Blood of My Blood (27 page)

Jonathan Dent. Sammy J. Ugly J. What if—

No. Jazz had dug up his grandfather. This was strictly the Billy and Sammy show.

He guided the car back a little ways, coming parallel to the mailbox. Confident that the cop couldn’t see him all the way down the driveway, he reached through the window, opened the box, and proceeded to violate federal law by stealing Gramma’s and Jazz’s mail. Oh, well. Now he and Jazz had even more in common. Maybe they could share a cell at the federal pen together. Roomies at last!

The mail safely inside the car, he got the hell out of there
before the cop could meander down the driveway and catch him. Once back on the main drag through the Nod, he pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot and riffled through the mail.

Bill. Bill. Catalog. Bill. Junk. Junk.

At the very bottom of the pile was a single plain white business envelope without a stamp or a return address. It said, simply,
JAZZ
.

With two days’ worth of antibiotics in his system, Jazz’s stomach was complaining regularly, but his leg had finally started to settle down, like a drunk guy in a bar slowly realizing the bouncer was much bigger. Hat’s bullet would be with him forever, so it was about time they made their peace with each other. If the leg held out long enough for him to settle things with Billy and Sam, that was all he cared about. Once they were dealt with, the damn thing could wither and die and fall off for all it mattered to him.

He knew the Nod better than most. As a child, he’d explored the town on his own, encouraged by Billy to find “crawly spots,” Billy’s term for hidden nooks and niches where he could conceal either himself or evidence. To a young boy like Jazz, it had been a parentally sanctioned adventure, and he’d roamed the Nod with a freedom other kids would have envied, had they not been aware of the price of that freedom.

As a result, he knew the town’s blind spots, its back alleys,
its off-grid pathways. Hughes’s overcoat was warm enough as long as he kept moving.

He had no intention of stopping. Not until he arrived at the place Billy had indicated.

Doug Weathers’s apartment.

Leave it to Billy to kill a man rather than just send Howie a text with Weathers’s address. One more body on the pile. One more name on Billy’s roster of death. One more reason for Billy to die.

And damn Billy, anyway, for putting Jazz in the position of avenging the death of a useless pissant like Doug Weathers.

Jazz had recognized Weathers’s voice, even through the pain, terror, and mangling of his mouth. That voice had haunted him for years, pestering him with demands for interviews, blaring from TV screens as he bloviated about Billy with the intensity summoned only by the abjectly clueless or the truly desperate.

Both applied in Weathers’s case.

A couple of years back, Weathers had been perversely persistent in his attempts to get Gramma to “go on the record” so that “the world knows you’re not to blame for your son.” He cared nothing for her reputation, of course—he just wanted to grill an old woman with Alzheimer’s until he could get her to blurt out something crazy or incriminating. Jazz could barely tolerate Weathers attacking him; he refused to countenance the bastard badgering his grandmother. So he’d gone to the courthouse to swear out a restraining order, and when the time had come to go to court, he’d seen a copy of the subpoena served on Weathers. Complete with the man’s home address.

The apartment building Weathers lived in was much nicer than he deserved. Then again, you didn’t have to make fat bank to live decently in the Nod. Good thing, too—Weathers hadn’t done much since Billy had gone to prison and the desire to put his ugly mug on TV had dried up.

People are real
, Jazz reminded himself.
People matter. Even Doug Weathers
.

I suppose
.

It seemed a monumental injustice of almost biblical proportions that Jazz had to let himself give a damn about Weathers. Surely even
normal
people hated the guy.

Jazz had waited until almost nightfall—late afternoon at this time of year, really—before setting out, trusting the cold and the darkness to be his shield against recognition. Breaking into Weathers’s apartment would be as easy as a baby sticking its thumb in its mouth. He swung around the back of the building. A locked steel door prevented him from getting inside for the roughly ten seconds it took for him to unveil Howie’s pickax from under Hughes’s coat and knock the doorknob off. Once the inner workings of the lock were exposed, it took him another few seconds to unlock the door.

Within, he found himself in a maintenance room or a janitor’s closet of some kind. Tired of carrying the pickax all the way from the Hideout, he left it. It was too heavy to keep carrying, especially with the stairs he was about to climb. Weathers was on the sixth floor. The top. Of course. He would have to be at the top.

His leg surprised him, making the six flights with only a minimum of stiffness and complaint.

Let’s hear it for painkillers! And antibiotics! But especially painkillers
.

The hallway on Weathers’s floor looked empty. Jazz didn’t wait around to be sure—he walked swiftly out of the stairwell and strode right up to Weathers’s door. He didn’t bother knocking—if Billy was in there, there was no point giving him fair warning. Instead, he jimmied the door open with the stiff plastic of Mark Culpepper’s Visa card, then stepped inside and immediately closed the door behind him.

Weathers’s apartment was dark and cramped. Jazz risked turning on the light, half expecting Billy to leap out at him.

No.

Finding the remains of Doug Weathers spread out around the apartment also wouldn’t have surprised him, and he was almost disappointed to find that the place was grungy in that special bachelor-chic way, but otherwise clean.

After being as tortured and carved (and hacked, and bashed, and crushed) as he’d sounded on the audio file, Doug Weathers would have lost enormous amounts of blood, as well as voided both bladder and intestine. The apartment should have stunk of bodily fluids and defecation. That it didn’t told Jazz what he’d suspected all along—Weathers had been killed elsewhere.

Of course. Billy never makes it easy. He likes leaving clues. Likes leading me around on a leash
.

The idea that this might just be another game floated through his mind. Maybe Billy was long gone from the Nod, a thousand miles away, laughing at Jazz’s stupidity with Aunt Sam, while Mom strained against a gag to beg for her life.

But he didn’t think that was the case. To have dealt with Weathers meant that Billy had to have been in the Nod recently, and given the timeline of his activities in New York,
recently
had to mean within the past day or so. Even if he’d fled Lobo’s Nod, Billy couldn’t have gotten far. He wouldn’t risk a train or a plane or even a bus. He would have to drive, alternating with Sam, sticking to back roads.

They would still be nearby.

There were two doors, one wide open, one ajar. The open one led to a bathroom, which meant the other had to be a bedroom. Jazz would check them later. For now, though, he spied a laptop on a desk across from the sofa, its lid up. If Weathers wasn’t here, he had gone somewhere else, either voluntarily or not. If voluntarily, maybe he’d been goaded along by an e-mail. It was worth a try.

Jazz ran his fingers along the track pad, and the laptop lit up. A Web page came into view, reloading.

A map. A map of the Nod, with a pin somewhere right outside town. Blue lines for driving directions from Weathers’s apartment.

Here we go again. More clues. More rolls of the dice
.

The weight of it plunged down on him, and he became so tired in that moment that he craved nothing more than to slump onto Weathers’s sofa, curl up into a ball, and sleep for a year. Maybe when he woke up, it would all be over: Billy dead, Sam dead, Mom safe.… Yeah, that all sounded about right.

Instead of going to the sofa, though, he sighed and rested his eyes while pinching the bridge of his nose. And that was when it happened. When he heard it.

He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to hear it or not. He clamped his eyes even more tightly shut, setting off spirals and whorls of color behind his eyelids.

How had he gotten here? How had he made it to Weathers’s apartment? It was as if he’d been on autopilot the whole time, only now totally aware of where he was.

Shaken back into reality by the footstep. Behind him.

Stupid! Stupid! Walked right into it!

Should have checked the bedroom first
.

And then Billy said, “Hello, son. Welcome back.”

Jazz opened his eyes but otherwise did not move, maintaining his frozen position at the desk. Maybe to Billy it looked like he was stunned into inaction.

In truth, he was scanning the desk for weapons, wishing he hadn’t left the pickax downstairs. He had the Taser tucked away in the right-hand slash pocket of Hughes’s overcoat, but he couldn’t be sure Billy would give him the opportunity to go for it.

“Hello, Billy,” he said. The desktop was cluttered, sloppy like Weathers himself, but Jazz saw nothing useful. He wished people still used letter openers. Nice and sharp, they were.

“You gonna turn around and say hi to Dear Old Dad?”

Shrugging, Jazz turned, his left leg giving a bit as he did so. He caught a slight wince from Billy, as though in sympathy. Not a chance. Billy felt sympathy for no one.

“Well, lookee here.” Billy grinned. He held—of all things—an iPad. He balanced it on the back of Weathers’s
sofa, which was interposed between them. Billy looked, as always, healthy and vibrant. Killing suited him. He planted his hands on his hips. “Father and son, together again. And this time, no one in handcuffs and no one lyin’ on the floor, bleeding. By the by, how’s that leg? Dear Old Dad did pretty well, didn’t he?”

Jazz’s leg trembled, and he staggered a tiny bit. “The doctors said a real butcher must have worked on it before them.”

If he was offended, Billy didn’t show it. He chuckled. “That you I feel up in my brain, trying to rummage around inside my head, rearrange the furniture? I don’t think that’ll work. I taught you everything you know, but not everything
I
know.”

With a relaxed but confident tilt of his head, Jazz replied, “Maybe I learned some new tricks while you were off in solitary.”

Billy laughed again. “That’s your weak-ass attempt at psychology? Here’s a free tip from the expert: You gotta use something the target
cares
about. Something that
disturbs
’em. My prison time weren’t a big deal to me. Gotta find something that
hurts
.”

“Like Mom escaping from the great Billy Dent? That must’ve been a blow to your ego. No wonder you purged every memory of her from the house.”

“Your momma done what she had to do. And I did what I had to do.”

“Did Samantha help you get over her?” The question nauseated him, but he had to know: Had father and son both shared in Sam’s charms?

“You’re asking all the wrong questions.” He said it almost plaintively, a child frustrated with the adult who will not play the game properly. “I thought you knew things, Jasper. I thought you’d had time to figure it out.”

Static buzzed Jazz’s ears. Stars and spots danced before his eyes. Without realizing it, he’d been holding his breath. His fists were clenched. He had come alive, more alive than he’d ever felt before. As though his whole life had been a test run up until now. He wanted to vault the sofa, race to Billy. Wanted his hands around his father’s throat. Wanted to feel Billy’s last breath wash over his face, wanted those damn blue eyes to roll up inside his head, wanted the trachea in splinters under the force of his grip.

It waits inside you
, Billy had said in the visitation room at Wammaket.
It pads around like a big cat, and when you least expect it, it comes up behind you
. Oh, he could feel it now. Exactly as Billy had described. It was a cougar, a tiger, a lion, prowling his innards, softly growling deep in its—and his—throat. It had the taste of blood on its lips and tongue.

It wanted that taste for him. And God help him, he wanted it, too.

“Maybe starting to feel like it’s time to do something about me?” Billy asked. “You’re welcome to try.”

The hospital guard’s Taser weighed a thousand pounds in Hughes’s pocket. It was his secret weapon, if only he could get to it. It wasn’t one of the ranged models—he would have to get within arm’s reach of Billy to use it. He would have to get it out of the pocket before Billy could come over Weathers’s sofa and take it away from him.

Was Billy armed? Jazz couldn’t imagine his father being here without a weapon, but there were no telltale bulges or shapes in Billy’s pockets. Probably he had a knife tucked into the back of his belt. Billy generally didn’t like guns, preferring the quiet and the up close and personal of a blade. Knife versus Taser. Billy was rested and fit. Jazz, less so. But he had youth on his side, and maybe he had justice, too.

“I want to understand things, Billy. I want to know about the Crows. I saw your father.”

Billy’s eyes lit up. “You did, now! How’s my old man?”

“Decomposed. He had some interesting reading material with him, though.”

“I bet he did. So, you understand it now.”

Whatever
it
was, Jazz sure as hell did
not
understand. Meaning had eluded him like a rabbit in the wild.

“Your writing needs some work,” Jazz said.

Billy clucked his tongue, shaking his head. Jazz took the moment to slip his hands into the overcoat pockets, wrapping his fingers around the Taser. It had, as best he could tell, one charge left. One chance to stun Billy.

And then what, Jazz? What do you do with him once he’s helpless at your feet?

He knew the answer to that. It
purred
.

“You’re disappointing me, boy. Thought you’d get something useful out of your Dear Old Dad’s writing. Wasn’t much older than you when I wrote that stuff. Figured it’d make sense to you.” If Billy noticed the hands in his pockets, he didn’t give any indication of it. Jazz had to assume he had and was already making plans.

“Just looked like more garden-variety crazy to me,” Jazz said lightly.

Billy lost his temper for the first time. “You watch your mouth, boy. You ain’t so old and so big that I can’t whup you for being disrespectful.”

“Come and get me.” He tightened his grip on the Taser. If he could get Billy to make the first move, his chances of getting out of this alive soared.

For a moment, he thought Billy would take the bait, but his father took a deep breath and settled down. “Just thought you’d get it, Jasper. That’s all.”

“Oh, I get it. I just don’t know
why
. You and your sociopath buddies have a little social club, right? The Crows.” He larded sarcasm onto his voice, slathering it thick. Adults had an intense allergy to teenage snark, and Jazz was hoping that Billy—who’d gone to prison before Jazz had had the opportunity to launch into teen rebellion—would react blindly and stupidly. “You guys like to kill people, and you help each other out when you can. You identify yourselves with those ridiculous code names you all like so much, but at the end of the day, you know each other by the name Jack Dawes. Because
jackdaw
is another word for crow. You guys are so inventive!”

He’d finally figured out that the repeated references to Jack Dawes in Billy’s book weren’t about an individual.
Jack Dawes
was a code word, a generic stand-in for a Crow. It was part password, part safe word, part ID. The Crows could shift names and identities as they needed to—Billy had done it repeatedly—but they could always fall back on Jack
Dawes, a name bland and generic enough that if there had been more than one in a community, no one would ever blink at the coincidence. But a Crow would know what it meant. It was, Jazz had to admit, brilliant.

But he wouldn’t admit that to Billy.

Billy’s lips quirked, and Jazz thought maybe he’d hit home. He struck again: “I mean, what kind of boogeyman plays
Monopoly
to decide who gets to join the club?”

“Ain’t always Monopoly.” Was that a defensive tone to Billy’s words? Jazz hoped so. “What matters is that they compete. Can’t have just anyone joining the Crows, you know. Sometimes the game’s been chess. Or Scrabble. Or Mother May I? What matters is that one ascends and one dies.”

The game is ancient
, Hat had said.
The game goes on forever
.

One ascends and one dies
.

“Except this time.”

Billy grinned wickedly. “No one ever said life was fair.”

“So the Crows are down one. You guys are gonna need to do a membership drive. Maybe start letting in the arsonists and the pedophiles.”

Another incipient flare from Billy at the mention of pedophiles.
It’s not like I hurt
kids, Billy had said at Wammaket. Jazz thought maybe he was whittling away at Billy’s reserve.

I can’t kill him. Not right away. He has to tell me where Mom is first
.

“We’re doing just fine,” Billy said confidently. “No need to appeal to the riffraff. And that’s the
point
, Jasper. Why don’t you
get it
? Can’t you see?”

“Oh, I see all right. I see a bunch of lunatics telling each other they’re okay. A support group for serial killers. Nice.”

The mocking tone only made Billy smile broadly. “You think that’s what it is? You ain’t really seein’ the big picture, are you?”

“Well, explain it to me.”

“Never thought I’d have to spell it out for you, son. Thought you were smarter than this.” Billy sighed, and his stance relaxed, became almost professorial. Jazz inched forward a step, still clutching the Taser.

“You know serial murder used to be relatively rare in this country?” Billy asked. “Relatively. Back in the fifties or so, not a whole lot of it going on. But then something happened. In the eighties, there was a big jump. Almost threefold.”

“It was just better reporting,” Jazz said dismissively. “You can’t—”

“Oh, the reporting got better, but the Crows got better, too. That’s when they started. I learned about them years later. Joined right up, too.”

“When Sam introduced you to the Crow King.” Bang. Jazz didn’t know much, but he knew
that
much.

“There’s a guy at Penn State,” Billy went on, ignoring him, “name of Jenkins. Studies serial killer statistics. Trends. Just like studying baseball or football, ain’t that a hoot? Anyway, you go look up his research. He proves that the last three decades have seen a rise in folks like me. That’s the Crows. Organizing. Becoming more effective. We’re like an epidemic that sweeps across society, see?

“And you’ll be at the front of it, Jasper.” Billy’s face seemed
alight with something unholy and powerful. Jazz couldn’t help but to be captivated by it. “You’ll be the next Crow King, the lord of murder, and you will change
everything
.”

His mouth had gone dry, and he could barely feel the Taser in his hand, so numb were his fingers. In spite of himself, despite the need to find his mother, Jazz couldn’t prevent his curiosity from thrashing for attention. He had thought Billy wanted him to grow up to be a serial killer, but the truth was more damning and more fascinating: Billy wanted him to
lead
serial killers.

“Why?” he asked, helpless to stop himself. “What’s the point? Why don’t you guys just do your thing and—”

Billy actually raised his palms skyward and looked up as if begging God for a smarter child. Enthralled, Jazz realized too late that he’d missed his chance to attack.

Keep him talking. Focus, Jazz!

“I gave you all the information you needed!” Billy fumed. “I told you to think about Gilles de Rais, remember?”

In the storage unit. “Yeah.”

“And did you?”

“Sure.”

“And?”

“He was a lunatic. Murdered people.”

Billy snorted. “Crap. Tell me something real.”

Dredging up the details from the lessons taught when he was done with his schoolwork each evening, Jazz recited: “He was a French nobleman in the 1400s. He liked going to poor people and pretending to be distraught at the plight of their children. So he would offer to take the young boys back
to his manor as servants, giving them a better life. And then he would sodomize them and beat them to death and do horrible things to the bodies, and no one ever knew until he’d killed over a hundred.”

“You said a real important word there.”

“French?” Jazz taunted.

“No. ‘Nobleman.’ ”

They stared across the sofa at each other, silent. Billy’s eyes danced with amusement. Would Jazz figure it out, he was wondering. How bright
was
his boy? In which
bright
meant
crazy
because surely he would
have
to be crazy to understand any of this. Right?

But, Jazz realized, it did all make a sick sort of sense. Why wouldn’t people with similar interests come together? The Crows were like… a trade union.

Oh, God. This is starting to sound reasonable to me
.

He forced his attention back to Gilles de Rais. But Billy had also told him to think about…

“Think about it,” Billy whispered now. “Think about all the lessons I taught you over the years. There’s only one more lesson, Jasper. One more, I promise, and then school’s out and you can do as you please.”

Caligula, the other name from unit 83F, had been an emperor of Rome. Gilles de Rais, a nobleman. Moving though history, stepping through Billy’s teachings, there’d been Elizabeth Bathory, a countess and one of history’s rare female serial killers. And Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of a pope, who’d murdered husband after husband. Precursors to Belle Gunness and Ugly J.

“I don’t under—”

Billy exploded. “We’re supposed to be kings!” he ranted. “You look back through history, and serial killers were the nobility! Jack the Ripper was most likely—”

“—a member of the royal family,” Jazz whispered.

“Right! Back in the day, back when our craft was first invented, our guild first formed, we were
rulers
, Jasper! We were nobles and kings and counts and lords. Murder was reserved for the elite, for the cream of society. The Egyptian pharaohs killed who and how they pleased. The Roman emperors. Later, the European and Slavic lords. The myth of Dracula started when a Transylvanian noble drained the blood of his enemies. Vlad Tepes wasn’t a vampire—he was a serial killer, boy. We sat at the top of the pyramid, and everyone else was supposed to be here for our pleasure and nothin’ else!

“But it’s all upside down now.” Billy’s voice took on an aggrieved, offended tone. “They put the kings in jail, and they let the prospects maunder like lobotomized sheep. And worse than that, worse than that, Jasper—there are killers with no grace, no meaning. They wander the world and make it more difficult for the rest of us.”