Текст книги "Game"

Автор книги: Barry Lyga

Соавторы: Barry Lyga
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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 52

Wheelchair Man was a young guy, maybe a couple of years out of high school, who couldn’t keep from referring to “a fine sister such as yourself” repeatedly as he wheeled her more slowly than was necessary to terminal four. Connie did her best to ignore him as he kept up a steady stream of increasingly flirtatious patter, but finally couldn’t take it any-more. By now she was in another building entirely, the TSA and the cops far behind her. She hopped up from the chair with ease. “Wow! Thanks! Look, I think it’s better now!” Before he could protest or even register surprise, she grabbed her duffel and headed in the direction indicated by the sign for ARRIVALS. So much for her would-be suitor.

She discarded the glasses in a trashcan and whipped off the bonnet, letting her braids clack around her shoulders as their beaded ends were set free.

She wondered exactly what the clue would be. JFK was huge, and even as specific a location as the arrivals area of a single terminal provided hundreds if not thousands of places to conceal a clue.

Then again, she wondered just how hidden the clue could possibly be. Airports had incredible security, after all. So whoever had hidden the clue couldn’t assume it would stay hidden. So maybe the clue wasn’t something left behind—maybe it was a part of the terminal itself, something that was always there….

Bring cash, the voice had said. So she needed money to access the clue.

She stood in the center of the arrivals area, feeling enormously conspicuous as she turned a slow, mincing circle, taking in everything within her range of vision. At the same time, she tried to prepare a cover story in case some security official approached her. I’m looking for my dad. My boyfriend. My ride. I’ve never been to New York before; just taking it in. They all sounded lame and she wasn’t sure she could sell any of them.

Excuses fluttered out of her mind when her eye caught the sign that said BAGGAGE STORAGE.

Bring cash….

She approached the Baggage Storage desk slowly, feeling as though she were being watched. Then she felt ridiculous. Of course she was being watched. It was an airport. There were probably three video cameras and a bunch of security guys watching her right now. Everyone was being watched.

There were two people working the desk and both of them were harried—the lines were long and unruly. Terminal four was international flights, Connie realized, and in addition to Baggage Storage, this same desk also seemed to offer a variety of services—hotel bookings, currency exchange, and more. The customers were a patchwork of races and ethnicities and accents.

“I need to pick up a bag,” Connie said, taking a wild guess.

“Ticket?” asked the East Asian woman behind the counter.

Crap. “I lost it,” Connie said.

The woman grimaced and her eyes flicked to the long and impatient line behind Connie.

Connie saw her chance. Jazz called it “social hacking,” like breaking into a computer, only with people. Channeling a vapid cheerleader, willing herself to look young, harmless, and cutely stupid, she moaned, “I’m soooo sorry. My dad will just kill me, y’know?” She yearned for some bubble gum to pop.

“What’s the name?” The woman sighed.

“Conscience Hall.” Gambling that Auto-Tune had left whatever it was under her own name.

The woman typed on her keyboard, grunted once, then said, “One bag?”

“Yes.”

“Left here when?”

Another gamble. Connie put on her most focused, concentrated, “I’m not that bright” face. “Gosh… I guess it would have been… gee… like, earlier today, you know?” Hoping Auto-Tune had brought it here after talking to her on the phone. “A couple of hours?” She whooshed out a breath, as if all the thinking made her tired. “I’ve just been wandering around the city and I totally lost track of time.” She smiled. “And my ticket.” Throw in a tee-hee? No, too much.

“So you told me.” The woman gritted her teeth. From behind, Connie heard people grumbling, and the woman’s coworker—a tall, older man, also East Asian—looked over. “What’s the holdup?”

Before the woman could explain, Connie jumped in, pumping up the cute lost girl crap to the max for the benefit of the older man.

“She knows when it was dropped off? She has the right name?” The man’s expression clearly said, How many people named “Conscience” could there be? “No ticket, but do you have ID?”

Connie dutifully hauled out her driver’s license.

“Give it to her,” the guy said.

The woman sighed with relief. “Four dollars.”

Connie gave her a five, took her change, and waited as the woman brought out a smallish black laptop bag. It was smaller and evidently lighter than the duffel Connie carried over her shoulder, and the woman regarded her with suspicion for a moment. Connie cranked up the wattage of her smile and made herself as guileless and as empty as possible, hoping that she looked dumb enough to have checked her lighter bag instead of the heavier one.

“Here you go.” Handing over the bag.

Inside, Connie experienced a heart-thrumming trill, which she suppressed outwardly. She took the bag into the ladies’ room. Catching a glimpse of her mottled face in the mirror, she took a moment to wash off the white lady’s makeup, then ducked into a stall, waiting until the room was empty before opening the laptop bag. If it was a bomb or anthrax or a plague toxin in there, she didn’t want to hurt anyone else if she could avoid it.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long until she was alone. She examined the outside of the bag—nothing exceptional about it. Just a generic laptop bag. There was a mesh outer pocket for a water bottle, but otherwise just the one top zipper, which she unzipped with her breath caught in her throat and her bottom lip between her teeth.

Nothing happened.

She pried open the bag. It was a single pocket within, padded, of course.

The first thing she saw was the gun.

Her heart jumped a beat into the future, even as her hand—as though remote-controlled—reached in to pull out the gun. It was a pistol—a revolver, to be precise—and as soon as she touched it, her entire body relaxed. It was plastic. An old, scuffed toy pistol, she saw, withdrawing it.

Ha, ha. Very funny. What am I supposed to make of this?

There was something else in the bag—an envelope. More family photos?

She opened the envelope and withdrew and unfolded a piece of paper. A second piece of paper fell out and into the bag, but she was focused on the one she held, which was typed with a generic font:

Connie:

Congratulations on making it this far. Well done.

I wrote this letter when you first agreed to play my little game. In truth, it’s not much of a game, and I apologize for that. You’re a late player, and I haven’t had time to prepare something adequate to your stature. I hope you’ll forgive this oversight on my part.

As a way of making it up to you, I have included not one but two clues to my identity in this bag, as well as a pointer to the next clue. If you are smart and talented enough to have snared young Jasper, then I believe you will possess perspicacity enough to deduce both.

I look forward to seeing you soon.

It was, of course, unsigned.

It doesn’t sound like something Billy Dent would write. And come to think of it, Mr. Auto-Tune didn’t really sound like him, either. Not the words he used. Not the way he talked. Is this Hat-Dog? Could that really be it?

Two clues, the letter said. There was the gun, of course. Add that to the bell and it meant absolutely nothing.

The second piece of paper in the bag was a clipping from a magazine of some sort—a picture of the actor Kevin Costner.

What. The. Hell.

She had a bell, a gun… and Kevin Costner? This was supposed to help her somehow? These were clues to Mr. Auto-Tune’s identity?

Is Kevin Costner a serial killer? Yeah, right.

She inspected the bag, even turned it inside out, but found nothing else. Nothing but the note and the gun and the clipping. Remembering how the bell clue had actually been a part of the lockbox, she scrutinized the bag for markings of any sort, but found nothing out of the ordinary.

What about the note itself, though? She thought of the note that the Impressionist had carried in his pocket, how there had been a simple acrostic UGLY J encoded into it. She studied the note, but found nothing of the sort. The opening letters of each paragraph, of each word, of each sentence, spelled nothing sensical. Which wasn’t to say that there wasn’t some sort of clue embedded in the note itself, only that she couldn’t figure it out. But didn’t the FBI have, like, a whole division of people who did stuff like this? Codebreaking? Deciphering experts? Cryptographers?

Maybe she could get Jazz to give the note to the FBI agent he knew. Maybe…

She sighed and stuffed the gun and the note and the clipping back into the bag, then left JFK, following signs that directed her to a taxi stand. The driver, a Sikh with a Bluetooth earpiece, nodded and smiled at her, shrugging with one shoulder when she said, “Brooklyn,” and the address of Jazz’s hotel.

“How you want me to go?” he asked.

Connie had no idea. She didn’t think he would appreciate if she said, “Maybe with a car? On the road?”

“Whatever’s fastest,” she said.

“BQE?” he asked.

“Sure.”

The cab took off. Connie laid her head back, letting lamppost light wash over her in staccato waves as they pulled away from JFK and onto a highway.

It started to rain, a cold, ugly rain that made Connie shiver just from the sound of it on the roof of the cab, the silver slash of it in the headlights.

Connie thought that she couldn’t have summoned by most ancient witchcraft a more perfect and more hideous night for what she had to do.

CHAPTER 53

Before they went any deeper into the storage facility, Morales popped the trunk of her car and hauled out a bulletproof vest. She strapped it on and then pulled her blazer on over it. She looked almost comically top heavy and squarish.

“I have another one,” she said, indicating the trunk. “It’s a little small, but it’ll probably fit you.”

“These guys don’t shoot people,” Jazz said.

Morales shrugged. “Protocol.”

I like how it’s so important to you to follow protocol while breaking the law with me, Jazz thought, but did not say.

With Jazz in the lead to scout out the cameras and guide Morales—now suited up and armed again—around them, they made their way to unit 83F. It was deep within a maze of tight, narrow corridors lit sporadically by overhead fluorescent tubes that seemed to spasm on and off of their own accord. The unit was on the second floor of what seemed to be a ten-story building, a concrete-and-metal bunker housing endless identical doors, differentiated only by the varying locks and the fading numbers etched onto their faces.

As they rounded a corner that would reveal 83F to them, Morales paused to draw her backup weapon. Her poise with the smaller Glock 26 was plenty intimidating—Jazz could only imagine how she would look with the bigger 22 in her grasp.

“What are you doing?” Jazz asked.

“You should have bought bolt-cutters at the damn hardware store. Now I’m gonna have to shoot off the lock,” she said. “This ought to do it.”

Jazz groaned. “Put that thing away,” he said. “I can pick the lock.”

“What if it’s a combination lock, smart-ass?”

“I’m not bad with them, either.”

Moot point.

As they came within sight, they saw that the lock was already unfastened, hanging loose in the open hasp of the door to unit 83F.

CHAPTER 54

Howie stood at the front door to the Dent house. The stars still hid beyond the blanket of clouds. He tried not to take that as an ill omen, but it wasn’t easy.

Just go on and do it, he told himself. And who knows? Maybe a hundred years from now, some dumb futuristic hemophiliac kid’s dumb futuristic parents will be all like, “Buck up! Did you know that the famous Howie Gersten also had hemophilia?” Beats the living hell out of Genghis Khan, right?

He had a key, of course, so he let himself in. The house was quiet. Too quiet, some idiot in a movie would say, then go in anyway.

Howie shrugged and went in anyway. He knew something that random movie idiots didn’t know—where the shotgun was. He recovered it from behind the big grandfather clock. The barrels were plugged and Jazz had removed the firing pins, but Sam and Gramma didn’t know that.

I’m going to cut the knot and figure this out one way or the other, he thought. And then, resolute, he stepped into the living room, where Sam lay on the sofa, watching TV.

“Howie?” she asked, startled. “What are you—” She broke off as she realized he was pointing the gun at her. “Howie!” Her voice cracked. “What the hell? Are you nuts?”

“That’s exactly what I was gonna ask you!” he said, astonished. “Wow. We’re totally on the same wavelength. Please don’t be a crazy serial-killer person.”

“What are you talking about?” She drew her legs up onto the sofa, hugging her knees as though she could shrink into a space where a shotgun blast couldn’t find her. “What are you doing? Point that thing somewhere else.”

“In a sec. I need to know if you’re a crazy serial killer like Billy. Are you Ugly J?”

“What’s Ugly J? Put that gun down!” Her voice went high and panicked. Too panicked to be fake, Howie thought. Would a serial killer be afraid of harmless Howie, even packing heat? He didn’t think so. The terror in Sam’s eyes seemed real. Howie didn’t think Billy had ever been afraid of anything in his life.

“Playtime!” a voice said from behind him. “Friends are here!” it singsonged, and Howie turned without thinking. Gramma had pranced in from the hallway, clapping her hands, but when she saw the shotgun pointed at her, she screamed.

“Whoa. Calm—”

“KILLER!” she yelled. “KILLER IN THE HOUSE!” So loud he thought her vocal cords would have to explode.

“It’s okay!” he told her, but she screamed again—this scream high and wordless, a nonsense syllable of terror—and clenched tight, old fists.

From behind him, he heard Sam cry out, and then she was on him from behind, tackling him, and he thought, That’s gonna leave a bruise, as he involuntarily pulled both triggers to the shotgun.

Boom. Not the sound of gunfire. No, the shotgun made only twin dry clicks as the hammers fell on empty space instead of firing pins. The boom rattled in Howie’s skull as he crashed to the floor, Sam on top of him, screaming, and then a new sound, a cry of fear, and Howie looked up in time to see Gramma, hands grasping at her own throat as she choked out a hollow gasp and collapsed to the floor, her head cracking solidly on the hardwood right in front of Howie.

“Oh, Jesus!” he blurted out, not sure if he meant for Mrs. Dent or for himself and the damage done to his body by his own fall. Maybe both.

Sam clambered off him, snatching the shotgun from his now-nerveless fingers. She tore skin away and Howie went swoony at the too-familiar sight of his own bright blood spurting onto the floor.

“Mom!” Sam was up, pushing past him, the shotgun cradled expertly in her arms. Howie tried to push off the floor; his palm slipped on his own blood. Sam caught his movement out of the corner of her eye and scowled murder at him, hoisting the gun threateningly. It couldn’t fire, but beating Howie to death would be the easiest thing in the world.

“I didn’t mean—” Howie started, and Sam dropped to her knees next to her mother.

She shook her.

Gramma Dent lay silent and loose, a skeleton in a bag of skin.

Sam spun around, now wielding the shotgun like a club, a crazed glint in her eye. And despite that, Howie suddenly was worried not for himself at all. He could only think:

Oh, no. Oh, God. I just killed Jazz’s grandmother.

CHAPTER 55

Jazz and Morales exchanged a quick look. And then Jazz knew the meaning of telepathy because in that instant, he knew exactly what Morales was thinking. She was thinking the exact same thing he was thinking, the thought stretched and shared between them like taffy:

Doggy needs a bone. But first, Doggy needs to play with his toys.

Belsamo. One half of the Hat-Dog Killer. He was in unit 83F right now. Gathering his tools for his next murder. They had thought they would beat him here, but he’d managed to get here first.

Before Jazz could say anything or signal, Morales single-handed her gun—good thing she was using the backup, Jazz thought—then grabbed the handle of the door down near the floor and flung it up. It rumbled and stuttered, but rolled almost entirely into the ceiling, revealing a ten-by-ten space within, lit by a portable battery-powered lantern.

Morales shifted her grip to two hands, her feet planted.

“Freeze!” she shouted. “Don’t even twitch!”

The room was divided into halves by a strip of bright tape that ran down the center of the floor. Both sides had what looked like a makeshift workbench, each piled high with tools and boxes. On the right-hand side, Jazz noticed a bottle of clear liquid with a pair of eyes floating in it.

On the other side, the workbench held multiple small jars, filled with cloudy liquid and tight, curled shadows that Jazz knew would turn out to be five excised penises.

Oliver Belsamo stood in front of the left-hand workbench, half-turned to Morales, his expression one of complete shock. He had a small laptop shoulder bag on the workbench before him, partly filled from the look of it.

In his hand, now frozen, he held a wicked-looking scalpel, halfway to the bag.

“Drop the knife,” Morales said, teeth clenched. “Drop it now or I drop you.”

Jazz wondered if she would actually shoot him. Dog was her best—only—pathway to Billy. Would she really kill him?

“You…” Belsamo’s voice. It was Jazz’s first time hearing it since the interrogation room, when he’d cawed and played madman. It still had that off-kilter timbre to it, that lunatic’s cadence. Belsamo was a man only marginally in control of himself.

His apartment. All the hoarding and OCD crap. That’s how he tries to stay in control of himself. By complete control of his environment.

“You went into my house!” Belsamo whined, gripping the scalpel more tightly. He didn’t even look at Morales—he seemed to have eyes only for Jazz. “You took my phone!” As if that crime somehow outweighed all his own.

“You do not want to mess with me!” Morales yelled. “Put! It! Down!”

She probably wouldn’t kill him. But he could easily see her shooting him in the leg.

“Better listen to her,” Jazz said. He took a step toward Belsamo. “Drop the scalpel and step away from the workbench and you’ll live, man. That’s what it’s all about, right?”

Above all else, serial killers did not want to die. They cherished their lives more than anything else.

Because you can’t kill people if you’re dead.

“Drop it!”

“Really, man. Drop it,” Jazz said, and took another step. The strong, overwhelming scents of formaldehyde and bleach and metal from the storage unit curled his nose hairs and made his nostrils want to slam shut. “Dude, it’s not worth dying.”

“Get back,” Morales said tightly. “Get out of there, Jasper. Now.”

Jazz looked down. He hadn’t realized it, but he had stepped into 83F. He had started to back up when he caught—out of the corner of his eye—Belsamo moving. His heart thrummed a quick, panicked beat.

But it was just Dog dropping the scalpel. It hit the workbench with a clatter.

“Good boy,” Morales said in a voice loaded with irony and relief.

And then Jazz jerked as though awakened by a nightmare as a flat cracking sound echoed in the claustrophobic confines of the storage hallway, followed by another one before the first could fade away.

In the time it took to blink, the entire world spun and shifted away from him, a dizzying amusement park ride gone horribly awry. For some reason he couldn’t understand, he was suddenly staring up at the ceiling of unit 83F, and his heartbeat roared loud in his ears, drowning out everything else. In that single, nigh-imperceptible instant, something—and everything—had changed.

It took only another moment for him to realize what and how. In the space of that new moment, the pain hit him. The pain and the dampness of his own blood soaking through his clothes.

She shot me, he thought. Morales shot me.