Bobbi May kept at it. “Jasper, you jerk! What is wrong with you?” He grinned and held the bottle up as if to nail her again. He was just daring her to give him any more backtalk. Her boyfriend had graduated from high school the year before, a kid who now worked in the gas station and spent his free time in tattoo parlors having all the Meme Melody characters squeezed into his flesh. Bobbi May had some shit scrawled around her wrist, something on her shoulder now too, it appeared, but Jazz didn’t get a close enough look. When she didn’t move fast enough he blasted her again until she ran away, pulling the kid with her, who looked warped on downers, probably Bobbi May’s Valium, and was easily led off.
Jazz grabbed an hors d’oeuvre off the tray of a passing steward, thinking, Poor serf, took a bite out of the smeared cracker, gagged on the slimy, lubricious taste of it, and started to chuckle. He’d seen this scene once in a flick, and it bit him funny. He looked around to see if there was a dog around that might take it off his hands. No such luck, so he hid the rest of the cracker in a napkin, crumpled it into a tight ball, and made a terrific hook shot back onto the butler’s tray as the servant bowed and spun from couple to couple.
Jazz slurped down his fourth scotch and soda, glanced across the dance floor, and saw that Mr. Spinelli was doing the Jitterbug with Florence Needlebaum, of all people; she had to be eighty years old and was dancing Spinelli’s ass into the ground. “Go, Flo!” he shouted. Spinelli undid his tie and unbuttoned his suit jacket, made eye contact with Jazz, and signaled him over. Oh no, hell no, forget that. Jazz lifted his seltzer bottle in a toast and turned, stalked past an enormous table covered with a magnificent layout of fruits and melting ice swans, and went to look for his friends.
His neighbors crushed against him as he made his way through the halls; it became weird, seeing them like this, people appearing to lose distinction as they wandered toward him en masse. Maybe the scotch was catching up to him a little. Some of the faces he knew but couldn’t quite recognize at the moment. Bemused and cocky, Frank Farlessi and his wife stepped in through the portico, and he saw they could look like any normal loving couple when they got out of the bedlam of the Krunch. It could happen. They strutted by without bothering to even look at him, though her hand sort of dragged by Jazz’s groin.
Jazz sighed, turned down another corridor, and thought he saw the gleam of Helen Bretnor’s auburn hair in the crowd, going by him at high speed.
Mattie had never come by for the suit he’d wanted, and Jazz wondered if that meant Mattie didn’t intend to show, that he couldn’t handle facing Helen again after stiffing her, along with the rest of them, five years before.
“Hey, Helen! Hey!”
He shouted her name again and made a move after her, but before he could take a full three steps he ran straight into Gigantor Davidson’s granite elbow. Jazz bounced into a breakfront and listened to all that highly expensive and easily shattered crystal clattering inside, thinking he’d wind up as Bosco Bob’s personal chauffeur for a year if anything broke.
All six feet nine of Gig looked down at him in slow motion.
Jeez, everybody had the good stuff, it was clear that the giant stood stoned, drunk, maybe just stupid, or any combination thereof. It was like watching a coked-up Tyrannosaurus rex. Mama. Gigantor took a deep breath, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and said, “Sawweee, Jazzpeerr.” Every syllable dragged out beyond it’s normal length. Gig dropped his head back, opened his cavernous mouth, and continued to simultaneously pour two half-filled bottles of Jack Daniel’s down his throat. A circle of his buddies clapped and hooted, urging him on. There were possibly three working brain cells left in that cranium.
Jazz bolted.
Helen had shifted into the throng, nowhere to be seen. A rush of something black passed in front of Jazz’s face, and he snatched another hors d’oeuvre from the same serf; this time he managed to finish the cracker, getting into the rich but slimy taste of it. It’s not too tough being wealthy. He opened a door at random and poked his head into a linen closet the size of his apartment, but with more shelf space. Flustered, he walked to a set of stairs right out of Gone with the Wind and made it to a different floor, a different wing. Space Quadrant 34E secure, Captain. All prepared for colonization. Christ, this place wanted to swallow you whole, you could feel it.
Kathy Marinello’s new hairdo made him stop short and do a double take, especially since it beat her into the hall by a good foot and a half. Corkscrew curls and dreadlocks and all kinds of dynamic waves and loops and ribbons snaked out from atop her head. He went, “Whoa, hey there now, this I might like …” She too was drunk, what else could you expect, and kept walking into the furniture, but didn’t spill a drop from either of the glasses of champagne she held. She smiled hideously, and Jazz trembled.
She giggled, hippity-hopped over to him, and cooed, “Hello, lover,” and started to say something else, maybe about that night when the Domino’s delivery guy found them in his truck, but she got her heel caught on the carpet and nearly fell. He reached out to steady her, but she took it as a come-on and tried to kiss him as she sprawled against his chest. He wound up with champagne fizzing all over the front of his twohundred-dollar blazer. He groaned and spritzed her big hair, and she screamed.
Direction grew meaningless in Bosco Bob’s mansion. You could walk for hours up and down these corridors and chandelier-lit stairways without ever getting to where you wanted to go—at least such was true in his case. Maybe Jello Joe and Jelly Jane knew the ins and outs, maybe they probably didn’t know them all. Although he’d made love to Jane several times in her bedroom, he had no idea how to get there from here. She’d sworn she had only one private bedroom, but he was pretty sure that someone this rich wouldn’t settle for that. What was the point? You’re going to have fifty rooms and only put your Barbie dolls in one? There still wasn’t enough space to fit all the clothes and shoes she owned.
Jelly Jane would prove difficult to miss amid this bog of milling bodies, but so far he hadn’t caught a glimpse of her, Joe, or their father. Big Bosco Bob was probably over there telling bad jokes and playing the piano, wherever the piano happened to be today. Jazz was in the ninety-nine to one hundred percent range of certainty that Jello Joe was at the moment making up with his girlfriend Jodi Carmichael in his bed on the fourth floor somewhere, the east wing — or the third floor, east wing? West wing? This is still North America, no?
“Where am I?” he yelled, getting dizzy, and for the first time not liking how it felt.
“Here!” someone hidden in the masses answered. A few others laughed.
“No shit, I think I knew that! Where’s here!”
“Here is here and nowhere else!”
“Fuck you!” Jazz shouted.
He cut down another corridor and thought he recognized some of the paintings on the walls. Was he anywhere near Jello Joe’s room? Maybe. It didn’t matter, he couldn’t disturb them anyway, it might imperil his record. So where was Jane? This became frustrating now, and the anxiety grew as the crowd pressed in on him even more. He yanked a couple of drinks off a passing pushcart, his hand forcing past all the other hands, Jesus, like there were wads of money falling off the thing.
It struck down on him like a mallet. He felt a sudden and urgent need to find a friend, one of the gang, all of them, in fact—he could feel the storm outside working its way in. It was important that they talk about … hell, what did they have to talk about? Well, everything, about how far the whole gang had drifted, and what that might mean, and where was Ruth. He needed them more now than ever before, and found no shame in the fact—damn, was he alone in that, too?
“I’m not that drunk,” he said. “I’m not.” I shouldn’t be babbling. Only they would be able to talk him through it, whatever it was. When was the last time any of them had really been here face-to-face, with meaning? He couldn’t remember, and hoped that it had happened at least once, at some point, and that he wasn’t just imagining it all.
“Jello
Joe!” he shouted. “Joey!” Others picked up on it, repeating his cry. “Jello Joe! Joey!” And farther on, like a wave at a baseball game going around the circuit, up to the cheap seats. “JelloJelloJellloooo!” Jazz sat in a chair cradling the seltzer, ran a hand over his face, and tried to shake away some of this goofy fugue.
When he looked up again Sheriff Hodges and Russell Stockton were standing in front of him totally drenched, their faces tight with fury and resentment.
“Oh damn,” Jazz said. “Are you going to beat me up?”
The sheriff stared down at him, and it was all there written into the corrugation of his face: weary, crimson-eyed, and indignant. Enough to make Jazz perk up even more in his seat, like a school kid being called on to solve nasty algebraic equations. Hodges always had a mad-on, it was part of the fucker’s charm, but tonight there was something different. A feral quality, definitive, and now devoid in the man.
Somebody shouted, “Happy New Year!” A party favor flew by, and a cork from a champagne bottle shot into the wall. No, Jazz thought, his stare locked with the sheriff’s. No way, you bastard, you are not going to force me to think about her. I am not going to ever talk or dream or think about what I saw this afternoon hanging from the station ceiling, thank you very much. Not now, not ever again. Hey, hey, you got a question? Go ask Mattie.
For all the mental bravado, his willpower couldn’t constrain the flow of images now, so young and pretty and cut up like that with her organs piled beneath her. Somebody really had a ball doing that.
Corded muscles of Hodges’s neck threatened to burst. “Metzner.”
Jazz stood quickly and bowed. “I live only to serve.”
“Where?” Hodges asked. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together like Doc Holiday warming up at the OK Corral.
“Where?” Jazz repeated. “Where what?”
“Where are they?” the sheriff said.
“Who they?”
“Them.”
“Them who?”
Hodges grabbed him by the lapels and lifted him up onto his tippy-toes. Stunned, Jazz couldn’t quite believe the amount of strength the man had, holding him like he weighed nothing.
“You know who!” Bloodshot glare burned up close, his wrinkled nose snarling and canines prepared to rip, ready to kill, lips skinned back. Jazz reacted the only way he knew how.
He spritzed the growling sheriff dead in the face with the seltzer.
Roaring, Hodges whirled like an enraged beast, as if he’d had acid thrown in his eyes. Russell just stood there completely dumbfounded for a second, scowling, now sneering, shaking his head, and his hand reaching for his cuffs.
Jazz fled down the corridor with the seltzer bottle held high before him like the winning football. He didn’t have any idea just which “they” Hodges might have been referring to, and, Heavens to Betsy, he didn’t ever want to know. There were too many theys and you-know-whos to worry about. How gauche for a cop to be so vague. He had to find his friends. I’m dead I’m dead.
They chased after him, the sheriff howling now and people laughing. The scene had to be pretty funny from the outside, but from here, from in here, Jazz knew the danger. He still remembered enough football plays to let him weave through the crowd. Notes from a piano fluttered off in a direction he couldn’t get a bead on. “Bosco Bob! Help!” There were no returning shouts of “I’ll save you” from any cavalry, and Jazz just knew he was going to wind up in a road gang chained between guys named Bubba and Maurice.
Russell yelled, “Stop!” Women screamed now, amid the giggles. Jazz scooted down another flight of stairs and then up another, sprinting crazily. He tried doorknobs, but the rooms were locked. Argh! They’re getting laid, and I’m going to be sent to the Okeefenokee. The crowd thinned down here, and he wasn’t sure if that was good or not. The more blockers the better. What did I do? I’m going to jail for the rest of my life, and all because that son of a bitch wanted me to think about that girl hanging like that …
“No,” he said. “Not now. Not ever.”
“Huh?” some girl asked.
“Shh, baby, it’s a dragnet. Say, you’re kind of cute.”
He ran down another hall and was about to clamber out a window, but at the last second something caught his attention and made him twirl and rush into an open room that seemed nebulously familiar. He shut the door behind him and leaned against it trying to barricade it with his own body. In the darkness he took in quick, short breaths, just waiting for the sheriff to shoot through the lock, come in, and shove a gun into Jazz’s eye for no reason. Sweat dripped down his back, soaking his shirt and pooling beneath his ponytail. He reached into his jacket for a cigarette, only to remember he’d smoked the last one; immediately the craving intensified. The things they’ll do to me in jail, he thought. I’ll have to give up my scrawny ass just to get a smoke.
Turning, Jazz saw something out of the corner of his eye flicker by him in the dim reflection of the moonlit mirror. The wind pounded against the window, chopping at the latch, and it appeared that the trellis had yanked loose from the side of the house, or that somebody climbed it at this very second. There was a slight tickle in his throat.
The latch didn’t give, but it certainly seemed to want to, as rain hammered the glass, panes quaking in their frames. He coughed into his fist but couldn’t clear his throat.
“Hey,” he said, and yet … no, wait, no, he hadn’t said that at all.
He fell back a half-step and faced the door, felt the light switch pressing against the side of his face. It seemed easier to hit it with his nose. A lamp went on across the room.
The seltzer bottle dropped from his fist and rolled away. He wondered how he’d protect himself now.
He was still hunched over and staring at the wall. Fatigue swamped him. He grew too tired to move and couldn’t help but think that if he passed out now, the scotch so good in his head, the sheriff really would kill him.
Gravity pulled. Heat filled his chest as though he’d just had another couple of shots, and he couldn’t figure out why it should be. He wanted a cigarette desperately.
The back of his neck itched. He couldn’t keep himself from spitting now, his mouth flooding, as if watering from the thought of the cigarette, the scotch, the seltzer, whatever. Disgusting, he knew, but he had no choice. He hacked against the wall, and something dark ran.
Blood?
That couldn’t be right. After a dazed moment he managed to drop his chin an inch to his chest and saw the blood gushing out onto the floor. Holy God, hey hey, holy God, my throat’s been cut, and I don’t even feel it.
Footsteps moved behind him in this moment of realization, but he was unable to turn his head, thinking that it would fall off. Delicately balanced, he stood with his brow resting on the wall in front of him, legs bent just so, useless arms dangling at his sides. He listened to the smooth slup slup slup of his life leaking away from him, painting the wall red.
In another three or four seconds he dropped over.
On his back now, Jazz stared at the ceiling, too weak to be frightened and almost thankful that the end hadn’t come from cancer, the way it did for most of his family. A hand and a blade moved into his line of sight. So there it was, the weapon of choice. No wonder it doesn’t hurt, that damn thing is honed fine.
This is just something else for me not to think about.
But he really couldn’t help himself when he saw who it was that had murdered him.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lines crossing, spheres converging.
Music rolled from the vestibule. Every window blazed with light, drunken shadows, candelabra, and slow dancers touching. Maniacal laughter merged with guffaws and fluttery giggles. Laughter and songs dripped into the storm, out past the floods of moonlight spreading over the washed-out gardens. Trees at the north ridge of the estate recoiled in the wind, leaves rushing across the great lawns as if filled with purpose. Statues of water nymphs remained poised and aware in the night, rain ru
nning from their mouths.
You there?
A presence drawn back and stopped in muddy tracks. A waxy hesitation, stoic and suspicious delay.
More silent than silence, there were words without voice. Yes, Matthew said. I’m taking the shortcut through Patterford’s backyard.
Coming to the party? Hell is already here. He seemed oddly jubilant, now that the endgame had finally started. You can feel it.
I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Wait for me. Don’t go inside on your own. And tell me more about Richie Hastings.
Vibes rang through the cochlea of the inner ear, a mental sigh, stifled chagrin, or an exhalation of remorse. I had no choice, the kid came onto the porch to collect for the goddamn gazette while I was using the bones to lock the caves up for good, and the Goat played into the irony, a paperboy meeting the paperboy, coming to collect. Get it? Some fun. Find the humor in it? Nothing to do, I had to connect the kid to me.
You could have let him go afterward.
I wasn’t sure of that. I’m not as adept as you, Mattie.
And you let them put you in Panecraft?
What difference did it make? Where else was I going to go? There’s nowhere to hide, you know that better than anyone, damn you.
I do. But you should have told me what you were doing.
No, I don’t trust you anymore. You’re going to miss all the fun.
A shudder passed through him. What can you see?
I’m in the grove freezing my ass off. Big Bosco Bob playing the piano, a lot of people having a good time. There are so many of them, Jesus God, the whole town’s been lured here. Jazz’s father the hippity-hop king is going loopy on the piazza. I can feel the charge of evil.
Running through the rain in the shadows, swinging through the yards again. Crappy wooden fence gave out under me. Gotta take a rest, can’t catch my breath.
You’re out of shape. I can hear the scars. You’ve got four of them now.
Branches overhead scraped together like the swords of children playing King Arthur. Who’s the enemy, A.G., do you know?
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