“There was a serial killer right here in the Nod,” Connie said quietly. “Jazz was involved in that, too. And it worked out fine.”
“Connie!” Mom exploded, her veneer of reserve finally breaking down. “Just because you survived this once doesn’t mean you should go looking for trouble! That’s like drinking and driving over and over just because you didn’t kill yourself the first time!”
“People are dying,” her dad added. “More than a dozen of them. You want to stand in the middle of that? Really?”
She thought of the lockbox. She thought of those quiet, tense moments when she and Howie had sneaked through the Dent house, looking for Jazz. A dead cop in a cruiser out in the driveway. Howie cradling the useless shotgun, as if it could help. Silent for the first time since she’d met him. Both of them knowing that it was entirely possible Jazz was already dead at the hands of the Impressionist.
And then, kicking down the bedroom door… Her boyfriend, bloodied but alive… The rush of her own blood and adrenaline as they got the drop on the man who’d killed Ginny Davis…
“I hear you, Daddy. I get it. But you can’t look after me forever. In a few months, I’ll be eighteen. What’s going to change in those few months? I’m already the person I’ll be at eighteen. The calendar just hasn’t caught up yet.” She took a deep breath. “I need to go back to New York. I need to do it now,” she said in a rush, before her parents could interrupt. But she needn’t have worried. They said nothing. Her mother stared down at her hands, and her father simply shook his head worriedly.
“And I’m going to go,” Connie went on. “I’m going to go. The only way you can stop me is physically. That’s just a fact. And I know you won’t lay a hand on me, Daddy.” Her father said nothing; his face remained impassive, but his eyes told the tale—he could not bring himself to harm his child, even if he thought it would save her. “So the only way you can stop me is if you call the police and have them stop me at the airport or on my way. And you can do that. I know you can. But you have to understand something: If you do, then I’ll know that you love me and want to protect me, but that you don’t trust me. And if you don’t trust me now, if you don’t trust me after seventeen years of being a good daughter, then that means that you’ve never really trusted me.” She took a deep breath. “And that means you never will.”
“Connie…” Mom wrung her hands.
“Let me finish, Mom. If you won’t ever trust me, then that means I’m done. You can have the cops drag me back from the airport and you can keep me locked up in the house, but once I graduate, I’ll move out and you won’t see me anymore. Not because I don’t love you—I do—but because I can’t be around people who don’t trust me. I’ll put myself through college. Somehow. Or maybe move to New York or LA and try to get into acting. I don’t know. But I won’t be here and I won’t come back.” She hefted her bag. “It’s your decision.”
Her father stood, and Connie was once again reminded just how massive a man he was—solid and tall and broad through the chest and shoulders. He looked like a construction worker, not a lawyer, thanks to a strict exercise regimen he’d followed since his years playing football in college. “You’re not leaving,” he said.
“I am. This isn’t a bluff, Daddy.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. I’m sure you believe it right now, as you’re saying it, but you’ll never go through with it. If you walk through that door, my first call is to the police. And you can threaten all you want, but we both know that you’ll eventually realize I’m right.”
“I love you both,” Connie said, and a tear surprised her. “Tell Whiz I love him, too.” She knew that if she sought out her brother in his room, she would break down completely, and she couldn’t afford to do that. It might be the last time she would see him, but she couldn’t put herself through that, couldn’t let what might be his last memory of her be one of weeping and sorrow.
She turned and walked to the front door.
“Do not walk through that door, Conscience!”
Connie thought she heard her mother say, “Let her go, Jerry,” but she couldn’t be sure. She closed the door behind her. Howie waited in the driveway, the engine of his car idling.
“Let’s do this,” she said to him as she climbed in.
“We gonna be dodging Johnny Law? Gonna have five-oh on our asses?”
“Just drive.”
CHAPTER 42
And
of course
a shoulder and trailing a line of
(yes)
cool heat
(yes)
a groan
whose?
He opens his mouth
(yes, like that)
and licks
And
Jazz woke the next morning, his mind muzzy, his emotions hacked and split into pieces. Groggy, he peered blearily at the clock on the bedside table. According to it, he actually had slept for hours. But with the dream arousing and terrifying him in alternating, equal measure, he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. He must have dreamed that he’d lain awake all night, searching for wisdom and insight in the blank white hotel ceiling.
Despite mentioning TARU, Hughes had—perhaps intentionally, perhaps not—neglected to take the disposable cell phone, so Jazz had put it on the bedside table, just in case Billy decided to call back. The phone’s caller ID listed a phone number, but when Jazz called it, he only got an anonymous, robotic outgoing voice mail message. Billy had probably already tossed that phone and moved on to another one.
He thought of calling Connie. But his dream still pounded at the doors of his conscious mind, only slightly unreal in these moments of waking.
He felt poisonous.
Slick and grimy with some contagion.
To speak to Connie now would be to pollute her with the thoughts spinning in his head. Would be to lie to her and not tell her about Belsamo and what he’d done. He couldn’t abide the thought of lying to Connie. Not to her.
He could have called Aunt Samantha or Howie, but he didn’t want to speak to anyone. Not now. All of his focus, all of his attention, was now devoted to recalling the conversation he’d had with Billy.
Jazz’s memory was good. Not eidetic like Billy’s, but better than most people’s. And recalling the things Billy said was sort of a specialty of his. Dear Old Dad had trained his son to lean extra-heavy on the fatherly wisdom he imparted.
Fine. You designed me to be your tape recorder. I’ll use that against you, you bastard.
The problem wasn’t remembering every line in the twisted play of Butcher Billy’s life. The difficulty lay in figuring out which words mattered and which ones were just verbal chaff, noisemakers designed to distract attention and lead Jazz into the corners of Billy’s maze where the walls closed in.
The crows… There’s something there. Something real. Belsamo was into crows. Billy mentioned them. And, yeah, I remember that old story he told me. I just recited it to Connie the other day.
Billy had been adamant that the story of the Crow King wasn’t a fairy tale. He’d called it folklore. Myth. The differences were crucial. Billy sounded like an inbred redneck, but his IQ was in the stratosphere and he wielded words as precisely as he wielded knives and cleavers and hammers.
Fairy tales and fables were stories for children. They involved magic. They weren’t real.
Myths and folklore, though… they weren’t precisely real, but they were designed to explain something that was real. They represented something about the real world. The origin of something.
The Crow King… what did the Crow King represent?
And then Jazz sat up straight in bed. Another chunk of knowledge had just dropped into his brain. More accurately, it had bobbed to the surface of the ocean of his memories, like a body that has broken free of its concrete shoes.
The Impressionist. In his cell in Lobo’s Nod. He’d said something to Jazz….
Jasper Dent. Princeling of Murder. Heir to the Croaking.
Not “the Croaking.” Damn it, Jazz! Did you really think he was that crazy? What’s wrong with you? You missed the connection right there!
The Impressionist had been talking about the Crow King.