Game (5 page)

“You can’t go on your own.”

“Why not?” he asked with infuriating aplomb, as though the question had already occurred to him and he was just letting her get it out of her system.

“You’ve never been in a town bigger than the Nod in your life. I’ve been to New York three times and grew up near Charlotte before we moved here.”

Jazz snorted and helped her up from the beanbag. “I’ll be with an NYPD detective. Somehow I think I’ll manage to avoid getting lost in the subway system. And even if I do get lost…” He dug into his pocket and proudly held up his new cell phone. After the disaster of the Impressionist, Connie, Howie, and even Sheriff Tanner had all chipped in to get Jazz his first cell.

“Shows what you know, smart guy: Cell phones don’t work in the subway. Are you taking Howie with you instead of me? Is that it? Two guys out in the big city?”

“Ha! Yeah, right. Are you kidding? After he got stabbed, his mother won’t let him outside of a ten-mile radius without a bodyguard and a Kevlar vest. I’d have to kidnap him to get him to New York….” Jazz drifted off, stroking his jaw. “Hmm… kidnap him…”

Coming from anyone else, it would be funny. A brief
moment of levity. But Jazz couldn’t quite pull it off, and Connie told him so. “Yeah, I know what you’re going for there, but I just got a chill down my spine.”

“Really?” Jazz blinked. “That wasn’t funny?”

“It’s all in the delivery. And you don’t have what it takes to pull off that kind of joke.” She pecked him on the lips, not wanting to tell him that for a moment there she’d actually been in fear for Howie’s life. “Come on, let’s get going. It’s already freezing in here.”

“Does this mean you’ve given up trying to convince me you’re coming with me?”

Connie thought for a moment and answered very carefully, very precisely. “Yes. It means I have given up trying to convince you.”

But, she knew, that didn’t mean that she wasn’t going.

That night, Connie toyed with her dinner at the Hall house, her appetite somewhere on a future flight with Jazz and Detective Hughes.

“Something wrong, Conscience?” her father asked gently as she introduced her peas one by one to her untouched pile of mashed potatoes. Only her father ever used her full name. Everyone else, including her mother, called her Connie. Jerome Hall believed that names held power, and he wanted his children to have all the advantages such names conferred. And so Connie was Conscience and her younger brother—nicknamed Whiz—was Wisdom.

“I’m okay,” Connie lied without even thinking about it. “Just not hungry, I guess.”

“She was with her
boyfriend
today,” Whiz said, almost singsonging it. “I saw the text on her phone. They have a hideout somewhere.”

Connie bristled. Whiz was ten years old, and his favorite pastime these days, it seemed, was spying on his big sister. “You’re a little sneak,” she told him.

Ignoring Connie, Whiz shoveled a forkful of ham and potatoes into his mouth. “They text all the time,” he went on, “now that
he
has a cell phone. Jasper Dent,” Whiz added helpfully, in case anyone didn’t already know.

“Whiz, I know your sister is still seeing that Dent boy. I don’t need you tattling on her.”

“But, Dad—”

“A butt is something you sit on and something I’m gonna kick if you don’t mind me.”

Connie held back a smirk. Her father was all talk. There had never been a spanking in the Hall house that she could remember. It was actually annoying that her father was the kindest, wisest man Connie knew… except for that special and pernicious blind spot he had toward her boyfriend.

Sure, she understood that Jazz wasn’t the ideal boyfriend. At least, not from a parent’s perspective. Raised by a serial killer—and not just
any
serial killer, really:
the
serial killer—Jazz had his share of issues, but she didn’t think his father’s sins should be held against him. In any event, Jazz could have been the son of the local saint and Connie’s dad still would have been against the relationship. The black/white
thing. Racial memories that hadn’t yet been purged. Jerome Hall just couldn’t abide seeing his daughter like that.

For her part, Connie wished someone would invent a drug that would make the world forget the past and get on with the future. Her love life was seriously being messed with, and she couldn’t take it any longer. And now she had before her a nearly impossible task: how to convince her parents to let her take the last few days of winter break and go to New York with Jazz. Jazz had said no way, but who was he to boss her around? She could make her own decisions, and this was the one she’d made. Jazz would have no choice but to deal with it. It’s not like it was against the law for her to go to New York. He couldn’t stop her.

Only her parents could do that.

“I know there’s not much more I can do to stop you from seeing him,” her dad was saying, “because you’ll be eighteen soon and because I’ve always treated you like an adult. But I wish you would maybe cool it off a little.”

“Dad has a point,” Mom said, jumping in before Connie could speak. “I know you feel strongly about Jasper, but you’re young. He’s your first real boyfriend. Maybe you should play the field a little. See what else is out there.”

Connie sighed. What her parents said made sense.
If
you assumed she wasn’t in love with Jazz. Which she was. She didn’t know what the future might hold—she hadn’t given herself permission to think beyond the next couple of years—but she did know that she wanted to find out with him at her side.

So what would Jazz do in this situation? Easy: He would manipulate. Which, of course, was a polite word for lie.

And lying
, she realized,
is really just acting. And I’m good at acting.

Almost without realizing what she was doing, she started speaking, putting down her fork and focusing intently on her father, the tough one to persuade.

“Here’s the problem,” she said, the blanks in her plan filling themselves in as she spoke, her heart beating faster as she realized what she was doing. She was Billying her parents.
So this is what that feels like.
“Here’s the problem. We only have a few more days of break left, and I really want to spend them with Jazz”—she marked the tightening of her father’s expression, the deepening of the worry lines around her mother’s eyes—“but there’s a great orientation weekend at Columbia, too. I know it’s sort of early for me, but Columbia’s where I want to go and I could narrow down my application choices for the fall right now. But here’s the thing: I would have to leave tomorrow.” Before her parents could say anything, she rushed on. “Remember Larissa? She played Maria in that weird version of
West Side Story
I did that summer at drama camp in Charlotte? Well, she’s already in college at Columbia, and she’s the one who told me about it. It sounds
amazing
, and I could totally stay with her. But then”—she said it expertly, as though it were just occurring to her—“I wouldn’t see Jazz until school started up again.”

Her parents exchanged a glance.

“How much would this trip cost?” her father asked, and Connie knew she had them.

“I can stay with Larissa for free. And you’ll always be able to reach me on my cell.” With a couple of texts, she could easily get Larissa to cover for her. And she figured Jazz would have a hotel room. Just the two of them… in a hotel room… The thought made her head spin and did things to her body she couldn’t enjoy right now. “I can probably fly standby since it’s last minute, and I can help pay for it—I have money from babysitting and Grampa’s Christmas check.”

Her father stroked his jaw and exchanged another look with her mother.

“She shouldn’t get to go to New York all on her own!” Whiz complained. “That’s not fair! I don’t get to go anywhere!”

Dad rolled his eyes in exasperation, and Connie knew she had him.

So this was how Jazz felt. All the time. Every day.

Connie had to admit it was pretty spectacular.

“Can’t say as I like this idea,” G. William told Jazz, settling with a sigh into the chair behind his desk. The chair wheezed and squeaked with complaint, and Jazz wondered—as he always did—if he would be there on that inevitable day when the chair gave up entirely and dumped its occupant to the floor. Today was not that day, apparently.

“Connie agrees with you,” Jazz told him. “She thinks I shouldn’t be going alone.”

“Then this is one of the few times I disagree with your girlfriend. Because I don’t think you should be going at all. You’re seventeen. You—”

“ ‘—should be thinking about college applications and getting into your girlfriend’s pants, not gallivantin’ all over God’s creation,’ ” Jazz quoted, finishing the riot act G. William read to him on a regular basis. “I know. I’ve heard it all before.”

“I’m not gonna deny you were a big help with Frederick Thurber”—the Impressionist’s real name, finally dug up after some intense detective work on G. William’s part—“but
that was a special case. He was imitating your daddy. Someone whose methods and special blend of crazy you knew real well. What makes you think you got any special insight into this Hot Dog?”

“The Hat-Dog Killer,” Jazz corrected him.

“All crazy people don’t think the same,” G. William went on. “It’s hubris to think otherwise in your case.”

“Hubris? Been hitting the word-a-day calendar, G. William?”

The sheriff cracked a smile for the first time since Jazz had walked into the office and told him of his intention to go to New York with Hughes. “That trick doesn’t work on me. The one where you insult someone, try to get them off their game, rattled? File that away as one way you can’t manipulate ol’ G. William.”

“Look,” Jazz said, leaning forward urgently, as if he’d never even tried manipulating the sheriff, “you caught Billy, right? You figured out the connections between all of his victims and the ones here in Lobo’s Nod, and then you went out and caught him when no one else in the world could have. But if someone else—someone other than the Impressionist, someone
not
copying Billy—started stacking up bodies in the Nod again, it’s not like you would just throw your hands up in the air and say, ‘Oh, well—all crazy people don’t think the same. I guess I won’t even try to catch this new guy.’ Would you?”

The sheriff drew one of his impeccably laundered, monogrammed handkerchiefs from a pocket and snorted heartily into it. “Nah. All that tells me is that
I
oughtta be the one headed to New York, not you.”

Was that a joke? Sometimes Jazz couldn’t tell. The sheriff had sworn that catching Billy Dent had been one serial killer too many for him, but maybe G. William was jealous that Jazz was getting called up to the big leagues.

“I could put in a good word for you,” he said lightly.

G. William waved the very idea out of the air like a bad smell. “If I wanted to go to the city, I’d’ve taken up the FBI on their offer when I was a much younger man and could still make the pretty girls swoon. You want to go to New York and try to help these folks, that’s your business.”

“Well, yeah.”

“But”—and here G. William leaned across the desk, pointing a stubby finger—“you listen and listen good, Jasper Francis: No good will come of this. You think you’re gonna find something there in New York.”

“No kidding. A serial killer.”

“No. More than that. You think you’re gonna find your soul. Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been thinkin’ that someday you’re gonna crack and end up like your daddy. And you’ve been looking for proof that you won’t. What you don’t realize is this: The looking
is
the proof. Trust me when I tell you that Billy Dent never had a moment’s doubt in his life about what he was and what he was doing. Your doubt is your soul, kid.”

It made all the sense in the world, and Jazz wished he could believe it. But he knew too much. He knew of too many serial killers who’d been horrified by their own actions, ones who’d acted on impulse and later didn’t understand that impulse. And, of course, the ones who’d acted on impulse and then discovered—to their delight—that they loved it, that the
blood and the torture and the other things fulfilled them and assuaged their longings in ways that nothing else could.

“I’m just looking for a killer in New York. And I hear they have good bagels.”

G. William regarded him in silence for a moment, then sighed. “Bring me back a knish,” he said at last. “Haven’t had a decent one in ten years.”