by Barry Lyga
“You’re gonna be the death of that FBI agent, Jasper. I promise you that. You’ll watch her die.”
“Bull. I’m not killing anyone.” Except you.
“It’s all in your hands, m’boy. She can die pretty or she can die ugly. Now, if it was me, I’d start with those lips, so full and… generous, I guess, is the word I’m looking for. I would start with them. And I sure am curious to see those goodies she hides under those FBI blazers. Those shapeless blazers they wear. Not shapeless enough for her, eh? Bet you wonder, too, don’tcha?”
Ugh. The worst part, of course, was that Jazz did wonder about Morales’s breasts and he had noticed the plush, inviting softness of her lips. Any straight man, he told himself, would have. But most straight men weren’t lethal.
“Want to get your hands up under there, don’t you, Jasper? Want to find the things she hides from the world, the things she won’t share. Bring ’em out into the light.”
Jazz shook his head with a violence that was nearly chiropractic. “Shut up, Billy.” He made his voice as stern as possible, deleting the quaver that wanted to creep in, the combined weakness and strength he felt at the mere thought of peeling Special Agent Morales’s clothes and armor and dignity at once. “You can’t do this to me anymore. I’m my own person. My own man.”
“Why, of course you are! Never said anything to the contrary!”
“Where are you?” Jazz screamed into the phone, his whole body leaning, straining, into the effort, as though his soul could be vomited out and up through the words, as though he could scream himself into the phone and out the other end, wherever Billy was. “Where are you? Tell me! Tell me, goddamn it! Tell me so I can kill you!”
The only response: a roar of laughter, so familiar, so damning.
“Jasper, if you really wanted me dead, you’d’a killed me when you visited me at Wammaket a couple, three months back. Coulda leaned right over the table and throttled me with your bare hands. Bet them COs woulda been real slow responding to that. Swim through molasses to rescue me, they would. Race like turtles. Lightbulb overhead—you could have gotten to that and broken it and slashed open my carotid before they took you down. Try as I might, I can’t picture a jury in the world—much less the county—that would have convicted you. Poor ol’ Jasper goes and offs his evil sumbitch daddy…. That Sheriff Tanner, he’d’ve given you a medal.
“No, Jasper.” Billy sighed, a professor who’s given the same lecture for too many years. “If I’m alive right now, it’s for one reason and one reason only: ’cause you let me live that day.”
The worst part wasn’t that it was true: The worst part was that Jazz had already known it. A part of him could excuse away the earlier deaths—the ones Billy had committed early on, some of the ones the Impressionist had committed in Lobo’s Nod—but he couldn’t excuse away the later ones.
All on his head. All of it.
“There is blood on my head!” Reverend Hale screamed in The Crucible. Jazz had screamed it, too, and in the end, it didn’t matter—John Proctor still went to the gallows.
All of Jazz’s strength and rage flooded out of him, sucked out by Billy’s cold, twisted rationality. By Billy’s truth.
“If you still got that anger in you, though,” Billy continued, “I’ll tell you what: Next time you see me, you go right ahead and kill me. Don’t dillydally around. Don’t dicker. This is serious business here, son. This is Crow business.”
“Why are you here?” Jazz could only find a whisper in his throat. “Who did you come to New York to find?”
Billy said nothing for a moment, and Jazz wondered if his father had hung up. “That’s not for you to know. Not yet. Tell you what—I’m gonna tell ol’ Doggy. I’m gonna let him in on the secret. And then you can ask him. Doggy needs a bone. But first, Doggy needs to play with his toys.
“Oh, and by the by… thanks so much for movin’ that birdbath. Bet it made my momma real happy.”
Click.
Jazz dropped the makeshift stake. This particular vampire would need more than a stake through the heart, he knew. He stared at the mute cell phone in his hand, then scooped up his own cell and fumbled for a number.
“Where are you?” he asked when the line opened. “I need to see you.”
“At my hotel.”
“I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER 47
Connie spent the flight forgiving Jazz. Was he being an overprotective jerk? Sure. But she had to admit that if ever there was a time to be an overprotective jerk, this was it.
There’s no need to distract him right now. I’ll just go find… whatever it is Mr. Auto-Tune left for me. How dangerous could that be? It’s in an airport, which has got to be, like, the safest place in the world these days. And then I’ll bring it to Jazz. And we’ll figure it out from there. Easy.
When they landed, she turned on her phone. It chirped at her immediately and a text message time-stamped from a couple of hours ago popped up:
go ghosty, girlfriend. 5-0 headed your way
Howie. She would have known even without his name on it.
WTF, Howie? What are you—
5-0. The police. Her parents must have called her bluff. There would be cops waiting for her as soon as she got off the plane. She gnawed her lower lip. What could she do?
The annoyed woman stuck between her and the window asked her rather impolitely to move. Connie automatically tucked her legs up and let the woman through.
Think, Connie. You’re not an action hero. You can’t escape them. So you have to trick them instead. You’re an actress, right? You need to act.
And she remembered something Jazz had said once, during one of his periodic “lessons” on avoiding sudden death at the hands of people like himself: Don’t get distracted by details. She remembered Ted Bundy and his arm-in-a-fake-cast routine. Women had seen that cast and been suckered to their own deaths.
People like details, Jazz had told her. They notice them. They fixate on them. And they let them consume them, to the detriment of the bigger picture.
Connie’s plan formed in seconds. Too little time for her to think it all the way through, but fortunately also too little time for her to doubt it. Worst-case scenario: I get caught. Best-case scenario if I do nothing: I get caught.
The woman who had pushed past her was now struggling with the overhead bin for her suitcase, her large purse resting on the empty aisle seat, unwatched. Connie quickly and efficiently rummaged through the bag. Reading glasses. Okay, cool. Then she silently thanked God that the woman was white as she found exactly what she’d hoped to find—a makeup compact. She palmed it.
As the plane slowly emptied (and her former row mate disappeared down the aisle), Connie ducked low behind the seat and whipped out the compact, with its powdery “neutral” makeup disk. Years of theater experience had taught her how to make makeup seem natural, but now she wanted anything but. It took a little doing, but within a few minutes she had managed to create a blobbish patch of beige skin that started above one eyebrow and leaked down her face, nicked the top of her nose, and came to an uneven end along the ridge of her cheekbone. It looked like a birthmark gone awry and it was pretty hideous, she thought.
Details.
She bound up her long, carefully braided hair and wrapped it in her satin sleeping bonnet. She slipped on the reading glasses and checked herself quickly in the compact’s mirror. It was good, but not good enough.
Hair and makeup, done. Time to raise the curtain and start the show.
The plane had almost entirely emptied out. Connie finally rose from her seat and maneuvered out of her aisle with great difficulty, avoiding coming down on her left foot. Bracing herself on the seatbacks, she managed to shuffle up to the front of the plane, where she made sure to make eye contact with one of the flight attendants who had not told her to turn off her phone at takeoff.
“Are you all right?” the attendant asked, telling Connie instantly that her posture and her faked expression of pai
n were both working.
“I feel like an idiot,” she started, “but I twisted my ankle running for the plane before. I didn’t think it was that bad, but after sitting all this time…”
“Oh, God, it’s probably even worse after the change in cabin pressure!”
The “let them finish your sentence” trick rides again.
“Yeah, is there any way…”
“I’ll get a wheelchair for you.”
Connie allowed herself to slump against one of the seats a little. “Thank you so much. I’m sorry to be such a pain.”
“Not at all. Just sit in that seat there and I’ll have someone get your bags.”
Soon, the attendant helped her out of her seat and off the plane. There in the jetway, a man waited with a wheelchair. Connie sank into it and thanked the attendant again as she piled Connie’s duffel onto a little rack on the back of the chair.
“Take good care of her,” the attendant told Wheelchair Man.
“No prob.”
On their way up the jetway, Connie unfolded the cheap little airplane blanket she’d grabbed from a nearby seat and wrapped it around herself like a shawl. She figured by this point she probably looked like a cancer patient. She tucked her arms together to make herself as small as possible.
Moments later, he rolled her out into the terminal. Connie immediately noticed two uniformed cops standing with a TSA agent off to one side. They were looking for a black teenage girl with beaded cornrows. Not some woman with a facial mark and glasses, wrapped up and wearing a bonnet that probably covered a bald head, as best they could tell.
Still, she held her breath as Wheelchair Man rolled her past them.
“Where to?” he asked her.
Connie finally allowed herself a grin.
“Terminal four,” she said. “Arrivals.”
CHAPTER 48
Morales was staying in a hotel three subway stops away from Jazz’s, but he hadn’t figured out the subway system yet and now was no time to try. So he had hailed a cab and—like in the movies—told the guy to floor it. The cabbie glanced over his shoulder at Jazz with an expression of mingled amusement and annoyance and proceeded to lope along at the speed limit. Jazz sighed heavily and resigned himself to the trip, watching Brooklyn bleed past him.
He should have gone to Morales in the first place, he realized. Should have texted her and not Hughes when he’d had Billy on the phone outside Belsamo’s apartment. She was the one he needed. Hughes had—after much thought and stress—broken NYPD regulations to bring Jazz to New York in the hope of catching a killer.
But the very first time he’d met her, Morales had offered to break the law for him. With him.
She answered the door in a hotel bathrobe, her hair spilling down, un-bunned, messy, disheveled. God, she was sexy. He felt his groin lurch at the sight of her. He wanted her. Not the same way he wanted Connie. Or maybe it was the same way. Maybe he was kidding himself. For all his talk of loving Connie, maybe it was just some animal reaction.
She can die pretty or she can die ugly.
“I was about to get some sleep for once,” Morales said, cocking a hip. “What’s so important you had to race over here?”
Her lips…
Now, if it was me, I’d start with those lips, so full and… generous.
Jazz shivered.
“Is it cold in the hall?” Morales stepped aside. “Come in. I can make some, well, coffee, I guess. Do you drink coffee?”
“Yeah…” Jazz hesitated, then entered the room.
You’re gonna be the death of that FBI agent, Jasper. I promise you that. You’ll watch her die.
No. He would not kill her. Billy was just trying to psych him out. That’s what Billy did—he planted seeds of doubt, of crazy, of dismay. And even if they didn’t bloom, he still got to paw through the loam of your psyche.
As if the sound and finality of the door closing suddenly made her aware of who she was with and what she was wearing, Morales pulled the front of the robe closer together with one hand and ran the other through her untamed hair.
I sure am curious to see those goodies she hides under those FBI blazers…. Want to get your hands up under there, don’t you, Jasper?
Of course I do.
Want to find the things she hides from the world, the things she won’t share. Bring ’em out into the light.
So what? So does every other guy with testosterone and a working penis.
And that made him think of Dog and Hat and the missing penises and he finally shook off Billy’s voice and listened to himself confess multiple felonies and misdemeanors to a special agent of the FBI.
To her credit, Morales didn’t interrupt Jazz as he related to her the path that had taken him physically into Dog’s apartment and mentally into Dog and Hat’s brutal game of “murder Monopoly,” as Hughes called it. Her eyes, so dark brown they were almost black, widened and narrowed at certain points, and she pursed those plush lips that Billy wanted to “begin” with, but she said not a word until he wound and wended his story to the point at which he’d hopped in a cab to visit her in her hotel room.
“And Hughes knows all of this?” was the first thing she said, confirming.
“Except for the last phone call. Well, and that I came to you.”
Morales clucked her tongue. “I have to think for a second. And I have to go get dressed because I can’t believe I’m sitting around talking about this in a bathrobe.”
She grabbed some clothes from a suitcase, then disappeared into the bathroom. Jazz took advantage of the few moments he had to take a quick inventory of the room.
Standard hotel room. Nothing special. The Bureau clearly wasn’t about to rent out a suite for one of its special agents. The room had the feel—no surprise—of someone who used it only to sleep and for the occasional shower. Morales had two double beds, her suitcase open on one of them. He glanced into it—dirty laundry, from the looks of it, probably ready to be sent out. Would it be terribly stereotypical—as a guy and as a potential future serial killer—to steal a pair of used panties? His amusement at the thought surprised him. Maybe if he could mock his own proclivities, he would end up all right. Billy Dent didn’t seem to truck in irony, after all.
Her service revolver—a standard-issue Glock 22—hung in a shoulder holster over the desk chair. Jazz stared at it. He’d figured her for the Glock 23 instead. It was basically the same weapon with the same load—a .40-caliber—but it was about an inch shorter. Easier for women and smaller men to handle. Made more sense for her to carry one of those, and not this friggin’ hand cannon in a shoulder rig that would ruin the line of those blazers Billy had taken note of. She was either exceptionally confident or exceptionally proficient. Or both.
She left that gun here with you. She deserves what comes next, Jasper.
Stop it.
Take that gun and hold it on her when she comes out of the bathroom. And then—I promise you—the fun starts.
Jazz turned away from the gun, away from the suitcase with its pervert bait. On the nightstand, he noticed a small frame with a black-and-white photo. Male. Caucasian. Maybe mid-thirties, lazy grin.
“My ex-husband,” Morales said from behind him. Jazz turned. She was in her FBI armor now—slacks, formless shirt. Hair tied back.
“I’m sorry,” Jazz said, mainly because it seemed to be the thing real people said when death and divorce were brought up. Ex-husband. So much for Hughes’s lesbian crap. Can’t believe I fell for that.
Morales shrugged.
“Most people don’t keep a picture of their—”
“I still love him,” she said. “He couldn’t deal with…”
“With you being a fed?”
“No. It was your dad. I became obsessed. Charlie couldn’t live with… he didn’t—”
“You don’t need to—”
“He shouldn’t have had to have dealt with it. With my obsession with catching the Hand-in-Glove Killer. But he tried to deal with it and then
he couldn’t and then we got divorced. Okay?”
Jazz felt soiled somehow, but he merely nodded.
“So what are you thinking?” she asked. “Why didn’t you go back to Hughes with the new phone call?”
“Because he’s pissed enough at me.”
“Like I’m not totaling up all the state laws you’ve broken in my head? Hell, I bet Belsamo could even file a civil suit against you. He’d probably win, too.”
“You said you would help me kill Billy,” Jazz told her, forcing her to shift uncomfortably, like a recalcitrant toddler needing to use the bathroom.
“Killing Billy and catching Dog are two different things.”
“No. They’re the same. The path to Billy leads through Dog. He said he came to New York looking for someone. Said he would tell Dog who. We catch Dog—without NYPD, without the task force—and we can force him to tell us who Billy came to find. And then we get that person and we’re one step closer to Billy.”
“Force him, huh? You gonna go all Cheney on him?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that. But I think I can be persuasive. In the first place, these freakshows are all giant Billy Dent geeks. The last one I caught thinks I’m some kind of demigod.” He left out the part about the Impressionist ramming his head into the bars of his cell.
“What if Dog doesn’t want to talk? Or what if he’s just too crazy to tell us anything worthwhile?”
“I think his whole cawing, look-at-my-dick act in the interrogation room was just that—an act. He wouldn’t be together enough to keep from being caught this long, otherwise. But you just have to trust me, Morales. We nail him down and I can make him talk. One way or the other.”
Morales rubbed her temples. “You’re talking about torture. You’re talking about kidnapping a United States citizen—”
“A criminal.”
“A United States citizen—”
“A serial killer.”
“—and depriving him of his rights, his due process. Then torturing him into giving up information not related to the crimes he’s accused of—”