Game (Jasper Dent #2)(108)

“Are you all right?” the attendant asked, telling Connie instantly that her posture and her faked expression of pain were both working.

“I feel like an idiot,” she started, “but I twisted my ankle running for the plane before. I didn’t think it was that bad, but after sitting all this time…”

“Oh, God, it’s probably even worse after the change in cabin pressure!”

The “let them finish your sentence” trick rides again.

“Yeah, is there any way…”

“I’ll get a wheelchair for you.”

Connie allowed herself to slump against one of the seats a little. “Thank you so much. I’m sorry to be such a pain.”

“Not at all. Just sit in that seat there and I’ll have someone get your bags.”

Soon, the attendant helped her out of her seat and off the plane. There in the jetway, a man waited with a wheelchair. Connie sank into it and thanked the attendant again as she piled Connie’s duffel onto a little rack on the back of the chair.

“Take good care of her,” the attendant told Wheelchair Man.

“No prob.”

On their way up the jetway, Connie unfolded the cheap little airplane blanket she’d grabbed from a nearby seat and wrapped it around herself like a shawl. She figured by this point she probably looked like a cancer patient. She tucked her arms together to make herself as small as possible.

Moments later, he rolled her out into the terminal. Connie immediately noticed two uniformed cops standing with a TSA agent off to one side. They were looking for a black teenage girl with beaded cornrows. Not some woman with a facial mark and glasses, wrapped up and wearing a bonnet that probably covered a bald head, as best they could tell.

Still, she held her breath as Wheelchair Man rolled her past them.

“Where to?” he asked her.

Connie finally allowed herself a grin.

“Terminal four,” she said. “Arrivals.”





CHAPTER 48


Morales was staying in a hotel three subway stops away from Jazz’s, but he hadn’t figured out the subway system yet and now was no time to try. So he had hailed a cab and—like in the movies—told the guy to floor it. The cabbie glanced over his shoulder at Jazz with an expression of mingled amusement and annoyance and proceeded to lope along at the speed limit. Jazz sighed heavily and resigned himself to the trip, watching Brooklyn bleed past him.

He should have gone to Morales in the first place, he realized. Should have texted her and not Hughes when he’d had Billy on the phone outside Belsamo’s apartment. She was the one he needed. Hughes had—after much thought and stress—broken NYPD regulations to bring Jazz to New York in the hope of catching a killer.

But the very first time he’d met her, Morales had offered to break the law for him. With him.

She answered the door in a hotel bathrobe, her hair spilling down, un-bunned, messy, disheveled. God, she was sexy. He felt his groin lurch at the sight of her. He wanted her. Not the same way he wanted Connie. Or maybe it was the same way. Maybe he was kidding himself. For all his talk of loving Connie, maybe it was just some animal reaction.

She can die pretty or she can die ugly.

“I was about to get some sleep for once,” Morales said, cocking a hip. “What’s so important you had to race over here?”

Her lips…

Now, if it was me, I’d start with those lips, so full and… generous.

Jazz shivered.

“Is it cold in the hall?” Morales stepped aside. “Come in. I can make some, well, coffee, I guess. Do you drink coffee?”

“Yeah…” Jazz hesitated, then entered the room.

You’re gonna be the death of that FBI agent, Jasper. I promise you that. You’ll watch her die.

No. He would not kill her. Billy was just trying to psych him out. That’s what Billy did—he planted seeds of doubt, of crazy, of dismay. And even if they didn’t bloom, he still got to paw through the loam of your psyche.

As if the sound and finality of the door closing suddenly made her aware of who she was with and what she was wearing, Morales pulled the front of the robe closer together with one hand and ran the other through her untamed hair.

I sure am curious to see those goodies she hides under those FBI blazers…. Want to get your hands up under there, don’t you, Jasper?

Of course I do.

Want to find the things she hides from the world, the things she won’t share. Bring ’em out into the light.

So what? So does every other guy with testosterone and a working penis.

And that made him think of Dog and Hat and the missing penises and he finally shook off Billy’s voice and listened to himself confess multiple felonies and misdemeanors to a special agent of the FBI.




To her credit, Morales didn’t interrupt Jazz as he related to her the path that had taken him physically into Dog’s apartment and mentally into Dog and Hat’s brutal game of “murder Monopoly,” as Hughes called it. Her eyes, so dark brown they were almost black, widened and narrowed at certain points, and she pursed those plush lips that Billy wanted to “begin” with, but she said not a word until he wound and wended his story to the point at which he’d hopped in a cab to visit her in her hotel room.

“And Hughes knows all of this?” was the first thing she said, confirming.