Still, the silence on the other side of the door was maddening. Was Hershey even still out there? Had he left?
That’s what he wants you to think. And then you open up the door and the last thing you see is the barrel of Morales’s gun.
Another wave of pain slammed at Jazz, bringing with it nausea. He realized someone was laughing and then realized that that person was him.
“There’s nothing funny about your situation,” Hershey said from outside.
Jazz agreed, but couldn’t stop giggling for some reason. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. “Do you have any idea what my father—”
“I know exactly who you are. You’re Jasper Dent. Crowson. And I don’t care. You’re not a part of the game. The dog creature was. Now he’s lost. The whoreslut was because all whoresluts are.”
Jazz closed his eyes. There was no light in the unit, so there was nothing to see, anyway. Then he forced them back open. Keep them open. Keep looking. You’re alive as long as you’re looking.
It was a standoff. For now. Jazz couldn’t get out and Hershey couldn’t get in. How long would that last? How long before Hershey decided to switch guns and just perforate the whole door—and Jazz—with the bigger-caliber gun? How long before—
Just then, he heard something scratching at the door.
What is—
And a tiny click!
No more standoff. He suddenly knew exactly what Hat planned to do to him.
Oh, hell no. This guy is not going to Cask of Amontillado me. No way.
“What are you doing?” He tried to keep the panic out of his voice, but he didn’t do a very good job. The pain, the shock—they wrecked all his control, all his skills built up over a lifetime.
“I’ll be back when you’re more compliant,” Hershey said through the door. “Or maybe I’ll just come back when you’re dead. Or maybe I’ll just leave you here forever. Whichever. It no longer matters.”
Jazz pounded at the door. It rattled and shook, but stayed in place. Hershey had locked him in. Locked him in the darkness with nothing but two corpses for company and a bullet wound that was slowly bleeding the life from him.
“Maybe we can make some kind of deal—” Jazz began, though what kind eluded him.
“No deals,” Hershey said. “You die. I live. Simple as that.”
“You left the message for me!” Jazz cried. “You were the one who welcomed me to the game! That was a Hat kill. You can’t just—”
“I was told to do that. I was just following the rules.”
A killer who followed the rules. Now Jazz had heard everything. He reached down to probe his leg, carefully feeling along as the pain increased.
He found a hole in his jeans.
And one in his thigh.
Still bleeding. Of course. All this moving around. Stupid.
Grimacing, he stuck his thumb in the bullet hole.
The sudden, new variety of pain jolted him like lightning. And in the same instant, his mind cleared and inspiration struck. The second workbench! This unit was divided in two—Hat and Dog shared it. A common space for their tools and trophies. He remembered the night—almost five years ago now—when Billy had realized that G. William was onto him, that the police would be at the Dent house within the hour.
Get into the rumpus room, he’d shouted to Jazz. Gather up my trophies and run to Gramma’s house. Do it now!
Jazz thought of that second bench. That second set of pristine murder tools. And that jar of eyeballs.
“You wouldn’t leave without your”—Come on! What does he call them? Tools or toys? Trophies or mementos?—“things, would you?”
In the silence that followed, he thought maybe he’d done it. He’d found Hershey’s psychological weak spot, his most crucial vulnerability, and had gained valuable leverage.
But then Hershey just laughed. It was the most terrifying thing Jazz could imagine in that moment.
“There’s always more out there,” Hershey said. “It’s time to clear the decks. Time to start over. You can have my old toys. There’s a world full of new ones waiting for me.”
“The new ones are never as good! You’ll miss these!” Jazz cried desperately. “You’ll think back to one of them and you’ll wish you had…”
He drifted off. Out of breath, for one thing. For another…
He’d expected a last word from Hershey. Something insane or unintelligible. But as he put an ear to the door he heard only footfalls.
Receding.
Silence greeted him, silence stretched out to long moments. Silence and darkness.
He thought it possible that he’d passed out again. He felt into his pocket for his cell phone. He would call Hughes. Hughes would come get him. And then… and then they could chase down Duncan Hershey. The task force already had a nice, thick dossier on him. There were only so many places for him to run to.
The cell phone screen read NO SIGNAL.
Of course. He was in a massive structure of concrete and steel and aluminum, with eight stories above him. If his cell wouldn’t work in a subway, it definitely wouldn’t work here, either.
Jazz didn’t panic, but he did allow himself to scream and pound on the door and bellow for help. He did it for roughly a minute, which is a long time to scream at the top of your lungs and beat your hands against a metal door, especially when shot.
He slumped against the door, sweat-drenched. He’d used up way too much energy on that temper tantrum.
No one came.
No one would be coming. Jazz did some quick math. His most conservative estimate was that there were close to three thousand storage units in this building alone. And given the twisty, narrow corridors, with their sound-killing corners, someone would probably have to come to one of the four or five units in this stretch of hallway in order to hear him.
Odds of five out of three thousand. Not the worst odds in the world, but when would someone come to their storage unit? Jazz didn’t know what it was like in New York, but in Lobo’s Nod, people only got storage units for stuff they didn’t really need, but couldn’t be bothered to get rid of. Stuff they might someday want, but didn’t really think about all that often.
Maybe a security guard—
Yeah. Right. Jazz thought of the man he’d gulled to get in in the first place. He could picture that fat-ass taking the elevator to each floor, poking his head out, saying “Good enough,” and calling it a night.
He wondered when the smell of Dog’s body and Morales’s and his own rotting corpse would finally permeate into some part of the building where someone would notice it.
He wondered if he would bleed to death first… or freeze to death in an unheated storage unit in the middle of winter?
At least whoever Dog planned on killing tonight is safe, he thought.
And then: And Connie. At least Connie is safe.
CHAPTER 58
Someone had propped open the front door to the building tagged with her name, so Connie was able to go right in.
She had three clues to Mr. Auto-Tune already. She had a bell. A gun. She had Eliot Ness.
Somewhere in this building, there were more clues. There had to be.
Out of the cold rain, she paused for a moment to shake off the chill. A dim overhead light barely illuminated the entryway.
Now, before you go chasing waterfalls, do something smart.
She composed a quick text to Howie, sending him the address of the building. As an afterthought, she also included bell, guns, Eliot Ness? just in case it meant anything to him. She resisted the urge to send the same text to Jazz. With any luck, she would tell him all of this and more in person soon enough.
Exploring for any sort of hint as to what to do next, she noticed that there was a missing mailbox on the wall—between the little doors for 2A and 2C, there was a gap. The mailbox door had been ripped off, the space filled with trash.
No mailbox meant no one living in that apartment. Right? And what better place to hide the next clue than in an abandoned apartment.