Game (Jasper Dent #2)(119)

Shortly, the cab pulled up to the intersection. “Where?” the driver asked, and Connie realized he wanted to know which corner to drop her off at.

“Doesn’t matter. Here is fine.” She shoved some money through the little slot in the plastic shield between her and the driver, then hauled her bags out into the cold, relentless rain. Gross.

“Hey, can you stick around for, like, two minutes?” she asked, but the driver—with that inscrutable single-shoulder shrug—just took off into the night. “Oh, terrific.”

Some people milled about under umbrellas, but the streets were almost completely empty. Connie held the laptop bag over her head and stared up at the fa?ade of the Ness Paper building. It looked like every other random building. Nothing exotic or strange about it. There were two large truck bays, closed off with corrugated garage doors, and a flight of steps leading up to a single door illuminated by a bright cone of light from a security lamp. The place was clearly closed.

“Good job, Conscience,” she muttered. The rain chilled down to her bones and then dug deeper.

She turned, looking up and down both streets at the intersection. Cars whizzed by, but no cabs that she could see. She was just about to dig out her phone and look for the nearest subway station when she noticed it, right across the street from the Ness building.

It was just another Brooklyn tenement, notable only due to its severely ramshackle appearance. It was the sort of building they showed in movies to communicate to the audience that you were in a bad part of town, though as near as Connie could tell, this part of Brooklyn wasn’t particularly scary. The building was almost out of place here, its face scarred and pitted, then made up garishly with layers of graffiti.

Only one graffito had caught her attention, though. New, she could tell, or at least newer than the rest because it overlaid them:



Almost as though she couldn’t help herself, Connie stepped off the curb and walked across the street, stepping carefully over a puddle as she went.





CHAPTER 57


Jazz couldn’t move. Harsh static buzzed in his ears. A lake of blood spread along his left flank, and that entire side of his body flamed with pain. He couldn’t even tell where he’d been shot—it could have been anywhere inside the creeping red stain that stretched from his waist to mid-thigh.

Why? he asked no one in the confines of his head. Why?

And then another of the flat cracks dragged Jazz’s attention away from his own pain. Morales was down on the floor, still. A man crouched over her, slightly winded, and Jazz realized—they’d struggled. For the gun. The man had come up behind them. Morales hadn’t shot him. Not on purpose, at least.

“Good,” said Belsamo. “Nicely done.”

“Shut up!” the other man said, pointing Morales’s gun at him. “Shut your mouth!”

Now Dog looked just as confused as Jazz felt. The scene swam before Jazz’s vision, watery, indistinct. He wondered if he was going to pass out and was surprised by how cleanly and clinically he could examine himself right now. Pulse racing. Skin a little cold and clammy. Am I going into shock? Don’t go into shock, Jazz. You’re no good to anyone then.

Thank God Morales had had her backup weapon out. It was a light caliber—a nine-millimeter—not the full .40-caliber load her service weapon held. He knew he had a decent chance at surviving this gunshot wound without too much permanent damage. In most shootings, the victim did himself as much harm as the bullet, if not more: Thrashing around when shot only made you bleed more. And the shock of being shot often sent victims into cardiac arrest or caused further bleeding from an accelerated heart rate.

So when you get shot, Jazz, just fall down, nice and calm. Just keep cool.

Yeah, right.

He forced himself to draw in a long breath and then let it out slowly. Connie had once tried to teach him yoga breathing, which he’d found annoying and unnatural, but right about now, he was up for whatever would keep him alive.

Morales wasn’t moving. There was a hole in her blazer, but no blood that Jazz could see. He was pretty sure the FBI vest could stop such a small caliber even at such close range. She would have had the wind knocked out of her and would have a hell of a bruise. He’d heard of people going into cardiac arrest just from the impact, though, even with a bulletproof vest on, but Morales seemed to be breathing normally. Knocked out when she hit the floor?

A surging wave of agony suddenly crashed upward from his leg and Jazz hissed in a breath. Forget Morales for now. He was shot.

He tuned back into the rest of the world for a moment and realized that Belsamo and the newcomer were arguing, going back and forth as though there weren’t two wounded people and a growing puddle of blood on the floor between them. Dog’s voice was flat and affectless, as though everything outside of his own skin was merely a curiosity. The newcomer spoke with heat, anger. Passion.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Belsamo said with an almost autistic precision. “The rules clearly state that unless told to, we are not to be here at the same—”

“Shut up!” the other man shouted. “Just shut up about the rules! Do you have any idea what’s happening here? Do you? You just had to be sloppy, didn’t you? Had to leave your tributes to Ugly J everywhere. Idiot.”

Jazz’s vision began to clear, just a bit. He was almost directly between the two men, still inside unit 83F. Morales was inside, too, having been knocked into it during her tussle.