Game (Jasper Dent #2)(18)

“What the hell are you doing?” Samantha asked.

“Taking this dish.”

“Why?”

He was still touching her. He realized he didn’t have a towel to dry the dish with. “Um.”

“Howie, you’re the same age as my nephew.”

“Actually, I’m six weeks older.”

She shook her head. “It’s not going to happen.”

“You say that now.”

“I do.”

“We’re both two lonely people,” Howie said seductively, “trapped in a world created by Billy Dent.”

Samantha howled with laughter. Howie figured that wasn’t a good sign.





CHAPTER 12


Jazz was surprised that he absolutely hated New York City.

No, that wasn’t quite accurate. Being from a small town like Lobo’s Nod, it was no surprise that he hated New York. What really surprised him was how much he hated it. He didn’t dislike New York with the simple diffidence of a small-town kid or the tragic ignorance of a yokel—he loathed it with the entirety of what he hoped was his soul.

The streets—cramped with cars and buses; with all the traffic, it took them almost two hours to get from the airport to some place called Red Hook, which looked like every bad ’hood in every action movie Jazz had ever seen.

The buildings—either rundown to the point of ruin or so overwrought that he felt like they’d been built not to serve any purpose but rather just to prove a point.

The smell—Jazz figured even New Yorkers had to hate the garbage and urine smells, but it wasn’t just that. The city managed to ruin even the good smells; at one point, while walking from the cab to the hotel, Jazz had smelled the most delightful bread baking, but the smell vanished as quickly as it teased his nose, and no matter where he looked or how much he tried, he couldn’t recapture it. He had never realized how odorless Lobo’s Nod was. Other than the occasional car exhaust, the town smelled utterly neutral.

The noise—it was perpetual.

But the worst thing about the city, the thing that poleaxed him, the thing Hughes had warned him about, the thing he should have been prepared for and yet—he acknowledged—never could have been prepared for…

The people.

Look at ’em all, Jasper, Billy whispered in his head.

So… many… people.

Look at ’em. You could take one. Easy. Or more than one. As many as you want, really. There’s so many, it’s not like anyone would miss one. Couple thousand go missing every year in this country—man, woman, and child alike. So many. Most of ’em, no one knows. No one cares. It’s like grabbin’ up blades of grass in the park. One more, one less. Makes no difference.

“You all right?” Hughes asked suddenly, and Jazz whipped around like a kid caught unscrambling the adult channels.

“I’m fine,” Jazz said. It came out weak and unconvincing.

“He’s overwhelmed,” Connie jumped in, grabbing his hand. “He’ll be fine.”

Connie. She’d been here before for short trips and seemed to be in love with New York already. She had managed to grab an earlier flight, a direct one, beating Hughes and him to JFK. An important lesson for Jazz: Connie wouldn’t stay put just because he said so.

There’s ways to change that, Jasper. Ways to make her listen. And the best part is, you know them ways already. You know them real well….

“I’m fine,” Jazz said again, and tightened his grip on Connie’s hand as Hughes led them into the hotel.




Movies and TV shows had prepared Jazz for two kinds of big-city hotels. There were the ostentatious, gilded palaces for the wealthy, and the rank, decrepit hovels for the itinerants and the junkies and the hookers. So he was mildly disappointed to find himself ensconced in neither—the hotel the NYPD had chosen for him was a bog-standard Holiday Inn that wouldn’t have looked out of place along the highway that ran past and beyond Lobo’s Nod.

“You okay?” Connie whispered as they waited for Hughes to check them in.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been squeezing my hand like it’s putty.”

“Sorry.” He released her. “Trying to find amusement in our setting.”

She looked around. “Yeah, doesn’t feel very New York, does it?”

Maybe that was a good thing.

Hughes approached them, brandishing two keycards. He hesitated for a moment and sized them up. “How old are you guys again?”

“Seventeen,” Connie answered.

The detective clucked his tongue, then shrugged. “I only have the one room. Use protection.” He handed over the cards and left them to find the room and get settled in while he attended to some other business, promising to return by lunchtime to get started on the case.

As Hughes retreated, Jazz stared slack-jawed at Connie, well and truly shocked by something not involving blood for the first time in a long time. “Can you believe that? He’s just gonna let us stay in the same—”

“We’re practically adults,” Connie said with an air of urbane sophistication. “What did you think he was going to do—call our parents? It’s New York. It’s a whole different world.” She waved her card in the air and led him off to the elevator.