by Barry Lyga
And the unmistakable sound of rapid footfalls from within, as time returned to its normal flow, Jazz’s heart thrumming like a timpani played by a spastic, his breath a harsh and hot wind in his throat.
“Don’t you dare run!” Jazz yelled. “The cops are already surrounding the place!” And then he pushed through the throbbing pain in his leg and lashed out again; he was surprised when the door burst inward, the knob and lock clanging to the floor.
He ran, limping, as fast as he could, exploding into Ginny’s entryway. The apartment was dark, but a rectangle of light spilled onto the floor halfway down a short hall. The living room, he remembered.
Jazz made for it, spinning into the open archway that led to the living room. He barely had time to adjust to the light before the scene assaulted his eyes: the sofa he’d sat on with Connie, holding hands, now pushed against the wall under the window, tilted crazily askew from the rest of the room, a figure climbing atop it. Another, slight figure lying on a white-and-red patterned throw rug.
The man on the sofa turned back. He wore a black ski mask, but that left the eyes open. Jazz’s gaze met his for a bare second. Blue eyes. Crazy eyes.
And then the killer turned away as though blasted with sunlight, one arm coming up to protect his face as he darted out the window.
Jazz scrambled to the sofa, stopping when he felt the carpet squishing under his feet. The throw rug didn’t have a white-and-red pattern. It was just white.
He froze for a moment. He could still go through the window, maybe grab the killer, hold him until the police arrived.…
But Ginny.
She was trembling on the throw rug, shaking as the fibers soaked up her blood, which jetted from the five clinical, almost surgical, stumps on her right hand. Her eyes had rolled back in her head.
He couldn’t move. He was paralyzed. Staring at her.
This was it. This was the moment he’d heard so much about. The moment Billy had apotheosized.
People say there’s a light goes out in their eyes when someone dies, Billy whispered in Jazz’s mind, in his memory. But that ain’t all. There’s a sound, Jasper. A sound that goes quiet. It’s beautiful and it’s peaceful and it’s sacred an’ holy. You gotta get close to hear it go.
The telltale pinprick on her neck told the story, as if he needed the help. Like Myerson had been and like the next two victims would be, she’d been injected with drain cleaner, which had wreaked havoc on the muscles of her heart. As if the shock trauma of her fingers being cut off weren’t enough, she was also in incredible pain, and suffering a massive heart attack.
Jazz prayed that Howie had called 911. He shook himself from his stupor and dropped to his knees next to Ginny. The sight and smell of the blood, the feel of it seeping through his jeans, made him dizzy. There was so much of it; you chop off five fingers while the victim’s alive and struggling, and most likely you open up an artery or two. First time I cut an artery, Billy said, I couldn’t believe how much—
Jazz stopped the voice. He felt the blood. He wanted more of it. He wanted to run his hands through the carpet. He wanted none of it. He wanted to run.
No! You can’t run! Help her! You have to help her!
Did she recognize him? Or was she too far gone? He couldn’t tell. Her expression was one of sheer panic, a terror that absorbed into every pore and every inch of flesh. If she did recognize him, what was she thinking? Was she thinking, Oh, thank God, it’s Jasper!
Or Oh, God, no—anyone but Jasper!
He felt like he should say something to her, but he didn’t trust his voice. He didn’t trust anything about himself. All he wanted at that moment was to lean over, take her throat in his hands.…
God! Goddamn it! Goddamn Billy Dent and goddamn his son, too. Tears sprang to Jazz’s eyes. She was dying. Dying right in front of him, and he didn’t trust himself to help her because he didn’t trust his hands not to finish the job instead.
“Just do it!” he yelled to himself, his voice raw and bleak in the close quarters of the apartment. “Save her, you useless piece of—”
He didn’t finish. As he watched, she hitched a breath, then gasped, then stopped breathing. She was in the full throes of cardiac arrest.
Jazz didn’t think. He didn’t torture himself. He tilted her head back and listened for breathing. Nothing. A moment of intense pleasure washed over him, followed by a revulsion so sickening that he almost threw himself headlong out the window.
Not yet. She’s not dead yet.
With her head still tilted back, he pinched her nose shut and sealed his mouth over hers, exhaling hard into her until her chest rose. Then again.
She lay there, still.
His fingers probed her chest until he found the xiphoid process. He started chest compressions, pumping thirty times, then rocking back on his heels. Nothing. He blew into her mouth again, her chest rising and falling for him, but then going still again when he switched back to compressions.
“Don’t do this, Ginny,” he said to her. “Don’t give him this. Don’t give me this.” Tears streamed down his face. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know if he was desperate to save her or just angry at himself for even trying. A voice in his head—it wasn’t Billy’s; Jazz was afraid it was his own—whispered that if she died, at least he would be here for it. At least he would witness it.
Breath-breath. And compressions. Breath-breath. And compressions. It felt like it went on forever. It felt like he’d aged years, grown old while trying to keep her alive, his arms and shoulders burning, his lips chapped and raw. The flow of blood from her fingers slowed and stopped. Clotting already? Or because the heart no longer beat to drive blood anywhere? He couldn’t decide which. Didn’t want to know which.
Finally, he rocked back on his heels, still kneeling in her blood. She was gone. There was nothing he could do. She’d probably been dead for entire minutes now.
And he felt…
He didn’t know. He didn’t know what he felt. A part of him had dreaded this day, this moment when he would encounter his first fresh kill. He’d been afraid it would awaken something that slumbered fitfully within him. But he’d also anticipated it, yearned for it. It would, he knew, answer the question one way or another: Did he lust for death like his father before him?
And yet here he was. Here he knelt, with a shattered, drained life before him. And nothing.
He had tried to save her, hadn’t he? Did that mean anything? But she wasn’t his victim. Maybe he’d only tried because he’d had no hand in her death. Or maybe he’d truly wanted her to live. He didn’t know.
He’d tried and failed. Had he tried hard enough? Had some part of him held back? Had he only done it so that he could touch her as she died? Everything he’d done seemed so loaded now, the motions of CPR taking on a tawdry, lurid tenor in his mind—his lips on hers, his hands on her chest, between those same breasts that had been compressed against him so recently.…
The silence was overpowering. Billy had been right. When she’d gone, some sound had gone with her. One moment, there’d been something of her, something along with his own hissing breath and his own grunts as he pounded at her still chest. In the next, that something was gone, dead, quiet. He listened to the silence. The emotions running through him made no sense: fear, hope, grief, joy, lust. They weren’t Billy Dent’s feelings, but they weren’t a normal person’s, either.
What the hell am I?
The silence ended as suddenly as it had begun—in the distance, sirens wailed, closing in. Howie had called 911 after all.
How much time had passed since he’d sent Howie rushing outside? The killer had gotten out the window, but how far had he gone? Could he still be caught?
Jazz leapt to his feet and scrambled over the sofa to the window. He looked down as the sirens grew louder.
Down in the alley, a long, thin figure lay in a pool of widening blood, illuminated by the lights from the car wash.
Howie!
CHAPTER 20
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br /> Jazz didn’t think; he hurled himself through the window and clambered down the fire escape like a monkey on crystal meth, dropping the last six feet to the dirty alley pavement the way the killer must have. How long had it been? How long had he struggled with Ginny?
No sooner had his feet touched the ground than one of the sirens moaned to a halt, an ambulance jerking to a sudden stop right in front of him. Two paramedics practically fell out of the ambo, one carrying a black bag.
Jazz got to Howie before they did; he was still breathing, lying facedown on the asphalt. Where was all the blood coming from? He didn’t want to move Howie and make it worse, but he had to know. In the background, he could still hear another siren—the police, pulling into the parking lot. Ginny lived—had lived, he reminded himself—closer to the hospital than to the police station.
“Howie, can you hear me? Howie? Come on, man. Howie?”
“Jumper?” the first paramedic said, running over and checking the distance from the roof at the same time. “What the hell? Call said third floor, but—”
“There’s no time,” Jazz said, taking control. “He’s a type-A hemophiliac—”
“Hold on, kid,” the second paramedic said. “Our call said third floor. Is this the same—”
“The woman on three is dead already,” Jazz said, as composed as he could make himself. Which was, actually, very, very composed. “This one here is a type-A hemophiliac. He needs—”
“No bracelet,” said the first one, already down on one knee next to Howie. The paramedic touched his neck. “Pulse is thready.”
“He needs clotting factor VIII,” Jazz said. He felt awash in blood—Ginny’s, now Howie’s. The second paramedic, standing doubtfully aside, pointed to Jazz’s pants.
“Is that your blood? What’s going on here?”
“Please.” Howie had already lost a lot of blood, and he would lose more if these yahoos didn’t get their acts together. Ten pints. Ten pints was all he had, and it gushed from him like a water cannon. As if to complicate things, a Lobo’s Nod deputy came into the alleyway, barking into his shoulder mic, clearly communicating with another cop in the building. A moment later, another man followed—it was Deputy Erickson, out of uniform, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Great. Where the hell had he come from?
Jazz shook it off. Howie was all that mattered. “Please, just administer a dose of—”
“Kid, this guy’s got no medical bracelet, and I’m not about to give him—”
“He forgets it all the time,” Jazz told them. By now the second paramedic had decided that Jazz needed medical attention, too, and was preparing to wrap a blood-pressure cuff around his arm. Jazz shook him off. “He forgets the bracelet. Trust me; he’s gonna bleed out if you don’t—”
“We know our jobs. Who the hell do you think you are, kid?”
And Jazz snapped.
He didn’t snap the way a normal person might snap. A normal person would fling his arms around and stomp his feet and rant at the top of his lungs, bellowing to the sky. There might be tears, from a normal person.
Jazz went quiet. He darted out one hand and grabbed the wrist of the paramedic who had been trying to cuff him and pulled the man close, holding his gaze.
In a moment, he channeled every last drop of Billy Dent.
“Who am I? I’ll tell you. I’m the local psychopath, and if you don’t save my best friend’s life, I will hunt down everyone you’ve ever cared about in your life and make you watch while I do things to them that will have you begging me to kill them. That’s who I am.”
It was ridiculous. It was absurd. And yet…It was utterly believable. He left no doubt in the man’s mind that Jazz could—and would—do exactly as he’d promised. Moreover, he left no doubt that Jazz would enjoy every last second of it.
“You, uh”—the EMT swallowed—“you said type-A?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t have, uh, clotting factor VIII on the bus, but we can give him DDAVP to hold him until we get to the hospital.”
“Then do it,” Jazz ordered, shoving the paramedic away from him. Erickson, who had watched the whole thing, stood stunned for a moment, then approached Jazz and, without preamble, slapped handcuffs on him.
CHAPTER 21
Erickson shoved Jazz against the wall and started reading him his rights. As much as Jazz didn’t like Erickson, he really couldn’t blame the deputy. Jazz had threatened the paramedic, and the other cops on the scene were reporting over their mics that the third-floor apartment’s door was kicked in, the window was open, and there was a dead woman on the floor. Jazz probably would have brought out the cuffs, too, if their positions had been flipped.
“Do you understand these rights?” Erickson asked as he finished. “Well?”
“Sure I do. Hey, do you always carry handcuffs when you’re off-duty?” Jazz taunted. “Your girlfriends like that?”
“Shut up,” Erickson said, frisking Jazz quickly but efficiently. Jazz stood mute as the deputy ran his hands up between his thighs. Howie would have had a smart-ass zinger ready; Jazz couldn’t think of a single one.
Erickson spun him around and Jazz made a point of looking at the deputy’s eyes. Blue.
Were they the same blue as the killer’s? Jazz couldn’t be sure. The lighting here in the alleyway was so different from the light in Ginny’s apartment. He could hear G. William now: Eye color ain’t exactly evidence, Jazz.
“Take a picture,” Erickson growled as Jazz stared. “It’ll last longer.”
“Just happened to be in the area while off-duty, Erickson?” Jazz said sarcastically. “Like when you were the first one there to see Carla O’Donnelly and Helen Myerson?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, kid. I live two blocks away.”
“What am I under arrest for?” Jazz asked. Behind Erickson, he could see the paramedics lifting Howie on a stretcher. An IV bag had already been hung. They were moving quickly, speaking in short, clipped sentences composed mostly of numbers and abbreviations. Howie’s stats. Howie’s meds. Howie’s life, reduced to medical jargon.
“Pretty much anything I can think of,” Erickson said. He gestured to another deputy, who had come back into the alleyway. “Take this kid to the station. I’ll be along soon.”
“What’s the charge?” the other deputy asked.
“Yeah, I was just wondering the same thing,” Jazz put in.
“Shut up,” Erickson said again. “The charge right now is suspicion of being a pain in my ass. I’ll put something formal down when I get to the station. For now, just get him out of my sight.”
“Wait!” Jazz shouted. “Look, don’t take me away yet. Let me go to the hospital with Howie.”
“Are you nuts? For all I know, you’re the one who killed him.”
“Killed him? He’s not—”
“Get him out of here,” Erickson said.
Jazz struggled as the deputy dragged him away. He heard the ambulance doors slam, and then the ambulance engine revved. The siren wailed. Good. If Howie were dead, then they wouldn’t be bothering with the siren.
Pulled out of the alley and into the parking lot of Ginny’s building, Jazz saw his night go from miserable to nightmarish. Standing there in the parking lot was none other than Doug Weathers. What was he doing there?
It took Weathers a moment to realize what was happening, but Jazz could see the calculation in his eyes as he began to understand what was unfolding before him: Jazz in cuffs. Police on the scene. Ambulance roaring past. It all equaled a major story to Weathers, a story that could easily be grafted to the Billy Dent story and once again have CNN and the networks pointing their satellites at Doug Weathers.
Weathers quickly fumbled in his pocket and brought out his cell phone, raising it to eye level. Oh, great. He was going to take a picture as soon as Jazz got close enough.
Jazz couldn’t let that happen.
“Hey, Jasper!” Weathers called out, naked glee in his voice. “Smile!”
>
Before Weathers could do anything, Jazz dropped his head and charged, breaking free from the deputy. His hands were cuffed behind him, so he collided with Weathers, his shoulder digging into the reporter’s gut, knocking him off-kilter and sending the cell phone to the ground. The deputy shouted out from behind him, but Jazz just barreled ahead; Weathers fell backward and landed on his butt. Jazz staggered to one side, stepping on the cell phone with a satisfying crack.
Just to be sure, he ground his foot down, hard. Plastic crunched.
“Hey!” Weathers shouted, jumping up. “Hey! You can’t do that!”
The deputy grabbed Jazz and pulled him away. The phone looked like someone had stepped on an enormous, high-tech cockroach, its wiry guts shooting out from the broken case.
“You son of a—!” Weathers got up in Jazz’s face. “You just destroyed private property, kid. I’m gonna sue you. I’m gonna have you arrested for malicious—”
“Already arrested,” Jazz said calmly. “And hey, you can’t sue me for being clumsy.”
“Clumsy!” Weathers’s eyes went so wide that Jazz wondered if the man’s sockets could hold them in. “Clumsy! You charged me.”
“Nah, I tripped, man. I’m such a klutz. Sorry. I’ll buy you a new cell.”
Weathers lunged for Jazz, who tried to sidestep but found himself stuck between the reporter and the deputy. Jazz grunted as Weathers landed a weak blow on his shoulder.
“You gonna arrest this guy for battery?” Jazz asked the deputy.
“Oh, jeez,” the deputy muttered as Weathers flailed again. This time, all three of them went down in a heap. Jazz winced as he landed on his side.
“Clumsy!” Weathers ranted. “I’ll clumsy you, you little—”
And then Erickson came running up, shouting. He waded into the fray, pulling Weathers off of Jazz, pushing Jazz to one side to free up the other deputy. He moved with ruthless efficiency and quiet strength, easily shoving Weathers aside as if the man weighed no more than a bag of sugar. Jazz kicked and shimmied a little to make Erickson’s job tougher.