by Robert Pobi
No shit, genius.
He rifled the Coke bottle across the room and it hit the wall, bounced back, and smashed on the concrete, skittering shards across the floor. He hated this. The being here, the dealing with his father, the man with the hunting knife and his nightmare skill set.
And they were all connected. Somehow sewn together with a thread so fine that the light wasn’t even hitting it.
Finding it was impossible, unless you ran into it. And when you did, chances were it was at neck height, and maybe you’d feel a slight pinch, then you’d hear your head hit the floor and get a last-second glimpse of your body stumbling forward, then bumping into something and going over in a clumsy crash of arms and legs that would twitch because they no longer had the software to tell them to stop and then the lights would go out and—
“STOP IT!” Jake roared, the words coming up like black hot vomit from his heroin days. He forced a few deep breaths down into his belly where they would do the most good.
It’s there.
Look for it.
I am.
No, you’re not.
Would you fucking stop it!
Sure. As soon as you figure it out. Witch doctor, my ass.
I’ve always said that.
That was when you were good at seeing things.
I can do this. It will take a little time.
You don’t have time. He’s coming.
Who?
Him.
Him, who?
Him.
Jake pinched the bridge of his nose and decided that it was time to get to bed. It was almost two a.m. He wasn’t much of a sleeper, in fact he never had been, but today, with the defibrillator misfiring like a gremlin-inhabited fuel pump, he needed to give the old corpus a little downtime. Mostly because tomorrow promised to be another rock-’em-sock-’em robots day. He turned off the lights and closed the door.
Outside, the wind was stronger and the swells were breaking before they hit the shore now, ugly white slashes against the black ocean, like blisters rupturing. The moon was squelched somewhere behind the bank of clouds and for the first time he realized how fast the weather was changing now, like watching time-lapse photography.
Jake came in the front door and flipped on a few lights. The Nakashima console lit up, the bright pin spot illuminating the sculpture of the sphere—a polyhedron, his father had once yelled at him—in stark relief. His old man had built it—no, built was the wrong word—engineered was more accurate. Out in the studio one night with a hundred-plus stainless-steel speargun shafts and a determination to learn how to TIG weld. Thousands of tiny transepts that terminated in triangles that connected into a perfect sphere. It looked like a NASA engineering model, sitting forgotten under the lone spotlight, a shrine to his father’s only experiment in three-dimensional art. He ran his finger over the frame and pulled up a line of fuzzy, greasy dust. The piece almost vibrated at his touch, it had lived alone for so long.
Kay had done a nice job with the place, even going so far as to lay some coasters out on the coffee table. Jake laughed at the gesture; the surface of the table was pitted with cigarette burns and drink circles that stared up like empty sockets. The big Chuck Close portrait with the cut-out eyes leaned against his mother’s Steinway like some Oedipal warning.
Something about the painting needled Jake, and he hated that he couldn’t nail it down with any sort of precision. He wanted to write it off as stress but the inability to put things together was becoming much too familiar to him lately and he was worried that it was some sort of permanent handicap. He hated not being able to see. The only event he could equate to it would be Kay blowing out her hearing and having to stare at her cello afterward. He stood above the sunken living room and took in the vandalized canvas.
Chuck Close was forced to reinvent his approach to painting after an unlucky roll of the genetic dice left him with diminished motor skills. His earlier photorealistic technique was replaced by pixilated portraits he painted with small blocks of color; Close had literally reinvented himself by writing new code.
Jacob Coleridge considered Chuck Close one of the truest American painters in history. And that meant something coming from a man known for hating everything. Even his own family.
Yet he had sliced the eyes out of the painting.
Hardly defending the museum with an axe.
Jake turned off the lights and headed upstairs into the quiet dark.
40
Jake padded softly down the hallway, tiptoeing past his old room—Jeremy’s for now—to the master bedroom. The door was open and Kay was sitting cross-legged on the bed, a massive atlas open on her lap.
“Hey, baby,” she said as she looked up from the tome.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping.” Jake pulled the door half closed.
She snickered. “Yeah. Sure. A cop parked out front and a hurricane coming like some kind of judgment and you expect me to be dead to the world.”
He smiled. “Yeah, I do.”
She closed up the book and eased it over the side of the bed, quietly lowering it to the floor. “If what the radio is saying is true, you wouldn’t believe how big Dylan is.” She pointed at the atlas. “Three whole inches. That’s bigger than most countries, pal.” Kay turned off the light and the room went quickly gray.
The nightlight in the hallway threw a soft glow into the room and his eyes quickly adjusted to the near-dark. He sat down on the mattress to pull off his boots.
It was then that he realized that she had cleared the barricade and made a path to the bed. Even in the gloom he could see that she had cleaned out the old clothes and food wrappers. The sheets were tight over the bed, unwrinkled, and smelled like fabric softener. The room smelled like Pledge. She had done a lot without him and a tinge of guilt made him wish he had never let her come here. “Sorry I’m so late.”
“Did the day end all right?”
What could he say to that? Sure, until I kicked in a wall. At the very least I’ll get billed four grand to repair it, at the worst charged with vandalism and destruction of private property. “No glitches. Not really.” His boot thudded into the carpet. “What did you guys do?”
Kay giggled. “Tonight was a hoot. I had to explain where the bread went when you put it in the toaster and where the toast came from. Jeremy couldn’t figure it out. It was wonderful.”
Jake laughed, and his other boot hit the floor. “Man, I know how he feels.”
“Jake?”
He knew what she wanted to talk to him about. “The man in the floor?”
“I don’t like it.”
Jake wanted to agree with her, to tell her that it made him uneasy, too, like some sort of a bad meal rumbling around in the plumbing. But he didn’t. “He come back?”
“Tonight, when I put him down—”
Jake rolled his eyes. Why did she have to put it like that?
“—he asked if the man in the floor was going to visit him when he was sleeping.”
Jake felt his skin tighten and steadied himself in preparation for a jolt in the engine room. All of the moisture had leeched out of him in one great gust, and his bones were rasping against the suede underbelly of his hide. He turned toward her shadow, now visible in the dark.
“He said that the man in the floor—who he keeps calling Bud—was disappointed in us.” She swallowed. “He swears that the man in the floor is not an imaginary friend. I’m afraid that he’s nuts.”
Jake heard an unvoiced accusation in her tone. After all, the mental illness seemed to be firmly entrenched in his side of the DNA. He stood up and went to the window. The weak glow of the moon was completely gone now and the ocean was putting on its war paint in earnest. The waves were well past small-craft-warning status. “Disappointed? That’s not the word of a three-year-old. He’s trying it out. He’s not nuts. Maybe it’s some kind of coping mechanism.”
“Coping mechanism for what? What’s wrong in Jeremy’s life? You work a lot but so what? So do
other fathers. My hours are weird. But he gets time with both of us. Quality time. He’s well behaved and even if the other parents down at the daycare think we’re freaks, we’re loving decent people who do a pretty fucking good job of raising our son.” The accusatory tone was gone, and had been replaced by a defensive one. “We’ve built something great here.”
The windows rattled a little—soft, almost inaudible, squeaks. “I don’t know, baby. Maybe he needs more friends.”
“More friends? I had to cancel three play dates and a birthday party to come out here for two days. He doesn’t need more friends.”
“Maybe he’s tired. I know how I get when I’m tired.” Jake let something that he had never shared with Kay come out. “After my mother was murdered, she used to visit me. You know I don’t believe in ghosts or the afterlife or any of that other religious bullshit. So I know it wasn’t one of those things—I knew it wasn’t really her—but she would come visit me. We would walk on the beach, sometimes sit in my bedroom, and she’d talk to me, listen to what I had to say. She’d answer me, help me with problems. She was there when I went through what I did with my dad. She’s the reason I’m here, pretending to care where he ends up. But it’s not really her. It’s my mind putting her together. Constructing her out of the parts she left behind.” Jake turned back to the bed and he felt his skin shift against his muscles and the frame of bones beneath. “But she seemed so real that it looked like I could reach out and touch her. Her dress rustled, she smelled of cigarettes, I could see eyeliner.”
Kay lifted herself up on her elbows. “You build things with your head. With your memory. That’s why you do what you do.” She paused, weighed her words. “I don’t want you here. You’re going backwards. I can see it in the way you move, the way you talk, the way you are reacting to all of this. It’s like circuits are blowing with all the shit you have to deal with.”
Another point he couldn’t argue with. “You and Jeremy go back to the city and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Maybe I can finish up tomorrow morning, maybe not. But I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired of doing this that I just don’t want to any more. But I have to close this case.”
Kay’s voice came out of the dark. “I don’t want you out here when the hurricane hits, Jake. Your appliance is going apeshit as it is. What happens if you get a bad jolt?”
I die, he wanted to say. “Cockroaches and Keith Richards and Jake Cole.” It was an old joke between them. “Before you can say ‘invisible friend’ we’ll be back in our flat listening to the MC5 and Jeremy will be sleeping in his own bed.”
He could see her clearly now, sitting up in bed, cross-legged in the dim of the half-light, Don’t Hassel The Hoff! riding up her tummy and bunched up under her breasts. Her hair was tied in pigtails and she was grinning.
“What are you grinning about?”
“You always make me feel safe.” She fell back and tugged her little white panties off, rolling them into a knot. She curved her tattooed leg down, yanked the underwear off her pointed toes, and pitched them at Jake. They bounced off as she opened her legs.
A pair of ink pistols crossed over her vagina with the words Tough Love underneath—Jake’s second-favorite tattoo on her body. “Now come here, because you make me horny.”
Jake pulled off his T-shirt, and the ink added to the deep shadow etched into his lean body. As he moved, part of him disappeared, became the background. Kay propped herself up on her elbows, folded herself forward like a cat, and undid the big sterling-and-turquoise buckle on his belt. It snaked through the loops of his Levi’s and he undid his jeans. Then he was naked in front of her and she smiled up at him.
Kay reached up between the heavy oak spokes of the headboard and Jake slipped the worn police handcuffs over her wrists. He snapped them closed—a shining pair of silver eyes—and began.
She rose up into him, her eyes locked on his. He reached down beside the bed and found his belt. He picked it up and her eyes twitched when she heard the buckle clink. She tried to turn her head, to see it coming, but he held her jaw and kept his eyes locked on hers in the almost-dark. The deep shadow of her sockets yawned up at him as he slipped the belt around her neck.
The black leather fell between her breasts, its tail curling up against the crossed pistols. She clenched her teeth and kept her eyes locked on his.
Her breaths rasped out in those little birthing whistles she made before the sex circuits in her head went supernova. The belt around her neck thrashed and writhed as she threw her hips into his weight, and he felt her hard pelvic bone beneath the flesh, knocking into his.
Kay was sliding back and forth beneath him. She snarled.
Jake reached down, looped the snapping tail of the belt around his hand, and began to tighten. The black noose circled in around her flesh and the buckle rose up against her chin, dimpling a small fold of skin with its floral edge.
She moaned the word, “Now,” only it came out in four fuck-jarred syllables.
He pulled the loop tight and Kay’s face jolted pale. Then red. Her mouth opened, to breathe, to scream, but she was unable to get air.
He tightened the belt one more turn of his fist and his fingers went numb.
Her mouth broadened, then opened like a beached fish sucking air. Her eyes snapped wide, gleaming out of the deep shadow of her sockets. Then bulged. The veins in her neck rose to the skin like fingers trying to claw through and there was a startling deep-space second when their eyes connected, then she arched her back violently and shuddered.
She lay there afterward, completely still, her unfocused eyes pointed into the dark.
41
Mike Hauser was only going to be home for a few minutes—very likely his last visit until the storm was gone. Very possibly his last visit to this house. This wasn’t melodrama speaking, just honest analysis of a situation that had so many outcomes that the possibilities could keep a supercomputer busy for a year. The hand of God was coming, advancing on a roiling storm that might obliterate Hauser’s community from the earth—and that’s precisely how he thought of this little patch of land—his community. And unfortunately that included the invisible motherfucker with the hunting knife. Along with Jake Cole—a man who attracted death like some kind of magnet for the broken. Right now Hauser’s kingdom had more than a few ugly shadows circling overhead. The trick would be in surviving them.
It was 2:12 a.m. and the sheriff walked into the kitchen in full gear, including the web belt with his Sig and the various accoutrements of his trade. He poured himself a ginger ale from a torpedo-sized plastic bottle in the fridge. He took a sip, got disgusted that it was flat, and poured it down the drain. Of all the things progress had bulldozed under in the name of improvement, he lamented the loss of glass bottles the most. He settled on water from the tap, put it away in three loud gulps, and placed the glass in the dishwasher.
Stephanie was out of town and he suddenly wished that she were here to give him one of her talks, maybe a smooch and a punch in the arm. But he had flown her inland, to her brother’s house where she’d be safe. Only Hauser’s concept of safe had changed a lot in the past few days. Irrevocably so.
Of all the images that this case brought with it, the one that kept popping up from behind the bushes was the woman and child up the beach, still known as Madame and Little X. More than two full turns of the hour hand later and all their forensic and digital know-how couldn’t answer the simple question as to who they were. It was like investigating the murder of two people who had never really been there at all.
He moved down the basement steps by feel, listening to the new voice of his house in the approaching hurricane. When he was at the bottom he flipped the two middle switches and the floor-to-ceiling display cases flickered to life, humming yellow like a bank of supermarket freezers.
One wall was taken up by his shotgun collection, the second by his deer rifles and handguns, the third by his reference library, and the last by his knives.
Hauser stared at
his reflection in the glass. He had organized what had happened to the point where images of Madame X and her son no longer popped up randomly, but they were never far from the viewfinder in his head and he continually turned his mind’s eye away from them whenever one fired to life. Things like this were not supposed to happen here. But he knew that wasn’t how it worked; if he put a little horsepower into the thought process the next deduction was that things like this weren’t supposed to happen anywhere.
Only they did. All the time. All you had to do was look in the bedroom of the house up the road. After all, why should this place be special?
The one break they were getting in the investigation—the single little let-up—was with the media; with Hurricane Dylan ripping in, reporters were having a hard time nailing down interviews. Usually, Hauser would worry about one of his men getting cornered over beers at the Scrimshaw Lounge after work, or one of the Macready woman’s neighbors ending up on Fox. But with the storm advancing, no one had time to talk to these people—they were too busy saving their iMacs and Franklin Mint collectibles. The very definite side benefit to this was that the news was now more interested in the weather than in the three dead bodies. Of course, Jake had assured him that this wouldn’t last for long. Not once those parasites attached the word serial to the killings.
Then everyone from the greengrocer to the gas station attendant would be popping up on Channel 7, analyzing the evidence, waxing poetic about DNA, CSI, and the rest of the acronyms they had picked up from prime-time television. The worst, Jake had assured him, would be watching the talking heads—the self-professed experts—yakking away, coming up with motivational or personality profiles of the killer when they were missing very important pieces of evidence—most notably facts.