I Hunt Killers (18 page)

Erickson shoved Jazz against the wall and started reading him his rights. As much as Jazz didn’t like Erickson, he really couldn’t blame the deputy. Jazz
had
threatened the paramedic, and the other cops on the scene were reporting over their mics that the third-floor apartment’s door was kicked in, the window was open, and there was a dead woman on the floor. Jazz probably would have brought out the cuffs, too, if their positions had been flipped.

“Do you understand these rights?” Erickson asked as he finished. “Well?”

“Sure I do. Hey, do you always carry handcuffs when you’re off-duty?” Jazz taunted. “Your girlfriends like that?”

“Shut up,” Erickson said, frisking Jazz quickly but efficiently. Jazz stood mute as the deputy ran his hands up between his thighs. Howie would have had a smart-ass zinger ready; Jazz couldn’t think of a single one.

Erickson spun him around and Jazz made a point of looking at the deputy’s eyes. Blue.

Were they the same blue as the killer’s? Jazz couldn’t be sure. The lighting here in the alleyway was so different from the light in Ginny’s apartment. He could hear G. William now:
Eye color ain’t exactly evidence, Jazz.

“Take a picture,” Erickson growled as Jazz stared. “It’ll last longer.”

“Just happened to be in the area while off-duty, Erickson?” Jazz said sarcastically. “Like when you were the first one there to see Carla O’Donnelly and Helen Myerson?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at, kid. I live two blocks away.”

“What am I under arrest for?” Jazz asked. Behind Erickson, he could see the paramedics lifting Howie on a stretcher. An IV bag had already been hung. They were moving quickly, speaking in short, clipped sentences composed mostly of numbers and abbreviations. Howie’s stats. Howie’s meds. Howie’s life, reduced to medical jargon.

“Pretty much anything I can think of,” Erickson said. He gestured to another deputy, who had come back into the alleyway. “Take this kid to the station. I’ll be along soon.”

“What’s the charge?” the other deputy asked.

“Yeah, I was just wondering the same thing,” Jazz put in.

“Shut up,” Erickson said again. “The charge right now is suspicion of being a pain in my ass. I’ll put something formal down when I get to the station. For now, just get him out of my sight.”

“Wait!” Jazz shouted. “Look, don’t take me away yet. Let me go to the hospital with Howie.”

“Are you nuts? For all I know, you’re the one who killed him.”

“Killed him? He’s not—”

“Get him out of here,” Erickson said.

Jazz struggled as the deputy dragged him away. He heard the ambulance doors slam, and then the ambulance engine revved. The siren wailed. Good. If Howie were dead, then they wouldn’t be bothering with the siren.

Pulled out of the alley and into the parking lot of Ginny’s building, Jazz saw his night go from miserable to nightmarish. Standing there in the parking lot was none other than Doug Weathers. What was
he
doing there?

It took Weathers a moment to realize what was happening, but Jazz could see the calculation in his eyes as he began to understand what was unfolding before him: Jazz in cuffs. Police on the scene. Ambulance roaring past. It all equaled a major story to Weathers, a story that could easily be grafted to the Billy Dent story and once again have CNN and the networks pointing their satellites at Doug Weathers.

Weathers quickly fumbled in his pocket and brought out his cell phone, raising it to eye level. Oh, great. He was going to take a picture as soon as Jazz got close enough.

Jazz couldn’t let that happen.

“Hey, Jasper!” Weathers called out, naked glee in his voice. “Smile!”

Before Weathers could do anything, Jazz dropped his head and charged, breaking free from the deputy. His hands were cuffed behind him, so he collided with Weathers, his shoulder digging into the reporter’s gut, knocking him off-kilter and sending the cell phone to the ground. The deputy shouted out from behind him, but Jazz just barreled ahead; Weathers fell backward and landed on his butt. Jazz staggered to one side, stepping on the cell phone with a satisfying
crack
.

Just to be sure, he ground his foot down, hard. Plastic crunched.

“Hey!” Weathers shouted, jumping up. “Hey! You can’t do that!”

The deputy grabbed Jazz and pulled him away. The phone looked like someone had stepped on an enormous, high-tech cockroach, its wiry guts shooting out from the broken case.

“You son of a—!” Weathers got up in Jazz’s face. “You just destroyed private property, kid. I’m gonna sue you. I’m gonna have you arrested for malicious—”

“Already arrested,” Jazz said calmly. “And hey, you can’t sue me for being clumsy.”

“Clumsy!” Weathers’s eyes went so wide that Jazz wondered if the man’s sockets could hold them in. “Clumsy! You charged me.”

“Nah, I tripped, man. I’m such a klutz. Sorry. I’ll buy you a new cell.”

Weathers lunged for Jazz, who tried to sidestep but found himself stuck between the reporter and the deputy. Jazz grunted as Weathers landed a weak blow on his shoulder.

“You gonna arrest this guy for battery?” Jazz asked the deputy.

“Oh, jeez,” the deputy muttered as Weathers flailed again. This time, all three of them went down in a heap. Jazz winced as he landed on his side.

“Clumsy!” Weathers ranted. “I’ll clumsy you, you little—”

And then Erickson came running up, shouting. He waded into the fray, pulling Weathers off of Jazz, pushing Jazz to one side to free up the other deputy. He moved with ruthless efficiency and quiet strength, easily shoving Weathers aside as if the man weighed no more than a bag of sugar. Jazz kicked and shimmied a little to make Erickson’s job tougher.

Suddenly, bright headlights stabbed at him. He couldn’t shield his eyes with his hands, so he had to close them instead, sinking into the bright red world behind his eyelids. The car stopped nearby; a door opened.

A voice said, “What the hell is going on here?”

Jazz had never been so glad to hear G. William’s voice.

Jazz’s wrists still hurt a half hour later at the hospital—Erickson had put the cuffs on way too tight. With the cuffs off now, he sat in the waiting room at Lobo’s Nod General Hospital, alternating between wrists, rubbing them back to life.

G. William had immediately demanded a report from Erickson, who ran down what he knew, including that Howie was on his way to the hospital. G. William had taken in the scene, including a beyond-irate Doug Weathers, and ordered Erickson to secure the area while he took Jazz to the hospital.

Jazz spoke little to G. William on the way to the hospital. A part of him—some intuitive, quiet part—wanted to warn G. William not to trust Erickson with the crime scene. But the larger part of him was worried about Howie. He was afraid that getting into an argument with the sheriff would delay his getting to the hospital.

Howie was still in surgery when Jazz arrived.

Once G. William was done with the crime scene at Ginny’s, the sheriff would—Jazz knew—unload a world of hurt on Jazz for interfering. Worse yet, once Howie’s parents returned from filling out the insurance forms, they were going to unload their own particular brand of hurt on him. Howie’s mom had never approved of her son hanging out with Jazz, and she would never, ever let him forget this, even if Howie lived.

The door whispered open and Connie ran in, out of breath, her braids flying behind her. She launched herself into Jazz’s arms as he rose from his chair. “What happened? Are you okay? Is Howie okay? What
happened
?” She’d been halfway to Tynan Ridge when Jazz, borrowing G. William’s cell for a moment, had texted her to tell her to get to the hospital.

He gave her a truncated version of events: Ginny, the killer, Howie. “Looks like he was cut when he intercepted the guy in the alley,” Jazz finished, “and then—”

“Ginny? Ginny’s dead?” Connie went weak in his arms and it took all his strength to keep her from collapsing to the floor and guide her to the chair he’d just abandoned. He maneuvered her into it.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “It was—”

Connie started sobbing; heaving, violent sobs that wracked her body. Jazz stood before her, baffled, unsure what to do. In movies and books, the man always puts his arms around the crying woman, but he’d never understood what that was supposed to accomplish, and he couldn’t see it now, either.

Still, it usually worked, so he bent over and folded Connie into his embrace, where her crying became muffled, the rhythm of it a strange and sour chorus to the beating of his heart.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, feeling like an idiot for saying it. It would not be okay. It would most emphatically
not
be okay. Ginny was dead. Howie was in surgery. Worst of all, the killer was still at large. It was the exact
opposite
of okay.

Just then, the door hissed again, in that peculiar sibilance reserved for hospital doors. Howie’s parents stumbled into the waiting room as though they’d both been shot. Mr. Gersten’s face was as ashen as Howie’s had been in the alleyway; Jazz couldn’t see Mrs. Gersten’s face, which was buried against her husband’s shoulder.

“Should we—” Connie started, then stopped herself, remembering, no doubt, that Howie’s parents had never liked Jazz much to begin with.

The Gerstens made their way to a sofa and collapsed onto it like some bizarre conjoined twins. Overhead, a voice said, “Dr. McDowell to Oncology. Dr. McDowell, Oncology,” and when it went away, the air was populated only with the stereo effect of two people weeping.

“What if he doesn’t…” Mrs. Gersten said.

“Shh. He will. He’s strong,” her husband answered in what Jazz thought was the least convincing tone of voice in history.

“He’s
not
strong!” she yelled. “He’s the
opposite
of strong! He can’t even—” And then she lost all her words and just wept and wept.

Jazz forced himself not to look away, and Mr. Gersten met his eyes. A moment passed between them, as if they were respecting each other and their strangely male, stoic roles in this drama, but then Mr. Gersten broke down, too, and tears streamed down his face.

“And now it happens.…” Jazz murmured, figuring that this would be the moment where Mr. Gersten would come over and abuse him, verbally at the very least, but physically would be completely understandable. But the Gerstens didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t glare, not even when Mrs. Gersten finally looked up from her husband’s shoulder to reveal eyes bloodshot like a road map.

Relatively sure he wouldn’t be assaulted, Jazz steered Connie to a largish chair and they both settled into it. “You ready to hear what happened?” he asked in a soft voice that would not cut through the churchlike quiet of the waiting room.

Connie wiped her eyes and nodded.

“This isn’t going to be easy to hear,” Jazz told her, already editing events in his mind; Connie didn’t need to know all of it. “We remembered Ginny’s real name was Virginia, making her a perfect match for the next victim,” Jazz started, and then told her what had happened after that, leaving out the most gruesome details of Ginny’s death and his own complicated reaction to it.

Time in the waiting room had no real meaning; even though Jazz was sure he must have spoken to Connie for hours, he was convinced no time had passed at all. Eventually, though, a doctor emerged through a different whispering, hissing door and approached the Gerstens.

“Mr. and Mrs. Gersten? I’m Dr. Mogelof. I’m the trauma surgeon who saw your son.”

Jazz felt Connie stiffen next to him, but the doctor’s body language and tone of voice told Jazz everything he needed to know even before she said it: “Your son came through surgery much, much better than we would have expected. Given his condition and the amount of trauma, he’s really in phenomenal shape. I think—”

She got no further. Mrs. Gersten collapsed against her husband, her tears now of joy. Mr. Gersten pumped the doctor’s hand enthusiastically, and the surgeon’s reserve cracked into a broad and relieved smile.

“He’s in recovery right now and he needs to be alone while he sleeps, but he’s going to be okay. He’s going to live.”

Connie sighed with relief as the Gerstens sank into the couch again. For Jazz, it was as though he’d been trapped underwater in a frozen lake, frantically swimming back and forth, pounding on the thick ice above, looking for a break, for a hole. Able to see the sunlight filtering through the ice, able to see the open air, but unable to breathe it, the air in his lungs already run out, his life measured not even in seconds, but in instants of no determinate length. When suddenly—just as the black of the water and the black of his own death had wrapped their tendrils around him and threatened to squeeze the last bits of life out of him—his questing hands found a break above and he launched himself through it and opened his mouth to the sweet, sweet—

Jazz dropped into a hard, sudden sleep in Connie’s arms.