Blood of My Blood (28 page)

And Jazz finally understood. The Crows weren’t about gathering together serial killers. The Crows were about gathering together the
best
of the serial killers. Using “games” to winnow out the radically unstable ones, the unreliable ones, then pulling up the others, indoctrinating them into the group, coordinating them.…

“You want to make a hunting preserve.” Jazz realized the
enormity of it in a flash, his mind’s eye conjuring the fields of Kansas covered in blood and bodies. He remembered Hat claiming he would fill the Grand Canyon with corpses. “You want to turn… what, the country? You want to make the country safe for your kind. So that you can stalk and kill whoever you want.”

“We want what is
ours
,” Billy whispered, low and so convincing. “This is the natural order, Jasper. Our history tells us so. The strong and the noble rule over the prospects and use them for our pleasure. It’s become perverted over the years. More leisure time. More opportunities for the undeserving—like Dog or even Hat—to muck up the works for everyone, make it harder for the rest of us. Used to be only the upper classes had the time, the discipline, the tools. Everyone else was too damn busy tryin’ to stay alive. So it was a naturally self-selecting group. Nowadays, you got too many people with time on their hands, thinkin’ they can be the next Bundy or Speck.”

“Or Dent?”

“Heh. Don’t they wish? I started small, too, Jasper. Ain’t gonna deny it. Always had big aspirations, though. Son of Sam was a mailman! A
mailman
! No finesse. No style. Just walk up to a car and shoot ’em. Jesus. You call him kin? ’Cause I sure as hell don’t. You and me, Jasper, we’re something special. You are one of the strong. You’re destined to be a Crow. And as the Crows strengthen, as we take on members across the spectrum of society, we get smarter. Harder to catch. Especially when we have highly placed Crows in government. In law enforcement. You ever wonder ’bout
when some intern goes missing in Washington and no one can find her? That’s ’cause no one’s lookin’ too hard. It’s tough to catch a killer when another killer has his back.”

Or hers.

The thought jolted him. He’d let Billy worm into his head, seducing him with bleak ideas and bloody notions. But at the end of the day, Billy was the man who killed people with his sister at his side. Billy was a father who’d allowed—compelled?—his own child… and… his own sister…

Not now! Not now! Focus!

Where was Sam? Was she waiting in the bedroom, where Billy had skulked? Was she somewhere with Mom, waiting for a signal from Billy to slit her throat?

Worse: If she
didn’t
get a signal from Billy at some preapproved time, would she kill Mom then?

His hand went sweaty on the Taser. He feared he would drop it at the worst possible time. He couldn’t keep up this verbal sparring with Billy. The Crows didn’t matter. None of it did. That was a problem for another day. Right now, his father was before him and his mother was missing, and that was all that mattered.

“You’re pathetic, Billy.” He wondered if all kids—if normal kids—had this moment of epiphany, this sudden sensation of understanding that their parents weren’t gods, weren’t even kings. They were just people. Sad, screwed-up people like everyone else. “You think you have some noble cause, but all you do is kill people. And all of your loser friends kill people, too. And you all talk about it. Good for you. You’ve surrounded yourself with people who think like you do. For
comfort and security. You know who else does that? Alcoholics and junkies and sex addicts.” He laughed heartily. “Guess what, Billy? You’re just like a prospect after all!”

His hand slipped on the Taser. He regripped it.

Billy didn’t move. His face was stone.

“You ready to back your words, boy?” he asked slowly.

“Dying to,” Jazz said.

“Then you decide, Jasper. You gonna use that gadget you think you’re hidin’ in your pocket…”

Billy reached around his back and produced a large, wicked knife.

“… or you gonna do this like a Crow?”

And his father held the knife out to him by its blade, the handle perfect and inviting and just within his reach.

Howie opened his eyes. The black sky hung overhead, speckled with stars, the glowing gash of the crescent moon dangling there like a wood shaving. The world was just going on, turning, as if nothing had changed.

The envelope he’d found in Gramma Dent’s mailbox—the one addressed simply to
JAZZ
—lay torn open on his passenger seat.

Jazz hadn’t said anything about
what
to do with any evidence he found at Gramma’s house, so he felt no moral compunction at all about opening the envelope addressed to Jazz.

He read it once.

He told himself it was a lie.

He read it again.

He was convinced it was a lie.

He read it a third time.

It wasn’t a lie.

Trade-offs. Life was full of them. Like being basketball tall but blood sick. Like having a best friend who could scare the crap out of anyone… even himself.

Like wanting to help but not knowing how.

He read the letter again. It could so easily be a lie. But it tasted true. Howie didn’t have a bulletproof, built-in lie detector like Jazz did, but he had a brain in his head. The letter made sense. It fit.

And if it was true…

If it was true, there was only one outcome for Jazz. One possibility.

He had no way to get in touch with Jazz. He’d driven to the Hideout again only to find his friend gone. Gone where, he couldn’t say. Perhaps Jazz had finally wised up and decided to grow a beard, find a cabin in obscurest Alaska somewhere, and settle in for a nice, quiet life as a salmon fisherman. Who occasionally solved minor local crimes. That sounded like one of the ridiculous murder-mystery series Howie’s dad devoured, and it would be the best of all possible endings for Jazz.

But Howie knew his best friend too well. If Jazz wasn’t at the Hideout, he was off stalking Billy.

At least he took the rest of the food I brought. A growing boy fighting his insane father to the death has to keep the calorie count up there. Fighting to the death is sweaty work
.

So what to do when Jazz isn’t around and there is Jazz-worthy news to be told? The answer was startlingly obvious, even to the oblivious: Go to the girlfriend.

He called Connie on her cell, expecting to get her in New York, surprised when she told him she was back in the Nod.

“I’ve got something you should see, then. Can I come over?”

Connie opened her eyes to the sound of her cell phone demanding attention.
“Don’t go chasing—”
She grabbed it before it could go any further. She’d chased the waterfall and gotten battered for it.

“Hey, Connie.” Howie. Not Jazz. Had she really expected Jazz to call?

“Howie, have you—”

“Not on the phone.”

Under ordinary circumstances, she would have found Howie’s paranoia either adorable or annoying. But given the forces that had mobilized to look for Jazz, paranoia was probably the most meagerly acceptable level of caution. Billy could kill him. Sam could kill him. The police could shoot him “accidentally.” She knew all about the cops and their trigger fingers and their predilection for dealing with those who would attack their brethren. Her father had drummed such stories into her from a young age; more so into Whiz, who bore the burden of being a black boy about to grow into
a black teen.
If the police even look at you funny
, Dad had said,
you hit the ground and put your hands over your head. Don’t talk back. Don’t try to run. Don’t try to explain. They’re just looking for an excuse to shoot you. Don’t give it to them
.

The same would apply to Jazz, she knew, despite his white skin. He’d assaulted cops; bad enough. But he was also suspiciously tied to the death of an FBI agent, and that made Jazz the functional equivalent of a black teenager in a hoodie in a white neighborhood.

If—
when
—the police caught up to Jazz, there was not even the remotest possibility that Jazz would lie flat on the ground with his hands over his head. And the police would, without hesitation, kill him.

She turned her lips away from the phone, struggling with tears. Howie kept talking, and as she told him to come over, she plucked the picture of Jazz and her from last summer from the nightstand. It was the only comfort she had.

Soon Howie arrived. He almost hit his head on the doorframe coming into her room but ducked at the last possible second.

“Ninja reflexes!” he cackled, and Connie almost burst into tears of gratitude for the familiar comfort of his ironic, overstated confidence. She settled for struggling into a sitting position in bed and holding out her arms so that the big goof could hug her. Wanting to squeeze him hard, she instead
held him gingerly, nestling her cheek against his bony, sharp shoulder.

When Howie started crying, it was as though his tears gave hers permission to show up, and soon they were sobbing against each other in intermingled relief and fear, clutching at each other like safety bars on a roller coaster. Connie wept unselfconsciously, dampening Howie’s shirt, and his chin vibrated against her hair, but for the first time in her life, she just didn’t give a good goddamn about her hair. Let Howie irrigate it with his tears. She didn’t care.

Eventually, the tears subsided and she became aware that she was in a deep, desperate clinch with
Howie
, with no idea of how to break loose without hurting his feelings or actually causing him harm. Howie settled it for her when he whispered—in a voice still congested with the detritus of his crying—“I can totally feel your boobs against me.”

Oh, thank God. He was Howie again. And she was Connie again, and she released him, pushing him back gently. “Get your face out of my hair, Bleeding Boy.”

He grinned at her, and they were good.

“You’ve seen him?” Connie asked in a low voice, worried about her parents or Whiz overhearing.

Howie laid a too-long index finger over his lips and stood to close the door. Then he returned, slumping into her wheelchair. Despite the several feet of height difference and the too-white skin, he looked for all the world as Whiz had looked, helpless and forlorn and trying so hard to be a man. He nodded.

If she hadn’t been cried out after the jag in Howie’s arms,
Connie might have fired up the waterworks again. But she was dry and she focused.

“When?” she asked. “Where?”

Howie’s lips quirked to the left like they did when he was considering a lie. It made his face look like someone had smeared a finger over a still-wet painting.

“Howie. Tell me.”

“Not sure it matters. He isn’t where he was. I checked.” He leaned forward, spiky elbows on jutting knees. “It’s going down, Connie. I think it’s happening.”

He told her how Billy had called to leave Jazz a message—“And to talk about my dad’s golf swing; what
is
it with this guy?”—and how Jazz had disappeared after that. No matter how much she asked, he refused to play the message.

“I’m gonna have nightmares for the rest of my life and then in my next incarnation as the twenty-second century’s version of Hugh Hefner. No need to give them to you, too.”

“Hefner, eh?”

“Hey, after everything I’ve suffered in
this
life, I figure I’m due for a lifetime of endless sex. But check it—on orders from you know who, I scoped out Gramma’s house and found this.” He produced a torn-open envelope from his pocket and handed it over to her.

The letter within was handwritten and brief. Connie read it twice, furrowing her brow as she tried to coax additional meaning out of it. It seemed so simple.…

“I don’t get it,” she admitted.

“What if what it says is true?” Howie asked.

“Well, then…” She trailed off. She wasn’t making the connection. Damn painkillers.

“If the letter is legit,” Howie said, “then that means we were wrong. You. Me. Jazz. Wrong. We made an assumption, and if it’s wrong—”

“Oh, God!” Connie dropped the letter and clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh, God, Howie! Then—”

“We have to go to the police,” Howie said. “No more screwing around. We tell them everything, and if Jazz doesn’t like—”

A knock at the door. Her father poked his head in.

“Conscience,” he said gravely, “the police are here to see you.”