by Barry Lyga
“Connie…” Mom wrung her hands.
“Let me finish, Mom. If you won’t ever trust me, then that means I’m done. You can have the cops drag me back from the airport and you can keep me locked up in the house, but once I graduate, I’ll move out and you won’t see me anymore. Not because I don’t love you—I do—but because I can’t be around people who don’t trust me. I’ll put myself through college. Somehow. Or maybe move to New York or LA and try to get into acting. I don’t know. But I won’t be here and I won’t come back.” She hefted her bag. “It’s your decision.”
Her father stood, and Connie was once again reminded just how massive a man he was—solid and tall and broad through the chest and shoulders. He looked like a construction worker, not a lawyer, thanks to a strict exercise regimen he’d followed since his years playing football in college. “You’re not leaving,” he said.
“I am. This isn’t a bluff, Daddy.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. I’m sure you believe it right now, as you’re saying it, but you’ll never go through with it. If you walk through that door, my first call is to the police. And you can threaten all you want, but we both know that you’ll eventually realize I’m right.”
“I love you both,” Connie said, and a tear surprised her. “Tell Whiz I love him, too.” She knew that if she sought out her brother in his room, she would break down completely, and she couldn’t afford to do that. It might be the last time she would see him, but she couldn’t put herself through that, couldn’t let what might be his last memory of her be one of weeping and sorrow.
She turned and walked to the front door.
“Do not walk through that door, Conscience!”
Connie thought she heard her mother say, “Let her go, Jerry,” but she couldn’t be sure. She closed the door behind her. Howie waited in the driveway, the engine of his car idling.
“Let’s do this,” she said to him as she climbed in.
“We gonna be dodging Johnny Law? Gonna have five-oh on our asses?”
“Just drive.”
CHAPTER 42
And
of course
a shoulder and trailing a line of
(yes)
cool heat
(yes)
a groan
whose?
He opens his mouth
(yes, like that)
and licks
And
Jazz woke the next morning, his mind muzzy, his emotions hacked and split into pieces. Groggy, he peered blearily at the clock on the bedside table. According to it, he actually had slept for hours. But with the dream arousing and terrifying him in alternating, equal measure, he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. He must have dreamed that he’d lain awake all night, searching for wisdom and insight in the blank white hotel ceiling.
Despite mentioning TARU, Hughes had—perhaps intentionally, perhaps not—neglected to take the disposable cell phone, so Jazz had put it on the bedside table, just in case Billy decided to call back. The phone’s caller ID listed a phone number, but when Jazz called it, he only got an anonymous, robotic outgoing voice mail message. Billy had probably already tossed that phone and moved on to another one.
He thought of calling Connie. But his dream still pounded at the doors of his conscious mind, only slightly unreal in these moments of waking.
He felt poisonous.
Slick and grimy with some contagion.
To speak to Connie now would be to pollute her with the thoughts spinning in his head. Would be to lie to her and not tell her about Belsamo and what he’d done. He couldn’t abide the thought of lying to Connie. Not to her.
He could have called Aunt Samantha or Howie, but he didn’t want to speak to anyone. Not now. All of his focus, all of his attention, was now devoted to recalling the conversation he’d had with Billy.
Jazz’s memory was good. Not eidetic like Billy’s, but better than most people’s. And recalling the things Billy said was sort of a specialty of his. Dear Old Dad had trained his son to lean extra-heavy on the fatherly wisdom he imparted.
Fine. You designed me to be your tape recorder. I’ll use that against you, you bastard.
The problem wasn’t remembering every line in the twisted play of Butcher Billy’s life. The difficulty lay in figuring out which words mattered and which ones were just verbal chaff, noisemakers designed to distract attention and lead Jazz into the corners of Billy’s maze where the walls closed in.
The crows… There’s something there. Something real. Belsamo was into crows. Billy mentioned them. And, yeah, I remember that old story he told me. I just recited it to Connie the other day.
Billy had been adamant that the story of the Crow King wasn’t a fairy tale. He’d called it folklore. Myth. The differences were crucial. Billy sounded like an inbred redneck, but his IQ was in the stratosphere and he wielded words as precisely as he wielded knives and cleavers and hammers.
Fairy tales and fables were stories for children. They involved magic. They weren’t real.
Myths and folklore, though… they weren’t precisely real, but they were designed to explain something that was real. They represented something about the real world. The origin of something.
The Crow King… what did the Crow King represent?
And then Jazz sat up straight in bed. Another chunk of knowledge had just dropped into his brain. More accurately, it had bobbed to the surface of the ocean of his memories, like a body that has broken free of its concrete shoes.
The Impressionist. In his cell in Lobo’s Nod. He’d said something to Jazz….
Jasper Dent. Princeling of Murder. Heir to the Croaking.
Not “the Croaking.” Damn it, Jazz! Did you really think he was that crazy? What’s wrong with you? You missed the connection right there!
The Impressionist had been talking about the Crow King.
Heir to the Crow King.
So… Billy was the Crow King, then. The one who bled the robins until they were dove-white. What the hell was that supposed to mean?
More important… how far back did this craziness stretch? How long had Billy been putting things in motion? The Impressionist knew about the significance of crows. So did Belsamo. Which meant that the lunacy went back at least to before Billy’s arrest and imprisonment. All those years Billy traveled for murder… was he also evangelizing his particular brand of lunacy? If so, how many protégés did he have out there? How many madmen had he programmed to follow in his footsteps?
And if he was able to program them as adults, what chance does his son have?
Jazz had been aware for years now that people existed out there in what he thought of as the “real world” (the world not of Lobo’s Nod or of his grandmother’s house and deepening senility) who admired Billy, who thought he was a patsy for someone else’s murders, who believed he’d been framed. And people who saw in him a strength they lacked and didn’t care that that strength had been turned toward murder.
But he’d never imagined that any of these sad, damaged people would turn out to be killers themselves. Since when do groupies become rock stars? Maybe they end up as roadies, sure. Maybe even an opening act or a one-hit wonder.
But for a groupie to become the main attraction…?
It chilled Jazz.
He thought—fantasized, perhaps—that he had plumbed the depths of Dear Old Dad’s sociopathy by dint of growing up in Billy Dent’s house. Now he had to face the frightening possibility that the Dent insanity bored a deeper hole in the core of one’s psyche than he’d ever imagined.
Where does it end? he wondered. Every pit, no matter how deep, had a bottom.
Where was the bottom to Billy’s madness?
Jazz had to know.
How many of them are out there? The Impressionist and Hat-Dog… that’s two. Is Ugly J a third? How many did he train? How much time did he have?
The story of the Crow King went all the way back to Jazz’s childhood. Had this all started then? Was it somehow co
nnected to his recurring nightmares—the death, the sex? Or was the story of the Crow King just something that Billy had made up back then on a whim and was now exploiting for his own amusement?
But then something occurred to Jazz. A nugget of information nudged from the rough walls of his memory:
No one held my hand and taught me how to play.
Billy had said that. When Jazz visited him at Wammaket a few months ago. Jazz had been trying to manipulate Billy and had asked… had asked for help with something relating to the Impressionist. Billy had scoffed.
Dear Old Dad wasn’t interested in teaching. So then what was he doing with Hat-Dog?
Jazz rolled over in bed in frustration. He needed to talk about this. It was no good to ricochet ideas in the spaces of his mind—he needed feedback. The task force was forbidden to him now, through his own actions. So he did the only thing that made sense.
“Lobo’s Nod Sheriff’s Department,” Lana said a moment later. “How may I direct your call?”
“Sheriff Tanner, please,” Jazz said.
“Just a… Jasper? Is that you?”
Jazz groaned inwardly. Leave it to Lana to recognize his voice. Her ability to obsess over a man, combined with her inability to weed out the bad boys, would probably get her killed someday.
“Yeah, it’s me. Can I talk to G. William?”
“Sure. So, how’s it going in New York?” she asked, almost giddy.
“It’s great, Lana,” Jazz said enthusiastically. “I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty, and I’m also tracking a guy who takes people’s eyes, cuts off their dicks, and—on two occasions—leaves their guts in a KFC bucket. It’s awesome.”
A normal person would have quickly transferred the call. “Oh. Okay. Um, when do you come back to the Nod? Kinda quiet around here without you.”
“Lana. G. William. Please?”
The line went silent for a moment and then G. William’s booming drawl: “Haven’t even had my coffee yet. It’s damn indecent to call a man before his coffee.”
Jazz checked the bedside clock again. “I knew I could count on you to be in this early.”
“Old habits. NYPD got you out of bed this early, too?”
Jazz bit his lip. He couldn’t go into his extra-legal activities with G. William. “Well, I’m working hard, that’s for sure,” he said amiably. “But I wanted to run something by you.”
“Shoot.”
“It’s about the Impressionist.”
“Speaking of whom… he’s back to being mute. And all patched up after you last saw him.”
“How nice for him. Remember when we were trying to find him and we were talking about him?”
“Which time?”
“Most of them. I’ve been going over it in my head and I keep thinking how we talked a lot about him playing us.”
“He wasn’t playing us. He was playing at being Billy.”
Jazz grunted. True. “But I keep thinking now… it’s almost like it was a sort of game to him, wasn’t it?” He was falling from a window, grabbing for ledges as they zipped by, trying for some connection between the Impressionist and Hat-Dog.
“You’re not making any sense, Jazz. What game? He wasn’t really cluing us in like some of these guys do. Yeah, he guided us to some of the bodies and he taunted you, but the only rules he followed were the ones your dad laid down years ago. And Billy himself pointed out to you how the guy didn’t even follow them very well. Hell, if he was playing a game, it was… like solitaire, I guess. He was playing a game he could only play by himself.”
Jazz shot out of bed. “That’s it!” he shouted, loud enough that someone on the other side of the wall pounded on it for quiet.
“What’s it?”
“Oh, man, I gotta go, G. William. And thanks,” he said hurriedly, and hung up before the sheriff could say anything more.
He flung himself to the room’s desk, where his copies of the Hat-Dog files lay scattered. He pawed through them, organizing them, riffling through the papers to confirm the details he needed.
It all came together. It was beginning to make an insidious sense.
Just as he’d been saying all along, it made perfect sense to a crazy person. And now Jazz believed he’d found a way to make it make sense to someone rational.
He glanced at the clock again. He’d been working for three hours without even realizing it. He needed one more thing to confirm his suspicions, then probably another couple of hours of work before he could tie it up nice and neat and take it to the task force.
A toy store. That’s what he needed—a toy store. There had to be one nearby. After all, a random walk on the street revealed legions of baby carriages everywhere he went.
He picked up his phone to call 411 for the nearest toy store and stared at its screen for a moment, cogs and gears clicking in his imagination. It was a smartphone, right? Its various icons shined up at him. He’d used maybe two of them since getting the phone.
Howie. He would call Howie.
CHAPTER 43
With a half hour still to go to the airport, Howie finally stopped checking the rearview mirror for the flashing lights and sirens of Lobo’s Nod’s finest.
“I think they believed me,” Connie said quietly.
“Would you really cut them off if they narced on you?”
“I don’t know.”
She had been quiet the whole way, arms folded over her chest, staring moodily out the window. He was trying to think of something very stupid and very funny to say—his usual tactic—when his phone buzzed in his pocket. Since his mom worried about her baby boy talking on the phone while driving, she’d installed a really kick-ass hands-free system in his car roughly ten seconds after he’d bought it, so at the same moment, a pleasant and very sexy robotic voice said, “Phone call. Jazz Matazz.” Howie had put Jazz into his contacts list that way because he liked the way the speakerphone said “Jazzmatazz.”
Connie perked up in the passenger seat for the first time since they’d left her house. “Whatever you do—” she started, but Howie had already hit Answer.
“Jazz Matazz!” he cried out.
“Does that dumb thing still call me that?”
“Of course not. I was just funning with you.”
“What are you up to?”
Next to him, Connie shook her head wildly and cut her hands back and forth in the universal “No!” gesture.
“I’m driving Connie to the airport.”
“What?”
“Jesus, Howie!” Connie exploded.
“Connie,” Jazz said from the speakerphone, “where are you headed? Back here?”
“Yeah,” she said, glaring at Howie.
“Don’t.”
“Well, I need to—”
When Jazz spoke again, it was in a voice so cold and so commanding that for a moment Howie thought maybe Billy Dent had grabbed the phone at the other end. “Do not come to New York. This isn’t something we’re talking about. Just turn around and go home. Howie, I need your help with something.”
Howie risked a look over at Connie, whose eyes had grown wide with fury, her lips pressed together as if to keep from breathing out flames.
“Um… sure, man, but you should know—”
“I don’t know how to download apps on my phone,” Jazz said with peculiar urgency.
Howie laughed nervously. “Is that really an issue right now?”
“I need a specific one. I’m pretty sure it exists. Can you walk me through it?”
“Jazz, this is kinda—” To his right, Connie was now back in arms-over-chest mode, glaring through the window.
“Please!” from the speaker.
“Fine, fine. What do you need?”
He told him. Completely confused, Howie nonetheless explained how to locate and download the app in question.
“Thanks,” Jazz said. “You’re gonna turn around and go home now, right? I’m counting on you. And Connie? Con?”
Howie studied her grim postur
e. “Now’s not a real good time, buddy. From the looks of things, you won’t be getting laid for a long, long time.”
“Con, I know you can hear me. I get that you’re pissed. But I’m in the middle of some crazy stuff here, and at least knowing that you’re safe keeps me going. All right? I love you.”
There was silence on the line as he waited for her to say it back. When she said nothing, the line went dead.
“You could have talked to him,” Howie said after a few minutes.
“Did you hear that voice he used with me?” she asked. “He went all Billy on me. I won’t tolerate that.”
Howie signaled and shifted lanes.
“What are you doing?” Connie demanded. “Are you getting off the highway?”
“Well… yeah. You heard him. I’m gonna turn around and—”
“You’re doing no such thing.”
“But—”
“A butt is something I’m gonna kick if you keep this up,” Connie said. “He doesn’t know what’s going on here. I’m going to track down this mystery person and help him whether he wants it or not.”
Howie watched an exit ramp go by. He could always turn at the next one….
Oh, who was he kidding?
“At least call him. Tell him what’s going on.”
“When he’s like this? When he’s all crazy like this? No way.” She jabbed a finger at him and he flinched even though she didn’t actually touch him. “And you don’t call him, either. Once I’m on that plane, he can’t stop me. No one can. And if he knows I’m on it, he’ll freak out and get all distracted, and with everything that’s going on, being distracted could get him killed.”
“Fine. Fine.” The next exit, it turned out, was for the airport. Howie guided the car down the ramp. “But are you sure about this? It could be dangerous.” Even as he said it, Howie felt idiotic. A mysterious voice was seducing Connie into traveling to New York. Manipulating her. Of course it was dangerous. Either Billy Dent or someone like him was at the other end of that phone call. “Maybe you should just let the cops handle this.”
“What, the NYPD? They have their hands full already with the Hat-Dog Killer. This is personal. I’ll go to New York. Find this clue at JFK, then get to Jazz. Show him what we’ve got, what we know. In the meantime, just to be safe and cover all the bases…” She twisted around in the car seat and retrieved the lockbox from the backseat. “I want you to wait until my flight is off the ground and then take this to the sheriff.”