“Normal?” Samantha’s laugh was short and harsh. “Normal. Not a chance. I got the hell out of this house and this town as fast as I could, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t know how to be around normal people by that point. I’ve spent my whole life figuring it out. And once Billy got caught, suddenly it was like I had to start all over again.”
Howie saw his chance; he took off his gloves and nabbed a wet, clean dish from Samantha’s hands, allowing his fingers to linger on hers for a moment. It was a good, subtle move—he’d seen it in a bunch of movies.
“What the hell are you doing?” Samantha asked.
“Taking this dish.”
“Why?”
He was still touching her. He realized he didn’t have a towel to dry the dish with. “Um.”
“Howie, you’re the same age as my nephew.”
“Actually, I’m six weeks older.”
She shook her head. “It’s not going to happen.”
“You say that now.”
“I do.”
“We’re both two lonely people,” Howie said seductively, “trapped in a world created by Billy Dent.”
Samantha howled with laughter. Howie figured that wasn’t a good sign.
CHAPTER 12
Jazz was surprised that he absolutely hated New York City.
No, that wasn’t quite accurate. Being from a small town like Lobo’s Nod, it was no surprise that he hated New York. What really surprised him was how much he hated it. He didn’t dislike New York with the simple diffidence of a small-town kid or the tragic ignorance of a yokel—he loathed it with the entirety of what he hoped was his soul.
The streets—cramped with cars and buses; with all the traffic, it took them almost two hours to get from the airport to some place called Red Hook, which looked like every bad ’hood in every action movie Jazz had ever seen.
The buildings—either run-down to the point of ruin or so overwrought that he felt like they’d been built not to serve any purpose but rather just to prove a point.
The smell—Jazz figured even New Yorkers had to hate the garbage and urine smells, but it wasn’t just that. The city managed to ruin even the good smells; at one point, while walking from the cab to the hotel, Jazz had smelled the most delightful bread baking, but the smell vanished as quickly as it teased his nose, and no matter where he looked or how much he tried, he couldn’t recapture it. He had never realized how odorless Lobo’s Nod was. Other than the occasional car exhaust, the town smelled utterly neutral.
The noise—it was perpetual.
But the worst thing about the city, the thing that poleaxed him, the thing Hughes had warned him about, the thing he should have been prepared for and yet—he acknowledged—never could have been prepared for…
The people.
Look at ’em all, Jasper, Billy whispered in his head.
So… many… people.
Look at ’em. You could take one. Easy. Or more than one. As many as you want, really. There’s so many, it’s not like anyone would miss one. Couple thousand go missing every year in this country—man, woman, and child alike. So many. Most of ’em, no one knows. No one cares. It’s like grabbin’ up blades of grass in the park. One more, one less. Makes no difference.
“You all right?” Hughes asked suddenly, and Jazz whipped around like a kid caught unscrambling the adult channels.
“I’m fine,” Jazz said. It came out weak and unconvincing.
“He’s overwhelmed,” Connie jumped in, grabbing his hand. “He’ll be fine.”
Connie. She’d been here before for short trips and seemed to be in love with New York already. She had managed to grab an earlier flight, a direct one, beating Hughes and him to JFK. An important lesson for Jazz: Connie wouldn’t stay put just because he said so.
There’s ways to change that, Jasper. Ways to make her listen. And the best part is, you know them ways already. You know them real well….
“I’m fine,” Jazz said again, and tightened his grip on Connie’s hand as Hughes led them into the hotel.
Movies and TV shows had prepared Jazz for two kinds of big-city hotels. There were the ostentatious, gilded palaces for the wealthy, and the rank, decrepit hovels for the itinerants and the junkies and the hookers. So he was mildly disappointed to find himself ensconced in neither—the hotel the NYPD had chosen for him was a bog-standard Holiday Inn that wouldn’t have looked out of place along the highway that ran past and beyond Lobo’s Nod.
“You okay?” Connie whispered as they waited for Hughes to check them in.
“Yeah.”
“You’ve been squeezing my hand like it’s putty.”
“Sorry.” He released her. “Trying to find amusement in our setting.”
She looked around. “Yeah, doesn’t feel very New York, does it?”
Maybe that was a good thing.
Hughes approached them, brandishing two keycards. He hesitated for a moment and sized them up. “How old are you guys again?”
“Seventeen,” Connie answered.
The detective clucked his tongue, then shrugged. “I only have the one room. Use protection.” He handed over the cards and left them to find the room and get settled in while he attended to some other business, promising to return by lunchtime to get started on the case.
As Hughes retreated, Jazz stared slack-jawed at Connie, well and truly shocked by something not involving blood for the first time in a long time. “Can you believe that? He’s just gonna let us stay in the same—”
“We’re practically adults,” Connie said with an air of urbane sophistication. “What did you think he was going to do—call our parents? It’s New York. It’s a whole different world.” She waved her card in the air and led him off to the elevator.
The room had two beds. Jazz wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He had stayed in hotels only as a child, on occasional “road trips” with Billy. Billy never flew anywhere, if he could help it. Too many security checks. Too many people checkin’ your ID. Too much damn nosiness, Jasper. So they had driven to any number of places, usually so that Billy could impart some sort of lesson to his son. Hands-on experience, Billy called it, turning Jazz into his assistant and his accomplice on more than one occasion.
Those hotels had usually been out-of-the-way rattraps, the sheets musty, the bathtubs stained even before Billy showered off the grime and the blood of his most recent prospect. This place was pleasant, if boring. There was a large framed photo of the Statue of Liberty over the bed.
“Why would you want to look at a picture of the Statue of Liberty when you’re in New York?” Connie demanded. “You can go see the real thing.”
Jazz shrugged and poked his head into the bathroom, half expecting to see his father emerging from the shower, dripping wet and grinning.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Connie said, “how pissed are you at me?”
“I don’t have time to be pissed at you,” Jazz said, more curtly than he’d intended. “I need to help the NYPD and then get the hell out of this city.”
“Settle down, big guy. You’ve seen a chunk of Brooklyn from the cab and a grand total of two whole blocks on your feet. Give it a chance before you hate it.”
“It’s not that.” He pushed away her comforting hands, forcing himself to do it gently. “This place isn’t good for me. It’s a hunting ground. It’s a… It’s a prospecting gold mine.”
“You’re not a killer,” she told him, grabbing a hand and imprisoning it with both of hers, then holding it to her chest. “Listen to me: You’re not a killer. It doesn’t matter what this place is.”
He stared at the Statue of Liberty. Flicked his eyes to the lamp on the nightstand between the two beds. Anything to avoid looking at Connie. “Remember how I told you once that the problem with people is that when there’s so many of them, they stop being special?” She nodded. “Well, take a look around and do the math.”
You could slaughter a thousand of them and never be caught, Jasper, m’boy. You could do all those things I taught you. You could—
Connie dragged him into the middle of the room. “You know what? Ten out of ten Lobo’s Nod boys would be splitting their pants right now at the thought of being unsupervised in a hotel room with me. That’s not ego talking—I saw that on someone’s Facebook page. So stop thinking about killing people and start thinking about the fact that we’ve got a couple of hours before Hughes comes back and you have to go to work.” She arched an eyebrow for added effect.
She was trying to distract him. Trying to break the cords of his inherited fears that bound him. He loved her for it.
He pitied her for it. Those cords, he knew, could be loosened and rearranged, but they could never be severed.
“Hughes said to use protection,” he said, smiling weakly. “We don’t have any.”
“We’re not going that far,” she said, kissing him hard and sure on the lips. “We’re just gonna get real close and mess up one of the beds, is all.”
He surrendered to her.