“Golly,” she chirped in her very best sorority girl impression, “maybe I’ll go shopping and buy shoes and kicky skirts and makeup! Dumbass,” she said, punching him in the shoulder and dropping her voice. “I’ll be helping you. You think I’m going to see the sights?”
“I hear they have really tall buildings.”
“And subways.”
“And museums.”
“And more than a dozen black people, too. It’s truly a land of wonder.”
“A miracle of our modern age,” Jazz agreed, and kissed the back of her neck.
“Oh, don’t do that,” she admonished in a tone of voice that didn’t convince even herself. “You’re trying to distract me.”
He kissed where her neck met her shoulder. “Mea culpa.”
Connie’s head swam. She both hated and loved being so deliriously vulnerable to him. She’d never felt this way with another boy, and she knew Jazz had never felt this way with another girl. Her friends were fond of telling her that she was drawn to Jazz Dent because he was the ultimate bad boy—whereas some girls fell for selfish jerks, Connie was in love with a guy who was quite literally deadly.
But that wasn’t it. Connie loved him despite his past, despite his darkness, not because of it. She saw in him a light, a light buried so deep that Jazz himself never saw it. But she did. Not always. There were hours and days and sometimes whole weeks that would go by where she lost track of it, but never had it failed to resurface. Connie believed in Jazz’s humanity more than he did.
A sexy, brooding boyfriend who didn’t realize exactly how sexy and brooding he was? God save her! It was all she could do sometimes not to jump him, but she knew that he wasn’t ready for that, no matter how ready he acted and felt. They’d never discussed it, but it was clear to her. And she understood. Just reading about Billy Dent’s crimes had freaked her out; growing up with a dad whose version of “the talk” included binding techniques and torture tactics would be even worse.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I’m thinking,” she managed to say, “that if you keep doing that thing with your tongue on my shoulder, I’m going to force myself on you.”
He nipped her shoulder playfully and then disentangled from her, rising to adjust the space heater. “We’re running out of kerosene. It’s gonna get really cold in here soon. We should get going.”
Connie kicked at his shin with the point of her toe. “You jerk. I’m onto you. You think you can make the sexy time with me and get me to forget what we were talking about? Not a chance. I’m going to New York with you.”
He sighed that very special sigh, the one that said he was exasperated that she couldn’t just be manipulated and stay manipulated like his Dear Old Dad had promised him people would. “Hughes already has my ticket. We’re flying out tonight.”
“Believe it or not, there are other ways of flying out that don’t rely on Detective Louis L. Hughes. If that’s really who he is.”
Jazz grunted. “The middle initial? Stands for Lincoln. How do I know? I called his precinct commander to make sure he was an actual cop. I’m not getting Fultoned again.”
They both fell silent. The Impressionist had suckered Jazz early and easily, claiming to be Jeff Fulton, the father of one of Billy Dent’s victims. Jazz had taken the man at his word and never bothered to check up on him. No one would ever know for sure, but Jazz was convinced that if he’d done some background snooping on Jeff Fulton, Ginny Davis and Helen Myerson and Irene Heller would still be alive.
“You can’t go on your own.”
“Why not?” he asked with infuriating aplomb, as though the question had already occurred to him and he was just letting her get it out of her system.
“You’ve never been in a town bigger than the Nod in your life. I’ve been to New York three times and grew up near Charlotte before we moved here.”
Jazz snorted and helped her up from the beanbag. “I’ll be with an NYPD detective. Somehow I think I’ll manage to avoid getting lost in the subway system. And even if I do get lost…” He dug into his pocket and proudly held up his new cell phone. After the disaster of the Impressionist, Connie, Howie, and even Sheriff Tanner had all chipped in to get Jazz his first cell.
“Shows what you know, smart guy: Cell phones don’t work in the subway. Are you taking Howie with you instead of me? Is that it? Two guys out in the big city?”
“Ha! Yeah, right. Are you kidding? After he got stabbed, his mother won’t let him outside of a ten-mile radius without a bodyguard and a Kevlar vest. I’d have to kidnap him to get him to New York….” Jazz drifted off, stroking his jaw. “Hmm… kidnap him…”
Coming from anyone else, it would be funny. A brief moment of levity. But Jazz couldn’t quite pull it off, and Connie told him so. “Yeah, I know what you’re going for there, but I just got a chill down my spine.”
“Really?” Jazz blinked. “That wasn’t funny?”
“It’s all in the delivery. And you don’t have what it takes to pull off that kind of joke.” She pecked him on the lips, not wanting to tell him that for a moment there she’d actually been in fear for Howie’s life. “Come on, let’s get going. It’s already freezing in here.”
“Does this mean you’ve given up trying to convince me you’re coming with me?”
Connie thought for a moment and answered very carefully, very precisely. “Yes. It means I have given up trying to convince you.”
But, she knew, that didn’t mean that she wasn’t going.
That night, Connie toyed with her dinner at the Hall house, her appetite somewhere on a future flight with Jazz and Detective Hughes.
“Something wrong, Conscience?” her father asked gently as she introduced her peas one by one to her untouched pile of mashed potatoes. Only her father ever used her full name. Everyone else, including her mother, called her Connie. Jerome Hall believed that names held power, and he wanted his children to have all the advantages such names conferred. And so Connie was Conscience and her younger brother—nicknamed Whiz—was Wisdom.
“I’m okay,” Connie lied without even thinking about it. “Just not hungry, I guess.”
“She was with her boyfriend today,” Whiz said, almost singsonging it. “I saw the text on her phone. They have a hideout somewhere.”
Connie bristled. Whiz was ten years old, and his favorite pastime these days, it seemed, was spying on his big sister. “You’re a little sneak,” she told him.
Ignoring Connie, Whiz shoveled a forkful of ham and potatoes into his mouth. “They text all the time,” he went on, “now that he has a cell phone. Jasper Dent,” Whiz added helpfully, in case anyone didn’t already know.
“Whiz, I know your sister is still seeing that Dent boy. I don’t need you tattling on her.”
“But, Dad—”
“A butt is something you sit on and something I’m gonna kick if you don’t mind me.”
Connie held back a smirk. Her father was all talk. There had never been a spanking in the Hall house that she could remember. It was actually annoying that her father was the kindest, wisest man Connie knew… except for that special and pernicious blind spot he had toward her boyfriend.
Sure, she understood that Jazz wasn’t the ideal boyfriend. At least, not from a parent’s perspective. Raised by a serial killer—and not just any serial killer, really: the serial killer—Jazz had his share of issues, but she didn’t think his father’s sins should be held against him. In any event, Jazz could have been the son of the local saint and Connie’s dad still would have been against the relationship. The black/white thing. Racial memories that hadn’t yet been purged. Jerome Hall just couldn’t abide seeing his daughter like that.
For her part, Connie wished someone would invent a drug that would make the world forget the past and get on with the future. Her love life was seriously being messed with, and she couldn’t take it any longer. And now she had before her a nearly impossible task: how to convince her parents to let her take the last few days of winter break and go to New York with Jazz. Jazz had said no way, but who was he to boss her around? She could make her own decisions, and this was the one she’d made. Jazz would have no choice but to deal with it. It’s not like it was against the law for her to go to New York. He couldn’t stop her.