بعد

AFTER

Four Days Later

Pete Huntley is far less familiar with Kiner Memorial than his old partner, who made many pilgrimages here to visit a long-term resident who has now passed away. It takes Pete two stops—one at the main desk and one in Oncology—before he locates Hodges’s room, and when he gets there, it’s empty. A cluster of balloons with HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD on them are tethered to one of the siderails and floating near the ceiling.

A nurse pokes her head in, sees him looking at the empty bed, and gives him a smile. “The solarium at the end of the hall. They’ve been having a little party. I think you’re still in time.”

Pete walks down. The solarium is skylighted and filled with plants, maybe to cheer up the patients, maybe to provide them with a little extra oxygen, maybe both. Near one wall, a party of four is playing cards. Two of them are bald, and one has an IV drip running into his arm. Hodges is seated directly under the skylight, doling out slices of cake to his posse: Holly, Jerome, and Barbara. Kermit seems to be growing a beard, it’s coming in snow-white, and Pete has a brief memory of going to the mall with his own kids to see Santa Claus.

“Pete!” Hodges says, smiling. He starts to get up and Pete waves him back into his seat. “Sit down, have some cake. Allie brought it from Batool’s Bakery. It was always her favorite place to go when she was growing up.”

“Where is she?” Pete asks, dragging a chair over and placing it next to Holly. She’s sporting a bandage on the left side of her forehead, and Barbara has a cast on her leg. Only Jerome looks hale and hearty, and Pete knows the kid barely escaped getting turned into hamburger out at that hunting camp.

“She went back to the Coast this morning. Two days off was all she could manage. She’s got three weeks’ vacation coming in March, and says she’ll be back. If I need her, that is.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Not bad,” Hodges says. His eyes flick up and to the left, but only for a second. “I’ve got three cancer docs on my case, and the first tests came back looking good.”

“That’s fantastic.” Pete takes the piece of cake Hodges is holding out. “This is too big.”

“Man up and chow down,” Hodges says. “Listen, about you and Izzy—”

“We worked it out,” Pete says. He takes a bite. “Hey, nice. There’s nothing like carrot cake with cream cheese frosting to cheer up your blood sugar.”

“So the retirement party is . . . ?”

“Back on. Officially, it was never off. I’m still counting on you to give the first toast. And remember—”

“Yeah, yeah, ex-wife and current squeeze both there, nothing too off-color. Got it, got it.”

“Just as long as we’re clear on that.” The too-big slice of cake is getting smaller. Barbara watches the rapid intake with fascination.

“Are we in trouble?” Holly asks. “Are we, Pete, are we?”

“Nope,” Pete says. “Completely in the clear. That’s mostly what I came to tell you.”

Holly sits back with a sigh of relief that blows the graying bangs off her forehead.

“Bet they’ve got Babineau carrying the can for everything,” Jerome says.

Pete points his plastic fork at Jerome. “Truth you speak, young Jedi warrior.”

“You might be interested to know that the famous puppeteer Frank Oz did Yoda’s voice,” Holly says. She looks around. “Well, I find it interesting.”

“I find this cake interesting,” Pete says. “Could I have a little more? Maybe just a sliver?”

Barbara does the honors, and it’s far more than a sliver, but Pete doesn’t object. He takes a bite and asks how she’s doing.

“Good,” Jerome says before she can answer. “She’s got a boyfriend. Kid named Dereece Neville. Big basketball star.”

“Shut up, Jerome, he is not my boyfriend.”

“He sure visits like a boyfriend,” Jerome says. “I’m talking every day since you broke your leg.”

“We have a lot to talk about,” Barbara says in a dignified tone of voice.

Pete says, “Going back to Babineau, hospital administration has some security footage of him coming in through a back entrance on the night his wife was murdered. He changed into maintenance-worker duds. Probably raided a locker. He leaves, comes back fifteen or twenty minutes later, changes back into the clothes he came in, leaves for good.”

“No other footage?” Hodges asks. “Like in the Bucket?”

“Yeah, some, but you can’t see his face in that stuff, because he’s wearing a Groundhogs cap, and you don’t see him go into Hartsfield’s room. A defense lawyer might be able to make something of that stuff, but since Babineau’s never going to stand trial—”

“No one gives much of a shit,” Hodges finishes.

“Correct. City and state cops are delighted to let him carry the weight. Izzy’s happy, and so am I. I could ask you—just between us chickens—if it was actually Babineau who died out there in the woods, but I don’t really want to know.”

“So how does Library Al fit into this scenario?” Hodges asks.

“He doesn’t.” Pete puts his paper plate aside. “Alvin Brooks killed himself last night.”

“Oh, Christ,” Hodges says. “While he was in County?”

“Yes.”

“They didn’t have him on suicide watch? After all this?”

“They did, and none of the inmates are supposed to have anything capable of cutting or stabbing, but he got hold of a ballpoint pen somehow. Might have been a guard who gave it to him, but it was probably another inmate. He drew Zs all over the walls, all over his bunk, and all over himself. Then he took the pen’s metal cartridge out of the barrel and used it to—”

“Stop,” Barbara says. She looks very pale in the winterlight falling on them from above. “We get the idea.”

Hodges says, “So the thinking is . . . what? He was Babineau’s accomplice?”

“Fell under his influence,” Pete says. “Or maybe both of them fell under someone else’s influence, but let’s not go there, okay? The thing to concentrate on now is that the three of you are in the clear. There won’t be any citations this time, or city freebies—”

“It’s okay,” Jerome says. “Me ’n Holly have still got at least four years left on our bus passes, anyway.”

“Not that you ever use yours now that you’re hardly ever here,” Barbara says. “You should give it to me.”

“It’s non-transferrable,” Jerome says smugly. “I better hold onto it. Wouldn’t want you to get in any trouble with the law. Besides, soon you’ll be going places with Dereece. Just don’t go too far, if you know what I mean.”

“You’re being childish.” Barbara turns to Pete. “How many suicides were there in all?”

Pete sighs. “Fourteen over the last five days. Nine of them had Zappits, which are now as dead as their owners. The oldest was twenty-four, the youngest thirteen. One was a boy from a family that was, according to the neighbors, fairly weird about religion—the kind that makes fundamentalist Christians look liberal. He took his parents and kid brother with him. Shotgun.”

The five of them fall silent for a moment. At the table on the left, the card players burst into howls of laughter over something.

Pete breaks the silence. “And there have been over forty attempts.”

Jerome whistles.

“Yeah, I know. It’s not in the papers, and the TV stations are sitting on it, even Murder and Mayhem.” This is a police nickname for WKMM, an indie station that has taken If it bleeds, it leads as an article of faith. “But of course a lot of those attempts—maybe even most of them—end up getting blabbed about on the social media sites, and that breeds still more. I hate those sites. But this will settle. Suicide clusters always do.”

“Eventually,” Hodges says. “But with social media or without it, with Brady or without him, suicide is a fact of life.”

He looks over at the card players as he says this, especially the two baldies. One looks good (as Hodges himself looks good), but the other is cadaverous and hollow-eyed. One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, Hodges’s father would have said. And the thought that comes to him is too complicated—too fraught with a terrible mixture of anger and sorrow—to be articulated. It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.

“More cake?” Barbara asks.

“Nope. Gotta split. But I will sign your cast, if I may.”

“Please,” Barbara says. “And write something witty.”

“That’s far beyond Pete’s pay grade,” Hodges says.

“Watch your mouth, Kermit.” Pete drops to one knee, like a swain about to propose, and begins writing carefully on ­Barbara’s cast. When he’s finished, he stands up and looks at Hodges. “Now tell me the truth about how you’re feeling.”

“Damn good. I’ve got a patch that controls the pain a lot better than the pills, and they’re kicking me loose tomorrow. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.” He pauses, then says: “I’m going to beat this thing.”

• • •

Pete’s waiting for the elevator when Holly catches up to him. “It meant a lot to Bill,” she says. “That you came, and that you still want him to give that toast.”

“It’s not so good, is it?” Pete says.

“No.” He reaches out to hug her, but Holly steps back. She does allow him to take her hand and give it a brief squeeze. “Not so good.”

“Crap.”

“Yes, crap. Crap is right. He doesn’t deserve this. But since he’s stuck with it, he needs his friends to stand by him. You will, won’t you?”

“Of course I will. And don’t count him out yet, Holly. Where there’s life, there’s hope. I know it’s a cliché, but . . .” He shrugs.

“I do have hope. I have Holly hope.”

You can’t say she’s as weird as ever, Pete thinks, but she’s still peculiar. He sort of likes it, actually. “Just make sure he keeps that toast relatively clean, okay?”

“I will.”

“And hey—he outlived Hartsfield. No matter what else happens, he’s got that.”

“We’ll always have Paris, kid,” Holly says in a Bogart drawl.

Yes, she’s still peculiar. One of a kind, actually.

“Listen, Gibney, you need to take care of yourself, too. No matter what happens. He’d hate it if you didn’t.”

“I know,” Holly says, and goes back to the solarium, where she and Jerome will clean up the remains of the birthday party. She tells herself that it isn’t necessarily the last one, and tries to convince herself of that. She doesn’t entirely succeed, but she continues to have Holly hope.