If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  Brad played it for me three times. The peaks and valleys on the spectrogram matched the ones still running above it—Freeman and Ondowsky. That was the technical part, Ralph, and I could appreciate it, but what really got to me, what gave me the chills, were those tiny pauses. Short on what was it like, longer on escape, which must be especially hard for lispers to conquer.

  Brad asked me if I was satisfied, and I said I was. Nobody who hasn’t been through what we’ve been through would have been, but I was. He isn’t the same as our outsider, who had to hibernate during his transformations and couldn’t be seen on video, but he’s certainly that being’s first or second cousin. There’s so much about these things we don’t know, and I suppose we never will.

  I need to stop now, Ralph. I haven’t had anything to eat today but a bagel and a chicken sandwich and a little bit of a turnover. If I don’t get something soon, I’ll probably pass out.

  More later.

  15

  Holly orders out to Domino’s—a small veggie pizza and a large Coke. When the young man shows up, she tips according to Bill Hodges’s rule of thumb: fifteen per cent of the bill if the service is fair, twenty per cent if the service is good. This young man is prompt, so she tips the full amount.

  She sits at the little table by the window, munching away and watching as dusk begins to steal over the Embassy Suites parking lot. A Christmas tree is blinking its lights on and off down there, but Holly has never had less Christmas spirit in her life. Today the thing she’s investigating was only pictures on a TV screen and spectrograms on an iPad. Tomorrow, if all goes as she hopes it will (she has Holly hope), she’ll be face to face with it. That will be scary.

  It has to be done; she has no choice. Dan Bell is too old and Brad Bell is too scared. He flat-out refused, even after Holly explained that what she planned to do in Pittsburgh couldn’t possibly put him at risk.

  “You don’t know that,” Brad said. “For all you know, the thing’s telepathic.”

  “I’ve been face to face with one,” Holly had replied. “If it was telepathic, Brad, I’d be dead and it would still be alive.”

  “I’m not going,” Brad said. His lips were trembling. “My grampa needs me. He’s got a very bad heart. Don’t you have friends?”

  She does, and one is a very good cop, but even if Ralph was in Oklahoma, would she risk him? He’s got a family. She doesn’t. As for Jerome… no. No way. The Pittsburgh part of her budding plan really shouldn’t be dangerous, but Jerome would want to be all in, and that would be dangerous. There’s Pete, but her partner has almost zero imagination. He’d do it, but treat the whole thing as a joke, and if there’s one thing Chet Ondowsky isn’t, it’s a joke.

  Dan Bell might have taken the shape-shifter on when he was younger, but in those years he was content to just watch, fascinated, when it popped up from time to time, a Where’s Waldo of disaster. Feeling almost sorry for it, maybe. But now things have changed. Now it is no longer content to live on the aftermath of tragedy, gobbling grief and pain before the blood dries.

  This time it brought the carnage, and if it gets away with it once, it will do it again. Next time the death toll may be much higher, and Holly will not allow that.

  She opens her laptop on the room’s chintzy excuse for a desk and finds the email from Brad Bell she was expecting.

  Attached is what you requested. Please use the materials wisely, and please keep us out of it. We have done what we can.

  Well, Holly thinks, not quite. She downloads the attachment and then calls Dan Bell’s phone. She expects Brad to answer again, but it’s the old man, sounding relatively rejuvenated. There’s nothing like a nap to do that; Holly takes one whenever she can, but these days the opportunity doesn’t come around as often as she’d like.

  “Dan, it’s Holly. Can I ask you one more question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “How does he move from job to job without being discovered? This is the age of social media. I don’t understand how that works.”

  For a few seconds there’s only the sound of his heavy, oxygen-assisted breathing. Then he says, “We’ve talked about that, Brad and I. We have some ideas. He… it… wait, Brad wants the damn phone.”

  There’s a smatter of talk she can’t pick up, but Holly gets the gist: the old guy doesn’t like being co-opted. Then Brad is on. “You want to know how he keeps getting jobs on TV?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a good question. Really good. We can’t be sure, but we think he jimmies his way in.”

  “Jimmies?”

  “It’s a broadcast term. Jimmying is how radio personalities and TV reporters move up in big markets. In those places there’s always at least one local TV station. Small. Unaffiliated. Pays peanuts. They mostly do community affairs. Everything from opening a new bridge to charity drives to city council meetings. This guy gets on the air there, does a few months, then applies at one of the big stations, using audition tapes from the little local station. Anybody seeing those tapes would get right away that he’s good at the job. A pro.” Brad gives a short laugh. “He’d have to be, wouldn’t he? He’s been doing it for at least sixty damn years. Practice makes perf—”

  The old man interrupts with something. Brad says he’ll tell her, but that isn’t good enough for Holly. She’s suddenly impatient with both of them. It’s been a long day.

  “Brad, put the phone on speaker.”

  “Huh? Oh, okay, good idea.”

  “I think he was doing it on radio, too!” Dan bawls. It’s as if he thinks they’re communicating with tin cans on a waxed string. Holly winces and holds the phone away from her ear.

  “Grampa, you don’t have to talk so loud.”

  Dan lowers his voice, but only slightly. “On the radio, Holly! Even before there was TV! And before there was radio, he might have been covering bloodshed for the newspapers! God knows how long he—it—has been alive.”

  “Also,” Brad says, “he must have a rolling file of references. Probably the aspect you call George writes some for Ondowsky, and the one you call Ondowsky has written some for George. You understand?”

  Holly does… sort of. It makes her think of a joke Bill told her once, about brokers marooned on a desert island getting rich trading each other’s clothes.

  “Let me talk, goddammit,” Dan says. “I understand as well as you do, Bradley. I’m not stupid.”

  Brad sighs. Living with Dan Bell can’t be easy, Holly thinks. On the other hand, living with Brad Bell is probably no bed of roses, either.

  “Holly, it works because TV talent is a seller’s market at big local affiliates. People move up, some quit the business… and he’s good at the job.”

  “It,” Brad says. “It’s good at the job.”

  She hears coughing and Brad tells his grandfather to take one of his pills.

  “Jesus, will you stop being such an old woman?”

  Felix and Oscar, yelling at each other across the generation gap, Holly thinks. It might make a good sitcom, but when it comes to getting information it’s extremely poopy.

  “Dan? Brad? Will you stop…” Bickering is the word that comes to mind, but Holly can’t quite bring herself to say it, even though she’s wound tight. “Stop your discussion for a minute?”

  They are blessedly quiet.

  “I understand what you’re saying, and it makes sense as far as it goes, but what about his work history? Where he went to broadcasting school? Don’t they wonder? Ask questions?”

  Dan says gruffly, “He probably tells them he’s been out of the business for awhile and decided to get back in.”

  “But we don’t really know,” Brad says. He sounds pissed, either because he can’t answer Holly’s question to her satisfaction (or to his own), or because he’s smarting over being called an old woman. “Listen, there was a kid in Colorado who posed as a doctor for almost four years. Prescribed drugs, even did operations. Maybe you read about it. He was seventeen passing for twenty-five, and didn�
�t have a college degree in anything, let alone medicine. If he could slip through the cracks, this outsider could.”

  “Are you done?” Dan asks.

  “Yes, Grampa.” And sighs.

  “Good. Because I have a question. Are you going to meet him, Holly?”

  “Yes.” Along with the pictures, Brad has included a spectrograph screen grab of Freeman, Ondowsky, and Philip Hannigan—aka George the Bomber. To Holly’s eye, all three look identical.

  “When?”

  “I hope tomorrow, and I’d like you both to keep completely quiet about this, please. Will you do that?”

  “We will,” Brad says. “Of course we will. Won’t we, Grampa?”

  “As long as you tell us what happens,” Dan says. “If you can, that is. I used to be a cop, Holly, and Brad works with the cops. We probably don’t have to tell you that meeting him could be dangerous. Will be dangerous.”

  “I know,” Holly says in a small voice. “I work with an ex-cop myself.” And worked with an even better one before him, she thinks.

  “Will you be careful?”

  “I’ll try,” Holly says, but she knows there always comes a point when you have to stop being careful. Jerome talked about a bird that carried evil like a virus. All frowsy and frosty gray, he said. If you wanted to catch it and wring its fracking neck, there came a time when you had to stop being careful. She doesn’t think that will happen tomorrow, but it will soon.

  Soon.

  16

  Jerome has turned the space over the Robinsons’ garage into a writing room and is using it to work on his book about great-great-Gramps Alton, also known as the Black Owl. He’s beavering away on it this evening when Barbara lets herself in and asks Jerome if she’s interrupting. Jerome tells her he can use a break. They get Cokes from the small refrigerator nestled beneath one sloping eave.

  “Where is she?” Barbara asks.

  Jerome sighs. “No how’s your book going, J? No did you find that chocolate Lab, J? Which I did, by the way. Safe and sound.”

  “Good for you. And how’s your book going, J?”

  “Up to page 93,” he says, and sweeps a hand through the air. “I’m sailing.”

  “That’s good, too. Now where is she?”

  Jerome takes his phone out of his pocket and touches an app called WebWatcher. “See for yourself.”

  Barbara studies the screen. “The airport in Portland? Portland, Maine? What’s she doing there?”

  “Why don’t you call her and ask?” Jerome says. “Just say ‘Jerome snuck a tracker on your phone, Hollyberry, because we’re worried about you, so what are you up to? Spill it, girl.’ Think she’d like that?”

  “Don’t joke,” Barbara says. “She’d be super-pissed. That would be bad, but she’d also be hurt, and that would be worse. Besides, we know what it’s about. Don’t we?”

  Jerome had suggested—just suggested—that Barbara could peek at the history on Holly’s home computer when she went to pick up those movies for her school report. If, that was, Holly’s password at home was the same as the one she used at work.

  That turned out to be the case, and while Barbara had felt extremely creepy and stalkerish about looking at her friend’s search history, she had done it. Because Holly hadn’t been the same after her trip to Oklahoma and subsequent trip to Texas, where she had nearly been killed by an off-the-rails cop named Jack Hoskins. There was a great deal more to that story than her near miss that day, and both of them knew it, but Holly refused to talk about it. And at first that seemed okay, because little by little the haunted look had left her eyes. She had returned to normal… Holly-normal, at least. But now she was gone, doing something she’d refused to talk about.

  So Jerome had decided to track Holly’s location with the WebWatcher app.

  And Barbara had looked at Holly’s search history.

  And Holly—trusting soul that she was, at least when it came to her friends—had not wiped it.

  Barbara discovered Holly had looked at many trailers for upcoming movies, had visited Rotten Tomatoes and Huffington Post, and had several times visited a dating site called Hearts & Friends (who knew?), but many of her current searches had to do with the terrorist bombing at the Albert Macready Middle School. There were also searches for Chet Ondowsky, a TV reporter at WPEN in Pittsburgh, a place called Clauson’s Diner in Pierre, Pennsylvania, and someone named Fred Finkel, who turned out to be a cameraman at WPEN.

  Barbara took all this to Jerome and asked if he thought Holly might be on the verge of some sort of weirdo breakdown, maybe kicked off by the Macready School bombing. “Maybe she’s like, flashing back to when her cousin Janey got blown up by Brady Hartsfield.”

  Based on her searches, it certainly crossed Jerome’s mind that Holly had caught the scent of another really bad man, but there’s something else that seemed—to him, at least—equally plausible.

  “Hearts & Friends,” he says to his sister now.

  “What about it?”

  “Has it not occurred to you that Holly might be, don’t gasp, hooking up? Or at least meeting a guy she’s exchanged emails with?”

  Barbara stares at him with her mouth open. Almost laughs, then doesn’t. What she says is, “Hmmm.”

  “Meaning what?” Jerome says. “Give me some insight here. You spend girl-time with her—”

  “Sexist, J.”

  He ignores that. “Does she have a friend of the male persuasion? Now or ever?”

  Barbara considers this carefully. “You know what, I don’t think so. I think she might still be a virgin.”

  What about you, Barb? is the thought that immediately jumps into Jerome’s mind, but some questions should not be asked of eighteen-year-old girls by their big brothers.

  “She’s not gay, or anything,” Barbara hastens on. “She never misses a Josh Brolin flick, and when we saw that stupid shark movie a couple of years ago, she actually moaned when she saw Jason Statham with his shirt off. Do you really think she’d go all the way to Maine for a date?”

  “The plot thickens,” he says, peering into his phone. “She’s not at the airport. If you zoom in, you’ll see it’s Embassy Suites. She’s probably drinking champagne with some guy who likes frozen daiquiris, strolling in the moonlight, and discussing classic films.”

  Barbara makes as if to punch him in the face, only springing her hand open at the last second.

  “Tell you what,” Jerome says. “I think we better leave this alone.”

  “For real?”

  “I think so, yeah. We need to remember that she survived Brady Hartsfield. Twice. Whatever happened in Texas, she got through that, too. She’s a little shaky on top, but down deep… solid steel.”

  “Got that right,” Barbara says. “Looking at her browser… that made me feel skeevy.”

  “This makes me feel skeevy,” he says, and taps the blinking dot on his phone that marks the Embassy Suites. “I’m going to sleep on it, but if I feel the same in the morning, I’m gonna dump it. She’s a good woman. Brave. Lonely, too.”

  “And her mother’s a witch,” Barbara adds.

  Jerome doesn’t disagree. “Maybe we should just let her alone. Work it out, whatever it is.”

  “Maybe we should.” But Barbara looks unhappy about it.

  Jerome leans forward. “One thing I know for sure, Barb. She’s never going to find out that we tracked her at all. Is she?”

  “Never,” Barbara says. “Or that I peeked at her searches.”

  “Good. We have that straight. Now can I go back to work? I want to get another two pages before I knock off.”

  17

  Holly isn’t even close to knocking off. In fact, she’s just about to get started on the evening’s real work. She thinks about kneeling for a little more prayer first and decides she would only be procrastinating. She reminds herself that God helps those who help themselves.

  Chet Ondowsky’s Chet on Guard segment has its own webpage, where folks who feel they have been burned
can call in on an 800 number. This line is manned (or womaned) twenty-four hours a day, and the page claims all calls will be kept absolutely confidential.

  Holly takes a deep breath and makes the call. It rings just a single time. “Chet on Guard, this is Monica speaking, how may I help?”

  “Monica, I need to speak to Mr. Ondowsky. It’s quite urgent.”

  The woman responds smoothly and with no hesitation. Holly’s sure she’s got a script, complete with possible variations, on the screen in front of her, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but Chet has either left for the day or is on assignment. I’ll be happy to take your contact information and pass it on to him. Some information on the nature of your consumer complaint would also be helpful.”

  “This isn’t exactly a consumer complaint,” she says, “but it is about consuming. Will you tell him that, please?”

  “Ma’am?” Monica is clearly puzzled.

  “I need to speak to him tonight, and before nine P.M. Tell him it concerns Paul Freeman and the plane crash. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Holly can hear the clitter-clitter-clitter of the woman typing.

  “Tell him it also concerns Dave Van Pelt in Dallas and Jim Avery in Detroit. And tell him—this is very important—that it concerns Philip Hannigan and the Pulse nightclub.”

  This startles Monica out of her previously smooth delivery. “Isn’t that where the man shot—”

  “Yes,” Holly says. “Tell him to call by nine, or I will take my information elsewhere. And don’t forget to tell him it’s not about consumers, but it is about consuming. He’ll know what that means.”

  “Ma’am, I can pass the message on, but I can’t guarantee—”

  “If you pass it on, he’ll call,” Holly says, and hopes she’s right. Because she doesn’t have a Plan B.

  “I need your contact information, ma’am.”

  “You have my number on your screen,” Holly says. “I’ll wait for Mr. Ondowsky’s call to give my name. Please have a pleasant evening.”