Game (8 page)

He looked around. At three in the morning in early January, Union Square Park in lower Manhattan was no one’s idea of a comfortable hangout. Still, there were a few junkies doing their nervous dance over in the shadows, waiting for the connection they prayed would come.

Billy didn’t care about the junkies. He made sure he was out of the cone of light thrown by a streetlight and dropped the phone, crushing it under his foot. Stooping, he picked up the pieces and discarded them in a half-dozen different trash cans as he made his way to the NQR subway entrance.

Eleven
, he thought.
Eleven as the crow flies
…

Before returning to the Dent house the next day, Howie realized he would need armor to deal with Jazz’s crazy grandmother. He had seen her slap and punch Jazz, as well as throw everything from stuffed teddy bears to skillets. She was surprisingly strong for a woman who looked to be five or six inches away from death. Maybe it was some kind of death adrenaline. Whatever the case, Howie didn’t plan on letting her turn his hemophiliac body into her own personal bruise-n-contuse plaything.

Since it was January, he got away with wearing long sleeves—flannel. Nice and thick, for protection. Just in case, he strapped on some wrist guards underneath. They were supposed to be for people who typed a lot, but they had hard steel inserts and would do him well if he had to suddenly protect his face. He also wore gloves, which he promised himself he would leave on even while inside. Heavy denim jeans, of course: That stuff really felt like armor. Howie figured he could go ride out in the Crusades with his heavy-duty
Levi’s on. He scrounged around the house until he found his dad’s old hunting cap, right down to the earflaps.
Oh, yeah.
He would look like a serious dork, but he didn’t care—his skull would be protected.

“I can’t believe the crap I go through for this guy….” Howie muttered to himself as he parked at the Dent house. He had spoken to Jazz’s aunt Samantha briefly over the phone before coming over. She had said little about her flight or rental car drive to the Nod or anything at all, really, despite Howie’s endless, helpful patter. Taciturn ran in the family. Well, except for Billy. Howie remembered hanging out at Jazz’s house when they were kids. Billy never stopped talking. Howie’s mom used the phrase “talk a blue streak” to mean someone who talked incessantly. Billy Dent talked streaks in all kinds of shades of blue: sky blue, navy blue, midnight blue. You name it, Billy Dent said it. The man never shut up.

Howie marched up the front steps, gave a warning knock at the front door, then let himself in with the key Jazz had given him, steeling himself for the crazy that was Gramma Dent.

Instead, he found Gramma Dent and Samantha sitting cross-legged on the parlor floor, playing “patty-cake.”

“Bake me a cake as fast as you can!” Gramma chanted in time with Samantha. “Roll it! And prick it! And mark it with an
A.
And put it in the oven for me and Sammy J!”

Jazz’s grandmother hooted with delight.

“Josephine,” Sam explained to Howie.

“What’s the
A
for, then?” he asked.

Sam shrugged. “She likes it to rhyme.”

“Again!” Gramma shrieked. “Again!”

Howie ended up on the floor with them, playing a nearly endless round of patty-cake that concluded only when Gramma mumbled “Nappy time” and crawled over to the couch to conk out.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Howie told Samantha moments later in the kitchen, where Jazz’s aunt was washing dishes. “She gets childlike sometimes, but she usually goes all temper-tantrum at some point, you know?”

“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Samantha confessed. “I knew she was getting worse—I had stopped writing and calling years ago, before all of the… well, you know. But I knew… I knew that she wasn’t going to be getting better as time went on, you know?”

“Was she always like this?”

Samantha shrugged. “She was always crazy. But you know… you know, the whole family was crazy, so it didn’t really stand out. I mean, Billy was going around”—she shuddered—“being Billy. And back in the seventies, you could be some crazy lady spouting all of her nutty racist crap and people would just sort of nod politely and pretend they didn’t hear it. She was never delusional, not like now. But crazy? Always?” Samantha smiled ruefully. “How do you think Billy ended up the way he did?”

Howie returned the smile. Samantha was in her late forties, he knew, but she looked good. Prime cougar material, really, and he had to admit he liked what he saw. His hemophilia having marked him as a freak from early days, not
many girls in Lobo’s Nod paid him any mind, much less were willing to get naked and sweaty with him in the way nature prescribed. But hey—maybe he’d have a shot with someone who didn’t have the hang-ups and the history of those who’d known him for years.

“It’s sort of a miracle that you ended up normal,” Howie told her as smoothly as he could, leaning against the counter with as much savoir faire as he could muster. He figured he cut a pretty dashing figure in his jeans and heavy shirt. And gloves. And hat. Not like a page out of a catalog or anything, but it showed how he thought ahead. He was prepared. Women dug guys who were prepared.

His advance preparations were lost on Samantha, who was paying attention to the dishes.

“Normal?” Samantha’s laugh was short and harsh. “Normal. Not a chance. I got the hell out of this house and this town as fast as I could, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t know how to be around normal people by that point. I’ve spent my whole life figuring it out. And once Billy got caught, suddenly it was like I had to start all over again.”

Howie saw his chance; he took off his gloves and nabbed a wet, clean dish from Samantha’s hands, allowing his fingers to linger on hers for a moment. It was a good, subtle move—he’d seen it in a bunch of movies.

“What the hell are you doing?” Samantha asked.

“Taking this dish.”

“Why?”

He was still touching her. He realized he didn’t have a towel to dry the dish with. “Um.”

“Howie, you’re the same age as my nephew.”

“Actually, I’m six weeks older.”

She shook her head. “It’s not going to happen.”

“You say that now.”

“I do.”

“We’re both two lonely people,” Howie said seductively, “trapped in a world created by Billy Dent.”

Samantha howled with laughter. Howie figured that wasn’t a good sign.

Jazz was surprised that he absolutely hated New York City.

No, that wasn’t quite accurate. Being from a small town like Lobo’s Nod, it was no surprise that he hated New York. What really surprised him was
how much
he hated it. He didn’t dislike New York with the simple diffidence of a small-town kid or the tragic ignorance of a yokel—he loathed it with the entirety of what he hoped was his soul.

The streets—cramped with cars and buses; with all the traffic, it took them almost two hours to get from the airport to some place called Red Hook, which looked like every bad ’hood in every action movie Jazz had ever seen.

The buildings—either run-down to the point of ruin or so overwrought that he felt like they’d been built not to serve any purpose but rather just to prove a point.

The smell—Jazz figured even New Yorkers had to hate the garbage and urine smells, but it wasn’t just that. The city managed to ruin even the
good
smells; at one point, while walking from the cab to the hotel, Jazz had smelled the most
delightful bread baking, but the smell vanished as quickly as it teased his nose, and no matter where he looked or how much he tried, he couldn’t recapture it. He had never realized how odorless Lobo’s Nod was. Other than the occasional car exhaust, the town smelled utterly neutral.

The noise—it was perpetual.

But the worst thing about the city, the thing that poleaxed him, the thing Hughes had warned him about, the thing he should have been prepared for and yet—he acknowledged—never could have been prepared for…

The people.

Look at ’em all, Jasper
, Billy whispered in his head.

So… many… people.

Look at ’em. You could take one. Easy. Or more than one. As many as you want, really. There’s so many, it’s not like anyone would miss one. Couple thousand go missing every year in this country—man, woman, and child alike. So many. Most of ’em, no one knows. No one cares. It’s like grabbin’ up blades of grass in the park. One more, one less. Makes no difference.

“You all right?” Hughes asked suddenly, and Jazz whipped around like a kid caught unscrambling the adult channels.

“I’m fine,” Jazz said. It came out weak and unconvincing.

“He’s overwhelmed,” Connie jumped in, grabbing his hand. “He’ll be fine.”

Connie. She’d been here before for short trips and seemed to be in love with New York already. She had managed to grab an earlier flight, a direct one, beating Hughes and him
to JFK. An important lesson for Jazz: Connie wouldn’t stay put just because he said so.

There’s ways to change that, Jasper. Ways to make her listen. And the best part is, you know them ways already. You know them real well….

“I’m fine,” Jazz said again, and tightened his grip on Connie’s hand as Hughes led them into the hotel.

Movies and TV shows had prepared Jazz for two kinds of big-city hotels. There were the ostentatious, gilded palaces for the wealthy, and the rank, decrepit hovels for the itinerants and the junkies and the hookers. So he was mildly disappointed to find himself ensconced in neither—the hotel the NYPD had chosen for him was a bog-standard Holiday Inn that wouldn’t have looked out of place along the highway that ran past and beyond Lobo’s Nod.

“You okay?” Connie whispered as they waited for Hughes to check them in.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been squeezing my hand like it’s putty.”

“Sorry.” He released her. “Trying to find amusement in our setting.”

She looked around. “Yeah, doesn’t feel very New York, does it?”

Maybe that was a good thing.

Hughes approached them, brandishing two keycards. He
hesitated for a moment and sized them up. “How old are you guys again?”

“Seventeen,” Connie answered.

The detective clucked his tongue, then shrugged. “I only have the one room. Use protection.” He handed over the cards and left them to find the room and get settled in while he attended to some other business, promising to return by lunchtime to get started on the case.

As Hughes retreated, Jazz stared slack-jawed at Connie, well and truly shocked by something not involving blood for the first time in a long time. “Can you believe that? He’s just gonna let us stay in the same—”

“We’re practically adults,” Connie said with an air of urbane sophistication. “What did you
think
he was going to do—call our parents? It’s New York. It’s a whole different world.” She waved her card in the air and led him off to the elevator.

The room had two beds. Jazz wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He had stayed in hotels only as a child, on occasional “road trips” with Billy. Billy never flew anywhere, if he could help it.
Too many security checks. Too many people checkin’ your ID. Too much damn nosiness, Jasper.
So they had driven to any number of places, usually so that Billy could impart some sort of lesson to his son. Hands-on experience, Billy called it, turning Jazz into his assistant and his accomplice on more than one occasion.

Those hotels had usually been out-of-the-way rattraps, the sheets musty, the bathtubs stained even before Billy showered off the grime and the blood of his most recent
prospect. This place was pleasant, if boring. There was a large framed photo of the Statue of Liberty over the bed.

“Why would you want to look at a
picture
of the Statue of Liberty when you’re in New York?” Connie demanded. “You can go see the real thing.”

Jazz shrugged and poked his head into the bathroom, half expecting to see his father emerging from the shower, dripping wet and grinning.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Connie said, “how pissed are you at me?”

“I don’t have time to be pissed at you,” Jazz said, more curtly than he’d intended. “I need to help the NYPD and then get the hell out of this city.”

“Settle down, big guy. You’ve seen a chunk of Brooklyn from the cab and a grand total of two whole blocks on your feet. Give it a chance before you hate it.”

“It’s not that.” He pushed away her comforting hands, forcing himself to do it gently. “This place isn’t good for me. It’s a hunting ground. It’s a… It’s a prospecting gold mine.”

“You’re not a killer,” she told him, grabbing a hand and imprisoning it with both of hers, then holding it to her chest. “Listen to me: You’re not a killer. It doesn’t matter what this place is.”

He stared at the Statue of Liberty. Flicked his eyes to the lamp on the nightstand between the two beds. Anything to avoid looking at Connie. “Remember how I told you once that the problem with people is that when there’s so many of them, they stop being special?” She nodded. “Well, take a look around and do the math.”