I Hunt Killers (13 page)

Helen blinked rapidly, coming to as a man spoke to her. She was in chains, she realized, bound upright to a post. Gagged, with a rag stuffed in her mouth. It looked like she was in some kind of barn or outbuilding; shafts of dust-speckled sunlight slanted in through breaks in the beams overhead. So it was still daylight. That was something. Really bad things—truly awful, heinous things—didn’t happen to people in broad daylight.

Did they?

A man spoke, rising from an old, battered chair. “Are you worried?” he asked, approaching her. “Are you scared?”

She didn’t know what to do. She was still disoriented—she vaguely remembered going out into the alley to take out the trash from the Coff-E-Shop. And a man…Coming close…Offering to help…

And then a little pinprick and…

“Are you scared?” he asked again, sounding genuinely concerned.

Whatever drug he’d used on her was still blurring her vision. She tried to think as quickly as she could—what, oh what, was the best answer? Her friend Marlene had once told her that you have to humanize yourself to a rapist. Make yourself a real person, and they’ll stop treating you like an object. Would that work?

It was the only shot she had. She nodded once, briefly, almost afraid to admit to being afraid.

“Shh, shh, shh,” he told her, now within arm’s length. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t.” He reached into his pocket and made a show of unfolding a piece of well-worn paper. He scanned its contents quickly.

“I have this memorized, you know,” he told her, his tone slightly jovial. “But I want to make sure I get it right. You know how it is.”

She nodded fiercely, agreeing with him. Anything to get on his good side. Now that he was closer—and now that her vision was clearing—she could see him. Average. Boringly average. Maybe a little familiar, but she saw so many faces every day at the shop.…

Oh, God! She saw his face! Didn’t they usually kill people who saw their faces?

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said soothingly. He grinned an aw-shucks grin. “You’re thinking that since you’ve seen my face, I have to kill you, right?” He
tsk
ed. “Don’t worry about
that
. I have a pretty common face. My own mother used to lose me in the supermarket all the time.” He chuckled, and she wanted to chuckle along with him,
burned
to chuckle along with him. But she had a rag stuffed in her mouth.

“Now then, down to business,” he said, consulting the paper once more. “Your name is Helen Myerson, right?” Before she could answer, he held up her purse by the shoulder strap. “Remember, I can check your driver’s license, so no lying. Helen Myerson?”

She nodded.

“And you are, in fact, a waitress, right?”

Another nod.

“Excellent!” He smiled at her and even dropped a friendly wink, then refolded the paper and returned it to his pocket. “I’m going to pull down your gag now and take that nasty rag out of your mouth. I’m not going to do that thing where I say, ‘Don’t scream or you’ll be sorry.’ Because you know what, Helen? You go ahead and scream if you want to. It won’t bother me at all, and no one will hear you, so I don’t care. So if it makes you feel better, you just go ahead and do it.”

She considered calling his bluff and hollering her head off as the gag came down and the rag came out, but she found herself too terrified to scream.

“Really?” he said. “Nothing? Not going to scream? Well, that’s okay. Whatever works for you.” He sighed and jammed his hands in his pockets and looked at her with a sort of lopsided smile on his face, as though he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing there or what she was doing there or how either of them had gotten there in the first place.

“Do you know what an impressionist is, Helen?” he asked suddenly.

Her lips had gone dry and she wet them before speaking. The sound of her own voice surprised her—it sounded deep and foreign. “It’s…Isn’t it…” She took a deep breath. Insane, but maybe if she answered his questions, he’d let her go. She’d heard crazier things. “It’s someone who does impressions of other people.” For a moment he said nothing, so she added, “Right?”

He grinned and clapped his hands together. “Ha! Well. Yes. Yes, I suppose so. But you know, Helen, that’s sort of cheating, isn’t it? ‘An impressionist is someone who does impressions.’ Sort of like saying, ‘An actor is someone who acts.’ Or ‘A worker is someone who works.’ Using the word to define itself. But that’s all right. I’m gonna give you…let’s say half-credit. Because that was about half the answer I wanted. And that’s all right. Don’t worry. Your grade on this quiz doesn’t really matter.”

With that, he meandered over to a table off to his left, an old rickety set of nailed-together planks that had gone halfway to rot. It was positioned just so that she couldn’t quite see what he was doing over there.

“What are…” she started, then stopped. Was this smart? She didn’t know, but she couldn’t stop herself. “What are you going to do? To me?”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” he told her, his voice soothing again. He was rummaging around on the table; she heard a slight
clink
of metal on metal. “Remember before, how I asked if you were afraid? And you said you were?”

“Yes.”

He came back from the table, his hands clasped behind his back as though he were taking a stroll. “Well, Helen, there’s no need to be afraid. None at all. You know why?”

Relief washed over her. He was smiling again.
No need to be afraid. None at all.
His exact words.

“Because you’re going to let me go?” she asked.

“In a sense,” he told her. “But there’s no reason to be afraid because in the end, it’s not going to help you one damn bit.” He leaned in close and brought up his hand. She saw a needle there, filled with something bright blue, and her breath left her.

“Helen, I have to be honest with you now. This is going to hurt. It’s going to hurt a lot.”

She went ahead and screamed. True to his word, he didn’t care at all.

After a while, Jazz knew he had to get going, no matter how tempting it was to stay in the Hideout with Connie forever. Gramma would be waiting.

He sped home, only to find his grandmother sprawled on the floor in front of the battered old TV, watching the Home Shopping Network with her chin in her hands, laughing her head off as if it were the latest sitcom.

“Four payments of $18.99 each!” she chortled. “Oh, Lord! Oh, Lordy!” She rolled to one side, held her flank, and laughed and laughed and laughed. “Supplies are limited, they say! Jasper, did you hear that? Oh, Lord!”

“This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while,” he admitted as she giggled like a teenager. “How about some dinner?”

“Ate already,” she said between gasps. “She brought me some of that fried chicken I like. From the Kentucky place.”

She?
Jazz had a sinking feeling, one that was rewarded when he went into the kitchen and found Melissa Hoover there, washing dishes in the sink.

“Hello, Jasper,” she said over one shoulder. “I’ll be done in a minute.”

She’d come by again, and this time found Gramma in a better mood. Fried chicken—the crispier and greasier the better—was a great bribe. Smart enough to park her car down the road somewhere and walk so that Gramma wouldn’t hear the engine, look out the window, and have time to go for the shotgun. Smarter than Jazz had given her credit for. He adjusted his perception of her threat level accordingly.

And that meant no more Mr. Nice Guy. He wasn’t going to let Social Services kick him out of his own house, and if Melissa Hoover was tougher than he thought, then it was time for him to get tough with her.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he exploded, slapping a palm against the refrigerator door for good measure. Melissa, gratifyingly, jumped. She actually
jumped
in shock and fear, spinning around, the water still running, her hands covered in suds.

“You think you can just come in here?” Jazz stage-whispered, pitching his voice low and scary. “That is a sick woman in there. She’s afraid of change, of people.”

“She was fine,” Melissa assured him. “She was so friendly—”

“Of course she was friendly. You brought her a bucketful of heart attack.” He snorted scornfully and knocked over the bucket of chicken, which sat on the kitchen table. A drumstick rolled out.

“It won’t hurt anything just once—”

“Where are you gonna be tonight when she’s complaining about stomach cramps because you fed her that crap? Are you gonna stick around to change her sheets and wash her up when she has diarrhea?”

Melissa folded her arms over her chest. “It’s that bad, then? What else are you keeping from me? Her last report indicated that her health was pretty good. Is she faking the paperwork? Are you?”

Jazz laughed as snottily as he could. “Please. She’s just old. Old people have gut problems.”

“You’re proving my point. You need to be out of this house. You’re seventeen. You should be living a life, not taking care of her.”

Deep down, Jazz knew that she was right. Deeper down, he knew it didn’t matter.

“Why are you so obsessed with me, Melissa? There have to be kids out there worse off than I am. Go work your mojo on them.”

“I’m trying to help you, which you would see if you weren’t so stubborn.”

“You’re wasting your time. I’m doing fine. In nine months I’ll be eighteen, and then you can’t stop me from taking care of her. Just because you couldn’t have kids of your own doesn’t mean I need you to be my mommy.”

Bang. It was the meanest, cruelest thing Jazz could have said to her. He’d been keeping it in reserve for just such an occasion, when he would need Melissa blinded by sudden emotion.

And it worked. Melissa’s entire demeanor changed, from hard-charging to shocked and hurt. He glared at her, then counted to ten in his head before ramping up the intensity of his stare. It was no contest; he’d learned intimidation from the best.

“Fine,” she said after an unnerving moment. “Fine.” She grabbed her purse from a kitchen chair. “Don’t think this is over, though. I’m coming back. I know what’s right for you, and it’s my job to make it happen.”

With a quick, angry stride, she made for the back door. Jazz grabbed her wrist before she could wrestle the old, stuck door open. “Melissa,” he said as contritely as he could.

“What?” She was annoyed, a tiny bit cowed, but she wasn’t shaking off his hand.

“I’m sorry I was so…overwrought. I shouldn’t have raised my voice. I shouldn’t have said what I said.”

When she looked over her shoulder, he cast his eyes downward in shame.

Heard her inhale.

“You’re going through things no one should go through. Especially not alone.” She patted his hand with her free one. “Get some rest. We’ll talk again soon.”

He let her go and watched her wend her way through the shrubbery that shrouded the side of Gramma’s house.
See, I really don’t need the extra acting practice, Ginny.
When Melissa thought about this encounter later—and she would, probably home alone in her tiny little studio apartment above the dry-cleaning place over in Calverton—she wouldn’t focus so much on the anger he’d shown; she’d remember the apology more than anything else. If he could crack through her toughness and make her more pliable, more manipulable, she’d be an ally. She would be able to make his life much easier. And the cost was just breaking her soul.

Gramma stumbled into the kitchen from the other room, still laughing. “I think I peed myself. A little. Maybe. I think.” Her eyes lit up. “Oh, look! Chicken! From Kentucky!”

“Knock yourself out, Gramma,” Jazz said, turning the bucket in her direction. She scampered back to the TV with a wing in each hand. Despite what he’d told Melissa, his grandmother had—as near as he could tell—a cast-iron gut. Her brain only worked sporadically, but her bowels were as regular as a metronome no matter what she ate. Cholesterol? Fat? Jazz figured she’d survived eighty-two years on Planet Earth, forty of them with Billy Dent as her son. She deserved some fat and cholesterol.

“Hey, look!” Gramma shouted around a mouthful of fried skin. “Your daddy’s on TV!”

Jazz didn’t want to look, but he knew she would pester him until he did. She must have changed the channel. Some “news” channel was running one of a million “documentaries” about Billy Dent, rolling the same footage they all had: Billy Dent in handcuffs and a crisp gray suit, walking up the courthouse steps with a phalanx of lawyers around him.

A portentous voice-over announced: “Dr. Perry Shinkeski thinks Dent is a new kind of serial killer, what he calls a ‘super-serial killer.’”

The video shifted to a mousy-looking man in a tweed jacket with enormous glasses and a self-satisfied little grin on his face as he spoke from behind a desk.

“Most, ah, serial killers,” Shinkeski said, “have, ah, a single identity and signature that they, ah, rely on. Dent metamorphosed from, ah, one to another to another over a period of, ah, years, each one highly organized and highly capable.”

Cut to a bottle-blond reporter showing way too much cleavage. “And is this typical, Doctor?”

Back to Shinkeski. “This, ah, is a new sort of, ah, psychopathology that we’re only now beginning to, ah, understand. These, ah, super-serial killers have no, ah, ‘type’”—he actually made air-quotes—“but, ah, rather consider everyone to be their ‘type.’”

“Did you hear that?” Gramma gasped. “Your daddy’s a
superhero
!”

Jazz wanted to bang his head against the wall. Better yet—put it through the television. Instead, he left her to the chicken and the TV, slipping into what had once been the den, when his grandfather had been alive. Nowadays it was dark and dusty, stacked high and tight with boxes of Grampa’s old clothes and old books, all of which Gramma refused to part with. That pack-rat gene.

The room also had a phone extension with an ancient answering machine attached to it. (Gramma refused to get voice mail, claiming that the phone company could hear those messages, then edit them into new and disturbing forms.) The light was blinking. A couple of messages from Doug Weathers—“Your experiences, my words—it’s gold, Jasper! We’ll both be famous. Best thing that could happen around this town, and you know it.”—were mixed in with messages from Melissa, her last one ending with “Well, I’m going to come over, then.” There was an excellent chance she would call back tonight, so he took the phone off the hook and then went upstairs and dropped onto his bed. He just wanted to rest for a moment, but even though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock, he fell asleep almost immediately.

Only to be awakened by a ceaseless pounding on the front door and his grandmother screaming, “They’re here! They’re here! They found us! Billy! Jon! Get the guns! Get the guns and blow their damn heads off before they take me away!”

“Jon” was Grampa Dent, dead twenty years except to Gramma’s synapses.

Jazz rolled out of bed. It was past eleven, according to his bedside clock, and that pounding from downstairs wouldn’t stop. Who would be banging away so late at—

Weathers.
Of course. It was the only answer.

That’s it
, Jazz thought darkly as he stumbled into the hall and down the stairs.
I’ve decided on my first victim.

Gramma was hiding in the shadow of the old grandfather clock, her trusty shotgun at the ready and aimed at the front door. “I’m usin’
God’s
ammo!” she shouted. “Wallop your ass with the hellfire o’ Jesus!”

The hellfire o’ Jesus
. That was new.

“I’ve got this one,” Jazz assured her.

“You be careful, Billy,” Gramma said, her eyes wild, her gums slack as she talked and slobbered bits of chicken. “You gotta bring a gun. And get your daddy.”

Oh, great. He just
loved
when she thought he was Billy. “I’m good,” he told her. “I’m gonna kill ’em all with my thoughts.”

Gramma cackled. “You hear that?” More pounding on the door. “He’s gonna kill y’all with—”

Jazz wrenched open the front door, ready to let loose at Doug Weathers with a soul-withering blast of invective. But instead, he saw G. William standing there, fist raised to knock again, his shoulders still broad, his stance still confident.

But his eyes…

Something had gone misty and cold in his eyes.

Oh
, Jazz thought, and the realization hit him even as G. William said it: “You were right. It’s a serial killer. We got another victim.”