If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  “Yes,” she says, and she is . . . but at the mention of outside evil, her mind immediately turns to the monster she and Ralph tracked to his final lair. The monster had gone under many names and worn many faces, but she had always thought of him simply as the outsider, and the outsider had been as evil as they come. She’s never told Jerome about what happened in the cave known as the Marysville Hole, although she supposes he knows something pretty dire went on there—a lot more than made it into the newspapers.

  He’s looking at her uncertainly. “Go on,” she tells him. “This is very interesting to me.” It’s the truth.

  “Well . . . the class consensus was there’s outside evil if you believe in outside good—”

  “God,” Holly says.

  “Yes. Then you can believe there really are demons, and exorcism is a valid response to them, there really are malevolent spirits—”

  “Ghosts,” Holly says.

  “Right. Not to mention curses that really work, and witches, and dybbuks, and who knows what else. But in college, all that stuff pretty much gets laughed out of court. God Himself mostly gets laughed out of court.”

  “Or Herself,” Holly says primly.

  “Yeah, whatever, if God doesn’t exist, I guess the pronouns don’t matter. So that leaves inside evil. Moron stuff. Guys who beat their children to death, serial killers like Brady fucking Hartsfield, ethnic cleansing, genocide, 9/11, mass shootings, terrorist attacks like the one today.”

  “Is that what they’re saying?” Holly asks. “A terrorist attack, maybe ISIS?”

  “That’s what they’re assuming, but no one’s claimed responsibility yet.”

  Now his other hand on his other cheek, scritch-scritch, and are those tears in Jerome’s eyes? She thinks they are, and if he cries, she will, too, she won’t be able to help it. Sadness is catching, and how poopy is that?

  “But see, here’s the deal about inside and outside evil, Holly—I don’t think there’s any difference. Do you?”

  She considers everything she knows, and everything she’s been through with this young man, and Bill, and Ralph Anderson. “No,” she says. “I don’t.”

  “I think it’s a bird,” Jerome says. “A big bird, all frowsy and frosty gray. It flies here, there, and everywhere. It flew into Brady Hartsfield’s head. It flew into the head of the guy who shot all those people in Las Vegas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, they got the bird. Hitler. Pol Pot. It flies into their heads, and when the wetwork’s done, it flies away again. I’d like to catch that bird.” He clenches his hands and looks at her and yes, those are tears. “Catch it and wring its fucking neck.”

  Holly comes around the desk, kneels beside him, and puts her arms around him. It’s a clumsy hug with him sitting in the chair, but it does the job. The dam breaks. When he speaks against her cheek, she feels the scratch of his stubble.

  “The dog’s dead.”

  “What?” She can barely make out what he’s saying through his sobs.

  “Lucky. The golden. When whoever stole him didn’t get the ransom, the bastard cut him open and threw him in a ditch. Somebody spotted him—still alive, barely—and took him to the Ebert Animal Hospital in Youngstown. Where he lived for maybe half an hour. Nothing they could do. Not so lucky after all, huh?”

  “All right,” Holly says, patting his back. Her own tears are flowing, and there’s snot, too. She can feel it running out of her nose. Oough. “All right, Jerome. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not. You know it’s not.” He pulls back and looks at her, cheeks wet and shining, goatee damp. “Cut that nice dog’s belly open, and threw him in the ditch with his intestines hanging out, and you know what happened then?”

  Holly knows but shakes her head.

  “The bird flew away.” He wipes his sleeve across his eyes. “Now it’s in someone else’s head, it’s better than ever, and on we fucking go.”

  4

  Just before ten o’clock, Holly gives up the book she’s trying to read and turns on the TV. She takes a look at the talking heads on CNN, but can’t bear their chatter. Hard news is what she wants. She switches to NBC, where a graphic, complete with grim music, reads SPECIAL REPORT: TRAGEDY IN PENNSYLVANIA. Andrea Mitchell is now anchoring in New York. She begins by telling America that the president has tweeted his “thoughts and prayers,” as he does after each of these horror shows: Pulse, Las Vegas, Parkland. This meaningless twaddle is followed by the updated score: thirty-one dead, seventy-three (oh God, so many) wounded, nine in critical condition. If Jerome was right, that means at least three of the criticals have died.

  “Two terrorist organizations, Houthi Jihad and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have claimed responsibility for the bombing,” Mitchell says, “but sources in the State Department say neither claim is credible. They are leaning toward the idea that the bombing may have been a lone-wolf attack, similar to that perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh, who set off a huge blast at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. That explosion took a hundred and sixty-eight lives.”

  Many of those also children, Holly thinks. Killing children for God, or ideology, or both—no hell could be hot enough for those who’d do such things. She thinks of Jerome’s frosty gray bird.

  “The man who delivered the bomb was photographed by a security camera when he buzzed for entry,” Mitchell continues. “We are going to put his picture up for the next thirty seconds. Look closely, and if you recognize him, call the number on your screen. There is a reward of two hundred thousand dollars for his arrest and subsequent conviction.”

  The picture comes up. It’s color, and clear as a bell. It’s not perfect because the camera is positioned above the door and the man is looking straight ahead, but it’s pretty good. Holly leans forward, all her formidable job skills—some that were always innate, some honed during her work with Bill Hodges—kicking in. The guy is either Caucasian with a tan (not likely at this time of year but not impossible), a light-skinned Latino, a Middle Easterner, or possibly wearing makeup. Holly opts for Caucasian and makeup. She puts his age as mid-forties. He’s wearing specs with gold frames. His black mustache is small and neatly trimmed. His hair, also black, is short. She can see this because he’s not wearing a cap, which would have obscured more of his face. Bold son of a gun, Holly thinks. He knew there would be cameras, he knew there would be pictures, and he didn’t care.

  “Not a son of a gun,” she says, still staring. Recording every feature. Not because this is her case, but because it’s her nature. “He’s a son of a bitch, is what he is.”

  Back to Andrea Mitchell. “If you know him, call the number on the screen, and do it right away. Now we’re going to take you to the Macready Middle School and our man on the scene. Chet, are you still there?”

  He is, standing in a pool of bright light thrown by the camera. More bright lights are shining on the middle school’s wounded side; each tumbled brick casts its own sharp shadow. Generators are roaring. People in uniform rush here and there, shouting and talking into mikes. Holly sees FBI on some of the jackets, ATF on others. There’s a crew in white Tyvek body suits. Yellow crime scene tape flutters. There is a sense of controlled chaos. At least Holly hopes it’s controlled. Someone must be in charge, maybe in the Winnebago she can see at the far left of the shot.

  Lester Holt is presumably at home, watching this in his pj’s and slippers, but Chet Ondowsky is still going. A regular Energizer Bunny is Mr. Ondowsky, and Holly can understand that. This is probably the biggest story he’ll ever cover, he was in on it almost from the start, and he’s chasing it for all he’s worth. He’s still wearing his suit jacket, which was probably okay when he got to the site, but now the temperature has dropped. She can see his breath, and she’s pretty sure he’s shivering.

  Someone give him something warmer, for heaven’s sake, Holly thinks. A parka, or even a sweatshirt.

  The suit jacket will have to be thrown out. It’s smeared with brick dust and torn in a couple of pla
ces, sleeve and pocket. The hand holding the mike is also smeared with brick dust, and something else. Blood? Holly thinks it is. And the streak on his cheek, that’s blood, too.

  “Chet?” Andrea Mitchell’s disembodied voice. “Are you there?”

  The hand not holding the mike goes to his earpiece, and Holly sees there are Band-Aids on two of the fingers. “Yes, I’m here.” He faces the camera. “This is Chet Ondowsky, reporting from the bombing site at Albert Macready Middle School in Pineborough, Pennsylvania. This ordinarily peaceful school was rocked by an explosion of enormous strength sometime not long after two o’clock this afternoon—”

  Andrea Mitchell appears on a split screen. “Chet, we understand from a source at Homeland Security that the explosion happened at two-nineteen P.M. I don’t know how the authorities can pinpoint the time that exactly, but apparently they can.”

  “Yes,” Chet says, sounding a little distracted, and Holly thinks how tired he must be. And will he be able to sleep tonight? She guesses not. “Yes, that sounds just about right. As you can see, Andrea, the search for victims is winding down, but the forensic work is just beginning. There will be more personnel on the scene by daybreak, and—”

  “Excuse me, Chet, but you took part in the search yourself, is that right?”

  “Yes, Andrea, we all pitched in. Townspeople, some of them parents. Also Alison Greer and Tim Witchick from KDKA, Donna Forbes from WPCW, and Bill Larson from—”

  “Yes, but I’m hearing you pulled two children from the ruins yourself, Chet.”

  He doesn’t bother looking falsely modest and aw-shucks; Holly awards him points for that. He keeps it on a reporting level. “That’s correct, Andrea. I heard one of them moaning and saw the other. A girl and a boy. I know the boy’s name, Norman Fredericks. The girl . . .” He wets his lips. The mike in his hand trembles, and Holly thinks not just from the cold. “The girl was in bad shape. She was . . . calling for her mother.”

  Andrea Mitchell looks stricken. “Chet, that’s awful.”

  It is. Too awful for Holly. She picks up the remote to kill the feed—she has the salient facts, more than she has any use for—and then hesitates. It’s the torn pocket she’s looking at. Maybe torn while Ondowsky was searching for victims, but if he’s Jewish, it might have been done on purpose. It might have been keriah, the rending of garments after a death and the symbolic exposure of a wounded heart. She guesses that is the truth of that torn pocket. It is what she wants to believe.

  5

  The sleeplessness she expected doesn’t happen; Holly drops off within a matter of minutes. Perhaps crying with Jerome let out some of the poison the news from Pennsylvania had injected in her. Giving comfort and receiving it. As she slips away, she thinks she should talk about that with Allie Winters at their next session.

  She wakes sometime deep in the early hours of December 9th, thinking about the correspondent, Ondowsky. Something about him—what? How tired he looked? The scratches and brick dust on his hands? The torn pocket?

  That, she thinks. It must have been. Maybe I was dreaming about it.

  She mutters briefly into the dark, a kind of prayer. “I miss you, Bill. I’m taking my Lexapro and I’m not smoking.”

  Then she’s out and doesn’t wake up until the alarm goes at 6 A.M.

  December 9–13, 2020

  1

  Finders Keepers has been able to move to the new, pricier digs on the fifth floor of the Frederick Building downtown because business has been good, and the rest of that week is busy for Holly and Pete. There’s no time for Holly to watch John Law and little to think about the school explosion in Pennsylvania, though the news reports continue and it never completely leaves her mind.

  The agency has working relationships with two of the city’s big law firms, the white-shoe kind with lots of names on the door. “Macintosh, Winesap, and Spy,” Pete likes to joke. As retired police, he has no great love for lawyers, but he would be the second to admit (Holly would be the first) that subpoenas and process-serving pay very well. “Merry fucking Christmas to these guys,” Pete says as he goes out on Thursday morning with a briefcase full of woe and annoyance.

  In addition to serving papers, Finders Keepers is on speed-dial at several insurance companies—locals, not affiliated with the big boys—and Holly spends most of Friday investigating an arson claim. It’s a pretty big one, the policy holder really needs the money, and she has been tasked with making sure that he was actually in Miami, as he claimed, when his warehouse went up in flames. Turns out he was, which is good for him but not so good for Lake Fidelity.

  In addition to those things, which reliably pay the big bills, there’s an absconding debtor to track (Holly does this on her computer and locates him quickly by checking his credit charges), bail-jumpers to put on the radar—what’s known in the trade as skip-tracing—and lost kids and dogs. Pete usually goes after the kids, and when Jerome’s working, he’s great with the dogs.

  She’s not surprised that Lucky’s death hit him so hard, not just because it was so extraordinarily cruel but because the Robinson family lost their beloved Odell to congestive heart failure the year before. There are no dogs on the docket, either lost or abducted, on that Thursday and Friday, which is good, because Holly is too busy and Jerome is at home, doing his own thing. The project that started as a school paper has now become a priority with him, if not an outright obsession. His folks are doubtful about their son’s decision to take what he calls “a gap year.” Holly isn’t. She doesn’t necessarily think Jerome is going to shock the world, but she has an idea he will make it sit up and take notice. She has faith in him. And Holly hope. That, too.

  She can only follow developments on the middle school explosion out of the corner of her eye, and that’s okay, because there haven’t been many. Another victim has died—a teacher, not a student—and a number of kids with minor injuries have been released from various area hospitals. Mrs. Althea Keller, the only person who actually spoke to the delivery guy/bomber, has regained consciousness, but she had little to add, other than the fact that the package purported to be from a school in Scotland, and that cross-Atlantic relationship was in Pineborough’s weekly newspaper, along with a group photo of the Nemo Me Impune Lacessit Society (perhaps ironic but probably not, all eleven of the Impunies, as they called themselves, survived the explosion uninjured). The van was found in a nearby barn, wiped clean of prints and bleach-cleaned of DNA. The police have been inundated with calls from people eager to identify the perp, but none of the calls has produced results. Hopes of an early capture are being replaced by fears that the guy may not be done but only getting started. Holly hopes this isn’t so, but her experience with Brady Hartsfield makes her fear the worst. Best case scenario, she thinks (with a coldness that once would have been alien to her), he’s killed himself.

  On Friday afternoon, as she’s finishing her report to Lake Fidelity, the phone rings. It’s her mother, and with news Holly has been dreading. She listens, she says the appropriate things, and she allows her mother to treat her as the child she thinks Holly still is (even though the purpose of this call will involve Holly acting like a grownup), asking if Holly is remembering to brush after every meal, if she is remembering to take her medication with food, if she is limiting her movies to four a week, etc., etc. Holly tries to ignore the headache her mother’s calls—and this call in particular—almost always bring on. She assures her mother that yes, she will be there on Sunday to help, and yes, she will be there by noon, so they can eat one more meal as a family.

  My family, Holly thinks. My fracked-up family.

  Because Jerome keeps his phone off when he’s working, she calls Tanya Robinson, Jerome and Barbara’s mom. Holly tells Tanya she won’t be able to eat Sunday dinner with them because she needs to go upstate. Kind of a family emergency. She explains, and Tanya says, “Oh, Holly. I’m so sorry to hear that, sweetie. Are you going to be all right?”

  “Yes,” Holly says. It’s what she always
says when someone asks her that horrible loaded question. She’s pretty sure she sounds okay, but as soon as she hangs up, she puts her hands over her face and begins to cry. It’s that sweetie that does it. To have someone call her, who was known in high school as Jibba-Jibba, sweetie.

  To have that, at least, to come back to.

  2

  On Saturday night Holly plans her drive using the Waze app on her computer, factoring in a stop to pee and gas up her Prius. To get there by noon, she will have to leave at seven-thirty, which will give her time for a cup of tea (decaf), toast, and a boiled egg. With this groundwork laid to a nicety, she lies awake for two hours as she didn’t on the night after the Macready School blew up, and when she does sleep, she dreams of Chet Ondowsky. He is telling about the carnage he saw when he joined the first responders, and saying things he would never say on television. There was blood on the bricks, he says. There was a shoe with a foot still in it, he says. The little girl who cried for her mommy, he says, screamed in pain even though he tried to be gentle when he took her in his arms. He tells these things in his best just-the-facts voice, but as he talks he rends his clothes. Not just his suit coat pocket and sleeve, but first one lapel and then the other. He yanks off his tie and rips it in two. Then the shirt right down the front, popping off the buttons.

  The dream either fades before he can go to work on the trousers of his suit, or her conscious mind refuses to remember it the next morning when her phone alarm goes off. In any case, she wakes feeling unrested, and she eats her egg and toast with no pleasure, just fueling up for what will be a trying day. She usually enjoys a road trip, but the prospect of this one sits on her shoulders like a physical weight.

  Her little blue bag—what she thinks of as her notions bag—is by the door, packed with a clean change of clothes and her toiletries, in case she has to spend the night. She slides the strap onto her shoulder, takes the elevator down from her cozy little apartment, opens the door, and there is Jerome Robinson sitting on the front step. He’s drinking a Coke and his backpack with its JERRY GARCIA LIVES sticker is resting beside him.