The cell phone screen read NO SIGNAL.
Of course. He was in a massive structure of concrete and steel and aluminum, with eight stories above him. If his cell wouldn’t work in a subway, it definitely wouldn’t work here, either.
Jazz didn’t panic, but he did allow himself to scream and pound on the door and bellow for help. He did it for roughly a minute, which is a long time to scream at the top of your lungs and beat your hands against a metal door, especially when shot.
He slumped against the door, sweat-drenched. He’d used up way too much energy on that temper tantrum.
No one came.
No one would be coming. Jazz did some quick math. His most conservative estimate was that there were close to three thousand storage units in this building alone. And given the twisty, narrow corridors, with their sound-killing corners, someone would probably have to come to one of the four or five units in this stretch of hallway in order to hear him.
Odds of five out of three thousand. Not the worst odds in the world, but when would someone come to their storage unit? Jazz didn’t know what it was like in New York, but in Lobo’s Nod, people only got storage units for stuff they didn’t really need, but couldn’t be bothered to get rid of. Stuff they might someday want, but didn’t really think about all that often.
Maybe a security guard—
Yeah. Right. Jazz thought of the man he’d gulled to get in in the first place. He could picture that fat-ass taking the elevator to each floor, poking his head out, saying “Good enough,” and calling it a night.
He wondered when the smell of Dog’s body and Morales’s and his own rotting corpse would finally permeate into some part of the building where someone would notice it.
He wondered if he would bleed to death first… or freeze to death in an unheated storage unit in the middle of winter?
At least whoever Dog planned on killing tonight is safe, he thought.
And then: And Connie. At least Connie is safe.
CHAPTER 58
Someone had propped open the front door to the building tagged with her name, so Connie was able to go right in.
She had three clues to Mr. Auto-Tune already. She had a bell. A gun. She had Eliot Ness.
Somewhere in this building, there were more clues. There had to be.
Out of the cold rain, she paused for a moment to shake off the chill. A dim overhead light barely illuminated the entryway.
Now, before you go chasing waterfalls, do something smart.
She composed a quick text to Howie, sending him the address of the building. As an afterthought, she also included bell, guns, Eliot Ness? just in case it meant anything to him. She resisted the urge to send the same text to Jazz. With any luck, she would tell him all of this and more in person soon enough.
Exploring for any sort of hint as to what to do next, she noticed that there was a missing mailbox on the wall—between the little doors for 2A and 2C, there was a gap. The mailbox door had been ripped off, the space filled with trash.
No mailbox meant no one living in that apartment. Right? And what better place to hide the next clue than in an abandoned apartment.
She heaved her duffel up a flight of stairs that smelled of urine and stale beer. Something crunched underfoot at one point and it took all her willpower not to look down. She didn’t want to see. Fortunately, the lighting in the stairwell was so bad that she wouldn’t have been able to tell what it was, anyway.
The second floor was just as poorly lit. Her pounding heart warned her away, but she told herself she’d come this far. She could check out 2B and then get the hell out of here.
TV shows echoed in the hall from 2A as she walked past.
The door to 2B was closed. She turned the knob and it moved freely. Then she jerked away, thinking twice. She should knock first. Just in case.
But there could be squatters in there. Homeless people. Drug dealers.
She knocked anyway.
To her surprise, the door opened right away, and Connie’s breath fled from her.
“Well now,” Billy Dent drawled, “ain’t you just the sweetest piece of chocolate I ever seen.”
Connie didn’t even have time to gasp, much less scream.
Part Five
Game Over
CHAPTER 59
Jazz kicked off his shoes and stuck the tongue of one of them in his mouth. He needed something to bite down on as he peeled off his jeans.
His blood had matted around the wound, so pulling off his pants tugged the flesh, stretching it around the wound and causing more blood to well up. Red spots danced and capered before his eyes; he bit down hard, groaning into his own clenched teeth.
After a wave of dizziness and nausea passed—and then another… and another—he used the bright screen of his phone to examine his leg in the dark.
The bullet hole itself was almost comically small and nearly perfectly round. Let’s hear it for small calibers, he thought.
There was nothing small about the pain, though. Or the blood.
He examined his thigh carefully, probing with his fingers where he couldn’t see.
No exit wound.
The bullet was still in there.
I have to be ready…. Hat could come back. He could come back and unlock the door and shoot me dead this time….
He stripped off his shirt and tied it tightly around his thigh, covering the wound. It would have to do as a bandage for now.
Have to be ready…
He leaned against the door and managed to work himself to a standing position. He found that he could hold the slightest bit of weight on his left leg if he only used his heel, so he limped around that way, gasping a little each time that left foot touched the ground.
Hat wasn’t an idiot. For all his disinterest in Billy (and Jazz had never imagined the day when he would meet a serial killer who wasn’t afraid of Billy—what did it mean?), Hat had allowed Billy to control him for purposes of the game. And Billy had done so, willingly. Billy didn’t truck with morons. Thus and so: Hat wasn’t stupid.
Which meant that there would be absolutely nothing on Hat’s or Dog’s workbench that could help Jazz escape or signal for rescue. Hat wouldn’t have locked him in here if he’d thought for a moment that Jazz could get out. Still…
Gotta make the effort. What else am I going to go? Put my head down for a nap and just die of apathy?
“That’s not how a Crow dies,” Jazz said for no particular reason.
He used the phone’s light to make his way to Hat’s workbench. The eyeballs in the jar stared at him, bobbing gently.
Hat’s workbench also had every sort of cutting, gouging, and slicing implement known to man. It had different varieties of tape. It had ropes, and cloth for gags. A grapefruit spoon (I knew it). It had—in a drawer—a collection of pins, buttons, and bits of cloth that Jazz knew had come from Hat’s victims.
His trophies. Stuff that wouldn’t necessarily be missed. Or that could be explained away.
Billy would have… not liked but rather approved of Hat. Jazz realized now that his father had sent Hat here specifically to kill Dog. Kill him in the storage unit and leave him here. It would take months if not years for someone to find him, along with the evidence tying Belsamo and Belsamo alone to the Hat-Dog murders. The gunshot was tough to explain, of course, but he was sure that hadn’t been intended. Hat’s original plan had probably involved knocking Dog out and injecting him with something that would simulate a heart attack. Then leave him with the evidence. When he’d shot Morales, though, the plan had changed. And Hat—for all his bluster and claims to filling the Grand Canyon with the dead—didn’t have the creativity to roll with the punches.
Or maybe he just didn’t care in this instance. Billy certainly saw something in Hat, and that was enough to spike Jazz’s concern and respect for Duncan Hershey.
Billy played favorites. Or maybe he just got bored of the game. Either one makes sense.
Jazz moved slowly to the other wor
kbench. Dog’s tools were lined up neatly and precisely. His murders may have been, as Hat put it, sloppy, but his workspace, like his apartment, was pristine.
The two benches were nearly identical. Of course. In Monopoly, each player begins with the same amount of money. So Billy ruled on what tools and toys each player got at the beginning. And it guaranteed that the cops would believe it was one guy, since the brand of tape, the type of rope, the kind of blade would always be the same. Diabolical and almost admirable. In that oh-so-special sociopathic way Billy had.
A job worth doin’s a job worth doin’ well, Jasper.
There were bottles of detergent, bleach, and filtered water stacked in a corner. Jazz figured the water would keep him alive for a couple of weeks, but after that, starvation would kill him quite handily.
Assuming Hat doesn’t come back. Assuming I don’t die of blood loss. Or some kind of infection.
Leaning against the bench, Jazz winced and gasped at a new bolt of pain from his leg. He thought he might be able to get the bullet out. There was a chance. The fact that he was still thinking was a good sign. The fact that he could still breathe on his own. He wasn’t in shock after all. He was just stunned by what had happened, ramped up on insane amounts of adrenaline. And now he was coming down.
Which, oddly, made him want to sleep.
No. Don’t sleep. Right now, sleep equals death.
And if I don’t want to let it get to that point… there’s always the bleach. Drink it down and end it all on my terms.
Stop being so defeatist!
Defeatist? Try realistic. There’s nothing in here that will help me get out. No way to get through that door. No way to get through the walls. Sure as hell no way to open that lock from the inside.
You’re contemplating suicide already? You’ve been in here all of ten minutes.
He decided that the colloquy in his mind was not a good idea, so he quashed it.
Of course, these two freaks didn’t have a single narcotic or Band-Aid between them. They didn’t even have antibacterial soap. Just water and detergent and bleach.
And plenty of knives.
All right, let’s get this going.
He gathered a few things, then slid back to a sitting position at Dog’s bench, right next to the killer’s body. The angle of Dog’s shoulder made a perfect place to put his cell phone so that the light stayed pointed at his left leg, jutting stiffly out in front of him.
Let’s see what we’ve got here… blood flow is consistent, but not spurting….
Now when you go cuttin’ up legs, Billy said from somewhere in the past, you watch out for that there femoral artery up in the thigh. He’s a big sumbitch, and you so much as nick him, you’ll know it.
Thanks, Dear Old Dad. The anatomy lessons are helpful.
The fact that the blood was dark, not bright, plus the fact that it wasn’t gushing told him that the bullet had avoided the femoral and most of its bigger branches. Which was a damn good thing. The fact that he was able to move the leg at all told him that the femur was probably still intact. The bullet hadn’t shattered or cracked his bones; it was lodged somewhere in the meat of his leg.
He spilled a little bleach on the small knife he’d borrowed from Dog’s workbench. It had a vaguely medical air about it, sort of scalpel-ish, and Jazz knew that Dog had used it to make the preliminary incisions when gutting his victims. Well, if it was possible to redeem a medical instrument, he was about to try.
He hoped the bleach would kill any random germs floating around on the knife. He poured some water on his leg to clear the field of operation for himself. More blood immediately welled up from the bullet hole, but he had a better view of it now.
Okay. Okay. You can do this, Jazz. You can do this. You’ve seen this on TV. You make a—what’s it called—you make a lateral cut. You just cut right across the hole. Open things up a little ’cause you need a hole bigger than the bullet in order to find the bullet. Then you dig out the slug and you’re done. Piece of cake, right?
But first… bleach. Right on the wound. To clean it. Just to be safe.
A burst of excruciating pain that was solar in its heat and scope burst from his leg and he actually screamed out loud, “Oh, Jesus Christ!” at the top of his lungs, and wept uncontrollably. He shook, the knife vibrating in his hand, and he had to grab his left leg with his hand to keep it from jittering out of control. The pain roared through him and he sobbed without self-consciousness, cried like a little boy as the bright, hot rage of agony slowly—over an infinity, it seemed—dulled to a throbbing ache.
He wiped his eyes and used the edge of his bloody shirt to blow the snot from his nose. In the dim light of the cell phone, his leg looked grayish, with splotches of blood and what appeared to be fizzing bubbles of bleach. He splashed a little water to clear the field again, and then—before he could think about it any further—he brought the knife down on his leg and he
cutting through
Oh, no.
See, Jasper, Billy said, guiding his hand in the past, it’s just like
No. No.
His hand jerked and new pain lanced up his leg. Blood welled up in the trench he’d carved. But he was lost in his own memory, in his own past.
a knife in the sink and then
And then in my hand.
just like cutting chicken—
And it was. It was, he realized. Billy had been right, all those years ago.
knife in the sink, knife in your hand
Cutting his own flesh. Felt just like the dream and felt just like cutting chicken and
No no no no no no no
With a cry, he flung the knife away from himself; it landed in a dark corner, a ghostly clatter of chains in the haunted house the storage unit had become.
He couldn’t do it.
He couldn’t complete the cut.
Not while Billy echoed in him, laughing, encouraging.
I cut someone. As a kid. It’s not just a dream. It was never just a dream. He actually made me do it. Who? Who did I cut? What did he make me do?
He stared at his leg. Fortunately, the cut he’d made was shallow. Especially compared to the hole the bullet had punched into him.
Snap out of it, Jazz. You didn’t go into shock before. Don’t do it now.
He ripped the sleeve off his shirt and wrapped it around the bullet hole. Then, to be safe, he twined a length of duct tape over it, then again. A crude bandage, but better than nothing.
He would just have to hope that it would be good enough. That it would stem the blood loss. That infection wouldn’t set in from the bullet. That he wouldn’t lose the leg.
You’re assuming you’ll still be alive to miss it, Jasper.
Dog’s laptop bag lay on the floor next to him. Jazz went through it, finding another small knife, some rags, latex gloves… and a big butcher knife.
Come to Papa, he thought, hefting it. It felt good in his hands. If Hat came back, Jazz would at least give him a scar for his troubles.
There was no longer blood streaming down his leg, but his thigh still throbbed and complained. Jazz had checked the entire unit, but hadn’t found any sort of painkiller. He had watched Morales get ready for this little excursion into hell—he knew she didn’t have anything on her that would help. Her purse—probably stocked with all kinds of goodies—was out in the car. Might as well be on the moon.
Was there anything he’d missed? Anything in the unit that he hadn’t explored? Yeah. Yeah, there’s one thing.
Jazz turned to Dog’s body. He wasn’t squeamish about touching a dead body. He’d touched plenty of them, many in worse shape than Dog’s. Hat’s shots had left small holes in Dog’s body. Blood glistened in the light from the cell phone, no longer pumping and flowing, now tracery rivulets staining Dog’s coat and shirt. Jazz spent a moment gazing into Dog’s vacant eyes and didn’t bother closing them.
Dog had collapsed against the workbench and still leaned partly upright. Jazz eased the body onto it
s back on the floor. Rigor mortis hadn’t started yet—and even when it did in ten or fifteen minutes, it would start with the small muscles—so the body was still pliant and easy to maneuver. A slick of blood welled out from an exit wound, pumped along by the motion of the body. Jazz wrinkled his nose. It bothered him more for the mess than anything else.
Hat knew there was nothing in here that could help me escape, but he couldn’t know if Dog brought anything new in. At this point, all I’m hoping for is a friggin’ aspirin.
He frisked the body, then went pocket-diving.
Come on, Oliver. Tell me you get migraines and you carry a bottle of Advil everywhere you go.
No wallet or ID, of course. Never carry any of that nonsense when you’re prospecting, Billy had told him. You can always claim you lost it or got mugged, if you have to.
A key ring, including—Jazz surmised—the key to the padlock that locked unit 83F. Nice to have. Even nicer if he had a way to reach the lock.
Some scraps of paper, covered in illegible scrawl. No doubt Dog’s prospecting notes, scribbled down while stalking his next victim.
Really? No aspirin? Nothing? The crazy people talking in your head never give you a headache?
Last thing he found: a cell phone.
A phone with as much signal strength as Jazz’s, which was to say none.
Jazz sat on the cold concrete floor, his back against Dog’s workbench. He propped his leg up on Dog’s corpse, keeping it elevated in an effort to prevent further blood loss.
There was nothing here and no way out and no way to stop the insistent, persistent ache from his leg, the pain that reminded him that he could die of infection, that he could end up an amputee, that—
Stay calm. You have water. You have two cell phones now. You just doubled your time to find a signal.
Oh, let’s throw a party, then! You bring the water; I’ll bring the bleach.
He opened Dog’s cheap, disposable cell. Yeah, no signal.
But there was a little envelope icon. A message. Must have come through before Dog came inside and lost his signal.