by Barry Lyga
“Don’t be surprised or overwhelmed by the city,” Hughes said suddenly.
“What?”
“You were just looking a little homesick already. I’m just telling you to prepare yourself, is all. The city can be overwhelming your first time.”
Homesick? Jazz snorted. “I’ve seen New York on TV. I think I can handle it. It can’t be worse than growing up with Billy.”
“Oh?” Hughes shrugged. “It’s pretty big.”
“So what?”
“It can be confusing.”
“Don’t care. I’ll be with you.”
“Whole lotta people who don’t look like you.”
Jazz bristled. “Just because my grandmother is—” He stopped himself and started over. “I’m not like her. I’m not a racist. Dude, my girlfriend is black.”
“Hey, yeah? Good for you. So’s mine.”
Jazz threw his hands up. “Fine. I lose. You win. Whatever.”
Hughes grinned, and Jazz suddenly realized what was really going on. The detective was poking and prodding, looking for weaknesses. Trying to find Jazz’s pressure points. And Jazz had given him one. Cops and crooks, Billy whispered to him, always usin’ each other’s tools.
All right, then. Lesson learned. Hughes liked to pick around in other people’s heads. Well, Jazz was no slouch at that, and he’d done a decent job keeping Billy out of his head back at Wammaket. It was tough to catch Jazz with the same trick twice. He adapted easily. A sociopath’s best trick—adaptation—and one that Jazz couldn’t help being damn good at.
“Kid,” Hughes said, his tone friendly now, “you gotta stop taking everything so seriously. Otherwise high blood pressure’ll kill you before your pops ever gets a chance.”
Ah, high blood pressure. What a way to go. Somehow a heart attack or a stroke sounded positively peaceful and bucolic compared to what Jazz knew Billy to be capable of. Still, Jazz didn’t fear his father. Or, more accurately, he had no personal fear of his father. Billy was convinced that Jazz would someday take up the family business and be the serial killer that other serial killers looked up to. Jazz knew his father would never jeopardize that by harming his only son. Billy had too much of himself—his ego, his madness, his genius—invested in Jazz to risk killing him.
“My dad would never hurt me. Not physically, at least.”
“So, no spankings when you were a kid?” Hughes said it with a lightness so deft and so false that even Jazz thought for a moment that it was just curious conversation. But it wasn’t. This was a skilled detective, a trained interrogator, digging for information. Jazz was impressed—he was tough to fool, and Hughes had come close.
“Nope. Not once.” It was harmless enough information to give to Hughes. It was also true. Billy had never laid a hand on Jazz as a child.
“So where do you think your dad is these days?”
Now Jazz shot him his best I-don’t-talk-about-my-dad look. Hughes was visibly rocked by it.
“Sorry.” He recovered nicely; they made ’em tough in NYC. He refocused on the road ahead. “Just making conversation.”
“You make conversation like the Inquisition.”
Hughes laughed. “Occupational hazard. Could be worse—I dated an ADA once and she couldn’t ask what you wanted for dinner without it feeling like a cross-examination. You’ve got a hell of a glare, kid. But I guess that’s to be expected.”
Jazz shrugged and looked out the window.
“Look, I’m not pumping you for info or anything. I’m not trying to find your dad. But I’m a homicide cop. It’s like if I had A-Rod’s batting coach in the car; how am I not supposed to ask questions? And I know the fibbies have already bugged you about him. I’m just curious. Not putting together a case or anything.”
Jazz blew out a sigh. “I’ll tell you what I told them: He’s nowhere they expect. He’s not near the Nod, watching over me or Gramma. He’s not in any of the places he used to prospect. He’s got to go somewhere where he can become invisible. A city.”
“New York?”
Jazz shrugged. “Could be. Heck, if the murders hadn’t started before he broke out of jail, I’d say maybe he was even Hat-Dog.”
“Nope. I can guarantee that’s not the case. We have consistent DNA from multiple scenes that doesn’t match Billy’s. Our unsub isn’t Billy Dent.”
Jazz snorted. Unsub. It was short, he knew, for “unknown subject,” the shorthand law enforcement used to describe their quarry. “You guys and your jargon. Makes you think you know something. Makes you think you can catch, define, and calculate the invisible world.”
He expected it to rattle Hughes, but the cop merely drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I’ve read The Crucible, too, kid. This isn’t a witch hunt. It’s real.”
On that, they both fell silent for the remainder of the drive. At the airport, Jazz watched closely as Hughes negotiated security so that he could carry his service weapon on the plane. Jazz had never flown before; he’d heard that airport security was stronger than it had once been, but if that was true, then he could only imagine that it had once been possible to carry automatic rifles openly onto planes. He lingered, watching, and made a decision.
Once his belongings were on the conveyor belt to the X-ray machine, Jazz waited until a TSA agent motioned him through the scanner. Jazz hesitated. “I’m not going through that thing,” he said. “My girlfriend told me that those full-body scanners were never fully medically tested.”
Clearly exasperated, the TSA agent said, “I assure you, they’re totally safe.”
“Right. And you’re a doctor and you can guarantee me that I let that thing scan my nads and I don’t end up sterile? Or having kids with six fingers someday?”
“So you’re opting out?”
“Yes.”
“Male opt-out!” the TSA agent called out to the universe in general.
Jazz was shunted aside to another spot. Hughes, already through security, gathered up his own stuff as well as Jazz’s and waited, frowning. Jazz didn’t react. He just lingered until a second TSA agent came over, this one wearing latex gloves.
“You’re opting out?” the agent asked.
“Yes,” Jazz said, his voice nasal and clogged. Part of it was a put-on. Part of it, though, was the little bit of shampoo he’d shot up his nose before getting into line. “Opting out.” And then he coughed—a really convincing, wet-sounding hack that made the TSA agent wince and turn away slightly.
The TSA agent talked Jazz through exactly what he was about to do and where he would be touching him. When he asked, “Do you have anything in your pockets?” Jazz said, “Just a Kleenex,” and then proceeded to produce it and blow his nose noisily into it. He left it open just long enough for the TSA agent to see the disgusting yellowish shampoo goop before folding it up.
“Just, uh, hold on to that,” the agent said, and proceeded to give Jazz the quickest, most perfunctory pat-down in the history of pat-downs. Jazz noted three spots on his body where he could have easily concealed some sort of contraband.
By the time he rejoined Hughes, the cop was shaking his head in amusement. “You are Homeland Security’s worst nightmare,” he said as they made their way to their gate.
“You could have intervened.”
“Yeah, but I know you’re harmless.”
Jazz shrugged. “You know how you said before that you have a black girlfriend, too? That was a lie. You don’t. And you never dated an ADA, either. You’re just trying to keep me out of your head because you know where I come from. You know just enough to know that I’m anything but harmless. So you make jokes and you drop in what seems like personal stuff to keep me off guard.” Jazz grinned the grin he used when he wanted to put people at ease. “You’re pretty good at it. But I’m better.”
Hughes gaped at him.
Jazz let the grin linger for another moment, then said, “I’m gonna hit the bathroom before we board,” leaving Hughes alone with his thoughts.
Later, in the
cramped space of the plane, he surprised himself by falling asleep almost immediately. He didn’t even wake up when the plane took off.
He dreamed.
Touch me
says the voice
again
His fingers
Oh, the flesh
So warm
So smooth
Touch me like that
His skin on hers.
Hers.
He knows her flesh.
like that
So warm
like that
it’s all right
it’s not all right
it’s right
no, it’s wrong
but the wrong makes it right
and the right makes it wrong
and
Jazz woke up as the plane landed and groggily grabbed his bag from the overhead. They had an hour-long layover before their next flight; Hughes tried to strike up a conversation, but Jazz withdrew. He was off-kilter, slightly airsick, and definitely dreamsick.
Who was it in his dream? What was he doing? Why did this dream keep recurring? He actually preferred the old dream, the one where he’d cut someone, maybe even killed someone. At least it was familiar. He had become accustomed to its specific nauseating qualities. The new dream kept knocking him down every time he tried to get up.
What did it mean? What was lurking back there in the cold, dark recesses of his memory? What secrets were hidden in his past? Jazz felt as though his own life was a minefield, one he’d lost the map for. One wrong step and he’d lose a foot or a leg.
Or his mind.
When Jazz awoke from the cutting dream, he felt confused. Guilty. A bit sick. When he woke from the sex dream, though, he felt a tiny bit of guilt, sure. But otherwise just… aroused. And he hated himself for it. Other guys his age could have dreams like that, sure. That was okay for them. But not for Jazz.
Because… This is how it starts, he thought. Dreams. Fantasies. Seems harmless at first. But then the dreams and the fantasies aren’t enough. And the next thing you know, you’re Jeffrey Dahmer, drilling holes in the heads of corpses in an attempt to make sex zombies, and the crazy thing isn’t that you’re drilling the heads to make sex zombies—the crazy thing is that doing so seems completely and utterly normal and necessary.
“You’re awful quiet,” Hughes said, edging back into conversation after they’d not spoken for hours. Jazz respected that the detective could recover from being busted before, but he had more important things on his mind. When he didn’t respond, Hughes gave up and left him alone.
They boarded the second plane, and this time Jazz stayed awake, peering out the window, feeling the sudden lurching rush as the plane ramped up and left the ground. It made him slightly dizzy, and it felt like waking up from the dream all over again. He closed his eyes and gripped the armrests and told himself that it would be over soon.
He didn’t mind the landing as much. At first, it seemed almost gentle, but then stabbing pains started in his ears from the change in air pressure and the plane touched down, the cabin roaring with the sudden speed. The violence of it was almost soothing. Distracting.
They gathered up their bags again and emerged into the terminal at JFK. As soon as they walked through security, Jazz froze, unable to believe his eyes.
“What?” Hughes asked. “What’s wrong?”
Grinning, Connie said to them, “What took you guys so long?”
Part Three
5 Players, 3 Sides
CHAPTER 9
The killer sat quietly in his apartment. The walls were thin. Through them, he could hear two different television programs. One, from the sound of it, was some sort of singing competition. The other could have been a movie or a cartoon of some sort—high-pitched zinging noises that were either laser beams or the zip of something moving fast.
Children, in either case.
The killer shuddered.
On the table in front of the killer, there were four cell phones. Cheap. Disposable. The killer did not know which one would ring, so he kept them all charged. They had come to him along with several others in a box delivered from somewhere upstate, with instructions to keep them charged and turned on at all times. “Upstate,” to the killer, might as well be the moon.
New York City was home.
New York City was safe.
New York City was the hunting preserve.
One of the phones rang. Third from the left. The killer let it ring two more times, then snatched it up.
“Hello?” The killer wondered, idly, which voice it would be this time.
“Eleven,” came the response. The new voice again. It had been the new voice for a while now.
The killer did not wonder what had happened to the old voice.
“Eleven,” the voice repeated calmly. “Six and five. Eleven.”
The killer’s eyes flicked to the part of the table beyond the phones. His lips moved silently…. Eight… nine… ten… and…
“Eleven,” he said back to the phone. “Eleven.” In a sudden fit of inspiration, he added, “As the crow flies.”
The voice at the other end was gone already, leaving silence in the killer’s ear.
The killer took the battery out of the phone. Then he put the phone on the floor and smashed it to pieces with a hammer.
“Eleven,” he said again. Well. So it would be.
CHAPTER 10
Billy held a cell phone in one hand and a pair of dice in the other. He tucked the dice into his coat pocket, followed by the phone’s battery.
He looked around. At three in the morning in early January, Union Square Park in lower Manhattan was no one’s idea of a comfortable hangout. Still, there were a few junkies doing their nervous dance over in the shadows, waiting for the connection they prayed would come.
Billy didn’t care about the junkies. He made sure he was out of the cone of light thrown by a streetlight and dropped the phone, crushing it under his foot. Stooping, he picked up the pieces and discarded them in a half-dozen different trash cans as he made his way to the NQR subway entrance.
Eleven, he thought. Eleven as the crow flies…
CHAPTER 11
Before returning to the Dent house the next day, Howie realized he would need armor to deal with Jazz’s crazy grandmother. He had seen her slap and punch Jazz, as well as throw everything from stuffed teddy bears to skillets. She was surprisingly strong for a woman who looked to be five or six inches away from death. Maybe it was some kind of death adrenaline. Whatever the case, Howie didn’t plan on letting her turn his hemophiliac body into her own personal bruise-n-contuse plaything.
Since it was January, he got away with wearing long sleeves—flannel. Nice and thick, for protection. Just in case, he strapped on some wrist guards underneath. They were supposed to be for people who typed a lot, but they had hard steel inserts and would do him well if he had to suddenly protect his face. He also wore gloves, which he promised himself he would leave on even while inside. Heavy denim jeans, of course: That stuff really felt like armor. Howie figured he could go ride out in the Crusades with his heavy-duty Levi’s on. He scrounged around the house until he found his dad’s old hunting cap, right down to the earflaps. Oh, yeah. He would look like a serious dork, but he didn’t care—his skull would be protected.
“I can’t believe the crap I go through for this guy….” Howie muttered to himself as he parked at the Dent house. He had spoken to Jazz’s aunt Samantha briefly over the phone before coming over. She had said little about her flight or rental car drive to the Nod or anything at all, really, despite Howie’s endless, helpful patter. Taciturn ran in the family. Well, except for Billy. Howie remembered hanging out at Jazz’s house when they were kids. Billy never stopped talking. Howie’s mom used the phrase “talk a blue streak” to mean someone who talked incessantly. Billy Dent talked streaks in all kinds of shades of blue: sky blue, navy blue, midnight blue. You name it, Billy Dent said it. The man never shut up.
Howie marched up the front steps, gave a warning knock at the front door, then let himself in with the key Jazz had given him, steeling himself for the crazy that was Gramma Dent.
Instead, he found Gramma Dent and Samantha sitting cross-legged on the parlor floor, playing “patty-cake.”
“Bake me a cake as fast as you can!” Gramma chanted in time with Samantha. “Roll it! And prick it! And mark it with an A. And put it in the oven for me and Sammy J!”
Jazz’s grandmother hooted with delight.
“Josephine,” Sam explained to Howie.
“What’s the A for, then?” he asked.
Sam shrugged. “She likes it to rhyme.”
“Again!” Gramma shrieked. “Again!”
Howie ended up on the floor with them, playing a nearly endless round of patty-cake that concluded only when Gramma mumbled “Nappy time” and crawled over to the couch to conk out.
“I’ve never seen her like this,” Howie told Samantha moments later in the kitchen, where Jazz’s aunt was washing dishes. “She gets childlike sometimes, but she usually goes all temper-tantrum at some point, you know?”
“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Samantha confessed. “I knew she was getting worse—I had stopped writing and calling years ago, before all of the… well, you know. But I knew… I knew that she wasn’t going to be getting better as time went on, you know?”
“Was she always like this?”
Samantha shrugged. “She was always crazy. But you know… you know, the whole family was crazy, so it didn’t really stand out. I mean, Billy was going around”—she shuddered—“being Billy. And back in the seventies, you could be some crazy lady spouting all of her nutty racist crap and people would just sort of nod politely and pretend they didn’t hear it. She was never delusional, not like now. But crazy? Always?” Samantha smiled ruefully. “How do you think Billy ended up the way he did?”
Howie returned the smile. Samantha was in her late forties, he knew, but she looked good. Prime cougar material, really, and he had to admit he liked what he saw. His hemophilia having marked him as a freak from early days, not many girls in Lobo’s Nod paid him any mind, much less were willing to get naked and sweaty with him in the way nature prescribed. But hey—maybe he’d have a shot with someone who didn’t have the hang-ups and the history of those who’d known him for years.