Erickson laughed. “That explains a lot.”
“Anyway, I’d consider it a big personal favor if you could sort of run like hell on your way out of here.”
“For you? Anything.”
Jazz felt a pang of guilt. Erickson was a good cop, relatively new to the tiny town of Lobo’s Nod, transferring in right as the Impressionist had begun his string of Billy Dent–inspired murders. To his eternal shame, Jazz had suspected Erickson in the crimes and hadn’t been shy about letting the sheriff know it. After that, he figured he was the one who owed Erickson, but the deputy didn’t see it that way. As far as Erickson was concerned, Jazz’s deducing and rescuing the Impressionist’s next victim made him a hero.
“Thanks again for watching her.”
“Take care of yourself, Jasper.” Erickson opened the door and then burst through as if chased by demons, screaming in a hilariously high voice all the way to his squad car.
Gramma minced into the house, peering around. “He didn’t leave any little baby spiders, did he? They’re tiny mind-controllers, and they crawl into your ears while you’re asleep and rewire your brain until you don’t know who you are anymore.”
Ah, so that’s what had happened to Gramma…. Jazz sighed. She was getting worse. He’d always known she was getting worse, but somehow he’d convinced himself that her madness was manageable and harmless. Once upon a time not long ago, a social worker named Melissa Hoover had moved heaven and earth to get Jazz removed from Gramma’s house to a foster home. Jazz had resisted, and then Billy—after his escape from prison—had killed Melissa before she could submit her report, putting an end to that particular problem.
For now.
The fact of the matter was that soon enough Social Services would get around to assigning another caseworker to Jazz. He still had six months until his eighteenth birthday—they could still yank him from Gramma’s house. And Jazz was beginning to think that maybe Melissa had been right after all. Maybe he needed to be out of this environment. Away from his grandmother. Away from Lobo’s Nod, even. Away from all the memories of his childhood and of Billy.
Oh, who was he kidding? Billy was out there in the world somewhere. As long as Billy was free, Jazz could never escape his past. His father would, he knew, find him and contact him. Somehow. Some way. No matter how many cops and FBI agents were looking for him and surveilling Jazz, Billy would find a way.
Jazz settled Gramma in the parlor in front of the TV. The first channel he happened to see was local news. Doug Weathers—sleazebag reporter par excellence—was speaking to the camera: “—funeral of Janice Dent, wife of the notorious William Cornelius Dent, also known as the Artist, Green Jack, Hand-in-Glove, and many other aliases. The press was not invited, but we can tell you that the service was brief and sparsely attended—”
Jazz quickly flipped over to a shopping channel. Gramma found them hilarious.
In the kitchen, he started washing the dishes Gramma had used while he was gone. Erickson had stacked them neatly in the sink for him, a far cry from Gramma’s latest habit of sticking them in the broiler. As he soaped and sponged them, he gazed out the kitchen window at the backyard.
And the birdbath.
You know that old birdbath my momma’s got in her backyard?
Billy. In the visitation room at Wammaket State Penitentiary.
She’s got it oriented to a western exposure. See? It’s not gettin’ the morning light, and that’s what them birds want. It needs to be moved to the opposite edge of the lawn.
They’d argued. Jazz had felt like an idiot, arguing with his sociopathic mass-murdering father about a birdbath….
Just move the damn thing. Go when she’s asleep and just move it. You know, where that big ol’ sycamore sits.
And this, Jazz had said with incredulity, is the price of your help?
And it had been. And so Jazz had done as Billy had commanded. Even now, months later, he wasn’t sure exactly why. Billy had no way of enforcing the favor he’d asked, after all. But Jazz had felt honor bound to do it. As though not moving that damn birdbath would have proven that he was an uncaring, unfeeling sociopath like Dear Old Dad, would have cemented his fate. So he’d moved it, and that very night Billy had broken out of prison.
Soon after the escape and its horrifying aftermath, Jazz had come clean to G. William, confessing to the sheriff that he’d done a favor for Billy. “I don’t see how it could be connected,” he’d said. “But I also don’t see how it couldn’t be.”
The next day—much to Gramma’s deluded consternation—a team made up of local cops and FBI analysts had descended on Jazz’s backyard. They dug up the ground where the birdbath had rested for years. They dug up the ground under its current location. They took sightings with surveyors’ tools along multiple angles, checking to see who or what might have a clear line of sight to the birdbath.
And they had also examined the birdbath itself, ultimately discovering the truth that destroyed Jazz.
Four screws held part of the fountain casing in place. Three of them were old and tarnished, but one was newer, still shiny. A bomb expert was called in—just in case—and when the screws were removed and the mechanism disassembled, they found…
“A GPS transmitter,” G. William told Jazz later that night in the sheriff’s office, where he’d summoned Jazz. “Pretty good one, too. Accurate to five meters.”
“Or one backyard,” Jazz muttered.
“Well…” G. William clearly didn’t want to confirm it. The big man’s florid, misshapen nose—bashed out of normalcy after a lifetime of being a cop—went bright red as the rest of his face paled. “Well, yeah.”
“So I move the birdbath and somewhere in the world, Billy’s lunatic confederate sees the Bat-signal and realizes it’s time to spring his Lord and Master from Wammaket. Next thing you know, there are dead guards—”
“Corrections officers,” G. William emended.
“Corrections officers, right, and Billy is in the wind.”
Billy’s escape gnawed at him with rat teeth. Obviously, he would rather Dear Old Dad stay behind bars, leaving Wammaket only when zipped up into a nice little body bag all his own. But Melissa… and the deaths of the COs… ah, now those chewed at him with saber-tooth fangs. Was he responsible for their deaths? In a manner of speaking, sure—he had set in motion the events leading to Billy’s escape, and the COs and Melissa had died as a result of that escape. But Jazz himself hadn’t killed them. The corrections officers had died during a mini-riot that covered Billy as he broke out of the infirmary and made his way outside. And Melissa had died ugly, at Billy’s own hand. Even if Jazz had known that moving the birdbath would mean Billy’s escape, could he reasonably have assumed people would die in the process?
He didn’t know. That didn’t stop him from feeling guilt, though.
Unless it wasn’t really guilt.
They got all these emotions, Billy had told him once. Things like love and fear and compassion and regret. They got ’em deep inside, all twisty and tight like a knot of living snakes. They think they’re in control of themselves, but they really just do what the snakes tell them.
“They,” of course, were ordinary people. Sheep. Potential victims. Prospects was the word Billy used to describe them. And their emotions? Well, those things were useless for people like Billy, but it was important to know how to fake them.
Is that what I’m doing? Jazz wondered. I know I should feel guilty for getting those people killed. And Billy spent my whole life teaching me how to pretend to feel things I wasn’t really feeling. Am I just fooling myself? Am I just acting guilty because that’s how I’m supposed to act? What is it really supposed to feel like?
Maybe Connie would know. Maybe Connie could describe it to him. Help him understand.