by Barry Lyga
And oh, lucky day! It was Howie’s favorite: Deputy Erickson. Howie’s wrists still ached from Erickson handcuffing him to a bench in the sheriff’s office last October, all for the minor, minor sin of breaking into the morgue. And examining a murder victim. And photocopying a confidential medical examiner’s report.
“Hello, Erickson.” Howie sniffed.
The deputy sat on a folding chair, scrolling through something or other on his cell. “Howie. Glad to see you’re up and about.”
“I bet you are.”
“Come on, Howie. Bygones and all that.”
Howie knew there was some kind of kick-ass rejoinder involving “bygones” and flipping it to “gone by,” but he couldn’t manage to wrap his brain around it at the moment.
“I’m not here for you, Erickson. I’m here to see Jazz’s grandmother.”
Erickson slipped his phone into his pocket and stood, folding his arms across his chest. Howie towered over the deputy by a good three inches, but what Erickson lacked in Howie’s height, he more than made up for in sheer muscle mass. And in not being a hemophiliac.
“Can’t let you in. No visitors. G. William is worried about press wanting pictures of Billy Dent’s mom in a hospital bed.”
“I’m not press.”
“He’s also worried about victims’ families looking for a little revenge.”
“I’m also not—”
“Come on, Howie! No visitors means no visitors. I’m not messing around here. Go back to your room and get some rest. You look like hell.”
“I just want to check up on her.”
“She’s resting. There. You’ve checked up.”
“And I need to talk to Sam.”
“Sam who?”
Howie sighed. “Man, I lost a lot of blood today. I’m in no mood. Samantha. Jazz’s aunt. She’s in there, right?” He jerked his head toward room 2007.
Erickson seemed genuinely baffled. “There’s no one in there but the old lady.”
That didn’t sound right. Sam had been extremely protective of Gramma every time Howie’d seen them together. He couldn’t imagine Sam abandoning her mother like this, despite G. William saying she’d disappeared. Disappeared didn’t have to be sinister—it could be as simple as being in the hospital john when the cops checked your mom’s room for you.
“You’re playing with me. Sam was there, right? When did she leave? Where did she go?”
The deputy shook his head, frowning. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Other than doctors and nurses, no one has gone in there. No one.”
But Sam would stay with her mom. At least check in with her, right? Unless…
“According to G. William, the nine-one-one call came in from the Dent house landline. By the time the ambo got there, all they found was you on the floor, bleeding, and the old woman nearby. That’s it. No one else.”
Unless Sam turns out to have more in common with her brother than just hair color. Crap.
“If that’s true, then there’s a good chance Samantha is working with Billy. You gotta let me see Gramma. There might be some kind of clue—”
“No visitors, Howie.”
“Look,” Howie begged, “just let me go in and—”
“No. Absolutely not.” Erickson refolded his arms across his chest, as if that made some kind of point.
“Fine.” Howie shuffled away down the hall. After a moment, he turned back.
“I’m still pretty sure you’re some kind of serial killer, Erickson.” It was the best insult he had in him at the moment.
“You’ve got serial killers on the brain, Howie. You’re seeing them everywhere.”
Howie snorted. “Well, yeah. That’s only because they are everywhere.”
CHAPTER 12
Nothing Connie tried could budge either the handcuff around Jan’s wrist or the one encircling the bed’s metal frame. She was keenly aware that Billy could return at any second. Every moment that passed, her adrenaline seemed to come more and more alive, as though it were a second being living inside her, one that ran through her every cell, screaming one thing over and over at the top of its lungs:
RUN.
The first thing Connie had done was go to the door, thinking that she might be able to find a key or at least something to pick the lock with, out in one of the other rooms. Barring those possibilities, she figured her cell might still be out there and she could at least call the police.
But the door refused to budge, even when Connie threw all her weight at it. Too sturdy for just a mere door. Maybe Billy had a police bar on the other side, or a bracketed barricade. Either way, that was it for the door.
Connie remembered an old movie she’d seen once, where a guy handcuffed to a bed had used one of the mattress springs to pick the lock. With Jan’s help, she managed to tear open an edge of the mattress and pick open one of the coils, at the cost of abrading her fingers until they bled.
But no matter how much she poked and prodded the keyhole with her little makeshift lockpick, she couldn’t get the cuffs open. It was much harder than it appeared in the movies.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said, trying to fight off the RUN that still coursed through her. Her fingers were trembling, and her blood smeared the handcuff. “Can we take apart the bed? Unscrew the pole where you’re cuffed?”
Jan shook her head. “It’s a welded joint. Billy’s not an amateur.”
Connie stood up and paced the room, jittery as though overcaffeinated. She couldn’t stop herself from touching the side of her neck, tracing the line of the laceration Billy had made there. The new blood from her fingers slicked the tacky, drying blood on her neck.
“What do we do?” she asked. Some rational part of her understood that she was skirting the line of complete panic; some rational part of her knew that it wouldn’t be long before she began screaming and pulling at her own hair and bouncing off the goddamn soundproofed walls.
But with every second that ticked by, she grew less and less rational.
“What do we do, Jan?” she asked again. It was idiotic, but somehow she felt like Jan should have all the answers. Jan was an adult, right? Jan had been married to Billy, for God’s sake. She should know something, right? Right?
Connie tried to slow her breathing and—for the first time since she’d started yoga at twelve—realized that she couldn’t. Which made her breathe even faster.
I’m gonna hyperventilate right into unconsciousness and Billy’s gonna come back and find me on the floor and then—
“Connie,” Jan said quietly.
“What?”
Jan raised a finger to her lips in the universal sign for Shut up. Connie realized she’d been breathing so rapidly that it was audible. She held her breath for a second.
A door.
A door, closing.
Nearby.
Her eyes met Jan’s. Connie was shocked to find no panic in the older woman’s eyes.
Just resignation.
They didn’t say it out loud. They didn’t need to.
Billy’s back.
Connie spun in a circle, as though she could somehow magically manifest another room or a weapon or something if she just kept looking hard enough. Her eyes fell on the chair. That was all she had. A plan began to form.
She would hear him disengage the police bar. She would stand by the door with the chair held high. The door opened out, so she couldn’t hide behind it, but as soon as he came through, she would bash him with the chair and—
And he would recover and kill her because he was tougher than her.
Connie spun around again. The room was four walls of soundproofing and the door. Nothing more. In a blind panic, she started pounding on the walls, desperate. Her blows were muffled, the pain muted, the resounding thumps solid.
Until.
Until she slammed a fist against the far wall. It felt different there, somehow. She tried it again.
Definitely different.
“What are you
doing?” Jan whispered.
Without a second thought, Connie began clawing at the soundproofing. Her bloody fingers found a seam, and she dug in, raking her nails down until she had enough purchase to get a grip and pull.
An industrial staple popped out of the wall, and a corner of the soundproofing came up. She saw the edge of a window, lower down than she was used to, at waist height.
“Dear Old Dad is home, ladies!” Billy’s voice boomed from the other room. He sounded happy, and that terrified Connie. “Just let me wash up and make a call, and I’ll be right in!” It was the jovial Billy the town of Lobo’s Nod had lived with for years, the popular Billy, everyone’s friend. If you didn’t know what Billy Dent was, that voice would be the signal for good times.
But Connie did know. And the voice, while terrifying, also somehow grounded her. Connie stopped clawing at the soundproofing for a moment and turned back to Jan, who had drawn her knees up to her chest on the bed.
“What about you?” Connie whispered. “I can’t leave without you.”
“He’ll kill both of us, if you don’t get out.”
“I can’t leave—”
Footsteps. Close.
“I’m the adult, Connie. The parent. I’m doing for you what I should have done for Jasper—protecting you. Now go.”
Connie reapplied herself to the soundproofing, snagging a corner. She peeled away a great swatch of it. Sure enough, there was a window there. She fumbled with the lock; it wouldn’t move.
He welded the lock shut. He. Welded. The. Lock.
Panic rode her like a horse. She tore down the remainder of the soundproofing. At the same time, she heard—through the door—the police bar drop.
“Hurry!” Jan nearly shouted.
Connie grabbed up the chair, and just as the door opened, she slammed the chair against the window with all her might. The window shivered and cracked. The chair was sturdy and withstood the blow.
She cast a panicked glance over her shoulder and saw that Billy had frozen for a moment in the doorway. Was that a delighted smile she detected playing at his lips? Yeah, she thought it was.
Delight this, she thought, and crashed the chair into the window again. This time, the glass broke into dozens of pieces, forming a jagged opening.
“You little witch!” Billy marveled, and some part of Connie found it amusing that Billy Dent didn’t drop the B word on her.
And then Billy roared like a bull moose in full mating throes and launched himself across the room at her, arms wide. Connie shrieked in abject terror and swung the chair around, putting every last ounce of her body weight into it. The chair smashed into Billy, who threw his arms to one side to shield himself. It sounded like someone dropping an armload of firewood, mingled with Billy’s shout of surprised pain.
Connie’s arms were numb with exertion, but she somehow found the strength to swing the chair again. This time, though, her swing was weak, and Billy caught the chair, wrestling it from her grasp. He hurled it across the room. His seething face came into uncomfortably close view, his nose bleeding, a scratch high up on his cheek where the chair had managed to get through.
He grabbed her and jerked her close.
“You can’t—” he began.
And Connie didn’t know where it came from, but she hooked her knee straight up, catching him squarely in the crotch, just like they taught in self-defense class. Eyes and groin. Go for the balls, whichever one you can.
Billy howled but didn’t lose his grip. His fingers did slacken a bit, however, just enough for Connie to twist out of his grasp.
“Run!” Jan screamed, her voice high and on the edge of panicked laughter. Connie realized she’d been screaming the whole time. Her adrenaline had whited out all sound until now. “Run, Connie!”
Billy showed impressive fortitude for a man who’d just had his balls mashed against her knee—he was gasping for breath, but he single-mindedly, doggedly, reached out for her again. Connie spun back to the window. The opening beckoned her, lined with sharp glass teeth.
No choice. No time. She couldn’t think, couldn’t even pause.
She covered her face with her arms and launched herself through the window headfirst. The shards scraped and tore at her, slicing furrows along her arms and snapping off as they caught on and ripped her clothes. But she was through the window. Through the window and onto a fire escape and—
And Billy’s hand was locked around her ankle.
Connie lay half in, half out the window, glass studding her along her arms and torso. As she twisted to turn her gaze to Billy, her weight drove glass deeper into her. She barely even noticed. All her senses were filled with Billy, with the gleam in his eye as he leaned toward her through the window. That gleam—that glow he seemed to exude—filled her sight and even her hearing and touch and smell. She could taste it.
She kicked with her free foot. A piece of glass slashed up her calf, but she didn’t care. She cared only that she managed to land a blow against Billy, just enough that he relaxed his grip on her ankle. She jerked away from him, spilling onto the fire escape, tumbling. She saw the sky through the fire escape above, then the filthy alley floor one story below.
Barely able to move, shaking with adrenaline, she pulled herself to the ladder. Billy knocked the remaining shards of glass out of the window frame and started to climb through.
Footsteps behind her. So near. She didn’t dare take the moment to look back. She flung herself at the ladder.
The opening was there, but the ladder was retracted all the way up. She couldn’t figure out how to lower it, so without thinking, she just dragged herself to the lip—
Only one story really only one story only about ten feet or so that’s all it is that’s all
—and dropped through feetfirst.
A dizzying moment of breathless descent. A cry from Billy, above.
She landed on her left foot a half second before her right touched down. Something very much like a shot of electricity blasted up her left leg, pins and needles along every inch of flesh, sunk deep into every muscle. She exhaled a WHOOF! and stumbled forward, nearly falling down but somehow managing to keep her feet under her, where they belonged.
run run run run run run
When her left foot came down, that electricity sizzled again, and she nearly screamed in pain, but she needed her breath for running. She hissed into the agony and forced herself to run, hobbling as quickly as she could, not caring which direction she went, not paying attention to where she was, just propelling herself forward as fast as she could go, each step a mad, hurtful rush.
Each step taking her farther from Billy Dent.
CHAPTER 13
Hughes didn’t want to coordinate his efforts to catch Billy Dent from the kitchen of the Hat Killer’s apartment, but right now he had no choice. He had uniforms rushing to him constantly, giving him updates every minute or so, and he wasn’t about to take the time to drive back to the precinct. He’d had someone get Hershey’s family to a hotel for the night about an hour ago and had set up camp at the table where—he was keenly aware—the Hat Killer had eaten dinner every night.
Currently, he was on the phone with his captain, Niles Montgomery, trying to get through the man’s head that they needed to shut down Brooklyn entirely.
“I’m talking buses, subways, tunnels,” Hughes went on. “Close the bridges.…”
“Lou, I’m not closing down the entire borough just because you have—”
“Captain, look—we’ve never been closer to Billy Dent than we are right now. He was here. Right here. If we don’t close off the borough, he’ll slip away—”
“You don’t even know if it’s him,” Montgomery said.
“He signed a—”
“For all we know, this was a falling-out between Hat and Dog, and Dog’s trying to throw us off the scent. Keep up your house to house and report back to me. I’ll put out the word to the media, and we’ll see if we get lucky. But I’m not telling the mayor and
the commissioner that we have to declare martial law in Brooklyn because you think Billy Dent might be here!”
Hughes hung up, grimacing. He had a map spread out on the table before him and had been marking with a Sharpie where his uniforms had confirmed no Billy Dent. So far, they’d tackled only three buildings in the immediate vicinity. It was past four in the morning, and it had taken time just to muster manpower at that hour, to say nothing of knocking on all those doors and then explaining to the groggy, angry inhabitants what was going on.
An officer in civvies approached Hughes. Most of his cops had been roused from home and hadn’t had time for uniforms before reporting.
“Detective Hughes?”
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to let you know: still no answer on Special Agent Morales’s cell or at her hotel. Do you want me to send a unit over there?”
Hughes gnawed on the end of the Sharpie. He didn’t want to spare the manpower. “Keep trying.”
The cop didn’t budge.
“Something else?” Hughes asked.
“Well, yeah. Nine-one-one just recorded a call about Jasper Dent.”
Hughes grunted and drew a circle around an abandoned bakery just up the street. Not a bad place for Billy Dent to hole up. “What’s he gotten into?”
“Not sure. Anonymous call says that he’s, well, that he’s been shot in a storage unit somewhere in—”
Hughes snapped to attention. A storage unit. He remembered the information Jasper had given him, the stolen info from Oliver Belsamo’s apartment.
“A U-STORE-IT-ALL building?” Hughes asked.
The cop stared at Hughes as though he’d just turned water into wine. “How did you know that?”
“Never mind. What else did it say?”
“Just that the kid was injured. Nine-one-one sent an ambo, but when they arrived, the security guard on duty was dead. Units are on the way.”
A ball of molten steel settled deep into Hughes’s stomach and began leeching into his guts. Jasper, what have you done?
He handed the Sharpie to the cop. “Grudzinski’ll be here in ten minutes; tell him he’s in charge and fill him in. Until then, you’re boss.”