Blood of My Blood (4 page)

Jazz hadn’t even realized he’d passed out again until the sensation of something crawling on his leg woke him with a panicked, heart-choking jolt. Without thinking, he slapped at whatever it was, bringing the heel of his palm down—hard—on the makeshift bandage he’d wrapped around the bullet wound. For a moment, the pain was so huge and broad and blinding that he froze, mouth agape, utterly silent, unable to move even his lips for the shock of it.

But in the next instant, he screamed—once, short. He had nothing else in him. No fuel for a further bellow of pain. He whimpered instead, desperate to cradle his leg in both hands, terrified to do so. The space around the entry wound felt swollen and ripe, the bandage tighter than it had been. Tears spilled down his cheeks.

It wasn’t some rodent or insect on his leg as he’d feared. And he dearly wished it was as simple and as easy to deal with as a stray roach or rat.

No, it was blood. His own blood, of course. The wound
was bleeding again. Or still. Maybe it had never stopped in the first place. He didn’t know.

He flipped open Dog’s cell and shined it on his bare leg. A trickle of blood wended its way down to his knee. That’s what he’d felt in his sleep.

Damn it. Damn it. Damn. It
.

He didn’t know what else to do. The thought of trying to dig in there for the bullet again made him swoon. Could he rewrap the wound? Even tighter? Apply a tourniquet?

You put a tourniquet on there and you’ll end up losing the leg
.

Ah, but if you don’t, you’ll end up losing, period
.

He picked at the edge of the duct tape with which he’d circled his thigh. As he peeled it away, it pulled on the hair on his legs, but that pain was nothing compared with when he had to tear the makeshift bandage—his shirt sleeve—away from the open wound itself. He bit down on the same shoe tongue he’d bit down on when getting his pants off.

Felt like years ago, he’d done that. Years. It had been hours, maybe. He no longer bothered to check the time on either of the cell phones. Pointless.

Sure enough, fresh blood was oozing out of the wound. He’d somehow pulled the wound open further.

“Somehow?” With all the thrashing around I’ve been doing, I’m surprised the whole damn leg didn’t fall off
.

He flashed on a brief tableau of himself without that leg, crutching along a sidewalk somewhere. Or limping the hallways of Lobo’s Nod High on a blade, more of a freak than ever. At least the outside would match the inside.

He had to stop the bleeding. But he had no idea how to do it, other than a tourniquet up high on his leg. Right up around the groin, really. He’d lose everything from an inch or two below the hip all the way down to his toes.

Was this really a debate to be having? Didn’t staying alive matter more than anything else?

He felt around for his pants in the dark. His fingers glided along something thin and sharp. The butcher knife. The one Dog had had in his laptop bag. Jazz had forgotten that he’d snagged it and kept it nearby. Just in case Hat came back. He laughed at himself. The very idea… What would he do if that door slid up and Duncan Hershey wandered in? Gesture threateningly from the floor before Hat put a bullet between his eyes?

And you told the cops Hershey wasn’t the guy. Soooo confident, weren’t you? He’s not the guy, you said. It’s not him, you said. Moron. How’s that working out for you now?

Skipping the knife, he slapped his hand in the dark until he found his pants. Dragging them over to him, he lay on his back, the pants piled on his chest as he threaded his belt out from the loops. It would suffice as a tourniquet.

Wait. Wait. Do I need to do this? Dummy
…

With his elbows and his one good leg, he managed to drag himself across the storage unit until he bumped against the body of Oliver Belsamo, the deceased half of the Hat-Dog Killer. Good. He’d left Belsamo’s body near one of the workbenches.

Gritting his teeth against the strain and the pain, Jazz used his hands to lift his shot leg as high as he could, then—gently—lowered it until he felt the solid wood of the workbench at his
heel. He ended up with his leg high in the air, stuck at a nearly right angle from his body. For comfort’s sake, he had no choice but to lean back, resting his head against Dog’s corpse.

He’d done this before, propping the leg on Belsamo himself. Maybe if he could keep the leg elevated higher this time… That might stop the blood loss enough to keep from needing a tourniquet. He would try it, at least. Give it a little while. See what happened.

He took a deep breath and let it out. It felt like the first real, clean breath he’d had since being shot.

He settled back against Dog. Until rigor set in, Belsamo would make a decent enough pillow.

And that’s how Billy found him.

Jazz refused to allow himself to drift into unconsciousness or sleep (he wasn’t sure which) again, so he was alert and did not miss the unmistakable sound of a key turning in the padlock that held the door to unit 83F shut.

Hat. Hat was back. To finish the job.

Jazz rolled partly onto his right side, trying to keep his leg elevated. The awkward movement twisted his left leg a bit, and a new pulse of pain lanced up and down that side of his body, but it wasn’t as bad as it would have been if he’d dragged it across the floor. The elevation was already numbing the leg.

He heard a slight grunt, and then the door to the unit clanked and rolled up to the ceiling. Jazz’s eyes recoiled at
the sudden bright light that spilled in, and he shaded them with a cupped hand, peering into the light, his mind racing. Unless Hat shot him immediately, Jazz figured he had a chance to talk the killer closer to him.… He cast about blindly for the butcher knife. If he could get Hat close enough, he could jam the butcher knife right into that bastard’s heart.

Ain’t I taught you nothin’, Jasper?
Billy’s voice whispered.
Heart’s protected by ribs and the sternum. Especially in your weakened condition, better to go for the carotid or the jugular. Or, if you can’t reach that, go for the femoral artery
.

Right. Of course. More fatherly wisdom from Dear Old Dad.

“Numb, stupid, self-absorbed prick don’t even bother to drag the body in!” the figure silhouetted against the hallway light said, and Jazz blinked rapidly, his quest for the knife forgotten. He was astonished that he wasn’t just hearing Billy’s voice in his head anymore—he was now imagining that Hat sounded like his father, too.

He shook his head, and his eyes adjusted to the light, and
Oh my God. I’m not hearing things after all
.

Billy tsked and kicked lazily at Morales’s body. A whispering sound came from her, and anyone other than Billy or Jazz might have thought—miracle of miracles!—she was still alive, but both Dents knew that sometimes gases built up in corpses are released when the body is moved or further damaged. Morales’s dead sigh was nothing more than that. Her last breath, perhaps, drawn in and never exhaled until now.

With a swift and sure stride, Billy crossed from the entrance to where Jazz had propped his leg up. Billy had disguised himself—new hair color and length, facial hair, things like that—but no mask could hide Jazz’s father from him. Even if he hadn’t heard the voice, he would have recognized the walk; the way the lips moved; those cold, dead blue eyes.

His father inhaled deeply and chuckled. “Ah, smell it! Preservative and rigor mortis! My two favorite smells.”

Billy held a leather satchel in one hand and placed it on the workbench. “Oh, Jasper,” he said, his voice strangled. “Oh, what have you done? What did you let him do to you?”

“Didn’t have a choice,” Jazz whispered. His voice, raw from screaming, was nearly useless.

“Always a choice,” Billy reprimanded. “We’re masters of our own destinies.” He crouched down by Jazz, his cool blue eyes scanning up and down Jazz’s body. Jazz shivered; he hadn’t been this close to Billy in years. They’d been separated by a table at Wammaket State Penitentiary. Now it was just inches. And there were no shackles. No guards.

Billy craned his neck to peer closely at the bullet wound and its attendant lateral cut. “You’ve butchered yourself, boy. Didn’t you learn nothin’ from listening to Dear Old Dad?”

“I…” Jazz stopped. He was exhausted. Too tired to speak, much less to engage in the psychological thrust and parry of a conversation with Billy Dent.

Billy took a moment to drag Morales into the unit—
unit 83F!
Jazz thought deliriously.
Population fifty-fifty, dead to alive!
—and then closed the door again, plunging them back
into darkness until he produced a powerful lantern from the leather satchel. The unit lit up; shadows leapt and pranced along the walls. Jazz went dizzy. Again. Stared off into the dark.

“That’s right. Nothin’ worth seein’.”

Clucking his tongue, Billy—with a gentleness that would have surprised anyone but Jazz, who now, quite involuntarily, experienced a sudden memory of his father tucking him into bed one night—took hold of Jazz’s left ankle. Supporting Jazz’s leg under the knee as well, he slowly rotated the leg down and settled Jazz’s heel on Billy’s own thigh, keeping it elevated a bit.

“You go after that bullet? That what you did? Damn, boy. You got guts, that’s for sure. Could have made it worse.”

“Cleaned it,” Jazz whispered. “Bleach.”

Billy sighed expansively. “Just when you had me all impressed… Bleach don’t clean out infection. Waste of time.”

Whistling a tuneless little ditty that Jazz didn’t recognize, Billy pawed around in the satchel and began laying out instruments. Jazz couldn’t stand to look at them.

“This Morales…” Billy mused, as if chatting about the weather over tea and cake. “She wanted me dead, didn’t she? Tracked me halfway across Kansas and through part of Oklahoma, back in the day.”

“Hand-in-Glove.”

“Yep. She came close, too. Real close. But I was closer. Walked right past her in a 7-Eleven outside Wichita. Tipped my hat to her and held the door, all gentlemanlike.”

Well, that was mighty nice of you
, Jazz thought, but did not have the energy to say.

“She was…” Billy shivered with a tiny frisson of delight. “I can’t tell you how much I had to fight myself not to take her, Jasper. Good thing I’m a man of strong will and good character.”

The instruments clinked. Billy was organizing things, humming under his breath now. Jazz wet his lips and took a deep breath.

“Who did you make me cut?” he whispered.

Billy leaned in close. “What? Can’t hear you.”

Jazz licked his lips again. “Who. Did you. Make me. Cut?”

Billy’s expression went blank.

“Don’t pull that on me,” Jazz told him. “When I was a kid. I have memories of it. Of you telling me to cut someone. And I did it, didn’t I? Which of your victims was it? Which one?”

“Never made you do nothin’,” Billy said. “Now, did I—let’s see—
guide
you in the proper technique, once you started the cuttin’? I surely did. I care, see? But I never suggested it. Never put that knife in your hand.”

“I wouldn’t have done it without—”

“Hush, boy. Dear Old Dad’s gotta think.”

Despite himself, Jazz went quiet. Right now, his only hope for surviving was Billy. Strangely enough—or maybe not so strangely—Jazz felt safe. Secure. He knew that Billy wouldn’t hurt him, knew that Billy would do everything in his power to keep him alive.

Just like any other father. God, that’s bizarre
.

Billy probed the wound with a clinical air that did nothing to blunt the pain his touch caused. Jazz tried holding his
breath against it, but he had to exhale eventually. With the exhalation came fiery threads crawling up his leg.

He craned his neck. “Holy shit, Billy—”

Billy slapped him once across the face. “Language, boy!”

His father returned to examining the wound, separating the edges with a hemostat. Jazz watched in sick fascination as his thigh opened. Blood welled up.

“Nothing major hit. Lotta little bleeders in there, though. Hell.” Billy grabbed one of the plastic jugs of water from the storage unit and splashed some water on Jazz’s leg. The blood cleared away, and he pried open the hole a bit more. If not for the look of studied concentration on Billy’s face, Jazz might have thought his father was enjoying this.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“Hush. Daddy’s thinkin’.”

More blood welled up, obscuring the wound again.

“No way to get to that bullet,” Billy announced. “Not with what we got here. Not without a proper irrigation setup and more clamps than I got in that kit and maybe some extra hands.”

Great
.

“Just gonna have to sew you up. Stop the bleeding.”

“Leave the bullet
in
?”

“Don’t go panicking,” Billy said. “I’m gonna sew you up good and tight. That bullet ain’t gonna do any more harm just sittin’ there.” He rummaged in his bag and came up with a curved needle trailing thin blue filament, which he held using something that looked like a pair of blunt-nosed scissors. With the water bottle, he cleaned the wound again.