And so warm

So warm

like that

Jazz woke up, trembling, but not because of the cold. His grandmother’s old house was drafty and leaked like a torpedoed tugboat, but the space heater next to the bed kept him plenty warm.

He trembled from the dream. From what it meant. Or didn’t mean. Or could mean.

He didn’t know. Days like this—nights like this, he checked himself—he felt like he didn’t know anything. Not a single thing in the whole wide world.

The new dream…

It was sex.

Duh.

Obviously.

In the old dream—the dream which now seemed to be relegated to special guest appearances as the new one took over the starring role, yee-haw!—he had been hurting someone. Cutting someone with a knife. And the question for him then had been this: Unless I’ve actually cut someone with a knife before, how could I know what it feels like? How could I dream it so… so… keenly?

Jazz was a virgin. Despite what Billy chose to believe, Jazz had never had sex. He was terrified by the possibility and the probability of it.

He longed for it, too, of course. He was, after all, seventeen years old and in good health. He had hormones pumping through his bloodstream like any other seventeen-year-old. Sometimes he wanted sex so bad that he thought he would pass out from the strain of desire. He was dizzy with wanting it.

But he was afraid of what it could lead to. Yes, there were serial killers out there who had no sexual component to their depredations, but they were few and far between, so rare as to be almost nonexistent. And none of them had been programmed since birth by William Cornelius “Billy” Dent.

Jazz couldn’t remember much of his childhood. Who knew what time bombs Billy had planted deep down in his subconscious?

Yeah, it was better to avoid sex. No matter how much he wanted it. No matter how smoking-hot his girlfriend was.

Would that last forever? Or just until the raging flush of teen hormones abated in his bloodstream? He had no idea. Didn’t even want to speculate. But priests managed to live lifetimes without sex, right?

Well, some of them managed.

Poor Connie. She pretended like she didn’t mind missing out on sex, but especially in the last couple of months, it had become obvious to Jazz that she was ready—eager, even—to take things to the next level. And he just couldn’t do it.

He had to be strong. For both of them.

Rolling out of bed, he crept down the stairs. There was a bathroom upstairs, but it shared a wall with Gramma’s room, and flushing the toilet would wake her up.

Washing his hands in the sink, he caught his bare torso in the mirror, and there it was: I HUNT KILLERS, tattooed in a V along his collarbone in those tall, black Gothic letters. It was tattooed backward so that he could read it in the mirror.

That’s what I thought I was. A stalker of stalkers. A predator preying on predators.

Sounded good. In theory. But the reality was this: He was just a messed-up kid living in a little town called Lobo’s Nod. What could he do? Hop on a plane to New York at a moment’s notice? Right. Who would watch Gramma? Who would take care of her and keep her deteriorating mental state a secret if he went off gallivanting to the big city to… do what? Sit in a squad room somewhere and regale a bunch of cops with tales of growing up under Billy’s thumb? Would that really accomplish anything?

He turned this way and that in the mirror. In addition to his own tattoo, he also had four others: a massive pistol-packin’ Yosemite Sam on his back, a stylized CP3 (for basketballer Chris Paul) on one shoulder, a string of Korean characters around his right biceps, and the latest addition: a flaming basketball on the other shoulder. These weren’t really his tats—they were just renting space on his body. Howie’s hemophilia prohibited him from getting tattoos, so Jazz had volunteered his body as Howie’s personal billboard. He had always felt that this gesture was a point in his favor, something a true sociopath would never do. Now he wasn’t so sure. Offering up his body like that? Permanently marring it without even really thinking about it? Was that the height of friendship or the height of lunacy?

He dried his hands and sneaked back upstairs without waking Gramma.

He’d gotten lucky with the Impressionist. Simple as that. The man had been obsessed with Billy, and that obsession bled over to Jazz. It would have been nearly impossible not to catch the Impressionist. The man had literally come knocking at Jazz’s front door.

I don’t hunt killers. I couldn’t save Ginny Davis. I couldn’t save Melissa Hoover. I almost couldn’t save myself. Who am I kidding?

The Impressionist had been taking pictures and video of Jazz while he’d been in Lobo’s Nod. Where he’d found the time between murdering Helen Myerson and Jazz’s drama teacher and the others, Jazz had no idea. But the cops had recovered the pictures and video from the killer’s cell phone when they’d arrested him. As soon as Jazz found out about them, he’d insisted on seeing them.

G. William, of course, had resisted. But Jazz was very persuasive. Natural gift for the progeny of a sociopath.

We’re the most convincing people in the world, Billy liked to say. Everyone wants to do us favors. Everyone wants to make us happy. Until they know what it really takes to make us happy. Then they tend to put up a fight. He grinned here. By then, it’s usually too late for the fighting. But I guess they think they gotta try.

So it had been a fait accompli—Jazz saw what his stalker had seen. Jazz outside the police station. On his way to the Coff-E-Shop. Hanging out with Howie. Holding hands with Connie on the way to play practice. A shot of his bedroom window at night, the light dimming.

“This is what it feels like,” Jazz had murmured, clicking through the photos on G. William’s computer.

“What what feels like?” the sheriff asked.

Jazz had paused before answering, “To be stalked.” But that was just the kind answer, the answer G. William could accept. And of course he accepted it because it came from Jazz and Jazz was the most convincing person in the world when he needed to be.

The truth—the real answer—was what he wanted to say but didn’t: This is what it feels like to be one of you. This is what it feels like to be vulnerable. And weak. And merely human.

This is what it feels like to be a prospect.

Now Jazz tossed and turned in bed. On his wall were photographs of the one hundred and twenty-three people Billy Dent had admitted to murdering. Plus a photo of his mother.

His own mother had been a prospect.

He drifted into that twilight space between wakefulness and sleep, that place where the world is plastic and malleable and unsure.

His own mother…

He groaned as sleep fled from him, and stretched to grab up his jeans from the floor where he’d left them. Pawed around until he found the pocket and the card within.

There was a gold embossed shield to the left, with the words CITY OF NEW YORK POLICE DETECTIVE. The name LOUIS L. HUGHES, with DETECTIVE beneath it, along with two phone numbers, a fax number, and an e-mail address.

Oh, hell. Jazz reached for the phone. If he was gonna do this, he might as well enjoy waking Hughes up in the middle of the night.