Blood of My Blood (16 page)

“Thanks, Miranda!” Jazz said, climbing out of the cab. The sight of Port Authority thrilled and terrified him all at once, but he managed to keep his voice nervous and tentative, as he had during the cab ride uptown from the place Miranda had called SoHo.

“Be careful, Mark,” she told him. “And reconsider calling the police, okay?”

He’d told her a lie. Several of them, actually, layered on top of one another and configured to maximize her pity. A physically abusive father. A mother addicted to drugs. A final straw, drawn when Dad “nearly broke my leg.” A kid trying to get away, to leave the city for the safety of a friend’s house in New Jersey.

Playing the abused, terrified kid to perfection, Jazz had hoped for nothing more than instructions on how to get the hell out of New York. The city was a bewildering array of streets, alleys, avenues, subways, tunnels, bridges.… He felt as though he could wander its byways for a century and keep
doubling back on himself, never breaking free of its confines. But while the police thought he was in Brooklyn, he’d made it to Manhattan. Now, before they realized where he actually was, he had to get out of New York entirely. Once beyond its endless concrete and glass chasms and canyons, he could disappear into the relative wilderness. They could cordon off bridges and stop subways, but they couldn’t blockade every road in the world.

So, still slumped against that trash can, he’d asked the woman he soon knew as Miranda for the best, cheapest way to get out of town, and she’d told him a bus from Port Authority. And then, after a few more pathetic moments, she’d offered to go there with him in a cab.

It was more than he could have hoped for. In a cab they wouldn’t be alone, so she felt safe and didn’t mind accompanying him. And a couple in a cab wouldn’t draw the same scrutiny from a police force and citizenry looking for a single man.

There was a little TV screen in the cab, but fortunately, it was running sports scores when they got in. Jazz couldn’t figure out how to turn it off entirely, but he muted it and positioned his “nearly broken” leg so that Miranda couldn’t see the screen.

And now she dropped him off at Port Authority. He waved to her as her cab pulled away. On the trip from downtown, he hadn’t been able to devise a way to persuade her to walk him into the building and to his bus, so he had to do this alone.

He’d never been to Port Authority before, so he had no idea if the cops milling about represented the usual force or
an amped-up, “looking for Jasper Dent” force. In any event, he had to avoid their notice at all costs.

If you’re on the run, you got two choices
, Billy had said.
You can go balls out and hope to outrun whatever’s behind you, or you can go nice and slow, easy as you please. Let whatever’s chasing you start to wonder if you’re the thing it’s really after. Don’t work like that in the wild. A gazelle can’t try reverse psychology on a lion. But it works a treat on humans, Jasper. It truly does
.

Fortunately, Jazz’s limp was much less pronounced when he walked slowly. He ambled along the sidewalk, surreptitiously glancing at the doors into Port Authority, taking in the police presence, looking for patterns in their patrols. A food cart was parked against the sidewalk on the corner, and even though Jazz wasn’t hungry, he paused to buy some kind of kebab. Fugitives on the run didn’t stop at food carts.

See? See how normal and unthreatening and totally not fleeing the jurisdiction I am?

He meandered up the steps to the phalanx of glass doors, stuffing his face with the kebab as he went. He chewed with obnoxiously huge bites, stretching out his face as much as he could. Anything to look even a tiny bit different.

No one approached him as he reached out for the door handle, and a moment later he was inside, though no less worried. One hurdle leapt, but there were many more to go.

More cops inside. Again, he couldn’t tell if this was the usual complement or a beefed-up patrol. He had to assume the worst-case scenario.

He risked kleptoing a Yankees cap from a nearby stall. He
didn’t want to stand still long enough to buy it and give the vendor a good look at his face. His shoplifting skills were rusty but good enough for this. He didn’t pull the cap down low over his face; that would be as good as screaming,
Come and get me, coppers!
at the top of his lungs. Instead, he swept back his hair and trapped it under the cap, tilting the brim up high. The result made his forehead seem several inches higher, changing the look of his face just slightly. It also concealed his hair, giving the cops one less marker to identify.

Port Authority was as bewildering and as complex as the city itself; New York in miniature. Jazz had expected something like the bus station in the Nod, only bigger. What he had gotten was a mini shopping mall choked with cops and no buses in sight.

At an information kiosk, he grabbed a handful of touristy brochures, a map of the city, and a bunch of bus schedules. He merged with a cluster of college-age kids who were laughing and giggling at one another in a way Jazz knew he would never experience. He didn’t even try to mimic them, just fell into step behind them and buried his nose in the map, the geeky outcast who had insisted on joining the cool kids in New York.

When his “friends” passed a men’s room, Jazz peeled off and slipped inside. His heart thudded nearly to a stop in his chest, though, when he saw a sign mounted above the sink:

RESTROOMS ARE PATROLLED BY PLAINCLOTHES OFFICERS

There was a man at one sink. Jazz froze for the first time since his escape from the hospital, paralyzed. Of
course
the police would patrol the restrooms. This was a big city. People
went into restrooms and did all kinds of nasty things. To themselves, to one another.

Maybe I can use that
, he thought.

The sign continued, offering numbers to call from the pay phones or house phones in the building. Before the man at the sink could finish and turn around, Jazz locked himself in a stall that smelled as though hoboes had been living in it for a month. For all he knew, they had. He was one of them now, in a way. Homeless, helpless, friendless.

That’s not true. None of it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself
.

He gnawed at his bottom lip as he shuffled through the bus schedules. With Mark Culpepper’s phone, he went online to fill in the gaps of his plan.

Yes.

Yes, this would work.

I’m coming, Mom. Intentionally or not, Billy gave me the clues, and I’m following them. Hold tight. I’m coming to get you
.

He spied the house phone as soon as he left the bathroom. Hoping that no one would take notice, he went straight to it, picked it up, and dialed the code from the bathroom sign.

When a voice answered, he reported—in his highest falsetto—that a “bad man” in the bathroom had “touched me where Mommy says no one is supposed to touch me.” Before the voice could ask any questions, he dropped the receiver and walked calmly away.

At the first pay phone he saw, he did it again, this time in a slightly different tone of voice, and this time reporting a man shooting up heroin in a stall.

He didn’t want to generate too suspicious a level of criminal bathroom activity, but he wanted some general disarray. With his brochures and the map of Port Authority on Culpepper’s cell, he made his way to the ticket kiosk, detouring twice for more calls. The cops on the floor were starting to move a bit differently. Maybe they suspected something. More likely, they were adjusting their patrols as some of them went to inspect the reported men’s rooms. Either way, they were slightly off now, and Jazz would take every little bit of help he could get.

Between Hughes’s wallet and Culpepper’s, he had only thirty bucks left. Cash was precious; he needed to hoard it now. He used Hughes’s credit card at the kiosk, buying four different bus tickets to four different destinations. Three of them went into the trash. If the cops had a trace on Hughes’s cards, they wouldn’t learn anything at all, other than that he was at Port Authority.

And he wasn’t going to be there for very long. His remaining ticket was for a bus to Albany, leaving in five minutes. Jazz mingled with the last few people to board and found a seat as close to the back as possible. Now he tugged his ball cap low over his face, turned up the collar of Hughes’s overcoat, and crossed his arms over his chest, pretending to sleep.

But sleep—though craved—was the last thing on his mind.

Stay strong, Mom. Stay alive. I’m coming
.

They were searching Brooklyn and paying extra-special attention to the tunnels and bridges, but it didn’t matter. Billy had a secret weapon, and between that and his new look (ditched the damn glasses, applied a theater-quality beard and a deliberately bad hairpiece), he cruised right on through a checkpoint in his rented car. Smiled straight at an NYPD officer in her winter weather gear. Said, “God bless, Officer!” in a tone he knew from previous experience to be calming and eminently forgettable.

Same way he’d said “You’re welcome” back in Wichita when that tit-heavy FBI agent had walked out the door he held for her at the 7-Eleven. She hadn’t even said “Thank you,” the self-involved bitch. If she had—if she had taken a moment to look up at the man holding the door for her, a courteous man, a gentleman—then maybe that liberated, enlightened, feminist, woman-power-believing lady cop might have recognized the man—the
man
—she was hunting, standing right there.

But she hadn’t, so she hadn’t. And Billy had made a point of saying “You’re welcome.” Remind her of her manners, not that it helped.

And now she was dead. Dead by Hat’s hand, and that was fine by Billy. Let the trash take out the trash. It was fitting. Almost poetic.

Bastard cops thought they could catch Billy. That was nothing new. The bastard cops
always
thought they could catch ol’ Billy.

Hadn’t done yet. Except for that fat prick in the Nod. G. William Tanner. Good ol’ boy done good. But that weren’t good police work or any kind of
deduction
. No, the sheriff had just gotten lucky was all. And sure, Billy had helped him along. Killing those two Nod girls had been foolish. Foolish and wrongheaded and just plain dumb. Billy knew that. He’d known it all along, and yet he’d been unable to help himself.

He had
needed one
.

When the urges came and the fantasies and the trophies of past kills weren’t enough, he
needed one
, and Billy was not the kind of man to deny himself. He hadn’t lived and studied and trained at his craft for so many years—he hadn’t ascended to the Crows—all so that he could sit at home with a beer and ESPN like a prospect, wishing he could do things to the cute little blond up the street.

No, sir. Not Billy Dent.

He was not a man of
whims
, Billy Dent. He was a man of
passions
. A man of
convictions
. He knew what he believed, and he knew what he deserved. When there were things to
be done to the cute little blond up the street, Billy Dent
damn well went and did them
.

Because no one else would, and Billy couldn’t live in that world.

There were some of his persuasion who felt guilt at their urges, their actions. Those sad sons of bitches ended up in jail for life, each and every time. Or dead by their own hands.

Billy knew that he was the most important man in the world. That his needs were, therefore, the most important in the world.

All men were like Billy, he mused. Well, except possibly the faggots. Billy had no hate in his heart for men who lusted for other men—they were as nature made them, just as Billy was as nature made him. Still, they were faggots, and it was ridiculous to call them anything else.

“Everything has a proper name,” Billy said aloud.

Janice said nothing. He expected such.

All men had the urges. They all wanted to possess, to dominate. They were triggered by a stolen glimpse of cleavage, by a daring hint of thigh. They dreamed and they wallowed in fantasy, but they never acted. They pilfered moments of pornography when their wives weren’t looking, masturbated relentlessly over their longings, then felt shame and relief in equal measure.

Only men who were real, men who mattered, men who were important—men like Billy—could rise above the base mud of morality and take charge, assume the mantle. Capture the prospects and do as nature intended.

Men like Billy were whole. Living in a world of sad, unfulfilled fractions.

Billy drove along through the night. His wife was with him again, after so many years. As was appropriate. Man and wife should be together, not separated by distance and deceptions.

All was good.

Except for one thing.

It was time, Billy knew, for the reckoning. Time to tie up loose ends. Jasper was almost a man. Long past time to stop treating him like a boy.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

That was from the Good Book. Billy didn’t quite believe in God—not quite—but the Bible was surely a useful source of wisdom. Good writing was good writing, no matter what you believed in, prayed to, or jerked off over.

Yes. It was time for Jasper to put away childish things. Jasper would take the next step toward becoming a Crow.

Or suffer the consequences.