“Jasper,” Mom said, quite calmly, “the fact that you think you can kill your father should tell you something. It tells you that we trained you well.”
“We?” Billy asked.
“Oh, fine. I know, I know—I had to leave before the training began in earnest. It’s hard, being a career woman and a mother. You have no idea. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to. Still, Jasper, consider this: that bloodlust you feel right now? That anger? There are better uses for it. Instead of using it all up, you can embrace it. Nurture it. Let it grow. And use it at our sides. A happy Crow family.”
Jazz wiped a gummy residue of vomit from his lips. He was still holding the Taser in his other hand, and at just the moment when someone wiping his lips would have finished and returned the hand to his side, he instead raised the hand holding the Taser and hurled it at Billy. In the split second it took for Billy to react and move to bat the thing out of the air, Jazz leapt.
Billy stood openmouthed for a moment, in shock, and then he realized what was happening.
He’d expected Jazz to leap right at him, using the momentary distraction of the Taser to his advantage.
Instead, he’d hurled himself at the sofa, crashing into it so hard that it tipped over, spilling the iPad to the floor, along with Jazz.
Who immediately rolled up onto his feet, crouched low as Billy bolted in that direction.
Only to find Jazz already there, wielding the knife Billy had left on the back of the sofa.
Billy stopped just out of reach, smirking. “Little boy’s got himself a pig sticker. You remember how to use one of those, boy? Remember what Dear Old Dad taught you?”
“Yes.” Jazz shifted the knife to his right hand. There were different ways to hold a knife. He deliberately used the worst grip for this situation, with the blade pointing down and the edge pointing outward. This grip made for excellent power, but poor defense—you had to raise your arm over your head to strike, meaning your opponent had open access to your chest and belly. It looked badass in the movies, but it was a novice choice.
Billy tut-tutted. “You sure you want to be doin’ that, Jasper? I ain’t lookin’ to check out today, but I want you to have a sporting chance.”
“Stop playing with him,” Mom said. The iPad now leaned precariously against a table leg, turned on its side. “Take that knife away from him, and let’s put an end to this.”
“I’ll just be a moment, Janice,” Billy said. He flexed his fingers. “You ready, boy?”
“Born ready.”
Jazz raised his right arm, ready to strike, and Billy charged him, forgetting something important.
Forgetting that Jazz wasn’t a prospect.
Prospects were afraid. They squealed and ducked and did anything to avoid pain. Sometimes they froze up instead, and the pain became inevitable.
Jazz didn’t move, but it was a deliberate choice. He knew how Billy would try to blitz him, try to chop at the elbow to make him lose the knife while also shouldering him in the chest to knock him down.
He knew this because he and Billy had practiced it together many, many times.
When Billy collided with him, just before the arm came up to strike his elbow, Jazz quickly dropped his arm back to his side, the knife catching along Billy’s shirt as he did so. It parted the fabric and sliced a narrow furrow into Billy’s upper arm.
Boom. Billy’s weight and momentum smashed into him. Jazz went with it, using his left arm to hook around Billy’s neck, dragging his father down to the floor with him. They crashed there like prizefighters, grunting and groaning. Jazz’s teeth rattled, and his left leg whined as Billy landed on it.
Billy lay half-on, half-off him. Before his father could exploit his upper hand, Jazz rapidly switched to a fencer’s grip on the knife, slashing out with it just as Billy rolled away from him, sensing the arm movement through the contact of their bodies. With a moan he wished he could suppress, Jazz rolled over and managed to shove up onto his knees. Billy was only a few feet away, down on one knee, glaring.
“Not bad,” he said. “It’s a good knife, ain’t it? Your girlfriend sure liked it.”
“You gonna talk or you gonna fight?” Jazz sneered. “Always did seem like you couldn’t tell the difference.”
Billy laughed. “Truce. I can’t get in your head, and you can’t get in mine.”
“No, we’re both in each other’s heads. There’s just nothing worth using in there.”
“Might be true.”
“Boys,” Mom said, bored. “This is all very entertaining but ultimately counterproductive. Jasper, put down the knife, and let’s deal with this as a family.”
For the space of an instant, Jazz’s attention flicked to the iPad, then flicked back just in time to see Billy, suddenly twice as large in his field of vision, springing off that one foot, lunging at Jazz like a linebacker. Jazz fell back and twisted to one side. Billy slammed into his left shoulder, and his knee came down on Jazz’s left thigh, setting the bullet wound to howling again. Jazz bit down hard, refusing to reveal the pain, and fumbled to his right, sliding around Billy.
He saw his chance. Billy’s back was exposed.
He swung the knife in a wide arc and brought it down on his father’s back. A jolt ran up his arm and he almost loosened his grip, but he screamed in that same instant, the sound of his own pain giving strength to his fingers.
He drove the knife in. Billy’s shirt folded and ripped under the pressure.
Then his flesh.
Then more.
For a moment, Billy wasn’t even aware it had happened. Then he suddenly yelped, in shock, it seemed, more than anything else.
Jazz drove the knife in deeper. Muscle split. Blood vessels erupted. Jazz felt a crunch, transmitted through the blade, dancing along his fingers.
He twisted the knife once, swiftly.
Billy howled like a dog at its dead master’s bedside. He tried to rise up on his hands, his shoulders straining, his neck muscles bulging, his face bright red with exertion.
The scream ended abruptly as Billy collapsed face-first on the floor, silent and still.
Jazz sat on the floor for a moment, his leg trapped under his father. He jerked and shimmied to free himself, then stood, looking down.
Billy lay before him.
Jazz stooped and pulled the knife from Billy’s back.
Yes. Very well, then.
He turned to the screen and his mother.
He said: “You’re next.”
CHAPTER 50
An instant later, the screen shut off and the iPad’s camera light winked out. Jazz stared at the black, blank eye for a moment.
Blank.
Sink into the blank and the black.
If you don’t feel anything, you can’t be hurt. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about what happened. Don’t think about it you’re good at that you’re good at compartmentalizing don’t think don’t think don’t—
He returned to Weathers’s desk and laptop, as if he’d never been interrupted, stepping over Billy on the way.
Weathers had encountered Billy and…
Billy and…
Ugly J. The Crow King. Yes. That’s who.
Weathers had encountered them and been tortured to send a message. So there had to be a clue here that led to…
To…
To Ugly J.
Jazz shook his head. He couldn’t get the image from the iPad screen out of his mind. It danced and leered from the edges of his vision. He put his palm down on the table and raised the knife. A small pain would do it, he figured. Just something to shock the memory away, to force himself not to think about it, to think of something else, anything else. He wouldn’t do his best Impressionist and cut off a finger. Or even spear through the whole hand. Just a cut, maybe, across the top of the hand. Avoid the radial nerve and the opponens digiti minimi and opponens pollicis and there’d be no permanent, lingering damage. Just blood. Just pain. Just what he needed.
touch me
/>
(oh, yes)
like that
His hand trembled as he brought the knife up. The blade passed before the laptop screen, and Jazz once again found himself staring at the map.
A location just beyond the town line.
And in the search field that had led Weathers there, a name: Jack Dawes.
Jazz knew the place. He’d ridden past it on the school bus as a child, or anytime he’d left town on a southwesterly track. It was a big, isolated, dilapidated Victorian that had been old when Gramma was young.
Billy’s safe house, Jazz realized. Billy’s and his—
Ugly J’s.
A place close enough that they could get to it if they needed to. Billy probably would have headed there the day he was arrested, if he’d been able to get away from G. William.
His plan to cut himself forgotten, Jazz scanned the map, plotting out the trip. Walking would take too long and be too visible. He needed a car.
Billy. Billy wouldn’t have walked here from the safe house. It’s just as risky for him to be seen here as it is for me. He would have driven.
Jazz returned to Billy and knelt down, feeling his father’s pockets. He hit pay dirt on the right side and wormed his hand in for the keys.
Just then, Billy coughed and jerked. Jazz pulled back, yanking his hand away. Billy glared, his lips peeled into a vicious snarl.
“Thought Dear Old Dad had gone away?” His voice, clogged with grit and anguish, still managed a sort of singsong chant: “You didn’t have the guts. Didn’t have the guts to do it. To kill me. Didn’t have the balls to off Dear Old Dad.”
Jazz met his father’s gaze and did not waver. “Shut up, Billy. You can’t goad me into killing you.”
“Didn’t. Have. The—”
“I had the guts not to kill you.” He stood, reared back, and kicked Billy in the side, just under the rib cage, not bothering to disguise the sheer glee he felt at the solid contact. “Now shut up.”
Billy pressed his palms to the floor and pushed his upper half off the floor, seething, his eyes fixated on Jazz. “Biggest mistake of your life, boy. Not killin’ me right. I’m gonna make goddamn sure you got plenty of time to regret it.”
Very calmly, Jazz said, “Who says I was trying to kill you?”
Billy hoisted himself higher… and stopped. His expression of rage turned to confusion. Bafflement. He strained to his utmost, pushing with his arms, muscles taut and tense under his shirt, his powerful shoulders flexing.
But try as he might, he couldn’t move any farther.
“What the hell—?”
And he realized. Jazz saw the understanding blossom in the sudden widening of his father’s eyes, in the slack and horror-stricken rictus of his expression.
“I can’t—”
“I cut your spinal cord,” Jazz said as neutrally as he could manage. “That was that burst of excruciating pain you felt. The pain that made you pass out. Right at the thoracicolumbar junction, around T-twelve and L-one.” He folded his arms over his chest and stared down at Billy with utter satisfaction. “The same way you taught Hat and Dog to do to their victims.”
“You took my legs!” Billy shouted. “You took my goddamn legs away!” He thrashed on the floor, flailing his arms, desperately seeking some kind of reaction from the lower half of his body, but there was no reaction there. Nothing but the occasional fishtailing caused by the upper body movements. Billy was paralyzed from the waist down. For good.
“You piece of shit!” Billy railed. “I should have strangled you in your crib! I should have ripped you out of your mother’s belly! I’m gonna destroy you for this, you hear me? I’m gonna make you wish I never shot my load inside her to make you!”
Jazz crouched down and fished the keys out of Billy’s pocket. His father tried to grab his hand, but it was easy enough to avoid him.
“I swear by all that is holy that I will piss in your hollow skull for this,” Billy ranted.
“You smell that?” Jazz leaned close and whispered in Billy’s ear, his voice trembling not with fear but with barely controllable excitement. “That’s your own shit, Billy. You can’t control your bowels anymore. You can’t walk. You can’t ever rape someone again, not with that useless thing between your legs. You’re not destroying me. You’re not going to destroy anyone ever again. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair, getting your diapers changed by a prison nurse.”
Billy’s bellow of impotent, tormented outrage was beautiful to Jazz’s ears.
He recovered the knife he’d used on Billy, the knife Billy had used on Connie. Holding it out as Billy had, handle first, Jazz waited until his father took it, then stepped just out of arm’s reach.
“Only one person left you can hurt, Billy,” Jazz said, backing away. “So if you get the urge, feel free to put that blade through your eye.”
And then, savoring the wailing, doleful cries of rage that filled Doug Weathers’s apartment, Jazz left, closing the door behind him.
The car was easy to find. Billy had parked carefully away from any streetlights on the next block over. Jazz kept hitting the remote lock until the headlights glimmered at him. No one was around. He got in the car and started it.
On autopilot. Just keep moving. It’s almost over. You don’t have to think until it’s all over, and then you can look back, but right now just look ahead.
You’re next, his own voice said. Over and over.
CHAPTER 51
Tanner drove like a bootlegger or a gangbanger. Hughes braced himself against the dashboard during the sharper turns and prayed like he hadn’t since Catholic school that the air bag wouldn’t pop at an impromptu moment and drive his forearms up into his shoulders. He’d been in high-speed pursuits before. Several in Brooklyn and a couple in Manhattan. There, traffic made a truly breakneck pace for any length of time nearly impossible.
But out here where men were men and cows were scared, the streets were as empty as a drug corner after five-oh was called. Tanner’s siren shoved aside any lingering late-night traffic, and the man took the corners as though he were being paid to test his cruiser’s axles to their breaking point.
Just when Hughes was about to ask if Tanner had ever actually hauled ass through his little burg like this before and if no, maybe it was time to slow down?, the sheriff reached over and switched off the siren. Before Hughes could react, Tanner tapped the brakes.
“Don’t want him to hear us coming,” the sheriff muttered.
Him.
Billy Dent.
Hughes couldn’t believe that he was about to encounter the country’s number one boogeyman, the guy who’d topped the FBI’s most-wanted list under two different aliases, the Master Murderer himself.
The pasty white string-bean kid—Howie—had shown Tanner a letter. Between that and the drawing they’d shown the kids, there seemed to be only one horrifying conclusion.
“Let’s not be too sure of that,” Tanner had said. Hughes had spent his entire adult life around cops; he knew when one was telling a witness a lie.
Then the kid had pulled out his phone and played a sound file that Hughes truly, deeply wished he’d never heard. A series of sounds he knew he would be hearing again in his dreams and nightmares, and would probably recall with frightening clarity and detail on his deathbed.
As soon as the file ended, Tanner had plopped his hat on his head and hustled the two of them back to the car, then proceeded to fling them into the night, siren blaring.
With the siren now off and the cruiser settling into a reasonable rate of speed, Hughes allowed himself to relax. “You really think Dent is going to be at this guy Weathers’s apartment?”
“Best lead we’ve had all day.” Tanner piloted around a corner, then parked illegally against a fire hydrant. Ahead lay their target, a six-story building on the far corner of the block. Relative to the squat buildings around it, it was damn near a skyscraper, and Hughes wondered what it was like to live somewhere with elevator
s in even the short buildings.
Tanner radioed in for backup. “But keep back a block and don’t move until I say so. I don’t want to spook him, and if he gets past us, I want y’all ready to close off the roads.”
“Copy, Sheriff,” a voice came back.
“Best lead all day,” Tanner said again. He popped his neck back and forth and drew in a deep breath. Hughes was itching to get out of the car and rush the building, but this was Tanner’s town; he would follow the sheriff’s lead.
Long seconds ticked by, turning into a minute. “We doing this or not?” Hughes asked gently.
Tanner smiled wanly. “Sorry. Just not lookin’ forward to seeing this one again. Memories.”
“I hear you. Do you—”
“Let’s do it.” Tanner slid out of the car with surprising grace for such a fat man. Hughes joined him, and the two of them hustled over to the building, keeping to the shadows. The building was locked up, a buzzer panel the only way in. Tanner produced a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. At Hughes’s raised eyebrows, he said, “This is a small town, Detective. People here actually like having the police able to get inside if necessary.”
Hughes tried to imagine the civil-libertarian crap he’d have to put up with if he wanted to walk around Brooklyn with the keys to every building.
They scooted inside, and Hughes drew his weapon an instant after Tanner did so. Nothing in the lobby. Without a word spoken between them, they’d fallen silent the instant they’d entered the building. Hughes’s body vibrated with adrenaline. He made sure his safety was on; he didn’t want to end up shooting some innocent Lobo’s Nod citizen taking her trash out.
Sure enough, there was an elevator. Tanner hit the button and consulted his smartphone quickly. The sheriff flashed a palm-out hand of spread fingers, then a solo index finger.
Right. Sixth floor.
Tanner pointed to Hughes, then the elevator. Hughes tried not to let his expression reveal how absurd the idea was. He gestured for Tanner to take the elevator instead and motioned that he would take the stairs up to six. With a shrug, Tanner shuffled into the elevator as soon as it opened.