Текст книги "Game"

Автор книги: Barry Lyga

Соавторы: Barry Lyga
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 40

For some period of time Jazz couldn’t determine, the two of them sat in the car as it idled along the sidewalk. Jazz had gone numb, and he didn’t know why.

Ever consider that? Think maybe you’re in over your head?

You’re the one in over your head, Dear Old Dad. You’re the one I’m closing in on.

But he knew it wasn’t true. Not even remotely. He hadn’t really been close to catching Billy just now. The disposable cell phone he’d swiped from Belsamo’s was disposable for a reason: so that it could be tossed and never traced. Billy would have one just like it, and the instant he hung up on Jazz, he’d probably tossed it into the… the…

“What’s the name of that river again?” he asked Hughes, his voice somewhat subdued.

“Which river?” Hughes asked.

“The one we drove over. To get to Manhattan.”

“The East River.”

Jazz nodded. He could easily imagine Billy’s disposable cell phone sinking into the East River, bound for the Atlantic Ocean and its endless anonymity.

“You kept him on the phone as long as you could,” Hughes said, soothing, proving that if the cop thing didn’t pan out, he could always fall back on being a phony psychic. “We probably couldn’t have traced the call. Maybe gotten a ping off a cell tower, but Billy’s smart—he would have been long gone by the time we—”

“He said for me to hold on to this phone,” Jazz said. “Said we’d talk again.”

Hughes pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay, then. We’ll take it to the TARU kids. They can clone it so that the next time he calls, you can talk to him and they can be tracking him at the same time. We’ll get him, Jasper. He’s playing with the big boys now. The NYPD doesn’t mess around.”

Jazz snorted laughter, then stopped himself immediately. He didn’t mean to sound disrespectful, but this was Billy they were talking about. Billy didn’t mess around, either. Billy had gotten the local and state police forces of sixteen separate states, to say nothing of the FBI itself, all tangled up in knots. A career that spanned more than two decades. The NYPD could not “mess around” all it wanted.

This was Billy Dent.

The snort hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“We have every terrorist in the world gunning for this city ever since Nine-Eleven,” Hughes said coldly. “You want to know how many of them have succeeded? I’ll give you a hint: It starts with z and ends with a fucking zero, that’s how many. Your dad is just another terrorist with a string of hits behind him and an NYPD badge ready to take him out in front of him. Bank on it, Jasper. Bank on it.”

For a moment, Jazz believed him. It was quite possibly the best moment of his life.

And then reality set in.

Billy was reality and reality was Billy, the two intertwined into an interlocked set of chains that wrapped around Jazz and sent out steely tendrils to anyone and anything close to him.

“So how’d he get the phone to you?” Hughes asked. “And what are you doing over here all by yourself? Lucky no one recognized you.”

Jazz gulped. He had no choice—he had to tell Hughes the truth.

As he told Hughes everything—everything—the detective’s eyes grew wider, his expression more and more incredulous. Every time Jazz thought he’d told Hughes the worst possible thing about the evening, he would get to the next part of the story—So then I went through his mail, oh, and here’s a photo of the envelope—and the cop’s face would assume an even more tortured aspect.

“Oh, sweet Christ,” Hughes said, visibly ill. “I can’t even tell you how many laws you broke.”

“I think nine,” Jazz said helpfully, hoping to get Hughes to crack a grin.

No such luck. “More like a dozen. To start. What possessed you to—No, no, never mind. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me….”

“Now we have an alias for him. C. D. Williams. We have confirmation that he’s tied to Billy.”

“We have jack. You broke—”

“I’m not a cop,” Jazz pointed out. “You can use everything I found in there. There’s no prosecutorial conflict. No violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. Go ahead and arrest me for breaking and entering and whatever else I did when I went in there. I poked at his mail and took a burner phone. Probably not even fifty bucks’ worth. I’ll plead guilty. It’s my first offense—I bet I walk or get probation. In the meantime, you can use the evidence against Belsamo.”

“Are you some kind of special idiot they grow down South?” Hughes erupted. “Do they fry you up with grits and whatever the hell else they deep-fry down there? No judge worth his robe is gonna let Billy Dent’s kid walk on a first offense, no matter what that offense is. No prosecutor who likes his job—and believe me, Jasper, they love their jobs—would let you plead out to anything but the top count on the indictment. You will go to jail. That’s a guarantee.”

Jazz began to protest, but Hughes cut him off with a threatening gesture. “Beyond that,” the detective went on, “is the fact that you’ve been working with the NYPD and the task force in an official capacity. Approved by Montgomery and everything. Any defense attorney in the world, even the most overworked public defender in the friggin’ Bronx, could convince the deafest, dumbest judge in the city that you needed a search warrant to go into that apartment. None of this evidence is admissible. It’s useless. It’s worse than useless because it’s also going to get you arrested and thrown in jail, where you won’t be able to help us nail this guy and where you’ll get raped and shived to death five minutes after you hit gen-pop.”

“They wouldn’t put me in with the general population,” Jazz said with some confidence.

Hughes glared at him wearily. “Then you get stuck in solitary like your old man. That sound good to you?”

Jazz forced a grin. “Well, he broke out….”

Hughes slammed the steering wheel with his fist. “Don’t joke about that! People died when your dad got out!”

“I know that!” Jazz screamed back at him, and even though he had sworn to himself that he would never break in front of anyone, that he would never show weakness, he couldn’t help himself. It was as though he’d been lugging a net full of boulders for weeks in stoic silence and could bear it—and them—no longer. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know everything that weighs on my conscience? Those guards are dead because of me! And Helen Myerson and Ginny Davis and Irene Heller are dead because I didn’t figure out who the Impressionist was quickly enough. And all the people Billy killed from the time I was around ten—when I could have reported him or killed him myself—those forty-seven people are dead because of me. And Melissa Hoover,” he remembered. “You can add her to my tally, too, Hughes! And let’s put my mom on the list, too, because I should have been able to save her. So you add that up. Go ahead. It’s more than fifty people on my list. I’m like Speck and Bundy and Dahmer combined. I’m one of the greatest murderers in U.S. history!” He kicked at the dashboard in frustration, in rage, leaving a broad scuff.

You’re a killer. You just ain’t killed no one yet.

Billy was right. He was right all along. Billy was always right.

I am Ugly J.

“You gonna cry now?” Hughes asked, somewhat softly.

Was Hughes poking at him again? Trying to prod a reaction out of him? Or was he actually concerned?

Didn’t matter. Jazz struggled to regain control of his emotions, grappling with them like a greased wrestler until he’d subdued them. Like always.

“That wasn’t for show,” he said evenly, “but I could. Do you want me to?”

Hughes sighed and stared out through the windshield. “No. I guess not.” He started the engine. “Damn it, Jasper. Look at this spot you’ve put me in.”

“You risked things to bring me here. This is—”

“This is different.” Hughes pulled away from the curb and they headed north. “That was a calculated risk on my part. Low risk, high reward. No laws broken. And it was my decision. You understand that, Jasper? It was my decision. I made it. You forced this one on me.”

“I’m sorry.” It was an automatic reaction. Programmed. When people were upset with you, you apologized. It usually worked.

“I know you are.” Hughes shrugged. “I guess you are. In any event, this is between us for now. You don’t tell your girlfriend or your grandmother, even. You sure as hell don’t tell anyone on the task force. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“I’ll take you to the hotel. You’re not coming in tomorrow. I’ll sling a line of bull at Montgomery and Morales. In the meantime, I’ll figure out a way to get some unis to sit on Belsamo without raising suspicions.”

“So you believe me?”

“What choice do I have? Unfortunately, now I have to do this the hard way. E-mail that picture to me. Now. I’ll see what I can find out about the storage place.”

Jazz remained silent as Hughes turned east and then south, piloting them back to the hotel. “Thanks,” he said when the detective pulled up to the hotel.

“Don’t thank me for this,” Hughes said, and drove away.

CHAPTER 41

Early the next morning, Connie packed a duffel bag and went to her parents; she didn’t even give them time to speak before saying, “This is how it’s going to be….” She had spent the night trying to think of ways to trick or cajole them into letting her return to New York, but in the end decided that a blitz attack was best, so she just walked into the family room and announced that she was headed back to New York.

“Oh?” Her father’s voice and expression both teetered on a precipice between amusement and anger. “You’re going to tell us how it’s going to be?” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. If he could have snorted a burst of fire, he would have. “This should be interesting.”

“It’s not really interesting at all,” she said. “It just is. I’m seventeen—”

“You live under my roof,” Dad interrupted. “And you—”

“Let her finish,” Mom said quietly.

“Are you on her side?” Dad turned to Mom. “What’s going on here?”

“There’s no ‘her side’ here, honey. We’re a family. There’s one side—our side—and we share it.”

“I’m seventeen,” Connie pressed, “and in a few months, I’ll be an adult. Like, officially. But I’ve always been responsible. I’ve always been good. My grades have always been excellent, and I’ve never been in trouble.”

“Until—”

“Until recently, I know,” Connie said, jumping in before her dad could go off on a rant. “And that should tell you something. If I went all this time without doing something wrong, doesn’t it tell you that I must have had a good reason?”

“You’re our child, Conscience.” He was mellower than she’d expected. Maybe he thought she could be reasoned out of this, rather than bludgeoned with parental wrath. Under normal circumstances, he might have been right. But Connie was convinced that this was a matter of life or death, if not for Jazz, then certainly for more innocents in New York. “Until you’re eighteen, it’s our job to take care of you. And we take that pretty seriously. When it comes to this boy”—she hated how he avoided saying Jazz’s name—“you don’t always think clearly.”

Mom picked at the edge of her sleeve. “Honey, this isn’t about whether or not you get to spend time with your boyfriend—”

“I know.”

“—it’s about the fact there are dangerous people—”

“There is a serial killer loose in New York,” her father interrupted. “And your boyfriend is directly tied into, caught up in it all. How on earth can you think of getting yourself wrapped up in that? And what in the world makes you think we would be okay with you doing that?”

“There was a serial killer right here in the Nod,” Connie said quietly. “Jazz was involved in that, too. And it worked out fine.”

“Connie!” Mom exploded, her veneer of reserve finally breaking down. “Just because you survived this once doesn’t mean you should go looking for trouble! That’s like drinking and driving over and over just because you didn’t kill yourself the first time!”

“People are dying,” her dad added. “More than a dozen of them. You want to stand in the middle of that? Really?”

She thought of the lockbox. She thought of those quiet, tense moments when she and Howie had sneaked through the Dent house, looking for Jazz. A dead cop in a cruiser out in the driveway. Howie cradling the useless shotgun, as if it could help. Silent for the first time since she’d met him. Both of them knowing that it was entirely possible Jazz was already dead at the hands of the Impressionist.

And then, kicking down the bedroom door… Her boyfriend, bloodied but alive… The rush of her own blood and adrenaline as they got the drop on the man who’d killed Ginny Davis…

“I hear you, Daddy. I get it. But you can’t look after me forever. In a few months, I’ll be eighteen. What’s going to change in those few months? I’m already the person I’ll be at eighteen. The calendar just hasn’t caught up yet.” She took a deep breath. “I need to go back to New York. I need to do it now,” she said in a rush, before her parents could interrupt. But she needn’t have worried. They said nothing. Her mother stared down at her hands, and her father simply shook his head worriedly.

“And I’m going to go,” Connie went on. “I’m going to go. The only way you can stop me is physically. That’s just a fact. And I know you won’t lay a hand on me, Daddy.” Her father said nothing; his face remained impassive, but his eyes told the tale—he could not bring himself to harm his child, even if he thought it would save her. “So the only way you can stop me is if you call the police and have them stop me at the airport or on my way. And you can do that. I know you can. But you have to understand something: If you do, then I’ll know that you love me and want to protect me, but that you don’t trust me. And if you don’t trust me now, if you don’t trust me after seventeen years of being a good daughter, then that means that you’ve never really trusted me.” She took a deep breath. “And that means you never will.”

“Connie…” Mom wrung her hands.

“Let me finish, Mom. If you won’t ever trust me, then that means I’m done. You can have the cops drag me back from the airport and you can keep me locked up in the house, but once I graduate, I’ll move out and you won’t see me anymore. Not because I don’t love you—I do—but because I can’t be around people who don’t trust me. I’ll put myself through college. Somehow. Or maybe move to New York or LA and try to get into acting. I don’t know. But I won’t be here and I won’t come back.” She hefted her bag. “It’s your decision.”

Her father stood, and Connie was once again reminded just how massive a man he was—solid and tall and broad through the chest and shoulders. He looked like a construction worker, not a lawyer, thanks to a strict exercise regimen he’d followed since his years playing football in college. “You’re not leaving,” he said.

“I am. This isn’t a bluff, Daddy.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. I’m sure you believe it right now, as you’re saying it, but you’ll never go through with it. If you walk through that door, my first call is to the police. And you can threaten all you want, but we both know that you’ll eventually realize I’m right.”

“I love you both,” Connie said, and a tear surprised her. “Tell Whiz I love him, too.” She knew that if she sought out her brother in his room, she would break down completely, and she couldn’t afford to do that. It might be the last time she would see him, but she couldn’t put herself through that, couldn’t let what might be his last memory of her be one of weeping and sorrow.

She turned and walked to the front door.

“Do not walk through that door, Conscience!”

Connie thought she heard her mother say, “Let her go, Jerry,” but she couldn’t be sure. She closed the door behind her. Howie waited in the driveway, the engine of his car idling.

“Let’s do this,” she said to him as she climbed in.

“We gonna be dodging Johnny Law? Gonna have five-oh on our asses?”

“Just drive.”

CHAPTER 42

And

of course

a shoulder and trailing a line of

(yes)

cool heat

(yes)

a groan

whose?

He opens his mouth

(yes, like that)

and licks

And

Jazz woke the next morning, his mind muzzy, his emotions hacked and split into pieces. Groggy, he peered blearily at the clock on the bedside table. According to it, he actually had slept for hours. But with the dream arousing and terrifying him in alternating, equal measure, he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. He must have dreamed that he’d lain awake all night, searching for wisdom and insight in the blank white hotel ceiling.

Despite mentioning TARU, Hughes had—perhaps intentionally, perhaps not—neglected to take the disposable cell phone, so Jazz had put it on the bedside table, just in case Billy decided to call back. The phone’s caller ID listed a phone number, but when Jazz called it, he only got an anonymous, robotic outgoing voice mail message. Billy had probably already tossed that phone and moved on to another one.

He thought of calling Connie. But his dream still pounded at the doors of his conscious mind, only slightly unreal in these moments of waking.

He felt poisonous.

Slick and grimy with some contagion.

To speak to Connie now would be to pollute her with the thoughts spinning in his head. Would be to lie to her and not tell her about Belsamo and what he’d done. He couldn’t abide the thought of lying to Connie. Not to her.

He could have called Aunt Samantha or Howie, but he didn’t want to speak to anyone. Not now. All of his focus, all of his attention, was now devoted to recalling the conversation he’d had with Billy.

Jazz’s memory was good. Not eidetic like Billy’s, but better than most people’s. And recalling the things Billy said was sort of a specialty of his. Dear Old Dad had trained his son to lean extra-heavy on the fatherly wisdom he imparted.

Fine. You designed me to be your tape recorder. I’ll use that against you, you bastard.

The problem wasn’t remembering every line in the twisted play of Butcher Billy’s life. The difficulty lay in figuring out which words mattered and which ones were just verbal chaff, noisemakers designed to distract attention and lead Jazz into the corners of Billy’s maze where the walls closed in.

The crows… There’s something there. Something real. Belsamo was into crows. Billy mentioned them. And, yeah, I remember that old story he told me. I just recited it to Connie the other day.

Billy had been adamant that the story of the Crow King wasn’t a fairy tale. He’d called it folklore. Myth. The differences were crucial. Billy sounded like an inbred redneck, but his IQ was in the stratosphere and he wielded words as precisely as he wielded knives and cleavers and hammers.

Fairy tales and fables were stories for children. They involved magic. They weren’t real.

Myths and folklore, though… they weren’t precisely real, but they were designed to explain something that was real. They represented something about the real world. The origin of something.

The Crow King… what did the Crow King represent?

And then Jazz sat up straight in bed. Another chunk of knowledge had just dropped into his brain. More accurately, it had bobbed to the surface of the ocean of his memories, like a body that has broken free of its concrete shoes.

The Impressionist. In his cell in Lobo’s Nod. He’d said something to Jazz….

Jasper Dent. Princeling of Murder. Heir to the Croaking.

Not “the Croaking.” Damn it, Jazz! Did you really think he was that crazy? What’s wrong with you? You missed the connection right there!

The Impressionist had been talking about the Crow King.

Heir to the Crow King.

So… Billy was the Crow King, then. The one who bled the robins until they were dove-white. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

More important… how far back did this craziness stretch? How long had Billy been putting things in motion? The Impressionist knew about the significance of crows. So did Belsamo. Which meant that the lunacy went back at least to before Billy’s arrest and imprisonment. All those years Billy traveled for murder… was he also evangelizing his particular brand of lunacy? If so, how many protégés did he have out there? How many madmen had he programmed to follow in his footsteps?

And if he was able to program them as adults, what chance does his son have?

Jazz had been aware for years now that people existed out there in what he thought of as the “real world” (the world not of Lobo’s Nod or of his grandmother’s house and deepening senility) who admired Billy, who thought he was a patsy for someone else’s murders, who believed he’d been framed. And people who saw in him a strength they lacked and didn’t care that that strength had been turned toward murder.

But he’d never imagined that any of these sad, damaged people would turn out to be killers themselves. Since when do groupies become rock stars? Maybe they end up as roadies, sure. Maybe even an opening act or a one-hit wonder.

But for a groupie to become the main attraction…?

It chilled Jazz.

He thought—fantasized, perhaps—that he had plumbed the depths of Dear Old Dad’s sociopathy by dint of growing up in Billy Dent’s house. Now he had to face the frightening possibility that the Dent insanity bored a deeper hole in the core of one’s psyche than he’d ever imagined.

Where does it end? he wondered. Every pit, no matter how deep, had a bottom.

Where was the bottom to Billy’s madness?

Jazz had to know.

How many of them are out there? The Impressionist and Hat-Dog… that’s two. Is Ugly J a third? How many did he train? How much time did he have?

The story of the Crow King went all the way back to Jazz’s childhood. Had this all started then? Was it somehow connected to his recurring nightmares—the death, the sex? Or was the story of the Crow King just something that Billy had made up back then on a whim and was now exploiting for his own amusement?

But then something occurred to Jazz. A nugget of information nudged from the rough walls of his memory:

No one held my hand and taught me how to play.

Billy had said that. When Jazz visited him at Wammaket a few months ago. Jazz had been trying to manipulate Billy and had asked… had asked for help with something relating to the Impressionist. Billy had scoffed.

Dear Old Dad wasn’t interested in teaching. So then what was he doing with Hat-Dog?

Jazz rolled over in bed in frustration. He needed to talk about this. It was no good to ricochet ideas in the spaces of his mind—he needed feedback. The task force was forbidden to him now, through his own actions. So he did the only thing that made sense.

“Lobo’s Nod Sheriff’s Department,” Lana said a moment later. “How may I direct your call?”

“Sheriff Tanner, please,” Jazz said.

“Just a… Jasper? Is that you?”

Jazz groaned inwardly. Leave it to Lana to recognize his voice. Her ability to obsess over a man, combined with her inability to weed out the bad boys, would probably get her killed someday.

“Yeah, it’s me. Can I talk to G. William?”

“Sure. So, how’s it going in New York?” she asked, almost giddy.

“It’s great, Lana,” Jazz said enthusiastically. “I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty, and I’m also tracking a guy who takes people’s eyes, cuts off their dicks, and—on two occasions—leaves their guts in a KFC bucket. It’s awesome.”

A normal person would have quickly transferred the call. “Oh. Okay. Um, when do you come back to the Nod? Kinda quiet around here without you.”

“Lana. G. William. Please?”

The line went silent for a moment and then G. William’s booming drawl: “Haven’t even had my coffee yet. It’s damn indecent to call a man before his coffee.”

Jazz checked the bedside clock again. “I knew I could count on you to be in this early.”

“Old habits. NYPD got you out of bed this early, too?”

Jazz bit his lip. He couldn’t go into his extra-legal activities with G. William. “Well, I’m working hard, that’s for sure,” he said amiably. “But I wanted to run something by you.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s about the Impressionist.”

“Speaking of whom… he’s back to being mute. And all patched up after you last saw him.”

“How nice for him. Remember when we were trying to find him and we were talking about him?”

“Which time?”

“Most of them. I’ve been going over it in my head and I keep thinking how we talked a lot about him playing us.”

“He wasn’t playing us. He was playing at being Billy.”

Jazz grunted. True. “But I keep thinking now… it’s almost like it was a sort of game to him, wasn’t it?” He was falling from a window, grabbing for ledges as they zipped by, trying for some connection between the Impressionist and Hat-Dog.

“You’re not making any sense, Jazz. What game? He wasn’t really cluing us in like some of these guys do. Yeah, he guided us to some of the bodies and he taunted you, but the only rules he followed were the ones your dad laid down years ago. And Billy himself pointed out to you how the guy didn’t even follow them very well. Hell, if he was playing a game, it was… like solitaire, I guess. He was playing a game he could only play by himself.”

Jazz shot out of bed. “That’s it!” he shouted, loud enough that someone on the other side of the wall pounded on it for quiet.

“What’s it?”

“Oh, man, I gotta go, G. William. And thanks,” he said hurriedly, and hung up before the sheriff could say anything more.

He flung himself to the room’s desk, where his copies of the Hat-Dog files lay scattered. He pawed through them, organizing them, riffling through the papers to confirm the details he needed.

It all came together. It was beginning to make an insidious sense.

Just as he’d been saying all along, it made perfect sense to a crazy person. And now Jazz believed he’d found a way to make it make sense to someone rational.

He glanced at the clock again. He’d been working for three hours without even realizing it. He needed one more thing to confirm his suspicions, then probably another couple of hours of work before he could tie it up nice and neat and take it to the task force.

A toy store. That’s what he needed—a toy store. There had to be one nearby. After all, a random walk on the street revealed legions of baby carriages everywhere he went.

He picked up his phone to call 411 for the nearest toy store and stared at its screen for a moment, cogs and gears clicking in his imagination. It was a smartphone, right? Its various icons shined up at him. He’d used maybe two of them since getting the phone.

Howie. He would call Howie.