If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  Holly was more than happy to do that.

  She had left her traveling bag in the front hall. As she slung it over her shoulder and turned to her mother for their usual parting salute—two dry pecks on the cheek—Charlotte flung her arms around the daughter she had denigrated and belittled her whole life (not always unknowingly) and burst into tears.

  “Don’t go. Please stay another day. If you can’t stay until Christmas, at least stay through the weekend. I can’t stand to be on my own. Not yet. Maybe after Christmas, but not yet.”

  Her mother was clutching her like a drowning woman and Holly had to suppress a panicky urge not just to push her away but to actually fight her off. She endured the hug as long as she could, then wriggled free.

  “I have to go, Mom. I have an appointment.”

  “A date, you mean?” Charlotte smiled. Not a nice one. There were too many teeth in it. Holly had thought she was done being shocked by her mother, but it seemed that wasn’t the case. “Really? You?”

  Remember this could be the last time you see her, Holly thought. If it is, you don’t want to leave with angry words. You can be angry at her again if you live through this.

  “It’s something else,” she said. “But let’s have some tea. I have time for that.”

  So they had tea and the date-filled cookies Holly had always hated (they tasted dark, somehow), and it was almost eleven before she was finally able to escape her mother’s house, where the scent of the lemongrass candles still lingered. She kissed Charlotte on the cheek as they stood on the stoop. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Holly got as far as the door of her rental car, was actually touching the handle, when Charlotte called to her. Holly turned, almost expecting her mother to come leaping down the steps, arms spread, fingers hooked into claws, screaming Stay! You must stay! I command it!

  But Charlotte was still on the stoop with her arms wrapped around her middle. Shivering. She looked old and unhappy. “I made a mistake about the bathrobe,” she said. “It is my size. I must have read the tag wrong.”

  Holly smiled. “That’s good, Mom. I’m glad.”

  She backed down the driveway, checked for traffic, and turned toward the turnpike. Ten past eleven. Plenty of time.

  That’s what she thought then.

  2

  Her inability to discover the cause of the holdup only adds to Holly’s anxiety. The local AM and FM stations tell her nothing, including the one that’s supposed to have turnpike traffic info. Her Waze app, usually so reliable, is totally useless. The screen shows a smiling little man digging a hole with a shovel above the message WE’RE CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION BUT WE’LL BE BACK SOON!

  Frack.

  If she can make it another ten miles, she can get off at Exit 56 and take Highway 73, but right now Highway 73 might as well be on Jupiter. She feels around in her coat pocket, finds the last cough drop, and unwraps it while staring at the rear end of the dumptruck where a bumper sticker reads HOW’S MY DRIVING?

  All these people should be at malls, Holly thinks. They should be shopping at malls and downtown small businesses and helping the local economy instead of giving their money to Amazon and UPS and Federal Express. All of you should get off this fracking highway so people with really important business could…

  The traffic starts to move. Holly gives a cry of triumph that’s hardly out of her mouth before the dumptruck stops again. On her left, a man is chatting on his phone. On her right, a woman is freshening her lipstick. Her rental car’s digital clock tells her she now cannot expect to arrive at the Frederick Building until four o’clock. Four at the earliest.

  That still would leave me two hours, Holly thinks. Please God, please let me be there in time to get ready for him. For it. For the monster.

  3

  Barbara Robinson puts aside her copy of the college catalogue she has been perusing, turns on her phone, and goes to the WebWatcher app Justin Freilander has put on her phone.

  “You know that tracking someone without their permission isn’t exactly kosher, right?” Justin had said. “I’m not sure it’s even, like, totally legal.”

  “I just want to make sure my friend is okay,” Barbara had said, and gave him a radiant smile that melted any reservations he might have had.

  God knows Barbara has her own reservations; just looking at the little green dot on the map makes her feel guilty, especially since Jerome dumped his own tracker. But what Jerome doesn’t know (and Barbara won’t tell him) is that after Portland, Holly went to Pittsburgh. That, combined with the web searches Barbara looked at on Holly’s home computer, makes her think Holly’s interested in the Macready School bombing after all, and that interest seems to focus on either Charles “Chet” Ondowsky, the reporter from WPEN who was first on the scene, or Fred Finkel, his cameraman. Barbara thinks it’s almost certainly Ondowsky Holly is interested in, because there are more searches for him. Holly has even jotted his name on the pad beside her computer… with two question marks after it.

  Barbara doesn’t want to think her friend is having some kind of mindfuck, maybe even a nervous breakdown, nor does she want to believe Holly might have somehow stumbled on the trail of the school bomber… but she knows that’s not beyond the realm, as they say. Holly is insecure, Holly spends way too much time doubting herself, but Holly is also smart. Is it possible that Ondowsky and Finkel (a pairing that inevitably reminds her of Simon & Garfunkel) somehow stumbled across a clue to the bomber without knowing it, or even realizing it?

  This idea makes Barbara think of a film she watched with Holly. Blow-Up, it was called. In it, a photographer taking pictures of lovers in a park accidentally photographs a man hiding in the bushes with a pistol. What if something like that happened at the Macready School? What if the bomber had returned to the scene of the crime to gloat over his handiwork, and the TV guys had filmed him as he watched (or even pretended to help)? What if Holly had somehow realized that? Barbara knew and accepted that the idea was farfetched, but didn’t life sometimes imitate art? Maybe Holly had gone to Pittsburgh to interview Ondowsky and Finkel. That would be safe enough, Barbara supposes, but what if the bomber was still in the area, and Holly went after him?

  What if the bomber went after her?

  All of this is probably bullshit, but Barbara is nevertheless relieved when the WebWatcher app tracks Holly leaving Pittsburgh and driving to her mother’s house. She almost deleted the tracker then, certainly doing so would have eased her conscience, but then Holly had called her yesterday, apparently for no reason other than to tell her she’d be staying over at her mom’s on Saturday night. And then, at the end of the call, Holly had said, “I love you.”

  Well, of course she does, and Barbara loves her, but that was understood, not the kind of thing you had to say out loud. Except maybe on special occasions. Like if you’d had a fight with your friend and were making up. Or if you were going on a long trip. Or going off to fight in a war. Barbara is sure it was the last thing men and women said to their parents or partners before leaving to do that.

  And there had been a certain tone to the way she’d said it that Barbara didn’t like. Sad, almost. And now the green dot tells Barbara that Holly isn’t staying the night at her mother’s after all. She’s apparently headed back to the city. Change of plans? Maybe a fight with her mother?

  Or had she flat-out lied?

  Barbara glances at her desk and sees the DVDs she’s borrowed from Holly for her report: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Harper. She thinks they’ll be the perfect excuse to talk to Holly when Holly gets back. She’ll affect surprise to find Holly at home, then try to find out what was so important in Portland and Pittsburgh. She may even confess to the tracker—that will depend on how things go.

  She checks Holly’s location on her phone again. Still the turnpike. Barbara guesses that the traffic might be jammed up by construction or an accident. She looks at her watch, then back at the green dot. She thinks that
Holly will be lucky to get back much before five o’clock.

  And I’ll be at her apartment by five-thirty, Barbara thinks. I hope nothing’s wrong with her… but I think maybe there is.

  4

  The traffic crawls… then stops.

  Crawls… and stops.

  Stops.

  I’m going to lose my mind, Holly thinks. It’s just going to snap while I sit here looking at the back of that dumptruck. I’ll probably hear the sound when it goes. Like a breaking branch.

  The light has begun to drain out of this December day, just two calendar squares away from the shortest day of the year. The dashboard clock tells her that the earliest she can now hope to arrive at the Frederick Building is five o’clock, and that will only happen if the traffic starts to move again soon… and if she doesn’t run out of gas. She’s down to just over a quarter of a tank.

  I could miss him, she thinks. He could show up, and call me to text him the door code, and get no answer. He’ll think I lost my nerve and chickened out.

  The idea that coincidence, or some malign force (Jerome’s bird, all frowsy and frosty gray), may have decreed that her second face to face with Ondowsky should not happen brings her no relief. Because she’s not just on his personal hit parade now, she’s number one with a bullet. Facing him on her home ground, and with a plan, was to be her advantage. If she loses it, he’ll try to blindside her. And he could succeed.

  Once she reaches for her phone to call Pete, to tell him that a dangerous man is going to show up at the side door of their building, and he should approach with caution, but Ondowsky would talk his way out of it. Easily. He talks for a living. Even if he didn’t, Pete is getting on in years and at least twenty pounds over what he weighed when he retired from the police. Pete is slow. The thing pretending to be a TV reporter is fast. She will not risk Pete. She’s the one who let the genie out of the bottle.

  Ahead of her, the dumptruck’s taillights go out. It rolls ahead fifty feet or so and stops again. This time, however, the stop is briefer and the next forward advance is longer. Is it possible that the jam is breaking? She hardly dares to believe it, but she has Holly hope.

  Which turns out to be justified. In five minutes she’s doing forty. After seven, she’s up to fifty-five. After eleven, Holly puts her foot down and takes possession of the passing lane. When she shoots by the three-car pileup that caused the jam, she barely gives the wrecks that have been pulled over to the median strip a glance.

  If she can keep her speed to seventy until she leaves the turnpike at midtown, and if she catches most of the traffic lights, she estimates she can be at her building by five-twenty.

  5

  Holly actually arrives in the vicinity of her building at five minutes past five. Unlike the weirdly underpopulated Monroeville Mall, downtown is busy-busy-busy. This is both good and bad. Her chances of spotting Ondowsky in the bustle of bundled-up shoppers on Buell Street are small, but his chances of grabbing her (if he means to do that, and she wouldn’t put it past him) are equally small. It’s what Bill would call a push.

  As if to make up for her bad luck on the turnpike, she spots a car pulling out of a parking space almost directly across from the Frederick Building. She waits until it’s gone, then backs carefully into the space, trying to ignore the poophead behind her laying on his horn. Under less fraught circumstances that constant blare might have induced her to let the space go, but she doesn’t see another space on the whole block. That would leave her with the parking garage, probably on one of the upper levels, and Holly has seen too many movies where bad things happen to women in parking garages. Especially after dark, and it’s dark now.

  The horn-blower rolls past as soon as the front end of Holly’s rental car has cleared enough space, but the poophead—not a he but a she—slows long enough to wish Holly a little Christmas cheer with her middle finger.

  There’s a break in the traffic when Holly exits the car. She could jaywalk to the other side of the street—jay-trot, anyway—but she joins a crowd of shoppers waiting for the walk light at the next corner instead. Safety in numbers. She has her key to the building’s front door in her hand. She has no intention of going around to the side entrance. It’s in a service alley where she’d be an easy target.

  As she slips the key into the lock, a man with a muffler over his lower face and a Russian hat jammed down to his eyebrows passes her almost close enough to jostle. Ondowsky? No. At least probably no. How can she be sure?

  The shoebox of a lobby is empty. The lights are low. Shadows stretch everywhere. She hurries to the elevator. This is one of downtown’s older buildings, only eight floors, Midwest to the core, and there’s only the one for passengers. Roomy and supposedly state-of-the-art, but one is one. Tenants have been known to grumble about this, and those in a hurry often take the stairs, especially those with offices on the lower floors. Holly knows there’s also a freight elevator, but that one will be locked off for the weekend. She pushes the call button, suddenly sure the elevator will once more be out of order and her plan will collapse. But the doors open immediately and a female robo-voice welcomes her in. “Hello. Welcome to the Frederick Building.” With the lobby empty, it sounds to Holly like a disembodied voice in a horror movie.

  The doors close and she pushes for 5. There’s a TV screen that shows news items and ads during the week, but now it’s off. No Christmas music either, thank heaven.

  “Going up,” the robo-voice says.

  He’ll be waiting for me, she thinks. He’s gotten in somehow, he’ll be waiting for me when the elevator doors open, and I’ll have nowhere to run.

  But the doors open on an empty hall. She walks past the mail-drop (as old-fashioned as the talking elevator is newfangled), past the women’s and men’s, and stops at a door marked STAIRS. Everybody complains about Al Jordan, and with cause; the building’s superintendent is both incompetent and lazy. But he must be connected somehow, because he keeps his job in spite of the way the trash piles up in the basement, the broken side entrance camera, and the slow—almost whimsical—delivery of packages. Then there’s the matter of the fancy Japanese elevator, which pissed everybody off.

  This afternoon Holly is actively hoping for more of Al’s carelessness, so she doesn’t have to waste time getting a chair to stand on from the office. She opens the door to the stairs, and she’s in luck. Clustered there on the landing—and blocking the way to the sixth floor, probably a fire code violation—is a cache of cleaning supplies which include a mop leaning against the stair rail and a squeegee bucket half-filled with wash water.

  Holly considers dumping the bucket’s murky contents down the stairs—it would serve Al right—but in the end she can’t bring herself to do it. She pushes it into the women’s, removes the squeegee attachment, and dumps the filthy water down one of the sinks. She then rolls it to the elevator with her satchel of a purse hanging awkwardly from the crook of her arm. She pushes the call button. The doors open and the robo-voice tells her (just in case she’s forgotten), “This is five.” Holly remembers the day when Pete came puffing into the office and said, “Can you program that thing to say ‘Tell Al to fix me, then kill him’?”

  Holly turns the bucket over. If she keeps her feet together (and is careful), there’s just room for her to stand on it between the rollers. From her purse she takes out a Scotch tape dispenser and a small package wrapped in brown paper. Standing on tiptoe, stretching until the bottom of her shirt pulls free of her pants, she tapes the package in the far left corner of the elevator car’s ceiling. It’s thus high above eye level, where (according to the late Bill Hodges) people tend not to look. Ondowsky better not. If he does, she’s hung.

  She takes her phone out of her pocket, holds it up, and snaps a picture of the package. If things go as she hopes, Ondowsky will never see this photo, which isn’t much of an insurance policy in any case.

  The elevator’s doors have closed again. Holly pushes the open button and rolls the mop bucket back up the
hall, returning it to where she found it on the stair landing. Then she goes past Brilliancy Beauty Products (where no one seems to work except for one middle-aged man who reminds Holly of an old cartoon character named Droopy Dog) to Finders Keepers, at the end. She unlocks the door and lets herself in with a sigh of relief. She looks at her watch. Nearly five-thirty. Time is now very tight, indeed.

  She goes to the office safe and runs the combination. She takes out the late Bill Hodges’s Smith & Wesson revolver. Although she knows it’s loaded—an unloaded handgun is useless even as a club, another of her mentor’s dictums—she rolls the chamber to make sure, then snaps it closed.

  Center mass, she thinks. As soon as he comes out of the elevator. Don’t worry about the box with the money; if it’s cardboard, the slug will go right through, even if he’s holding it in front of his chest. If it’s steel, I’ll have to go for a headshot. The range will be short. It could be messy, but—

  She surprises herself with a little laugh.

  But Al has left cleaning supplies.

  Holly looks at her watch. 5:34. That leaves her twenty-six minutes before Ondowsky shows up, assuming he’s on time. She still has things to do. All are important. Deciding which is the most important is a no-brainer, because if she doesn’t survive this, someone has to know about the thing that bombed the Macready School in order to eat the pain of the survivors and the bereaved, and there is one person who will believe her.

  She turns on her phone, opens the recording app, and begins to speak.

  6

  The Robinsons gave their daughter a nifty little Ford Focus for her eighteenth birthday, and as Holly is parking downtown on Buell Street, Barbara is three blocks from Holly’s apartment building, stopped at a red light. She takes the opportunity to glance at the WebWatcher app on her phone and murmurs “Shit.” Holly hasn’t gone home. She’s at the office, although Barbara can’t understand why she’d go there on a Saturday evening this close to Christmas.