Game (Jasper Dent #2)(47)
He remembered Special Agent Morales leaning toward him. She wore no perfume. Her face was smooth and unblemished by makeup, and her grin had revealed big, strong teeth. “You want to do more than find him, don’t you? You want to kill him,” she’d said. “Well, I can help with that.”
The second thing—he would figure that out when the time came.
The other piece of paper was the letter found on the Impressionist. It was two pages long, but the sheriff’s department had reduced it to fit both pages on one sheet. Handwritten in a careful, neat, and unfamiliar hand. Most of the letter was a listing of the major characteristics of Billy Dent’s first victims, with notations as to possible doppelg?ngers for the Impressionist to use in his harrowing of Lobo’s Nod. But there was an appendix at the end, one that still mystified Jazz:
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO
GO NEAR THE DENT BOY.
LEAVE HIM ALONE.
YOU ARE NOT TO ENGAGE HIM.
JASPER DENT IS OFF-LIMITS.
He stared at the letter for a while, willing the letters to rearrange themselves into something that made more sense, then gave up, grabbed some clean clothes and the letters, and headed to his temporary quarters. He figured he’d delayed the inevitable long enough.
Sitting on the floor, his back against his father’s childhood bed, Jazz called Connie.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said back.
Neither of them said anything. Jazz ran through his options. Pretend nothing had happened? Apologize immediately? The nuclear option: break up. He’d written and rewritten the speech in his head a million times: I know you love me and I love you, but I’m broken, Connie. I’m defective. I’m the toy you got for Christmas that’s missing pieces, and even if it was complete, no one bought the batteries to go with it.
“Before we talk about anything else, I need to say I’m sorry,” Connie said.
“Excuse me?”
“I shouldn’t have pushed you. I know you have… issues with sex. I get it. And, I mean, don’t get me wrong. I totally think we’re ready, but I went about it wrong. It wasn’t cool. So I’m sorry.”
Jazz closed his eyes and thumped the back of his head against the bed. “Con… it’s not… you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me. It was me. And then with your dad… I just…”
“I know. And we’ll talk about that in—look, you don’t have to… In New York. I just thought that with me, it might be okay. It might be safe. For you.”
He sat upright. “What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”
“Well, I know that your dad never… never prospected any African Americans. Right?”
Jazz’s heart thrummed. What?
“And I always figured that that maybe meant that I wouldn’t… that I couldn’t…” She blew into the phone, exasperated. “I know what you’re worried about. You’re worried that he somehow, like, programmed you to be a serial killer. And that there’s all this crazy lurking under the surface—”
“It’s not just under the surface,” he said seriously.
“I know. But anyway, there’s this stuff buried in you, and you’re afraid it’ll erupt if you have sex. Like, sex is the trigger, right? But Billy never killed any black women. It’s like he just skipped over us. Almost deliberately. Like we don’t exist to him. So I thought maybe that made me safe for you.” She paused. “Didn’t you ever think that?”
Jazz held back a laugh of commingled relief and horror. His big secret! His hidden fear! That Connie would someday find out why he’d first dated her. How long had he been terrified of telling her this, only to learn that not only did she know but she was okay with it and thought it was a good idea.
“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “I was just sitting here thinking how I needed to apologize to you—”
“For what? For freaking out?” She said it like it was no big deal.
“For that. For the way I freaked out. And now, I guess, for the way we first started dating. Which seems pretty racist, now that I think about it.”
Connie laughed. “Jazz, if you liked—I don’t know—blond girls or girls with big boobs—”
“Your boobs are pretty big.”
“Anyway. If you had a thing for one of those girls and saw her across a crowded room and went and introduced yourself, would that be a bad thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do—the answer is no. So, in my case, you saw a really foxy-looking black girl across a crowded room—”
“It was the Coff-E-Shop and it was close to closing, so no one was there.”
“—and you were like, ‘I like black girls, so I’m going to introduce myself.’ No big deal.”
“Yeah, but what if the reason I like black girls is because they’re, you’re, safe—”
“So what? Who knows why anyone likes what they like? Guys who are obsessed with, like, redheads. Why? Because they’re rare? Because they had a redheaded babysitter? Because they watched too many Emma Stone movies? Beats me. Who cares? I mean, why do I like white boys?”
“I’m the only white boy you’ve ever dated.”