by Stephen King
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 cliche, 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.
Eight Months Later
When Jerome shows up at Fairlawn, two days after the funeral and at ten on the dot, as promised, Holly is already there, on her knees at the head of the grave. She's not praying; she's planting a chrysanthemum. She doesn't look up when his shadow falls over her. She knows who it is. This was the arrangement they made after she told him she didn't know if she could make it all the way through the funeral. "I'll try," she said, "but I'm not good with those fracking things. I may have to book."
"You plant these in the fall," she says now. "I don't know much about plants, so I got a how-to guide. The writing was only so-so, but the directions are easy to follow."
"That's good." Jerome sits down crosslegged at the end of the plot, where the grass begins.
Holly scoops dirt carefully with her hands, still not looking at him. "I told you I might have to book. They all stared at me when I left, but I just couldn't stay. If I had, they would have wanted me to stand up there in front of the coffin and talk about him and I couldn't. Not in front of all those people. I bet his daughter is mad."
"Probably not," Jerome says.
"I hate funerals. I came to this city for one, did you know that?"
Jerome does, but says nothing. Just lets her finish.
"My aunt died. She was Olivia Trelawney's mother. That's where I met Bill, at that funeral. I ran out of that one, too. I was sitting behind the funeral parlor, smoking a cigarette, feeling terrible, and that's where he found me. Do you understand?" At last she looks up at him. "He found me."
"I get it, Holly. I do."
"He opened a door for me. One into the world. He gave me something to do that made a difference."
"Same here."
She wipes her eyes almost angrily. "This is just so fracking poopy."
"Got that right, but he wouldn't want you to go backward. That's the last thing he'd want."
"I won't," she says. "You know he left me the company, right? The insurance money and everything else went to Allie, but the company is mine. I can't run it by myself, so I asked Pete if he'd like to work for me. Just part-time."
"And he said . . . ?"
"He said yes, because retirement sucked already. It should be okay. I'll run down the skippers and deadbeats on my computer, and he'll go out and get them. Or serve the subpoenas, if that's the job. But it won't be like it was. Working for Bill . . . working with Bill . . . those were the happiest days of my life." She thinks that over. "I guess the only happy days of my life. I felt . . . I don't know . . ."
"Valued?" Jerome suggests.
"Yes! Valued."
"You should have felt that way," Jerome says, "because you were very valuable. And still are."
She gives the plant a final critical look, dusts dirt from her hands and the knees of her pants, and sits down next to him. "He was brave, wasn't he? At the end, I mean."
"Yes."
"Yeah." She smiles a little. "That's what Bill would have said--not yes, but yeah."
"Yeah," he agrees.
"Jerome? Would you put your arm around me?"
He does.
"The first time I met you--when we found the stealth program Brady loaded into my cousin Olivia's computer--I was afraid of you."
"I know," Jerome says.
"Not because you were black--"
"Black is whack," Jerome says, smiling. "I think we agreed on that much right from the jump."
"--but because you were a stranger. You were from outside. I was scared of outside people and outside things. I still am, but not as much as I was then."
"I know."
"I loved him," Holly says, looking at the chrysanthemum. It is a brilliant orange-red below the gray gravestone, which bears a simple message: KERMIT WILLIAM HODGES, and, below the dates, END OF WATCH. "I loved him so much."
"Yeah," Jerome says. "So did I."
She looks up at him, her face timid and hopeful--beneath the graying bangs, it is almost the face of a child. "You'll always be my friend, won't you?"
"Always." He squeezes her shoulders, which are heartbreakingly thin. During Hodges's final two months, she lost ten pounds she couldn't afford to lose. He knows his mother and Barbara are just waiting to feed her up. "Always, Holly."
"I know," she says.
"Then why did you ask?"
"Because it's so good to hear you say it."
End of Watch, Jerome thin
ks. He hates the sound of that, but it's right. It's right. And this is better than the funeral. Being here with Holly on this sunny late summer morning is much better.
"Jerome? I'm not smoking."
"That's good."
They sit quiet for a little while, looking at the chrysanthemum burning its colors at the base of the headstone.
"Jerome?"
"What, Holly?"
"Would you like to go to a movie with me?"
"Yes," he says, then corrects himself. "Yeah."
"We'll leave a seat empty between us. Just to put our popcorn in."
"Okay."
"Because I hate putting it on the floor where there are probably roaches and maybe even rats."
"I hate it, too. What do you want to see?"
"Something that will make us laugh and laugh."
"Works for me."
He smiles at her. Holly smiles back. They leave Fairlawn and walk back out into the world together.
August 30, 2015
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Thanks to Nan Graham, who edited this book, and to all my other friends at Scribner, including--but not limited to--Carolyn Reidy, Susan Moldow, Roz Lippel, and Katie Monaghan. Thanks to Chuck Verrill, my longtime agent (important) and longtime friend (more important). Thanks to Chris Lotts, who sells the foreign rights to my books. Thanks to Mark Levenfus, who oversees such business affairs as I have, and keeps an eye on the Haven Foundation, which helps freelance artists down on their luck, and the King Foundation, which helps schools, libraries, and small-town fire departments. Thanks to Marsha DeFilippo, my able personal assistant, and to Julie Eugley, who does everything Marsha doesn't. I'd be lost without them. Thanks to my son Owen King, who read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. Thanks to my wife, Tabitha, who also made valuable suggestions . . . including what turned out to be the right title.
Special thanks to Russ Dorr, who has traded in his career as a physician's assistant to become my research guru. He went the extra mile on this book, patiently tutoring me on how computer programs are written, how they can be rewritten, and how they can be disseminated. Without Russ, End of Watch would have been a lesser book. I should add that in some cases I deliberately changed various computer protocols to serve my fiction. Tech-savvy individuals will see that, which is fine. Just don't blame Russ.
One last thing. End of Watch is fiction, but the high rate of suicides--both in the United States and in many other countries where my books are read--is all too real. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline number given in this book is also real. It's 1-800-273-TALK. If you are feeling poopy (as Holly Gibney would say), give them a call. Because things can get better, and if you give them a chance, they usually do.
Stephen King
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph (c) Shane Leonard
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Drunken Fireworks, Finders Keepers, Revival, Mr. Mercedes, Doctor Sleep, and Under the Dome. His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. King is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
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