I Hunt Killers

by Barry Lyga

  Cops!

  Brenda Quimby. Mid-thirties. Blond. Kept the minutes for her husband’s monthly Masons meetings. Which, as far as the Impressionist was concerned, made her a secretary, even though her actual job was data analyst for a computer help desk.

  It had taken him a while to find her, and he’d been keeping tabs on her for days. Tonight was the night he planned to abduct her and create his next artistic masterpiece, his final homage to Billy Dent’s career as the Artist before moving on to the next phase in his personal evolution.

  But her apartment was surrounded by cops.

  Oh, they thought they were clever, these particular cops. Thought they were hiding in plain sight, thought their undercover disguises would fool him.

  The Impressionist was no idiot. He could see right through their deception.

  How had they known? How had they figured it out? How had they beaten him to the punch?

  The answer came to him in a flash of insight: the Dent kid. It had to be the Dent kid. There was no other possible answer. No other way. The Impressionist had underestimated young Dent, the only mistake he’d made so far in Lobo’s Nod.

  Well, it would also be the last mistake.

  The Impressionist strode calmly up the driveway toward the Dent house. The sun was down, the night black and starless. A police car was parked there, and the man inside had already noticed him coming. The Impressionist waved cheerfully. See? Nothing to worry about here. Why, if I were a serial killer, I would hardly call attention to myself with a wave, would I?

  He came up alongside the car and crouched down to look at the cop through the open window. “Is there something wrong, Officer?” he asked, feigning worry as he pulled a silenced pistol from his pocket and shot the cop right through the temple. The pistol made a small coughing sound; the cop made a strangled hiccupping sound. They sounded nice together.

  Well, that was easy.

  CHAPTER 33

  Jazz blinked awake at the sound of the doorbell. He checked the clock on his nightstand. It was just past nine. He’d only been asleep a half hour.

  The bell rang again.

  “Hang on!” Jazz shouted, rolling out of bed. He pawed around in the dark, found his jeans and T-shirt by touch, and dressed on his way to the stairs. Before going down, he poked his head into Gramma’s room. Still asleep. Good. Who was bothering him, anyway? Couldn’t be a reporter—there was still a cop positioned in the driveway, after all.

  Maybe it was G. William, come to deliver some good news in person.

  He raced down the stairs and threw open the front door.

  Oh.

  “Hi,” he said, slightly annoyed, but also—in an odd way—grateful. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Really? Can I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  Jazz stepped aside and ushered Jeff Fulton into the house.

  CHAPTER 34

  The Impressionist took in the foyer. He’d been here before, but he’d been in a hurry. Now he could truly take it in. The house where Billy Dent had grown up. Somehow, he’d expected more. He wrinkled his nose.

  “I guess this isn’t ideal,” the boy was saying, “but I’m glad you came over. I was going to call you in the morning.”

  “My business kept me here a little longer than I thought,” the Impressionist said. “But I’ll be leaving soon.” He wanted to grin—wanted quite badly to grin—but instead forced himself to maintain Jeff Fulton’s air of agony and depression.

  “Can I get you some coffee? Or something else?”

  “Coffee would be great,” the Impressionist said. Billy Dent’s child was about to serve him coffee! What an amazing day.

  He followed the boy into the kitchen—peeling paint on the cabinets, old appliances in harvest gold and avocado green. Leftover remnants from Billy Dent’s childhood. Billy Dent might have run to that refrigerator for an afternoon snack. He might have stored the severed head of a dead cat in the freezer.

  The boy turned away from the Impressionist, reaching into one of the shadowy cabinets for a coffee mug.

  And the Impressionist reached into his jacket pocket.

  Jazz sensed more than felt Jeff Fulton come up behind him, stepping closer than usual propriety or politeness would dictate. For a single moment, he did not question their proximity.

  That single moment was one moment too long.

  Before he could turn, before he could move at all, the cool, unmistakable ring of a pistol muzzle pressed into the back of his neck.

  “What—” he began, breaking off the instant he felt something sharp and thin press against the side of his neck and then break the skin.

  “Don’t worry,” Fulton said in a tone of voice that Jazz thought was intended to be comforting. It wasn’t.

  Fulton probably had more to say, but Jazz never heard it.

  CHAPTER 35

  Jazz’s head throbbed, and there was a harsh rushing in his ears. He thought he heard something else, something above and beyond the rushing, but he couldn’t be sure.

  dond whirrrr e

  He tried to focus.

  nahhhhhhd rain clee nar

  His eyelids were weighed down with lead blocks, or so it felt. He didn’t even try to open them. He focused on the words (if they were words at all) in and among the vicious thrum filling his ears:

  rain clee narrrr

  He was bound, he realized. His limbs, numb until this moment, had come back online and reported that he was shackled. And—oh, what a pleasant surprise—gagged.

  He had no choice. He had to open his eyes.

  unnerstan meee?

  He pried open his eyes. It took forever. Or at least much longer than it should have. Spots danced before him, sparkles flashing in the air, and he half expected to see Billy standing there, with Rusty’s leash in his hand.

  A figure sat before him, elbows on knees, leaning forward. The lips moved in slow motion, and Jazz tried to match the shapes they made to what his ears were picking up a second later.

  Drugged. I’ve been—

  “—understand me?” Jeff Fulton said. “I said, ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t drain cleaner.’ Just a mild sedative.”

  Jazz blinked rapidly, clearing his vision. The room snapped into shape: He was in his own bedroom. Handcuffed to a chair at the wrists. His ankles were also cuffed. He was, he realized, manacled just as Billy had been earlier in the day. Fulton was sitting on the edge of the desk.

  “Awake now, eh?” Fulton said. “Good. Good.” He stood up and walked over to Jazz. “I’m gonna take off your gag now. If you feel like yelling or screaming, go right ahead and do it. Won’t bother me at all. No one’s around to hear you. Closest house is…Well, I guess you know where that is, right? And the cop outside is, well, not terribly attentive right now.”

  He slipped the gag off. Jazz drew in a huge breath. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, but he knew that Fulton had told the truth.

  So instead of screaming, he said, “What do you want?”

  Fulton’s eyes glittered. He spoke without rancor. “What do I want? Oh, I want a great many things, Jasper Francis Dent. For one thing, I want that pretty little girlfriend of yours dead. I want her gutted and her innards in a heap on the floor in front of you.”

  Jazz’s jaw tightened. “Is that what this is about? Vengeance for your daughter? Kill Connie, kill me, to make Billy pay? That won’t bring your daughter back.”

  Fulton looked surprised. “My daughter? What are…? Oh.” He lit up. “Oh, oh!” He laughed. “Oh, this is delicious! You still think I’m Fulton!” He produced a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at his face, smearing some theatrical makeup, which made him look a little younger, a little less tired. Then he pawed around in his eyes and removed a pair of contact lenses. He fixed Jazz with a new gaze, this one bright blue.

  Jazz blinked rapidly a few more times, chasing away the last of the drug-induced blurriness. He knew those eyes. He’d glimpsed them oh-so-briefly as the Impressionist jump
ed onto Ginny’s sofa, heading out the window.

  The Impressionist laughed again, raucously. “You know something, Jasper? I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was even gonna work. Even with the contacts. I thought for sure you’d see right through me. You, of all people. But then, after that first time I confronted you, I knew I had you. Because you could barely look at me. I could have had THE IMPRESSIONIST tattooed on my forehead and you wouldn’t have noticed.

  “My God,” he went on. “I gave you every chance. I flew so close to the sun for you. When I got up to speak at that woman’s memorial…” He drew in a deep, satisfied breath. “When I spoke at her memorial, Jasper—God, I thought I was going to explode right there. I thought I would just combust from the sheer joy of it all. All of them looking at me. None of them knowing. It was glorious. Glorious.”

  Jazz’s guts clenched, and for a perilous moment he thought he would soil himself, like a baby. The Impressionist had been under his nose the whole time. Playing with him. Manipulating him. Jazz’s failure was complete—he could have stopped the killer after Fiona Goodling died if only he’d done something as simple as looking for a picture of Jeff Fulton online.

  The Impressionist returned to his chair, now sitting more confidently, as if by removing the elements of his disguise he’d also cleaned away the last dregs of Jeff Fulton’s sad, downtrodden personality. “Now do you get it?” he asked. “Now do you understand?”

  “Yeah,” Jazz said, thinking quickly. He was physically restrained, so all he had on his side was psychology. He knew how sociopaths thought. Especially this one. This one, who had mimicked his own father. “You’re trying to take me off the board. You think Billy doesn’t need another protégé because he has me. But if you get rid of me, you can have that spot.”

  The Impressionist didn’t honor that with a laugh. He just snorted. “You don’t get it at all. You have no idea what this is about. You can’t begin to imagine. You’re Billy Dent’s son, the heir apparent, and you haven’t killed a single person yet! Not even an animal!”

  He stood up and advanced on Jazz, coming around behind him. Jazz tensed, remembering the pistol at his neck, the needle. But the Impressionist simply leaned over, his lips close to Jazz’s ear, and whispered, “You’ve forsaken your birthright. I’ve decided to make sure you accept it, Jasper Francis Dent. I’m here to help you learn the ways of blood and bone.”

  Jazz closed his eyes. No. He would not.

  “You know you want to,” the Impressionist said, his voice soft and low. “You’ve always wanted to.”

  —do it—

  “You’ve always wanted to be like Daddy, deep down inside.”

  —good boy, good boy—

  “Stop it,” Jazz said in a voice so quiet it was almost silent. “Stop.”

  “Too much?” the Impressionist asked. He came around Jazz’s left side and sat on the edge of the desk again. “Too much for you? I know. It’s tough, isn’t it? At first, when you first realize what you are…It isn’t easy.”

  “And what are you?” Jazz asked. He realized that he had to keep the Impressionist talking. As long as he kept him talking, there was always the chance that the man would reveal something—some weakness or quirk—that Jazz could exploit.

  The Impressionist grinned. “What am I? I think you mean ‘What are we?’ You and I, we’re the same. We could have been brothers, Jasper. I’ll tell you what we’re not: We’re not sheep. We’re not mere humans. We’re not prospects. Oh, no. And we are not lords or kings or emperors. We’re gods, Jasper.” He leaned in toward Jazz again, his face lit with rapture. “You are the child of divinity. I came here to honor your father in my own way, you know. And I was never supposed to talk to you or see you, but I couldn’t resist. Who could resist meeting the child of Billy Dent?” He stroked Jazz’s cheek like a small child touching the softness of a rabbit for the first time. “Who could resist?” He leapt up from the desk, suddenly outraged and offended. “Imagine my disappointment in you. Imagine it!” he roared. “Pretending to be one of them! Acting—and yes, I know it’s an act—like any other child, forsaking your rightful place as king of the murderers. Well, all of that will change. I could not be here and watch you stumble through your life like a new toddler. Oh, no. I will birth you into the world you richly deserve.”

  He turned to Jazz’s desk, where the contents of Jazz’s pockets lay: wallet, keys, Howie’s cell phone.

  “We won’t need these things,” the Impressionist said, sweeping them all to the floor with his arm. “This, however…”

  And he placed on the table the largest of the kitchen knives from the block on Gramma’s counter.

  He grinned wickedly. “This, we will definitely need.”

  Jazz swallowed. “You can’t kill me,” he said. He wanted to blurt it out, to scream it, to cry, but he knew that human weakness was like an aphrodisiac to a sociopath such as the Impressionist. “If you try, you’ll fail. I’m Billy Dent’s son. I can’t be killed.” A bluff. An insane bluff that wouldn’t work on anyone with even a shred of intact brainpower, but the Impressionist was a madman who believed he was a god. So…

  The Impressionist blinked and in a moment his wicked expression fell into abject innocence, an innocence so real that for a moment Jazz felt guilty for accusing the man at all.

  “Kill you? Why on earth…Is that what you think? That I want to kill you? No! Of course not! I would never…” He dropped to his knees in front of Jazz and gazed earnestly into his eyes. “I want to improve you. I want you to stride this earth like the murder god you’re meant to be, like the creature your father wanted to create. I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to help you.

  “I’m going to help you fulfill your first kill.”

  And with that, the Impressionist turned the chair so that Jazz could see his bed.

  Lying on it was his grandmother.

  She was still alive—Jazz could hear the slight susurration of her breathing. The tranq he’d given her would have kept her out for hours, and who knew if the Impressionist had given her a booster shot from his own stash?

  “I killed my father when I was fifteen,” the Impressionist said. “Trust me when I say, Jasper, that you have no idea how liberating it is to cut—literally—your ties to your past. It’s a glorious thing.”

  “I won’t do it,” Jazz said.

  “Of course you will. If Billy Dent were here, he would want you to do it. He would gladly let you kill him, knowing that it would ignite your path to glory.”

  Jazz thought of Billy in prison, gesturing to the universe and saying, And destroy all of this? when asked why he hadn’t committed suicide. “You don’t know anything about my father,” he said, and then some strange combination of panic and fear and guilt and—he couldn’t believe it—filial honor took him over, and he blurted out, “You don’t know anything about him. You’re some psychopathic fanboy who’s such a loser that he has to pretend to be my father in order to give meaning to his life. You’re nothing. You’re not a god. You’re nothing. You couldn’t even get it up to rape Irene Heller.”

  He scored. The Impressionist’s left eyelid twitched, though the rest of his face remained serene even as he backhanded Jazz across the face with a blow so powerful that Jazz wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d lost a molar.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” the Impressionist said, leaning in close. “I could worship you, but I will never fear you. Do you understand?” He held up the knife between them. Jazz caught his reflection in the blade and was astonished to see that he did not look in the least bit afraid.

  “Then I’m one up on you,” Jazz said, his head spinning from the force of the blow and the taste of his own blood. “Because I’m also not afraid of you, and I’ll never worship you.”

  With a strangled cry, the Impressionist grabbed Jazz’s collar with his free hand, jerking him forward. But the shirt was thin and old—it split down the middle from the force of the tug. The Impressionist laughed and twisted his arm,
ripping the shirt apart, so that it hung in three big folds down around Jazz’s waist.

  “Get your kicks like this?” Jazz taunted. “Is that why you couldn’t rape Irene Heller?”

  But the Impressionist wasn’t paying attention. He’d caught notice of something and, after craning his neck to look behind Jazz, moved around the chair so that he had a view of Jazz’s back.

  “Yosemite Sam?” he said in a perplexed voice. “Don’t you think it’s time to grow up?”

  It could have been worse. Howie wanted SpongeBob SquarePants, but I talked him into something at least a little bit tough.

  “This has all been fun.” The Impressionist came back around to face Jazz. “But we have much to do before the night is over. And we need to start now.”

  The Impressionist came at Jazz, and Jazz tensed, ready for the knife blade. But all the man did was unlock Jazz’s ankles from the chair, then quickly cuff them together. He did the same with his hands, first unshackling the right wrist from the chair, then recuffing it to the left before unshackling that one.

  Jazz was free to stand. To hobble. Could he escape?

  Impossible. He couldn’t move more than six inches at a time. His hands were practically glued together.

  The Impressionist hauled him out of the chair and half marched, half dragged him over to Gramma. Jazz’s head spun. Still dizzy from the drugs.

  Jazz felt the knife forced into his hands—

  —hold it tight—

  —and then his hands pressed around the grip. The Impressionist’s strength was impressive. With one hand, he was keeping Jazz’s grip tight on the knife handle, and preventing Jazz from jerking the knife into the Impressionist.

  A knife.

  Another knife.

  So familiar.

  And Jazz knew in that moment: It wasn’t just a dream.

  It was a memory.

  He’d held a knife before. Like this.