بخش 01 - فصل 18

18

Hodges tries to swim below the pain and stay asleep, but it pulls him up steadily until he breaks the surface and opens his eyes. He fumbles for the bedside clock and sees it’s two AM. A bad time to be awake, maybe the worst time. When he suffered insomnia after his retirement, he thought of two AM as the suicide hour and now he thinks, That’s probably when Mrs. Ellerton did it. Two in the morning. The hour when it seems daylight will never come.

He gets out of bed, walks slowly to the bathroom, and takes the giant economy-sized bottle of Gelusil out of the medicine cabinet, careful not to look at himself in the mirror. He chugalugs four big swallows, then leans over, waiting to see if his stomach will accept it or hit the ejector button, as it did with the chicken soup.

It stays down and the pain actually begins to recede. Sometimes Gelusil does that. Not always.

He thinks about going back to bed, but he’s afraid that dull throb will return as soon as he’s horizontal. He shuffles into his office instead and turns on his computer. He knows this is the very worst time to start checking out the possible causes for his symptoms, but he can no longer resist. His desktop wallpaper comes up (another picture of Allie as a kid). He mouses down to the bottom of the screen, meaning to open Firefox, then freezes. There’s something new in the dock. Between the balloon icon for text messaging and the camera icon for FaceTime, there’s a blue umbrella with a red 1 sitting above it.

“A message on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella,” he says. “I’ll be damned.”

A much younger Jerome Robinson downloaded the Blue Umbrella app to his computer almost six years ago. Brady Hartsfield, aka Mr. Mercedes, wanted to converse with the cop who had failed to catch him, and, although retired, Hodges was very willing to talk. Because once you got dirtbags like Mr. Mercedes talking (there weren’t very many like him, and thank God for that), they were only a step or two from being caught. This was especially true of the arrogant ones, and Hartsfield had been arrogance personified.

They both had their reasons for communicating on a secure, supposedly untraceable chat site with servers located someplace in deepest, darkest Eastern Europe. Hodges wanted to goad the perpetrator of the City Center Massacre into making a mistake that would help identify him. Mr. Mercedes wanted to goad Hodges into killing himself. He had succeeded with Olivia Trelawney, after all.

What kind of life do you have? he had written in his first communication to Hodges—the one that had arrived by snail-mail. What kind, now that the “thrill of the hunt” is behind you? And then: Want to get in touch with me? Try Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. I even got you a username: “kermitfrog19.”

With plenty of help from Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney, Hodges tracked Brady down, and Holly clobbered him. Jerome and Holly got free city services for ten years; Hodges got a pacemaker. There were sorrows and loss Hodges doesn’t want to think about—not even now, all these years later—but you’d have to say that for the city, and especially for those who had been attending the concert at the Mingo that night, all ended well.

At some point between 2010 and now, the blue umbrella icon disappeared from the dock at the bottom of his screen. If Hodges ever wondered what happened to it (he can’t remember that he ever did), he probably assumed either Jerome or Holly dumped it in the trash on one of their visits to fix whatever current outrage he had perpetrated on his defenseless Macintosh. Instead, one of them must have tucked it into the apps folder, where the blue umbrella has remained, just out of sight, all these years. Hell, maybe he even did the dragging himself and has forgotten. Memory has a way of slipping a few gears after sixty-five, when people round the third turn start down the home stretch.

He mouses to the blue umbrella, hesitates, then clicks. His desktop screen is replaced by a young couple on a magic carpet floating over an endless sea. Silver rain is falling, but the couple is safe and dry beneath a protective blue umbrella.

Ah, such memories this brings back.

He enters kermitfrog19 as both his username and his ­password—isn’t that how he did it before, as per Hartsfield’s instructions? He can’t remember for sure, but there’s one way to find out. He bangs the return key.

The machine thinks for a second or two (it seems longer), and then, presto, he’s in. He frowns at what he sees. Brady Hartsfield used merckill as his handle, short for Mercedes Killer—Hodges has no trouble remembering that—but this is someone else. Which shouldn’t surprise him, since Holly turned Hartsfield’s fucked-up brain to oatmeal, but somehow it still does.

Z-Boy wants to chat with you!

Do you want to chat with Z-Boy?

Y N

Hodges hits Y, and a moment later a message appears. Just a single sentence, half a dozen words, but Hodges reads them over and over again, feeling not fear but excitement. He is onto something here. He doesn’t know what it is, but it feels big.

Z-Boy: He’s not done with you yet.

Hodges stares at it, frowning. At last he sits forward in his chair and types:

kermitfrog19: Who’s not done with me? Who is this?

There’s no answer.