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Jazz went for his binoculars. He owned three different pairs, each for different purposes, each a gift from his father, who had very specific reasons for giving them to his son.
He hated most things about Dear Old Dad, but what he hated most was that Dear Old Dad was pretty much always right.
He came across as a sort of parody of himself when you first met him, but underneath that BBQ-infused gut and floppy, dishwater-colored mustache was some serious law-enforcement genius, as Jazz knew from personal experience.
Jazz was afraid of two things in the world, and two things only. One of them was that people thought that his upbringing meant that he was cursed by nature, nurture, and predestination to be a serial killer like his father. The second thing… was that they were right.
Making a duplicate key from a wax impression was an extremely useful skill to have if you were the sort of person who liked invading other people’s homes and killing them.
He was replaying his memory of looking at Jane Doe’s mutilated hand in the morgue when sleep finally slipped up behind him, wrapped an arm around him, and carried him off, this time without dreams.
The more people there were around him, the less personal they became. The less real.
“I mean,” she went on, “I care about the people who are hurting there. The wars. The genocide. The famine. I care about that. But no more than people on any other continent who are suffering. And I don’t care about slavery, either. I know I’m supposed to. I know I’m supposed to be angry about it, like my dad is. But I care about the now, Jazz. The now and the coming. I don’t care about the past. Get it?”
“This is why I forgive, but I don’t forget. When you forget someone, the forgiveness doesn’t mean anything anymore.
Everyone was controlled by something, the Impressionist knew. By a spouse. A parent. A boss. A friend. By one’s own impulses, be they dark or light. Everyone was a puppet to something. Most people just couldn’t see the strings, is all. And so they didn’t believe they were puppets in the first place. The Impressionist could see his strings. He knew how long they were. He knew their tensile strength. How much slack they had. He knew who pulled them. But he wondered. He wondered about a puppet that can see its strings. He wondered… What if a puppet could cut its own strings? Physics and logic
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But what if that didn’t happen? What if a puppet could cut its own strings, and
