Текст книги "Game"

Автор книги: Barry Lyga

Соавторы: Barry Lyga
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Connie stiffened next to him, and Jazz cursed himself inwardly. To him, rape was just another crime visited upon Hat-Dog’s victims, but of course to Connie it would resonate more viscerally than that. “We really don’t have to talk about this now,” he said as gently as he knew how.

“I want to help,” she told him. “Keep going.”

He drew in a deep breath. “Okay. Well, rape is about power,” he told her. “Power and dominance.” And fun, Billy chortled. Heaps and heaps of fun! “But this guy doesn’t seem to enjoy his power. At least, not all of the time. If you look at the medical examiner’s reports, his rapes fall into two categories—some are violent and repeated while the victims are alive. Others are perimortem.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means at or around the time of death.”

“He’s raping corpses? Jesus Christ.”

“No, not corpses. Just raping them at their weakest, so he doesn’t have to struggle as much. So part of the time, he’s getting off on the power and the domination over them while they’re still alive and fighting. The rest of the time, he waits until they’re practically dead so that he can do it without any trouble. It doesn’t make sense.”

“The guy’s crazy, Jazz. It doesn’t always have to make sense.”

The same thing Hughes had said earlier. And the answer was still the same: “Not to you, no. But to them—to me—yeah, they should always make sense.”

“Are you saying your dad made sense to you?” she asked, horrified.

“I’m saying…”

This is a special thing, Jasper. For us and only us. Not for anyone else.

“I’m saying that I can understand it. I can live in his head. That doesn’t mean I agree with it.” I don’t think.

Because a part of him couldn’t stop thinking about Billy’s voice. Before. Urging him to sucker Connie’s legs apart and slide between them…

“I can live in his head,” Jazz told her, “because that’s where I grew up. With that kind of thinking. It was my normal. Like being in a cult, I guess. All the normal things, all the things that made sense to you or to Howie, were things I was taught didn’t apply to me. Like… like, did your parents ever tell you stories?”

“You mean, like ‘Goldilocks’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’? Yeah, sure.”

“Well, Billy used to tell me stories, too. Stories about his prospects. And there was even…” He drifted off, suddenly lost in his own past. The Crow King… He had forgotten all about the Crow King. How could he forget that? It had been a mainstay of his childhood, that story. That myth. He’d loved it, not for the story itself but rather for the way Billy had told it, changing his voice and his facial expression to match the different characters as he went.

“You still there? Earth to Jazz…”

“I was just remembering, is all. When I was a kid, after Mom died, Billy used to tell me this story. Like a fairy tale, or a fable. It was about a crow. The king of crows, really.”

“The king of crows?”

“Yeah. It started out with the Crow King, who was surveying all he ruled…”

… and he saw it was good, Jasper. There was peace where there was supposed to be peace, and war where there was supposed to be war. Because the crow is a wise bird, the crow knows that someone’s always killin’ someone else somewhere. That’s the way of the world. That’s the natural order of things. And the Crow King was the wisest of all the wise birds, so there wasn’t no way no how he was gonna dispute the natural order of things. And so the world turned and the crows ate carrion and the young squirrels still a-sleepin’ in their nests and the vegetables growin’ in the fields (and you need to eat your vegetables, too, Jasper, to grow up big and strong).

Now one day, into this perfection, into this natural world, there came a red robin. Red like a sunset, Jasper. A more beautiful bird you could not imagine, not with all the thinking in all the world. And the robin decided that it wanted to be like a crow. More than that, it wanted to be the Crow King.

And so the robin went off and the robin killed. It killed a great many birds. It slaughtered, bringing war where there had been peace.

And the Crow King said, “No, this is not for you. This is only for me.” And he hunted down the robin, and when he found him, he held down the robin and pierced its breast with his beak and drank from it, draining it until its red feathers turned white.

And that, Jasper, was the first dove. And this is why the dove is a bird of peace—because it knows better than to try to be otherwise.

“That’s… that’s a horrible story!” Connie said.

“That was my bedtime story,” Jazz said, without inflection.

Connie wrapped her arms around him and Jazz let her and then—thankfully—he fell asleep, just like a little boy who’s been read to by his father.

CHAPTER 14

Lips on his

(oh, yes)

shoulder and trailing a line of cool heat

(oh)

down farther and his fingers touch something so soft and familiar

(there, touch me there)

and also somehow unknown and a groan

his groan?

or

hers?

He reaches out, back, around

(Oh, yes)

and opens his mouth

and licks

He awoke to find himself pressed tightly against Connie, terrified and horrified and aroused all at once. She was awake, too, whether because of him or not he didn’t know, but he kissed her and she kissed back just as urgently and fumbled with the drawstring on his pajama bottoms and reached for him there, and he would have let her, he needed to let her, but at the last minute he drew in a breath and

—like cutting—

Oh, yes, just touch—

he pulled back, pulled away, shoving Connie more violently than he’d intended.

Both dreams. Both of them at once—

He rolled out of bed, arms flailing, smacking into the nightstand, pulling the alarm clock and the phone down to the floor with him.

Both of them. Killing and sex and—

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Sorry’s not enough. Never enough. Never, ever…

Connie crawled over from her side of the bed to look down at him, her hair covered by the satin bonnet she wore to sleep. In the murky light that bled through the thin curtains, she was chocolate cream and he wanted to devour every last inch of her, wanted to run his tongue over her, wanted to sink his teeth into her and suck out everything of her, ingest it into him.

No. No! Stop it! That’s crazy.

Take it, Jasper, Billy cooed. Take her. She’s yours. She’s your prospect. This is what you’ve been waiting for. And best of all, Jasper? Best of all is that she’s been waiting for it, too.

Not true. He couldn’t believe it was true.

But then there was the naked lust, the yearning in Connie’s eyes, in the parting of her lips, in her pose on the bed. It was less than human, this electricity between them. It was primal, as it was meant to be, as it should be.

That’s when it’s best, Jasper. When they come to you. When they want it as badly as you want to give it.

“Why are you afraid?” Connie whispered, and her voice tasted like warm pie. “Why are you so afraid of me?”

“I’m not afraid of you.” And he wasn’t. Jazz was afraid only of himself.

“I know it isn’t easy,” she said. “I know it’s complicated for you. But this—this thing, this moment—this is supposed to be easy. So easy.”

“We can’t.”

“I brought condoms,” she said, the words an electric prod to his heart. “I thought… I knew we’d be alone here.”

Jazz closed his eyes. It was as though he could see the future. But not just one future. He could see so many of them. He could see himself, happy, with Connie, two normal people living normal lives, drawn closer together and connected by their shared intimacy, the way it was supposed to work, the way it was supposed to be.

But he could also see…

But here’s the thing, Jasper, Billy’s voice purred, speaking from the last time he’d spoken to his father, at Wammaket State Penitentiary. I bet you’re a nice, responsible kid, ’cause I raised you that way, but are you always the one buyin’ the rubbers? Hmm? Or maybe she’s on that pill? ’Cause you can’t always trust ’em, Jasper. You look at them rubbers real close-like, see? You watch her take that pill, Jasper. Hell (and here Billy had roared with laughter), how you think you was born?

He could also see sex as the ignition moment, the fulcrum upon which his own career of serial murder would lever.

None of Billy’s victims had been black. There had been Latinas and Asians and a great profusion of white girls, but not a single African American. Jazz thought that made Connie safe.

He’d thought that… until now.

Now he was no longer certain.

He wanted her so badly. And was that because he was a boy and she was a girl and they were in love and that’s how it was supposed to work?

Or was it because the deepest part of him, the Billy part of him, champed at the bit, strained against its tether, eager and desperate for freedom, to begin what it had been born and made to do?

He squeezed his eyes shut tight, as tight as he could. As tight as the night Billy had skinned poor Rusty alive. The howl of the dog as Billy’s knife did its gruesome work…

Phosphenes again behind his eyelids, this time not of the crime scenes from the pictures, but rather as he’d seen them tonight.

I did something good tonight. I helped tonight. Doesn’t that mean I should be getting better, not worse?

Sex and killing. The two dreams, conflating. What did that mean?

When Jazz opened his eyes and spoke, his voice was deep, sure, emotionless.

“You should throw those condoms away,” he said.

And then he crawled into the other, empty bed to sleep.

CHAPTER 15

Billy Dent roamed Brooklyn, the day having dawned clear and cold. He turned up the collar of his coat and tugged his hat down around his ears.

The cold weather made hiding even easier. Everyone all bundled up. Everyone in such a hurry to get to where they were going. No one stopping to look at anyone else. Everyone wearing gloves, how convenient. Cover up those prison tats. Cover up LOVE. Cover up FEAR.

Cover ’em up, but they’re still there. Love and fear. Equal. Maybe even the same.

It wouldn’t have mattered if anyone had been looking at him, anyway. Billy didn’t fear the human eye. The human eye was a fickle, foolish thing. His goatee and mustache, along with a set of muttonchop sideburns trimmed and shaped just right, changed the angles and configuration of his face. Cutting down his eyebrows made his eyes more prominent. And, of course, he’d dyed his hair.

Billy chuckled to himself when he thought of the vanity of women, and how they’d made it easier on folks like him. God bless Miss Clairol and her endless variations of hues and shades! Billy had—by mixing together a specific set of colors—managed to turn his dirty blond hair into graying brown. After thinning it out with an electric razor, he looked ten years older. The final touch was a pair of black, heavy-rimmed glasses, the kind Billy’s own father had once worn. To the idiotic hipsters of Brooklyn, these glasses were “fashionable.” They also distorted Billy’s features in a way that pleased him and made him harder to recognize. Oh, glorious fashion!

Disguising yourself wasn’t just about making yourself look different; it was about making yourself look different from what people were looking for. The cops could imagine Billy growing a beard or shaving a beard or growing out his hair or coloring his hair, but would they imagine him making himself look older?

He’d studied the FBI and police procedure most of his life. He knew how cops thought and, more important, how they thought he thought. They thought him a creature of immeasurable vanity, and they couldn’t imagine that he would be willing to make himself look worse in order to evade recapture.

Billy was willing to do anything to evade recapture.

After years in prison with nothing to do but exercise, Billy was in top condition, but he dressed to hide his physique. Walked with a slump. When he was out and about, he made sure to wear a watch and checked it constantly, communicating that he was in his own world.

Plus, he had the perfect bit of camouflage: a stroller and a diaper bag.

This part of Brooklyn was called Park Slope, and Billy had noticed quickly that damn near everyone here had either a dog or a baby carriage or both. He had no interest in actually taking care of anything living, but he had a big interest in blending in, so he’d bought a used stroller at an antiques store, then wrapped up a bundle of blankets to look like a baby. Since it was winter, he could keep the top down; anyone looking through the little plastic window would see what appeared to be a well-tucked-in child, napping.

And the diaper bag actually held diapers. Under the diapers, Billy had stashed three different-sized knives, a Glock he’d bought on the street, and a length of rope.

Ambling along the streets of Brooklyn, no one gave an older dad a second look.

People. Ha.

Billy worried more about facial-recognition software than he worried about a human being recalling his face from TV. Cameras were everywhere in “free” America—at ATMs, at street intersections, at banks, behind convenience-store counters. The bastard cops and the FBI were supposed to need search warrants and court orders to look at those cameras, but Billy was no fool. He knew about the Patriot Act. And he knew something even more sinister—he knew the fear that ruled in the hearts of all prospects. The bastard cops needed a court order only when someone said no to them. And these days, all you had to do was wave a flag or say “keeping Americans safe” and anyone owning those cameras would let the cops look all they wanted. No hassle. No fuss, no muss. So Billy took no chances. He wore sunglasses and a hat whenever possible.

And he smiled.

Facial-recognition software, for some reason, had trouble distinguishing between two faces if one of them was smiling. There were even states where you couldn’t smile for your driver’s license photo. So, Billy smiled everywhere he went.

This was hardly a chore. Billy liked smiling. Billy was a happy guy.

In his coat pockets, he had a total of five different throwaway cell phones. One of them buzzed for his attention as he pushed his stroller past the umpteenth coffee shop on Fourth Street. This place was obsessed, Billy had noticed, with coffee shops. There were three of them on every block, not to mention the occasional Starbucks.

He paused as he groped for the proper phone. Only one person had the numbers to his various phones, and that was just for emergencies. He shouldn’t be receiving phone calls—he gave them.

Finding the right phone, he flipped it open, and before he could say anything, the voice at the other end said, almost saucily, “Guess who’s in town?”

And then told him.

And Billy Dent’s smile grew even wider.

CHAPTER 16

The pounding at the door woke Jazz from a deep slumber that morning, gasping awake as if he’d forgotten how to breathe. Connie bolted up in the other bed, startled.

“Who—” she started.

“NYPD!” a voice barked. “Open up! Now!”

“NYPD?” Connie whispered. “What?”

Jazz shook sleep from his head and rolled to his feet. Was Hughes playing some kind of joke? Or…

Or was he being Fultoned again?

He left the chain on the door, opening it just enough to peer out. Two uniformed cops stood there, along with an older white guy in a suit and tie. The white guy pushed at the door. “Jasper Dent,” he said. It wasn’t a question. It was more like a command, as though he were ordering the kid at the door to be Jazz.

“Let me see some ID,” Jazz said, but before the words were even out of his mouth, he was looking at the name card and badge for Detective Stephen Long.

“Homicide,” Long snapped. “Brooklyn South. Open the door.”

Brooklyn South. Homicide. The same division Hughes came from.

Or claimed to come from. The badge and name card looked similar to Hughes’s. How hard would that be to fake? Probably easier than Jazz thought, but harder than made it worthwhile.

“What can I do for you, Detective?” Jazz asked, stalling. He could hear Connie behind him, throwing on clothes, no doubt.

“I said open the goddamn door. Do it now or we’ll bust it down. Seriously.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

Long blew out an annoyed breath. “Okay, we’re knocking it down.”

“Wait, wait.” Connie had stopped moving around. Jazz unchained the door and stepped back. “Come in. What can I do for—”

“You can come with us,” Long said as he and the other two cops came into the room. Long looked around, spied Connie, who was in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. The detective raised an eyebrow. “You guys,” he directed the uniforms, “check the room and the girl. Dent, put on some pants. You’re coming with me.”

“What’s going on here?” Jazz asked.

Long looked at his watch. “You have thirty seconds to put on real clothes. Dressed or not, I’m taking you with me.”

Bristling, Jazz grabbed his clothes from the previous day and retreated to the bathroom to change. Outside, he could hear the cops going through the dresser and desk drawers. One of them must have started to go through Connie’s suitcase because he heard her shout, “Hands off the panties, you perv!”

He emerged from the bathroom, dressed, to find one of the cops triumphantly brandishing the iPad and papers Hughes had brought over the day before. From the crestfallen expression on Connie’s face, Jazz realized that she had hidden them in her suitcase while he’d stalled at the door.

“We’re done here,” Long said, and tipped an imaginary hat to Connie. “Ma’am,” he fake-drawled, and grabbed Jazz by the arm and led him out the door.

Connie handled the cops dragging Jazz away with an aplomb that both surprised and impressed her. Good for you, she thought. You totally didn’t do the whole shrieking girlfriend thing while they hauled your boyfriend out of here. That would have been pretty low-class.

Then again, Jazz had a history of being dragged away by the cops, and it always worked out. He had been arrested once a couple of months ago during the Impressionist case, at the same time that Howie struggled for his life after being knifed. And she had been there in the school auditorium when Deputy Erickson had pulled Jazz out of play rehearsal one afternoon, all because Jazz had done too good a job predicting the Impressionist’s next victim. Both times, he had returned safe and sound.

As she did at home every morning in her own room, she switched on the TV to listen to the news and weather while she got dressed. She would have to figure out where he’d gone, of course. Even though he always came back to her, that didn’t mean he didn’t need help. After all, the Impressionist had managed to hold Jazz hostage in his own home, and only Connie and Howie’s last-minute heroics had saved him.

Or had they? Maybe Jazz could have saved himself. Put that one up there on the list of things she would never know. She sighed. You could have chosen an easier life for yourself, Conscience Hall, than falling in love with a guy who packs the kind of baggage Jazz packs.

Nah. She was kidding herself. It hadn’t been a choice—she had fallen desperately in love with Jazz early on. Tried to hide it. From her father especially, but even from herself. In love with the son of the world’s most notorious serial killer? For reals? Maybe he’s not nuts, but you sure are, Connie!

The first time they kissed, though…

God, that first kiss!

Connie’s driveway. Evening bleeding into an unusually cool summer night. She was sixteen at the time and he wasn’t the first boy she’d kissed, but he was the first one to make her feel cold and warm all at once, the first one to make her want to dissolve into him.

He’d groaned somewhere deep in the back of his throat as they kissed, and she thought that groan was surrender.

And speaking of surrender, she thought, pawing through her suitcase for a shirt, what the hell happened last night? A less confident girl might have curled up in a corner with her Cosmo and wept and snuffled her way through some idiotic article with a title like “How to Make Him Your Boy Toy.” But not Connie. She wasn’t self-centered, but she also wasn’t blind. She knew she had it going on and that there were basically only two good excuses for a guy not wanting to take advantage of her willingness: gay or dead.

She checked herself in the mirror. Not that it mattered. She would be bundled in a heavy coat when she went outside. And she didn’t know anyone in Brooklyn, anyway.

Mirror Connie looked pretty damn good. She pouted, then puckered up and blew herself a kiss. And then felt like a stupid little girl.

Had she been unfair to Jazz the night before? Was she still being unfair to him? He’d made it pretty clear that he wasn’t ready for the big step to Real Sex. What kind of girlfriend was she if she couldn’t understand and respect that?

Then again… maybe he was the one being unfair to her. All kinds of people had traumas in their pasts. Not all of them were completely unable to connect with other people. And Jazz had proven many, many times in the past that he had no problem making out—they’d kissed, touched, probed, and groped each other in every way imaginable. He had drawn a line he refused to cross for no good reason and she was on the other side of that line, begging him to cross over.

Why couldn’t he—

And just then, the TV, burbling in the background, said her boyfriend’s name.

Connie spun around, reaching for the remote so that she could turn up the volume.

“—son of Billy Dent,” a very, very blow-dried anchorman said. “Needless to say, this news comes as something of a shock to New Yorkers, prompting questions as to the possible involvement of Billy Dent in the Hat-Dog murders.”

You moron. Hat-Dog’s been killing since before Billy broke out of jail.

“In the meantime, police sources tell WPIX that Jasper Dent will be arriving at the Seventy-sixth Precinct in Carroll Gardens soon to discuss the case. We expect a press conference with task-force commander Captain Niles Montgomery later today to brief us. We’ll have details of that press conference on our website, of course, along with a wrap-up and commentary tonight at five.”

Connie turned off the TV—news anchors had a bizarre, sing-song way of talking, a constant up-and-down of weird word emphasis that nauseated her. She could only take it for roughly the length of time it took her to get dressed each morning.

So, Jazz was safe. With the NYPD. As usual, no one could be bothered to fill her in, and she figured she wouldn’t hear from him until he was done. Odds were it would take him all day. What should she do in the meantime?

Come on, Connie. You’re in the coolest city in the world for the day.

Just then, her cell phone burbled for her attention. It was her father.

“Hi, Daddy!” she chirped, making every effort to sound like a girl who had not skipped off to New York with her boyfriend and lied about it to her parents. The only problem was that Connie didn’t know what that girl would sound like.

“Something you’d like to tell me?” her father asked without preamble or greeting. That was how her father operated: He always gave his kids an opportunity to come clean. Connie had never noticed a difference in the punishment, though, so she usually gambled on trying to get away with it.

“New York is amazing,” Connie effused, trying for “breathless and overwhelmed.” “Last night we went to Rockefeller Center, which is so much cooler than on TV—”

“I was reading the paper today, and guess what it says?”

“Well,” Connie said, “I bet it doesn’t say anything about the awesome Chinese food I had for dinner last night.”

“It says that Jasper is in New York. Right now.”

Ouch. Of course. That made sense. The news probably leaked from Lobo’s Nod to New York, not the other way around. “Really?” She aimed for surprised, but came closer to “oh, busted.” Cleared her throat for a second try. “Really? That’s a weird coincidence.”

“I’m sure,” her father said drily. “And right now, you’re where?”

“At Larissa’s place.”

“Let me talk to her, then.”

Double ouch.

“She’s in the shower.”

“I can wait.”

“Dad…”

“Seriously. I have all kinds of rollover minutes. I can wait.”

Damn.

“Okay, Dad. I’m not with Larissa. I’m at a hotel in Brooklyn.”

“With him.” Her father’s anger was palpable, even over the phone.

“No. I’m not with him. Honest.” It wasn’t a lie. Present tense was your friend when it came to lying.

“Do you really think I’m going to believe anything you tell me? This isn’t like you got caught doing something and lied to avoid punishment, Conscience. This was premeditated. You set this up. You set me up. You planned this and then you executed your plan, a plan based on deception and dishonesty. So explain to me why I should believe anything you say. Go on. Explain.”

“Because I’m telling the truth. He’s not here. He’s with the police.”

“That’s where he belongs.”

Connie considered explaining that Jazz wasn’t under arrest—not really—but figured she’d just let it go. “Dad, the whole reason we’re here—”

“The paper says—”

“It’s Doug Weathers, Dad. Jesus, you can’t believe anything that guy—”

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, Conscience. You’re in enough trouble with me as it is already. And I don’t care why you’re there. What I care about is this: My child lied to me, deceived me, in order to run away with her boyfriend. That’s what I care about. I want you home five minutes ago, do you understand?”

“I can’t—I have a plane ticket. I won’t be home for—”

“Give me your confirmation number. I’ll call the airline and see about getting it changed.”

“But, Dad—”

“What? What are you going to say? Are you going to tell me that this is unfair? That I’m inconveniencing you? That you can be trusted to handle this yourself?”

She’d been planning on saying pretty much all of that.

“Well, let me tell you something.” The rage in her father’s voice had grown more and more potent as he spoke, as though each word stoked a fire in his heart. “Let me tell you something: Fairness is for people who don’t lie. Convenience is for people who don’t lie. And trust is sure as hell for people who don’t lie.”

Connie dropped onto the bed Jazz had slept in. “I’m seventeen,” she said quietly. “You can’t control me for—”

“I can control you for five more months. And if it means protecting you from the world and that boy and yourself, I will damn sure control you right up to midnight on your birthday. Do you understand?”

She turned to her left. Cheek to Jazz’s pillow. She could smell him. Not his deodorant or his shampoo—him. The pure, unadulterated scent of him.

“I love him, Daddy.” The simple, unvarnished truth.

“I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you to hear that I. Don’t. Care.”

There was nothing else she could do. Her father wouldn’t be persuaded by logic and he wouldn’t be persuaded by love. At least she’d tried.

Connie surrendered. She gave her father the confirmation number.