Game (13 page)

Sorry’s not enough. Never enough. Never, ever
…

Connie crawled over from her side of the bed to look down at him, her hair covered by the satin bonnet she wore to sleep. In the murky light that bled through the thin curtains, she was chocolate cream and he wanted to devour every last inch of her, wanted to run his tongue over her, wanted to sink his teeth into her and suck out everything of her, ingest it into him.

No. No! Stop it! That’s crazy.

Take it, Jasper,
Billy cooed.
Take her. She’s yours. She’s your prospect. This is what you’ve been waiting for. And
best of all, Jasper? Best of all is that
she’s
been waiting for it, too.

Not true. He couldn’t believe it was true.

But then there was the naked lust, the yearning in Connie’s eyes, in the parting of her lips, in her pose on the bed. It was less than human, this electricity between them. It was primal, as it was meant to be, as it should be.

That’s when it’s best, Jasper. When they come to you. When they want it as badly as you want to give it.

“Why are you afraid?” Connie whispered, and her voice tasted like warm pie. “Why are you so afraid of me?”

“I’m not afraid of you.” And he wasn’t. Jazz was afraid only of himself.

“I know it isn’t easy,” she said. “I know it’s complicated for you. But this—this thing, this moment—this is supposed to be easy. So easy.”

“We can’t.”

“I brought condoms,” she said, the words an electric prod to his heart. “I thought… I knew we’d be alone here.”

Jazz closed his eyes. It was as though he could see the future. But not just one future. He could see so many of them. He could see himself, happy, with Connie, two normal people living normal lives, drawn closer together and connected by their shared intimacy, the way it was supposed to work, the way it was supposed to be.

But he could also see…

But here’s the thing, Jasper
, Billy’s voice purred, speaking from the last time he’d spoken to his father, at Wammaket
State Penitentiary.
I bet you’re a nice, responsible kid, ’cause I raised you that way, but are you always the one buyin’ the rubbers? Hmm? Or maybe she’s on that pill? ’Cause you can’t always trust ’em, Jasper. You look at them rubbers real close-like, see? You watch her take that pill, Jasper. Hell
(and here Billy had roared with laughter),
how you think
you
was born?

He could also see sex as the ignition moment, the fulcrum upon which his own career of serial murder would lever.

None of Billy’s victims had been black. There had been Latinas and Asians and a great profusion of white girls, but not a single African American. Jazz thought that made Connie safe.

He’d thought that… until now.

Now he was no longer certain.

He wanted her so badly. And was that because he was a boy and she was a girl and they were in love and that’s how it was supposed to work?

Or was it because the deepest part of him, the Billy part of him, champed at the bit, strained against its tether, eager and desperate for freedom, to begin what it had been born and made to do?

He squeezed his eyes shut tight, as tight as he could. As tight as the night Billy had skinned poor Rusty alive. The howl of the dog as Billy’s knife did its gruesome work…

Phosphenes again behind his eyelids, this time not of the crime scenes from the pictures, but rather as he’d seen them tonight.

I did something good tonight. I helped tonight. Doesn’t that mean I should be getting
better,
not worse?

Sex and killing. The two dreams, conflating. What did
that
mean?

When Jazz opened his eyes and spoke, his voice was deep, sure, emotionless.

“You should throw those condoms away,” he said.

And then he crawled into the other, empty bed to sleep.

Billy Dent roamed Brooklyn, the day having dawned clear and cold. He turned up the collar of his coat and tugged his hat down around his ears.

The cold weather made hiding even easier. Everyone all bundled up. Everyone in such a hurry to get to where they were going. No one stopping to look at anyone else. Everyone wearing gloves, how convenient. Cover up those prison tats. Cover up
LOVE
. Cover up
FEAR
.

Cover ’em up, but they’re still there. Love and fear. Equal. Maybe even the same.

It wouldn’t have mattered if anyone had been looking at him, anyway. Billy didn’t fear the human eye. The human eye was a fickle, foolish thing. His goatee and mustache, along with a set of muttonchop sideburns trimmed and shaped just right, changed the angles and configuration of his face. Cutting down his eyebrows made his eyes more prominent. And, of course, he’d dyed his hair.

Billy chuckled to himself when he thought of the vanity of
women, and how they’d made it easier on folks like him. God bless Miss Clairol and her endless variations of hues and shades! Billy had—by mixing together a specific set of colors—managed to turn his dirty blond hair into graying brown. After thinning it out with an electric razor, he looked ten years older. The final touch was a pair of black, heavy-rimmed glasses, the kind Billy’s own father had once worn. To the idiotic hipsters of Brooklyn, these glasses were “fashionable.” They also distorted Billy’s features in a way that pleased him and made him harder to recognize. Oh, glorious fashion!

Disguising yourself wasn’t just about making yourself look different; it was about making yourself look different from what people were looking for. The cops could imagine Billy growing a beard or shaving a beard or growing out his hair or coloring his hair, but would they imagine him making himself look older?

He’d studied the FBI and police procedure most of his life. He knew how cops thought and, more important, how they thought
he
thought. They thought him a creature of immeasurable vanity, and they couldn’t imagine that he would be willing to make himself look worse in order to evade recapture.

Billy was willing to do
anything
to evade recapture.

After years in prison with nothing to do but exercise, Billy was in top condition, but he dressed to hide his physique. Walked with a slump. When he was out and about, he made sure to wear a watch and checked it constantly, communicating that he was in his own world.

Plus, he had the perfect bit of camouflage: a stroller and a diaper bag.

This part of Brooklyn was called Park Slope, and Billy had noticed quickly that damn near everyone here had either a dog or a baby carriage or both. He had no interest in actually taking care of anything living, but he had a big interest in blending in, so he’d bought a used stroller at an antiques store, then wrapped up a bundle of blankets to look like a baby. Since it was winter, he could keep the top down; anyone looking through the little plastic window would see what appeared to be a well-tucked-in child, napping.

And the diaper bag actually held diapers. Under the diapers, Billy had stashed three different-sized knives, a Glock he’d bought on the street, and a length of rope.

Ambling along the streets of Brooklyn, no one gave an older dad a second look.

People. Ha.

Billy worried more about facial-recognition software than he worried about a human being recalling his face from TV. Cameras were everywhere in “free” America—at ATMs, at street intersections, at banks, behind convenience-store counters. The bastard cops and the FBI were supposed to need search warrants and court orders to look at those cameras, but Billy was no fool. He knew about the Patriot Act. And he knew something even more sinister—he knew the fear that ruled in the hearts of all prospects. The bastard cops needed a court order only when someone said no to them. And these days, all you had to do was wave a flag or say “keeping Americans safe” and anyone owning those cameras would
let the cops look all they wanted. No hassle. No fuss, no muss. So Billy took no chances. He wore sunglasses and a hat whenever possible.

And he smiled.

Facial-recognition software, for some reason, had trouble distinguishing between two faces if one of them was smiling. There were even states where you couldn’t smile for your driver’s license photo. So, Billy smiled everywhere he went.

This was hardly a chore. Billy liked smiling. Billy was a happy guy.

In his coat pockets, he had a total of five different throwaway cell phones. One of them buzzed for his attention as he pushed his stroller past the umpteenth coffee shop on Fourth Street. This place was obsessed, Billy had noticed, with coffee shops. There were three of them on every block, not to mention the occasional Starbucks.

He paused as he groped for the proper phone. Only one person had the numbers to his various phones, and that was just for emergencies. He shouldn’t be receiving phone calls—he gave them.

Finding the right phone, he flipped it open, and before he could say anything, the voice at the other end said, almost saucily, “Guess who’s in town?”

And then told him.

And Billy Dent’s smile grew even wider.

The pounding at the door woke Jazz from a deep slumber that morning, gasping awake as if he’d forgotten how to breathe. Connie bolted up in the other bed, startled.

“Who—” she started.

“NYPD!” a voice barked. “Open up! Now!”

“NYPD?” Connie whispered. “What?”

Jazz shook sleep from his head and rolled to his feet. Was Hughes playing some kind of joke? Or…

Or was he being Fultoned again?

He left the chain on the door, opening it just enough to peer out. Two uniformed cops stood there, along with an older white guy in a suit and tie. The white guy pushed at the door. “Jasper Dent,” he said. It wasn’t a question. It was more like a command, as though he were ordering the kid at the door to be Jazz.

“Let me see some ID,” Jazz said, but before the words were even out of his mouth, he was looking at the name card and badge for Detective Stephen Long.

“Homicide,” Long snapped. “Brooklyn South. Open the door.”

Brooklyn South. Homicide. The same division Hughes came from.

Or claimed to come from. The badge and name card looked similar to Hughes’s. How hard would that be to fake? Probably easier than Jazz thought, but harder than made it worthwhile.

“What can I do for you, Detective?” Jazz asked, stalling. He could hear Connie behind him, throwing on clothes, no doubt.

“I said open the goddamn door. Do it now or we’ll bust it down. Seriously.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

Long blew out an annoyed breath. “Okay, we’re knocking it down.”

“Wait, wait.” Connie had stopped moving around. Jazz unchained the door and stepped back. “Come in. What can I do for—”

“You can come with us,” Long said as he and the other two cops came into the room. Long looked around, spied Connie, who was in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. The detective raised an eyebrow. “You guys,” he directed the uniforms, “check the room and the girl. Dent, put on some pants. You’re coming with me.”

“What’s going on here?” Jazz asked.

Long looked at his watch. “You have thirty seconds to put on real clothes. Dressed or not, I’m taking you with me.”

Bristling, Jazz grabbed his clothes from the previous day
and retreated to the bathroom to change. Outside, he could hear the cops going through the dresser and desk drawers. One of them must have started to go through Connie’s suitcase because he heard her shout, “Hands off the panties, you perv!”

He emerged from the bathroom, dressed, to find one of the cops triumphantly brandishing the iPad and papers Hughes had brought over the day before. From the crestfallen expression on Connie’s face, Jazz realized that she had hidden them in her suitcase while he’d stalled at the door.

“We’re done here,” Long said, and tipped an imaginary hat to Connie. “Ma’am,” he fake-drawled, and grabbed Jazz by the arm and led him out the door.

Connie handled the cops dragging Jazz away with an aplomb that both surprised and impressed her.
Good for you
, she thought.
You totally didn’t do the whole shrieking girlfriend thing while they hauled your boyfriend out of here. That would have been pretty low-class.

Then again, Jazz had a history of being dragged away by the cops, and it always worked out. He had been arrested once a couple of months ago during the Impressionist case, at the same time that Howie struggled for his life after being knifed. And she had been there in the school auditorium when Deputy Erickson had pulled Jazz out of play rehearsal one afternoon, all because Jazz had done too good a job predicting the Impressionist’s next victim. Both times, he had returned safe and sound.

As she did at home every morning in her own room, she switched on the TV to listen to the news and weather while she got dressed. She would have to figure out where he’d gone, of course. Even though he always came back to her, that didn’t mean he didn’t need help. After all, the Impressionist had managed to hold Jazz hostage in his own home, and only Connie and Howie’s last-minute heroics had saved him.