelchair. Once he might have worried that this drastic step would backfire on him, that his consciousness and all his grand plans would die along with his body. No more. The umbilical cord has been severed. He has crossed the Rubicon.
So long, Brady, he thinks, it was good to know you.
This time when he pushes the laundry cart past the nurses’ station, the one who was playing solitaire is gone, probably to the bathroom. The other is asleep on her notes.
10
But it’s quarter to four now, and there’s so much more to do.
After changing back into Babineau’s clothes, Brady leaves the hospital the same way he entered and drives toward Sugar Heights. Because Z-Boy’s homemade silencer is kaput and an unmuffled gunshot is likely to be reported in the town’s ritziest neighborhood (where rent-a-cops from Vigilant Guard Service are never more than a block or two away), he stops at Valley Plaza, which is on the way. He checks the empty lot for cop cars, sees none, and drives around to the loading area of Discount Home Furnishings.
God, it’s so good to be out! Fucking wonderful!
Walking to the front of the Beemer, he breathes deeply of the cold winter air wrapping the sleeve of Babineau’s expensive topcoat around the .32’s short barrel as he goes. It won’t be as good as Z-Boy’s silencer, and he knows it’s a risk, but not a big one. Just the one shot. He looks up first, wanting to see the stars, but clouds have blanked out the sky. Oh, well, there will be other nights. Many of them. Possibly thousands. He is not limited to Babineau’s body, after all.
He aims and fires. A small round hole appears in the Beemer’s windshield. Now comes another risk, driving the last mile to Sugar Heights with a bullet hole in the glass just above the steering wheel, but this is the time of night when the suburban streets are at their emptiest and the cops also doze, especially in the better neighborhoods.
Twice headlights approach him and he holds his breath, but both times they pass by without slowing. January air comes in through the bullet hole, making a thin wheezing sound. He makes it back to Babineau’s McMansion without incident. No need to tap the code this time; he just hits the gate opener clipped to the visor. When he reaches the top of the drive, he veers onto the snow-covered lawn, bounces over a hard crust of plowed snow, clips a bush, and stops.
Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.
Only problem is, he neglected to bring a knife. He could get one in the house, he has another piece of business in there, but he doesn’t want to make two trips. He has miles to go before he sleeps, and he’s anxious to start rolling them. He opens the center console and paws through it. Surely a dandy like Babineau will keep spare grooming implements, even a fingernail clipper will do … but there’s nothing. He tries the glove compartment, and in the folder containing the Beemer’s documents (leather, of course) he finds an Allstate insurance card laminated in plastic. It will serve. They are, after all, the Good Hands people.
Brady pushes back the sleeve of Babineau’s cashmere overcoat and the shirt beneath, then drags a corner of the laminated card over his forearm. It produces nothing but a thin red line. He goes again, bearing down much harder, lips pulled back in a grimace. This time the skin splits and blood flows. He gets out of the car holding his arm up, then leans back in. He tips a spatter of droplets first onto the seat and then onto the bottom arc of the steering wheel. There’s not much, but it won’t take much. Not when combined with the bullet hole in the windshield.
He bounds up the porch steps, each springy leap a small orgasm. Cora is lying beneath the hall coathooks, just as dead as ever. Library Al is still asleep on the couch. Brady shakes him, and when he only gets a few muffled grunts, he grabs Al with both hands and rolls him onto the floor. Al’s eyes creak open.
“Huh? Wha?”
The stare is dazed but not completely blank. There’s probably no Al Brooks left inside that plundered head, but there’s still a bit of the alter ego Brady has created. Enough.
“Hey there, Z-Boy,” Brady says, squatting down.
“Hey,” Z-Boy croaks, struggling to sit up. “Hey there, Dr. Z. I’m watching that house, just like you told me. The woman—the one who can still walk—she uses that Zappit all the time. I watch her from the g’rage acro
ss the street.”
“You don’t have to do that anymore.”
“No? Say, where are we?”
“My house,” Brady says. “You killed my wife.”
Z-Boy stares at the white-haired man in the overcoat, his mouth hung open. His breath is awful, but Brady doesn’t draw away. Slowly, Z-Boy’s face begins to crumple. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. “Kill? … did not!”
“Yes.”
“No! Never would!”
“You did, though. But only because I told you to.”
“Are you sure? I don’t remember.”
Brady takes him by the shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault. You were hypnotized.”
Z-Boy’s face brightens. “By Fishin’ Hole!”
“Yes, by Fishin’ Hole. And while you were, I told you to kill Mrs. Babineau.”
Z-Boy looks at him with doubt and woe. “If I did, it wasn’t my fault. I was hypnotized and can’t even remember.”
“Take this.”
Brady hands Z-Boy the gun. Z-Boy holds it up, frowning as if at some exotic artifact.
“Put it in your pocket, and give me your car keys.”
Z-Boy stuffs the .32 absently into his pants pocket and Brady winces, expecting the gun to go off and put a bullet in the poor sap’s leg. At last Z-Boy holds out his keyring. Brady pockets it, stands up, and crosses the living room.
“Where are you going, Dr. Z?”
“I won’t be long. Why don’t you sit on the couch until I get back?”
“I’ll sit on the couch until you get back,” Z-Boy says.
“Good idea.”
Brady goes into Dr. Babineau’s study. There’s an ego wall crammed with framed photos, including one of a younger Felix Babineau shaking hands with the second President Bush, both of them grinning like idiots. Brady ignores the pictures; he’s seen them many times before, during the months when he was learning how to be in another person’s body, what he now thinks of as his student driver days. Nor is he interested in the desktop computer. What he wants is the MacBook Air sitting on the credenza. He opens it, powers it up, and types in Babineau’s password, which happens to be CEREBELLIN.
“Your drug didn’t do shit,” Brady says as the main screen comes up. He’s actually not sure of this, but it’s what he chooses to believe.
His fingers rattle the keyboard with a practiced speed of which Babineau would have been incapable, and a hidden program, one Brady installed himself on a previous visit to the good doctor’s head, pops up. It’s labeled FISHIN’ HOLE. He types again, and the program reaches out to the repeater in Freddi Linklatter’s computer hideaway.
WORKING, the laptop’s screen says, and below this: 3 FOUND.
Three found! Three already!
Brady is delighted but not really surprised, even though it’s the graveyard of the morning. There are a few insomniacs in every crowd, and that includes the crowd that has received free Zappits from badconcert.com. What better way to while away the sleepless hours before dawn than with a handy game console? And before playing solitaire or Angry Birds, why not check those pink fish on the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, and see if they’ve finally been programmed to turn into numbers when tapped? A combination of the right ones will win prizes, but at four in the morning, that may not be the prime motivator. Four in the morning is usually an unhappy time to be awake. It’s when unpleasant thoughts and pessimistic ideas come to the fore, and the demo screen is soothing. It’s also addictive. Al Brooks knew that before he became Z-Boy; Brady knew from the moment he saw it. Just a lucky coincidence, but what Brady has done since—what he has prepared—is no coincidence. It’s the result of long and careful planning in the prison of his hospital room and his wasted body.
He shuts down the laptop, tucks it under his arm, and starts to leave the study. At the doorway he has an idea and goes back to Babineau’s desk. He opens the center drawer and finds exactly what he wants—he doesn’t even have to rummage. When your luck is running, it’s running.
Brady returns to the living room. Z-Boy is sitting on the sofa, head lowered, shoulders slumped, hands dangling between his thighs. He looks unutterably weary.
“I have to go now,” Brady says.
“Where?”
“Not your business.”
“Not my business.”
“Exactly right. You should go back to sleep.”
“Here on the couch?”
“Or in one of the bedrooms upstairs. But you need to do something first.” He hands Z-Boy the felt-tip pen he found in Babineau’s desk. “Make your mark, Z-Boy, just like when you were in Mrs. Ellerton’s house.”
“They were alive when I was watching from the g’rage, I know that much, but they might be dead now.”
“They probably are, yes.”
“I didn’t kill them, too, did I? Because it seems like I was in the bathroom, at least. And drawed a Z there.”
“No, no, nothing like th—”
“I looked for the Zappit like you asked me to, I’m sure of that. I looked hard, but I didn’t find it anywhere. I think maybe she throwed it away.”
“That doesn’t matter anymore. Just make your mark here, okay? Make it in at least ten places.” A thought occurs. “Can you still count to ten?”
“One … two … three …”
Brady glances at Babineau’s Rolex. Quarter past four. Morning rounds in the Bucket begin at five. Time is fleeting on wingèd feet. “That’s great. Make your mark in at least ten places. Then you can go back to sleep.”
“Okay. I’ll make my mark in at least ten places, then I’ll sleep, then I’ll drive over to that house you want me to watch. Or should I stop doing that now that they’re dead?”
“I think you can stop now. Let’s review, okay? Who killed my wife?”
“I did, but it wasn’t my fault. I was hypnotized, and I can’t even remember.” Z-Boy begins to cry. “Will you come back, Dr. Z?”
Brady smiles, exposing Babineau’s expensive dental work. “Sure.” His eyes move up and to the left as he says it.
He watches the old guy shuffle to the huge God-I’m-rich television mounted on the wall and draw a large Z on the screen. Zs all over the murder scene aren’t absolutely necessary, but Brady thinks it will be a nice touch, especially when the police ask the former Library Al for his name and he tells them it’s Z-Boy. Just a bit of extra filigree on a finely crafted piece of jewelry.
Brady goes to the front door, stepping over Cora again on the way. He bops down the porch steps and does a dance move at the bottom, snapping Babineau’s fingers. That hurts a little, just a touch of incipient arthritis, but so what? Brady knows what real pain is, and a few twinges in the old phalanges ain’t it.
He jogs to Al’s Malibu. Not much of a ride compared to the late Dr. Babineau’s BMW, but it will get him where he needs to go. He starts it and frowns when classical shit comes pouring out of the dashboard speaker. He switches to BAM-100 and finds some Black Sabbath from back when Ozzy was still cool. He takes a final look at the Beemer parked askew on the lawn, then gets rolling.
Miles to go before he sleeps, and then the final touch, the cherry on top of the sundae. He won’t need Freddi Linklatter for that, only Dr. B.’s MacBook. He’s running without a leash now.
He’s free.
11
Around the time Z-Boy is proving that he can still count to ten, Freddi Linklatter’s blood-caked lashes come unstuck from her blood-caked cheeks. She finds herself looking into a gaping brown eye. It takes her several long moments to decide it isn’t really an eye, only a swirl of woodgrain that looks like an eye. She is lying on the floor and suffering the worst hangover of her life, even worse than after that cataclysmic party to celebrate her twenty-first, when she mixed crystal meth with Ronrico. She thought later that she was lucky to have survived that little experiment. Now she almost wishes she hadn’t, because this is worse. It’s not only her head; her chest feels like Marshawn Lynch has been using her for a tackling
dummy.
She tells her hands to move and they reluctantly answer the call. She places them in push-up position and shoves. She comes up, but her top shirt stays down, stuck to the floor in a pool of what looks like blood and smells suspiciously like Scotch. So that’s what she was drinking, and fell over her own stupid feet. Smacked her head. But dear God, how much did she put away?
It wasn’t like that, she thinks. Someone came, and you know who it was.
It’s a simple process of deduction. Lately she’s only had two visitors here, the Z-Dudes, and the one who wears the ratty parka hasn’t been around for awhile.
She tries to get to her feet, and can’t make it at first. Nor can she take more than shallow breaths. Deeper ones hurt her above her left breast. It feels like something is sticking in there.
My flask?
I was spinning it while I waited for him to show up. To give me the final payment and get out of my life.
“Shot me,” she croaks. “Fucking Dr. Z shot me.”
She staggers into the bathroom and is hardly able to believe the train wreck she sees in the mirror. The left side of her face is covered with blood, and there’s a purple knob rising from a gash above her left temple, but that’s not the worst. Her blue chambray shirt is also matted with blood—mostly from the head wound, she hopes, head wounds bleed like crazy—and there’s a round black hole in the left breast pocket. He shot her, all right. Now she remembers the bang and the smell of gunsmoke just before she passed out.
She tweezes her shaking fingers into the breast pocket, still taking those shallow breaths, and pulls out her pack of Marlboro Lights. There’s the bullet hole right through the middle of the M. She drops the cigarettes into the basin, works at the buttons of the shirt, and lets it fall to the floor. The smell of Scotch is stronger now. The shirt beneath is khaki, with big flap pockets. When she tries to pull the flask from the one on the left, she utters a low mewl of agony—all she can manage without taking a deeper breath—but when she gets it free, the pain in her chest lessens a little. The bullet also went through the flask, and the prongs on the side closest to her skin are bright with blood. She drops the ruined flask on top of the Marlboros, and goes to work on the khaki shirt’s buttons. This takes longer, but eventually it also falls to the floor. Beneath it is an American Giant tee, the kind that also has a pocket. She reaches into it and takes out a tin of Altoids. There’s a hole in this, too. The tee has no buttons, so she works her pinky finger into the bullet hole in the pocket and pulls. The shirt tears, and at last she’s looking at her own skin, freckled with blood.
