“You still with me, Jasper?” Billy said, not pausing, not giving him a chance to recover. “Hate to think I could be talkin’ to a dead line, you know? Hate to think of this fatherly advice bein’ wasted.”
“We’re tracking this call,” Jazz said, hoarse. A pathetic lie, obviously told. Jazz didn’t expect his father to buy it, and sure enough, Billy didn’t even acknowledge it, just kept on talking:
“I still have so much to teach you. There are days when I sit here, when I sit here and I think, There’s so much I still haven’t taught him. So much I need to give him. We lost time, Jasper. Lost four good years, four important years. And that’s on me. That’s my fault, y’hear me? I take that blame and I carry it on my shoulders every day and it makes me stooped and weak, to think that I let my needs and my urges come between us. I’d’a been able to control myself better, those two sunny, silly bitches’d still be alive and I’d be home and we’d be doing just fine, learning together.”
Jazz fumbled with his cell, flicking to where the pictures were stored, tapping and swiping until he found the one he was looking for: a scan of the picture of his mother. The only thing left of her.
And what about Mom? Jazz wanted to ask. Would we be one big happy family? But there was no point. Billy had killed Mom—had erased her—years before he killed in Lobo’s Nod, years before he’d been captured by G. William.
“You don’t have anything to teach me,” Jazz managed. “You taught me enough.”
“It’s never enough. When you have your own kids, you’ll understand. You’ll be fifty, and you’ll still be my boy, Jasper, and I’ll still wish I could take you and put my arm around you and teach you what you need to know in this ugly, evil world.”
Jazz swiped his mother’s picture aside. A new photo: him with Connie and Howie, all grinning for the camera. The shot was bittersweet—he enjoyed seeing the honest smile on his own face, the camaraderie with his closest friends, but the picture had been snapped by Ginny Davis one day after school. Poor, dead Ginny, her death caused by the Impressionist—and, therefore, by Billy—and not prevented by Jazz himself.
“You think you can come after me, don’t you?” Billy asked. “That’s why no one’s tracing this call. That’s why you’re not screaming your head off for help. Because you want me all to yourself. Just like a crow.”
A crow… Jazz slid his phone away and used his free hand to steady himself on the floor. The fog in his brain began to clear, just a little, and through the parting clouds he saw a black bird, its wings wide and all-encompassing. “A crow,” he said. “Crows. Belsamo—Dog—had a crow on his laptop. He made noises like a crow. And the Impressionist said something about—”
“You been thinkin’ about that story, Jasper?”
“The one you told me. About the Crow King. I looked it up once. Tried to find it in a book or on the Web. But it doesn’t exist. No one knows it.”
“Yeah. That’s the one. That was your favorite when you were a kid.”
“No.”
“Well, seemed to me like you liked it! Always got a chuckle out of it. Anyway, like I said before—it’s not just a story. It ain’t just somethin’ made up. It’s got some real in it, you see?”
“No. I don’t get it.”
“You will.” Billy chuckled. “Or you won’t! Hey, who knows, right? Crazy ol’ world we live in. Anything’s possible, I guess. But my money’s on you, Jasper. Always has been. I raised you right, boy. Raised you strong and proud and tough. Last four years or so been hard on you, I know. Been hard without your Dear Old Dad around.”
“I’ve been fine.” He forced himself up to a crouch, looking around the room for a weapon. Anything that could cause pain. He would march out of this room and keep Billy talking for days, if that’s what it took, but he would follow his father’s trail of crazy right to his hideaway and then he would do what he should have done years ago.
“You’ve been foundering,” Billy said confidently. “You keep goin’ back and forth: ‘Am I fit for other people?’ ‘Am I a monster?’ ‘Can I touch this pretty little colored girl?’ Sorry—African American girl? Or… woman? Does she make you call her a woman, not a girl?”
Jazz decided on the chair. It was heavy and sturdy. He tilted it so that the back of it rested on the floor, then kicked at one of the legs, which splintered and cracked into a good length of wood, hefty and solid with a wickedly jagged point.
“What’s that I hear in the background?” Billy asked. “Almost sounded like snapping an arm, but I know that ain’t it. You tearing up the furniture? You ready to hunt vampires, boy?”
Somehow, the solidity of a weapon in his hand cut through the morass of confusion, a blazing trail of bloodlust leading to sparkling clarity. “You get off on this crap, don’t you?” Jazz asked, the question as obvious as its answer, but his voice no longer weak. “Not just trying to mess with my head. Not just killing people. But the rest of it, too: puppetmastering these guys. You love telling them who to kill as much as you love killing yourself.”
“Not really,” Billy mused. “Ain’t true. Not at all. And you got it wrong—I don’t dictate to them. I just watch the clock and keep the rules. They decide how to play the game.”
“But you started it. You inspired it.”
“I did?” Billy sounded genuinely surprised at the notion. “You really think that? See, like I said before, I still got a lot to teach you. Like this: Wasn’t my idea to set these boys playin’ against each other. I just stepped in to help adjudicate.”
“Yeah?” Jazz recovered his cell phone and dropped it in his pocket, still clutching the stake he’d made. He paced the hotel room like that, powerful and impotent all at once, a wolf on a leash. “How’s it work? How do you pick the winner? Or do you just play until someone gets caught?”
“We play until they can’t play anymore,” Billy said.
“Oh? What does the winner get? Bragging rights? A signed Billy Dent trading card?”
“Oh, no, Jasper. Better than that. Much better, I promise. Why, you may even get it yourself one day.”
“I don’t want anything you have to offer,” Jazz snarled. “I won’t be one of your puppets. One of your pawns. I won’t be a party to any more dying.”
“You’re gonna be the death of that FBI agent, Jasper. I promise you that. You’ll watch her die.”
“Bull. I’m not killing anyone.” Except you.
“It’s all in your hands, m’boy. She can die pretty or she can die ugly. Now, if it was me, I’d start with those lips, so full and… generous, I guess, is the word I’m looking for. I would start with them. And I sure am curious to see those goodies she hides under those FBI blazers. Those shapeless blazers they wear. Not shapeless enough for her, eh? Bet you wonder, too, don’tcha?”
Ugh. The worst part, of course, was that Jazz did wonder about Morales’s breasts and he had noticed the plush, inviting softness of her lips. Any straight man, he told himself, would have. But most straight men weren’t lethal.
“Want to get your hands up under there, don’t you, Jasper? Want to find the things she hides from the world, the things she won’t share. Bring ’em out into the light.”
Jazz shook his head with a violence that was nearly chiropractic. “Shut up, Billy.” He made his voice as stern as possible, deleting the quaver that wanted to creep in, the combined weakness and strength he felt at the mere thought of peeling Special Agent Morales’s clothes and armor and dignity at once. “You can’t do this to me anymore. I’m my own person. My own man.”
“Why, of course you are! Never said anything to the contrary!”
“Where are you?” Jazz screamed into the phone, his whole body leaning, straining, into the effort, as though his soul could be vomited out and up through the words, as though he could scream himself into the phone and out the other end, wherever Billy was. “Where are you? Tell me! Tell me, goddamn it! Tell me so I can kill you!”