Game (Jasper Dent #2)(93)

“Let’s do this,” she said to him as she climbed in.

“We gonna be dodging Johnny Law? Gonna have five-oh on our asses?”

“Just drive.”





CHAPTER 42


And

of course

a shoulder and trailing a line of

(yes)

cool heat

(yes)

a groan

whose?

He opens his mouth

(yes, like that)

and licks

And




Jazz woke the next morning, his mind muzzy, his emotions hacked and split into pieces. Groggy, he peered blearily at the clock on the bedside table. According to it, he actually had slept for hours. But with the dream arousing and terrifying him in alternating, equal measure, he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. He must have dreamed that he’d lain awake all night, searching for wisdom and insight in the blank white hotel ceiling.

Despite mentioning TARU, Hughes had—perhaps intentionally, perhaps not—neglected to take the disposable cell phone, so Jazz had put it on the bedside table, just in case Billy decided to call back. The phone’s caller ID listed a phone number, but when Jazz called it, he only got an anonymous, robotic outgoing voice mail message. Billy had probably already tossed that phone and moved on to another one.

He thought of calling Connie. But his dream still pounded at the doors of his conscious mind, only slightly unreal in these moments of waking.

He felt poisonous.

Slick and grimy with some contagion.

To speak to Connie now would be to pollute her with the thoughts spinning in his head. Would be to lie to her and not tell her about Belsamo and what he’d done. He couldn’t abide the thought of lying to Connie. Not to her.

He could have called Aunt Samantha or Howie, but he didn’t want to speak to anyone. Not now. All of his focus, all of his attention, was now devoted to recalling the conversation he’d had with Billy.

Jazz’s memory was good. Not eidetic like Billy’s, but better than most people’s. And recalling the things Billy said was sort of a specialty of his. Dear Old Dad had trained his son to lean extra-heavy on the fatherly wisdom he imparted.

Fine. You designed me to be your tape recorder. I’ll use that against you, you bastard.

The problem wasn’t remembering every line in the twisted play of Butcher Billy’s life. The difficulty lay in figuring out which words mattered and which ones were just verbal chaff, noisemakers designed to distract attention and lead Jazz into the corners of Billy’s maze where the walls closed in.

The crows… There’s something there. Something real. Belsamo was into crows. Billy mentioned them. And, yeah, I remember that old story he told me. I just recited it to Connie the other day.

Billy had been adamant that the story of the Crow King wasn’t a fairy tale. He’d called it folklore. Myth. The differences were crucial. Billy sounded like an inbred redneck, but his IQ was in the stratosphere and he wielded words as precisely as he wielded knives and cleavers and hammers.

Fairy tales and fables were stories for children. They involved magic. They weren’t real.

Myths and folklore, though… they weren’t precisely real, but they were designed to explain something that was real. They represented something about the real world. The origin of something.

The Crow King… what did the Crow King represent?

And then Jazz sat up straight in bed. Another chunk of knowledge had just dropped into his brain. More accurately, it had bobbed to the surface of the ocean of his memories, like a body that has broken free of its concrete shoes.

The Impressionist. In his cell in Lobo’s Nod. He’d said something to Jazz….

Jasper Dent. Princeling of Murder. Heir to the Croaking.

Not “the Croaking.” Damn it, Jazz! Did you really think he was that crazy? What’s wrong with you? You missed the connection right there!

The Impressionist had been talking about the Crow King.

Heir to the Crow King.

So… Billy was the Crow King, then. The one who bled the robins until they were dove-white. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

More important… how far back did this craziness stretch? How long had Billy been putting things in motion? The Impressionist knew about the significance of crows. So did Belsamo. Which meant that the lunacy went back at least to before Billy’s arrest and imprisonment. All those years Billy traveled for murder… was he also evangelizing his particular brand of lunacy? If so, how many protégés did he have out there? How many madmen had he programmed to follow in his footsteps?

And if he was able to program them as adults, what chance does his son have?

Jazz had been aware for years now that people existed out there in what he thought of as the “real world” (the world not of Lobo’s Nod or of his grandmother’s house and deepening senility) who admired Billy, who thought he was a patsy for someone else’s murders, who believed he’d been framed. And people who saw in him a strength they lacked and didn’t care that that strength had been turned toward murder.

But he’d never imagined that any of these sad, damaged people would turn out to be killers themselves. Since when do groupies become rock stars? Maybe they end up as roadies, sure. Maybe even an opening act or a one-hit wonder.

But for a groupie to become the main attraction…?