CHAPTER 58
Someone had propped open the front door to the building tagged with her name, so Connie was able to go right in.
She had three clues to Mr. Auto-Tune already. She had a bell. A gun. She had Eliot Ness.
Somewhere in this building, there were more clues. There had to be.
Out of the cold rain, she paused for a moment to shake off the chill. A dim overhead light barely illuminated the entryway.
Now, before you go chasing waterfalls, do something smart.
She composed a quick text to Howie, sending him the address of the building. As an afterthought, she also included bell, guns, Eliot Ness? just in case it meant anything to him. She resisted the urge to send the same text to Jazz. With any luck, she would tell him all of this and more in person soon enough.
Exploring for any sort of hint as to what to do next, she noticed that there was a missing mailbox on the wall—between the little doors for 2A and 2C, there was a gap. The mailbox door had been ripped off, the space filled with trash.
No mailbox meant no one living in that apartment. Right? And what better place to hide the next clue than in an abandoned apartment.
She heaved her duffel up a flight of stairs that smelled of urine and stale beer. Something crunched underfoot at one point and it took all her willpower not to look down. She didn’t want to see. Fortunately, the lighting in the stairwell was so bad that she wouldn’t have been able to tell what it was, anyway.
The second floor was just as poorly lit. Her pounding heart warned her away, but she told herself she’d come this far. She could check out 2B and then get the hell out of here.
TV shows echoed in the hall from 2A as she walked past.
The door to 2B was closed. She turned the knob and it moved freely. Then she jerked away, thinking twice. She should knock first. Just in case.
But there could be squatters in there. Homeless people. Drug dealers.
She knocked anyway.
To her surprise, the door opened right away, and Connie’s breath fled from her.
“Well now,” Billy Dent drawled, “ain’t you just the sweetest piece of chocolate I ever seen.”
Connie didn’t even have time to gasp, much less scream.
Part Five
Game Over
CHAPTER 59
Jazz kicked off his shoes and stuck the tongue of one of them in his mouth. He needed something to bite down on as he peeled off his jeans.
His blood had matted around the wound, so pulling off his pants tugged the flesh, stretching it around the wound and causing more blood to well up. Red spots danced and capered before his eyes; he bit down hard, groaning into his own clenched teeth.
After a wave of dizziness and nausea passed—and then another… and another—he used the bright screen of his phone to examine his leg in the dark.
The bullet hole itself was almost comically small and nearly perfectly round. Let’s hear it for small calibers, he thought.
There was nothing small about the pain, though. Or the blood.
He examined his thigh carefully, probing with his fingers where he couldn’t see.
No exit wound.
The bullet was still in there.
I have to be ready…. Hat could come back. He could come back and unlock the door and shoot me dead this time….
He stripped off his shirt and tied it tightly around his thigh, covering the wound. It would have to do as a bandage for now.
Have to be ready…
He leaned against the door and managed to work himself to a standing position. He found that he could hold the slightest bit of weight on his left leg if he only used his heel, so he limped around that way, gasping a little each time that left foot touched the ground.
Hat wasn’t an idiot. For all his disinterest in Billy (and Jazz had never imagined the day when he would meet a serial killer who wasn’t afraid of Billy—what did it mean?), Hat had allowed Billy to control him for purposes of the game. And Billy had done so, willingly. Billy didn’t truck with morons. Thus and so: Hat wasn’t stupid.
Which meant that there would be absolutely nothing on Hat’s or Dog’s workbench that could help Jazz escape or signal for rescue. Hat wouldn’t have locked him in here if he’d thought for a moment that Jazz could get out. Still…
Gotta make the effort. What else am I going to go? Put my head down for a nap and just die of apathy?
“That’s not how a Crow dies,” Jazz said for no particular reason.
He used the phone’s light to make his way to Hat’s workbench. The eyeballs in the jar stared at him, bobbing gently.
Hat’s workbench also had every sort of cutting, gouging, and slicing implement known to man. It had different varieties of tape. It had ropes, and cloth for gags. A grapefruit spoon (I knew it). It had—in a drawer—a collection of pins, buttons, and bits of cloth that Jazz knew had come from Hat’s victims.
His trophies. Stuff that wouldn’t necessarily be missed. Or that could be explained away.
Billy would have… not liked but rather approved of Hat. Jazz realized now that his father had sent Hat here specifically to kill Dog. Kill him in the storage unit and leave him here. It would take months if not years for someone to find him, along with the evidence tying Belsamo and Belsamo alone to the Hat-Dog murders. The gunshot was tough to explain, of course, but he was sure that hadn’t been intended. Hat’s original plan had probably involved knocking Dog out and injecting him with something that would simulate a heart attack. Then leave him with the evidence. When he’d shot Morales, though, the plan had changed. And Hat—for all his bluster and claims to filling the Grand Canyon with the dead—didn’t have the creativity to roll with the punches.
Or maybe he just didn’t care in this instance. Billy certainly saw something in Hat, and that was enough to spike Jazz’s concern and respect for Duncan Hershey.
Billy played favorites. Or maybe he just got bored of the game. Either one makes sense.
Jazz moved slowly to the other workbench. Dog’s tools were lined up neatly and precisely. His murders may have been, as Hat put it, sloppy, but his workspace, like his apartment, was pristine.
The two benches were nearly identical. Of course. In Monopoly, each player begins with the same amount of money. So Billy ruled on what tools and toys each player got at the beginning. And it guaranteed that the cops would believe it was one guy, since the brand of tape, the type of rope, the kind of blade would always be the same. Diabolical and almost admirable. In that oh-so-special sociopathic way Billy had.
A job worth doin’s a job worth doin’ well, Jasper.
There were bottles of detergent, bleach, and filtered water stacked in a corner. Jazz figured the water would keep him alive for a couple of weeks, but after that, starvation would kill him quite handily.
Assuming Hat doesn’t come back. Assuming I don’t die of blood loss. Or some kind of infection.
Leaning against the bench, Jazz winced and gasped at a new bolt of pain from his leg. He thought he might be able to get the bullet out. There was a chance. The fact that he was still thinking was a good sign. The fact that he could still breathe on his own. He wasn’t in shock after all. He was just stunned by what had happened, ramped up on insane amounts of adrenaline. And now he was coming down.