Blood of My Blood (36 page)

He brought her hand to his cheek, reveling in the sensation of her skin on his.

“I want to tell you something,” she whispered. “Something difficult. I don’t know how it will make you feel.”

He didn’t know if he was up to anything new, to any additional input. His brain, his heart, and his soul were all topped off. No more room for good or for bad. But he gave a lopsided shrug, telling her it was okay to continue.

“It’s about your grandmother.”

“I know she’s dead. My—Ugly J killed her.”

If Connie noted the stutter, she didn’t let on. “Yeah. Okay, so you know that. They think it was a potassium overdose.”

That would have sent her into hyperkalemic shock. Similar to lethal injection. Depending on when the doctors saw
her, they wouldn’t have even realized—she would have presented like a heart-attack patient. Jazz hoped it had been painless.

“They tried to save her. They worked really hard. And they even resuscitated her for a couple of minutes, but she was too old and too weak.”

“I see.”

“When she had those few minutes, she said something, Jazz.” Connie’s bottom lip trembled. “Do you want to know what it was?”

Did he? The better question was,
should he?

“Go ahead.”

“She said, ‘He’s a good boy.’ That’s all. ‘He’s a good boy.’ ”

Jazz expected tears but thought he had no more to give. And besides, Gramma wasn’t lucid on her best day. On her deathbed? She could have been talking about Jazz, sure. Or she could have been talking about Billy, Grampa, or the Easter Bunny.

She could have been talking about Jazz.

He squeezed Connie’s hand. “Thanks for telling me.”

How long they spent together, he couldn’t say. There was no clock in the room, and no one counted off the seconds.

They compared scars and bandages, prescriptions and doctor’s orders. They talked about how much school they’d missed and would continue to miss. They laughed at the absurdity of Howie lusting for Samantha, then laughed
harder at the idea of it actually happening. They avoided talk of the last week, speaking instead of their shared past and the future.

Eventually, it had to end; the door opened, and Connie’s father walked in.

“Sweetheart, it’s time,” he said.

Connie clutched Jazz’s hand even harder. “Not yet.” She held on, tight and resolute.

“I’m sorry, but now that he’s up, I have to speak to my client.”

Nodding with sad defeat, Connie leaned in as best she could and kissed him again. “Soon,” she whispered.

He wanted to believe her, but as she wheeled out, he couldn’t help thinking it was the last time they would ever be together. If the criminal justice system didn’t see to that, then her father would.

Mr. Hall gestured to the deputy. “You, too. Attorney-client.”

The deputy left. Jazz felt less safe, cuffed to the bed, at Mr. Hall’s mercy.

“A little surprised,” Jazz said defensively. “I thought for sure G. William would visit before you.”

“You’re not talking to any cops at all. You’re invoking your Fifth Amendment rights. That deputy they’ve stationed in here? Only here because you proved yourself so dangerous in New York. I fought like hell against that, and the judge says if you say anything to him at all that he’s under strict orders to summon a doctor immediately and have you
sedated so that you can’t incriminate yourself. That’s how serious this all is.”

Mr. Hall dragged over the chair Howie had used and sat down. “I want you to understand something,” he began. “In New York, I agreed to be your lawyer. That means I’m your lawyer forever. Even if you fire me, I still can’t act against you. Do you understand?”

Jazz nodded.

“Good. With that in mind, realize that you’ll need a criminal attorney at some point. It’s been years since my days in the public defender’s office, and that was in Georgia, not here or New York. You’ll need people who can act on your behalf in those two jurisdictions, and I’m not that guy. We still clear?”

Jazz nodded again.

“I’m part of your team until you don’t want me. I know, go figure. I never imagined myself in this position, defending you. But here I am. And right now, Jasper, I’m your best friend.”

“No.” Jazz shook his head fiercely, no matter how much it hurt. “Howie’s my best friend. Always.”

“Howie doesn’t have a law degree and a daughter saying, ‘Daddy, please help him.’ ” Mr. Hall took out his phone and thumbed through it. “Now, I’ve spoken to Howie, in my capacity as your attorney, and he tells me that you found some evidence. Something that implicates your parents and others.”

The book. Billy’s book.

“Yeah.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Yeah, we—”

Hall held up a hand. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. You broke the law when you dug up your grandfather, and technically I might have to tell the court where the fruit of that crime lies. Just tell me it’s safe.”

“It is.”

“Good.” Mr. Hall sighed. “Jasper, you broke a lot of laws. And not for the first time.”

Jazz knew it was true. He couldn’t even keep track of all the laws he’d broken, but he was sure someone, somewhere had kept a tally. His day in court would be long.

“But,” Mr. Hall went on, “I know that a good trial attorney could get a jury to look at what you’ve done, to look at your past, and probably get you a pretty decent sentence at the end of the day. Plead you down pretty low, even. You might never have to go to court, under those circumstances.”

That was about the best Jazz could hope for. The right jury—lots of mothers—would go easy on him. Still, with the sheer volume of charges against him, even “going easy” would add up.

“But with the evidence you’ve found… If it’s as good as Howie says it is, I’m pretty sure we can trade it for getting a slew of charges dropped or pleaded out. Or maybe some sort of probation.”

It took Jazz a moment to process what was being said. He wouldn’t get off scot-free, but the idea of keeping his freedom under
any
circumstances… That was more than he’d ever dreamed possible.

“Are you serious?” He half expected Mr. Hall to shout
Psych!
and chortle at Jazz’s cluelessness.

“New York is a political disaster right now. The evidence in the Hat-Dog case is severely compromised, and the DA wants the book closed on that. For good. They’re willing to give you immunity on the crimes you committed up to Oliver Belsamo’s death, in exchange for your testimony.”

Jazz pondered. That still left everything he’d done
after
Hat plugged Dog in the face. “What about the rest of the stuff I did in New York? Assaulting the cops? Everything else? And I probably broke some federal laws, too, when I fled across state lines.” He swallowed. “My parents.”

Mr. Hall spoke slowly. “We have testimony that what… happened to your mom was in self-defense. And as for Billy… Well, the knife that caused his wound was wiped clean when the police checked it. No prints. And Billy isn’t talking. There’s nothing concrete to implicate you, as long as you keep your damn mouth shut.”

Billy must have wiped the knife. Protecting his son to the last. It was so magnanimous and so twisted that Jazz couldn’t process it.

“You didn’t kill anyone,” Mr. Hall went on. “I’ve seen the crime-scene report of what happened in the storage unit, and it bears out your testimony that Duncan Hershey killed Oliver Belsamo and Agent Morales. They have you stone-cold on a whole passel of misdemeanors and things like breaking and entering, assault, but I bet we can get it all knocked down if you trade that evidence Howie’s hiding.”

“It seems too easy,” Jazz said doubtfully.

Mr. Hall leaned back in the chair, arms crossed over his chest. “It isn’t easy. It’s damn hard and you know it. That’s not what’s bothering you.”

“You don’t know what’s bothering me.”

“I’ve been around my share of defendants. I know exactly what’s bothering you. You feel guilty. Guilty about what you did and guilty about getting away with it.”

Jazz looked away.

“Do you think you deserve punishment, Jasper? Is that it?”

Did he? Was that it? He had done wrong. Much of it in the service of doing right, but did that really matter? He clenched his jaw, which tugged at the sutures in his face, spiking him with a moment of pain.

Pain.

Yes, pain meant life. But the symmetric property did not apply: Life did not mean pain.

“All right,” he said, turning back to Mr. Hall. “Let’s do it.”

“I thought you’d see it my way.”

“So, that’s New York. What about the feds and the stuff I did here in the Nod?”

“In exchange for your testimony against your father and mother, as well as producing information relevant to multiple unsolved serial killer cases, I can get a lot of that pleaded down to lesser charges. You’ll probably end up with probation.” Mr. Hall paused. “It’s going to be the mother of all probations, don’t get me wrong.”

“So I flip on the Crows, help the cops and the feds solve some old crimes…”

“Roll up some bad guys out there, resolve some lingering crimes committed by your parents…”

“And I get sent to my room without supper.”

“Repeatedly.”

“That’s the same deal Billy made,” Jazz said quietly. “He gives up information, he stays off death row. Like father, like son.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Mr. Hall said with a heat that surprised Jazz. “Your father murdered a great many people. And he made a deal not to die. You didn’t murder anyone. At worst, you assaulted people. And I’m not saying that’s not serious, but every last one of them is fine and will continue to be fine. You stole some things that can be replaced. You’ll get serious probation, but you’ll walk. Because at the end of the day, the good you’ve done has outweighed the bad.”

“That’s not the way the system works.”

“Today it is.” Mr. Hall actually cracked a smile. “Because you have a really good lawyer.”

Jazz drew in a deep breath that tested the work they’d done to stabilize his ribs. “So, I guess this is the part where you tell me that the price of you helping me out is staying away from your daughter.”

Mr. Hall stared at Jazz for a protracted moment that would have been unnerving and uncomfortable for anyone not the son of two Crows.

“I’m going to be brutally honest with you, Jasper. I don’t know where to go from here. The law stuff is almost simple compared to this. I don’t like my daughter with someone like
you, someone who seems magnetized to danger. But even before that, yeah, I never liked my daughter with a white kid.”

“I know.”

Mr. Hall seemed to be struggling, helpless in the claws of something he couldn’t explain. “It’s visceral. It’s not in my brain, Jasper. It’s in my gut. It’s history and it’s still haunting us and I don’t like it.”

“I can respect that.”

“You can’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it means to be black in this country, so you can never understand.”

They said nothing. Words ran through Jazz’s head, but they seemed impossible to form, to say. He couldn’t arrange them into anything that made sense.

So he just started talking.

“You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to be black. And I never will. But here’s the thing: Everyone’s different, right? And sure, there are common experiences, but everyone sees the world at least a
little
bit differently. Everyone filters it their own way. You know
your
black experience, and you know so much more than I’ll ever know, but you can’t know everyone’s experience. Because if you think people are the same, if you think our experiences are interchangeable, well… that’s almost thinking like Billy. We are all individuals. People are real. People matter. Each one of us matters, for our differences as much as for our similarities.”

Mr. Hall grunted. Jazz wasn’t sure if what he’d said made much sense or if it was even relevant, but he felt better for saying it. He couldn’t go through life classifying people. For him, at least, that way lay the madness of Billy Dent.

“I’ve wondered my whole life what it would take,” Mr. Hall mused, “what it would take for us as a people, as a society, to become truly equal. To reconcile the sins of the past.”

“I don’t think you can reconcile the sins of the past.”

“Exactly.”

Jazz pondered. “Forgive, maybe. Forget, maybe.”

When you forget someone
, Connie had told him once,
the forgiveness doesn’t mean anything anymore
.

“I can’t do either of them,” Mr. Hall admitted. “But here’s one thing I know for certain. For
certain
. I look at you and I look at Connie, and I see how much she cares for you, and now I see how much you care for her. And I think maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. It’s not about us as a people. Or as a society. It’s about us as individuals. One white boy and one black girl at a time. And maybe someday we—all of us—don’t forgive or forget, but maybe we just get a little better, and you folks get a little more tolerant and maybe I get a little less angry, and maybe we all don’t think about it as often. Does that make sense?”

“Makes sense to me. Then again, I grew up with two lunatics in the house.”