by Barry Lyga
See how they run? Billy whispered. See how they obey? That’s ’cause they’re not real, Jasper. They hew to you; they hearken. Because you are one of the only things in the world that matter.
People are real, Jazz told himself. People matter.
No, they aren’t. No, they don’t.
“Back in the room!” Jazz barked to a nurse who was just emerging through a door. “Now! Do it now!” She scampered back comically, and if he could have afforded to, Jazz would have laughed.
He made his way across to the other side of the hospital. His radio still squawked and bleated with pandemonium. He imagined the panic throughout the hospital itself, on the streets outside, as cops told one another to stand down or to move into position or whatever. Occasionally, he chimed in on the radio, contributing something garbled or cut off, something easily interpreted ten different ways. Even a well-trained force like the NYPD could be thrown into disarray. Who, after all, would expect Jazz to do this?
From the hospital map, he’d memorized a side exit on the opposite end of the building. There was a bank of elevators here, too, but he eschewed them for the stairs after donning a cloak of panic over his voice and shouting into the mic: “Oh, crap! Trip wire in north stairs! Repeat, trip wire in north stairs! Keep out of the stairwells! This son of a bitch is playing with us!”
Someone commed back: “Bomb squad is en route. Stay frosty.” Jazz shook his head and chuckled. For the first time in his life, Billy’s reputation as a superhuman murder machine was working for him, not against him.
Going down the stairs was easier than going up. He could lean on the railing and take most of the weight off his bad leg. He hop-ran down the stairs, taking the corners at dangerous speeds. He couldn’t afford to linger. Eventually, someone would realize that there was no Billy Dent, no trip wires. Or someone would find Finley or Hughes. He had to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. Disappear into the jungle of New York. He’d hated New York almost from the moment he’d landed at JFK—days ago, years ago, lifetimes ago—for its crowds, its unconscionably cramped streets, its temptingly expendable population. But now he could use that to his advantage, vanish against the backdrop of humanity. Gather his wits. Figure out Billy’s next move.
He’s probably already out of the city. He wouldn’t stick around after Connie escaped. He would know the heat would come down. Fast. So he’d get the hell out.
The police probably thought they could blockade Billy, keep him contained in the city. What they didn’t understand was that Billy always had an exit plan. More than one, usually.
You never go into a place, Jasper, Billy had said so many times, without knowing how you’ll get out. And don’t never assume you can come out the same way you went in. You make that assumption, you’ll end up pig-stuck in the weight room at Wammaket or bleedin’ out of your ass in some local jail somewhere.
Billy himself had ended up in Wammaket and had managed to get stuck nowhere. Billy always survived. Like a cockroach.
The world’s smartest, meanest, craziest cockroach.
He’ll scurry away. But this time he’s not alone. He’ll take Mom with him. She escaped, and he’ll want to punish her for that. And me.
He paused at the stairwell door. He’d made his way down to the first floor. If the map he’d memorized was right, there was a side entrance not ten yards from here. Ten yards and he would be outside, with all the cops in the world at the back of the building, looking for Billy.
I’m coming, Mom. As fast as I can.
Before he could open the door, it opened for him. A hospital security guard—young, vaguely Middle Eastern, pudgy—gawked at him for a moment before fumbling for his radio. There was no time to finesse it; it was the guard or Mom, and that particular coin came up in Mom’s favor every single time Jazz flipped it.
He punched the guard in the face. Pretty sure nothing broke, but the guard staggered back, his nose gushing blood. Jazz grabbed him by the lapels and jerked him into the stairwell. No gun, but the guy had a Taser holstered at his hip, so Jazz yanked it free and gave him a good jolt right in the neck. There was a sizzling sound, and the man danced comically for a moment before collapsing to the floor.
Jazz ripped loose the radio and stuffed it in his pocket along with the Taser. Out in the corridor, he spied two cops—not security, actual NYPD—standing by the exit he needed.
He ducked back into the stairwell. Damn it! He’d thought this plan couldn’t fail. Draw the cops to one door, then leave through the other. Simple, right? But the NYPD wasn’t so easily fooled. They were probably focused on “Billy’s” location, but they clearly were willing to divert a portion of their forces to guard the other entrances, just in case.
Bastard cops ain’t all that smart, Billy said, but they’re smart enough, you hear? And for the times when their brains aren’t working, they got all kinds of protocols and procedures and rules and guidelines that substitute for their thinking. Keeps ’em dangerous.
But predictable, Jazz realized. And no matter how well trained, no matter how smart, cops were still human beings. Human beings with emotions.
Which meant vulnerabilities.
Jazz raised his stolen mic to his lips. He spared a second to prepare himself, and then hit the Send button and screamed into the mic.
“Officer down! Officer down! North side! Oh, Jesus!”
Then, into the security guard’s radio, he raised his voice an octave and shouted, “Copy that! Copy that! Officer down! Repeat: officer down!”
Quite involuntarily, he grinned at his ruse. Both Billy and Connie would have been proud of his performance.
As expected, the two cops at the door dashed down the corridor, weapons drawn, barking into their shoulder mics. Jazz gave them a moment to round a corner, then slipped into the hallway and out the door, into the frigid, free Brooklyn night air.
Billy Dent’s face was on every channel in Connie’s hospital room. She vacillated between CNN and a local station. Both covered Billy’s presence in New York with breathless excitement. She could almost see the ratings charts reflected in the eyes of the reporters.
One corner of the screen was given over to a photo of Billy from his days at Wammaket. Next to it was a police-artist sketch of Billy as he appeared now. The NYPD had sent in an artist to get a description of Billy’s disguise from Connie. The words ARMED & EXTREMELY DANGEROUS scrolled over and over again.
“If you see this man,” the reporter said, “do not approach him or otherwise engage him. Contact NYPD immediately.…”
The sketch didn’t matter. By now, she figured, Billy had changed his appearance yet again. Probably as soon as she had escaped. He wasn’t stupid. You didn’t kill more than a hundred people over a twenty-year period by being stupid. Billy Dent knew exactly what he was doing. He’d most likely worked out the details of a new disguise before Connie even got to New York. As soon as it was necessary, he would just pull it on like a snake in reverse, slipping into a new skin.
“… now being told that Dent may be converging on Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn,” the reporter said, holding a hand to her ear. “Rumor has it that Dent’s son, Jasper, is a patient there, and there is some speculation that Dent is perhaps trying to retrieve his son. The hospital has been placed on lockdown, with patients confined to rooms, and medical personnel…”
Connie’s throat locked, as though a metal claw had snapped shut around it. She couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t cough or even breathe.
Billy Dent. Billy Dent was headed this way. And maybe he was coming for Jazz, but would he even consider leaving without settling accounts with the girl who’d escaped him?
Temporarily escaped. No one ever really escaped Billy, she realized. Not his son. Not his wife. Certainly not Connie.
He’s coming back. He’s going to get me this time.
Her father had gone down to the cafeteria for something to eat. She was stuck here, alone. Helpless. Shattered foot. Broken leg. She cast about for any kind
of weapon, something she could use to defend herself when Billy came through the door. There was nothing. Even the food tray was cheap plastic, and her utensils were gone, having been taken by an orderly.
Her phone buzzed. The NYPD had returned it to her in a plastic bag, grimy with fingerprint dust. A uniformed cop had handed it over with a shrug and mumbled, “Nothing on it,” without so much as a note of apology in his voice. She had left it on the nightstand, forgotten as she dozed in and out of a drug-aided sleep.
Now she tilted it out of the bag and wiped the screen with the edge of her pillowcase. It was a text from her dad.
Stuck in the caf. They’re going to bring me up with a police escort soon. Sit tight.
A police escort. She was a target.
She wondered if there was still a cop positioned outside her door. There had been when she’d woken up, but that was almost a day ago now. How long would they keep an eye on her?
Still, if they were sending Dad back with cops, that meant they must assume she was in danger. How quickly could they get here? What if Billy got here first?
The other phone—the room’s landline—rang. Connie stared at it as though it had grown tentacles.
It rang again.
Half expecting the Auto-Tuned voice of Samantha Dent as Ugly J, she answered and nearly sobbed with relief when she heard Jazz’s voice.
“How did you…” Connie paused and looked around, even though she was alone in her room. She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. “How did you know this number?”
“I just asked the hospital operator for you. Easy. I figured they’re already tracking your phone, but I went through the switchboard to the landline, so that might buy us some time.”
“Jazz, your father is here. He’s—”
“No, he’s not.”
Connie looked over at the TV. She had muted it when she realized Jazz was on the phone, and now the screen showed what she assumed to be the exterior of the hospital she was in, swarming with NYPD SWAT units in full tactical gear. Fat snowflakes had just begun to drift into frame; in a nice, warm hospital, it was easy to forget that outside, the January cold lurked with Billy Dent.
“The police have the hospital totally surrounded. They’re probably on their way to your room right now to protect you.”
“Well, that’s nice of them, but I’m not there anymore.”
“Where did they take you?”
“Let’s just say I checked myself out.”
Connie could have sworn she heard—through the phone—something like a garbage truck or a big city bus. “Are you outside? Did you leave the hospital?”
“Yes, and yes.”
As Jazz related his tale, beginning with choking Hughes into unconsciousness, Connie felt the room begin to rotate around her, as though her bed had been mounted on a lazy Susan spun by a bored child. It started slowly, but as Jazz’s story lengthened and turned more and more horrifying, the speed picked up until she had to shut her eyes against it. Even then, she still felt dizzy and nauseated with truth.
“Jazz, you have to turn yourself in.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening. Not until I’m done.”
“You’re not thinking straight.” Now that she was no longer petrified of Billy Dent slipping into her room with a grin and a knife, she could start to sort her thoughts into some kind of order, as opposed to heaping them into a single unruly pile of panic. Jazz’s refusal threatened to send the room into its own sick revolution again. For the sanity of them both, she needed to talk him down.
“You’ve been through hell,” she said. “Come back. You have to take care of yourself. You’ve been shot.”
“It’s not that bad. Well, okay, it’s actually pretty bad. But I’m getting around all right.”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere in Brooklyn.” He laughed at himself, and she could see the quirk of his lips, the dance in his eyes when he laughed like that. She loved him and hated him in that moment.
“I just wanted to call you because… because it’ll probably be a while before we talk again. I’m using Hughes’s phone, but I’ll have to ditch it soon. They can track it. Mine, too, now that I think of it. Battery’s almost dead, anyway.”
He sounded cold. She glanced at the TV again. The snowflakes weren’t any thicker in the air than before, but they weren’t thinning, either. It was literally freezing out there.
“What are you wearing?” she asked. “Are you warm enough?”
“There might a little charge left in there, though?” he said, ignoring her. “I don’t trust it. I’m going to have to ditch it. I can’t let them follow me.”
“Why? Where are you going?” But she knew before he answered.
“I’m going after Billy.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I need to do this.”
“Let the police—”
“The police can’t handle him. They’ve proven that. They had him in a maximum-security prison, and they couldn’t hold him.”
“You’re going to get yourself hurt—”
“Already did that. And it didn’t stop me. I’m going after him. He has my mom, Connie. I can’t let him hurt her.”
“Look, I get it. You’re in pain. A couple of different kinds. And you’ve had a bunch of shocks: the birth certificate. Finding out about your mom. But it’s over now. The cops know where he held me, and they’re tracking him, and they’ll get him and save your mom. It’s not all on you anymore. We can rest now. Let them do what they—”
“Connie! Listen to me!” It was the first time she could think of that he’d raised his voice to her. Once, months ago, when hunting the Impressionist, he’d tried to scare her with his creepy Billy skills. What she thought of—in her most private thoughts, not even for recording in her diary—as his “wannabe sociopath” persona. He’d thought he was doing it for her own good, of course. She hadn’t bought it then, because she was always on guard for the sudden reappearance of those walls he could erect at a moment’s notice. She’d spent their first year together knocking them down, then scaling the ones she couldn’t bash through. She knew them intimately. Knew when he was acting out in order to push people away so that he could keep from hurting them. And she also knew that much of the time, his shields powered on not to protect someone else, but to protect himself from himself.
But this wasn’t typical Jazz. This wasn’t a ploy calculated to frighten her or shut her up. He was legitimately out of control. His emotions had finally smashed through those walls from the inside.
“The police can’t stop Billy,” he ranted, his voice hot. “The FBI can’t stop Billy. Cops and feds across the country had twenty years to hunt him, Connie. Do you get that? They had two decades. That’s longer than we’ve been alive. He hunted prospects, and he raped and murdered his way around America. And G. William got lucky. He’d be the first to tell you that. He got lucky and Billy got stupid, and the two things happened at the same time, and that’s the only reason Billy ended up in Wammaket.”
“Jazz—”
“No, I’m not finished yet. Listen. The only person who can stop Billy is Billy. And I’m the closest thing we’ve got. He spent my whole life trying to turn me into him. Well, now I get to turn that back around on him. He wants me to be a new version of him? Fine.”
“Stop it.” Connie squeezed her eyes shut even tighter, tears swelling against her lids, pressing at the corners. With her free hand, she gripped the edge of the bed, her world tilting and whirling until she felt that she could be hurled from the bed by the sheer force of their argument.
But he was relentless. Like his father. He couldn’t stop.
“And let me tell you something about that birth certificate: I owe you and Howie for finding that. For showing it to me. Because it made some things really, really clear to me.”
What things? she wondered but did not ask. She knew he wouldn’t answer. “You’re right—you owe me. I’m calling in the debt, and
what I want in return is for you to go to the first cop you see and turn yourself in. Come back to me.”
“If I turn myself in, I’ll never see you again. Your dad made that abundantly clear. And besides, I assaulted two NYPD cops and made a slew of them look like idiots. I’ll be lucky to get out of a squad room alive.”
“The police aren’t going to hurt you.” The irony of an African American defending the cops was not lost on her; it cut her to her heart. But she had to believe that the police wouldn’t hurt him too badly when they caught up to him. And certainly a lot less if he came in voluntarily than if they had to hunt him down. “Just turn yourself in. Pick a public place, if you want. I can help coordinate something with the press—”
“It’s not happening, Connie. I’m the only one who can do what needs to be done.”
What needs to be done. Five simple words. Monosyllables. Nothing exceptional or special about them. But when Jazz strung them together, polychromatic spatters erupted behind Connie’s closed eyelids.
“You can’t kill him.” She hated herself for saying it. Days ago, before she’d ever met the man, she had fantasized Billy Dent’s death. She lusted for it even more deeply now. But not at the expense of Jazz. Not with the risk of him spending the rest of his life in jail. It was selfish and self-absorbed of her, but even for the betterment of the world, she wasn’t willing to sacrifice Jazz. Let Hughes put a bullet in Billy. Let Jan break free and rip his throat out with her bare hands. It was the least she could do to make up for the years of jealous freedom she’d enjoyed while Jazz lived under the thumb and tutelage of a lunatic.
Anyone. Anyone but her Jazz.
“He won’t stop,” Jazz said. “He’ll never stop. Unless he is stopped.”
She had only one more card to play. It wasn’t an ace or a king—it was the meanest, most unpredictable card in the deck. She was dead serious as she threw down her trump card, the joker:
“I’m trying to understand, Jazz. I really am. I’m trying to get past it. But I need you. I need you in my life.”