Blood of My Blood (17 page)

And now they had a driver.

Hughes figured he’d had less than four hours of sleep over the last forty-eight, but he didn’t care. He’d gone longer when on a case, when on a hunt, and this was the biggest, best hunt of his career. A few more Red Bulls and a cup of the terrible swill the Seven-Six dared call coffee and he was right as rain, his mind buzzing along like nothing had gone wrong.

The noose was draped over Jasper Dent’s neck. Soon, he could tighten it.

He was alone, watching through the glass as Detective Miller interrogated the hack, who’d come forward after seeing the news. The Dent kid had flagged him on the street, or so the hack—one Khosrow Abbasi—claimed. Hughes didn’t buy it. Dent wasn’t familiar with the city. He wouldn’t have known to flag down Abbasi’s unmarked black Lincoln any more than he’d’ve known to switch to the uptown 6 at Broadway-Lafayette to get to Grand Central. So Abbasi probably saw the kid on a street corner and pulled over,
thinking he could grab a quick fare. Happened all the time. Abbasi was vigorously protesting that he’d not done anything wrong, probably more concerned about his fate in front of the Taxi & Limousine Commission than by the fact that he’d shuttled a wanted fugitive over the bridge into Manhattan.

Hughes tapped twice on the window, lightly—the precinct’s code for “hurry the hell up.” Time was wasting. They needed whatever information Abbasi had, and they needed it now.

New York City wasn’t a speedboat; it was a tanker. It couldn’t turn on a dime. It took time—hours—to execute a lockdown, to shut down certain routes, to do it right. And along the way, there were any number of opportunities for a bad guy to slip through the sieve. Deep down, Hughes knew that it
should
be this way; you couldn’t just shut down a city of eight million people on a whim—the ensuing chaos would be catastrophic. But a part of him wished it were possible. That there could be a button somewhere he could press that would close the bridges and tunnels and stop the subways and kill the buses and ground the planes out at JFK and LaGuardia all in the same instant.

Keep dreaming
.

A brief tableau flashed before Hughes’s eyes: Morales, dead on the floor of the storage unit. Then her body loaded onto a stretcher by the medical examiner’s team, the way her head had lolled, one arm trailing off the stretcher as though she were drifting on an inflatable pool raft on a warm summer day…

Damn. He pinched the bridge of his nose. That wasn’t like him. Victims didn’t haunt him like that. They were cases, not ghosts. All his years as a homicide cop, and he’d had scanty nightmares. Partly because he was good at seeing the murder as a puzzle to be solved. But also, mostly, because he was good at what he did. He cleared cases. Period. That absolved him of a lot of sleepless nights.

But usually you have a grasp on it. And usually you don’t know the victim
.

There was a light tap at the door, and then a uniform stepped in.

“Captain Montgomery wanted me to let you know: We have that trace on your phone up and running. And we got a hit on one of your credit cards. Four tickets bought at an automated kiosk at Port Authority.”

The need for sleep receded into the furthest recesses of Hughes’s mind. “Tickets where?”

The uniform handed him a printout. “And the cell trace indicates he’s northbound on 495. From the rate of movement, it looks like he hitched a ride.”

Hughes pondered the printout. “Or he hopped a bus to Albany.”

“We shut down all the buses.”

“Yeah, but he could have gotten out before then. He’s been one step ahead the whole time.” Hughes massaged his temples. The headache that had flared at the sight of Billy Dent’s note near Hat’s body had never really gone away—it just ebbed and flowed with the levels of caffeine in his system. “Get me a cup of coffee. And tell Captain Montgomery
to have all northbound buses stopped and searched. I’ll call the state police myself to coordinate.”

The uniform about-faced and headed out. Hughes closed his eyes and enjoyed the quiet of the observation room for a single, lingering moment.

And then his face split with a wide, satisfied grin.

Gotcha
.

Jazz opened his eyes, but the dream followed him into wakefulness.

Touch me

says the voice

like that

it goes on

And he does.

His fingers glide over warm, supple flesh.

Touch me like that

And his legs, the friction of them—

And so warm

So warm

like that

The woman was in shadows and the hands on her were his own, his own small, childish hands, which had yet to learn how to dismember, how to hack, how to strangle. Innocent hands, they should have been. Young, soft, small hands roaming the endless fields of her. “Her,” the mystery
she
of
his dreams for months now, the woman he now realized—in a lightning-fast, thunder-loud burst of epiphany—could be no one but his father’s partner in crime, Billy Dent’s hidden, secret weapon: Samantha Dent.

Aunt Sam. My own aunt. I—

Oh, God
.

He lurched upward in his seat, gagging.

“Not in the truck!” Marta yelled. “Roll down the window!”

Jazz fumbled to his right for the window controls. A blast of cold air hit him as the glass slid down, the shock of it forestalling the moment of regurgitation. Straining against the seat belt, he leaned his head out the window and let go, unselfconsciously vomiting in an impressive stream that wicked back along the side of the truck, spattering the paint job and flicking away into the still dark.

When he was done, he struggled back inside and lay back against the worn seat, gasping for breath.

“You okay?” Marta asked. “Water at your feet.”

Jazz’s mind churned like his now-empty gut. Marta’s voice was familiar, and the smells around him reminded him of something, but he was still thrashing against the dream, his stomach-sick body fighting itself.

Sure enough, there was a half-full bottle of water at his feet. Jazz managed to pluck it up and rinsed his mouth, spitting the befouled water out the window.

He remembered. Marta. The truck driver.

He knew the NYPD could track him via cell phone GPS, so he’d taken a calculated risk. Billy always said,
Cop toys
are just like a little baby’s toys: They love ’em so much that they just
have
to play with them, even when it’s not good for them
.

The cops (he managed to stop himself from thinking of them as “the bastard cops,” but only just) wouldn’t be able to help themselves—they knew he had Hughes’s phone, so they would track him with it. So he’d left it on the bus to Albany, wedged between the seat and the wall, and then gotten off at the first stop, an unscheduled “convenience break” at a New Jersey rest station. The bus driver had loitered near the bus, smoking and guzzling coffee, while most of Jazz’s fellow passengers had made for the vending machines.

Jazz, though, had immediately headed for the gas pumps, where massive semitrucks hissed and belched like dragons lined up at a buffet. Concealed in the shadows, he’d watched each truck. He knew he was in bad shape. His leg pulsated like an alien egg sac in a horror movie. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He needed to be on the road and needed to be safe.

So once again, men were out. He needed a woman trucker, and he’d been pleasantly surprised that it didn’t take long for him to find one.

Marta’s rig had blue flames emblazoned on the hood, with a slit-eyed green girl dancing among them, naked, her naughty bits strategically concealed by licks of flame. The words
TRUCK IT UP
, spelled out in cursive, wafted above her. The joke—if there was one—was lost on Jazz. The trucker herself was slighter than he’d anticipated, his prejudice predicting a mannish, bulky half woman. Marta didn’t resemble the
fetching alien creature prancing on her rig’s hood, but she also was not some buzz-cut caricature from a homophobe’s nightmares.

He’d approached her tentatively when she left the restroom and had barely begun the rollout of his sad, sad cover story—repeated sexual molestation by stepdad, mom a useless junkie and part-time whore—when she’d shaken her head and welcomed him into the passenger seat. “Details make me depressed. Just don’t get carsick, okay?”

Now, as Jazz finished rinsing, she glanced over at him. “You okay?” she asked again.

“I think so.”

“You’re hosing that shit off my rig at the next stop,” she said, her tone not unkind.

“Of course.”

The sun peeked above the hills and treetops. The NYPD thought he was headed north, following the reliable signal of Hughes’s GPS. But Jazz—thanks to Marta—was going south. South and west. Marta’s route wouldn’t get him exactly where he needed to go, but she would get him close enough. How would he make it the rest of the way?

He’d improvise. It had worked so far.

He knew where he was going, though. That much was critical.

He’d figured it out in the hour he’d spent on the bus.

Where would Billy go, once leaving New York? His father had the whole world open to him.

I’ll be happy to explain it to you when the time comes. When we ain’t in such… constrained circumstances
.

That’s what Billy had said, before leaving unit 83F. So he wanted to see Jazz again. To explain. That meant he would leave clues. A map, written in a language only Jazz could understand.

In the meantime, think about Caligula. Think about Gilles de Rais
.

Caligula and Gilles de Rais. Both murderers from ancient times.

You know more than you think
.

Flattering, but useless. The Caligula/de Rais bit made Jazz think Billy referred to the beginning of something.
You’ve got the beginnings of it, boy
. That confirmed it.
Told you as much back at Wammaket. Told you where it started. The genesis. “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord.”

And Jazz had figured it out. When the bus had stopped soon thereafter, he’d left Hughes’s phone and sought out a truck heading south.

South.

Home.

And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord
. Genesis, chapter 4.

And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord
, Jazz recalled,
and dwelt in the land of Nod
.

The land of Nod.

Billy was returning to Lobo’s Nod.

Connie opened her eyes to the light of a new day, the sun streaming in through the open hospital room window blinds. She couldn’t greet the day with hope or even a smile, though. She’d told her father to wake her if there was news of or from Jazz during the night, so the fact that she’d actually slept eight hours meant that Jazz was still missing.

Maybe that’s a good thing
, she thought.
Maybe it means he’s safe
.

But even Connie’s natural optimism couldn’t crumble the ramparts of fear that had risen up around Jazz. Jazz was wounded and on the run, with every cop in New York looking for him. If there was no news, he was probably—

No. No
.

Dad was standing over by the door to her room, huddled in the corner, murmuring into his cell phone. Trying not to wake her. Connie smiled, and the smile hurt, reminding her of the long road to recovery before her.

“Dad?”

Her father glanced over at her. “She’s up now. Yeah, I’ll tell her. Love you, too.” He slipped the phone into his pocket and came to her bedside, taking her hand. “Mom sends her love.”

Her mother would be looking after Whiz. Pulling him out of school and bringing him to New York would be a headache none of them needed. “I bet you had to have someone tie her down to keep her from getting on the first plane here.”

“Pretty close. How do you feel? Should I get the nurse—”

“No. No, I’m okay.” She winced as she adjusted herself into a sitting position, putting the lie to her words. But the pain—while significant—wasn’t overwhelming. “Has there been any—”

Dad’s frown told her everything she needed to know, but she pressed, anyway. He told her what he knew from the news: that the police believed Billy Dent had escaped the city. The FBI had once again placed Billy at the top of its vaunted most-wanted list. He was considered armed and dangerous; there was a nationwide 1-800 number for information about him, and every news story emphasized that, if seen, he was not to be approached.

As for Jazz: They were circulating photos of him, too. He was considered “potentially armed and dangerous” but also “wounded and scared.” Once again, no one was to approach him.

Connie wanted nothing more than to approach him. To hold him. To be the anchor she knew she was and could be for him. She replayed their last conversation over and over. She had given him an ultimatum, a recklessly stupid thing to do
in this situation. Jazz wasn’t thinking straight. Threatening him with the end of their relationship was supposed to shock him back to reality, make him see how dangerous his current course was. Instead, it had sent him scurrying into that same dark, safe, lonely bolt-hole he’d been living in when she’d first met him. He’d withdrawn completely. Gone dark.

He always thought he knew best. He was so confident of it that he would risk his life over and over, supremely assured that, in the final analysis, he would be proven right.

She fisted tears away. Her dad pulled a chair over and put a gentle hand on her arm, away from any of the bruised or slashed exposed flesh. “Is the pain that bad? I can call the nurse and get some more painkillers.”

“No. No, it’s not that.” How could she explain it to her father? It wasn’t just that he hated and feared Jazz. Even if it hadn’t been Jazz—if it had been a quiet, shy, respectful black guy—her father still wouldn’t understand. He would tell her that no boy her age was worth crying over. He would tell her that true love doesn’t start in high school.
When I was your age
, he’d said many times,
I had no idea what I wanted or needed. You know why? Because I didn’t even know who I was yet. If I’d met your mother when I was seventeen, I wouldn’t have even spoken to her
.

Usually, at this point, Mom interjected:
Don’t flatter yourself, honey. I wouldn’t have given you a second look if you were on fire
.

“When can I get out of here?” Connie asked. A mighty and all-consuming urgency bubbled up from the same place as the tears. She had to get out of this hospital bed, out of the
hospital itself. She needed to
do
something. The rest of the world was hunting Jazz and Billy; Connie knew Jazz better than anyone else in the world—she should be out there, too. On crutches or in a wheelchair, if that’s what it took, but she knew she could contribute. Yes, Billy had tormented her, terrified her, but she would hunt him now, if she could. If that would finally resolve Jazz’s torture, then that’s what she’d do. Billy scared the living hell out of her, but for Jazz, she would happily confront him again.

If I kill him
, Jazz had said, all too calmly,
he’s dead
.

I have to do something
.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“What?”

She favored her father with the most piercing stare she could muster; she’d practiced it for months in a mirror, teaching herself how to lock eyes with someone and not blink for minutes at a time. It was very unnerving, she knew—Jazz had used it on her in the past.

“Home,” she said. “I want to go. Today.” It had come to her along with the resolve: Jazz was headed back to Lobo’s Nod. It had to be. There was no other option. It was his only strategy. He knew the Nod, and he had the Hideout there, his ramshackle, run-down sanctum in the woods, where he could recuperate and make plans. He would feel safe there. Surrounded by a building of his own design, he would be able to start over and figure out how to mount a rescue mission for his mother.

Only Connie knew about the Hideout. Not even Howie knew.

“Honey…” Her dad had that look he got when he was about to tell her how “impractical” or “capricious” something was. “Baby, you need some more time before we go gallivanting off on an airplane. You can’t just—”

“I’m not in any danger. Dr. Cullins said so. I have some broken bones. So what? People travel with broken bones all the time. I can use crutches. I’ll be fine.”

He shook his head, and she knew the volley of excuses and rebuttals was about to accelerate; it was a game she was too familiar with, living in her father’s house. But before he could speak, her cell phone rang.

BLOCKED
, said the screen.

Jazz
, Connie thought, and swiped to answer.

“Hello, Conscience,” said Mr. Auto-Tune.

She stared at her father, for a moment unable to understand why his expression was one of confusion and irritation, not shock, but then she realized: Of course. He couldn’t hear Mr.—or, possibly,
Ms
.—Auto-Tune. He was annoyed at Connie for answering her phone in the middle of their conversation. If only he knew.

He
had
to know.

Get the police
, she mouthed to him.

“Conscience?” Mr. Auto-Tune said. Connie thought maybe there was a touch of bemusement in the voice, but it was difficult to tell. “Are you so beaten up you can’t talk?”

“I’m here,” she told the voice, then hit Mute. “Dad, go get
the cops.” When he raised his eyebrows and moved not an inch, she growled, “Go! Seriously, Dad!” He paused as though he didn’t believe her for a moment, then hopped up and darted out the door.

Mr. Auto-Tune had been talking the whole time, but Connie had caught only pieces of it.
Have to keep the call going so the cops can trace it
. She unmuted her phone and just flat-out interrupted:

“Why the Auto-Tuning?” she asked. “I already know who you are. You’re either Billy or Samantha.”

The voice was silent for a time. Then: “You’re a very smart girl, Connie. And lucky, too, to survive your recent… travails. When you dropped off the fire escape, did you think you would survive, or were you just so desperate to get away that even falling to your death seemed preferable?”

“What’s the difference? It worked.”

“There are entire oceans of difference between the two.” Even through the flat inflection of Auto-Tuning, she caught a note of disapproval. “If the former, you’re optimistic. Hopeful. If the latter, you just surrendered to the inevitable.”

Keep the conversation going. Keep it going. Dad, where are you?
“Why don’t you turn off this stupid Auto-Tuning thing? I want to know if I’m talking to Billy or Sam. Did you feel it when I kicked you in the balls, or did Billy just tell you about it later?”

“Bravado lacks a certain element of verisimilitude when it comes from someone who, not long ago, was pleading for her life.”

“I’m ready for round two,” Connie said with a bravery
that surprised her. The only way she ever wanted to see Billy or his twisted sister was on a morgue slab.

“I’m sure you think you are, but you’re one step behind, Connie. That game is over.”

“Too bad. I was just getting good at it.”
Dad! Come on!

“All games end, Connie. Hat and Dog have concluded their business in New York. And so have you. So has Jasper. It’s time for everyone to come home, don’t you think?”

“So you can use me for a hostage? I don’t think so.”

That tinny, reverberating laughter. It had given her a headache before, and it was no better now. “Your days as a hostage are quite over, Connie. You’ve fulfilled your service. Your utility is at an end. Pawns are always sacrificed before game’s end. When next we meet, you will witness your last vista, hear your last cry, weep your last tears. You will take your last breath.”

Connie shivered and closed her eyes, pressing herself back against the pillow. For a moment, she’d been back in that horrible little apartment, bound to that chair, Billy Dent looming over her. The threats weren’t idle. She knew that. Billy had cut open her neck and would have done worse if he hadn’t gone off to rescue Jazz. She’d been a blade’s width from death already, and only luck had saved her.

“If I’m not important anymore,” she heard herself say, “then why are you even bothering to call me?” There. It was out there now.

“Because I find you interesting, Connie. I admit a certain weakness toward you. You fascinate me. Outsider. New. Black girl. Forcing yourself into the inner circles of popularity in a
town like Lobo’s Nod. Dating the local outcast, but still maintaining your clique status.”

“Need lessons in social interaction?”

“When you die, Connie, it will be ugly. I promise you that. And I also promise you that I will be a little sad at that moment. But only a little bit.

“Good-bye, Conscience.”

She bolted upright in bed, hissing in pain. “No! Wait! Don’t go!”

But the line was dead already.

Her dad chose that moment—that useless moment—to push breathlessly through her door with Detective Hughes in tow.