by Barry Lyga
—touch—
This time, it was the sex dream.
—his hand runs up—
The cutting dream was on hiatus. He didn’t need it anymore. He knew now that it wasn’t merely a dream—it was a memory. As a child, he had taken a knife and he had sliced into the flesh of another human being. The sensation of trying to cut his own leg open to dig out the bullet had confirmed it.
Oh, yes, you know—
Then what did the sex dream mean? If the cutting dream turned out to be real, then what did the sex dream mean and who had—
The vibration of his phone startled him from his slumber. He jerked as he woke, once again yanking hard against the handcuff that held him fast to the bed. The pain shivered up his arm.
It was nearly eight o’clock at night. Caller ID showed HOWIE.
“You alone?” Howie asked, his voice low.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. My parents are gonna be here soon to take me home, so I figured we better do this now because once I’m in the house, they’re gonna be on me like the fifty tattoos you owe me.”
“Fifty’s a little much.” Jazz glanced at the door. He was certain there was a cop stationed there; Hughes wouldn’t be stupid enough not to have a guard posted. He dropped his voice to a whisper and turned as best the handcuff would allow, showing his back to the door.
“I want a tattoo that just says ‘tattoo,’ ” Howie went on. “It’s a meta thing. Very postmodern. Avant-garde. I don’t expect you to understand. Anyway, hang on a sec.” Jazz heard a clicking sound. A moment later: “You still there, Jazz?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re all in the hospital at the same time. What are the odds? Okay, I’m conferencing in—”
“Jazz!”
It was Connie’s voice. It was the sweetest, sweetest thing Jazz had ever heard in his life. Until that moment, he had imagined her in an ICU or on an operating table, fighting for her life after the depredations Billy had unleashed upon her. Tears surprised him, and he dabbed at his eyes with the corner of the sheet.
He wanted to shout. He longed to scream his joy at her voice until his elation filled every last cubic inch of space in the hospital.
Instead, he forced himself to keep his voice to a whisper: “Are you okay? What did he do to you?”
“Nothing. Well, not nothing, but I got away.”
“You fought off Billy?” He didn’t mean to sound disbelieving, but he actually couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that Billy would let Connie go, no matter what it took.
“I messed up, Jazz.” Connie’s voice broke into sobs. “I was stupid. I was trying to help you and I came to New York and—”
“Hey, look, guys,” Howie interrupted, “Connie’s dad could come back soon. We don’t have much time. Let’s figure out what’s going on, and keep it quick.”
They tried, but it proved impossible. Too much had happened since the last time they spoke to one another.
Jazz explained to them about the Hat-Dog Killer and the game of serial killer Monopoly. About tracing Belsamo to the storage unit and everything that had happened there.
About his mother being alive.
“I know,” Connie said. “I met her.”
Jazz could not have been more surprised had Connie announced she was pregnant with Howie’s love child.
“I can’t believe this,” Jazz said. “Howie? You still on?”
“Yeah, sorry, I was just trying to figure out the actual odds of us all being in the hospital at the same time.”
“Howie!”
“What? It’s weird!”
“What’s going on down there in the Nod? With Gramma and Aunt Sam?”
“Yeah, about that… Your grandmother’s doing okay in the hospital. Sam is gone.”
“Gone?”
He listened as Howie recounted his night at Gramma’s house. Then, with a little backtracking and some help from Howie, Connie recounted what she’d been up to in Lobo’s Nod and her trip back to New York. Jazz’s relief at her safety flopped in and out of his heart, alternating with his terror at what she’d endured at Billy’s hands and his complete outrage at the danger she’d blithely walked into.
“It was so stupid,” she said, “and I know it was. But there was the picture of you, Jazz. And I couldn’t bear the idea of him hurting you. You get it, right?” There was a thick cast of concern and love and self-recrimination in her voice, and not for the first time, Jazz knew exactly how undeservedly lucky he was. “After the Impressionist and after helping out in New York, I just thought… I don’t know. I thought I could contribute and it was you and…” She trailed off, and the three of them said nothing for a while.
“I’m so glad you’re going to be okay,” Jazz whispered at last.
“Tell him the rest of it,” Howie said. “What you found when you dug up his old backyard.”
“Oh, right. What was in the box?” Jazz asked.
And Connie told him. The childhood photos. The plastic toy.
The birth certificate.
Jazz couldn’t breathe for a moment. His mouth opened and closed like a fish lacking water. “It’s not true,” he managed at last. “It’s a fake.”
“Howie can text it to you. It looks real, Jazz.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jazz said. The moment the words came out, he knew they were true. He had been raised by Billy. Taught. Indoctrinated.
But what if it’s not in my DNA? What if I’m not damned by my own blood?
Yeah, what if? Then all that means is that Billy was able to conquer nature. He opened up my head and dumped his crazy in there. I’m not sure which is worse—being born to it or learning it.
“It makes no difference,” he said again. “We’re not talking about it anymore. It doesn’t matter.”
Connie and Howie gave him a moment. “Jazz…” Connie began.
“Seriously. Not talking about it. Tell me about this bell and the stuff you found at JFK.”
With his eyes closed, he could see Connie pursing her lips and nodding in studied, resigned frustration at his obstinance. “It was some kind of code,” she said. “There was the bell and the gun at JFK. And then this picture of Kevin Costner, believe it or not, as an FBI agent, and the place where he was hiding was near this place called Ness—”
Jazz nearly choked. “Dude, you all right?” Howie asked, panicked. Connie chimed in, just as concerned: “Jazz? Jazz, are you still there?”
“You’re sure about all that?” he asked. “A bell, a gun, and Ness?”
“Yeah. But what—”
Jazz leaned back on the pillow. It was just the kind of sick joke Billy would play. “Bell. Gun. Ness,” he said.
“Right,” Connie said slowly. “Does it mean something?”
“It’s a name. Not bell and gun and Ness. A name. Belle Gunness.”
“I don’t get it,” Howie said. “Was she a friend of your dad’s or—”
“She was a serial killer,” Jazz told them. “One of history’s rare female serial killers. Over a hundred years ago.”
Silence on the line again. Jazz didn’t want to say the next thing, the obvious thing.
“Then that means your aunt Samantha…”
“There’s a reason she’s disappeared,” Jazz said. He didn’t want to say what came next, because somehow saying it made it real. But he had no choice: “Aunt Sam is Ugly J.”
The antibiotic IV was nearly empty. The saline drip was a newer bag.
Jazz pulled the antibiotic first, easing the needle out of his arm with care. The millimeters of metal slipping through his flesh felt like yards. But after Billy’s suturing of his leg, he could handle it.
A couple of hours ago, a nurse had come by to remove the drain in his leg. He could bend it, and the pain was much, much less than he’d feared. He sensed he would have a limp, but all that mattered right now was that the leg worked.
He had to get out of here, handcuff notwithstanding.
Hughes tho
ught he’d killed Morales. Or had at least been involved somehow. And who could blame him? Hughes had known Jazz a total of four days, and in those days Jazz had nonchalantly broken into someone’s apartment, stolen private property, and disobeyed any number of requests from the police. Top that off with a couple of bodies in a storage unit, and of course Hughes thought he was responsible for Morales’s death.
Then there was the more disturbing fact of the matter: Namely, that Jazz was responsible for Morales’s death.
You’re gonna be the death of that FBI agent, Jasper. I promise you that.
Just as Billy had predicted.
You’ll watch her die.
Hughes had told Jazz to back off on his Hat-Dog theory. He’d expressly and explicitly told Jazz to do nothing, in effect sending him to his (hotel) room while Hughes himself tried to figure out what to do with the illegally obtained evidence Jazz had procured. But Jazz had ignored that command, had gone to the FBI agent with a towering hard-on for Billy Dent, and had persuaded her to join him on a jaunt to unit 83F.
Persuaded might be too strong a word. It hadn’t been difficult to lure Morales into going. Like so many of those who’d stalked Billy, she had more vengeance and rage pumping through her veins than blood. Billy had humiliated her as Hand-in-Glove, leading her on a merry chase through Kansas and Oklahoma, teasing her with false evidence and fruitless leads. It wasn’t personal, Jazz knew. Billy didn’t care about individual pursuers. They were—despite their rank, position, title, or agency—“bastard cops,” one and all. Morales, though, had taken it personally. She’d sacrificed her marriage in pursuit of Billy Dent, a law enforcement cliché if ever there was one, but that would have been little comfort to Morales and her ex-husband.
Charlie. She called him Charlie, and she packed a framed picture of him that she took on assignments.
Yeah, his days of getting assistance from law enforcement were over. Hughes would probably insist on throwing the switch himself if Jazz were given the death penalty. No one was going to help him.
He had to rely on himself.
That’s the way it’s s’posed to be, Jazz heard Billy say in his head.
He hated it when his father told the truth.
Aunt Samantha was Ugly J. She fit. Using the name Belle Gunness was the final piece of evidence Jazz needed.
A brother-sister pair of serial killers. And I sat right across from her at my kitchen table, and she Billy’d me like a pro. I can’t believe I fell for it.
Billy was on the loose. Sam had disappeared from the Nod. They were reuniting, Jazz was certain.
They had his mother.
It made sick sense. Jazz remembered telling Hughes how the Hat-Dog Killer’s crimes made perfect sense to the murderer. The same held true for Billy and Sam. Billy was obsessed with Jazz becoming the next generation of killer.
Thing I can’t decide, Billy had said as he left unit 83F, is whether I’m gonna kill her or I’m gonna watch you kill her.
At the time, he’d meant Connie. Connie’s death—whether by Jazz’s hand or before his very eyes—would push him over the edge into Billyland.
The antibiotic IV was out. Jazz took a deep breath and reached for the saline needle. This one was in a little deeper.
With Connie out of his grasp, though, Billy would move on to the next best thing: Mom. Jazz was positive that Billy would keep his mother alive for now. Until he could murder her in front of Jazz.
That was the original plan, I bet. That’s why he came to New York. Sam was here looking for her all along. And she was using Hat and Dog, playing with them. Then Billy got to town, and we stupidly called Sam for help. They must have been laughing their asses off at us. I let her right into the house. I left her with Howie, of all people, the most fragile person I know.
Tears blurred his vision. He rubbed them away savagely, focusing on removing the needle without tearing the skin or slashing open a blood vessel.
Don’t lose it, Jazz. Not now. Howie’s safe. Connie’s safe. Gramma’s safe. Mom is only safe for now. You have to find her. You have to save her, and you can’t do that from a hospital bed.
At the name Belle Gunness, he’d remembered more than that she was a serial killer. He’d also remembered what Billy had said in the storage unit. About Gilles de Rais. About Caligula. About “where it started.”
The needle came out. He was now completely free.
Except for the handcuffs.
You’ve got the beginnings of it, boy. Told you as much back at Wammaket. Told you where it started.
Yes. He understood now. Where it all began. It would lead him to Billy, he was certain.
Carefully, lest he stab himself through a finger, he bent one of the IV needles, giving it a ninety-degree hook at the end. He inserted this into the handcuff’s keyhole and used the edge of the hole for leverage to bend the needle again.
It broke.
Damn it!
Well, that was why it was a good thing he had two needles.
He was more careful with the second needle. The second bend took. Exhaling a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, Jazz wiggled the needle into place and heard the click of the cuff as it opened.
CHAPTER 16
Hughes slumped at a table in the hospital cafeteria, nursing his third Red Bull of the day. He wondered exactly how many cans of the noxious swill he would need to drink before his heart exploded. It seemed, at the moment, an experiment worth conducting. Less than twenty hours since the phone call about Duncan Hershey had awoken him from a deep slumber, the world had turned topsy-turvy in ways he never could have predicted, right down to Jennifer Morales already leaving the morgue for a flight to… to wherever the hell she was from. With Grudzinski handling the logistics of the Billy Dent manhunt for now, Hughes could—in theory—head home and grab some shut-eye.
Truth be told, he didn’t want to shut his eyes. He knew what he would see—the abattoir of unit 83F. And were there scents in dreams? He didn’t know, but he was certain he would smell its noisome human reek, too, with undertones of bleach and preservative.
Hughes scrubbed his face with both hands. Goddamn it. He didn’t even know where Morales was from. Didn’t know if she had family. Didn’t know a damn thing about her, despite them working ass-to-nuts God knows how many months on the Hat-Dog case. And then along came Jasper Dent, killing the ant colony with a grenade.
My fault, Hughes thought. My damn fault.
He had disobeyed orders and gone to Lobo’s Nod to entice the Dent kid to Brooklyn out of sheer desperation, nothing more.
Well, there was something more. Hubris.
Pride went before, ambition follows him. More Shakespeare. One of the Henrys, he thought. Sure, okay. Cards on the table? It was pride, and it was ambition. But they’d been stymied for months! People were abjectly terrified. Hughes hadn’t seen fear like that in his city since the days after 9/11, when the streets were damn near empty, the subways echoing, hollow tubes. What few people braved the outdoors had the haunted, shell-shocked looks of soldiers going into battle. Brooklyn had a similar savor to it these past few months. Something had to be done. They were days away from vigilante justice. Mobs in the streets.
And so Hughes had reached out to Jasper Dent, desperate for something—anything—that would bring sanity back to the borough.
It’s not like I turned the investigation over to him. I just showed him the facts. I asked him to draw some conclusions.
He took another swig of the Red Bull. It burned his throat. Who was he kidding? He’d screwed up. Monumentally. Bringing the Dent kid to New York had been like dropping napalm on an oil spill.
If only I knew then what I know now.…
His phone buzzed for his attention. An unfamiliar number. He answered it, only to hear a drawling, booming voice:
“Is this Detective Louis Hughes, NYPD? This here’s G. William Tanner, sheriff of Lobo’s Nod.”
Hughes turned down the volume on his phone. “Sheriff Tanner? What can I do
for you?”
“I’ve been doing a little digging on my end of things here in Lobo’s Nod. I understand you’ve got a couple of my kids in the hospital there.”
Hughes weighed what he knew of Tanner from conversations with Dent and from the media. “That’s true, Sheriff. And I have to tell you—the Dent kid is currently under arrest for a whole slew of things.”
He could almost hear the gears ticking over in the sheriff’s head before that booming voice came back again. “I’m sure you’ve done what you think is right, Detective. Ain’t gonna try to convince you otherwise. But look here—I’ve been talking to a boy here in town name of Howard Gersten. Wanted to fill you in on what he told me.”
Ah, the mysterious Howie reared his head. Leave it to Dent to figure out how to cause trouble in two places at once. “Shoot.”
Tanner spoke for a few minutes, rattling off information, most of which Hughes didn’t care about. Lockboxes buried in backyards and toy birds and baby pictures. Secret flights to New York. Dent’s racist grandmother and something about a missing aunt and blah blah blah.
The only thing he did care about was the birth certificate. That was interesting. Hughes had interrogated any number of criminals, and he knew that one way to break them was to yank some fundamental underpinnings away. Tilt their world askew, force them to see it from a new angle, and sometimes something shook loose.
Hughes was convinced that the Dent kid knew more than he was telling. He couldn’t believe that Billy Dent would show up in the storage unit to sew up his kid’s leg and not let something drop, some important bit of information that Jasper now held tight like a baby blanket.
“Thanks for that information, Sheriff,” Hughes told him, downing the last of the Red Bull. The day wasn’t over yet. “Hey, I have a question for you.”
“Go ’head.”
“Do you mind me asking what the G stands for?”
“Don’t mind you askin’ at all. Do mind telling, though.”
Hughes chuckled and signed off. He crumpled the Red Bull can into a ball and surprised himself with a perfect three-pointer into the trash can. A nearby nurse applauded.