Game (Jasper Dent #2)(90)

CHAPTER 40


For some period of time Jazz couldn’t determine, the two of them sat in the car as it idled along the sidewalk. Jazz had gone numb, and he didn’t know why.

Ever consider that? Think maybe you’re in over your head?

You’re the one in over your head, Dear Old Dad. You’re the one I’m closing in on.

But he knew it wasn’t true. Not even remotely. He hadn’t really been close to catching Billy just now. The disposable cell phone he’d swiped from Belsamo’s was disposable for a reason: so that it could be tossed and never traced. Billy would have one just like it, and the instant he hung up on Jazz, he’d probably tossed it into the… the…

“What’s the name of that river again?” he asked Hughes, his voice somewhat subdued.

“Which river?” Hughes asked.

“The one we drove over. To get to Manhattan.”

“The East River.”

Jazz nodded. He could easily imagine Billy’s disposable cell phone sinking into the East River, bound for the Atlantic Ocean and its endless anonymity.

“You kept him on the phone as long as you could,” Hughes said, soothing, proving that if the cop thing didn’t pan out, he could always fall back on being a phony psychic. “We probably couldn’t have traced the call. Maybe gotten a ping off a cell tower, but Billy’s smart—he would have been long gone by the time we—”

“He said for me to hold on to this phone,” Jazz said. “Said we’d talk again.”

Hughes pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay, then. We’ll take it to the TARU kids. They can clone it so that the next time he calls, you can talk to him and they can be tracking him at the same time. We’ll get him, Jasper. He’s playing with the big boys now. The NYPD doesn’t mess around.”

Jazz snorted laughter, then stopped himself immediately. He didn’t mean to sound disrespectful, but this was Billy they were talking about. Billy didn’t mess around, either. Billy had gotten the local and state police forces of sixteen separate states, to say nothing of the FBI itself, all tangled up in knots. A career that spanned more than two decades. The NYPD could not “mess around” all it wanted.

This was Billy Dent.

The snort hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“We have every terrorist in the world gunning for this city ever since Nine-Eleven,” Hughes said coldly. “You want to know how many of them have succeeded? I’ll give you a hint: It starts with z and ends with a fucking zero, that’s how many. Your dad is just another terrorist with a string of hits behind him and an NYPD badge ready to take him out in front of him. Bank on it, Jasper. Bank on it.”

For a moment, Jazz believed him. It was quite possibly the best moment of his life.

And then reality set in.

Billy was reality and reality was Billy, the two intertwined into an interlocked set of chains that wrapped around Jazz and sent out steely tendrils to anyone and anything close to him.

“So how’d he get the phone to you?” Hughes asked. “And what are you doing over here all by yourself? Lucky no one recognized you.”

Jazz gulped. He had no choice—he had to tell Hughes the truth.

As he told Hughes everything—everything—the detective’s eyes grew wider, his expression more and more incredulous. Every time Jazz thought he’d told Hughes the worst possible thing about the evening, he would get to the next part of the story—So then I went through his mail, oh, and here’s a photo of the envelope—and the cop’s face would assume an even more tortured aspect.

“Oh, sweet Christ,” Hughes said, visibly ill. “I can’t even tell you how many laws you broke.”

“I think nine,” Jazz said helpfully, hoping to get Hughes to crack a grin.

No such luck. “More like a dozen. To start. What possessed you to—No, no, never mind. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me….”

“Now we have an alias for him. C. D. Williams. We have confirmation that he’s tied to Billy.”

“We have jack. You broke—”

“I’m not a cop,” Jazz pointed out. “You can use everything I found in there. There’s no prosecutorial conflict. No violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. Go ahead and arrest me for breaking and entering and whatever else I did when I went in there. I poked at his mail and took a burner phone. Probably not even fifty bucks’ worth. I’ll plead guilty. It’s my first offense—I bet I walk or get probation. In the meantime, you can use the evidence against Belsamo.”

“Are you some kind of special idiot they grow down South?” Hughes erupted. “Do they fry you up with grits and whatever the hell else they deep-fry down there? No judge worth his robe is gonna let Billy Dent’s kid walk on a first offense, no matter what that offense is. No prosecutor who likes his job—and believe me, Jasper, they love their jobs—would let you plead out to anything but the top count on the indictment. You will go to jail. That’s a guarantee.”

Jazz began to protest, but Hughes cut him off with a threatening gesture. “Beyond that,” the detective went on, “is the fact that you’ve been working with the NYPD and the task force in an official capacity. Approved by Montgomery and everything. Any defense attorney in the world, even the most overworked public defender in the friggin’ Bronx, could convince the deafest, dumbest judge in the city that you needed a search warrant to go into that apartment. None of this evidence is admissible. It’s useless. It’s worse than useless because it’s also going to get you arrested and thrown in jail, where you won’t be able to help us nail this guy and where you’ll get raped and shived to death five minutes after you hit gen-pop.”