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.”
You could slaughter a thousand of them and never be caught, Jasper, m’boy. You could do all those things I taught you. You could—
Connie dragged him into the middle of the room. “You know what? Ten out of ten Lobo’s Nod boys would be splitting their pants right now at the thought of being unsupervised in a hotel room with me. That’s not ego talking—I saw that on someone’s Facebook page. So stop thinking about killing people and start thinking about the fact that we’ve got a couple of hours before Hughes comes back and you have to go to work.” She arched an eyebrow for added effect.
She was trying to distract him. Trying to break the cords of his inherited fears that bound him. He loved her for it.
He pitied her for it. Those cords, he knew, could be loosened and rearranged, but they could never be severed.
“Hughes said to use protection,” he said, smiling weakly. “We don’t have any.”
“We’re not going that far,” she said, kissing him hard and sure on the lips. “We’re just gonna get real close and mess up one of the beds, is all.”
He surrendered to her.
True to his word, Hughes was back in a couple of hours. By then, Jazz and Connie had remade the bed and were lounging innocently as if they’d moved not an inch since Hughes had left.
Hughes wasn’t fooled; he cracked a smile as soon as he walked in the door, then hid it behind his usual stern fa?ade. He bore a huge flat pizza box, topped with another box, as well as a satchel slung over one shoulder. “I come bearing pizza and pictures of death,” he announced.
Soon they had the files spread out over one of the beds, with the pizza and drinks on the smallish hotel table. Jazz was surprised at the dearth of files—fourteen murders should have generated a lot more paperwork.
“Most of it’s scanned in,” Hughes told them, and handed over an iPad. “Crime-scene photos and video, reports, evidence photos, the whole nine yards. Makes it a lot easier to see what’s what, and keeps me from having to schlep a metric ton of paperwork over here.”
“Why are we working here?” Jazz asked. “Why can’t we just go to the”—it wouldn’t be a sheriff’s office, not in New York—“precinct?”
Hughes shook his head. “Trust me, you don’t want to go there. It’s a disaster area. The task force is spread out all over the place. It’s a madhouse.”
Jazz thought of the state of G. William’s building when the Impressionist Task Force had moved in. Yeah, maybe it was better to work here.
“If it turns out there’s something I forgot or something else you need, just let me know,” Hughes said, “and I’ll get it for you.”
“Where do we start?” Connie asked.
Hughes raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean ‘we’?”
“Oh, is this work too manly for a princess like myself?” Connie’s sarcasm was damn near toxic.
“Whoa! Whoa!” Hughes held both hands up in surrender and looked over at Jazz for help. Jazz just gave him a “You’re on your own, pal” smirk. “Damn, I didn’t think there was a girl on this planet who could handle Billy Dent’s kid, but I’ve been proven wrong. Look, Connie—it’s Connie, right?—this has nothing to do with boys versus girls. Jasper here is technically my, well, he’s here at the request of the NYPD. You’re not. I can’t just let you go rummaging through files.”
Connie folded her arms over her chest and fixed Hughes with a glare that said she wasn’t buying it. Jazz figured he’d better jump in before Hughes felt threatened enough to draw his weapon.
“Look, maybe she can’t go through the files with us,” Jazz said, “but there’s nothing that says she can’t stay in the room, right? And if she hears us talking and has ideas, it’s still a free country and she can say what she wants.”