Blood of My Blood (18 page)

Howie opened his eyes to the familiar, glorious sight of the delectable Uma Thurman, gazing saucily down at him from his ceiling. It was his own personal collage of Ms. Thurman, culled from photos discovered online, strategically covering most of the space above his bed.

Uma was tall. Howie, being of basketball-ish mien himself, adored tall women. Especially tall women with lots of pictures online. Especially tall women who, in pursuit of their art, had gone nude in something like a half dozen movies.

Howie loved women who pursued their art. It was a small thing, sure, but it made Howie happy.

Howie’s head throbbed as he swung his ridiculously long legs out of bed. The painkillers were wearing off, as was the nice dose of lidocaine Dr. Mogelof had injected into his scalp. He would have a scar, he was sure. Maybe more than one. To go with the scar on his midsection after the Impressionist had cut him open a few months back.

Maybe Mom was right. Maybe hanging around with “that Dent boy” would kill him.

Oh, well. Everyone had to go sometime, right?

For now, though, he had one more in an endless string of favors to execute for Jazz. Howie wrapped himself in a megasized robe and crept into the hallway. He called out for a parental unit—just in case—and received no reply. Good. He was home alone.

Mom and Dad’s bed was unmade when he stole into their room. He tried their en suite bathroom first. Medicine cabinet. Duh. Where else do you look for medicine? But other than Mom’s Xanax—the extra-large, economy-sized prescription—and Dad’s blood pressure meds, he came up empty. So he rummaged around in the cabinet under the sink, pretending not to see the boxes of tampons and maxipads and failing.
Great Zeus, how many of these things does one woman
need
? It’s like her own personal feminine hygiene aisle under here
.

He recovered some old cold medicine and a half bottle of cough syrup, but not what Jazz needed.

I’m going to need some stuff
, Jazz had said the night before.

Of course you are. You always need something
.

Painkillers would be nice—

Got ’em. In spades. Dr. Mogelof was very generous with my prescription. She underestimates my manly ability to shrug off pain that would kill lesser mortals
.

But what I really need are antibiotics
.

And I’m supposed to procure these how? My street dealer only has meth and crack
.

Don’t be an idiot. Your mother hoards meds. You know it. I know it. She’s been doing it since we were kids. “Just in case.” I’m willing to bet she has a course of penicillin or a Z-pak stashed away somewhere. And I’m gonna need it, or my leg is going to blow up like a microwaved sausage
.

With that disgusting image fully implanted in his psyche, Howie scrounged deeper into the darkest, cobwebbiest corners under the sink. He found an old blister pack of allergy medicine and several used-up toilet paper tubes, but nothing else.

Great
.

Jazz was right, though. Duh. When it came to reading people and remembering things and drawing inferences from those two data points, Jazz was pretty much unparalleled. He knew when the pop quizzes were coming in school, based on how tired a teacher looked the day before. He knew how to avoid getting caught in the halls based on the bell schedule. And he knew that Howie’s mom worried obsessively about a medical emergency striking her genetic freak of a son at any moment, so she often talked Howie’s doctors into writing an extra script or two here and there.

Where did she keep the stuff, though?

As distasteful as it was, Howie realized he would need to prowl the dark and nameless tracts of his parents’ nightstands.

“Here there be dragons,” he muttered as he went back into the bedroom. Dad’s side of the bed was closest, so Howie cursorily examined the disarrayed jumble atop the nightstand—mystery novel,
Sports Illustrated
, iPad, iPhone dock—then delved into the drawers themselves.

To his massive, undying chagrin, he found a tube of
“personal lubricant” that was a little less than half-full. Howie tried not to imagine how many parental sex sessions that meant. He pawed around, finding only stray business cards, some more paperback novels, and Dad’s collection of eyedrops. The man was petrified of dry eyes, apparently.

Mom’s nightstand was neat and orderly, with a stack of magazines squared to the perpendicular edges of the surface. Her alarm clock stood at a perfect right angle to the stack, positioned precisely in the cone of light thrown by her reading lamp. She needed to unclench something fierce.

Exploring within, he groaned at the sight of a pack of birth control pills.
Come
on
!
he mentally upbraided the universe.
Stop throwing this stuff in my face! Parentals shouldn’t be going at it. Especially when I can’t
.

Another tube of “personal lubricant,” this one a bright purple that somehow made it worse. But underneath a copy of
Women’s Running
, he hit pay dirt: a neatly organized (of course) tray, with a variety of amber prescription bottles, all made out in Howie’s name. Howie grinned and began pawing through them.

Erickson had been standing guard outside Clara Dent’s hospital room off and on ever since the old lady had been brought in. When he’d moved to Lobo’s Nod back in October, he’d never imagined himself getting caught up in any of the Dent family nonsense. “That stuff ended years ago,” he’d confidently told family and friends. Lobo’s Nod had returned to its status quo ante, just another sleepy little burg in a sleepy little county, with the benefit of a terrific sheriff to learn from, a sheriff most likely ready to retire in a few years. The perfect place for a guy like Erickson to spend a couple of years, learning from and impressing the boss at the same time. And then, when the big man retired, well, who knew? Sheriff Erickson? Why not? Sheriff of a sleepy little burg in a sleepy little county.

Ha! Within days of signing on at the Nod, Erickson had witnessed a naked dead girl in a field, fingers chopped off. He’d caught Jasper Dent skulking around the morgue, slapped cuffs on the kid
twice
, been suspected of being a serial killer,
and gotten caught up in the hunt for the real killer.… If Lobo’s Nod was sleepy, it was the fitful sleep of a colicky baby.

And now he was guarding the mother of the most notorious serial killer in the world. The hits, as Erickson’s mom loved to say, just kept a-comin’.

The guard duty wasn’t that bad, honestly. It was just boring. He relieved the previous guard, radioed to the office that he was on-site, and then commenced eight hours of sitting on his ass, playing with his phone. Food was brought to him, and when he had to take a piss, a hospital security guard would spell him for five minutes.

Did G. William
really
think Billy Dent would try to contact his mother? Erickson had enormous respect for the big man, but he thought in this instance, the sheriff might be a few clams short of a chowder. Crazy was crazy, sure, but walking into a hospital in the town where everyone knew your face was just idiotic.

Shortly after he settled in for his latest shift, a nurse came by for the old lady’s usual vitals check. They did this every couple of hours. As best Erickson could glean, Mrs. Dent was in a “light coma” due to the twin traumas of a mild heart attack and a serious concussion. Separately, either one would have laid her up for a while—coming one right after the other as they had, she wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon. The docs were pretty confident she would recover; they just weren’t sure exactly when.

The nurse grinned at Erickson. He tipped his hat and said, “Evenin’, ma’am,” just like a cowboy hero. She ate it up, her
grin widening. “I thought you were a deputy,” she teased, “but you sound more like a marshal.”

She was young—midtwenties maybe, a little younger than Erickson—and pretty, even in her shapeless scrubs. Glossy black hair and pale green eyes that made Erickson think of sour green-apple Life Savers. In the best, sexiest way possible, of course. Erickson surreptitiously admired the toss of her hips and the sway of her ass as she went into Mrs. Dent’s room.

If life were a movie, Erickson realized this would be the moment when he would turn back to the hallway and—violin sting!—Billy Dent would be standing there, bigger than life and ten times as crazy.

But life was life, not a movie, and the hallway was empty but for a couple of doctors.

When the nurse emerged, Erickson flashed her a smile. He considered the hat tip again but figured it would seem tired already. He settled on asking, “How is she?”

The nurse glanced around. “I’m really not supposed to tell you. But…” She bit her bottom lip very fetchingly. “She’s stable. BP isn’t bad. About as good as can be expected. She came in breathing on her own, so that’s good. And I’ve been monitoring her from the nurses’ station. She’s pretty stable. The doctors will know more later.”

“I guess that’s the best news we can expect, huh?”

With a nod, the nurse headed off, but not before flashing a very winning, very welcoming smile at Erickson. He basked in the glow of that smile for a few minutes, calculating his chances and his next reasonable move. Soon his curiosity got
the better of him. He’d been guarding this woman for days, and he had no idea what she even looked like. He stood and stretched. No one was around, so he opened the door and poked his head in. A little peek wouldn’t hurt.

From his vantage point at the door, he could barely make out the shape of her on the bed. The lights were out, except for a dim bar mounted above her. Tubes, wires, and cables ran to her from machines and IV stands arrayed around her. It was like watching a car in the shop, hooked up to all manner of monitoring gear. The heart monitor beeped steadily along, and her chest rose and fell in a shallow but reliable rhythm.

If I ever get that old and that bad
, Erickson thought,
someone pull the plug
.

About a half hour later, a second nurse stopped by. This one was older, midforties, with her hair tied back in a severe bun and bright red, chunky glasses that he couldn’t stop staring at. Nice enough–looking woman, but Erickson wasn’t interested in cougars. Still, he stopped her before she could go in—not for conversation, but just to let her know that Mrs. Dent had already been looked in on, just a half hour ago.

“Young pretty thing?” The nurse rolled her eyes when Erickson nodded. “God, these girls right out of school… She used the wrong solution.” She held up an IV bag. “Maybe someday she’ll learn the difference between point zero five percent and five percent.”

Erickson wanted to leap to the nameless young nurse’s defense, but he really had nothing to say. He shrugged and let her through.

In the hospital room, the nurse paused for a moment at the door, waiting to see if the deputy would look in. She gave him only a few seconds. Any longer would be foolish.

Dropping the IV bag in the trash, she went to the bedside and looked down at the patient. She had always been withered and wasted, but in the hospital bed, she took on the appearance of a cadaver, one that hadn’t realized it was time to stop breathing.

“Hello, Mom,” the nurse whispered.

She didn’t expect a response and, indeed, got none.

“Good-bye, Mom,” she said, and withdrew a needle from her pocket. She emptied its contents into the IV line through the port, slid the needle through the slot on the sharps container, and walked out of the room, not bothering to speak to or even look at the deputy as she went.

They stopped somewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania for fuel, both for the rig and for themselves. Jazz delved into Hughes’s wallet and treated Marta to lunch—it was the least he could do, even though it reduced his funds to the depressingly low level of a single twenty and two ones. He couldn’t risk using Culpepper’s or Hughes’s credit cards or debit cards; they would be monitored and give away his location. He cursed himself for not maxing out the ATM cards in New York. There’d been a machine at the bar where he’d met Culpepper. NYPD wouldn’t have known about Culpepper until hours later, so it would have been a risk worth taking. Stupid. Stupid, amateur mistake.

There was no TV in the tiny diner where they’d stopped. Tiny miracles, making life just a wee bit easier every day. He hoped his luck would hold out.

While Marta used the restroom, he—as promised—hosed his vomit off the truck. It wasn’t the most pleasant
task, but it had the advantage of being repetitive and brainless, allowing his mind to wander.

He kept coming back to the birth certificate.

Howie had texted it to him before he’d broken out of the hospital, and he’d looked at it several times before dropping his phone on Mark Culpepper in that bar bathroom. It looked legit to him. It had to be legit, right? Why would anyone bury a fake birth certificate in his backyard?

Anyone
meaning Billy, of course. He was the only one who could have done it, would have done it. After Mom had escaped the Dent house, Billy had sent her straight into the memory hole, scouring the house for anything reminiscent of her—clothes, books, magazines, photos, the box of tampons under the sink, everything. Jazz had come from school one day, and Mom was just
gone
. Eradicated from the Dent house. No matter what he asked Billy or how he asked, no matter how he begged, pleaded, or importuned, Billy would not speak of her, and soon enough Jazz learned to go about his day as Billy did, pretending Mom had never existed. If not for the wallet-sized photo of her he’d luckily had in his backpack that day, he might have come to believe that, in fact, she never had existed, that he had been born of no woman, had sprung fully formed from Billy’s fevered brow like a prepubescent Athena.

Billy must have buried the birth certificate, the crow toy, and the pictures at the same time. Why? Why not destroy it all?

The birth certificate had haunted Jazz at first. Initially, he’d been obsessed with—maybe “possessed by” was more
accurate—the notion that he might not be Billy’s son. He’d pondered the multitudinous possibilities of his parenthood. If Billy wasn’t his father, then who was? One of Billy’s victims? Some boyfriend or one-night stand of Mom’s?

The more he thought about the birth certificate, the more he came to understand that while it held many potentialities, in the end only one mattered. He knew exactly what the birth certificate meant.

“Looks good,” Marta said, coming up behind him. “You ready?”

Jazz throttled the hose and beheld his handiwork. Marta’s rig glistened, nary a trace of puke to be found.

“Yep. Let’s go.”

Driving straight through from the New Jersey rest stop to Lobo’s Nod would have taken less than fifteen hours, by Jazz’s calculations. Marta was by all accounts addicted to a particular brand of energy booster that came in tiny, shot glass–sized bottles. She slammed them back with a ferocity and frequency that made Jazz fear for the disposition of her heart. Still, even she wasn’t about to drive straight through.

Her route, as best he could tell, would take him to within a couple of hours of the Nod, along I-40. He wouldn’t ask her to take him straight to the Nod; he couldn’t. It was risky enough having her see his face. He couldn’t further risk having her remember by name the one place in the world
irrevocably associated with the Dent family. He could picture the interrogation already:
The kid who hitched? Yeah, I guess he looked like this Jasper Dent kid. Dropped him off at a place called Lobo’s Nod
. And boom. The police, the FBI, the press—they all instantly knew everything they need to know.

Near the Kentucky border, Marta finally hit her limit. Either that, or she ran out of energy shots. One way or the other, she pulled over on the highway and announced that she needed a few hours’ shut-eye. She climbed into the berth behind the seat and curled up, but not before showing Jazz the pistol under her pillow. “You seem like a nice kid and I hate to do this, but if you try something, you should know that I’m a crack shot.”

Jazz had merely nodded. The gun didn’t scare him. Taking a gun away from a sleeping or half-asleep woman was child’s play. He had no intention of harming Marta, anyway, so it was a moot point. He huddled in the passenger seat, nearly vibrating with anticipation and annoyance. Why couldn’t she have bought more energy shots when they’d stopped? Why did they have to stop? He was a fugitive. By definition, he was on the run. “On the run” did not include parking on the side of the highway, waiting for some distressingly dedicated Kentucky state trooper to decide to take a look-see inside the cab of the big rig resting on the shoulder. Peering through the window and—hey, that’s the kid on TV!

Then Jasper would have no choice but to fight again. And now he knew that Marta had a gun. It would be difficult
not
to go for it, when cornered.

I won’t let it get that far
.

It’s already gone that far
, Billy said.
You choked Hughes. You knocked out that girl cop. You beat up a drunk man in a bathroom. Violence suits you
.

Exigent circumstances
.

Life is an exigent circumstance, Jasper
.

Shut up
.

He couldn’t help remembering what Billy had said to him back at Wammaket:
Want to know the difference between good and evil, Jasper?
And then Billy had snapped his fingers.
That’s it, kid. That’s the difference. You won’t even know you’ve crossed the line until it’s way back in your rearview mirror
.

And now:
You crossed a whole lot of lines today. Got some momentum going. Not many more to cross. Pretty much just the big one
.

You’re right, Billy. I’m a violent thug. Always have been. Held back until now. But you’ve proven yourself right. You told me back at Wammaket: I’m a killer who hasn’t killed yet. But that will change when I see you
.

I look forward to it. Who knows? Maybe you actually
will
kill me. That would be sad for me, but good, too. Because then the beast is loose. The god within you is loose. And your next victim is your mother. And then your girlfriend. And then you and Ugly J can walk this world together. Crows
.

He slapped himself, both to silence the voices and to keep himself awake. No matter what happened, he did
not
want to sleep. Not again. No matter how tired he got. Sleep meant
dreams and the dream.… His stomach turned in on itself at the thought of the sex dream. Now that he knew his tango partner, he had no desire to relive the dance. He feared dreaming further details, and he didn’t want to know how far he’d gone with his aunt as a child.

Female serial killers rarely committed sexual homicide. Their motivations were typically fear or compassion or greed. Black widows and angels of mercy. They preyed on the weak, the elderly, children. Lacking the physical strength of men, most of them worked in teams. Support staff for a male murderer. Billy’s personal, handpicked handmaiden of slaughter. His own sister.

Best of all, they avoided capture for so long because no one ever suspected them. Jazz himself had never even considered the possibility that Sammy J and Billy were a team.

Fernandez and Beck… She pretended to be
his
sister in order to lure women to him for the slaughter. They died in dual electric chairs, still proclaiming their love for each other. Hindley and Brady… Two Brits in love with the Nazis. And with killing children.

How many people had Sam killed? When you added her total to Billy’s, what was the final reckoning?

And worst of all: How much of it had she
wanted
to do? Jazz knew the force of Billy’s charisma firsthand. Was Sam a willing participant in the murders?

In the things she’d done with Jazz?

Was it consensual on her part? Did Billy
make
her do it with me?

Necessary questions. Reasonable questions.

He didn’t want to come within a mile of the answers.

He wanted only two things: His mother safe. And Billy’s neck in his hands.

It was a comforting brace of thoughts. Despite himself, he drifted off to sleep.