by Barry Lyga
When a voice answered, he reported—in his highest falsetto—that a “bad man” in the bathroom had “touched me where Mommy says no one is supposed to touch me.” Before the voice could ask any questions, he dropped the receiver and walked calmly away.
At the first pay phone he saw, he did it again, this time in a slightly different tone of voice, and this time reporting a man shooting up heroin in a stall.
He didn’t want to generate too suspicious a level of criminal bathroom activity, but he wanted some general disarray. With his brochures and the map of Port Authority on Culpepper’s cell, he made his way to the ticket kiosk, detouring twice for more calls. The cops on the floor were starting to move a bit differently. Maybe they suspected something. More likely, they were adjusting their patrols as some of them went to inspect the reported men’s rooms. Either way, they were slightly off now, and Jazz would take every little bit of help he could get.
Between Hughes’s wallet and Culpepper’s, he had only thirty bucks left. Cash was precious; he needed to hoard it now. He used Hughes’s credit card at the kiosk, buying four different bus tickets to four different destinations. Three of them went into the trash. If the cops had a trace on Hughes’s cards, they wouldn’t learn anything at all, other than that he was at Port Authority.
And he wasn’t going to be there for very long. His remaining ticket was for a bus to Albany, leaving in five minutes. Jazz mingled with the last few people to board and found a seat as close to the back as possible. Now he tugged his ball cap low over his face, turned up the collar of Hughes’s overcoat, and crossed his arms over his chest, pretending to sleep.
But sleep—though craved—was the last thing on his mind.
Stay strong, Mom. Stay alive. I’m coming.
CHAPTER 22
They were searching Brooklyn and paying extra-special attention to the tunnels and bridges, but it didn’t matter. Billy had a secret weapon, and between that and his new look (ditched the damn glasses, applied a theater-quality beard and a deliberately bad hairpiece), he cruised right on through a checkpoint in his rented car. Smiled straight at an NYPD officer in her winter weather gear. Said, “God bless, Officer!” in a tone he knew from previous experience to be calming and eminently forgettable.
Same way he’d said “You’re welcome” back in Wichita when that tit-heavy FBI agent had walked out the door he held for her at the 7-Eleven. She hadn’t even said “Thank you,” the self-involved bitch. If she had—if she had taken a moment to look up at the man holding the door for her, a courteous man, a gentleman—then maybe that liberated, enlightened, feminist, woman-power-believing lady cop might have recognized the man—the man—she was hunting, standing right there.
But she hadn’t, so she hadn’t. And Billy had made a point of saying “You’re welcome.” Remind her of her manners, not that it helped.
And now she was dead. Dead by Hat’s hand, and that was fine by Billy. Let the trash take out the trash. It was fitting. Almost poetic.
Bastard cops thought they could catch Billy. That was nothing new. The bastard cops always thought they could catch ol’ Billy.
Hadn’t done yet. Except for that fat prick in the Nod. G. William Tanner. Good ol’ boy done good. But that weren’t good police work or any kind of deduction. No, the sheriff had just gotten lucky was all. And sure, Billy had helped him along. Killing those two Nod girls had been foolish. Foolish and wrongheaded and just plain dumb. Billy knew that. He’d known it all along, and yet he’d been unable to help himself.
He had needed one.
When the urges came and the fantasies and the trophies of past kills weren’t enough, he needed one, and Billy was not the kind of man to deny himself. He hadn’t lived and studied and trained at his craft for so many years—he hadn’t ascended to the Crows—all so that he could sit at home with a beer and ESPN like a prospect, wishing he could do things to the cute little blond up the street.
No, sir. Not Billy Dent.
He was not a man of whims, Billy Dent. He was a man of passions. A man of convictions. He knew what he believed, and he knew what he deserved. When there were things to be done to the cute little blond up the street, Billy Dent damn well went and did them.
Because no one else would, and Billy couldn’t live in that world.
There were some of his persuasion who felt guilt at their urges, their actions. Those sad sons of bitches ended up in jail for life, each and every time. Or dead by their own hands.
Billy knew that he was the most important man in the world. That his needs were, therefore, the most important in the world.
All men were like Billy, he mused. Well, except possibly the faggots. Billy had no hate in his heart for men who lusted for other men—they were as nature made them, just as Billy was as nature made him. Still, they were faggots, and it was ridiculous to call them anything else.
“Everything has a proper name,” Billy said aloud.
Janice said nothing. He expected such.
All men had the urges. They all wanted to possess, to dominate. They were triggered by a stolen glimpse of cleavage, by a daring hint of thigh. They dreamed and they wallowed in fantasy, but they never acted. They pilfered moments of pornography when their wives weren’t looking, masturbated relentlessly over their longings, then felt shame and relief in equal measure.
Only men who were real, men who mattered, men who were important—men like Billy—could rise above the base mud of morality and take charge, assume the mantle. Capture the prospects and do as nature intended.
Men like Billy were whole. Living in a world of sad, unfulfilled fractions.
Billy drove along through the night. His wife was with him again, after so many years. As was appropriate. Man and wife should be together, not separated by distance and deceptions.
All was good.
Except for one thing.
It was time, Billy knew, for the reckoning. Time to tie up loose ends. Jasper was almost a man. Long past time to stop treating him like a boy.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
That was from the Good Book. Billy didn’t quite believe in God—not quite—but the Bible was surely a useful source of wisdom. Good writing was good writing, no matter what you believed in, prayed to, or jerked off over.
Yes. It was time for Jasper to put away childish things. Jasper would take the next step toward becoming a Crow.
Or suffer the consequences.
CHAPTER 23
And now they had a driver.
Hughes figured he’d had less than four hours of sleep over the last forty-eight, but he didn’t care. He’d gone longer when on a case, when on a hunt, and this was the biggest, best hunt of his career. A few more Red Bulls and a cup of the terrible swill the Seven-Six dared call coffee and he was right as rain, his mind buzzing along like nothing had gone wrong.
The noose was draped over Jasper Dent’s neck. Soon, he could tighten it.
He was alone, watching through the glass as Detective Miller interrogated the hack, who’d come forward after seeing the news. The Dent kid had flagged him on the street, or so the hack—one Khosrow Abbasi—claimed. Hughes didn’t buy it. Dent wasn’t familiar with the city. He wouldn’t have known to flag down Abbasi’s unmarked black Lincoln any more than he’d’ve known to switch to the uptown 6 at Broadway-Lafayette to get to Grand Central. So Abbasi probably saw the kid on a street corner and pulled over, thinking he could grab a quick fare. Happened all the time. Abbasi was vigorously protesting that he’d not done anything wrong, probably more concerned about his fate in front of the Taxi & Limousine Commission than by the fact that he’d shuttled a wanted fugitive over the bridge into Manhattan.
Hughes tapped twice on the window, lightly—the precinct’s code for “hurry the hell up.” Time was wasting. They needed whatever information Abbasi had, and they needed it now.
New York City wasn’t a spe
edboat; it was a tanker. It couldn’t turn on a dime. It took time—hours—to execute a lockdown, to shut down certain routes, to do it right. And along the way, there were any number of opportunities for a bad guy to slip through the sieve. Deep down, Hughes knew that it should be this way; you couldn’t just shut down a city of eight million people on a whim—the ensuing chaos would be catastrophic. But a part of him wished it were possible. That there could be a button somewhere he could press that would close the bridges and tunnels and stop the subways and kill the buses and ground the planes out at JFK and LaGuardia all in the same instant.
Keep dreaming.
A brief tableau flashed before Hughes’s eyes: Morales, dead on the floor of the storage unit. Then her body loaded onto a stretcher by the medical examiner’s team, the way her head had lolled, one arm trailing off the stretcher as though she were drifting on an inflatable pool raft on a warm summer day…
Damn. He pinched the bridge of his nose. That wasn’t like him. Victims didn’t haunt him like that. They were cases, not ghosts. All his years as a homicide cop, and he’d had scanty nightmares. Partly because he was good at seeing the murder as a puzzle to be solved. But also, mostly, because he was good at what he did. He cleared cases. Period. That absolved him of a lot of sleepless nights.
But usually you have a grasp on it. And usually you don’t know the victim.
There was a light tap at the door, and then a uniform stepped in.
“Captain Montgomery wanted me to let you know: We have that trace on your phone up and running. And we got a hit on one of your credit cards. Four tickets bought at an automated kiosk at Port Authority.”
The need for sleep receded into the furthest recesses of Hughes’s mind. “Tickets where?”
The uniform handed him a printout. “And the cell trace indicates he’s northbound on 495. From the rate of movement, it looks like he hitched a ride.”
Hughes pondered the printout. “Or he hopped a bus to Albany.”
“We shut down all the buses.”
“Yeah, but he could have gotten out before then. He’s been one step ahead the whole time.” Hughes massaged his temples. The headache that had flared at the sight of Billy Dent’s note near Hat’s body had never really gone away—it just ebbed and flowed with the levels of caffeine in his system. “Get me a cup of coffee. And tell Captain Montgomery to have all northbound buses stopped and searched. I’ll call the state police myself to coordinate.”
The uniform about-faced and headed out. Hughes closed his eyes and enjoyed the quiet of the observation room for a single, lingering moment.
And then his face split with a wide, satisfied grin.
Gotcha.
Part Three
Killers Hunt Me
CHAPTER 24
Jazz opened his eyes, but the dream followed him into wakefulness.
Touch me
says the voice
like that
it goes on
And he does.
His fingers glide over warm, supple flesh.
Touch me like that
And his legs, the friction of them—
And so warm
So warm
like that
The woman was in shadows and the hands on her were his own, his own small, childish hands, which had yet to learn how to dismember, how to hack, how to strangle. Innocent hands, they should have been. Young, soft, small hands roaming the endless fields of her. “Her,” the mystery she of his dreams for months now, the woman he now realized—in a lightning-fast, thunder-loud burst of epiphany—could be no one but his father’s partner in crime, Billy Dent’s hidden, secret weapon: Samantha Dent.
Aunt Sam. My own aunt. I—
Oh, God.
He lurched upward in his seat, gagging.
“Not in the truck!” Marta yelled. “Roll down the window!”
Jazz fumbled to his right for the window controls. A blast of cold air hit him as the glass slid down, the shock of it forestalling the moment of regurgitation. Straining against the seat belt, he leaned his head out the window and let go, unselfconsciously vomiting in an impressive stream that wicked back along the side of the truck, spattering the paint job and flicking away into the still dark.
When he was done, he struggled back inside and lay back against the worn seat, gasping for breath.
“You okay?” Marta asked. “Water at your feet.”
Jazz’s mind churned like his now-empty gut. Marta’s voice was familiar, and the smells around him reminded him of something, but he was still thrashing against the dream, his stomach-sick body fighting itself.
Sure enough, there was a half-full bottle of water at his feet. Jazz managed to pluck it up and rinsed his mouth, spitting the befouled water out the window.
He remembered. Marta. The truck driver.
He knew the NYPD could track him via cell phone GPS, so he’d taken a calculated risk. Billy always said, Cop toys are just like a little baby’s toys: They love ’em so much that they just have to play with them, even when it’s not good for them.
The cops (he managed to stop himself from thinking of them as “the bastard cops,” but only just) wouldn’t be able to help themselves—they knew he had Hughes’s phone, so they would track him with it. So he’d left it on the bus to Albany, wedged between the seat and the wall, and then gotten off at the first stop, an unscheduled “convenience break” at a New Jersey rest station. The bus driver had loitered near the bus, smoking and guzzling coffee, while most of Jazz’s fellow passengers had made for the vending machines.
Jazz, though, had immediately headed for the gas pumps, where massive semitrucks hissed and belched like dragons lined up at a buffet. Concealed in the shadows, he’d watched each truck. He knew he was in bad shape. His leg pulsated like an alien egg sac in a horror movie. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He needed to be on the road and needed to be safe.
So once again, men were out. He needed a woman trucker, and he’d been pleasantly surprised that it didn’t take long for him to find one.
Marta’s rig had blue flames emblazoned on the hood, with a slit-eyed green girl dancing among them, naked, her naughty bits strategically concealed by licks of flame. The words TRUCK IT UP, spelled out in cursive, wafted above her. The joke—if there was one—was lost on Jazz. The trucker herself was slighter than he’d anticipated, his prejudice predicting a mannish, bulky half woman. Marta didn’t resemble the fetching alien creature prancing on her rig’s hood, but she also was not some buzz-cut caricature from a homophobe’s nightmares.
He’d approached her tentatively when she left the restroom and had barely begun the rollout of his sad, sad cover story—repeated sexual molestation by stepdad, mom a useless junkie and part-time whore—when she’d shaken her head and welcomed him into the passenger seat. “Details make me depressed. Just don’t get carsick, okay?”
Now, as Jazz finished rinsing, she glanced over at him. “You okay?” she asked again.
“I think so.”
“You’re hosing that shit off my rig at the next stop,” she said, her tone not unkind.
“Of course.”
The sun peeked above the hills and treetops. The NYPD thought he was headed north, following the reliable signal of Hughes’s GPS. But Jazz—thanks to Marta—was going south. South and west. Marta’s route wouldn’t get him exactly where he needed to go, but she would get him close enough. How would he make it the rest of the way?
He’d improvise. It had worked so far.
He knew where he was going, though. That much was critical.
He’d figured it out in the hour he’d spent on the bus.
Where would Billy go, once leaving New York? His father had the whole world open to him.
I’ll be happy to explain it to you when the time comes. When we ain’t in such… constrained circumstances.
That’s what Billy had said, before leaving unit 83F. So he wanted to see Jazz again. To explain. That meant he would leave c
lues. A map, written in a language only Jazz could understand.
In the meantime, think about Caligula. Think about Gilles de Rais.
Caligula and Gilles de Rais. Both murderers from ancient times.
You know more than you think.
Flattering, but useless. The Caligula/de Rais bit made Jazz think Billy referred to the beginning of something. You’ve got the beginnings of it, boy. That confirmed it. Told you as much back at Wammaket. Told you where it started. The genesis. “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord.”
And Jazz had figured it out. When the bus had stopped soon thereafter, he’d left Hughes’s phone and sought out a truck heading south.
South.
Home.
And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord. Genesis, chapter 4.
And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, Jazz recalled, and dwelt in the land of Nod.
The land of Nod.
Billy was returning to Lobo’s Nod.
CHAPTER 25
Connie opened her eyes to the light of a new day, the sun streaming in through the open hospital room window blinds. She couldn’t greet the day with hope or even a smile, though. She’d told her father to wake her if there was news of or from Jazz during the night, so the fact that she’d actually slept eight hours meant that Jazz was still missing.
Maybe that’s a good thing, she thought. Maybe it means he’s safe.
But even Connie’s natural optimism couldn’t crumble the ramparts of fear that had risen up around Jazz. Jazz was wounded and on the run, with every cop in New York looking for him. If there was no news, he was probably—
No. No.
Dad was standing over by the door to her room, huddled in the corner, murmuring into his cell phone. Trying not to wake her. Connie smiled, and the smile hurt, reminding her of the long road to recovery before her.
“Dad?”