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.
Holly says, “I’m going to count down from ten to one, Jerome. Each time you hear a number, you’ll be a little more awake. Okay?”
For several seconds Jerome says nothing. He sits calmly, peacefully, touring some other reality and perhaps trying to decide if he would like to live there permanently. Holly, on the other hand, is vibrating like a tuning fork, and Hodges can feel his fingernails biting into his palms as he clenches his fists.
At last Jerome says, “Okay, I guess. Since it’s you, Hollyberry.”
“Here we go. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . you’re coming back . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . waking up . . .”
Jerome raises his head. His eyes are aimed at Hodges, but Hodges isn’t sure the boy is seeing him.
“Four . . . three . . . almost there . . . two . . . one . . . wake up!” She claps her hands together.
Jerome gives a hard jerk. One hand brushes Dinah’s Zappit and knocks it to the floor. Jerome looks at Holly with an expression of surprise so exaggerated it would be funny under other circumstances.
“What just happened? Did I go to sleep?”
Holly collapses into the chair ordinarily reserved for clients. She takes a deep breath and wipes her cheeks, which are damp with sweat.
“In a way,” Hodges says. “The game hypnotized you. Like it hypnotized your sister.”
“Are you sure?” Jerome asks, then looks at his watch. “I guess you are. I just lost fifteen minutes.”
“Closer to twenty. What do you remember?”
“Tapping the pink fish and turning them into numbers. It’s surprisingly hard to do. You have to watch closely, really concentrate, and the blue flashes don’t help.”
Hodges picks the Zappit up off the floor.
“I wouldn’t turn that on,” Holly says sharply.
“Not going to. But I did last night, and I can tell you there were no blue flashes, and you could tap pink fish until your finger went numb without getting any numbers. Also, the tune is different now. Not much, but a little.”
Holly sings, pitch perfect: “‘By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea, you and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be.’ My mother used to sing it to me when I was little.”
Jerome is staring at her with more intensity than she can deal with, and she looks away, flustered. “What? What is it?”
“There were words,” he says, “but not those.”
Hodges heard no words, only the tune, but doesn’t say so. Holly asks Jerome if he can remember them.
His pitch isn’t as good as hers, but it’s close enough for them to be sure that yes, it’s the tune they heard. “‘You can sleep, you can sleep, it’s a beautiful sleep . . . ’” He stops. “That’s all I can remember. If I’m not just making it up, that is.”
Holly says, “Now we know for sure. Someone amped the Fishin’ Hole screen.”
“Shot it full of ’roids,” Jerome adds.
“What does that even mean?” Hodges asks.
Jerome nods to Holly and she says, “Someone loaded a stealth program into the demo, which is mildly hypnotic to begin with. The program was dormant when Dinah had the Zappit, and still dormant when you looked at it last night, Bill—which was lucky for you—but someone turned it on after that.”
“Babineau?”
“Him or someone else, if the police are right and Babineau is dead.”
“It could have been a preset,” Jerome says to Holly. Then, to Hodges: “You know, like an alarm clock.”
“Let me get this straight,” Hodges says. “The program was in there all along, and only became active once Dinah’s Zappit was turned on today?”
“Yes,” Holly says. “There’s probably a repeater at work, don’t you think, Jerome?”
“Yeah. A computer program that pumps out the update constantly, waiting for some schlub—me, in this case—to turn on a Zappit and activate the WiFi.”
“This could happen with all of them?”
“If the stealth program is in all of them, sure,” Jerome says.
“Brady set this up.” Hodges begins to pace, hand going to his side as if to contain the pain and hold it in. “Brady fucking Hartsfield.”
“How?” Holly asks.
“I don’t know, but it’s the only thing that fits. He tries to blow up the Mingo during that concert. We stop him. The audience, most of them young girls, is saved.”
“By you, Holly,” Jerome says.
“Be quiet, Jerome. Let him tell it.” Her eyes suggest she knows where Hodges is going.