Game (48 page)

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.

Connie’s cabbie said nothing until they pulled onto the highway.

“Good thing not a little colder,” he said abruptly. “All this be snow.” He gestured through the windshield.

Connie nodded. That would suck. Being stuck out here by the airport, waiting for plows. Ugh.

She vaguely remembered that when Hughes had driven them to Brooklyn, it had taken almost an hour, so she knew she had some time. She dug into the laptop bag and produced the Costner picture, staring at it. Costner wore a three-piece suit and pointed a gun right at her. Was that the clue? A gun in the bag and then another gun in a picture…? Both fake guns, of course… Was the Costner picture because Mr. Auto-Tune knew that Connie wanted to be an actor? And if so, what was the message? This whole scavenger hunt seemed handcrafted specifically for her, so what did two fake guns and a picture of an actor mean?

Two guns…

When in doubt, check the Internet. She Googled
two guns
, but got nothing helpful. Some kind of band, an Old West feature in Arizona, and a comic book character called “The Two-Gun Kid.” Really helpful.

Then she punched
Costner
into Google. She tapped on some of the links, skimmed his Wikipedia entry. Then, for the hell of it, she tried
Costner serial killer
.

A movie called
Mr. Brooks
came up. Connie’s eyes widened as she read the description. In the movie, Costner played a sociopath. A Billy Dent type, who went around killing people and even mentored a wannabe serial killer.

That makes some kind of sense. Is Mr. Auto-Tune the Hat-Dog Killer? Is it Billy’s new protégé?

But according to Jazz, Billy had always said that
Jazz
was his protégé.

Wait. Maybe it’s not Costner. Maybe it’s the
role
he’s playing in this picture.
She compared the image on her phone for
Mr. Brooks
to the clipping. Costner looked much younger in the clipping, at least ten or twenty years, so she went back to Wikipedia and started looking at older movies.

“Okay to take Atlantic?” the cabbie asked suddenly.

She looked up. They were stuck in traffic and had barely moved since the last time she’d paid attention, almost a half hour ago. At this rate, she would get to the hotel sometime tomorrow morning.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Connie said, returning her attention
to her phone. And then she found it. The clipping of Costner had been cut from a printout of the poster for the movie
The Untouchables.

Kevin Costner had played an FBI agent. Eliot Ness.

This was it. It had to be. It was a clue with multiple levels, designed to lead Connie to this moment, to this name. Eliot Ness. First, the image of Costner led her to
Mr. Brooks
, assuring her that she was on the right path. Then to Eliot Ness. Was there a further step? Was there something in Ness’s history? Or was Ness himself the clue?

She switched over to Google Maps and punched in
Ness
. Maybe it was a street name in New York or—

A pin dropped onto the map, spearing an intersection in Brooklyn.
Ness Paper Manufacturing
, it said.

Connie slid the map around and realized that the glowing blue dot representing her position wasn’t far from the Ness Paper pin. “Hey!” she said to the cabbie. “Can you take me to…” She glanced back down at the phone and read off the intersection.

The cabbie did another one-shoulder shrug and blurted something in Hindi. Probably telling whoever was at the other end of the Bluetooth headset that the crazy girl was changing her mind.

Shortly, the cab pulled up to the intersection. “Where?” the driver asked, and Connie realized he wanted to know which corner to drop her off at.

“Doesn’t matter. Here is fine.” She shoved some money through the little slot in the plastic shield between her and
the driver, then hauled her bags out into the cold, relentless rain. Gross.

“Hey, can you stick around for, like, two minutes?” she asked, but the driver—with that inscrutable single-shoulder shrug—just took off into the night. “Oh, terrific.”

Some people milled about under umbrellas, but the streets were almost completely empty. Connie held the laptop bag over her head and stared up at the façade of the Ness Paper building. It looked like every other random building. Nothing exotic or strange about it. There were two large truck bays, closed off with corrugated garage doors, and a flight of steps leading up to a single door illuminated by a bright cone of light from a security lamp. The place was clearly closed.

“Good job, Conscience,” she muttered. The rain chilled down to her bones and then dug deeper.

She turned, looking up and down both streets at the intersection. Cars whizzed by, but no cabs that she could see. She was just about to dig out her phone and look for the nearest subway station when she noticed it, right across the street from the Ness building.

It was just another Brooklyn tenement, notable only due to its severely ramshackle appearance. It was the sort of building they showed in movies to communicate to the audience that you were in a bad part of town, though as near as Connie could tell, this part of Brooklyn wasn’t particularly scary. The building was almost out of place here, its face scarred and pitted, then made up garishly with layers of graffiti.

Only one graffito had caught her attention, though. New,
she could tell, or at least new
er
than the rest because it overlaid them:

Almost as though she couldn’t help herself, Connie stepped off the curb and walked across the street, stepping carefully over a puddle as she went.

Jazz couldn’t move. Harsh static buzzed in his ears. A lake of blood spread along his left flank, and that entire side of his body flamed with pain. He couldn’t even tell where he’d been shot—it could have been anywhere inside the creeping red stain that stretched from his waist to mid-thigh.

Why
? he asked no one in the confines of his head.
Why?

And then another of the flat cracks dragged Jazz’s attention away from his own pain. Morales was down on the floor, still. A man crouched over her, slightly winded, and Jazz realized—they’d struggled. For the gun. The man had come up behind them. Morales hadn’t shot him. Not on purpose, at least.

“Good,” said Belsamo. “Nicely done.”

“Shut up!” the other man said, pointing Morales’s gun at him. “Shut your mouth!”

Now Dog looked just as confused as Jazz felt. The scene swam before Jazz’s vision, watery, indistinct. He wondered
if he was going to pass out and was surprised by how cleanly and clinically he could examine himself right now. Pulse racing. Skin a little cold and clammy.
Am I going into shock? Don’t go into shock, Jazz. You’re no good to anyone then.

Thank God Morales had had her backup weapon out. It was a light caliber—a nine-millimeter—not the full .40-caliber load her service weapon held. He knew he had a decent chance at surviving this gunshot wound without too much permanent damage. In most shootings, the victim did himself as much harm as the bullet, if not more: Thrashing around when shot only made you bleed more. And the shock of being shot often sent victims into cardiac arrest or caused further bleeding from an accelerated heart rate.

So when you get shot, Jazz, just fall down, nice and calm. Just keep cool.

Yeah, right.

He forced himself to draw in a long breath and then let it out slowly. Connie had once tried to teach him yoga breathing, which he’d found annoying and unnatural, but right about now, he was up for whatever would keep him alive.

Morales wasn’t moving. There was a hole in her blazer, but no blood that Jazz could see. He was pretty sure the FBI vest could stop such a small caliber even at such close range. She would have had the wind knocked out of her and would have a hell of a bruise. He’d heard of people going into cardiac arrest just from the impact, though, even with a bulletproof vest on, but Morales seemed to be breathing normally. Knocked out when she hit the floor?

A surging wave of agony suddenly crashed upward from his leg and Jazz hissed in a breath. Forget Morales for now. He was
shot
.

He tuned back into the rest of the world for a moment and realized that Belsamo and the newcomer were arguing, going back and forth as though there weren’t two wounded people and a growing puddle of blood on the floor between them. Dog’s voice was flat and affectless, as though everything outside of his own skin was merely a curiosity. The newcomer spoke with heat, anger. Passion.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Belsamo said with an almost autistic precision. “The rules clearly state that unless told to, we are not to be here at the same—”

“Shut up!” the other man shouted. “Just shut up about the rules! Do you have any idea what’s happening here? Do you? You just had to be sloppy, didn’t you? Had to leave your tributes to Ugly J everywhere. Idiot.”

Jazz’s vision began to clear, just a bit. He was almost directly between the two men, still inside unit 83F. Morales was inside, too, having been knocked into it during her tussle.

Her gun. That hand-cannon in her shoulder rig. If I can get to it
…

It was no more than a few feet to her, but right now it looked like a marathon.

Just then, the overhead light in the hallway flickered to life for the space of two or three seconds and Jazz could see the face of the man with the gun. His gut turned in on itself, writhing and twisting. He knew this man.

Duncan Hershey. The very first man the task force had interviewed based on the FBI profile. Jazz had a potent flash of watching the interrogation, of watching him drink a cup of water and surrender that same cup.

Of course. He didn’t care if we had his DNA because he knew it wouldn’t match Dog’s. Dog’s Get out of Jail Free might as well have been Hat’s, too.

“You’re the other one,” Jazz said, unable to help himself. “You’re Hat. We
had
you.”

Hershey snarled and didn’t even bother to look in Jazz’s direction as he spoke. “You had nothing. A ghost, a vapor. Nothing more. Quite possibly much less. And by the by, I’m not Hat. Not anymore. That was just my name in the game.” His lips quirked into something Jazz imagined was supposed to approximate a grin, but was more of a leer. “The game is over now. I won.”

“The game isn’t
over
,” Belsamo said again in that peculiarly emotionless voice. Still, Jazz could tell Dog was worried. “It’s still my move. I still—”

“This has nothing to
do
with you!” Hat snapped. “Don’t you get it? You were never in contention. Not really. You were just there to temper me. Anvil to my blade. Nothing more. A tool. Used. Used up. Discarded. Do you really not understand this?”

Jazz swallowed, his throat barely working. The pain from his leg—it was definitely his leg that had been hit, he knew now; all the pain radiated from his thigh—had cranked up, as if it wanted to remind him of something. The thought of moving at all terrified him.

But the gun terrified him more.

You got lucky once. Don’t push it.

You have to push it. You have to. They’re not gonna talk forever.

Hissing in a breath, he dragged himself along the floor, careful to go on his right side. Every time he moved, he jostled his left leg and it screamed at him in protest, but he bit down on his lip and refused to cry out.

Pain turns Hat on. He’s the one who liked hurting women. He likes it when people are hurt. Dog doesn’t think other people are real. They’re just toys to him. But if Hat sees I’m in pain, that’ll just get him off even more.

The pain doused his eyes with tears and his left side with napalm.

It also brought him a little closer—just a little—to Morales.

He blinked several times to clear his vision, which had gone watery again. Morales
was
breathing. He could tell. Hat had knocked her out in the struggle, was all. She was so close. Without a bullet in him, it would be nothing to dive for that gun and—

“What do you think you’re doing?” Hershey had finally turned his attention back to Jazz.

“I’m just going to check on her,” Jazz said, strong-arming his voice into a non-shaking, confident tone. Fighting the urge to whimper, to beg. “She’s FBI. You don’t want a fed’s death on your rap sheet, man. Trust me. Even Billy was never stupid enough to—”

“Oh.” Hershey blinked. “She’s still alive?” He moved the gun a bit, pulled the trigger before Jazz could even shout.