by Barry Lyga
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.
“Why didn’t you teach me this?” Jazz managed to ask. “Something useful?”
“Never had the chance,” Billy said with real regret. “I was planning on starting this stuff soon, but then I got taken away from you.” He paused for a moment. “This is probably gonna hurt like hell, by the by.”
And then, without another word, he drove the hooked needle into Jazz’s thigh. Earlier, Jazz’d imagined the pain as fiery threads; now he saw just how impoverished his imagination had been. This was fire. This was white-hot cables of sheer agony unspooling from the wound site, racing up and down his leg, filling even his lungs with pain.
Billy flipped his wrist, spinning the hook under the skin, popping it out on the other side of the cut. Jazz screamed.
Hardly taking his eyes off the suturing before him, Billy used his free hand to find and then shove Jazz’s belt at him. Jazz took it and stuck it between his teeth, biting down in groaning torment. Against his own will, he sat up partially and thrashed, trying to escape the awful bite of Billy’s needle, but his father simply sat on Jazz’s lower leg, holding him in place.
“Rest your damn head on the floor!” Billy snapped. “If you pass out, I don’t want you splittin’ your skull open. I ain’t got the equipment for that.”
Somehow, through the endless stabbing at and in his thigh, he understood and managed to lie back.
“It’s for your own good,” Billy said with casual kindness as he executed the sutures quickly, with no regard for the pain. He made six individual sutures, each one knotted neatly and precisely, the knots pulled to one side. “So it won’t irritate the injury,” Billy explained.
When it was over, Jazz lay exhausted on the floor, his forehead shiny with sweat, his body soaked in it. He was wrung out, spent, drained even of thought.
“That’ll hold you, keep the blood loss down,” Billy said. “I used a simple interrupted suture. There’s gonna be infection, so this way they can just pop one of ’em to drain it. Soon as I’m clear of this place and somewhere safe, I’m calling an ambulance for you, boy.”
“Look who’s bucking for Father o
f the Year,” Jazz whispered.
Billy chuckled. “You know what most parents don’t get, Jasper?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Most parents, they’re all—what do you call it—narcissists. Is that the right word? I think it is. Parents get all focused on themselves, and then they see their little babies start walkin’ and talkin’, and since they kinda look like them and sound like them, they start thinkin’ of those little babies as extensions of themselves. And so they do everything in the world for them, Jasper. Everything.” Here, Billy rocked back on his heels, pensive. “And then somethin’ funny happens. Those babies grow up to be kids and teenagers and grown-ups in their own right. And they stop bein’ little extensions of the parents, but the parents can’t let go of that. They can’t deal with it, because it’s like a part of their body—like a leg or an arm—just up and decided to act on its own. So everything the kids do, everything, is a betrayal. It’s a mark of ingratitude, Jasper. That’s how those parents see it.”
Billy began wrapping a clean bandage around Jazz’s leg.
“But not Dear Old Dad, Jasper. No way, no how. I ain’t like that. Father of the Year? Maybe not. But a damn sight better than most.”
“You’re crazier than the shrinks say if you believe that crap,” Jazz managed. “You’ve spent your whole life trying to turn me into you.”
Billy pursed his lips and regarded Jazz with a look that was pure wounded puppy. Jazz wouldn’t countenance it; sociopaths didn’t have real emotions.
Still. If anyone could hurt Billy, it would be his son, right?
“Now, that hurts, Jasper. It hurts like, well, like a bullet. Truly. I ain’t never treated you as nothin’ but your own person. Never made you do anything you didn’t want to do. Let you find your own path. Didn’t tell you who to kill or how or why or when. Left that up to you. Even now, you see me takin’ advantage of your situation to make you do anything you don’t want to do?” He shrugged. “I just want you to be true to yourself, boy. Be who you’re destined to be.”
“I know Mom’s alive,” Jazz said, struggling into a sitting position. Maybe it was just psychological, but with the sewing of his wound and the stanching of the bleeding, he felt a little stronger. Probably all in his head.
Billy nodded distractedly as he wound the bandage. Every time he lifted Jazz’s leg to get under it, a little burst of pain raced up Jazz’s left side.
“Nothing to say about that?” Jazz asked.
“What’s there to say?”
“What are you going to do to her? Now that you’ve found her?”
Billy shrugged. “I guess that’ll be up to her.”
Jazz lay back down again. Billy would happily talk all day without actually saying anything. He tried another tack:
“What’s the deal with the Crows, Billy?”
“The Crows? Same as the deal’s always been, I suspect.”
“Don’t play me for a fool. There’s something, isn’t there? I always knew you had fans out there, but I didn’t think they would actually kill for you. Is that what your idiot followers call themselves? Crows? Because of that fairy tale you told me as a kid?”
Billy frowned. “Weren’t no fairy tale, Jasper. It was allegory, you see? And the Crows ain’t followin’ me; they’re followin’ a dream. Pursuin’ it, you might say. Tell you what: Next time we meet face-to-face like this, when I ain’t all concerned about some bastard cop wanderin’ in on us, I’ll sit you down and tell you all about the Crows. Deal?”
“I expect nothing less from the Crow King.”
Billy chortled. “The Crow King? Me?”
“New name for yourself, right? Green Jack, Hand-in-Glove, the Artist, Satan’s Eye. And now, the Crow King.”
Billy didn’t so much smile as he seemed to suffer some kind of lip spasm. The delight crossed his face so quickly that it was gone in the same instant that Jazz noticed it.
“You flatter me, boy.”
“Will you give a straight answer? Just once in your life?”
Billy sighed and sat back, eyes lifted to the ceiling as though thinking, Lord, give me strength. It was a pose and an expression familiar to any parent of a teenager, and seeing it on Billy Dent’s face was one more reminder of how good a job Billy did blending in with human beings.
“Ain’t got too much time, Jasper. Can’t really spend it chitchatting with you about your mom and the Crows and whatever else pops into your head.”
“Are you trying to convince me that you’re not the Crow King?”
“I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m not the Crow King, and that’s the plain truth. Whether you believe it is up to you.” He started packing his satchel.
“I—”
“Here’s the thing, Jasper.” Billy leaned in close, his eyes shining. “Here’s the thing: Once upon a time, we were all kings. You understand? Once upon a time, the commoners were there for us, for our pleasure.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll be happy to explain it to you when the time comes. When we ain’t in such… constrained circumstances. In the meantime, think about, oh, let’s say Caligula. Think about Gilles de Rais. You know more than you think. You’ve got the beginnings of it, boy. Told you as much back at Wammaket. Told you where it started. The genesis of it. ‘And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord.’ ”
Jazz’s head spun. Billy hadn’t said anything at all about the Crows at Wammaket.
Before he could say anything, though, Billy finished packing up his things. He left out the lantern.
“Now, here. Take this.” He held out two pills: one pink, one white.
“What is it? Are they, I mean.”
“A little painkiller and something to knock down the fever you’re buildin’. Nothing too strong. Want you awake enough to tell the EMTs what happened to you when they get here.”
Reluctantly, Jazz took the pills from Billy’s outstretched hand. As he did so, he noticed something on his father’s wrist. Like a bracelet, almost, but tied, like one of those braided—
Wait.
There was a bead at one end of it. A shiny red bead. Just like the beads—
“That’s Connie’s,” he whispered, staring at it. He knew it. Knew that braid.
Sick terror and rage swelled in his gut. He choked back the urge to vomit.
“That’s from Connie,” he said, finally tearing his gaze away from Billy’s wrist and looking up at Billy’s face.
In the bright white light of the lantern, Billy’s eyes danced merrily.
“Was wonderin’ how long it’d be before you noticed.”
From Connie. It was from Connie. It was her hair. Billy had been knife-close to her and oh my God oh my God.
With a choking cry, Jazz rolled onto his side, ignoring the flare from his thigh, and reached out for Billy’s throat with both hands. Billy nimbly fell back just far enough to avoid Jazz’s grasp.
“What have you done?” Jazz demanded. “Tell me what you did!”
“Is this the part where you threaten me? Where you tell me I better not touch a hair on her head?” He held up his wrist, Connie’s braid loosely draped around it. “Oops.”
“I’ll kill you,” Jazz told him through clenched teeth. He clawed at the concrete floor, and if rage meant strength, he would have torn great gray chunks from it. “If she’s hurt, I will kill you.”
“Well now, like I said last time we talked: You go on and do that.”
Billy picked up his satchel and then snagged a knife from Dog’s workbench. He tossed the knife on the floor near Jazz, who immediately snatched it up and lunged for his father’s leg.
Billy laughed and took a step back, then another, letting Jazz get a little closer, then evading him easily as Jazz flopped and struggled to move close enough to cut him. They played their father-and-son, cat-and-mouse game for as long as it took for Billy to back to the door.
Jazz lay in an exhausted pool of sweat as Billy raised the door and stepped int
o the corridor.
“Thing I can’t decide,” Billy said pensively, “is whether I’m gonna kill her or I’m gonna watch you kill her. Can’t make up my mind about that one.”
“You’re a dead man!” Jazz thrashed on the floor, helpless and enraged and too full of anger to do anything but scream. “I will make you feel every last thing you do to her! I will rip your body to shreds and feed you to the rats! Do you hear me?”
“Of course I hear you,” Billy said quietly, and lowered the door.
“I! Will! Kill! You!” Jazz raged with the last of his energy, and collapsed in a heap.
CHAPTER 7
Connie averted her eyes immediately after flipping the light switch, but she needn’t have bothered; the overhead light was weak, forty watts at best, and even her dark-adjusted eyes could handle it.
She had managed to serpentine her way over to the bed, where her fellow captive had—after many failed attempts—untied one hand. Then, using her free arm to pull herself along and with the guidance of the other prisoner, she’d gotten to the proper wall, braced herself, levered herself upright, and found the light switch, nestled in a cutout rectangle of the soundproofing material.
There had been many—many—failed attempts there, too. Connie’s entire body ached and throbbed with her efforts. But at least now there was light.
She wondered if the light was visible under the doorway from the other room. Connie tried not to envision what Billy would do if he walked in at that moment, but her imagination wasn’t taking orders. The grisly tableau unspooled in her head over and over, until finally, as a distraction, she forced herself to examine the room instead.
Not much to examine. The room was just as she remembered it from her panicked look around: small, soundproofed with rubbery egg crates on the walls.
And there was the bed, of course. The blankets had been kicked off, and Connie could finally see her fellow prisoner, who was handcuffed to the bedpost by her right wrist. Otherwise, she was unshackled, but that one chain was enough to keep her imprisoned. With a bit of struggle, the woman managed to sit up on the edge of the bed. She pushed her brownish, gray-threaded hair back from her face. She looked younger than the gray would indicate, with an unlined forehead and only a few subtle wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her eyes—a shade of hazel Connie knew well—were familiar.
