Think, Connie. You’re not an action hero. You can’t escape them. So you have to trick them instead. You’re an actress, right? You need to act.
And she remembered something Jazz had said once, during one of his periodic “lessons” on avoiding sudden death at the hands of people like himself: Don’t get distracted by details. She remembered Ted Bundy and his arm-in-a-fake-cast routine. Women had seen that cast and been suckered to their own deaths.
People like details, Jazz had told her. They notice them. They fixate on them. And they let them consume them, to the detriment of the bigger picture.
Connie’s plan formed in seconds. Too little time for her to think it all the way through, but fortunately also too little time for her to doubt it. Worst-case scenario: I get caught. Best-case scenario if I do nothing: I get caught.
The woman who had pushed past her was now struggling with the overhead bin for her suitcase, her large purse resting on the empty aisle seat, unwatched. Connie quickly and efficiently rummaged through the bag. Reading glasses. Okay, cool. Then she silently thanked God that the woman was white as she found exactly what she’d hoped to find—a makeup compact. She palmed it.
As the plane slowly emptied (and her former row mate disappeared down the aisle), Connie ducked low behind the seat and whipped out the compact, with its powdery “neutral” makeup disk. Years of theater experience had taught her how to make makeup seem natural, but now she wanted anything but. It took a little doing, but within a few minutes she had managed to create a blobbish patch of beige skin that started above one eyebrow and leaked down her face, nicked the top of her nose, and came to an uneven end along the ridge of her cheekbone. It looked like a birthmark gone awry and it was pretty hideous, she thought.
Details.
She bound up her long, carefully braided hair and wrapped it in her satin sleeping bonnet. She slipped on the reading glasses and checked herself quickly in the compact’s mirror. It was good, but not good enough.
Hair and makeup, done. Time to raise the curtain and start the show.
The plane had almost entirely emptied out. Connie finally rose from her seat and maneuvered out of her aisle with great difficulty, avoiding coming down on her left foot. Bracing herself on the seatbacks, she managed to shuffle up to the front of the plane, where she made sure to make eye contact with one of the flight attendants who had not told her to turn off her phone at takeoff.
“Are you all right?” the attendant asked, telling Connie instantly that her posture and her faked expression of pain were both working.
“I feel like an idiot,” she started, “but I twisted my ankle running for the plane before. I didn’t think it was that bad, but after sitting all this time…”
“Oh, God, it’s probably even worse after the change in cabin pressure!”
The “let them finish your sentence” trick rides again.
“Yeah, is there any way…”
“I’ll get a wheelchair for you.”
Connie allowed herself to slump against one of the seats a little. “Thank you so much. I’m sorry to be such a pain.”
“Not at all. Just sit in that seat there and I’ll have someone get your bags.”
Soon, the attendant helped her out of her seat and off the plane. There in the jetway, a man waited with a wheelchair. Connie sank into it and thanked the attendant again as she piled Connie’s duffel onto a little rack on the back of the chair.
“Take good care of her,” the attendant told Wheelchair Man.
“No prob.”
On their way up the jetway, Connie unfolded the cheap little airplane blanket she’d grabbed from a nearby seat and wrapped it around herself like a shawl. She figured by this point she probably looked like a cancer patient. She tucked her arms together to make herself as small as possible.
Moments later, he rolled her out into the terminal. Connie immediately noticed two uniformed cops standing with a TSA agent off to one side. They were looking for a black teenage girl with beaded cornrows. Not some woman with a facial mark and glasses, wrapped up and wearing a bonnet that probably covered a bald head, as best they could tell.
Still, she held her breath as Wheelchair Man rolled her past them.
“Where to?” he asked her.
Connie finally allowed herself a grin.
“Terminal four,” she said. “Arrivals.”
CHAPTER 48
Morales was staying in a hotel three subway stops away from Jazz’s, but he hadn’t figured out the subway system yet and now was no time to try. So he had hailed a cab and—like in the movies—told the guy to floor it. The cabbie glanced over his shoulder at Jazz with an expression of mingled amusement and annoyance and proceeded to lope along at the speed limit. Jazz sighed heavily and resigned himself to the trip, watching Brooklyn bleed past him.
He should have gone to Morales in the first place, he realized. Should have texted her and not Hughes when he’d had Billy on the phone outside Belsamo’s apartment. She was the one he needed. Hughes had—after much thought and stress—broken NYPD regulations to bring Jazz to New York in the hope of catching a killer.
But the very first time he’d met her, Morales had offered to break the law for him. With him.
She answered the door in a hotel bathrobe, her hair spilling down, un-bunned, messy, disheveled. God, she was sexy. He felt his groin lurch at the sight of her. He wanted her. Not the same way he wanted Connie. Or maybe it was the same way. Maybe he was kidding himself. For all his talk of loving Connie, maybe it was just some animal reaction.
She can die pretty or she can die ugly.
“I was about to get some sleep for once,” Morales said, cocking a hip. “What’s so important you had to race over here?”
Her lips…
Now, if it was me, I’d start with those lips, so full and… generous.
Jazz shivered.
“Is it cold in the hall?” Morales stepped aside. “Come in. I can make some, well, coffee, I guess. Do you drink coffee?”
“Yeah…” Jazz hesitated, then entered the room.
You’re gonna be the death of that FBI agent, Jasper. I promise you that. You’ll watch her die.
No. He would not kill her. Billy was just trying to psych him out. That’s what Billy did—he planted seeds of doubt, of crazy, of dismay. And even if they didn’t bloom, he still got to paw through the loam of your psyche.
As if the sound and finality of the door closing suddenly made her aware of who she was with and what she was wearing, Morales pulled the front of the robe closer together with one hand and ran the other through her untamed hair.
I sure am curious to see those goodies she hides under those FBI blazers…. Want to get your hands up under there, don’t you, Jasper?
Of course I do.
Want to find the things she hides from the world, the things she won’t share. Bring ’em out into the light.
So what? So does every other guy with testosterone and a working penis.
And that made him think of Dog and Hat and the missing penises and he finally shook off Billy’s voice and listened to himself confess multiple felonies and misdemeanors to a special agent of the FBI.
To her credit, Morales didn’t interrupt Jazz as he related to her the path that had taken him physically into Dog’s apartment and mentally into Dog and Hat’s brutal game of “murder Monopoly,” as Hughes called it. Her eyes, so dark brown they were almost black, widened and narrowed at certain points, and she pursed those plush lips that Billy wanted to “begin” with, but she said not a word until he wound and wended his story to the point at which he’d hopped in a cab to visit her in her hotel room.
“And Hughes knows all of this?” was the first thing she said, confirming.
“Except for the last phone call. Well, and that I came to you.”
Morales clucked her tongue. “I have to think for a second. And I have to go get dressed because I can’t believe I’m sitting around talking about this in a bathrobe.”