“Jump,” Brady whispers. “Jump, and you won’t have to take the SAT. Your mother won’t hate you. She’ll be sorry. Jump and all the numbers will come right. You’ll get the best prize. The prize is sleep.”

“The prize is sleep,” Ellen agrees.

“Do it now,” Brady murmurs as he sits behind the wheel of Al Brooks’s old car with his eyes closed.

Forty miles south, Ellen jumps from her bedroom window. It’s not a long drop, and there’s banked snow against the house. It’s old and crusty, but it still cushions her fall to a degree, so instead of dying, she only breaks a collarbone and three ribs. She begins to scream in pain, and Brady is blown out of her head like a pilot strapped to an F-111 ejection seat.

“Shit!” he screams, and pounds the steering wheel. Babineau’s arthritis flares all the way up his arm, and that makes him angrier still. “Shit, shit, shit!”

19

In the pleasantly upscale neighborhood of Branson Park, Ellen Murphy struggles to her feet. The last thing she remembers is telling her mother she was too sick to go to school—a lie so she could tap pink fish and hunt for prizes on the pleasantly addictive Fishin’ Hole demo. Her Zappit is lying nearby, the screen cracked. It no longer interests her. She leaves it and begins staggering toward the front door on bare feet. Each breath she takes is a stab in the side.

But I’m alive, she thinks. At least I’m alive. What was I thinking? What in God’s name was I thinking?

Brady’s voice is still with her: the slimy taste of something awful that she swallowed while it was still alive.

20

“Jerome?” Holly asks. “Can you still hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to turn off the Zappit and put it on Bill’s desk.” And then, because she’s always been a belt-and-suspenders kind of girl, she adds: “Facedown.”

A frown creases his broad brow. “Do I have to?”

“Yes. Right now. And without looking at the damn thing.”

Before Jerome can follow this order, Hodges catches one final glimpse of the fish swimming, and one more bright blue flash. A momentary dizziness—perhaps caused by his pain pills, perhaps not—sweeps through him. Then Jerome pushes the button on top of the console, and the fish disappear.

What Hodges feels isn’t relief but disappointment. Maybe that’s crazy, but given his current medical problem, maybe it’s not. He’s seen hypnosis used from time to time to help witnesses achieve better recall, but has never grasped its full power until now. He has an idea, probably blasphemous in this situation, that the Zappit fish might be better medicine for pain than the stuff Dr. Stamos prescribed.