• • •

The following night, while delivering a stroke victim to Kiner Memorial, the partners checked on Martine Stover. She was in the ICU, and showing those signs of increasing brain function that signal the imminent recovery of consciousness. When she did come back, someone would have to give her the bad news: she was paralyzed from the chest down.

Rob Martin was just glad it wouldn’t have to be him.

And the man the press was calling the Mercedes Killer still hadn’t been caught.

Z
January 2016

1

A pane of glass breaks in Bill Hodges’s pants pocket. This is followed by a jubilant chorus of boys, shouting “That’s a HOME RUN!”

Hodges winces and jumps in his seat. Dr. Stamos is part of a four-doctor cabal, and the waiting room is full this Monday morning. Everyone turns to look at him. Hodges feels his face grow warm. “Sorry,” he says to the room at large. “Text message.”

“And a very loud one,” remarks an old lady with thinning white hair and beagle dewlaps. She makes Hodges feel like a kid, and he’s pushing seventy. She’s hip to cell phone etiquette, though. “You should lower the volume in public places like this, or mute your phone entirely.”

“Absolutely, absolutely.”

The old lady goes back to her paperback (it’s Fifty Shades of Grey, and not her first trip through it, from the battered look of the thing). Hodges drags his iPhone out of his pocket. The text is from Pete Huntley, his old partner when Hodges was on the cops. Pete is now on the verge of pulling the pin himself, hard to believe but true. End of watch is what they call it, but Hodges himself has found it impossible to give up watching. He now runs a little two-person firm called Finders Keepers. He calls himself an independent skip-tracer, because he got into a little trouble a few years back and can’t qualify for a private investigator’s license. In this city you have to be bonded. But a PI is what he is, at least some of the time.

Call me, Kermit. ASAP. Important.

Kermit is Hodges’s actual first name, but he goes by the middle one with most people; it keeps the frog jokes to a minimum. Pete makes a practice of using it, though. Finds it hilarious.

Hodges considers just pocketing the phone again (after muting it, if he can find his way to the DO NOT DISTURB control). He’ll be called into Dr. Stamos’s office at any minute, and he wants to get their conference over with. Like most elderly guys he knows, he doesn’t like doctors’ offices. He’s always afraid they’re going to find not just something wrong but something really wrong. Besides, it’s not like he doesn’t know what his ex-partner wants to talk about: Pete’s big retirement bash next month. It’s going to be at the Raintree Inn, out by the airport. Same place where Hodges’s party took place, but this time he intends to drink a lot less. Maybe not at all. He had trouble with booze when he was active police, it was part of the reason his marriage crashed, but these days he seems to have lost his taste for alcohol. That’s a relief. He once read a science fiction novel called The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He doesn’t know about the moon, but would testify in court that whiskey is a harsh mistress, and that’s made right here on earth.