Game (20 page)

The other piece of paper was the letter found on the Impressionist. It was two pages long, but the sheriff’s department had reduced it to fit both pages on one sheet. Handwritten in a careful, neat, and unfamiliar hand. Most of the letter was a listing of the major characteristics of Billy Dent’s first victims, with notations as to possible doppelgängers for the Impressionist to use in his harrowing of Lobo’s Nod. But there was an appendix at the end, one that still mystified Jazz:

He stared at the letter for a while, willing the letters to rearrange themselves into something that made more sense,
then gave up, grabbed some clean clothes and the letters, and headed to his temporary quarters. He figured he’d delayed the inevitable long enough.

Sitting on the floor, his back against his father’s childhood bed, Jazz called Connie.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said back.

Neither of them said anything. Jazz ran through his options. Pretend nothing had happened? Apologize immediately? The nuclear option: break up. He’d written and rewritten the speech in his head a million times:
I know you love me and I love you, but I’m broken, Connie. I’m defective. I’m the toy you got for Christmas that’s missing pieces, and even if it was complete, no one bought the batteries to go with it.

“Before we talk about anything else, I need to say I’m sorry,” Connie said.

“Excuse me?”

“I shouldn’t have pushed you. I know you have… issues with sex. I get it. And, I mean, don’t get me wrong. I totally think we’re ready, but I went about it wrong. It wasn’t cool. So I’m sorry.”

Jazz closed his eyes and thumped the back of his head against the bed. “Con… it’s not… you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me. It was me. And then with your dad… I just…”

“I know. And we’ll talk about that in—look, you don’t have to… In New York. I just thought that with me, it might be okay. It might be safe. For you.”

He sat upright. “What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”

“Well, I know that your dad never… never prospected any African Americans. Right?”

Jazz’s heart thrummed.
What?

“And I always figured that that maybe meant that I wouldn’t… that I couldn’t…” She blew into the phone, exasperated. “I know what you’re worried about. You’re worried that he somehow, like, programmed you to be a serial killer. And that there’s all this crazy lurking under the surface—”

“It’s not just under the surface,” he said seriously.

“I know. But anyway, there’s this stuff buried in you, and you’re afraid it’ll erupt if you have sex. Like, sex is the trigger, right? But Billy never killed any black women. It’s like he just skipped over us. Almost deliberately. Like we don’t exist to him. So I thought maybe that made me safe for you.” She paused. “Didn’t you ever think that?”

Jazz held back a laugh of commingled relief and horror. His big secret! His hidden fear! That Connie would someday find out why he’d first dated her. How long had he been terrified of telling her this, only to learn that not only did she know but she was okay with it and thought it was a good idea.

“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “I was just sitting here thinking how I needed to apologize to you—”

“For what? For freaking out?” She said it like it was no big deal.

“For that. For the way I freaked out. And now, I guess, for the way we first started dating. Which seems pretty racist, now that I think about it.”

Connie laughed. “Jazz, if you liked—I don’t know—blond girls or girls with big boobs—”

“Your boobs are pretty big.”

“
Any
way. If you had a thing for one of those girls and saw her across a crowded room and went and introduced yourself, would that be a bad thing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I do—the answer is no. So, in my case, you saw a really foxy-looking black girl across a crowded room—”

“It was the Coff-E-Shop and it was close to closing, so no one was there.”

“—and you were like, ‘I like black girls, so I’m going to introduce myself.’ No big deal.”

“Yeah, but what if the reason I like black girls is because they’re, you’re, safe—”

“So what? Who knows why anyone likes what they like? Guys who are obsessed with, like, redheads. Why? Because they’re rare? Because they had a redheaded babysitter? Because they watched too many Emma Stone movies? Beats me. Who cares? I mean, why do I like white boys?”

“I’m the only white boy you’ve ever dated.”

“And I’m the only black girl you’ve ever dated. So there.”

“So, we’re good?”

“We’re beyond good.”

“Is your dad gonna come at me with a shotgun the next time I come over?”

“Probably.” She waited for a moment. “You went too far, you know. At the airport.”

“I know.”

“You crossed the line.”

“I know.”

“It’s one thing to mess with a teacher’s head to get out of detention or to charm that girl at the police station to get you some file you shouldn’t have, but—”

“I know.”

“—this is my
dad
, Jazz. He’s my
father
. And you were, like, like, waving a cape in front of a bull.”

“It was totally wrong.”

“And you know what they do to the bulls, right? And that’s how you were treating my dad.”

“I’m sorry. I really am.”
Nah
, Billy whispered,
you ain’t sorry. You just know sayin’ it gets you what you want.

Jazz shook Billy away. He
was
sorry.

He was, like, 99 percent sure he was really sorry.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I’ll apologize to your dad right now.”

Maybe 98 percent.

“That is
not
a good idea. He’s still on fire. He’s so pissed it’s ridiculous. He
just now
stopped lecturing me. If you’d called five minutes ago, he would have grabbed the phone and you’d be talking to him instead.”

Ouch.

“But anyway,” she went on, “every couple has their thing, you know? My dad doesn’t like you. And your grandmother thinks I’m the spawn of Satan. We’ll deal.”

“What about…” He didn’t even want to bring it up, but he had to. It was in the open now. “What about sex?”

“Yes, please,” Connie deadpanned.

He laughed. “Seriously. Come on.”

“We’ll take it slow.”

“We’ve
been
taking it slow. Because of me. You know it’s true, Con. Any other guy would have been all over you after a week. We’ve been together for almost a year.”

“Maybe those guys would have been all over me, but they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. And you wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, either. Not that soon. I wasn’t ready. Not then. Now I am. Any man worth having will wait for his woman to be ready. How can I not return the favor?”

And that was when Jazz knew Connie was more and better than he deserved.

“I’ll just have to get by thinking about you while I’m in the shower,” she went on. “It’s gotten me this far.”

Jazz groaned. “You just had to put that image in my head, didn’t you?”

“It’s a pretty great image,” she admitted. “All that lather and soapy bubbles making me slick and shiny.” Her voice dropped, low and sweet.

Jazz adjusted uncomfortably. “I surrender. We need to change the subject. You’re killing me.”

He could almost hear Connie’s delicious smile over the phone. “What are we supposed to talk about?”

“I don’t know. Tell me what you were doing while I was with the cops yesterday.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.” She quickly filled him in on her mini-tour of some of the murder sites.

“Crime scenes,” he corrected her. “It’s possible they were murdered elsewhere and dumped there.”

“Right, right. Anyway, there was this graffito—”

“Graffito?”

“It’s the singular of
graffiti
.”

“Now you’re just messing with me.”

“I swear to God.
Graffiti
is plural. It’s like
data
and
datum
.”

“No one says ‘datum.’ ”

“People who speak properly do,” Connie sniffed. “Anyway, someone had painted
Ugly J
.”

“
Ugly J
? Why did you even notice that?”

She explained how it had stood out. “So someone went back afterward and left that tag,” Jazz mused.

“Maybe the killer? They go back to the scene, right?”

“Sometimes. Not always. It’s just as likely it’s some smart-ass tagging crime scenes. Some kid’s idea of a sick joke.”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t stylized or artistic. Like, most taggers have a style. A little finesse. They want it to stand out, to be noticed. But this was just
there
. It was like doing your homework in Arial or Times New Roman. And before you asked: I already Googled
Ugly J
. Didn’t find anything.”

“It’s probably some New York thing.”

“I love the way you say ‘New York’ with such contempt,” Connie said, laughing. “You were there, what, thirty-six hours? And you already hate the place.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“Sure. Let me tell you about the bath I took the other day….”

He groaned. Eventually, they hung up, and Jazz went to take the coldest shower in the history of cold showers. He tried not to think of Connie in the shower, too, but that task
wasn’t particularly easy to accomplish. He had a very, very vivid imagination.

Emerging dripping and freezing, he wrapped a towel around his waist and headed back to Billy’s old room. His clothes were scattered on the bed, so he picked through them for an outfit, shoving aside the sheets of paper.

But he just couldn’t let them go. Every time he touched those papers, it was as though they had some sort of psychic/magnetic attraction to him. He felt compelled to read them every time. This time was no different—cold and half-naked, he scanned his father’s letter, then looked over the Impressionist’s vile “shopping list” and its strange appendix.

And that’s when he saw it. And once he saw it, he couldn’t unsee it. In fact, he wondered how he could have possibly
not
seen it until now.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO

GO NEAR THE DENT BOY.

LEAVE HIM ALONE.

YOU ARE NOT TO ENGAGE HIM.

JASPER DENT IS OFF-LIMITS.

He blinked and looked again. It was so obvious:

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO

GO NEAR THE DENT BOY.

LEAVE HIM ALONE.

YOU ARE NOT TO ENGAGE HIM.

JASPER DENT IS OFF-LIMITS.

In his relatively short life, Jazz had disturbed crime scenes, stolen and tampered with evidence, broken into the morgue, and illegally photocopied official police files. Now he broke most of Lobo’s Nod’s speed limits on his way to the sheriff’s office and compounded his criminal career by breaking the state law about cell phone use while driving; he just kept getting G. William’s voice mail.

“Lana?” he demanded, now having gotten through to the police dispatch line. “Lana, it’s Jasper Dent. Where’s G. William?”

Lana had a thing for Jazz—even seeing him handcuffed late that one night for breaking into the morgue with Howie hadn’t dissuaded her. Now she was flustered, stuck halfway between trying to make small talk with him and answering his question. “Well, he’s—he just stepped—are you okay, Jasper? Can
I
help you, maybe?”

“I need to see G. William. Is he coming back to the office?”

“Sure. I just saw him pull up. He’s—”

“Tell him I’m on my way,” Jazz said, and hung up. Soon, he pulled into the sheriff’s department lot, parking Billy’s old Jeep right next to G. William’s cruiser.
Someone should get a picture of
that, he thought.

Inside, he blew past the reception desk, blowing off Lana, who smiled and tried to get his attention. He found G. William in his office, grinning and leaning back in his chair. The sheriff saluted Jazz with a massive mug of coffee that said
SUPERCHARGED!
on it.

“G. William—”

“Settle down, Jazz. You got ants in your pants again.”

“Is Thurber still here? Has he been transferred yet?”

G. William slurped some coffee. “He’s here. Catch your breath. Stroke at your age is a hell of a thing.”

Jazz took a deep breath and compelled himself to calm down.

“You come on a social call, or is this business?” G. William asked. “ ’Cause I do have some news for you. Somethin’ you might find interesting.”

Okay, sure. Jazz let out that deep breath and let the tension all along his spine dissipate. “Is it about the new coffee cup?” he said with forced friendliness.

“And there’s the keen powers of observation that brought down the Impressionist.”

“You’re stoned on caffeine, aren’t you?”

“I gotta admit—when there’s more coffee in the cup, I tend to drink more coffee. You think this is why my leg feels all numb and tingly?”