End of Watch: A Novel (The Bill Hodges Trilogy Book 3)

by Stephen King

  He gets a seven-fish, then a four, and then—jackpot!—one turns into a twelve. He says, “I’m up to twenty-seven.” But is that right? He’s losing count.

  Brady doesn’t tell him, Brady only says, “Eighty seconds to go,” and now his voice seems to have picked up a slight echo, as if it’s coming to Hodges from the far end of a long hallway. Meanwhile, a marvelous thing is happening: the pain in his gut is starting to recede.

  Whoa, he thinks. The AMA should know about this.

  He gets another pinky. It turns into a 2. Not so good, but there are plenty more. Plenty, plenty more.

  That’s when he starts to feel something like fingers fluttering delicately inside his head, and it’s not his imagination. He’s being invaded. It was easy, Brady said of Nurse MacDonald. It always is, once you get inside and start pulling the levers.

  And when Brady gets to his levers?

  He’ll jump inside me the way he jumped inside Babineau, Hodges thinks … although this realization is now like the voice and the music, coming from the far end of a long hallway. At the end of that hallway is the door to Room 217, and the door is standing open.

  Why would he want to do that? Why would he want to inhabit a body that’s turned into a cancer factory? Because he wants me to kill Holly. Not with the gun, though, he’d never trust me with that. He’ll use my hands to choke her, broken wrist and all. Then he’ll leave me to face what I’ve done.

  “You’re getting better, Detective Hodges, and you still have a minute to go. Just relax and keep tapping. It’s easier when you relax.”

  The voice is no longer echoing down a hallway; even though Brady is now standing right in front of him, it’s coming from a galaxy far, far away. Brady bends down and stares eagerly into Hodges’s face. Only there are fish swimming between them. Pinkies and blueies and reddies. Because Hodges is in the Fishin’ Hole now. Except it’s really an aquarium, and he’s the fish. Soon he will be eaten. Eaten alive. “Come on, Billy-boy, tap those pink fish!”

  I can’t let him inside me, Hodges thinks, but I can’t keep him out.

  He taps a pink fish, it turns into a 9, and it isn’t just fingers he feels now but another consciousness spilling into his mind. It’s spreading like ink in water. Hodges tries to fight and knows he will lose. The strength of that invading personality is incredible.

  I’m going to drown. Drown in the Fishin’ Hole. Drown in Brady Hartsfield.

  By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful s—

  A pane of glass shatters close by. It’s followed by a jubilant chorus of boys shouting, “That’s a HOME RUN!”

  The bond binding Hodges to Hartsfield is broken by the pure, unexpected surprise of the thing. Hodges jerks back in the chair and looks up as Brady wheels toward the couch, eyes wide and mouth open in startlement. The Victory .38, held against the small of his back only by its short barrel (the cylinder won’t allow it to go deeper), falls out of his belt and thumps to the bearskin rug.

  Hodges doesn’t hesitate. He throws the Zappit into the fireplace.

  “Don’t you do that!” Brady bellows, turning back. He raises the Scar. “Don’t you fucking da—”

  Hodges grasps the nearest thing to hand, not the .38 but the ceramic penholder. There’s nothing wrong with his left wrist, and the range is short. He throws it at the face Brady has stolen, he throws it hard, and connects dead center. The ceramic skull shatters. Brady screams—pain, yes, but mostly shock—and his nose begins to gush blood. When he tries to bring up the Scar, Hodges pistons out his feet, enduring another deep gore of that bull’s horn, and smashes them into Brady’s chest. Brady backpedals, almost catches his balance, then trips over a hassock and sprawls on the bearskin rug.

  Hodges tries to launch himself out of the chair and only succeeds in overturning the end table. He goes to his knees as Brady sits up, bringing the Scar around. There’s a gunshot before he can level it on Hodges, and Brady screams again. This time it’s all pain. He looks unbelievingly at his shoulder, where blood is pouring through a hole in his shirt.

  Holly is sitting up. There’s a grotesque bruise over her left eye, in almost the same place as the one on Freddi’s forehead. That left eye is red, filled with blood, but the other is bright and aware. She’s holding the Victory .38 in both hands.

  “Shoot him again!” Hodges roars. “Shoot him again, Holly!”

  As Brady lurches to his feet—one hand clapped to the wound in his shoulder, the other holding the Scar, face slack with ­disbelief—Holly fires again. This bullet goes way high, ricocheting off the fieldstone chimney above the roaring fire.

  “Stop that!” Brady shouts, ducking. At the same time he’s struggling to raise the Scar. “Stop doing that, you bi—”

  Holly fires a third time. The sleeve of Brady’s shirt twitches, and he yelps. Hodges isn’t sure she’s winged him again, but she at least grooved him.

  Hodges gets to his feet and tries to run at Brady, who is making another effort to raise the automatic rifle. The best he can manage is a slow plod.

  “You’re in the way!” Holly cries. “Bill, you’re in the fracking way!”

  Hodges drops to his knees and tucks his head. Brady turns and runs. The .38 bangs. Wood splinters fly from the doorframe a foot to Brady’s right. Then he’s gone. The front door opens. Cold air rushes in, making the fire do an excited shimmy.

  “I missed him!” Holly shouts, agonized. “Stupid and useless! Stupid and useless!” She drops the Victory and slaps herself across the face.

  Hodges catches her hand before she can do it again, and kneels beside her. “No, you got him at least once, maybe twice. You’re the reason we’re still alive.”

  But for how long? Brady held onto that goddam grease gun, he may have an extra clip or two, and Hodges knows he wasn’t lying about the SCAR 17S’s ability to demolish concrete blocks. He has seen a similar assault rifle, the HK 416, do exactly that, at a private shooting facility in the wilds of Victory County. He went there with Pete, and on the way back they joked about how the HK should be standard police issue.

  “What do we do?” Holly asks. “What do we do now?”

  Hodges picks up the .38 and rolls the barrel. Two rounds left, and the .38 is only good at short range, anyway. Holly has a concussion at the very least, and he’s almost incapacitated. The bitter truth is this: they had a chance, and Brady got away.

  He hugs her and says, “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe we should hide.”

  “I don’t think that would work,” he says, but doesn’t say why and is relieved when she doesn’t ask. It’s because there’s still a little of Brady left inside of him. It probably won’t last long, but for the time being, at least, Hodges suspects it’s as good as a homing beacon.

  32

  Brady staggers through shin-deep snow, eyes wide with disbelief, Babineau’s sixty-three-year-old heart banging away in his chest. There’s a metallic taste on his tongue, his shoulder is burning, and the thought running through his head on a constant loop is That bitch, that bitch, that dirty sneaking bitch, why didn’t I kill her while I had the chance?

  The Zappit is gone, too. Good old Zappit Zero, and it’s the only one he brought. Without it, he has no way to reach the minds of those with active Zappits. He stands panting in front of Heads and Skins, coatless in the rising wind and driving snow. The keys to Z-Boy’s car are in his pocket, along with another clip for the Scar, but what good are the keys? That shitbox wouldn’t make it halfway up the first hill before it got stuck.

  I have to take them, he thinks, and not just because they owe me. The SUV Hodges drove down here is the only way out of here, and either he or the bitch probably has the keys. It’s possible they left them in the vehicle, but that’s a chance I can’t afford to take.

  Besides, it would mean leaving them alive.

  He knows what he has to do, and switches the fire control to FULL AUTO. He socks the butt of the Scar against his good shoulder, and starts shooting, raking the barrel fr
om left to right but concentrating on the great room, where he left them.

  Gunfire lights up the night, turning the fast-falling snow into a series of flash photographs. The sound of the overlapping reports is deafening. Windows explode inward. Clapboards rise from the façade like bats. The front door, left half-open in his escape, flies all the way back, rebounds, and is driven back again. Babineau’s face is twisted in an expression of joyful hate that is all Brady Hartsfield, and he doesn’t hear the growl of an approaching engine or the clatter of steel treads from behind him.

  33

  “Down!” Hodges shouts. “Holly, down!”

  He doesn’t wait to see if she’ll obey on her own, just lands on top of her and covers her body with his. Above them, the living room is a storm of flying splinters, broken glass, and chips of rock from the chimney. An elk’s head falls off the wall and lands on the hearth. One glass eye has been shattered by a Winchester slug, and it looks like it’s winking at them. Holly screams. Half a dozen bottles on the buffet explode, releasing the stench of bourbon and gin. A slug strikes a burning log in the fireplace, busting it in two and sending up a storm of sparks.

  Please let him have just the one clip, Hodges thinks. And if he aims low, let him hit me instead of Holly. Only a .308 Winchester slug that hits him will go through them both, and he knows it.

  The gunfire stops. Is he reloading, or is he out? Live or Memorex?

  “Bill, get off me, I can’t breathe.”

  “Better not,” he says. “I—”

  “What’s that? What’s that sound?” And then, answering her own question, “Someone’s coming!”

  Now that his ears are clearing a little, Hodges can hear it, too. At first he thinks it must be Thurston’s grandson, on one of the snowmobiles the old man mentioned, and about to be slaughtered for trying to play Good Samaritan. But maybe not. The approaching engine sounds too heavy for a snowmobile.

  Bright yellow-white light floods in through the shattered windows like the spotlights from a police helicopter. Only this is no helicopter.

  34

  Brady is ramming his extra clip home when he finally registers the growl-and-clank of the approaching vehicle. He whirls, wounded shoulder throbbing like an infected tooth, just as a huge silhouette appears at the end of the camp road. The headlamps dazzle him. His shadow leaps out long on the sparkling snow as the whatever-it-is comes rolling toward the shot-up house, throwing gouts of snow behind its clanking treads. And it’s not just coming at the house. It’s coming at him.

  He depresses the trigger and the Scar resumes its thunder. Now he can see it’s some kind of snow machine with a bright orange cabin sitting high above the churning treads. The windshield explodes just as someone dives for safety from the open driver’s side door.

  The monstrosity keeps coming. Brady tries to run, and Babineau’s expensive loafers slip. He flails, staring at those oncoming headlights, and goes down on his back. The orange invader rises above him. He sees a steel tread whirring toward him. He tries to push it away, as he sometimes pushed objects in his room—the blinds, the bedclothes, the door to the bathroom—but it’s like trying to beat off a charging lion with a toothbrush. He raises a hand and draws in breath to scream. Before he can, the left tread of the Tucker Sno-Cat rolls over his midsection and chews it open.

  35

  Holly has zero doubt concerning the identity of their rescuer, and doesn’t hesitate. She runs through the bullet-pocked foyer and out the front door, crying his name over and over. Jerome looks as if he’s been dusted in powdered sugar when he picks himself up. She’s sobbing and laughing as she throws herself into his arms.

  “How did you know? How did you know to come?”

  “I didn’t,” he says. “It was Barbara. When I called to say I was coming home, she told me I had to go after you or Brady would kill you … only she called him the Voice. She was half crazy.”

  Hodges is making his way toward the two of them at a slow stagger, but he’s close enough to overhear this, and remembers that Barbara told Holly some of that suicide-voice was still inside her. Like a trail of slime, she said. Hodges knows what she was talking about, because he’s got some of that disgusting thought-snot in his own head, at least for the time being. Maybe Barbara had just enough of a connection to know that Brady was lying in wait.

  Or hell, maybe it was pure woman’s intuition. Hodges actually believes in such a thing. He’s old-school.

  “Jerome,” he says. The word comes out in a dusty croak. “My man.” His knees unlock. He’s going down.

  Jerome frees himself from Holly’s deathgrip and puts an arm around Hodges before he can. “Are you all right? I mean … I know you’re not all right, but are you shot?”

  “No.” Hodges puts his own arm around Holly. “And I should have known you’d come. Neither one of you minds worth a tinker’s damn.”

  “Couldn’t break up the band before the final reunion concert, could we?” Jerome says. “Let’s get you in the—”

  There comes an animal sound from their left, a guttural groan that struggles to be words and can’t make it.

  Hodges is more exhausted than ever in his life, but he walks toward that groan anyway. Because …

  Well, because.

  What was the word he used with Holly, on their way out here? Closure, wasn’t it?

  Brady’s hijacked body has been laid open to the backbone. His guts are spread out around him like the wings of a red dragon. Pools of steaming blood are sinking into the snow. But his eyes are open and aware, and all at once Hodges can feel those fingers again. This time they’re not just probing lazily. This time they’re frantic, scrabbling for purchase. Hodges ejects them as easily as that floor-mopping orderly once pushed this man’s presence out of his mind.

  He spits Brady out like a watermelon seed.

  “Help me,” Brady whispers. “You have to help me.”

  “I think you’re way beyond help,” Hodges says. “You were run down, Brady. Run down by an extremely heavy vehicle. Now you know what that feels like. Don’t you?”

  “Hurts,” Brady whispers.

  “Yes,” Hodges says. “I imagine it does.”

  “If you can’t help me, shoot me.”

  Hodges holds out his hand, and Holly puts the Victory .38 into it like a nurse handing a doctor a scalpel. He rolls the cylinder and dumps out one of the two remaining bullets. Then he closes the gun up again. Although he hurts everywhere now, hurts like hell, Hodges kneels down and puts his father’s gun in Brady’s hand.

  “You do it,” he says. “It’s what you always wanted.”

  Jerome stands by, ready in case Brady should decide to use that final round on Hodges instead. But he doesn’t. Brady tries to point the gun at his head. He can’t. His arm twitches, but won’t rise. He groans again. Blood pours over his lower lip and seeps out from between Felix Babineau’s capped teeth. It would almost be possible to feel sorry for him, Hodges thinks, if you didn’t know what he did at City Center, what he tried to do at the Mingo Auditorium, and the suicide machine he’s set in motion today. That machine will slow down and stop now that its prime operative is finished, but it will swallow up a few more sad young people before it does. Hodges is pretty sure of that. Suicide may not be painless, but it is catching.

  You could feel sorry for him if he wasn’t a monster, Hodges thinks.

  Holly kneels, lifts Brady’s hand, and puts the muzzle of the gun against his temple. “Now, Mr. Hartsfield,” she says. “You have to do the rest yourself. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

  “I hope not,” Jerome says. In the glare of the Sno-Cat’s headlights, his face is a stone.

  For a long moment the only sounds are the rumble of the snow machine’s big engine and the rising wind of winter storm Eugenie.

  Holly says, “Oh God. His finger’s not even on the trigger. One of you needs to help me, I don’t think I can—”

  Then, a gunshot.

  “Brady’s last trick,” Je
rome says. “Jesus.”

  36

  There’s no way Hodges can make it back to the Expedition, but Jerome is able to muscle him into the cab of the Sno-Cat. Holly sits beside him on the outside. Jerome climbs behind the wheel and throws it into gear. Although he backs up and then circles wide around the remains of Babineau’s body, he tells Holly not to look until they’re at least up the first hill. “We’re leaving blood-tracks.”

  “Oough.”

  “Correct,” Jerome says. “Oough is correct.”

  “Thurston told me he had snowmobiles,” Hodges says. “He didn’t mention anything about a Sherman tank.”

  “It’s a Tucker Sno-Cat, and you didn’t offer him your MasterCard as collateral. Not to mention an excellent Jeep Wrangler that got me out here to the williwags just fine, thanks.”

  “Is he really dead?” Holly asks. Her wan face is turned up to Hodges’s, and the huge knot on her forehead actually seems to be pulsing. “Really and for sure?”

  “You saw him put a bullet in his brain.”

  “Yes, but is he? Really and for sure?”

  The answer he won’t give is no, not yet. Not until the trails of slime he’s left in the heads of God knows how many people are washed away by the brain’s remarkable ability to heal itself. But in another week, another month at the outside, Brady will be all gone.

  “Yes,” he says. “And Holly? Thanks for programming that text alert. The home run boys.”

  She smiles. “What was it? The text, I mean?”

  Hodges struggles his phone out of his coat pocket, checks it, and says, “I will be goddamned.” He begins to laugh. “I completely forgot.”