by Barry Lyga
CONTENTS
Title Page
Neutral Mask
About this Story
About the Author
Also by Barry Lyga
Back Matter/Credits
NEUTRAL MASK
an I Hunt Killers prequel
Barry Lyga
CONNIE DID HER BEST to conceal her emotions as she entered the house. She was a good actress, but it wasn’t easy. Fortunately, her younger brother was already in bed by the time she got home, and he was the one who could read her most easily.
Mom and Dad were still up, of course.
“You guys didn’t have to wait,” she told them.
Her father gestured at the TV. “Someone great is on Letterman.”
Right. Connie found it beyond suspicious that those few times she’d been out late on a date just so happened to match up with her dad suddenly needing to catch someone on some late-night talk show. She bit back the tempting urge to ask who, even though she was curious as to what Z-list celebrity her father would conjure up.
“Well, I’m going to bed,” she said lightly instead, waggling her fingers at her parents. “See you tomorrow.”
In the bathroom, she ran the tap, then positioned herself at the door, listening carefully. It took less than a minute before the TV’s burble of audience laughter snapped into silence. The low murmur of her parents’ conversation maundered past the bathroom. She caught “—home, at least, and—” from her mother, then an indecipherable Charlie Brown again until their bedroom door closed.
Predictable.
At the sink, she gathered water in her cupped hands and nearly had it to her face when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Pausing, she stared at herself, momentarily baffled by what she saw.
She looked exactly the same.
Somehow, she had expected to see something different in the mirror. An absurd notion, sure—to think that just kissing a boy would change her appearance —but it had lingered on the fringes of her conscious thought until just now regardless. Every time she’d kissed Jasper—no, wait, he wanted to be called “Jazz” now—she thought the act would transform her as much outside as inside.
She dumped the water and leaned in toward her flat doppelgänger. With one finger, she traced the outline of her lips.
I would kill for your lips.
Her lips should be different, shouldn’t they? After that first intense kiss out in the driveway (and thank God her dad hadn’t been peeking out the window right then, right?) and all the ones that had followed in the past couple of weeks, shouldn’t her lips be different? In the trashy romance novels she couldn’t stop herself from reading, the heroine always noticed her lips were swollen after such a kiss.
I would kill for your lips. They’re sooooo gorgeous.
Tracy. Or, depending on the time of year and her mood, Trécii. Connie’s best friend from when she’d lived in Charlotte. A walking blond cliché of Southern charm and long-lashed, early onset sex kitten.
I have to spend, like, a million years with that special lip balm and the cinnamon oil stuff, and I can’t get, like, half as awesome as your lips.
Connie pursed her lips at herself.
Your lips and your booty. I would kill, like, four or five people for them.
Of course. At first, Connie had been flattered by the girls who coveted her lips and her ass. But then it became so frequent a lament that all flattery drained from it and spiraled down some psychological sewage pipe. The white girls yearned for one another’s lashes and boobs and hair—hair, especially—and eyes and legs and nails and any number of anatomical permutations, but all they ever wanted from Connie were those lips, that “boo-tay.”
No one wanted her hair.
No one wanted her eyes.
She shook herself in the mirror. How had she managed to turn kissing Jazz—not her first kisser, but her very best, by a long shot—into this kind of self- recrimination?
After washing up, she made her way to bed, aware that her parents would have much more to say than who was on Letterman in the morning.
*****
SURE ENOUGH, SATURDAY MORNING at breakfast, her father cleared his throat with unnecessary force and said, “So, when are we going to hear about this young man who’s been keeping you out?”
“He didn’t ‘keep her out,’ Jerry,” Mom chided. “They were on a date. She was in before midnight, for God’s sake.”
“It’s been two weeks,” Dad said with almost preternatural calm. “I think we’re entitled to learn a few things at this point.”
“Connie’s always been responsible. She’s almost seventeen—”
“She’s still sixteen.”
“She’s right here,” Connie interrupted, waving a fork in the air as though signaling for a plane from a desert island, “and she can hear you.”
“Tell us about him. Is he black?” Dad asked.
Connie snorted. “Not a lot of options in that direction in this town.”
“You should—”
“You’re the one who moved us here,” she reminded him. “My dating pool selection is a function of your decisions.”
Her father gaped as her mother chuckled. “She has you there, sweetheart.”
“It’s not like we’re living in a fifties sitcom,” Dad grumbled. “You can find some appropriate boys to date here.”
Appropriate meaning black, Connie groused inside. Her father didn’t understand. He was too old-school. Yeah, his generation had come of age at a time when it was acceptable for interracial couples to mingle in public, but even that was just one generation removed from miscegenation laws and lynchings.
Connie, though, had grown up in a world of interracial couples on TV. In movies. On the sidewalks. And for the most part no one blinked, and those who did were pretty much universally seen as jackasses.
Which sort of made her dad a jackass, she realized, and immediately, abashed, scrutinized her huevos rancheros.
Jazz had told her that he would be busy all weekend with his grandmother. She was sick or something, Connie had inferred from Jazz’s demeanor when he spoke of the old woman. She was probably a real sweetheart. Connie thought that maybe she should bake something for her. People did that, right? Baked things for old people?
If she couldn’t see Jazz this weekend, she could at least do a little cyber stalking. That was harmless. After breakfast, she curled up with her laptop on the beanbag chair in the corner of her room. It was a relic of some long-past birthday and she was way too old for it, except that she wasn’t.
She couldn’t find Jazz on Facebook, even though she used every permutation of his name she could imagine. Twitter, similarly, came up empty. It was weird. She gnawed at a cuticle. He wasn’t even on Instagram, which...actually made sense when she thought about it. He hadn’t had a cell phone with him on their date. Even in Lobo’s Nod, everyone carried a cell.
Except for Jasper Dent.
Jasper Dent had no social networking footprint at all. It was like he was a teenager with the social skills of an eighty year old. Who wasn’t on Facebook? Who wasn’t on Twitter? Even if he never posted, he would have to be on just to keep up with friends, right?
Friends...
She remembered talking to Jazz on their second or third date. He wasn’t going by Jazz yet. And she had mentioned that ridiculous basketball-tall kid. “Why are you friends with that guy? He’s so creepy.”
Jazz had blinked at her in a way that was somehow reptilian. It caught her off guard. “Howie? Creepy?”
“He’s always staring at my boobs,” she said. “And he—”
She could go no further in her list of Howie’s sins because Jazz burst out laughing. It wasn’t an affected sort of laughter, a laugh designed to prove something about the laugher o
r the statement that preceded it. It was just an honest, balls-out eruption of disbelieving humor.
“Howie’s the creepy one,” Jazz said, relief and incredulity both skimming the surface of his voice. “Right. Look.” And here he took her hands, and she noted how cool and dry his were, and she found her breath suddenly deciding to hibernate somewhere north of her lungs and south of her mouth.
“Look,” he said. “Seriously. Howie is golden. Howie is like the moon, okay?”
“I don’t get it,” she managed, her breath returning in the nick of time.
“The moon wavers and the moon changes and the moon drives some people crazy, but the moon is always there. That’s Howie Gersten. He’ll drive you nuts, but he’s always there.”
“He’s your best friend.” Right. Noted. Connie was pretty sure she’d read an article on some website somewhere about not dissing your man’s bestie.
She had changed the subject quickly.
And now she thought: Howie Gersten.
Howie had a social networking profile. He was on Facebook. He was on Twitter. (His bio: “Raconteur. Stealth romantic. Ladies’ Man Supreme. It’s OK to want me so bad.”)
But nowhere in his list of followers or friends could she find a link to Jazz.
Other girls might have given up at this point. Other girls might have resigned themselves to the fact that Jazz just wasn’t an online kind of guy. But other girls weren’t as determined as Connie Hall.
Other girls, she admitted, probably didn’t have so much free time on a random Saturday, either.
She plugged Jasper Dent into Google, figuring that she would get nothing. After all, what were the odds of a kid without a Facebook profile doing anything Google-able—
A page of links came up. Connie tried to swallow, but her throat had clogged, had jammed up with something heavy and corrosive, something that blunted her breath and burned the back of her tongue. Something acid and primitive.
KILLER’S SON: JUST ANOTHER VICTIM? read the first link. An article by a man named Doug Weathers.
A photo. A boy. Definitely Jazz, though younger.
And beneath, a caption. Two names. She knew both of them.
JASPER DENT, SON OF WILLIAM CORNELIUS DENT, SEEN HERE IN A SCHOOL YEARBOOK PHOTO.
Why didn’t...why didn’t anyone tell me? Why didn’t anyone—
Because you never asked, Connie. Because you never told anyone you were seeing him. You were being careful. You were...
She closed the laptop and huffed in air through her nose. She forced herself to take a deep, cleansing yoga breath to crush and dissolve and gag down that ball of torment stuck in her gullet.
Billy Dent. She knew the name. Everyone knew the name. But Dent was such a bland last name that she’d never...
Oh, God, she thought.
*****
CONNIE READ EVERYTHING SHE could. She read for hours.
Her mother came by at one point, leaning in the door that way she did, as if not wanting to place a foot in her daughter’s space without permission, and asked if Connie wanted lunch. With one hand scrolling the laptop’s track pad, Connie waved her off with the other, far more dismissive and disrespectful than she normally would have been.
But Mom was part of some other world, and Connie was currently orbiting a whole different planet.
The planet of Billy Dent.
It had only been a few years since Billy Dent’s arrest, but those years to a sixteen year old might as well have been decades. There are eons between thirteen and sixteen. Millennia. The Halls had been living in Charlotte. Billy Dent’s arrest in Lobo’s Nod—a town that might as well announce “The Middle of Nowhere’s bedroom community” on its welcome sign—had not made enough of an impression at that age for her to remember the town, the state. She’d been latched onto her budding interests in yoga and acting. She’d been discovering boys, and they’d been discovering her.
A madman in the middle of the country held no interest to her.
And now she was dating his son.
“Is he black?” her father had asked, and Connie began giggling, snickering as if it could ward off disease or death or even—let’s say— a crazy serial killer.
Not only is he white, Dad, she could picture herself saying, but you know that guy they call “Butcher Billy” on TV? Guess what?
On YouTube, there was a clip of Billy Dent coming down the steps of a courthouse with his lawyer. He wore a gray pin-striped suit with a black-and-pale-blue rep tie. And holy God above, it was Jazz. Only older. The hair lighter, sun-kissed, and she instantly chided herself for adjoining such a bucolic adjective to Billy Dent.
She played the video. Billy spoke only once, as a reporter shoved a mic at him and said something unintelligible that sounded like “What are your regrets?”
Billy grinned, and Connie had seen that grin, had kissed the lips that made it. “Once this is all done and I’m a free man,” Billy drawled, “we can talk about that.”
His voice. God. His voice was just like—
She slammed the laptop shut, too hard, not caring.
Oh, Jazz. Oh, what the hell have I gotten into?
*****
THAT NIGHT, SHE DREAMED that Jazz came in through her window, handcuffing her to the bedpost before she was even entirely awake. She screamed for her parents, but Jazz just shrugged, and then there was somehow Billy, too, and Billy dumped a trash bag’s contents on the floor—her parents’ heads. Her brother’s.
“Two is better’n one,” Billy said offhandedly. Jazz nodded and, with a large, wicked knife, cut Connie’s oversized T-shirt—the one she’d snaked from her Dad’s dresser years ago, with his college crest over the left breast—from her body and leaned in, and she woke up, and everything was fine, of course. Everything was normal.
It was his father, she reminded herself, yoga breathing to bring her heartbeat —which had decided to Sousa march—back into line. You don’t inherit crazy.
That thought, plus the yoga, guided her back to sleep.
*****
MONDAY AT SCHOOL, SHE rushed through her normal locker routine—bio, English, trig books into the backpack, lip gloss check in the mirror—and made it to homeroom with plenty of time to spare. Van—Vanessa McCurdy, one of her new friends here in the Nod—was lazily sketching what looked like an astronaut in her notebook when Connie sidled up to her and said, “I need to talk.”
Van shrugged and popped her gum. “Now?”
“Before first period.”
“Def.”
Right after the first bell, they ducked into the girls’ bathroom and jammed into a stall at the far end. “What’s so urge?” Van asked. She was incapable of using more syllables than strictly necessary.
Connie hesitated. She hadn’t told any of her new friends that she had gone on a few dates with Jazz. First of all, it hadn’t seemed like anyone’s business. Second of all, she knew how territorial girls could be—lions on the Serengeti seemed more likely to share a patch of veldt sometimes—and she had no desire to be “the new black girl” and “the girl who stole the guy someone else was secretly into.” Lastly, she was “the new girl,” and she didn’t know the prestige (or lack thereof) of Jazz’s particular block on the flowchart of the Lobo’s Nod High School social scene. She thought he was cute. She didn’t want to prejudge him based on high school gossip before she got to know him.
Well, she knew him now. Never in her life had she felt such an immediate connection to someone. And never before in her life had she felt such an equally immediate need to know more about someone.
“Do you know Jasper Dent?” she asked.
Van’s eyes went so wide that Connie could see the curve of the orbs sinking back into the sockets.
“What about him?”
“I—” Connie paused. Had someone just come into the bathroom? She and Van held their breath and stared at each other through the silence until convinced they were still alone.
“Remember how I told you I went on a couple o
f dates with a—”
“Jasper Dent?” said Van, sounding like a woman who’d just gagged down a bowl of toddler stew. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“He’s the one—”
“I know. That’s his father, though.”
“You don’t get it, Connie. You’re new to town. We grew up with him.”
“So what?”
“He was normal. He seemed normal. But the whole time, his dad was killing people and stuff, and he was teaching Jasper all about it.”
“We don’t know that,” Connie said with a confidence she neither deserved nor trusted.
“He taught him,” Van shot back just as confidently, though Connie suspected Van’s confidence—deserved or not—was backed up by something more than Connie’s own. “But here’s the thing. Here it is. Look, the whole time his dad was murdering peeps, Jasper seemed normal.”
“You already said—”
“He acted normal. Like nothing was weird at home. Like everything was cool. Get it? His dad was a psycho freakazoid, and Jasper just came to school every day and acted like everything was normal. No one ever knew.” She shook her head. “Acting normal when that kinda shizz is going down at home? When your dad killed your mom? That’s not normal, Connie.”
The bell rang. Van swore briefly and stumbled out of the stall.
Connie sank onto the commode. She would be written up for being late to her first class, but right now she didn’t care. She had to think.
*****
AFTER SCHOOL, CONNIE CAUGHT up to Jazz in the parking lot, near his battered old Jeep. Howie was with him. Of course. Where goeth the Lone Ranger, so too goeth Tonto. Sherlock needs his Watson. Batman needs his Robin. And on and on.
She was wearing a modestly cut shirt with a cardigan to cover up, but even with the sweater, there was a little more cleavage than was probably prudent around a horn dog like Howie.
Connie frowned. “Hey, Howie, my eyes are up here, buddy.”
Howie recoiled, as though bitten. “I know that! But your boobs are down here,” he said helpfully, “so that’s why I was looking there.”
Connie gave up. Howie, she had to keep reminding herself, was completely harmless. Male or not, bigger or not, stronger or not, he was still a hemophiliac. He could be stopped with a strong hit to the head. If she raked her fingernails down his neck, he’d probably bleed out.
