Game (Jasper Dent #2)(30)

He squeezed his eyes shut tight, as tight as he could. As tight as the night Billy had skinned poor Rusty alive. The howl of the dog as Billy’s knife did its gruesome work…

Phosphenes again behind his eyelids, this time not of the crime scenes from the pictures, but rather as he’d seen them tonight.

I did something good tonight. I helped tonight. Doesn’t that mean I should be getting better, not worse?

Sex and killing. The two dreams, conflating. What did that mean?

When Jazz opened his eyes and spoke, his voice was deep, sure, emotionless.

“You should throw those condoms away,” he said.

And then he crawled into the other, empty bed to sleep.





CHAPTER 15


Billy Dent roamed Brooklyn, the day having dawned clear and cold. He turned up the collar of his coat and tugged his hat down around his ears.

The cold weather made hiding even easier. Everyone all bundled up. Everyone in such a hurry to get to where they were going. No one stopping to look at anyone else. Everyone wearing gloves, how convenient. Cover up those prison tats. Cover up LOVE. Cover up FEAR.

Cover ’em up, but they’re still there. Love and fear. Equal. Maybe even the same.

It wouldn’t have mattered if anyone had been looking at him, anyway. Billy didn’t fear the human eye. The human eye was a fickle, foolish thing. His goatee and mustache, along with a set of muttonchop sideburns trimmed and shaped just right, changed the angles and configuration of his face. Cutting down his eyebrows made his eyes more prominent. And, of course, he’d dyed his hair.

Billy chuckled to himself when he thought of the vanity of women, and how they’d made it easier on folks like him. God bless Miss Clairol and her endless variations of hues and shades! Billy had—by mixing together a specific set of colors—managed to turn his dirty blond hair into graying brown. After thinning it out with an electric razor, he looked ten years older. The final touch was a pair of black, heavy-rimmed glasses, the kind Billy’s own father had once worn. To the idiotic hipsters of Brooklyn, these glasses were “fashionable.” They also distorted Billy’s features in a way that pleased him and made him harder to recognize. Oh, glorious fashion!

Disguising yourself wasn’t just about making yourself look different; it was about making yourself look different from what people were looking for. The cops could imagine Billy growing a beard or shaving a beard or growing out his hair or coloring his hair, but would they imagine him making himself look older?

He’d studied the FBI and police procedure most of his life. He knew how cops thought and, more important, how they thought he thought. They thought him a creature of immeasurable vanity, and they couldn’t imagine that he would be willing to make himself look worse in order to evade recapture.

Billy was willing to do anything to evade recapture.

After years in prison with nothing to do but exercise, Billy was in top condition, but he dressed to hide his physique. Walked with a slump. When he was out and about, he made sure to wear a watch and checked it constantly, communicating that he was in his own world.

Plus, he had the perfect bit of camouflage: a stroller and a diaper bag.

This part of Brooklyn was called Park Slope, and Billy had noticed quickly that damn near everyone here had either a dog or a baby carriage or both. He had no interest in actually taking care of anything living, but he had a big interest in blending in, so he’d bought a used stroller at an antiques store, then wrapped up a bundle of blankets to look like a baby. Since it was winter, he could keep the top down; anyone looking through the little plastic window would see what appeared to be a well-tucked-in child, napping.

And the diaper bag actually held diapers. Under the diapers, Billy had stashed three different-sized knives, a Glock he’d bought on the street, and a length of rope.

Ambling along the streets of Brooklyn, no one gave an older dad a second look.

People. Ha.

Billy worried more about facial-recognition software than he worried about a human being recalling his face from TV. Cameras were everywhere in “free” America—at ATMs, at street intersections, at banks, behind convenience-store counters. The bastard cops and the FBI were supposed to need search warrants and court orders to look at those cameras, but Billy was no fool. He knew about the Patriot Act. And he knew something even more sinister—he knew the fear that ruled in the hearts of all prospects. The bastard cops needed a court order only when someone said no to them. And these days, all you had to do was wave a flag or say “keeping Americans safe” and anyone owning those cameras would let the cops look all they wanted. No hassle. No fuss, no muss. So Billy took no chances. He wore sunglasses and a hat whenever possible.

And he smiled.

Facial-recognition software, for some reason, had trouble distinguishing between two faces if one of them was smiling. There were even states where you couldn’t smile for your driver’s license photo. So, Billy smiled everywhere he went.

This was hardly a chore. Billy liked smiling. Billy was a happy guy.

In his coat pockets, he had a total of five different throwaway cell phones. One of them buzzed for his attention as he pushed his stroller past the umpteenth coffee shop on Fourth Street. This place was obsessed, Billy had noticed, with coffee shops. There were three of them on every block, not to mention the occasional Starbucks.

He paused as he groped for the proper phone. Only one person had the numbers to his various phones, and that was just for emergencies. He shouldn’t be receiving phone calls—he gave them.