by Barry Lyga
“Is this what you found in, you know, in the grave?” Howie turned the book over in his hands. It was dense with some unknowable mass.
“Yes. It’s Billy’s. I need you to hide it, and if I end up dead, give it to G. William.”
Howie blinked rapidly at the onslaught of tears that assaulted him. Damn sneak attack. Sniffling, he said, “Don’t talk like that. You aren’t—”
“This is it, Howie. I may not come back. If I do, I’ll need that book. If not, G. William can use it to pick up where I left off.”
Wiping at his eyes, Howie set his mouth in a firm line. “You’re being an idiot. You should take this stuff to G. William and let him handle it.”
“It’s my job. I have to be the one.”
“Why?” Howie hated the note of whining that crept into his voice but could do nothing to excise it. “Why?”
“Because I could have killed Billy. When I was a kid. Or at least turned him in. I didn’t. I was afraid.”
“You were a kid!” Howie yelled and damn near bashed Jazz over the head with his father’s Book of Evil and Crazy. “Stop beating yourself up over this! Go to the cops!”
Jazz shook his head. “I don’t expect you to understand. Billy’s crazy, and so is Sam. So was my grandmother. And from what I’ve heard, so was my grandfather. It’s genetic, Howie. It’s in my blood, inherited, just like you inherited your hemophilia.”
“So what? What does that have to do with…” Suddenly it dawned on him. “You want to die,” Howie whispered. “You don’t plan on coming back. You think you deserve it.”
Jazz folded his arms over his chest and looked away. “I’m just doing what has to be done. And I’m asking you for these two last favors. And that’s it.”
“There isn’t enough space on your body for the tattoos, man.”
Jazz shook his head. “We’re not trading here. This isn’t I do something for you, you do something for me. This is hard-core friendship. Varsity level. This is me asking you to do something for me without getting anything in return. This is friendship, Howie.”
More tears. Howie swabbed them away with the heel of his hand. “That’s a low blow. You’ve manipulated me before, but—”
“I’m not manipulating. I think for the first time, I really understand what friendship is. And I have you to thank for that.” He rested his hands, gently, on Howie’s shoulders, gazing up into his eyes. “You’ve been the best, most normal thing in my life for the longest time. Before Connie, there was you. And I can never repay you for that. And I can never repay you for what you’re doing for me now. You just have to ask yourself, Howie: Do you need to be repaid or not?”
Every piece of him cried out to say yes, to demand that in return for what he had done and would do, Jazz would give up now and live.
But.
He knew.
He knew what he didn’t know. Which was this: what it was like to grow up with Billy Dent as a father. What it was like to live with that burden hanging over your head, dangling like that sword of that Greek dude they learned about in school and promptly forgot about. What it meant to discover a dead mother still alive but now in the clutches of a lunatic with every reason to kill her an inch at a time.
He couldn’t pretend to understand any of that. So his job as best friend was to trust his best friend. Trust that Jazz knew what he was doing. And would somehow come out of this alive and whole.
“If you die,” Howie said, “I’m going to piss on your grave twice a year. On the solstices.”
For the first time in a long time, Jazz favored Howie with a grin. He chucked Howie along the jaw, careful not to do it too hard. “Attaboy,” he said.
Howie drove off to the next stop on the Jazz Dent World Tour of Crazy.
In truth, he wanted to be anywhere in the world but Gramma Dent’s house. It had always been a creepy, off-putting place. The old lady smell of it. The reality show–level hoarding that rendered certain rooms unusable. And of course, Jazz’s grandmother’s tendency to erupt at any moment into a fusillade of racist epithets, paranoid delusions, fragmented memories of the past, or some combination of the three. Over the years, he’d gone through different phases during his visits, alternating between finding the house terrifying, hilarious, disturbing, and flat-out weird.
The last time he’d been there, Sammy J had ripped half the skin off his fingers and Gramma had gotten one banana peel closer to the grave. He was just plain damn sick of the place now.
But Jazz insisted and Howie obeyed. He had called the sheriff’s office already and blatantly lied, telling a deputy that he’d left his phone charger at the Dent house the night of “the incident” and needed to get it back. The place was technically a crime scene, but the cops were done with it. No reason not to let him in.
They were cagey, though. They insisted he have an escort.
A Lobo’s Nod Sheriff’s Department car waited for him in the driveway. A deputy he didn’t know got out.
“Gersten?” the deputy said. “I’m supposed to be your escort.”
“For serious?” Howie climbed out of his car. “An escort? I kinda wanted one with big knockers.”
The deputy groaned and gestured Howie to the house.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Howie went on. “I mean, if you guys are footing the bill, I would have taken an escort with little tiny ones, too, but I’m just expressing a preference, you feel me?” He kept up a constant stream of chatter as he mounted the porch steps and crossed the threshold, hoping that his babble would keep the cop from noticing how nervous he was. Going back into the house… not sure what he would find…
Just inside the door, the floor was strewn with some junk left behind by the EMTs—small pieces of cardboard, torn plastic wrappings, a slim needle cover. There was a brownish stain on the floor that Howie realized had to be his own blood. And the shotgun—the Plugged-Barrel Special Howie had threatened Sam with—lay nearby. His head spun at the sight, and he had to close his eyes for a moment.
“Get a move on,” the deputy snapped. “We don’t have all day.”
Jazz wanted him to check the house for anything left behind by Samantha. Given that Gramma and Howie had both been hauled out on stretchers under mysterious circumstances, the police would have already gone through the house, but—as Jazz put it—They’d be looking for obvious things. Signs of criminal activity. You were there every day. You’ll see what they didn’t.
Howie scoured the downstairs—kitchen, living room, dining room—then went upstairs to the bedrooms. The deputy’s eyes widened when he saw Jazz’s Wall of Billyness, the photos of Billy’s victims painstakingly tacked up in chronological order. This dude is running straight to TMZ and cashing a big ol’ check, Howie thought sourly. SON OF SERIAL KILLER OBSESSED WITH DAD’S VICTIMS! The headlines write themselves.
After checking the entire house, Howie was as annoyed with himself as the deputy was. He’d looked everywhere and found nothing. Even in Jazz’s room, where Sam had slept while staying in the Nod, he’d found not so much as a forgotten pair of panties. Stop thinking about that, Howie!
With a weak chuckle and shrug of his shoulders—“I guess I lost it somewhere else”—Howie allowed himself to be led back outside and escorted to his car. Trying not to let his annoyance and frustration show, he backed out to the road that made a T at the end of Gramma’s long, winding dirt driveway and carefully cranked the wheel to turn the car perpendicular. His first time coming here in the car, he’d nearly killed the mailbox on his way out.
Wait.
Wait.
The mailbox?
He hit the brake. In his rearview, Gramma’s mailbox leaned halfway out into the road, as it always had. It was dented, appropriately enough, and mounted on a hefty spike of oak. Barely discernible on its sun-faded, pitted exterior were old painted orchids and letters in black reading MR. & MRS. J. DENT. Howie shivered at the memory of the last time he’d seen Jonathan’s name. On his gravestone.
Jonathan Dent. Samm
y J. Ugly J. What if—
No. Jazz had dug up his grandfather. This was strictly the Billy and Sammy show.
He guided the car back a little ways, coming parallel to the mailbox. Confident that the cop couldn’t see him all the way down the driveway, he reached through the window, opened the box, and proceeded to violate federal law by stealing Gramma’s and Jazz’s mail. Oh, well. Now he and Jazz had even more in common. Maybe they could share a cell at the federal pen together. Roomies at last!
The mail safely inside the car, he got the hell out of there before the cop could meander down the driveway and catch him. Once back on the main drag through the Nod, he pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot and riffled through the mail.
Bill. Bill. Catalog. Bill. Junk. Junk.
At the very bottom of the pile was a single plain white business envelope without a stamp or a return address. It said, simply, JAZZ.
CHAPTER 43
With two days’ worth of antibiotics in his system, Jazz’s stomach was complaining regularly, but his leg had finally started to settle down, like a drunk guy in a bar slowly realizing the bouncer was much bigger. Hat’s bullet would be with him forever, so it was about time they made their peace with each other. If the leg held out long enough for him to settle things with Billy and Sam, that was all he cared about. Once they were dealt with, the damn thing could wither and die and fall off for all it mattered to him.
He knew the Nod better than most. As a child, he’d explored the town on his own, encouraged by Billy to find “crawly spots,” Billy’s term for hidden nooks and niches where he could conceal either himself or evidence. To a young boy like Jazz, it had been a parentally sanctioned adventure, and he’d roamed the Nod with a freedom other kids would have envied, had they not been aware of the price of that freedom.
As a result, he knew the town’s blind spots, its back alleys, its off-grid pathways. Hughes’s overcoat was warm enough as long as he kept moving.
He had no intention of stopping. Not until he arrived at the place Billy had indicated.
Doug Weathers’s apartment.
Leave it to Billy to kill a man rather than just send Howie a text with Weathers’s address. One more body on the pile. One more name on Billy’s roster of death. One more reason for Billy to die.
And damn Billy, anyway, for putting Jazz in the position of avenging the death of a useless pissant like Doug Weathers.
Jazz had recognized Weathers’s voice, even through the pain, terror, and mangling of his mouth. That voice had haunted him for years, pestering him with demands for interviews, blaring from TV screens as he bloviated about Billy with the intensity summoned only by the abjectly clueless or the truly desperate.
Both applied in Weathers’s case.
A couple of years back, Weathers had been perversely persistent in his attempts to get Gramma to “go on the record” so that “the world knows you’re not to blame for your son.” He cared nothing for her reputation, of course—he just wanted to grill an old woman with Alzheimer’s until he could get her to blurt out something crazy or incriminating. Jazz could barely tolerate Weathers attacking him; he refused to countenance the bastard badgering his grandmother. So he’d gone to the courthouse to swear out a restraining order, and when the time had come to go to court, he’d seen a copy of the subpoena served on Weathers. Complete with the man’s home address.
The apartment building Weathers lived in was much nicer than he deserved. Then again, you didn’t have to make fat bank to live decently in the Nod. Good thing, too—Weathers hadn’t done much since Billy had gone to prison and the desire to put his ugly mug on TV had dried up.
People are real, Jazz reminded himself. People matter. Even Doug Weathers.
I suppose.
It seemed a monumental injustice of almost biblical proportions that Jazz had to let himself give a damn about Weathers. Surely even normal people hated the guy.
Jazz had waited until almost nightfall—late afternoon at this time of year, really—before setting out, trusting the cold and the darkness to be his shield against recognition. Breaking into Weathers’s apartment would be as easy as a baby sticking its thumb in its mouth. He swung around the back of the building. A locked steel door prevented him from getting inside for the roughly ten seconds it took for him to unveil Howie’s pickax from under Hughes’s coat and knock the doorknob off. Once the inner workings of the lock were exposed, it took him another few seconds to unlock the door.
Within, he found himself in a maintenance room or a janitor’s closet of some kind. Tired of carrying the pickax all the way from the Hideout, he left it. It was too heavy to keep carrying, especially with the stairs he was about to climb. Weathers was on the sixth floor. The top. Of course. He would have to be at the top.
His leg surprised him, making the six flights with only a minimum of stiffness and complaint.
Let’s hear it for painkillers! And antibiotics! But especially painkillers.
The hallway on Weathers’s floor looked empty. Jazz didn’t wait around to be sure—he walked swiftly out of the stairwell and strode right up to Weathers’s door. He didn’t bother knocking—if Billy was in there, there was no point giving him fair warning. Instead, he jimmied the door open with the stiff plastic of Mark Culpepper’s Visa card, then stepped inside and immediately closed the door behind him.
Weathers’s apartment was dark and cramped. Jazz risked turning on the light, half expecting Billy to leap out at him.
No.
Finding the remains of Doug Weathers spread out around the apartment also wouldn’t have surprised him, and he was almost disappointed to find that the place was grungy in that special bachelor-chic way, but otherwise clean.
After being as tortured and carved (and hacked, and bashed, and crushed) as he’d sounded on the audio file, Doug Weathers would have lost enormous amounts of blood, as well as voided both bladder and intestine. The apartment should have stunk of bodily fluids and defecation. That it didn’t told Jazz what he’d suspected all along—Weathers had been killed elsewhere.
Of course. Billy never makes it easy. He likes leaving clues. Likes leading me around on a leash.
The idea that this might just be another game floated through his mind. Maybe Billy was long gone from the Nod, a thousand miles away, laughing at Jazz’s stupidity with Aunt Sam, while Mom strained against a gag to beg for her life.
But he didn’t think that was the case. To have dealt with Weathers meant that Billy had to have been in the Nod recently, and given the timeline of his activities in New York, recently had to mean within the past day or so. Even if he’d fled Lobo’s Nod, Billy couldn’t have gotten far. He wouldn’t risk a train or a plane or even a bus. He would have to drive, alternating with Sam, sticking to back roads.
They would still be nearby.
There were two doors, one wide open, one ajar. The open one led to a bathroom, which meant the other had to be a bedroom. Jazz would check them later. For now, though, he spied a laptop on a desk across from the sofa, its lid up. If Weathers wasn’t here, he had gone somewhere else, either voluntarily or not. If voluntarily, maybe he’d been goaded along by an e-mail. It was worth a try.
Jazz ran his fingers along the track pad, and the laptop lit up. A Web page came into view, reloading.
A map. A map of the Nod, with a pin somewhere right outside town. Blue lines for driving directions from Weathers’s apartment.
Here we go again. More clues. More rolls of the dice.
The weight of it plunged down on him, and he became so tired in that moment that he craved nothing more than to slump onto Weathers’s sofa, curl up into a ball, and sleep for a year. Maybe when he woke up, it would all be over: Billy dead, Sam dead, Mom safe.… Yeah, that all sounded about right.
Instead of going to the sofa, though, he sighed and rested his eyes while pinching the bridge of his nose. And that was when it happened. When he heard it.
He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to hear it or not. He c
lamped his eyes even more tightly shut, setting off spirals and whorls of color behind his eyelids.
How had he gotten here? How had he made it to Weathers’s apartment? It was as if he’d been on autopilot the whole time, only now totally aware of where he was.
Shaken back into reality by the footstep. Behind him.
Stupid! Stupid! Walked right into it!
Should have checked the bedroom first.
And then Billy said, “Hello, son. Welcome back.”
Part Four
The Crow King
CHAPTER 44
Jazz opened his eyes but otherwise did not move, maintaining his frozen position at the desk. Maybe to Billy it looked like he was stunned into inaction.
In truth, he was scanning the desk for weapons, wishing he hadn’t left the pickax downstairs. He had the Taser tucked away in the right-hand slash pocket of Hughes’s overcoat, but he couldn’t be sure Billy would give him the opportunity to go for it.
“Hello, Billy,” he said. The desktop was cluttered, sloppy like Weathers himself, but Jazz saw nothing useful. He wished people still used letter openers. Nice and sharp, they were.
“You gonna turn around and say hi to Dear Old Dad?”
Shrugging, Jazz turned, his left leg giving a bit as he did so. He caught a slight wince from Billy, as though in sympathy. Not a chance. Billy felt sympathy for no one.
“Well, lookee here.” Billy grinned. He held—of all things—an iPad. He balanced it on the back of Weathers’s sofa, which was interposed between them. Billy looked, as always, healthy and vibrant. Killing suited him. He planted his hands on his hips. “Father and son, together again. And this time, no one in handcuffs and no one lyin’ on the floor, bleeding. By the by, how’s that leg? Dear Old Dad did pretty well, didn’t he?”
Jazz’s leg trembled, and he staggered a tiny bit. “The doctors said a real butcher must have worked on it before them.”
If he was offended, Billy didn’t show it. He chuckled. “That you I feel up in my brain, trying to rummage around inside my head, rearrange the furniture? I don’t think that’ll work. I taught you everything you know, but not everything I know.”