Game (Jasper Dent #2)(17)

Eleven, he thought. Eleven as the crow flies…





CHAPTER 11


Before returning to the Dent house the next day, Howie realized he would need armor to deal with Jazz’s crazy grandmother. He had seen her slap and punch Jazz, as well as throw everything from stuffed teddy bears to skillets. She was surprisingly strong for a woman who looked to be five or six inches away from death. Maybe it was some kind of death adrenaline. Whatever the case, Howie didn’t plan on letting her turn his hemophiliac body into her own personal bruise-n-contuse plaything.

Since it was January, he got away with wearing long sleeves—flannel. Nice and thick, for protection. Just in case, he strapped on some wrist guards underneath. They were supposed to be for people who typed a lot, but they had hard steel inserts and would do him well if he had to suddenly protect his face. He also wore gloves, which he promised himself he would leave on even while inside. Heavy denim jeans, of course: That stuff really felt like armor. Howie figured he could go ride out in the Crusades with his heavy-duty Levi’s on. He scrounged around the house until he found his dad’s old hunting cap, right down to the earflaps. Oh, yeah. He would look like a serious dork, but he didn’t care—his skull would be protected.

“I can’t believe the crap I go through for this guy….” Howie muttered to himself as he parked at the Dent house. He had spoken to Jazz’s aunt Samantha briefly over the phone before coming over. She had said little about her flight or rental car drive to the Nod or anything at all, really, despite Howie’s endless, helpful patter. Taciturn ran in the family. Well, except for Billy. Howie remembered hanging out at Jazz’s house when they were kids. Billy never stopped talking. Howie’s mom used the phrase “talk a blue streak” to mean someone who talked incessantly. Billy Dent talked streaks in all kinds of shades of blue: sky blue, navy blue, midnight blue. You name it, Billy Dent said it. The man never shut up.

Howie marched up the front steps, gave a warning knock at the front door, then let himself in with the key Jazz had given him, steeling himself for the crazy that was Gramma Dent.

Instead, he found Gramma Dent and Samantha sitting cross-legged on the parlor floor, playing “patty-cake.”

“Bake me a cake as fast as you can!” Gramma chanted in time with Samantha. “Roll it! And prick it! And mark it with an A. And put it in the oven for me and Sammy J!”

Jazz’s grandmother hooted with delight.

“Josephine,” Sam explained to Howie.

“What’s the A for, then?” he asked.

Sam shrugged. “She likes it to rhyme.”

“Again!” Gramma shrieked. “Again!”

Howie ended up on the floor with them, playing a nearly endless round of patty-cake that concluded only when Gramma mumbled “Nappy time” and crawled over to the couch to conk out.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Howie told Samantha moments later in the kitchen, where Jazz’s aunt was washing dishes. “She gets childlike sometimes, but she usually goes all temper-tantrum at some point, you know?”

“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Samantha confessed. “I knew she was getting worse—I had stopped writing and calling years ago, before all of the… well, you know. But I knew… I knew that she wasn’t going to be getting better as time went on, you know?”

“Was she always like this?”

Samantha shrugged. “She was always crazy. But you know… you know, the whole family was crazy, so it didn’t really stand out. I mean, Billy was going around”—she shuddered—“being Billy. And back in the seventies, you could be some crazy lady spouting all of her nutty racist crap and people would just sort of nod politely and pretend they didn’t hear it. She was never delusional, not like now. But crazy? Always?” Samantha smiled ruefully. “How do you think Billy ended up the way he did?”

Howie returned the smile. Samantha was in her late forties, he knew, but she looked good. Prime cougar material, really, and he had to admit he liked what he saw. His hemophilia having marked him as a freak from early days, not many girls in Lobo’s Nod paid him any mind, much less were willing to get naked and sweaty with him in the way nature prescribed. But hey—maybe he’d have a shot with someone who didn’t have the hang-ups and the history of those who’d known him for years.

“It’s sort of a miracle that you ended up normal,” Howie told her as smoothly as he could, leaning against the counter with as much savoir faire as he could muster. He figured he cut a pretty dashing figure in his jeans and heavy shirt. And gloves. And hat. Not like a page out of a catalog or anything, but it showed how he thought ahead. He was prepared. Women dug guys who were prepared.

His advance preparations were lost on Samantha, who was paying attention to the dishes.

“Normal?” Samantha’s laugh was short and harsh. “Normal. Not a chance. I got the hell out of this house and this town as fast as I could, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t know how to be around normal people by that point. I’ve spent my whole life figuring it out. And once Billy got caught, suddenly it was like I had to start all over again.”

Howie saw his chance; he took off his gloves and nabbed a wet, clean dish from Samantha’s hands, allowing his fingers to linger on hers for a moment. It was a good, subtle move—he’d seen it in a bunch of movies.