Jazz hadn’t cared which faith buried his mother; Father McKane at the local church had been the most willing to perform the service, so Jazz had gone Catholic. Now, as the priest droned on and on, Jazz wondered if he should have held out for a less verbose brand of religion. He sighed and gripped Connie’s hand and stared straight ahead at the casket. It contained a bunch of brand-new stuffed animals, similar to the ones Jazz remembered his mother buying him as a child. It also contained a batch of lemon-frosted cupcakes Jazz had baked. That was his strongest memory of his mother—the lemon-frosted cupcakes she used to bake. He could have just had a service and a stone, but he’d wanted the whole experience, the totality of the funeral ritual. He wanted to witness the literal expression of burying his past.
Sentimental? Probably. And what of it? Bury it all. Bury the memories and the sentiment and move on.
Arrayed around the cemetery, he knew, were more than a dozen police officers and federal agents. Once the authorities had gotten wind of Jazz’s plan to hold a funeral service for his mother, they had insisted on staking it out, certain (or maybe just hopeful) that Billy wouldn’t be able to resist this opportunity to emerge from hiding. It was a waste of time, Jazz had told them, his insistence as useless as a sledgehammer against a tidal wave.
Billy would never reveal himself for something as prosaic and predictable as a funeral. He had occasionally attended the funerals of his victims, but that was before cable news had splashed his face on HD screens all around the world. “Butcher Billy” was too smart to show that famous face here, of all places.
“We’re going to make a go of it, anyway,” an FBI agent had told Jazz, who had shrugged and said, “You want to waste tax dollars, I guess that’s your prerogative.”
Finally the priest finished up. He asked if anyone would like to say anything at the grave, looking pointedly at Jazz. But Jazz had nothing to say. Nothing to say in public, at least. He’d come to terms with his mother’s death years ago. There was nothing left to say.
To his surprise, though, the priest nodded and pointed just over Jazz’s shoulder. Jazz and Connie both turned—he caught the shock of her expression, too—and watched as Howie Gersten, Jazz’s best friend, threaded carefully between G. William and Jazz, studiously avoiding meeting Jazz’s eyes. Dressed in a black suit with a somber olive tie, six foot seven at the age of seventeen, Howie looked like a white-boy version of the images Jazz had seen of Baron Samedi, the skeletal voodoo god of the dead. The suit jacket was slightly too short for Howie’s ridiculously long limbs, and a good two inches of white shirt cuff and pale wrist jutted out.
“My name is Howie Gersten,” Howie said once he’d gotten to the gravestone. Jazz almost burst out laughing. Everyone here knew who Howie was already. “I didn’t know Mrs. Dent. But I just really feel like when you bury someone, when you say good-bye, that someone should say something. And I figure that’s my job as Jazz’s best friend.” Howie cleared his throat and glanced at Jazz for the first time. “Don’t be pissed, dude,” he stage-whispered.
A ripple of laughter washed over the attendees. Connie shook her head. “That boy…”
“Anyway,” Howie went on, “here’s the thing: When I was a kid, I used to get pushed around a lot. I’m a hemophiliac, so I have to be careful all the time, and when you combine that with being a gangly string bean, it’s like you’re just asking for trouble, you know? And I wish I could tell you that Mrs. Dent was nice to me and used to say kind and encouraging things to me when I was going through all of that, but like I said, I didn’t know her. By the time I met Jazz, she was already, y’know, not around.
“But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. And I think it’s an obvious thing, but someone needs to say it. We all know that, uh, Jazz’s dad wasn’t, isn’t, exactly a great role model. But there I was one day when I was like ten or something and these kids were having a fine old time poking bruises into my arms. And Jazz came along. He was smaller than them and outnumbered, and let’s face it—I wasn’t going to be much help—”
Another ripple of laughter.
“But Jazz just waded into those douchebags—um, sorry, Father. He just waded into them and kicked their, um, rears, which I know isn’t terribly Christian or anything, but I’ll tell you, it looked pretty good from where I was standing. And I guess the thing is—the obvious thing that I mentioned before is—that I never met Mrs. Dent, but I know she must have been a good person because I’m pretty sure Billy Dent didn’t raise Jazz to rescue helpless hemophiliacs from bullies. And that’s all I have to say. I’ll miss you, Mrs. Dent, even though I never met you. I wish I had.” He started to walk back to the group of mourners, then stopped and said, “Um, God bless you and amen and stuff,” before hustling back to his spot.
And then they lowered the casket into the ground. The stone said JANICE DENT, MOTHER. No dates, because Jazz couldn’t be sure exactly when Billy had killed her.
He took the small spade from the priest and shoveled some dirt into the grave. It rattled.
G. William and Connie and Howie followed suit. Then they backed away so that the cemetery workers could do the real shoveling.
Jazz became aware that he was staring at the shovels as they heaved dirt on top of the casket that did not hold his mother’s body, snapping out of it only when Connie poked him to get his attention. She held a tissue out for him.
“What’s this for?” he asked, taking it automatically.
“Your eyes,” she said, and Jazz realized that—much to his surprise—he was crying.
CHAPTER 5
Jazz’s grandmother was waiting for him when he got home, sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, a blanket thrown over her legs. From all appearances, she looked like just another old lady enjoying a crisp day in January.
“They’re here,” she whispered to Jazz as he mounted the front steps. “They’ve come for your daddy.”
Jazz wasn’t sure who she meant when she said “your daddy.” Gramma was delusional enough that she sometimes thought Jazz was Billy, meaning that she could think “they” had come for Jazz’s long-dead grandfather. Or she could be lucid enough to think that the “they” in question—actually Deputy Michael Erickson, who had volunteered to keep an eye on Gramma during the funeral—were here for Billy himself. Which meant that Gramma’s thinking was roughly on par with the FBI’s these days. Jazz wasn’t sure if that was funny or sad.
He could see Erickson peering out at them from the corner of a window. Gramma had hated Mom, so there was no way in the world Jazz was going to have her at the funeral. And even if Gramma had loved Janice, when given the choice between inviting his black girlfriend or his insane, racist grandmother, Jazz would choose Connie every time.
“They sent spies,” Gramma went on, her voice a hush, “and they look like one man, but they can split into two, then four, and so on. I’ve seen it before. During the war. It’s a Communist trick and they taught it to the Democrats so that they could take our guns. I would have fought them off, but they already made the shotgun disappear.”
No, Jazz had made the shotgun disappear. It was Grampa’s old hunting piece, and Jazz had plugged both barrels and removed the firing pins so that Gramma couldn’t really hurt anyone with it. But when he was going to be gone for a long stretch—like today—he made sure to hide it from her. It was nice to know that she was blaming Washington politicians and not him.
Years of dealing with Gramma’s progressively deteriorating mental state had rendered Jazz pretty much impervious to shock. “So, there’s a commie spy in the house looking for Dad, huh?” he said. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself say. “Don’t worry. I’m gonna go in there and run him out. He won’t dare come back by the time I’m done with him.” He brandished the ceremonial spade the priest had given him at the end of the service as though it were a samurai sword.
Gramma’s eyes widened, and she clapped her hands. “Gut him!” she yelled. “Gut him like that raccoon you gutted on Fourth of July that one year!” And she made vicious stabbing and hacking motions as Jazz went inside.
“How’s it going?” he asked Erickson. “Other than the usual.”
Erickson shrugged. “She started bugging out about an hour ago. I just decided to go with it. As long as I could keep an eye on her from in here, I figured it was better just to let her sit outside.”
“Good call. She thinks you’re some kind of Communist clone, by the way.”