Game (17 page)

He wondered: When next he saw his father, would he be thrilled or terrified?

The killer sat in his easy chair, the remains of a home-cooked meal on the coffee table before him. The TV blathered the sorts of banalities his wife enjoyed—so-called reality TV, in which people competed to prove their superiority over one another. The killer tolerated the show, even pretended to enjoy it. One player and one alone captured his attention, a dental hygienist from Spokane, who spoke with a slight lisp and had hair the color of clarified butter and eyes so big and blue that he wanted to pop them out and eat them.

The killer had never eaten eyes. Or any other part of a human body. But he now desperately, desperately wanted to. The thought consumed him in a familiar, caressing way. He knew this feeling. It had been with him most of his life. He could not remember a time in his life when he could look at a woman and not want to possess her.
Possess
was an important word. It meant much. It meant to own. It meant to maintain one’s calm. It meant to captivate and enter like a demon,
though the killer did not believe in such bogus and repugnant claptrap.

It also meant to have intercourse with.

The killer wanted to own women. In every way. And he had, indeed, owned many. Even the ones he found possessed (that word again!) of subpar appearance he yearned to own, for to own meant to be able to destroy.

Tall, short, thin, fat, ugly, gorgeous, black, white, all shades between and beyond… He wanted them all. For his own. So that no one else could have them. His to use and to keep or discard as he saw fit.

He had spent much of his life dreaming of this. Dreaming of captive women, compelled to do as he commanded. Dreaming of them on their knees before him, subject to his whims—beaten or comforted, killed or succored, raped or loved.

The dreams could not be sated. Not by anything he watched or touched or knew. Only finding her (any “her”) and owning her, making her his in every way, could satisfy his needs.

The first time he’d owned a woman, he’d thought it over at that. Thought that with the realization of his dream, he could and would now be like all the others he saw around him. He would now be what they called “normal.” He discovered relaxation; he learned that with his fantasy fulfilled, he could breathe and settle and close his eyes at last.

But his calm, his repose, did not last. The fantasies returned, first as niggling daydreams, then as all-consuming compulsions, until every woman he saw on the street, on the
subway, anywhere, was a target, a victim waiting to happen. And he resisted. He resisted as long as he could. As best as he could. Until…

Until…

Until he no longer had to.

Until the message and the voice…

Just then, a phone rang. The killer stiffened. It was not his cell phone or his wife’s. It was something else.

“Is that yours?” his wife asked.

“Yes,” he said, and swiftly went to the small, cramped bedroom, where he closed the door and dug into the bottom of his chest of drawers. Three cell phones were there. One rang again. The killer answered, trembling.

“The number is six,” the voice said, and the killer felt a trill of anticipation—six!—until the voice said, “Six. Five and one.”

“Six,” the killer repeated. Five and one. Not three and three.

“And,” the voice went on, “a little something special this time.”

Shocked, the killer almost dropped the phone, but held tight and kept listening. He wrote nothing down—that would be foolish—but memorized every word.

“I understand,” he said when the voice had finished, then removed the battery from the phone. On his way back to the TV, he stopped in the kitchen and tossed the phone’s battery into the trash. Then he quickly snapped the cheap plastic hinge and tossed both halves of the broken phone into the garbage compactor.

“Who was that?” his wife asked.

He ignored her. She ignored him back, caught up in her show.

The killer stared at the TV. The dental hygienist from Spokane was staring back at him.

Even though she wanted to, Connie didn’t bring up what had happened between them at the hotel overnight. She said nothing about it in the car on the way to the airport, nor at the airport itself, as they went through security and then waited for their flight. The NYPD—eager to get Jazz out of its jurisdiction as quickly as possible—had made some calls and arranged for his ticket to be switched to Connie’s flight, so they were in a rush from the time she returned to the hotel.

She tried to pretend that nothing had happened, that nothing had changed. She started to tell Jazz about her mini-tour of the crime scenes, but he clearly wasn’t focused. He kept interrupting to bring up something about Long or Hughes or the captain guy—Montgomery—who’d kicked him out of New York, and she eventually realized that he just needed to vent. So she listened as he told her about his encounter with the NYPD. And Special Agent Morales of the FBI.

“Do you think she was serious about helping you kill your
dad?” she asked in a low voice. They were at their gate, and it was crowded. She didn’t want anyone to overhear.

Jazz shrugged. He was wearing sunglasses indoors and had bought a Mets cap, which he kept pulled over his forehead. Being recognized would—in a word—suck. “I don’t know.”

“Would you…” She stopped herself. This was neither the time nor the place for such a discussion. The amount of hatred in her heart for Billy Dent surprised her, though. She felt an immediate and powerful kinship with Special Agent Morales, whom she’d never even met. Any woman who wanted Billy Dent dead badly enough to risk her career—for surely if Jazz reported what she’d offered to a superior, she’d be out of the FBI—was a woman Connie could learn to love. Conscience Hall was well named by her parents, but even
her
conscience had its breaking point. The man who had mauled the childhood of the boy she loved definitely occupied a spot beyond that breaking point.

So she wasn’t surprised to find that she wanted Billy Dent dead. What surprised her was how happy the thought made her, how liberated it made her feel, even though she knew that Jazz killing his own father would send her boyfriend into a darker place than even
he
could imagine.

But if Jazz didn’t do it… If this Special Agent Morales was the one to do it…

Well, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? The world would be rid of Billy Dent. More important,
Jazz
would be rid of him, without adding to the burden already on his too-full back.

Maybe this FBI lady is a gift from God
, Connie wanted to tell Jazz.

She settled for squeezing his hand. After a moment, he squeezed back.

Jazz said nothing on the flight, staring moodily out the window instead, as though answers or resolutions had been inscribed in the billowy curves of the clouds. Connie, for her part, stared just as moodily at him, willing him to turn and look at her.

She so badly wanted to discuss what had happened the night before, in the hotel room. She still didn’t know who was being more unfair to whom, but one thing was certain—she wouldn’t figure it out until they actually opened their mouths and talked about it.

Had it been presumptuous to bring the condoms to New York? Probably. She could admit that. But she couldn’t shake the memory of the giddy, stomach-twirling elation she’d experienced at the drugstore when she’d bought them.
They’ll have condoms in New York
, she had thought.
Why buy them here, where someone you know might see you?
Then she dismissed it. She didn’t
care
if someone saw. She was in love. So what if people knew she was having sex with the man she loved? Her parents were both at work, so they wouldn’t see her—it would be a friend or an enemy, and it just didn’t matter.

She’d bought them and packed them and thought of them
on the flight to New York. This was the right way to do it. Responsible. She and Jazz were both virgins, and they would do this the right way. The adult way.

It was time.

She knew in her head and she felt in her heart and in other, more primal, parts of her body. She was ready. When this state of readiness had been obtained, she couldn’t say. But after the Impressionist nearly killed Jazz, and after Jazz finally faced the demon of his past—his father—she sensed a change in their relationship. A growth. A maturation. They were ready for the next step, and once she knew that, she was desperate for it.

Still. She hadn’t planned on springing it on him the way she had. A late-night/early-morning grope-fest gone manically passionate. Blurting out that she had protection.
Wrong way to go about it
, she thought.
I should have brought it up before. Been cool about it. Like, “Hey, I think it’s time. I think we’re ready. How about you?” And when he said, “Yeah,”
then
you say, “Great, we’re covered; let’s go.”

All of that was true, but no matter how badly she’d bungled it, his reaction—his refusal to talk, his sulking in the other bed—pained her. Intellectually, she knew that it was fear driving him, that it had nothing to do with her. But emotionally and with all the yearning in her body, she felt rejected. Harshly.

When the plane landed, she hoped that maybe they could talk while waiting for Howie to pick them up, but to her absolute mortification, her father was waiting as they passed through security.

“I just need a second—” she started.

“You had a first, a second, and a third,” her father said with barely concealed rage. “No more chances. Come with me. Now.”

“But, Dad—”

“No buts, Conscience.”

Jazz cleared his throat. “Mr. Hall, if Connie and I could just have a minute to—”

“To what?” Dad said, rounding on Jazz, that rage now no longer concealed at all. “To do what, Jasper? Abduct her to Chicago this time?”

“I didn’t abduct her,” Jazz said with amazing calm. “In fact, I told her not to come at all.”

“I’m sure you did,” Dad said sarcastically. He loomed over Jazz like a hawk on a high branch. Connie didn’t know for whom she was more afraid: Jazz or her dad. Jazz seemed harmless, although she knew he was anything but. Her dad knew it, too. Or should have.

“Dad, let’s go.” Connie stepped in and took her father’s hand. “Let’s just go.”

Dad shook her off. “Listen to me, Jasper Dent. I haven’t said this before, but I’m saying it now: Stay the hell away from my daughter. Or else.”

“Or else what?” Jazz said with an infuriating, dead calm that belied his words. Connie knew this voice. “More history lessons about Sally Hemmings?” Almost bored. Contemptuously so. “Maybe this time a video on lynching?”

Connie pulled harder at her dad, who wouldn’t budge. Jazz’s calm was a gimmick, a trick. It was a Billy Dent
tactic—forcing your prey to overreact by seeming completely unaffected. Jazz was trying to—

Oh, God.
Jazz wanted Dad to take a swing at him. Maybe so that he could hit back and feel justified doing it. Maybe just because he was so pissed about everything that had and hadn’t happened in New York that he wanted to take it out on someone, anyone, and why not the man standing between him and Connie?

“Or
else
,” Dad said, in a threatening tone Connie had never heard before, “I’m going to make you wish you’d never seen her.”

And Jazz stared at her father. Connie had never seen such a stare. He didn’t move; his expression didn’t change. It was something ethereal, something in his eyes, or in his soul. Something had shifted, and Connie suddenly realized that she’d been wrong before—her father wasn’t the hawk on the high branch.

Jazz was.

“You think you’re scary?” Jazz said quietly, his lips quirking in a little smile.

He said nothing else. He didn’t have to. Connie’s dad swallowed visibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Stop it!” Connie hissed at Jazz. She knew him better than anyone else in the world—well, maybe except for Billy—but right now she didn’t know
what
she was witnessing. “Cut it out. Now!”

Her father pulled his arm from her.

“You don’t scare me,” he told Jazz, but his voice had mellowed just a tad.

And now Jazz smiled a full smile. It terrified Connie, because to anyone not listening in, it looked as though Jazz had just heard something funny. But there was nothing funny here.

“You tell yourself that,” Jazz said. “That’s okay. Keep telling yourself that.”

“Dad,” Connie said, tugging again. “Let’s go.”

This time, he let her pull him away. Connie glared at Jazz over her shoulder. “Knock off the nonsense!” she stage-whispered. He sure as hell wasn’t making it easier for them to be together by pulling this kind of crap. “Seriously!”

But for his part, Jazz just watched them go, still smiling.

As soon as Connie and her dad disappeared around a bend, Jazz blew out his breath and slumped against a nearby wall. What the hell had he been thinking? Was he nuts? Goading Mr. Hall like that? This was the man who could keep him from Connie. Well, at least until Connie was eighteen.

But he had to admit that, deep down, there was a part of him that had loved the confrontation. He hadn’t been able to manipulate Montgomery—the pull of his pension and his career had outweighed Jazz’s “Jedi mind tricks”—but he’d come pretty close to getting Mr. Hall to take a swing at him. If Connie hadn’t been there, Jazz was sure he’d have had her father roaring and punching. And then…