by Barry Lyga
Suddenly, bright headlights stabbed at him. He couldn’t shield his eyes with his hands, so he had to close them instead, sinking into the bright red world behind his eyelids. The car stopped nearby; a door opened.
A voice said, “What the hell is going on here?”
Jazz had never been so glad to hear G. William’s voice.
Jazz’s wrists still hurt a half hour later at the hospital—Erickson had put the cuffs on way too tight. With the cuffs off now, he sat in the waiting room at Lobo’s Nod General Hospital, alternating between wrists, rubbing them back to life.
G. William had immediately demanded a report from Erickson, who ran down what he knew, including that Howie was on his way to the hospital. G. William had taken in the scene, including a beyond-irate Doug Weathers, and ordered Erickson to secure the area while he took Jazz to the hospital.
Jazz spoke little to G. William on the way to the hospital. A part of him—some intuitive, quiet part—wanted to warn G. William not to trust Erickson with the crime scene. But the larger part of him was worried about Howie. He was afraid that getting into an argument with the sheriff would delay his getting to the hospital.
Howie was still in surgery when Jazz arrived.
Once G. William was done with the crime scene at Ginny’s, the sheriff would—Jazz knew—unload a world of hurt on Jazz for interfering. Worse yet, once Howie’s parents returned from filling out the insurance forms, they were going to unload their own particular brand of hurt on him. Howie’s mom had never approved of her son hanging out with Jazz, and she would never, ever let him forget this, even if Howie lived.
The door whispered open and Connie ran in, out of breath, her braids flying behind her. She launched herself into Jazz’s arms as he rose from his chair. “What happened? Are you okay? Is Howie okay? What happened?” She’d been halfway to Tynan Ridge when Jazz, borrowing G. William’s cell for a moment, had texted her to tell her to get to the hospital.
He gave her a truncated version of events: Ginny, the killer, Howie. “Looks like he was cut when he intercepted the guy in the alley,” Jazz finished, “and then—”
“Ginny? Ginny’s dead?” Connie went weak in his arms and it took all his strength to keep her from collapsing to the floor and guide her to the chair he’d just abandoned. He maneuvered her into it.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “It was—”
Connie started sobbing; heaving, violent sobs that wracked her body. Jazz stood before her, baffled, unsure what to do. In movies and books, the man always puts his arms around the crying woman, but he’d never understood what that was supposed to accomplish, and he couldn’t see it now, either.
Still, it usually worked, so he bent over and folded Connie into his embrace, where her crying became muffled, the rhythm of it a strange and sour chorus to the beating of his heart.
“It’ll be okay,” he said, feeling like an idiot for saying it. It would not be okay. It would most emphatically not be okay. Ginny was dead. Howie was in surgery. Worst of all, the killer was still at large. It was the exact opposite of okay.
Just then, the door hissed again, in that peculiar sibilance reserved for hospital doors. Howie’s parents stumbled into the waiting room as though they’d both been shot. Mr. Gersten’s face was as ashen as Howie’s had been in the alleyway; Jazz couldn’t see Mrs. Gersten’s face, which was buried against her husband’s shoulder.
“Should we—” Connie started, then stopped herself, remembering, no doubt, that Howie’s parents had never liked Jazz much to begin with.
The Gerstens made their way to a sofa and collapsed onto it like some bizarre conjoined twins. Overhead, a voice said, “Dr. McDowell to Oncology. Dr. McDowell, Oncology,” and when it went away, the air was populated only with the stereo effect of two people weeping.
“What if he doesn’t…” Mrs. Gersten said.
“Shh. He will. He’s strong,” her husband answered in what Jazz thought was the least convincing tone of voice in history.
“He’s not strong!” she yelled. “He’s the opposite of strong! He can’t even—” And then she lost all her words and just wept and wept.
Jazz forced himself not to look away, and Mr. Gersten met his eyes. A moment passed between them, as if they were respecting each other and their strangely male, stoic roles in this drama, but then Mr. Gersten broke down, too, and tears streamed down his face.
“And now it happens.…” Jazz murmured, figuring that this would be the moment where Mr. Gersten would come over and abuse him, verbally at the very least, but physically would be completely understandable. But the Gerstens didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t glare, not even when Mrs. Gersten finally looked up from her husband’s shoulder to reveal eyes bloodshot like a road map.
Relatively sure he wouldn’t be assaulted, Jazz steered Connie to a largish chair and they both settled into it. “You ready to hear what happened?” he asked in a soft voice that would not cut through the churchlike quiet of the waiting room.
Connie wiped her eyes and nodded.
“This isn’t going to be easy to hear,” Jazz told her, already editing events in his mind; Connie didn’t need to know all of it. “We remembered Ginny’s real name was Virginia, making her a perfect match for the next victim,” Jazz started, and then told her what had happened after that, leaving out the most gruesome details of Ginny’s death and his own complicated reaction to it.
Time in the waiting room had no real meaning; even though Jazz was sure he must have spoken to Connie for hours, he was convinced no time had passed at all. Eventually, though, a doctor emerged through a different whispering, hissing door and approached the Gerstens.
“Mr. and Mrs. Gersten? I’m Dr. Mogelof. I’m the trauma surgeon who saw your son.”
Jazz felt Connie stiffen next to him, but the doctor’s body language and tone of voice told Jazz everything he needed to know even before she said it: “Your son came through surgery much, much better than we would have expected. Given his condition and the amount of trauma, he’s really in phenomenal shape. I think—”
She got no further. Mrs. Gersten collapsed against her husband, her tears now of joy. Mr. Gersten pumped the doctor’s hand enthusiastically, and the surgeon’s reserve cracked into a broad and relieved smile.
“He’s in recovery right now and he needs to be alone while he sleeps, but he’s going to be okay. He’s going to live.”
Connie sighed with relief as the Gerstens sank into the couch again. For Jazz, it was as though he’d been trapped underwater in a frozen lake, frantically swimming back and forth, pounding on the thick ice above, looking for a break, for a hole. Able to see the sunlight filtering through the ice, able to see the open air, but unable to breathe it, the air in his lungs already run out, his life measured not even in seconds, but in instants of no determinate length. When suddenly—just as the black of the water and the black of his own death had wrapped their tendrils around him and threatened to squeeze the last bits of life out of him—his questing hands found a break above and he launched himself through it and opened his mouth to the sweet, sweet—
Jazz dropped into a hard, sudden sleep in Connie’s arms.
A hand gently nudged Jazz from a deep slumber
—gotta wakey, wakey, Jasper, my boy—
and he startled, waking Connie, who had drifted off with him. The Gerstens were nowhere to be seen, and G. William stood over him.
“You hearin’ me, Jazz? You awake?”
Jazz grumbled, sitting up and wiping an embarrassing string of drool from his chin. It hadn’t been the usual dream, with the knife. It had been Rusty this time. He blinked bleary sleep away.
—gotta wakey—
“I’m awake. Is Howie—”
“He’s up. In the ICU. Dr. Mogelof says no visitors tonight, but she’s making an exception, given the circumstances. Need to talk to the two of you. Put together some kind of timeline for what happened tonight.” G. William checked his watch. “Last night, techn
ically.”
Connie disentangled herself from Jazz and stood up. “Let’s go.”
“Sorry.” G. William seemed genuinely apologetic. “Family only back there. I got a need for Jazz—police business—but they won’t let you in. Maybe tomorrow.”
Connie took that as well as she usually took someone telling her what she couldn’t do: She crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her left hip in what she called her Sassy Stance and fixed the sheriff with a glare that Jazz knew all too well.
He leapt up between them before Connie could start a fight. “Con, it’ll be okay. You should go home. Get some real rest. We’ll both come back tomorrow to see Howie together, okay?”
“He’s my friend, too,” she said, her jaw set, her eyes flashing with anger.
“I know.” He hugged her, even though she didn’t open her arms to him. He held her until she thawed, pecking him on the cheek and leaving without so much as a kind look in the sheriff’s direction.
G. William adjusted his hat and grinned. “That one’ll keep you on the straight and narrow, Jasper Francis. Don’t let her go.”
He clapped a hand on Jazz’s shoulder and guided him through a door and down a corridor. The hospital was quiet, even the footfalls of nurses muffled by the gummy soles of their shoes. Jazz felt like he was walking down a dream hallway, where sounds were not allowed to exist. Sounds and, maybe, the living.
Breaking the unnerving silence, he said, “I have to ask.…This may seem stupid, but…Ginny. Ms. Davis. Is she really—”
“Sorry, Jazz. I know you tried your best. But yeah.”
“Okay. I thought there was a chance maybe that I was wrong, that I didn’t read her pulse right, or…”
—put your fingers right here and make sure, Jasper, make damn sure, ’cause the last thing you want is what’s supposed to be a corpse gettin’ up and tellin’ the world what you done—
There was no chance. Of course not. But he’d hoped.
“I want to wrap this up fast,” G. William said, moving. “I bet you’re worried about your grandmom, and I want to get you home to her.”
Gramma. In all the craziness, he’d forgotten about her, had completely lost track of time. He wasn’t even sure what day it was, or what year. Time had gone elastic and malleable and ductile.
Nighttime was the worst time of the day for Gramma, but the Benadryl should have kept her knocked out. He hated imagining what she would do if she woke up alone. Anything was possible, really, up to and including deciding that he’d been abducted and launching her own version of a commando raid on the nearest house.
Well, there was nothing to do about it for now. He had to help G. William, and then—
“Here we are,” G. William said, gesturing to a door.
Somehow it wasn’t fair. Beyond that door lay Jazz’s best friend in the world, the best friend he’d put in harm’s way, the best friend he had nearly killed as easily as if he’d wielded the knife himself. And yet the door looked like every other door along the corridor. There was nothing special about it, and there should have been.
“You ready for this?” G. William asked.
Jazz wasn’t, but he nodded anyway and G. William pushed open the door.
It wasn’t nearly as bad as Jazz had feared. That said, it was still bad enough.
“If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all,” Howie said as soon as he saw Jazz, cracking a grin.
It was Howie and it wasn’t Howie, all at once. His best friend lay in a hospital bed, covered to the chest with a blanket so faded blue that it was almost white. Stick-thin Howie looked even thinner under that blanket, a series of long wrinkles in the fabric that suggested a body more than revealed one. His skin was sallow, his eyes sunken above massive bags that drooped down like twin black eyes with something to prove. Bruises ran up and down both arms, radiating out from the points where tubes entered his body.
The tubes.
There were—Jazz counted—three of them. A saline drip for hydration. A line still transfusing blood. And a third one. Something else…
“Dinnertime,” Howie joked, pointing to one bag, as if he could read Jazz’s confusion over the air like a radio transmission.
Dextrose. Right. It had been hours since Howie had eaten, and he probably still wasn’t up to taking solid food, what with the trauma, the anesthetics.…
A duo of wires also hung limp between connection points on Howie’s chest and a heart monitor beside the bed. The monitor’s EKG line loped along at a steady, slow sixty beats per minute. Tolerable.
“Apparently,” Howie said jovially, “he missed every vital organ and only nicked a blood vessel. You probably would have gotten up and chased the guy down. Me? I end up facedown in my own blood. Three cheers for low clotting factor! Next time you get to be the one who gets stabbed.”
“You weren’t stabbed,” Jazz said after a moment’s hesitation. “You were slashed. They’re different.”
“Okay, whatever.” Howie grimaced as he adjusted his position in bed. “Can we at least do some CSI mojo on my wound and figure out what kind of knife he used and then, like, track him down where he bought it and totally go SWAT-style on his ass?”
G. William answered before Jazz could. “Doesn’t work like that. Sorry. Slashing wounds don’t, uh, betray any characteristic of the blade. Only stab wounds do that. If he’d stabbed you instead of slashing you, then maybe we could get some kind of forensic…” G. William realized he was rambling and drifted off into silence, clearing his throat. He settled into a chair next to the bed. “Anyway. The docs are saying you’re gonna be fine. Glad to hear it.”
Jazz still lingered by the door, unable to move closer. A crashing wave of guilt had broken over him as soon as he recognized Howie in the bed, and the force of that wave kept him from approaching. Guilt—this kind of guilt, at least—was unfamiliar to him. Guilt for manipulating people? Sure. All the time. But he dismissed that guilt as a matter of course, as a cost of doing business. This was different. He’d almost gotten someone killed.
He had gotten someone killed.
Howie raised a hand, even though it clearly took effort, and waved for Jazz to come closer. “You gonna guard the door all night? Don’t you want to see my stitches? They’re gross.” He said “gross” with a whisper of delight.
Jazz went to the bed and stood opposite G. William. He had a powerful urge to touch Howie, almost to prove to himself that this paper-thin, transparent-skinned thing in bed was really his best friend and not a hallucination.
Howie leaned as close as he could, given his weakness and the tubes. His voice—already weak—wasn’t getting any stronger as he spoke. “I have to own up, dawg; you can’t see the stitches yet. They’re still taped and gauzed.”
Jazz played along. “Are you gonna have a scar?”
Howie frowned. “A little one. I wanted a nice big one, but no one asked me, on account of me being unconscious at the time. Can you believe it?”
“Bastards,” Jazz intoned, and then he did it—he reached out and put his hand over Howie’s where it lay on top of the blanket.
Something in that connection, something in that completed circuit—the taut vulnerability of Howie’s skin, the reality of contact, something—shattered a vessel deep inside Jazz, and he found himself speaking before he could think.
“It’s all my fault,” he whispered. “It’s my fault she’s dead.”
“It’s not.”
“It is. You wanted to call G. William from the car. If we had—”
“If we had”—Howie’s voice floated from the bed, weak but resolved—“it would have gone down the same. Homeboy was already killing her.”
“Howie’s right, Jazz,” G. William said gently. He rubbed his battered mass of a nose. “If you’d called, we wouldn’t have gotten there any faster. And in the meantime, you made him deviate from his plan. You interrupted him. Scared him. He usually cuts the fingers off postmortem. This time he cut them off while she wa
s still alive.”
“Oh, yay.” The bitterness lay heavy on Jazz’s tongue. “A victory for us. I’m sure Ginny will be glad to hear— Oh, wait, that’s right: She’s dead.”
G. William gave him a moment to indulge his anger and guilt, then cleared his throat. “I need to know exactly what you guys did and saw. Gonna record this, okay?” He brandished his smartphone and aimed the camera at them.
They consented to being recorded and Jazz pulled up a chair, sinking into it next to Howie, leaving one hand brushing against Howie’s, as if to make sure his friend wasn’t going anywhere. Between the two of them, they recounted the logic that had taken them to Ginny’s apartment, and what had happened afterward. Jazz surprised himself by recalling and describing Ginny’s death in a voice entirely devoid of emotion, and as he recited the facts, he found those same facts bothering him less and less. Grief was replaced with anger—anger at himself for failing, but also anger at the man impersonating his father.
“…called nine-one-one,” Howie was saying, “and then I heard something in the alleyway, so I went back there and”—Howie coughed—“and valiantly attacked his knife with my guts, to no avail.”
“Did you get a good look at him? Could you describe him?”
Howie smiled wanly. “Yeah. He was about yay long”—he held up his hands, four inches apart—“thin, made of steel. Pointy. Sharp.”
Jazz grinned despite himself.
“What about you, Jasper?”
Jazz shook his head. He’d been trying to recall the killer’s face, his eyes, anything. But he’d had only that single instant before the man vanished through the window, heading for street level and Howie’s gut. Those blue eyes. “All I can tell you is he’s white, which I think we already assumed. Probably between five-eleven and six-one. Ish.” He waggled a hand. “Blue eyes.”