“It’s my uncle,” Jazz said in a hoarse whisper, and then leaned his forehead against the glass, as if he needed the support.
Uncle. Not mother or father or brother or sister. Immediate family was expected. Con men knew that people had an emotional response to immediate family, so they cornerstoned their lies on the nuclear family. A good security guard would be wary of such a ploy. Jazz didn’t know if this guard was any good—he suspected not—but as Billy said, Assume every damn cop in the world is Sherlock Holmes and you’ll never do anything stupid.
“Look, I know you can’t help me,” Jazz said with quiet fierceness. “I know that. But will you at least listen to me? And then maybe you can tell me what to do next?” Now making his voice tremulous, bordering on querulous.
“I can’t do anything for you,” the guard said. “You need a passcode or a receipt to get in.” But his voice had changed, just slightly. There was the smallest bit of curiosity in it now. A tiny rip in the fabric.
“My uncle,” Jazz said. “Look, he’s dead, which doesn’t matter because he was sort of a jerk, okay?” Another switch-up. The guard was expecting a sob story. Oh, my beloved uncle is dead and he always wanted me to have his collection of rare Portuguese pencil erasers! Please, sir, let me in! “No one liked him. He was a tool. But the problem is that he had this rare comic book collection, see? And my mom is on her way here right now to get it.” Now he’d brought the mom in—the guard would be tracking back to caution, so Jazz had to move quickly, establish the lie, the narrative.
“She’s a drunk,” Jazz said. He was thinking “junkie” originally, but for some reason drunk seemed to work better. It was less dramatic and so more believable. “And if she gets here and gets those comics, she’s just gonna sell ’em for a bunch of money and buy more booze.”
“So I let you in and you’re gonna save your mother from herself, is that it?” Sarcastic. Incredulous.
“I just want to change the lock,” Jazz said. He held up a key and a small padlock, bought not long ago at the hardware store. “There’s like two thousand comic books in there. There’s no way I could haul them out. And hell, the rain would ruin ’em. I just want to change the lock so that she can’t get in. And then maybe my sister and I can get her back to the treatment place next week and we can deal with all of this later. I’m just trying to buy some time, you know?”
The guard snorted. “And maybe cherry-pick the most valuable comics while you’re in there?”
“I wouldn’t know which ones to take,” Jazz said, with complete earnestness. “You can come with me if you want. Come watch. I’m just gonna swap one lock”—he held up the key—“for another.” He held up the padlock. “It’ll take five minutes.”
The guard hesitated. “I can’t leave my desk.” Relief. He doesn’t have to make a personal choice—he can just fall back on the rules.
They follow their rules. They worship their rules, Billy said. And that’s their downfall, Jasper. Because we don’t give two tugs of a dead dog’s tail about the rules.
“Then screw you!” Jazz yelled, suddenly boiling over with anger and exasperation. He leaned down to let the guard see his face for the first time, a face screwed up with pain and rage, a few hot tears wicking from the corners of his eyes. “Screw you like everyone else!”
Set them up. Let them think they know the rules of the conversation. They’re in power. You’re the supplicant. Let them think all they have to do is brush you off.
Then change it up. Suddenly. Starkly. Get them off their asses and out of their comfort zones.
He thumped the heel of his palm against the glass and then spun away from the booth, stalking off, then whirling around to scream, “It’s on you! When she’s passed out in some alley in Brighton Beach, it’s all your fault!” before walking farther into the darkness. Jazz didn’t know where or what Brighton Beach was, but he’d heard someone on the task force mention it.
“Hey! Kid!” the guard shouted, his voice different now. Bewildered. Maybe a bit hurt. No one likes to be yelled at. Especially by someone who mere moments ago had been so pliable and pitiable.
Jazz spun around again and shot the double-bird at the guard. It was a calculated risk. But usually someone who’s trying to con you won’t flip you off. Not on a conscious level, but somewhere beneath that, the guard would now actually be a little more inclined to believe Jazz.
“Kid!” the guard shouted again, now just a tiny bit desperate. Jazz took two more steps into the darkness, then stopped. He waited a moment, then turned around, assessing the distance to the guard as though it were laced with acid pits and vipers.
“What?” he shouted back, aggressive. Accusatory.
Even from here, he could detect the slump of the guard’s shoulders, the sense of defeat.
“Don’t steal anything!”
And the gate rumbled as it slid open.
Jazz resisted the urge to fist-pump, and instead acted like a kid who’d just been given a way to help his drunk mom. He tossed a “thank you!” over his shoulder as he ran through the widening gap in the fence.
A moment later, the gate clanked and cranked shut behind him. Jazz stood for a moment, catching his breath. He was aware of a box to his left and a camera up high watching the gate, and him. A map of the facility was mounted on a nearby wall, and he pretended to study it, as though unsure of where to go next. As long as the guard could watch him on the camera, he couldn’t do anything too overt, but while arguing with the guard, Jazz had surreptitiously examined the monitor setup. As best he could tell, there were four screens available at any one moment in time, cycling through a variety of cameras. As long as he was careful to keep out of the camera’s range as much as possible, he should be okay.
He stepped under the camera and quickly called Morales, telling her what to do. A few moments later, she pulled up to the gate, her engine loud, distracting the guard, who would be watching as she stretched through her window for the keypad. Couldn’t make it. She’d pulled in too far away.
With exaggerated exasperation, she climbed out of the car and walked to the keypad. She had already removed her jacket and guns. Her shirt—now wet—clung to her, all but guaranteeing that the guard would watch her, not his monitors.
Jazz darted into the camera’s view for a moment, triggering the motion sensor that opened the gate from this side. As the gate cranked open, he kept running, into the shadows where he couldn’t be seen.
Morales pulled in and the gate closed behind her.
They were in.
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.”