“Hells to the N-O, G-Dub. You forget—I’m a regular at Casa de Crazy. Just wanted to see how the old lady’s doing. She’s missing most of the cards in her deck, but there are times she can remember how to make a mean snickerdoodle. You don’t just give up on that shizz, Sheriff.”
Tanner’s sigh wound through the phone connection and filled the car. “Howie, I might as well… We’ve been holding this back, but the hospital’s about to make an announcement, so I might as well tell you: Mrs. Dent passed away a little while ago.”
Somehow, from the moment of G. William’s sigh, Howie had known what was coming, but even prepared, the news struck him like a semi running down roadkill. A clot blocked his throat, and he struggled to swallow past it.
It was his fault. All his fault. She’d be alive if he hadn’t gone stomping into her house with that damn useless shotgun, Bruce Willis-ing up the place in an effort to figure out whether or not Sam was Ugly J. He should have just brought a real gun and pulled the trigger on her; it would have been faster and more humane.
“Howie? You still there?”
Speaking past the clot: “Uh-huh.”
“I don’t want you blamin’ yourself, you hear me, son? She was an old woman. Her health was not good, not at all. It was her time, okay?”
“Sure, Sheriff.”
“I mean it, Howie. Anything—absolutely anything—could have startled her like that.”
I killed my best friend’s grandmother. I can’t believe it. “I gotta go, G-Dub,” he said with forced brightness. “My Xbox isn’t gonna play itself, you know, and someone has to save the universe. Might as well be me.”
Once he broke the connection, he stared at the phone in his hand, resisting the urge to hurl it as far as he could. Or to smash it against the dashboard.
Dead. She’s dead. Oh, man. Oh, man, Jazz is gonna kill me. Or, hell, Billy is gonna really kill me. Like, for a long, long time.
He wiped tears from his cheeks. Damn it. Damn it. Damn. It.
CHAPTER 35
Jazz and Marta drove through hours of frosty silence.
He didn’t think she was actually scared. More like wary. She didn’t know what to think or what to believe, and that was just fine with Jazz. Off-kilter people generally chose the safest courses of action, and at that moment in time, the safest thing for Marta to do was to keep piloting her rig.
He munched on a granola bar he’d bought at their last rest stop, back before the Nap That Changed Everything. Marta hadn’t stopped since then, as though she believed the gas pedal was some kind of antimurder lever and if she could just keep up the pressure, no harm would come to her.
Billy had called him a killer who hadn’t killed yet. Jazz hadn’t believed him, but Billy had also scoffed at Jazz’s claims of being a virgin; Billy had been proven right about that, as Jazz’s stomach proved every time he thought about Sam. Which meant maybe Billy was right about the other thing, too. Jazz had to admit—the thought of killing Billy warmed his insides, like hot apple cider. It suffused him, body and soul.
Consequences would arise. Of course. He wasn’t so stupid or so foolish or so obsessed that he thought he could kill Billy and walk away without the world taking its requisite pound of flesh from him. But—and maybe this was naive—he imagined that the consequences might not be quite so dire as imagined at first blush. Removing the Artist, Green Jack, Satan’s Eye, and all the others from the world with one swift blow would most likely make Jazz something of a folk hero to some. The families of his father’s victims would no doubt rally to his side. Jurors would look sympathetically at his upbringing, his father’s depredations. His defense attorneys would invoke battered-person syndrome and the theory of “learned helplessness.”
What kind of defense attorneys do you think you’re going to have? How much money does that kind of expert testimony cost?
It could go either way. He could end up in maximum security or he could end up doing time in a mental-health facility somewhere until he was determined to no longer be a danger to others. Good luck with that.
And, of course, in every formulation, he would lose Connie. If he hadn’t already. That made sense. She could handle only so much. He couldn’t blame her. But this was bigger than her happiness, and certainly bigger than his own.
“Take this exit,” Jazz said, breaking the silence. He directed Marta into two or three turns from the off-ramp, and the rig belched and groaned to a stop at a run-down gas station that squatted, isolated, on the side of the road. Jazz spotted Howie’s car parked across the way but pretended not to notice it. They were a good hour away from the Nod.
Hand on the door lever, he glanced over at Marta, who stared at her own knuckles, tight on the steering wheel.
“I’m leaving now,” he told her. “I’m letting you go.” The words tasted both magnanimous and filthy. Yes, she would live. But who was he to be making that decision?
He didn’t know. And it no longer mattered. Nothing mattered except for catching Billy.
“I want to ask you something,” she said.
“No. Just go.”
“But my family…”
The toughness, the power in her—it all melted away in that instant, and she lay naked and terrified before him. Jazz ground his teeth. She was, he realized, his Lisa McVey, the girl Bobby Joe Long had let go, even though he knew she would lead the police back to him.
People are real. People matter.
It couldn’t be that simple. Billy mattered, but Billy had to die. Jazz was real, but he knew he didn’t matter. His life and his dreams were nothing compared with Billy’s machinations.
Marta is real. Marta matters.
Maybe that’s all he could rely on right now.
“All that stuff I said before? I think…” He hesitated, unsure of the words until they actually came out, hearing them for the first time and recognizing them not by his voice or by their sounds, but by their truth. “I think it was bull. Maybe. I don’t know. I really don’t. But I think you and your family are safe. I’m pretty sure. I’m looking for my mother, and I have to kill my father because it’s the only way, and I think maybe I’m losing it, but I don’t know for sure. It’s been a rough few days. But I’m pretty sure you’ll never see or hear from me again.”
Before she could say anything more, he opened the door and hopped out of her life.
Howie watched Jazz head to the ramshackle gas station building and cut around the far side. Bathroom break?
After long moments, the rig Jazz had arrived in wheezed into gear. Its brakes farted, and it groaned back onto the main road. Still, Jazz remained in the bathroom. Howie found himself nervously strumming the steering wheel. He seriously considered—only for a minute, but still—gunning the engine and peeling out of the parking space, hauling ass back to the Nod. Abandoning his best friend in a moment of desperate need? Yeah, that was pretty high on the “instant karma’s gonna get you” scale, but it still seemed a vastly superior alternative to telling Jazz about Gramma.
Who are you kidding, Howie? You’re not going anywhere.
Soon after the big rig disappeared down the road, Jazz came around the side of the building, walking quickly, a stutter to his step. Howie wanted to hop out and give Jazz a shoulder to lean on, but the instructions had been explicit: Start the car, stay in the driver’s seat, unlock all the doors, be ready to take off.
Jazz eventually made his way to the car and flopped into the backseat.
“Constipated? Shy bladder?” The jokes tumbled out of Howie reflexively but didn’t sound funny even to him. Gramma was dead.
“Had to wait until she left,” Jazz said. The sound of his friend’s voice startled him—it was flat and completely disaffected. Sure, Jazz had been through three or four kinds of hell recently, but he sounded like someone who’d died.
Or, more accurately, like someone who’d given up living.
“What are—”
“Drive,” Jazz said. He was crouched in the backseat, even though
the requisite contortions must have hurt his leg. He pulled Howie’s old raincoat over himself.
Howie backed out of the spot and pulled away. “Where to?”
“The Nod.”
“Oh, sure, that’s a great idea. No one thinks you’re going there.”
“I’m not asking you to take me home or to the middle of town. We’re actually headed to the end of Danvers Street.”
Making the turn onto the road, he scoured the rearview mirror for a glimpse of Jazz but could see nothing, so he reached back and dangled the bag of meds.
“Stop that,” Jazz ordered, snatching them. “Just drive like there’s nothing wrong and no one back here.”
Howie heard a prescription bottle open, then the sound of Jazz crunching through a pill. The longer he went without telling Jazz about Gramma, the worse it would be when he finally did. The impact would be heavier, the guilt stronger. But he couldn’t do it like this. Not while cruising down the road, Jazz tucked and hidden away like a toddler who thought that if he couldn’t see you, you couldn’t see him.
So they drove in silence. They were back on the highway, bound for the Nod, when it clicked for him. Danvers Street. Danvers…
Oh. Right. Of course. Because who wouldn’t want to go to the town cemetery?
CHAPTER 36
By the time they arrived at the cemetery, a winter’s early night had fallen around them. Jazz had not spoken at all for the rest of the drive; Howie thought maybe he’d fallen asleep back there on the floor. When he pulled up to the cemetery, he cleared his throat, about to say, “Hey, wake up, Jazz,” but before he could speak, Jazz’s voice floated up from behind him, still dead:
“Is there anyone around?”
“No. Just us.”
“Look at the big fir tree on the north corner, kitty-corner to the gate. One of G. William’s deputies likes to take smoke breaks there when he’s on this shift.”
Howie didn’t want to know how Jazz knew this. He squinted through the windshield and saw nothing. He told Jazz so.
“Good.” Jazz popped up from the backseat. “You brought the stuff I asked for?”
“Yeah, of course.” As soon as he said it, Howie flashed to the shovel and pickax in the trunk. Feeling like an idiot, he added the tools to the location and found something gross on the right-hand side of the equal sign. “No way, Jazz. We’re not digging up a body. Not happening.”
Jazz shrugged as he slid across the seat and opened the door. “ ‘We’ don’t have to do anything at all. I can do it alone.”
Of all the things Jazz could have said in that moment, that was the one thing guaranteed to prompt Howie to get his skinny butt out of the car. Jazz never said he could do things alone; he almost had a mania for bringing Howie along on his quests. Howie didn’t flatter himself that Jazz just craved his inimitable company—it was most likely because he knew the loner streak that ran through serial killers like his father. Almost as though having Howie along acted as a breaker switch, a kill switch, really, that would trip when too much crazy juice ran through the wiring. Howie’s eternal (and internal, for that matter) fragility forced Jazz to be more careful than he might otherwise be.
Which made Howie join Jazz at the trunk. “You’re not going in there alone.”
Jazz shrugged again. For the first time, Howie could actually see his best friend. He tried to tell himself it was just an artifact of the wan, dull lighting of a gibbous moon and the feeble bulb from the trunk, but the fact was this: Jazz looked awful. His face was sallow, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. His hands trembled just slightly as he reached for the pickax and shovel.
“Jazz,” Howie said quietly. Jazz didn’t listen, bracing himself against the lip of the open trunk in order to lever out the tools.
“Jasper.” It was the first time in forever that Howie had used Jazz’s real name, and it didn’t have the effect Howie hoped for. Jazz hauled the tools out with a soft grunt, slung them over his shoulder, and turned to the cemetery.
So Howie fired the last arrow in his quiver.
“Dude, your grandmother is dead.” He winced as he said it, both for himself and for Jazz.
Jazz paused and looked back at Howie. “Are you kidding?”
Shaking his head, Howie said, “I wish, man. Really, I do. But she died in the hospital today.” He held out his hands, arms outstretched, ready for the bro hug that would come.
Instead, Jazz laughed.
The laughter was quick, unexpected, and bright. Jazz dropped the pickax and shovel with an ill-considered clang and leaned against the car as he caught his breath.
Oh, holy hell. He’s lost it. He’s seriously lost it.
“You okay?” he asked as Jazz stooped to pick up the tools.
“I’ve never been okay,” Jazz told him, and walked away.
Howie froze for a moment as his best friend disappeared into the darkness. Then, without thinking further, he dashed off after Jazz.
Inside the cemetery, Howie loped along beside Jazz as they maneuvered through rank-and-file headstones and the occasional ostentatious piece of statuary. The people of Lobo’s Nod were not given to overbearing displays of remembrance for their dead; a simple gravestone sufficed in lieu of the ornate statues and vaults Howie had seen in movies. The Nod’s cemetery was flat and dull and the same in most directions. A million jokes floated through his head, but he somehow managed to keep them from gusting out of his mouth.
Once he’d caught up to Jazz, it was no trick to keep up—his best friend’s leg was clearly bothering him. When Jazz walked slowly, like now, he could maintain a steady gait. When he sped up, his left leg dragged.
Howie couldn’t bear the silence any longer. He usually hated quiet, but quiet in a cemetery was the absolute worst. “What was the deal with that truck that dropped you off?” he asked.
“Nothing. She probably called the cops as soon as she left. That’s why I had to hide in the backseat. Would take too long to hitch from there.”
And you’re not exactly walking at your best.…
“What exactly are we doing?” Howie asked, even though the tools made their task obvious.
“Looking for what Billy left behind,” Jazz said, and put on a little speed.
Useless. Even on his best day, Jazz couldn’t outpace Howie’s ten-foot-long legs, and this was so not Jazz’s best day.
“Billy left something here? In the cemetery? With a victim or what?”
Two of Billy’s victims, as best Howie could remember, were buried in the Nod. His last two, in fact, before his arrest. He couldn’t imagine how or why Billy would leave something in their caskets, though.
“No,” Jazz said, and they stopped. “He left it here.”
Howie followed Jazz’s pointing finger. The moon’s light was just enough that he could make out the engraving on the stone.
JONATHAN WALTER DENT
And two dates.
Howie did the math. “Your grandfather?”
“Yeah. Died something like twenty years ago.”
“We weren’t even alive twenty years ago. Billy wouldn’t know to leave something for you.”
Normally, a comment like that would have jostled loose some kind of snarky retort from Jazz, but he only shrugged, a gesture Howie was quickly tiring of.
“I didn’t say he left it for me. I said he left it. Period.” Jazz dropped the shovel and took an experimental swing with the pickax, stretching out his muscles. “When he came to me in the storage unit, Billy told me he’d already explained how this all began.”
“I don’t get it.”
Silent and then with a painful grunt, Jazz swung the ax. It bit into the frozen ground just below his grandfather’s headstone, chewing out a depressingly small amount of turf.
“I read in a book once,” Howie said, “that if you roll a trash can full of fire over the frozen ground, it makes it easier to dig.”
Jazz took another swing. “Where would we get a trash can of fire?” In that same lifeless voice. Matter-o
f-fact. Not the genially combative voice Howie had become accustomed to. “And how would we keep the light from being seen?”
“I don’t know.”
Then shut up floated, unsaid but understood, in the cold January air.
Jazz attacked the ground again. And again. After a while, he paused to wipe sweat from his brow and leaned on the ax handle, catching his breath.
“Billy told me that he’d given me a clue when I talked to him at Wammaket,” he said, unbidden. “And I couldn’t figure out what he meant, but then I did.”
Silent again. Howie wanted to prod for more, but Jazz had vanished into the zone. More chopping at the ground. Rhythmic and sustained. Howie surreptitiously checked his phone. Both parents would be home from work soon. How long could he stay here with Jazz? Until he froze as solid as the ground? Jazz was working up a sweat, but Howie was shivering already.
“I have something else I need you to do,” Jazz said in a tone that revealed no apology and brooked no dissent.
“What?”
Jazz told him.
CHAPTER 37
Before releasing Howie back into the real world beyond the walls of the cemetery, Jazz had him bring the prescriptions he’d filched from his mother. Waiting until Howie left, Jazz greedily gobbled down another painkiller—he was now at twice the recommended dose—and one of the antibiotics, then slumped against a tombstone for a break. The cold ground burned his ass through Mark Culpepper’s pants. Sweaty from his labors, he’d stripped off Hughes’s overcoat, so he folded it up and sat on it.
Before him, his grandfather’s grave looked chewed. He’d broken through the hardest layer of earth in a ragged oval measuring about three feet through its major axis. Now dark, rich dirt welcomed him. Less frozen, sure, but he would need to shovel it out rather than just use momentum and gravity and his own weight to break through it.