Blood of My Blood (24 page)

Dad had sprung for first class back to the Nod, so Connie reclined the seat as far back as it would go and closed her eyes. She had just enough room for her broken leg. Perfect. She took one of the painkillers from the prescription they’d filled at the hospital pharmacy, and soon the thrum of the jet engines and the power of the narcotics lulled her to sleep.

When she awoke, they were landing and the flight attendant was telling her to return her seat to its full and upright position. Connie blinked away sleep and groggily did as she was ordered. Next to her, Dad stared out the window at the clouds rolling and crashing like slow-motion waves.

At home, her mother wept over her like she was a returning soldier. Connie murmured assurances and tried not to show how painful it was to be in her mother’s tight embrace. She wondered when she would stop hurting. Would it happen all at once, or would some part of her body drop off the roster first, followed by others? At this point, she felt as though
even her eyelids and hair hurt; she would be happy with one part of her body not aching.

Whiz feigned indifference, shuffling listlessly off to one side as her mother and father took turns clutching and worrying at her. When Mom said, “Come say something to your sister,” he grunted something vaguely audible and hugged her awkwardly with one arm. “Welcome back, I guess,” he said.

They rolled her into her room in a wheelchair Mom had bought when Dad called. Her bedroom seemed too big for her, too bright, too loud. The artifacts of her old life stunned her—childish, little-girl baubles. Hair products and cheap jewelry exchanged with friends and pages torn from
Essence
and
Heart & Soul
and the copies of
Cosmo
her friends kept shoving at her. The ruffles at the base of the bed glared at her, almost accusing her of being a frivolous, shallow
girl
. Thank God there was nothing pink—she didn’t think she could bear that. She imagined herself screaming for the pink to be stripped from the room, her room denuded if need be.

Managing a taut, convincing smile for her parents, she eased herself out of the chair and onto the bed. Mom had already left extra pillows so that she could elevate her leg while sleeping. Dad put the crutches within arm’s reach, and they both asked, “Do you need anything? Are you sure?” multiple times as they slowly backed out of the room.

She didn’t need anything. She was sure.

Until they closed the door.

Her heart hammered so fast, so strong, so sudden that she thought it had exploded, that her last thought in this life
would be
What just happened in my chest?
But the moment passed. She yoga breathed but had trouble catching her breath.

It was the door. It was closing the damn door with her alone and helpless in her room. It didn’t matter that it was her own bedroom; it had become an alien place. It was the soundproof room in Brooklyn, where she had struggled to free herself, where Jazz’s poor mother had been unable to escape. It was the fight with Billy Dent, the crash through the window, the drop.…

Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to focus on a meadow. On a field. But there was a body in the field and there was blood in the meadow, and nothing she did could relax her. This wasn’t her room anymore. This wasn’t her home. This was just a place to live. She had become a new person in New York, and being in her parents’ house was like having skin that fit too tightly. She didn’t know how she could possibly cope; she would scream, she knew.

The room was the same when she opened her eyes; it hadn’t transmogrified through some magic into her prison in Brooklyn. Everything was too bright, too garish. Except for one thing.

Taped to the full-length mirror opposite the bed, a makeshift frame of photos called to her. She groped for the crutches, managed to lurch out of bed, and balanced herself well enough that she could take the four hop-steps to the mirror. There, in the upper-left corner, was the only thing in the room that did not assault her eyes.

A photo. Of her and Jazz. In each other’s arms.

It was from the previous summer. The Hat-Dog Killers would have just been on the trailhead of their path through the brambles of murder, but in Lobo’s Nod, Connie and Jazz knew nothing of what waited for them in mere months. The Impressionist was still in the future, and Hat-Dog were on their second kill, maybe, and for the moment, Jazz and Connie were just, merely, only, simply happy.

Jazz smiled so rarely. And smiled honestly even less frequently. She adored that smile.

With a trembling hand, she pried the photo from the mirror and held it close. Their closeness. Their becoming indeterminate in each other. Was that even possible now? If he came to her with his father’s blood on his hands, could she forgive that? Live with that?

Certainly, she wanted Billy dead. Preferably dead, chopped into little pieces, fed to rats, and then the rats’ scat collected and burned. Just to be sure.

But did Jazz have to be the one to pull the trigger?

Maybe it would liberate him. Maybe it would set him free, and with his mother back in his life, maybe…

Maybe maybe maybe.

It was all moot, in any event. Jazz was off, lost in the wind, in some place where she couldn’t touch him. Maybe nearby. Probably not. She knew the odds put him in a ditch somewhere, shivering, his leg infected and ballooned up to the size of an elephant’s. If anyone could survive on the run, though, it was Jazz.

Where is he
, she wondered.
Where is he and what is he doing?

Surrounded by the Hideout again, Jazz felt as though he’d somehow stepped into the past, back into a world that—in retrospect—was much kinder and easier than he’d thought at the time.

He hadn’t been to the Hideout since around the time of the Impressionist. Once the weather turned, even the space heater couldn’t keep out the cold, especially given that he had to keep the door cracked when running it, lest the kerosene fumes finish the job Duncan Hershey had failed to complete on his own.

Struggling with the casket, he’d managed to get the removed lid portion back into position, though the lock and hinges were useless now. He had begun refilling the grave—out of common decency, if not a desire to cover his tracks—when he heard wheels on gravel. So Jazz had shoveled one last heap of dirt into the grave and then scampered off into the darkness surrounding the graves.

Finally safe, he spent a few minutes chasing various
bugs, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies out of his sanctum before turning on the heater and settling into the beanbag chair that he usually reserved for make-out sessions with Connie. A sudden, pungent memory smote him—wrapped up with Connie in the Hideout, their breath desperate and ragged as their lips and tongues fought each other for primacy. His hands, explorers, ranged every inch of her; nothing off-limits, nothing left untouched. In those moments, at that time, he’d thought that maybe someday he might be normal, that maybe there might somehow be a happy ending for his story.

He repressed the memory with a savage brutality. There was no time for this. He had a purpose. His mother needed him. His father lurked in the darkness.

If the price of ridding the world of Billy Dent was the loss of his own life, or happiness, or freedom, well, that was the cheapest price imaginable.

And finally—finally!—he had a weapon. One he was not yet sure how to use. But a weapon nonetheless. If Billy had buried the book with his father, it must have contained something important and useful. Something revealing. A chink in Billy’s armor, maybe. Some psychological flaw that could be used against him. Or maybe something as simple as a list of safe houses that Jazz could use to harrow his father into the open, where—like a bug skittering away from the baseboards—he would be easier to crush.

Jazz popped another painkiller. The directions on the antibiotics said
Take one per day until finished, as directed
, so he left that bottle closed for now.

He cracked open the book and began reading. Puzzled, he skipped a page. Then another.

He flipped through.

His leg forgotten, he kept reading.

Maybe it was the painkillers, but after paging through and poring over the book for what felt like hours, it still made no sense.

Everything was out of order, for one thing. There was no structure to it, nothing to lend it coherence. The book measured 8" x 10", and every flat white page was crammed full of text, some of it running vertically in the margins, some of it curling in circles, ellipses, or conch-shell-like receding twists. The book spelled out a heady mélange of fantasies, instructions, and bits of doggerel, all connected by nothing but the commonality of Billy’s tight, nigh-perfect penmanship. One page would end in the middle of a sentence, only for the next one to start anew with something clearly written years earlier. Where did that sentence end? Did it ever end? Jazz hadn’t found out yet. A page would describe in excruciating detail the look of Billy’s father’s skin at the funeral home, but the next page would be a very-much present-tense discussion of a conversation Billy had clearly
just
had with the man. Time was random, as if the book had been written in chronological order, then unbound, the pages randomly shuffled and rebound.

This, he reasoned, had to be what it was like in Billy’s
head. He remembered again telling Hughes how Hat-Dog’s murders, while insensible to the police, made perfect sense to the killer. The same truism held here. While the book made little to no sense to Jazz, it obviously meant something to Billy. It obviously
said
something to Billy, and most likely said something
about
him as well.

Two things stood out to Jazz on his first look-through: The first was the name Jack Dawes, repeated throughout, on various pages, always larger than the surrounding text, usually stroked over several times so that it was jagged and bold. The second was a sort of spiral arrow that often connected certain names with other names, sometimes spanning a full spread of two pages to draw a connection between names on opposing leaves.

There was a whole cast of characters, though he was damned if he could figure out who any of them were or what they did. Many of them were mentioned only once, with names like the Surgeon and Honey Trap, the Chef and Respector. Billy wrote as if they were real people, ascribing motivations and physical characteristics (“blue-flecked green eyes,” “red wart on finger,” “crooked incisor”), so Jazz assumed they actually existed, even though it was possible—he supposed—that they were all figments of Billy’s imagination. Still, as crazy as his father was, Jazz didn’t think Billy had ever descended into outright hallucination. Delusion? Sure. But seeing or hearing things that weren’t there? No. Billy was firmly entrenched in the here and now, obsessively aware of the world around him at all times. Ever alert for motion from the prospects.

Turning forward and back, trying to catch threads that floated away like jellyfish in the tide, he paged the book all night. As soon as he thought he understood some particular aspect or “subplot” (as he’d come to think of them—there seemed to be no main plot at all), he would glimpse some other madness or oddity that wrested his attention away and sent him on another exploratory mission through the text.

Somewhere within the text, he divined an early version—a rough draft?—of the bedtime story Billy had told him as a child, the tale of the Crow King and his harrowing and bleeding of a wayward dove. Jazz couldn’t tell if this was something Billy had come up with on his own and written down, or if he’d copied it from somewhere. Seeing it recorded in his father’s handwriting set the flesh on his arms crawling.

Without a phone or a watch, he had no idea what time it was as the night wore on. He knew only that even with the kerosene heater pumping away, he was freezing. His fingers routinely went numb as he turned the pages, so he took breaks to blow on them and stuff them into his armpits for warmth.

He’d imagined that the Crows were some sort of collective of Billy Dent hangers-on, a group of Impressionists, as it were, each of them somewhere out there acting independently in honor of their Crow King. But if he had the chronology from the book right, the Crows actually predated Billy. They’d been in existence before he began killing, and he’d learned of them around the time of his father’s death. Sam had introduced him to them (
Today she told me about the Crow King
.) and initiated him into their ranks.

As incredible and unbelievable as it seemed, the Crows appeared to be, well… a kind of serial killer social network. Developed and up and running years before Twitter or Facebook or even MySpace. If the Crows were extant in the early nineties, when Billy’s father died, then they might even stretch back further. They probably antedated the popularization of the Internet itself, a dark, underground precursor of what was to come. Jazz pictured them gathering in virtual chat rooms—old-style BBSs—or, before that, over ham radio or whatever other technology they had at their disposal. Hell, if the book was any indication, they probably wrote things down and sent stuff through the mail back in the day.

Maybe they still did so. Using the idea of a social network but keeping off the Internet would make it more difficult for some governmental data-sniffing program to identify and isolate them. No one had figured out how to hack paper, so putting a letter in a mailbox was still a safer way to keep things secret, as long as you used multiple addresses and aliases and didn’t care about immediacy.

And serial killers could be very, very patient.

Statistically, it was believed that there were roughly three dozen serial killers active and hunting in the U.S. at any point in time. If what Jazz had gleaned from the book was right, that figure was probably low by a factor of three. Assuming, of course, that the names inside weren’t different aliases for some of the same people, just as Billy had taken the names Green Jack, Satan’s Eye, Hand-in-Glove, and the others.

But what was the point? What was the purpose? Did they just exchange… tips? He had a sudden, comical vision of Billy making careful notes on dismemberment on index cards, placing those cards in an old-fashioned recipe box. Trading them at a serial killer swap meet somewhere like baseball cards.

It was ridiculous. Besides, most serial killers don’t play well with others. They are, by their nature, solitary. What on earth could draw them all together?

He closed the book and strummed his fingers against it to keep them moving and limber. His breath frosted the air, despite the heater. A decision loomed: Close the door and shut out the wind, or leave it open so that the heater could stay on?

A check of the heater’s fuel reserve answered the question for him: He was low on kerosene, with maybe an hour’s worth left. Judgment-call time. He settled on a superficially risky path, shutting the door tightly while leaving the heater on. The Hideout was hardly airtight; long before he could asphyxiate on kerosene fumes, the heater would conk out, but in the meantime, he would store up enough heat—he hoped—to get him through the night.

No closer to catching Billy than he had been when there’d been hundreds of miles between them, Jazz curled into a tight ball on the beanbag chair. He knew he would get no sleep, but that was the last thing he thought before drifting off, the book clutched to his chest like a child’s bedtime story.