End of Watch

“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.”

This passage introduces and explains the term “End of Watch.” It also foreshadows Hodges’s death. Hodges is unable to lay down his role as a police detective. His own “end of watch” comes only with death.

“[Martine Stover] used to say that being alone after someone you love passes on was the worst kind of paralysis.”

This passage again foreshadows Hodges’s death, which will leave Holly alone. Holly will have to overcome the paralysis that threatens to freeze her when Hodges is gone. Fortunately, Holly has grown enough that she will be able to step into her role as an adult.

“With the patients she is also swift and competent, but she’s cold, and there’s an undertone of contempt there, as well. She will not allow even the most cataclysmically injured of them to be called a gork or a burn or a wipeout, at least not in her hearing, but she has a certain attitude. ‘She knows her stuff,’ one nurse said to another in the break room not long after Scapelli took up her duties. ‘No argument about that, but there’s something missing.’

The other nurse was a thirty-year veteran who had seen it all. She considered, then said one word… but it was le mot juste. ‘Mercy.’”

“Le mot juste” translates roughly as “the one perfect word.” The veteran nurse’s description of Ruth Scapelli as lacking mercy is more complicated than merely lacking empathy or kindness or pity. It is all those things, but it is also an adherence to the letter of the law without regard for circumstances—the magistrate who would imprison the mother who stole bread to feed her starving children.

“‘Because you don’t like me,’ [Ruth Scapelli] says, bending forward with her hands on her pink-skirted knees. ‘Do you, Mr. Hartsfield? And that makes us even, because I don’t like you.’…She glances around at the door to make sure it’s shut, then removes her left hand from her knee and reaches out with it. ‘All those people you hurt, some of them still suffering. Does that make you happy? It does, doesn’t it? How would you like it? Shall we find out?’ She first touches the soft ridge of a nipple beneath his shirt, then grasps it between her thumb and index finger. Her nails are short, but she digs in with what she has. She twists first one way, then the other. ‘That’s pain, Mr. Hartsfield. Do you like it?’ His face remains as bland as ever, which makes her angrier still.”

Ruth has been described as lacking mercy. Her action here is both consistent and inconsistent in that respect. She violates every principle of her job by abusing one of her charges. Had any of her staff done the same, regardless of the provocation, she would impose merciless punishment according to the letter of the law. At the same time, she is exacting justice (of a sort) on Brady by punishing him for a misdeed, exhibiting a sadism that has been controlled before. Brady has broken Ruth’s self-control as he has manipulated others before her. This time, he didn’t even have to get into her mind.

“This morning there’s [a message] from [Cynthia’s] mother, sent last night at 10:44 PM, which translates to 8:44, West Coast time. She frowns at the subject line, which is a single word: Sorry. She opens it. Her heartbeat speeds up as she reads. I’m awful. I’m an awful worthless bitch. No one will stand up for me. This is what I have to do. I love you.

I love you. When is the last time her mother said that to her? Cynthia—who says it to her boys at least four times a day—honestly can’t remember.”

Ruth Scapelli was a cold and distant mother. Her message to Cynthia, brought on by Brady’s manipulation of her mind, exposes something she has never publicly acknowledged. Brady preys on existing cracks in his targets’ minds, the things they hate or fear about themselves. He has brought out Ruth’s well-buried sense of failure as a mother and her love for her child.

“I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers…but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.”

Hodges speaks of evil as if it is an external force that infects humanity. When its host is captured, the evil has no more use for it. Hodges detects that Brady, despite his apparently catatonic condition, hasn’t lost his usefulness. In fact, Brady now embodies the force itself. He infects people like Library Al and Dr. Babineau, taking them over and discarding them when he is finished. He infects people like Barbara Robinson in a different way, digging into their heads and increasing their negative feelings, then abandoning them when he has achieved his aim.

“‘I’m going to be fine. And this is probably nothing. We’re like kids worrying that the empty house on the corner is haunted. If we said anything about it to Pete, he’d have us both committed.’

Holly, who actually has been committed (twice), believes some empty houses really might be haunted.”

Part of Holly’s originality is that in addition to a very meticulous and logical mind, she accepts the improbable as possible. This is in part because she takes in all the information around her without a filter to exclude what she presumes to be irrelevant. In the next book connected to this series, The Outsider, Holly’s logical and meticulous mind enables her to recognize a supernatural (or abnatural) threat and successfully counter it.

“Bill Hodges is her touchstone, the way she measures her ability to interact with the world. Which is only another way of saying that he is the way she measures her sanity. Trying to imagine her life with him gone is like standing on top of a skyscraper and looking at the sidewalk sixty stories below.”

When Hodges laid down his role as an active police detective, he took up the next stage of life as a mentor to a new generation (Holly). She doubts her readiness to survive without him and feels that she is standing on a precipice.

“Crying harder than ever, because she knows he’s telling the truth about needing her. And being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.”

Holly’s early life was characterized by bullying, abuse, and disregard for her abilities. Hodges has always respected and appreciated her. Being needed tells her that she matters. It also represents Holly’s leaving the guidance of the mentor and becoming the hero of her own story.

“‘I wish you’d died before they brought you in,’ Babineau says. His voice is rising, becoming a whine. ‘Or on the operating table. You’re a Frankenstein!’

‘Don’t confuse the monster with the creator,’ Brady says.”

Dr. Babineau is referring to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by the writer Mary Shelley. It is a popular mistake to refer to Dr. Frankenstein’s creation as “Frankenstein.” In fact, the “monster” is largely a victim of his creator. Dr. Frankenstein is the true monster of the story. Where the creation does evil, his actions can be directly traced back to his creator. Brady’s comparison is only partly correct. Frankenstein’s creation—the monster—was not evil from the outset; his creator made him so. Brady, on the other hand, chose evil and embraced it willingly on his own behalf. Dr. Babineau, like Dr. Frankenstein, carries the blame for “resurrecting” Brady and giving him his powers, but Brady’s evil is not Babineau’s fault.

“[Hodges] learned the phrase to cross the Rubicon way back in high school, and grasped its meaning without Mrs. Bradley’s explanation: to make an irrevocable decision. What he learned later, sometimes to his sorrow, is that one comes upon most Rubicons unprepared.”

In this philosophical statement, Hodges adds an addendum to the popular aphorism “to cross the Rubicon,” which is derived from Julius Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon River, which ultimately caused a war in which he took control over a large swath of territory and became dictator for life. It means to make an irrevocable decision. This is the beginning of the third act of the story where Hodges makes a definitive choice that shapes the rest of the story. Everything else flows from his decision to follow the evidence wherever it leads rather than burden Pete with the impossible.

“From the pocket of the borrowed gray trousers [Brady] takes the bottle of pills and spills half a dozen in the upturned palm. Take, eat, he thinks. This is my body, broken for you.”

Brady is killing his own damaged body. His reference to the words of Christ serving the first communion to his disciples invokes death and resurrection. Brady is killing himself in order to resurrect himself in a new body.

“[Hodges] won a lot of citations over the years, but they’re piled helter-skelter on a shelf in his closet instead of hanging on a wall. The citations never mattered to him. The reward was the flash of light that came with the connections. He found himself unable to give it up. Hence Finders Keepers instead of retirement.”

Hodges’s fixation on solving the puzzle rather than getting commendations directly contrasts with Isabelle, who is seeking exactly the commendations Hodges earned. The difference is that Isabelle is willing to get her commendations by closing cases rather than solving them. Ironically, whereas Hodges never advanced—or wanted to advance—beyond the rank of detective, Isabelle, a more mediocre detective, may achieve her ambition to become Chief of Police.

“‘Or it could have been a combination of the two,’ Hodges says. He can’t believe they’re having this conversation, but not to have it would fly in the face of rule one in the detective biz: you go where the facts lead you.”

Hodges is paraphrasing the Holmesian adage that when one has eliminated the impossible, then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. Having eliminated several impossibilities, Hodges must consider the improbable—that Brady is somehow still influencing the world. The trick is that the evidence leads inevitably to a conclusion outside Hodges’s understanding of the real world.

“We had a blow-up. Me and Izzy. Big one. I tried to tell her what you told me when we started working together—how the case is the boss, and you go where it leads you. No ducking, no handing it off, just pick it up and follow the red thread all the way home. She stood there listening with her arms folded, nodding her head every now and then. I actually thought I was getting through to her. Then you know what she asked me? If I knew the last time there was a woman in the top echelon of the city police. I said I didn’t, and she said that was because the answer was never. She said the first one was going to be her.”

Isabelle’s view of police work differs from that of Hodges and Pete. They are both focused more on finding the truth than on closing the case. Isabelle is unable to see solutions that might make her look “weird” to her co-workers and block her advancement.

“[Brady] began to understand what contentment actually was: the emotional version of the horse latitudes, where all the winds died away and one simply drifted. It ensued when one ran out of goals to grow.”

It is ironic that Brady feels something in common with ordinary humanity. Most people feel a need to pursue some meaningful goal to be truly happy, and Brady turns that need on its head. He is seeking not meaning but nihilism.

“No, he thinks, dread is the wrong word. Terror is the right one. For the first time in my life, I’m terrified of the future, where I see everything that I am or ever was first submerged, then erased. If the pain itself doesn’t do it, the heavier drugs they give me to stifle it will.”

What Hodges fears is loss of self. He describes seeing himself in a state like Brady, a shell, barely animate without a mind to inhabit it. Hodges, however, will never find himself truly in that state. The part of himself that he fears losing is contained in the people who love him, as the reader sees when Holly and Jerome meet at Hodges’s graveside, bringing the threesome together again for the last time.

“‘You know what, I did,’ Jerome says. ‘One of those fucking Zappits almost got my sister killed.’ He steps toward her, and Freddi cringes back. ‘Did you have any idea what you were doing? Any fucking idea at all? I think you must have. You look stoned but not stupid.’

Freddi begins to cry. ‘I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to.’”

Freddi has the self-awareness to recognize (too late) her moral weakness. She fell victim to manipulation; yes, Freddi knew what Brady was up to, but he drew her in step by step, using cultlike tactics to groom her by making each step so small that she found herself chin-deep in his plot and too wound up in greed and fear of Brady to back out. King uses Freddi to illustrate the necessity of critical thinking and moral courage even under outside pressure.

“‘No. I was thinking about a sociology class I took when I was a high school senior. We did a four-week mod on suicide, and there was one statistic I never forgot. Every teen suicide that makes it onto social media spawns seven attempts, five that are show and two that are go. Maybe you should think about that instead of running the tough-girl act into the ground.’

Freddi’s lower lip trembles. ‘I didn’t know. Not really.’”

Jerome is describing the social contagion phenomenon in which people contemplating suicide may be moved to imitate when they hear about another death. Once again, Freddi illustrates the willingness to ignore inconvenient truth. She doesn’t need to know the statistic to know what Brady is doing. Her intuition told her what was going to happen, whether she understood about social contagion or not, and she certainly knew that some people would die.

“‘Hello, this is Holly.’ She listens, then mouths Miss Pretty Gray Eyes to Hodges. ‘Uh-huh…yes…okay, I understand…no, he can’t, his hands are full right now, but I’ll tell him.’ She listens some more, then says, ‘I could tell you, Izzy, but you wouldn’t believe me.’

She closes his phone with a snap and slips it back into his pocket.

‘Suicides?’ Hodges asks.

‘Three so far, counting the boy who shot himself in front of his father.’ ‘Zappits?’

‘At two of the three locations. Responders at the third one haven’t had a chance to look. They were trying to save the kid, but it was too late. He hung himself. Izzy sounds half out of her mind. She wanted to know everything.’

‘If anything happens to us, Jerome will tell Pete, and Pete will tell her. I think she’s almost ready to listen.’”

The rash of suicides now threatens Isabelle’s career if she can’t stop it, but her mind is not quite open enough yet to eliminate the impossible and accept the improbable—that the suicides are associated with Brady Hartsfield. When Holly tells Isabelle she wouldn’t believe the reality, she is stating the precise truth. Isabelle still wouldn’t believe the truth, but she may be more willing in future to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

“[Hodges] would give anything to just sleep, and sleep, and sleep. But he opens [his eyes] again and forces himself to look at Brady, because you play the game to the end. That’s how it works; play to the end.”

Hodges isn’t thinking only of the present moment, the present conflict with Brady. He is also thinking about his life. He has never been able to let go and embrace his own End of Watch. He feels compelled to continue to the end—his end.

“One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, Hodges’s father would have said. And the thought that comes to him is too complicated—too fraught with a terrible mixture of anger and sorrow—to be articulated. It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.”

This is the anger stage of confronting death. Hodges is referring to suicide. Hodges wants to live and he feels some resentment for people who are giving up what he desperately wants. His anger is expressed in his reference to blindness and self-involvement, descriptions which lack empathy. His anger contrasts with his love for Holly, who twice attempted to die by suicide. By thinking of her as emotionally-scarred, he is denying many of the things that he loves most about her.

“‘That’s where I met Bill, at that funeral. I ran out of that one, too. I was sitting behind the funeral parlor, smoking a cigarette, feeling terrible, and that’s where he found me. Do you understand?’ At last she looks up at him. ‘He found me.’

‘I get it, Holly. I do.’

‘He opened a door for me. One into the world. He gave me something to do that made a difference.’”

Before meeting Hodges, Holly was held back by people who derided her or tried to protect her, sometimes both at once. Hodges was the first person who took the time to really know her. He became a mentor, bringing out the strengths in his pupil/friend, compensating for her weaknesses and helping her to overcome them or work around them. She may not feel that is ready to stand on her own, but by laying down his watch, Hodges is symbolically saying that Holly is ready to be the hero of her own stories—as she will be in The Outsider and Holly (coming in 2023).