بخش 02 - فصل 02

2

“He’s not done with you yet.”

Holly repeats it in a soft voice. She puts her half-eaten veggie burger down on its paper plate. Hodges has already demolished his, talking between bites. He doesn’t mention waking with pain; in this version he discovered the message because he got up to net-surf when he couldn’t sleep.

“That’s what it said, all right.”

“From Z-Boy.”

“Yeah. Sounds like some superhero’s sidekick, doesn’t it? ‘Follow the adventures of Z-Man and Z-Boy, as they keep the streets of Gotham City safe from crime!’”

“That’s Batman and Robin. They’re the ones who patrol Gotham City.”

“I know that, I was reading Batman comics before you were born. I was just saying.”

She picks up her veggie burger, extracts a shred of lettuce, puts it down again. “When is the last time you visited Brady Hartsfield?”

Right to the heart of the matter, Hodges thinks admiringly. That’s my Holly.

“I went to see him just after the business with the Saubers family, and once more later on. Midsummer, that would have been. Then you and Jerome cornered me and said I had to stop. So I did.”

“We did it for your own good.”

“I know that, Holly. Now eat your sandwich.”

She takes a bite, dabs mayo from the corner of her mouth, and asks him how Hartsfield seemed on his last visit.

“The same . . . mostly. Just sitting there, looking out at the parking garage. I talk, I ask him questions, he says nothing. He gives Academy Award brain damage, no doubt about that. But there have been stories about him. That he has some kind of mind-power. That he can turn the water on and off in his bathroom, and does it sometimes to scare the staff. I’d call it bullshit, but when Becky Helmington was the head nurse, she said she’d actually seen stuff on a couple of occasions—rattling blinds, the TV going on by itself, the bottles on his IV stand swinging back and forth. And she’s what I’d call a credible witness. I know it’s hard to believe—”

“Not so hard. Telekinesis, sometimes called psychokinesis, is a documented phenomenon. You never saw anything like that yourself during any of your visits?”

“Well . . .” He pauses, remembering. “Something did happen on my second-to-last visit. There was a picture on the table beside his bed—him and his mother with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. On vacation somewhere. There was a bigger version in the house on Elm Street. You probably remember it.”

“Of course I do. I remember everything we saw in that house, including some of the cheesecake photos of her he had on his computer.” She crosses her arms over her small bosom and makes a moue of distaste. “That was a very unnatural relationship.”

“Tell me about it. I don’t know if he ever actually had sex with her—”

“Oough!”

“—but I think he probably wanted to, and at the very least she enabled his fantasies. Anyway, I grabbed the picture and talked some smack about her, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to get him to respond. Because he’s in there, Holly, and I mean all present and accounted for. I was sure of it then and I’m sure of it now. He just sits there, but inside he’s the same human wasp that killed those people at City Center and tried to kill a whole lot more at Mingo Auditorium.”

“And he used Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to talk with you, don’t forget that.”

“After last night I’m not likely to.”

“Tell me the rest of what happened that time.”

“For just a second he stopped looking out his window at the parking garage across the way. His eyes . . . they rolled in their sockets, and he looked at me. Every hair on the nape of my neck stood up at attention, and the air felt . . . I don’t know . . . electric.” He forces himself to say the rest. It’s like pushing a big rock up a steep hill. “I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers—one was a mother who killed her three-year-old for insurance that didn’t amount to a hill of beans—but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.”

“I believe you,” she says in a voice so small it’s barely a ­whisper.

“And he had a Zappit. That’s the connection I was trying to make. If it is a connection, and not just a coincidence. There was a guy, I don’t know his last name, everyone just called him Library Al, who used to hand Zappits out along with Kindles and paperbacks when he made his rounds. I don’t know if Al was an orderly or a volunteer. Hell, he might even have been one of the janitors, doing a little good deed on the side. I think the only reason I didn’t pick up on that right away was the Zappit you found at the Ellerton house was pink. The one in Brady’s room was blue.”

“How could what happened to Janice Ellerton and her daughter have anything to do with Brady Hartsfield? Unless . . . has anyone reported any telekinetic activity outside of his room? Have there been rumors of that?”

“Nope, but right around the time the Saubers business finished up, a nurse committed suicide in the Brain Injury Clinic. Sliced her wrists in a bathroom right down the hall from Hartsfield’s room. Her name was Sadie MacDonald.”

“Are you thinking . . .”

She’s picking at her sandwich again, shredding the lettuce and dropping it onto her plate. Waiting for him.

“Go on, Holly. I’m not going to say it for you.”

“You’re thinking Brady talked her into it somehow? I don’t see how that could be possible.”

“I don’t, either, but we know Brady has a fascination with suicide.”

“This Sadie MacDonald . . . did she happen to have one of those Zappit things?”

“God knows.”

“How . . . how did . . .”

This time he does help. “With a scalpel she filched from one of the surgical suites. I got that from the ME’s assistant. Slipped her a gift card to DeMasio’s, the Italian joint.”

Holly shreds more lettuce. Her plate is starting to look like confetti at a leprechaun birthday party. It’s driving Hodges a little nuts, but he doesn’t stop her. She’s working her way up to saying it. And finally does. “You’re going to see Hartsfield.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Do you really think you’ll get anything out of him? You never have before.”

“I know a little more now.” But what, really, does he know? He’s not even sure what he suspects. But maybe Hartsfield isn’t a human wasp, after all. Maybe he’s a spider, and Room 217 at the Bucket is the center of his web, where he sits spinning.

Or maybe it’s all coincidence. Maybe the cancer is already eating into my brain, sparking a lot of paranoid ideas.

That’s what Pete would think, and his partner—hard to stop thinking of her as Miss Pretty Gray Eyes, now that it’s in his head—would say it right out loud.

He stands up. “No time like the present.”

She drops her sandwich onto the pile of mangled lettuce so she can grasp his arm. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

“Guard your thoughts. I know how crazy that sounds, but I am crazy, at least some of the time, so I can say it. If you should have any ideas about . . . well, harming yourself . . . call me. Call me right away.”

“Okay.”

She crosses her arms and grasps her shoulders—that old fretful gesture he sees less often now. “I wish Jerome was here.” Jerome Robinson is in Arizona, taking a semester off from college, building houses as part of a Habitat for Humanity crew. Once, when Hodges used the phrase garnishing his resume in relation to this activity, Holly scolded him, telling him Jerome was doing it because he was a good person. With that, Hodges has to agree—Jerome really is a good person.

“I’m going to be fine. And this is probably nothing. We’re like kids worrying that the empty house on the corner is haunted. If we said anything about it to Pete, he’d have us both committed.”

Holly, who actually has been committed (twice), believes some empty houses really might be haunted. She removes one small and ringless hand from one shoulder long enough to grasp his arm again, this time by the sleeve of his overcoat. “Call me when you get there, and call me again when you leave. Don’t forget, because I’ll be worrying and I can’t call you because—”

“No cell phones allowed in the Bucket, yeah, I know. I’ll do it, Holly. In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of things for you.” He sees her hand dart toward a notepad and shakes his head. “No, you don’t need to write this down. It’s simple. First, go on eBay or wherever you go to buy stuff that’s no longer available retail and order one of those Zappit Commanders. Can you do that?”

“Easy. What’s the other thing?”

“Sunrise Solutions bought out Zappit, then went bankrupt. Someone will be serving as the trustee in bankruptcy. The trustee hires lawyers, accountants, and liquidators to help squeeze every cent out of the company. Get a name and I’ll make a call later today or tomorrow. I want to know what happened to all those unsold Zappit consoles, because somebody gave one to Janice Ellerton a long time after both companies were out of business.”

She lights up. “That’s fracking brilliant!”

Not brilliant, just police work, he thinks. I may have terminal cancer, but I still remember how the job is done, and that’s something.

That’s something good.