Game (3 page)

“So I move the birdbath and somewhere in the world, Billy’s lunatic confederate sees the Bat-signal and realizes it’s time to spring his Lord and Master from Wammaket. Next thing you know, there are dead guards—”

“Corrections officers,” G. William emended.

“Corrections officers, right, and Billy is in the wind.”

Billy’s escape gnawed at him with rat teeth. Obviously, he would rather Dear Old Dad stay behind bars, leaving Wammaket only when zipped up into a nice little body bag all his own. But Melissa… and the deaths of the COs… ah, now those chewed at him with saber-tooth fangs. Was
he
responsible for their deaths? In a manner of speaking, sure—he had set in motion the events leading to Billy’s escape, and the COs and Melissa had died as a result of that escape. But Jazz himself hadn’t killed them. The corrections officers had died during a mini-riot that covered Billy as he broke out of the infirmary and made his way outside. And Melissa had died ugly, at Billy’s own hand. Even if Jazz had known that moving the birdbath would mean Billy’s escape, could he reasonably have assumed people would die in the process?

He didn’t know. That didn’t stop him from feeling guilt, though.

Unless it wasn’t really guilt.

They got all these emotions
, Billy had told him once.
Things like love and fear and compassion and regret. They got ’em deep inside, all twisty and tight like a knot of living
snakes. They think they’re in control of themselves, but they really just do what the snakes tell them.

“They,” of course, were ordinary people. Sheep. Potential victims.
Prospects
was the word Billy used to describe them. And their emotions? Well, those things were useless for people like Billy, but it was important to know how to fake them.

Is that what I’m doing?
Jazz wondered.
I know I
should
feel guilty for getting those people killed. And Billy spent my whole life teaching me how to pretend to feel things I wasn’t really feeling. Am I just fooling myself? Am I just acting guilty because that’s how I’m supposed to act? What is it really supposed to feel like?

Maybe Connie would know. Maybe Connie could describe it to him. Help him understand.

Maybe.

Almost against his will, he had shared more with Connie than he’d ever intended. He’d told her about the dreams, for example, the dreams in which he held a knife and cut… something. Or someone. He didn’t know for sure. He’d wondered for the longest time who he’d been cutting in the dream. Maybe it was his mother, he’d wondered. Maybe he had killed her….

But the last time he’d seen Billy, his father had seemed to deny that, saying that Jazz was a killer… just one who hadn’t killed yet. It was typical Billy double-talk, the kind of stuff Billy had said all of Jazz’s life, words defined and redefined and misdefined to break down Jazz’s natural inhibitions.
People out there ain’t real
, Billy would say.
They ain’t really real, not real like you’re real or I’m real. They’re real in
their own false way. They think they’re real, but they only get to think it because we let them, you see?

Classic brainwashing tactics. Cults used them. Heck, most established religions did, too. The human mind was a horribly fragile thing—breaking it and reassembling it in a new order was so easy it was depressing.

People are real
, Jazz told himself, repeating his mantra.
People matter.

In the dream, though, nothing mattered. Nothing, that is, except for bringing down the knife, his father’s voice urgent, the knife meeting the flesh… then parting it…

That dream was bad enough. But the new one… the one that had started the very night Billy escaped, the night Jazz met and defeated the Impressionist…

—touch
—

—his hand runs up
—

Oh, yes, you know
—

—touching
—

—you know how to
—

The doorbell rang. Thank God.

Jazz got to the door before Gramma could, calming her as he cut through the parlor. “It’s just the doorbell,” he told her.

“Air raid!” Gramma screamed. “Air raid! Commie missiles!”

“Doorbell,” Jazz assured her. “Look—Bowflex on TV!”

Gramma swiveled and hitched in a breath at the sight of
an oiled bodybuilder doing bench presses. “Muscles!” she shouted, and clapped like a little girl.

Jazz peered through the small window next to the door and heaved a sigh of relief that Gramma hadn’t made it to the door first—the man on the porch was black, and Gramma’s notion of racial tolerance hadn’t evolved past the late forties. The
eighteen
-forties.

The man was unfamiliar, but Jazz recognized the stance, the poise. Not a reporter, thank God. The guy was a cop of some variety. Maybe even an FBI agent. In any event, it was no one Jazz wanted to talk to. He would have to shoo the guy off—if he just ignored him, he would ring the bell again and set Gramma off.

So he opened the door a crack and focused his sternest gaze out onto the porch. “We gave at the office. I don’t like Girl Scout cookies. No, I would not like a copy of
The Watchtower
—we’re Buddhist. Thanks and bye.”

Before he could get the door closed, though, the cop moved with practiced ease and jammed his toe in the gap. “You don’t work at an office. You were raised Lutheran. And what on earth do you have against Thin Mints?”

Jazz pushed against the door. Nothing doing. The cop was wearing steel-toed boots; he could stand there all day. “You caught me. I just don’t like cops.”

“Neither do I,” the man said with forced joviality. “Come on, kid.” His voice became suddenly earnest, almost pleading. “Give me five minutes. I promise I’ll leave you alone after that.”

“Last person I opened this door for turned out to be doing
his best impersonation of my father. You understand why I’m hesitant.”

The man flipped open a small leather folder to reveal his badge. “I came all the way from New York to see you. Should be, like, a two-hour flight, but the department’s so damn cheap, would you believe I had to make
two
connections? Took more like five hours. Plus, I had to rent a car. And I
hate
driving like you hate your pops. Five minutes. I swear on my badge.”

Jazz scrutinized the badge. Looked authentic, as best he could tell. He’d never seen an actual NYPD badge, but he knew the basics. The ID card next to it had a lousy photo of the man on the porch, along with his name and rank:
LOUIS L. HUGHES, DET. 2ND/GRADE. NYPD. BROOKLYN SOUTH. HOMICIDE DIVISION.

Despite himself, he was intrigued. New York. A New York cop. What could he—

Ah. Ah
, he got it.

“This is about Hat-Dog, isn’t it?”

“Five minutes. That’s all.”

That toe wasn’t going anywhere, and as long as it stayed, Hughes would stay, too. Jazz sighed and opened the door. Before Hughes could step in, Jazz pushed him back and joined him on the porch, closing the door behind.

“It’s getting cold out here,” Hughes complained.

“I would invite you in, but my grandmother is an insane racist.”

A snort. “As opposed to all those nice,
sane
racists out there?”

Jazz folded his arms over his chest. “Your five minutes
started thirty seconds ago. We can talk about the historic injustices that continue to be visited upon the African American community to this day, or you can talk about Hat-Dog.”

Hughes nodded. “What do you know already?”

Jazz shrugged. “Just what’s been on the news. Which means probably less than anything real or relevant.” They shared a grimace of disdain for the media. “First killing was about seven months ago. There’ve been a total of fourteen so far. Most in Brooklyn. All show signs of a mixed organization killer—he’s good at covering his tracks, but he goes buck wild on the bodies. Lots of mutilation. Maiming. Details withheld by the police ‘to weed out possible false leads.’ ” Jazz thought for a moment. “I bet he’s started disemboweling them, right?”

Hughes did a good job covering his surprise, but not so good that Jazz couldn’t tell. “Yeah. How did you know that? That’s one of the things we kept out of the news.”

“Reading between the lines. There was a quote in one news story from the medical examiner, talking about ‘a real mess.’ And in the background of one of the pictures in the paper, you can see a CSI with a covered bucket. I played the odds.”

Hughes pressed his lips together. “Not bad. Yeah, he’s started disemboweling them.”

“And his deal is he marks them, right? Didn’t I read that? Some of them with a hat, some with a dog? Cuts it into them.”

“Yeah. There’s no pattern to that. At first we thought he was alternating, or marking the women with hats and the men with dogs. That would fit a certain sort of pathology.
But then we got a dog on a woman. Then two hats in a row. And a hat on a man. And then another couple of hats in a row. There’s no pattern to it.”

“There’s a pattern to it,” Jazz said. “It’s just not one that you can see.”

“And you can?”

“I didn’t say that. It makes sense to
him
, though.”

“I know,” Hughes said testily. “I’m not right out of the academy. In this guy’s head, the most sensible thing in the world is to grab up people and torture them and kill them and carve hats and dogs on them. I get it.”

Jazz looked at his watch. “There’s your five. I hope it was worth it.”

“Wait!” Hughes threw out a beefy arm, blocking the front door. “Look, I didn’t come here to gab with you on your front porch. I need—we, that is. We need your help.”

Jazz laughed. “My help? What, because I caught the Impressionist? That was sort of a special circumstance.”

“Oh? How so?”

“He was imitating my father. He was practically killing people in my backyard.”

“I get it—so you only take the easy ones. And the people of New York just don’t count. They might as well not be real to you.”

People are real. People matter.

Words to live by, for Jazz. He had no other choice—the moment he stopped believing that (and it would be depressingly easy to do so, he feared) would be the moment he turned into his father.

But, yeah, people were real and people mattered, but Jazz couldn’t save them all. Flush off his success of capturing the Impressionist, he’d gone and tattooed
I HUNT KILLERS
in gigantic black Gothic letters on his chest. A new mantra, this one inked directly into flesh so that he couldn’t forget.

But in the months since the Impressionist’s arrest, Jazz had hunted nothing more than his own self-doubt. Sure, “I hunt killers”
sounded
great and made for a nice little slogan, but at the end of the day, he was still seventeen. Still dealing with his disintegrating grandmother and her dilapidated house. Still trying to get through school. To figure out what the hell he would do when he graduated. The million mundane details of everyday life had made him feel old before his time, as though the promise of that tattoo had begun to fade the instant the ink dried. Maybe even while it was still wet.

Jazz sighed and watched his breath drift off and dissipate. “Look, Detective Hughes. I got… I got lucky. Once. I’m sure you guys are doing the best you can. You have the FBI and all the resources of the NYPD. I’m not going to be much more help.”

“I disagree.” Hughes leaned in close, his eyes wide and insistent. “You understand these guys, don’t you? You have a lifetime’s experience with them, in a way even the best, most dedicated profiler can’t understand. All we can do is ask them questions after the fact. And who knows if they tell us the truth, or how much of the truth they bother with?

“You’re different. You grew up with him. While he was still hunting. And he told you everything, didn’t he?”

“Prospecting…” Jazz whispered before he could stop himself.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“You said ‘prospecting.’ Is that what your dad called it?”

“I said it’s nothing.” Jazz shoved Hughes’s arm away from the door. “I can’t help you. I’m seventeen, man. I’ve got school starting up in a few days.”

“So? I’ll write you a note. I write good notes.” Hughes grinned, his teeth huge and almost predatory. “Look, it’ll just be a couple of days. You come up, you look at some of the case files. Go to some of the crime scenes and work your mojo.” Hughes waved his hands like a magician. “You’re back before Christmas break is over. Maybe you miss one day of school. I will seriously write you a note, on NYPD letterhead and everything. I’ll get the commissioner to sign it. The mayor. You can eBay it when he runs for president someday.”

“I’m really sorry,” Jazz said, and even though he wasn’t all that sorry, it was no big trick to make Hughes think he was. The word
sorry
had magical properties. Say it with the right intonation and downcast eyes, and people will always believe it.

“My card,” Hughes said, believing. “In case you change your mind.”

Jazz tucked the card into his pocket without looking at it. “I won’t,” he said, and went inside.

Touch me