And wouldn't it be nice I could totally believe she's crazy, Hodges thinks.
Jerome points at the readout above her jumbo monitor. It's now flashing 247 FOUND. "Is that thing searching or downloading?"
"Both." Freddi's hand is pressing at the makeshift bandage under her shirt in an automatic gesture that reminds Hodges of himself. "It's a repeater. I can turn it off--at least I think I can--but you have to promise to protect me from the men who are watching the building. The website, though . . . no good. I've got the IP address and the password, but I still couldn't crash the server."
Hodges has a thousand questions, but as 247 FOUND clicks up to 248, only two seem of paramount importance. "What's it searching for? And what's it downloading?"
"You have to promise me protection first. You have to take me somewhere safe. Witness Protection, or whatever."
"He doesn't have to promise you anything, because I already know," Holly says. There's nothing mean in her tone; if anything, it's comforting. "It's searching for Zappits, Bill. Each time somebody turns one on, the repeater finds it and upgrades the Fishin' Hole demo screen."
"Turns the pink fish into number-fish and adds the blue flashes," Jerome amplifies. He looks at Freddi. "That's what it's doing, right?"
Now it's the purple, blood-caked lump on her forehead that her hand goes to. When her fingers touch it, she winces and pulls back her hand. "Yeah. Of the eight hundred Zappits that were delivered here, two hundred and eighty were defective. They either froze while they were booting up or went ka-bloosh the first time you tried to open one of the games. The others were okay. I had to install a root kit into each and every one of them. It was a lot of work. Boring work. Like attaching widgets to wadgets on an assembly line."
"That means five hundred and twenty were okay," Hodges says.
"The man can subtract, give him a cigar." Freddi glances at the readout. "And almost half of them have updated already." She laughs, a sound with absolutely no humor in it. "Brady may be nuts, but he worked this out pretty good, don't you think?"
Hodges says, "Turn it off."
"Sure. When you promise to protect me."
Jerome, who has firsthand experience with how fast the Zappits work and what unpleasant ideas they implant in a person's mind, has no interest in standing by while Freddi tries to dicker with Bill. The Swiss Army Knife he carried on his belt while in Arizona has been retrieved from his luggage and is now back in his pocket. He unfolds the biggest blade, shoves the repeater off its shelf, and slices the cables mating it to Freddi's system. It falls to the floor with a moderate crash, and an alarm begins to bong from the CPU under the desk. Holly bends down, pushes something, and the alarm shuts up.
"There's a switch, moron!" Freddi shouts. "You didn't have to do that!"
"You know what, I did," Jerome says. "One of those fucking Zappits almost got my sister killed." He steps toward her, and Freddi cringes back. "Did you have any idea what you were doing? Any fucking idea at all? I think you must have. You look stoned but not stupid."
Freddi begins to cry. "I didn't. I swear I didn't. Because I didn't want to."
Hodges takes a deep breath, which reawakens the pain. "Start from the beginning, Freddi, and take us through it."
"And as quickly as you can," Holly adds.
12
Jamie Winters was nine when he attended the 'Round Here concert at the Mac with his mother. Only a few subteen boys were there that night; the group was one of those dismissed by most boys his age as girly stuff. Jamie, however, liked girly stuff. At nine he hadn't yet been sure that he was gay (wasn't even sure he knew what that meant). All he knew was that when he saw Cam Knowles, 'Round Here's lead singer, he felt funny in the pit of his stomach.
Now he's pushing sixteen and knows exactly what he is. With certain boys at school, he prefers to leave off the last letter of his first name because with those boys he likes to be Jami. His father knows what he is, as well, and treats him like some kind of freak. Lenny Winters--a man's man if ever there was one--owns a successful building company, but today all four of Winters Construction's current jobs are shut down because of the impending storm. Lenny is in his home office instead, up to his ears in paperwork and stewing over the spreadsheets covering his computer screen.
"Dad!"
"What do you want?" Lenny growls without looking up. "And why aren't you in school? Was it canceled?"
"Dad!"
This time Lenny looks around at the boy he sometimes refers to (when he thinks Jamie isn't in earshot) as "the family queer." The first thing he's aware of is that his son is wearing lipstick, rouge, and eye shadow. The second thing is the dress. Lenny recognizes it as one of his wife's. The kid is too tall for it, and it stops halfway down his thighs.
"What the fuck!"
Jamie is smiling. Jubilant. "It's how I want to be buried!"
"What are you--" Lenny gets up so fast his chair tumbles over. That's when he sees the gun the boy is holding. He must have taken it from Lenny's side of the closet in the master bedroom.
"Watch this, Dad!" Still smiling. As if about to demonstrate a really cool magic trick. He raises the gun and places the muzzle against his right temple. His finger is curled around the trigger. The nail has been carefully coated with sparkle polish.
"Put that down, Son! Put it--"
Jamie--or Jami, which is how he has signed his brief suicide note--pulls the trigger. The gun is a .357, and the report is deafening. Blood and brains fly in a fan and decorate the doorframe with gaud. The boy in his mother's dress and makeup falls forward, the left side of his face pushed out like a balloon.
Lenny Winters gives voice to a series of high, wavering screams. He screams like a girl.
13
Brady disconnects from Jamie Winters just as the boy puts the gun to his head, afraid--terrified, actually--of what may happen if he's still in there when the bullet enters the head he's been messing with. Would he be spit out like a seed, as he was when he was inside the half-hypnotized dumbo mopping the floor in 217, or would he die along with the kid?
For a moment he thinks he's left it until too late, and the steady chiming he hears is what everyone hears when they exit this life. Then he's back in the main room of Heads and Skins with the Zappit console in his sagging hand and Babineau's laptop in front of him. That's where the chiming is coming from. He looks at the screen and sees two messages. The first reads 248 FOUND. That's the good news. The second is the bad news:
REPEATER NOW OFFLINE
Freddi, he thinks. I didn't believe you had the guts. I really didn't.
You bitch.
His left hand gropes along the desk and closes on a ceramic skull filled with pens and pencils. He brings it up, meaning to smash it into the screen and destroy that infuriating message. What stops him is an idea. A horribly plausible idea.
Maybe she didn't have the guts. Maybe somebody else killed the repeater. And who could that someone else be? Hodges, of course. The old Det.-Ret. His fucking nemesis.
Brady knows he isn't exactly right in the head, has known that for years now, and understands this could be nothing but paranoia. Yet it makes a degree of sense. Hodges stopped his gloating visits to Room 217 almost a year and a half ago, but he was sniffing around the hospital just yesterday, according to Babineau.
And he always knew I was faking, Brady thinks. He said so, time and time again: I know you're in there, Brady. Some of the suits from the DA's office had said the same thing, but with them it had only been wishful thinking; they wanted to put him on trial and have done with him. Hodges, though . . .
"He said it with conviction," Brady says.
And maybe this isn't such terrible news, after all. Half of the Zappits Freddi loaded up and Babineau sent out are now active, which means most of those people will be as open to invasion as the little fag he just dealt with. Plus, there's the website. Once the Zappit people start killing themselves--with a little help from Brady Wilson Hartsfield, granted--the website will pu
sh others over the edge: monkey see, monkey do. At first it will be just the ones who were closest to doing it anyway, but they will lead by example and there will be many more. They'll march off the edge of life like stampeding buffalo going over a cliff.
But still.
Hodges.
Brady remembers a poster he had in his room when he was a boy: If life hands you lemons, make lemonade! Words to live by, especially when you kept in mind that the only way to make them into lemonade was to squeeze the hell out of them.
He grabs Z-Boy's old but serviceable flip phone and once again dials Freddi's number from memory.
14
Freddi gives a small scream when "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" starts tootling away from somewhere in the apartment. Holly puts a gentling hand on her shoulder and looks a question at Hodges. He nods and follows the sound, with Jerome on his heels. Her phone is on top of her dresser, amid a clutter of hand cream, Zig-Zag rolling papers, roach clips, and not one but two good-sized bags of pot.
The screen says Z-BOY, but Z-Boy, once known as Library Al Brooks, is currently in police custody and not likely to be making any calls.
"Hello?" Hodges says. "Is that you, Dr. Babineau?"
Nothing . . . or almost. Hodges can hear breathing.
"Or should I call you Dr. Z?"
Nothing.
"How about Brady, will that work?" He still can't quite believe this in spite of everything Freddi has told them, but he can believe that Babineau has gone schizo, and actually thinks that's who he is. "Is it you, asshole?"
The sound of the breathing continues for another two or three seconds, then it's gone. The connection has been broken.
15
"It's possible, you know," Holly says. She has joined them in Freddi's cluttered bedroom. "That it really could be Brady, I mean. Personality projection is well documented. In fact, it's the second-most-common cause of so-called demonic possession. The most common being schizophrenia. I saw a documentary about it on--"
"No," Hodges says. "Not possible. Not."
"Don't blind yourself to the idea. Don't be like Miss Pretty Gray Eyes."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Oh God, now the tendrils of pain are reaching all the way down to his balls.
"That you shouldn't turn away from the evidence just because it points in a direction you don't want to go. You know Brady was different when he regained consciousness. He came back with certain abilities most people don't have. Telekinesis may only have been one of them."
"I never saw him actually moving shit around."
"But you believe the nurses who did. Don't you?"
Hodges is silent, head lowered, thinking.
"Answer her," Jerome says. His tone is mild, but Hodges can hear impatience underneath.
"Yeah. I believed at least some of them. The levelheaded ones like Becky Helmington. Their stories matched up too well to be fabrications."
"Look at me, Bill."
This request--no, this command--coming from Holly Gibney is so unusual that he raises his head.
"Do you really believe Babineau reconfigured the Zappits and set up that website?"
"I don't have to believe it. He got Freddi to do those things."
"Not the website," a tired voice says.
They look around. Freddi is standing in the doorway.
"If I'd set it up, I could shut it down. I just got a thumb drive with all the website goodies on it from Dr. Z. Plugged it in and uploaded it. But once he was gone, I did a little investigating."
"Started with a DNS lookup, right?" Holly says.
Freddi nods. "Girl's got some skills."
To Hodges, Holly says, "DNS stands for Domain Name Server. It hops from one server to the next, like using stepping-stones to cross a creek, asking 'Do you know this site?' It keeps going and keeps asking until it finds the right server." Then, to Freddi: "But once you found the IP address, you still couldn't get in?"
"Nope."
Holly says, "I'm sure Babineau knows a lot about human brains, but I doubt very much if he has the computer smarts to lock up a website like that."
"I was just hired help," Freddi says. "It was Z-Boy who brought me the program for retooling the Zappits, written down like a recipe for coffee cake, or something, and I'd bet you a thousand dollars that all he knows about computers is how to turn them on--assuming he can find the button in back--and navigate to his favorite porn sites."
Hodges believes her about that much. He's not sure the police will when they finally catch hold of this thing, but Hodges does. And . . . Don't be like Miss Pretty Gray Eyes.
That stung. It stung like hell.
"Also," Freddi says, "there was a double dot after each step in the program directions. Brady used to do that. I think he learned it when he was taking computer classes in high school."
Holly grabs Hodges's wrists. There's blood on one of her hands, from patching Freddi's wound. Along with her other bells and whistles, Holly is a clean-freak, and that she's neglected to wash the blood off says all that needs to be said about how fiercely she's working this.
"Babineau was giving Hartsfield experimental drugs, which was unethical, but that's all he was doing, because bringing Brady back was all he was interested in."
"You don't know that for sure," Hodges says.
She's still holding him, more with her eyes than her hands. Because she's ordinarily averse to eye contact, it's easy to forget how burning that gaze can be when she turns it up to eleven and pulls the knobs off.
"There's really just one question," Holly says. "Who's the suicide prince in this story? Felix Babineau or Brady Hartsfield?"
Freddi speaks in a dreamy, sing-songy voice. "Sometimes Dr. Z was just Dr. Z and sometimes Z-Boy was just Z-Boy, only then it was like both of them were on drugs. When they were wide awake, though, it wasn't them. When they were awake, it was Brady inside. Believe what you want, but it was him. It's not just the double dots or the backslanted printing, it's everything. I worked with that skeevy motherfucker. I know."
She steps into the room.
"And now, if none of you amateur detectives object, I'm going to roll myself another joint."
16
On Babineau's legs, Brady paces the big living room of Heads and Skins, thinking furiously. He wants to go back into the world of the Zappit, wants to pick a new target and repeat the delicious experience of pushing someone over the edge, but he has to be calm and serene to do that, and he's far from either.
Hodges.
Hodges in Freddi's apartment.
And will Freddi spill her guts? Friends and neighbors, does the sun rise in the east?
There are two questions, as Brady sees it. The first is whether or not Hodges can take down the website. The second is whether or not Hodges can find him out here in the williwags.
Brady thinks the answer to both questions is yes, but the more suicides he causes in the meantime, the more Hodges will suffer. When he looks at it in that light, he thinks that Hodges finding his way out here could be a good thing. It could be making lemonade from lemons. In any case, he has time. He's many miles north of the city, and he's got winter storm Eugenie on his side.
Brady goes back to the laptop and confirms that zeetheend is still up and running. He checks the visitors' count. Over nine thousand now, and most of them (but by no means all) will be teenagers interested in suicide. That interest peaks in January and February, when dark comes early and it seems spring will never arrive. Plus, he's got Zappit Zero, and with that he can work on plenty of kids personally. With Zappit Zero, getting to them is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Pink fish, he thinks, and snickers.
Calmer now that he sees a way of dealing with the old Det.-Ret. should he try showing up like the cavalry in the last reel of a John Wayne western, Brady picks up the Zappit and turns it on. As he studies the fish, a fragment of some poem read in high school occurs to him, and he speaks it aloud.
"Oh do not ask what is it, let us go and
make our visit."
He closes his eyes. The zipping pink fish become zipping red dots, each one a bygone concertgoer who is at this very moment studying his or her gift Zappit and hoping to win prizes.
Brady picks one, brings it to a halt, and watches it bloom.
Like a rose.
17
"Sure, there's a police computer forensics squad," Hodges says, in answer to Holly's question. "If you want to call three part-time crunchers a squad, that is. And no, they won't listen to me. I'm just a civilian these days." Nor is that the worst of it. He's a civilian who used to be a cop, and when retired cops try meddling in police business, they are called uncles. It is not a term of respect.
"Then call Pete and have him do it," Holly says. "Because that fracking suicide site has to come down."
The two of them are back in Freddi Linklatter's version of Mission Control. Jerome is in the living room with Freddi. Hodges doesn't think she's apt to flee--Freddi's terrified of the probably fictional men posted outside her building--but stoner behavior is difficult to predict. Other than how they usually want to get more stoned, that is.
"Call Pete and tell him to have one of the computer geeks call me. Any cruncher with half a brain will be able to doss the site and knock it down that way."
"Doss it?"
"Big D, little o, big S. Stands for Denial of Services. The guy needs to connect to a BOT network and . . ." She sees Hodges's mystified expression. "Never mind. The idea is to flood the suicide site with requests for services--thousands, millions. Choke the fracking thing and crash the server."
"You can do that?"
"I can't, and Freddi can't, but a police department geek freak will be able to tap enough computing power. If he can't do it from the police computers, he'll get Homeland Security to do it. Because this is a security issue, right? Lives are at stake."
They are, and Hodges makes the call, but Pete's cell goes directly to voicemail. Next he tries his old pal Cassie Sheen, but the desk officer who takes his call tells him Cassie's mother had some sort of diabetic crisis and Cassie took her to the doctor.
Out of other options, he calls Isabelle.
"Izzy, it's Bill Hodges. I tried to get Pete, but--"