by Barry Lyga
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For Kathy. Finally.
Part One
3 Players, 2 Sides
CHAPTER 1
She had screamed, but she had not cried.
That’s what he would remember about this one, he thought. Not the color of her hair or her eyes. Not the tilt of her hips, the curve of her lips. None of those things. Not even her name.
She had screamed. Screamed to an uncaring, star-pocked sky. They all screamed. Everyone screamed.
But she had not cried.
Not that crying would have helped. He was going to kill her no matter what, so her behavior was moot. And yet it stuck with him: No tears. No weeping. Women always cried. It was their last, best weapon. It made boyfriends apologize and husbands fold them in their arms. It made Daddy spend the extra money on the prom dress.
She screamed. Her screaming was beautiful.
But, truth be told, he missed the crying.
Later, when he was finished, he looked down on her. The early morning—so early the sun had yet to rise—was warm and the air held the slight tang of motor oil. Now that she was silent and dead and still, he could no longer remember why he had killed her. For a brief moment, he wondered if that was strange, but dismissed the doubt immediately. She was one of what would be many. There had been others, and there would be more.
Kneeling next to her, he unsheathed a short, sharp knife. Ran his fingertips over her for a moment.
He decided on the left hip. He began to carve.
CHAPTER 2
The dying man’s name was…
Well, it didn’t matter. Not anymore. Not right now. Names were labels for things, the killer knew. Nouns. Person, place, thing, idea—just like you learned in school. See this thing I drink from? I give it the label of “cup,” and so what? See this thing I cover my body with? I give it the label of “shirt,” and so what? See this thing I have opened to the darkening sky, allowing beautiful moonlight to shine within? I give it the label of “Jerome Herrington,” and so what?
The killer stood and stretched, arching his back. Carrying the thing labeled Jerome Herrington up five flights of stairs hadn’t been easy; his muscles were sore. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to carry the thing labeled Jerome Herrington back down.
The thing’s head twisted left and right, the eyes staring straight ahead, unblinking. Unblinking because they had no choice—the killer had removed the eyelids first. Always first. Very important.
The killer crouched down near the thing’s head and whispered, “We’re very close now. Very close. I’ve opened your gut, and I have to say—you’re beautiful in the moonlight. So very beautiful.”
The thing labeled Jerome Herrington said nothing, which the killer found rude. And yet the killer was not angry. The killer knew what anger was, but had never experienced it. Anger was a waste of time and energy. Anger was useless. “Anger” was the label given to an emotion that accomplished nothing.
Maybe the thing labeled Jerome Herrington simply did not and could not appreciate its own beauty. The killer pondered a moment, then reached down and lifted a blood-slippery mass of intestines from the thing’s open cavity. Moonlight glinted on the shiny, gray-red loops.
The thing labeled Jerome Herrington groaned with deep and abiding agony. It raised its head, straining as though to escape, barely able to keep its head aloft.
The thing blubbered. Tears streamed down its cheeks and it tried to speak.
The killer beamed. The thing sounded happy. That was good.
“Almost done,” the killer promised, dropping the guts. At the same moment, the thing’s neck gave out and its head dropped. Kunk! went one. Splet! went the other.
The killer slid a small, sharp knife from his boot. “I think the forehead,” he said, and began to carve.
CHAPTER 3
Billy Dent stared in the mirror. He didn’t quite recognize himself, but that was nothing new. Billy had almost always seen a stranger in mirrors, ever since childhood. At first he had hated and feared the figure that seemed to pursue him everywhere, stalking him through mirrors and store windows. But eventually Billy came to understand that what he saw in the mirror was what other people saw when they looked at him.
Other people somehow did not see the real Billy. They saw something that looked like them. Something that looked human and mortal. Something that looked like a prospect.
From outside came the grinding, mechanical sound of a trash compactor. Billy parted the curtains and looked out. Three stories down, a trash truck was smashing recycled cans and bottles.
Billy grinned. “Oh, New York,” he whispered. “We’re gonna have so much fun.”
Part Two
4 Players, 3 Sides
CHAPTER 4
It was a cold, clear January day when they gathered to bury Jazz’s mother.
Bury was probably the wrong word; there was no body. Janice Dent had disappeared more than nine years ago, when Jazz was eight, and hadn’t been seen since. The world knew she was dead; the courts had declared her dead after the requisite seven-year waiting period. Jazz just hadn’t been able to bring himself to take the final step.
A funeral.
As the only child of the world’s most notorious serial killer, he’d grown up with an intimate understanding of the mechanisms and the causes of death. But, strangely enough, he’d never attended a funeral until now.
This was poetic justice, in a way: Many of his father’s victims had had funerals without bodies, too. They would have had more mourners, of course. For Janice Dent, wife of Billy, there were fewer than a dozen people. The press, fortunately, was held back at the cemetery gate.
No one would cry for Janice Dent. Not today. Her parents were long dead, and she’d been an only child. She had no friends left in Lobo’s Nod that Jazz knew of, at least no one who had come forth when the funeral had been announced. Jazz figured this was fitting; she had vanished alone, and now she would be buried alone.
Next to him, his girlfriend, Connie, squeezed his hand tightly. On the other side of him stood G. William Tanner, the sheriff of Lobo’s Nod and the man who had brought Billy Dent to justice more than four years ago. He was the closest thing Jazz had to a father figure, an irony that Billy would probably have laughed at. That was just Billy’s sense of humor.
“Dear Lord,” the priest said, “we ask that you continue to look over our beloved sister Janice in your kingdom. She has been gone from us for a while, O Lord, and we know you have watched over her in that time. Now we ask you to watch over us, as well, as we grieve for her.”
Jazz found himself in the strange position of wanting this to be over as quickly as possible, for the priest to wrap things up and let them all go. Ever since Lobo’s Nod’s assault by the Impressionist—a Billy Dent wannabe—and then Billy’s escape from prison into the wide world a couple of months ago, Jazz had felt a burning need to close off as much of his past as possible. He knew the future portended a brutal reckoning (Billy had been quiet, but that wouldn’t last), so he wanted his past put to rest. Finally acknowledging his mother’s death was the biggest step he’d taken so far.
Jazz hadn’t cared which faith buried his mother; Father McKane at the local church had been the most willing to perform the service, so Jazz had gone Catholic. Now, as the priest drone
d on and on, Jazz wondered if he should have held out for a less verbose brand of religion. He sighed and gripped Connie’s hand and stared straight ahead at the casket. It contained a bunch of brand-new stuffed animals, similar to the ones Jazz remembered his mother buying him as a child. It also contained a batch of lemon-frosted cupcakes Jazz had baked. That was his strongest memory of his mother—the lemon-frosted cupcakes she used to bake. He could have just had a service and a stone, but he’d wanted the whole experience, the totality of the funeral ritual. He wanted to witness the literal expression of burying his past.
Sentimental? Probably. And what of it? Bury it all. Bury the memories and the sentiment and move on.
Arrayed around the cemetery, he knew, were more than a dozen police officers and federal agents. Once the authorities had gotten wind of Jazz’s plan to hold a funeral service for his mother, they had insisted on staking it out, certain (or maybe just hopeful) that Billy wouldn’t be able to resist this opportunity to emerge from hiding. It was a waste of time, Jazz had told them, his insistence as useless as a sledgehammer against a tidal wave.
Billy would never reveal himself for something as prosaic and predictable as a funeral. He had occasionally attended the funerals of his victims, but that was before cable news had splashed his face on HD screens all around the world. “Butcher Billy” was too smart to show that famous face here, of all places.
“We’re going to make a go of it, anyway,” an FBI agent had told Jazz, who had shrugged and said, “You want to waste tax dollars, I guess that’s your prerogative.”
Finally the priest finished up. He asked if anyone would like to say anything at the grave, looking pointedly at Jazz. But Jazz had nothing to say. Nothing to say in public, at least. He’d come to terms with his mother’s death years ago. There was nothing left to say.
To his surprise, though, the priest nodded and pointed just over Jazz’s shoulder. Jazz and Connie both turned—he caught the shock of her expression, too—and watched as Howie Gersten, Jazz’s best friend, threaded carefully between G. William and Jazz, studiously avoiding meeting Jazz’s eyes. Dressed in a black suit with a somber olive tie, six foot seven at the age of seventeen, Howie looked like a white-boy version of the images Jazz had seen of Baron Samedi, the skeletal voodoo god of the dead. The suit jacket was slightly too short for Howie’s ridiculously long limbs, and a good two inches of white shirt cuff and pale wrist jutted out.
“My name is Howie Gersten,” Howie said once he’d gotten to the gravestone. Jazz almost burst out laughing. Everyone here knew who Howie was already. “I didn’t know Mrs. Dent. But I just really feel like when you bury someone, when you say good-bye, that someone should say something. And I figure that’s my job as Jazz’s best friend.” Howie cleared his throat and glanced at Jazz for the first time. “Don’t be pissed, dude,” he stage-whispered.
A ripple of laughter washed over the attendees. Connie shook her head. “That boy…”
“Anyway,” Howie went on, “here’s the thing: When I was a kid, I used to get pushed around a lot. I’m a hemophiliac, so I have to be careful all the time, and when you combine that with being a gangly string bean, it’s like you’re just asking for trouble, you know? And I wish I could tell you that Mrs. Dent was nice to me and used to say kind and encouraging things to me when I was going through all of that, but like I said, I didn’t know her. By the time I met Jazz, she was already, y’know, not around.
“But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. And I think it’s an obvious thing, but someone needs to say it. We all know that, uh, Jazz’s dad wasn’t, isn’t, exactly a great role model. But there I was one day when I was like ten or something and these kids were having a fine old time poking bruises into my arms. And Jazz came along. He was smaller than them and outnumbered, and let’s face it—I wasn’t going to be much help—”
Another ripple of laughter.
“But Jazz just waded into those douchebags—um, sorry, Father. He just waded into them and kicked their, um, rears, which I know isn’t terribly Christian or anything, but I’ll tell you, it looked pretty good from where I was standing. And I guess the thing is—the obvious thing that I mentioned before is—that I never met Mrs. Dent, but I know she must have been a good person because I’m pretty sure Billy Dent didn’t raise Jazz to rescue helpless hemophiliacs from bullies. And that’s all I have to say. I’ll miss you, Mrs. Dent, even though I never met you. I wish I had.” He started to walk back to the group of mourners, then stopped and said, “Um, God bless you and amen and stuff,” before hustling back to his spot.
And then they lowered the casket into the ground. The stone said JANICE DENT, MOTHER. No dates, because Jazz couldn’t be sure exactly when Billy had killed her.
He took the small spade from the priest and shoveled some dirt into the grave. It rattled.
G. William and Connie and Howie followed suit. Then they backed away so that the cemetery workers could do the real shoveling.
Jazz became aware that he was staring at the shovels as they heaved dirt on top of the casket that did not hold his mother’s body, snapping out of it only when Connie poked him to get his attention. She held a tissue out for him.
“What’s this for?” he asked, taking it automatically.
“Your eyes,” she said, and Jazz realized that—much to his surprise—he was crying.
CHAPTER 5
Jazz’s grandmother was waiting for him when he got home, sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, a blanket thrown over her legs. From all appearances, she looked like just another old lady enjoying a crisp day in January.
“They’re here,” she whispered to Jazz as he mounted the front steps. “They’ve come for your daddy.”
Jazz wasn’t sure who she meant when she said “your daddy.” Gramma was delusional enough that she sometimes thought Jazz was Billy, meaning that she could think “they” had come for Jazz’s long-dead grandfather. Or she could be lucid enough to think that the “they” in question—actually Deputy Michael Erickson, who had volunteered to keep an eye on Gramma during the funeral—were here for Billy himself. Which meant that Gramma’s thinking was roughly on par with the FBI’s these days. Jazz wasn’t sure if that was funny or sad.
He could see Erickson peering out at them from the corner of a window. Gramma had hated Mom, so there was no way in the world Jazz was going to have her at the funeral. And even if Gramma had loved Janice, when given the choice between inviting his black girlfriend or his insane, racist grandmother, Jazz would choose Connie every time.
“They sent spies,” Gramma went on, her voice a hush, “and they look like one man, but they can split into two, then four, and so on. I’ve seen it before. During the war. It’s a Communist trick and they taught it to the Democrats so that they could take our guns. I would have fought them off, but they already made the shotgun disappear.”
No, Jazz had made the shotgun disappear. It was Grampa’s old hunting piece, and Jazz had plugged both barrels and removed the firing pins so that Gramma couldn’t really hurt anyone with it. But when he was going to be gone for a long stretch—like today—he made sure to hide it from her. It was nice to know that she was blaming Washington politicians and not him.
Years of dealing with Gramma’s progressively deteriorating mental state had rendered Jazz pretty much impervious to shock. “So, there’s a commie spy in the house looking for Dad, huh?” he said. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself say. “Don’t worry. I’m gonna go in there and run him out. He won’t dare come back by the time I’m done with him.” He brandished the ceremonial spade the priest had given him at the end of the service as though it were a samurai sword.
Gramma’s eyes widened, and she clapped her hands. “Gut him!” she yelled. “Gut him like that raccoon you gutted on Fourth of July that one year!” And she made vicious stabbing and hacking motions as Jazz went inside.
“How’s it going?” he asked Erickson. “Other than the usual.”
Ericks
on shrugged. “She started bugging out about an hour ago. I just decided to go with it. As long as I could keep an eye on her from in here, I figured it was better just to let her sit outside.”
“Good call. She thinks you’re some kind of Communist clone, by the way.”
Erickson laughed. “That explains a lot.”
“Anyway, I’d consider it a big personal favor if you could sort of run like hell on your way out of here.”
“For you? Anything.”
Jazz felt a pang of guilt. Erickson was a good cop, relatively new to the tiny town of Lobo’s Nod, transferring in right as the Impressionist had begun his string of Billy Dent–inspired murders. To his eternal shame, Jazz had suspected Erickson in the crimes and hadn’t been shy about letting the sheriff know it. After that, he figured he was the one who owed Erickson, but the deputy didn’t see it that way. As far as Erickson was concerned, Jazz’s deducing and rescuing the Impressionist’s next victim made him a hero.
“Thanks again for watching her.”
“Take care of yourself, Jasper.” Erickson opened the door and then burst through as if chased by demons, screaming in a hilariously high voice all the way to his squad car.
Gramma minced into the house, peering around. “He didn’t leave any little baby spiders, did he? They’re tiny mind-controllers, and they crawl into your ears while you’re asleep and rewire your brain until you don’t know who you are anymore.”
Ah, so that’s what had happened to Gramma…. Jazz sighed. She was getting worse. He’d always known she was getting worse, but somehow he’d convinced himself that her madness was manageable and harmless. Once upon a time not long ago, a social worker named Melissa Hoover had moved heaven and earth to get Jazz removed from Gramma’s house to a foster home. Jazz had resisted, and then Billy—after his escape from prison—had killed Melissa before she could submit her report, putting an end to that particular problem.
