Bloodman

by Robert Pobi

  Hauser had come home to pick up a few personal things, the first being his great-grandfather’s 1918 trench knife. If the house and everything else was torn from the earth, this was the only thing he wanted to save besides his wedding band and that one trophy his son, Aaron, had won in little league. The rest of the shit could go and he wouldn’t care. Not in any real sort of way.

  He opened the case and removed the weapon. He had no memories of his great-grandfather, but this knife had meant a lot to his grandfather, and then to his father so, by extension, it meant a lot to him. He had hoped that it would mean something to Aaron some day—a little piece of honor handed down from man to man in the family—but all that had been taken away by a drunk in a van. But that didn’t mean that Hauser was going to let it sit here and maybe get taken away by the storm.

  The waxy feel of the metal gave way to a greasy one as the protective oil on the knife warmed to his touch. He examined it for a few minutes, hoping that it would give up some of its secrets. What did Jake see when he looked at a knife? Something told Hauser that a man like that didn’t see just another tool in the history of human evolution—for a man like Jake, a knife was a potential opera of horror.

  The sheriff looked around the room, examining the display cases full of his hunting gear. Suddenly he understood why to a man like Jake Cole, the world looked like an accident waiting to happen.

  Hauser slid the knife into its worn leather case, snapped the stay, and strung it onto his tactical belt. Then he shut off the lights and headed out to his cruiser.

  42

  Kay lay still, cuffed to the headboard, Jake resting solidly on top of her. The belt around her neck hung in a loose loop now, the tight lines of pressure bruised into her throat. She had popped a blood vessel in her left eye, and it had ruptured into a beautiful red flower.

  Jake watched her face for a few minutes, a series of unmoving geometric shadows in the dark. She lay still, barely breathing. He stared at her, willing himself to be here and now, not there and then. He wondered how he had learned to compartmentalize his life so completely, so utterly, that he could visit horror all day yet come home to such happiness. And in this swirl of thoughts came the realization that it really was time for him to quit the job. To leave. To move on with his life and become a whole man—a man without fractures.

  “How did I find you?” she asked.

  Kay was beautiful lying there, but Jake knew that behind her, deep in the pockets of her mind, things were not bright or happy or safe. Her eyes were riveting, mesmerizing, but something was missing in the way they moved, as if a little of the happiness had been knocked out along the way. Once, after they had begun to suspect that what they had might be something special, she told him that she had always loved bad men. There was something about the danger—about the not knowing what was next—that was as addictive as the booze had ever been. She said she still hated herself for it.

  Jake suspected that sometimes he did, too.

  Her mouth started a smile, the blistered vein in her left eye tinting it with weirdness. “I love getting fucked by you,” she said.

  “That’s because you’re a hopeless romantic.”

  The tinkle of laughter turned into a wide-mouthed roar that wracked her body and the buckle clinked in the dark, a scratchy metallic note that sounded like Hauser pushing the Macready woman’s door open.

  Jake stiffened. “I want you two on the noon bus.”

  Her laugh stopped cold and he felt her stiffen beneath him. “No way, Poppy. I didn’t haul this hot little ass out here for a fast fuck and the bum’s rush. I’m not leaving without my man.”

  “We’ll talk about it.” But he knew she’d be off Long Island at noon no matter how much she bitched, even if he had to shoot her and Jeremy in the ass with tranq darts and send them home in a pair of FedEx boxes.

  He tilted his head and looked into her eyes. Her face held a loose peaceful edge that he knew he was lucky to see. He kissed her.

  “Another one?” she asked.

  The day ran through his head on fast-forward, from the bloody portrait to Rachael Macready bled out and abandoned on the sopping carpet. He thought about the lighthouse over her shoulder, about Hauser pacing the morgue, about the departmental Charger pushing 120 miles an hour and the sound the Coke bottle made when it hit the floor in the studio. He wanted to say he was too tired, that he needed some sleep, but it would have been a lie.

  He opened his mouth and fastened it on hers.

  She moaned, slid her legs wider apart, and shimmied further under him. The buckle clinked.

  Then he wrapped the belt around his fist.

  And began to squeeze off her oxygen.

  43

  Day Three

  Sumter Point

  “Jake!”

  The single word was filled with such panic, such wrongness, that he was down the hall with the pistol in his hand before he was fully awake.

  He stopped at the top of the stairs and looked out at the nave. Jeremy stood in the living room, his back to the staircase, his head canted over at an odd angle as if some of the hydraulic hoses that powered his neck had ruptured. Jake couldn’t see his face but the boy’s body language was foreign, unfamiliar, and with that realization came a little more of the fear he had heard in Kay’s voice.

  Kay was on her knees in front of the boy, holding him at arm’s length, her face sculpted tight with shock.

  Jake walked down the stairs with the pistol still clamped in his fingers. He was naked.

  Kay didn’t look up. Didn’t acknowledge his existence. She was staring at Jeremy with the same eyes she had last night during climax—bulging and glassy. Both of them had hemorrhages now, and the second had burst into a bloody storm that raged around her pupil. She was holding Jeremy and shaking, the tremors traveling down her arms and transferring to his little body, which was vibrating like more hydraulic hoses were about to pop.

  Jake moved slowly. “Baby?”

  Kay just stared at the boy’s face, and a bright rim of tears formed on her lashes below the hemorrhaged reds and it made her eyes look like they were bleeding.

  Jake’s foot hit the bottom stair and this nearness flipped a switch in Jeremy’s head because he shrugged off his mother’s grip and turned around.

  His sockets, cheekbones, and the curved line of his jaw were outlined in sloppy red finger strokes. The stitching of the mouth was broad, and went across his face in thick vertical lines that were crooked and unequal. The boy’s face was painted like a skull. The whole thing had the lilt of madness about it, as if his face was a funhouse prop. Jake didn’t need to be told that it was blood—he could smell it.

  Jeremy’s bottom lip trembled and he was crying red streaks. Tears dripped down his cheeks and ran to the collar of his T-shirt, slowly turning pink. Jake could see that he was one breath away from flying into hysterics.

  Jake scooped him up, covering the back of his head with his hand, and hugged him. “Moriarty, what happened?”

  He looked at Kay over the top of the boy’s head. She stood there shaking her head, her red eyes leaking clear tears. The big door to the deck was open a few inches. “We were in here alone, Jake. I opened the door to get some fresh air because it smells so…bad. I turned my back on him for a minute. Maybe less.” She shook her head. “I was making coffee…just making coffee when Jeremy barked—literally barked—like a dog and I rushed over and he was…he was…like that…I…don’t…um…I—” She shuddered and for a second it looked like she would throw up.

  Jake looked at the open door. “Moriarty?”

  Jeremy squeezed him, his little body quivering.

  “What happened?” His voice climbed up a little, and he had to add the words, “It’s okay, son,” to let Jeremy know he wasn’t angry—the natural assumption of someone without fully developed emotions.

  “It was him, Daddy.”

  Jake pried his son’s head out of the nook in his collar. Jeremy’s little tear-streaked blood-skull
leered up at him, teeth outlined, eye sockets darkened, the logo for an album cover. “He said he wants to play with you, Daddy.”

  Jake felt his chest tighten again and he sat down on the sofa, his skull-painted boy clinging to him like a lemur.

  “Then he touched me,” the little boy said. “He touched my face. And now it smells icky. He said he started a game with you when you were a little boy and he likes playing with you very much. He said you don’t get scared. Is that true, Daddy? You don’t get scared? Because I’m scared. I’m very scared and I want to go home and I don’t want to play with him any more. He’s not nice. He’s mean and ugly and he smells bad and—” The words stopped and he looked around, as if the room were bugged.

  “It’s okay, son,” Jake said again.

  Jeremy’s eyes widened, two contrasting orbs in black-red sockets. “Remember the time in the park when I found that bird, Daddy? Remember that? I said it smelled yucky and you said that’s because it was dead. Do you remember? And you ’splained that sometimes birds and animals have accidents or get sick and then they are made dead and that makes them smell bad. Do you remember, Daddy? Do you?” There was a fevered, crazed quality to the boy’s voice.

  Jake looked over at Kay. She had her back to the window and she was hugging herself and crying, bright streaks streaming down her cheeks. She didn’t see him. Or Jeremy. She was off in the theater behind her eyes watching a test pattern.

  “I remember, son.”

  “The man in the floor smelled just like that bird in the park, all bad and sick and dead. And he’s not nice any more. Don’t play the game with him. Please promise me that you won’t play the game with him.”

  Jake pulled Jeremy in close, cradling his head in his collarbone. He stepped forward and grabbed Kay and the touch of another human seemed to snap her out of the place she had retreated to. She sniffled, looked up, and locked her eyes on him.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Kay shook her head. “Do I look okay?” She wiped her nose on the hem of her T-shirt. “I don’t want you staying here. I don’t care what this job is about. I don’t care if this whole fucking place gets washed into the ocean. You are coming home with us.”

  Jake nodded.

  “They won’t let him on the bus with no pants, Mommy.”

  Jake and Kay looked down at his naked body. “You, my friend, may have a point,” Jake said, and reached for the phone to call Hauser.

  44

  Jake was relieved that the medical examiner was at one of the Olympus microscopes in the corner of the lab instead of headed west in the Long Island Hurricane Exodus. It was obvious that she had been here all night. She was hunched over, her face squinched up with the expression common to microscope-gazers everywhere. He dropped a Ziploc containing Jeremy’s bloody T-shirt onto the table beside her and the noise jarred her from her scientific myopia.

  “Special Agent Cole,” she tried as a greeting.

  Jake was glad people were laying off the Charles Bronson thing—he hated it. “Dr. Reagan.”

  She offered her version of a smile—the same tight line she had shown at Madame and Little X’s the other night. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” There was something about the last word that sounded insincere.

  Jake put on his be-nice face, as Kay called it. “Could you please analyze the blood on that?”

  She picked up the bag and examined it. It squished against the polyethylene, red like a battlefield dressing. “What is it?”

  “T-shirt. There may be some contaminants like mucus and saline from another source but it’s the blood I want analyzed.”

  “DNA?”

  “First check the typing against all three bodies. Madame and Little X and the Macready woman.”

  “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  “Something smeared it on my son’s face.”

  “You mean someone.”

  “No.” Jake’s voice sounded a million miles away, even to him. “I don’t.”

  45

  The doctor’s waiting room looked like every one he had ever been in, the chairs just a little past being presentable and the walls adorned with the unimaginative combination of public health posters and ugly hotel-room art.

  Jake sat with his head in his hands, feeling like his brain was filled with ants. He was going over Jeremy’s Misfits makeup, trying to figure out where it had come from. The cop in the driveway hadn’t seen a thing; no one had come via the road, and with the way the house was situated on the property, he would have seen someone approach from three of the sides. Which left the beach as the only viable route.

  But by looking at things this way, he was forgetting to ask the most important questions of all: Who was the man in the floor and what did he want?

  Jake lifted his head and eased back in the vinyl seat, letting his focus drift to the thought of pulling up stakes and heading back to the city. But he knew that he couldn’t leave—even the thought of it in the abstract felt treasonous; he would stay in Montauk until everything was tied up and nailed shut. And like the old saying about how to eat an elephant, Jake knew that the next step in the process began here, in psychiatrist’s office.

  Sobel’s receptionist, a woman of twenty-five with the unhappy face of a burgeoning depressive, busied herself behind the desk. A mother and daughter sat at the other corner of the office. The girl was about twelve, and had the look of someone plugged into a different sensory universe. Jake guessed that she was autistic. She played with a bowl of colored candies. Her mother sat reading a thick paperback that had a beautiful man with beautiful hair embracing a beautiful woman with beautiful hair, and they were wearing beautiful clothes, and back, in the distance over their shoulders—

  —like that goddamned lighthouse over Rachael Macready’s shoulder—

  —skinned—

  —was a beautiful estate filled with their beautiful life. The book was titled The Bluebloods of Connecticut and Jake knew there were horses in the story. Horses with long, well-groomed tails. Probably a private jet. Kisses and muscular embraces. Unadulterated crap.

  The girl stared off into the distance, as if watching a movie behind her eyes. She slid the large glass bowl of candies from the center to the side of the coffee table and had cleared all the magazines into a neat pile. As her mother read of the steamy sexploits visited upon the handsome characters of the Connecticut estate, Jake watched the girl mechanically remove candies from the bowl one at a time, then lay them out on the table. She was sitting on the floor and her hand would dip into the bowl, then place the candy on the table. Then she would repeat the process. The table was strewn with candies in no apparent order, most not touching. Her mother was too engrossed with the heavy breathing between the pages of her paperback to notice that her daughter was making a mess.

  “Mr. Cole,” the receptionist said, her mouth turned down at the corners. “Please go on in.”

  Jake stood up and stepped around the coffee table. Neither the woman nor her daughter seemed to notice.

  Dr. Sobel got up from behind his desk and shook Jake’s hand. “I’m sorry about yesterday, Jake. If I thought that your father was a danger to himself, I would have had him restrained before.”

  Jake eased into the mail-order-catalog chair and examined Sobel for anything that he could make use of. The psychiatrist’s face was a blank sheet of meat and Jake recognized the clinical training of a man trying to study him for, well, anything he could make use of. Jake put his hands on the knuckles of the chair arms, crossed one booted foot over his knee, and waited. After Sobel’s eyes finished taking him apart, he took a deep breath and opened his hands as if he were trying to sell Jake pet insurance.

  “I know how tough this can be.” Sobel did a pretty good job of sounding sincere.

  “I’m not having this conversation—I’m not here to have a candle put to my head.”

  Sobel seemed to mull this over for a few seconds.

  “What’s going on with my father? How do I best take
care of his needs right now, in the immediate future, and in the long-term?”

  Sobel opened a large file on his desk and Jake recognized the same colored pages and Post-Its from the metal clipboard the day before. “For a man of eighty, your father’s vitals and blood work are spectacular. He’s obviously taken care of himself.”

  Jake snorted. “Not that I know of.”

  Sobel’s mouth turned down at being contradicted.

  How to say this without sounding like a prick? No clean route. “My father has been a raging alcoholic ever since he could raise his arm. He ate for shit. Never exercised. Ran himself ragged. Sometimes he’d stay up for a week solid, fueled on booze and anger. No, I don’t think that your tests have painted an entirely accurate picture.”

  Sobel penciled a note onto the page. “What is his domestic life like?”

  Jake felt the cold flash of wasted time burst in his head. “Dr. Sobel, I thought you had done an evaluation on my father. You should know all of these things. If you don’t even know who he was, how can you compare that to who he is?”

  Sobel stopped nodding and folded his arms across his chest. “I am also trying to get a feel for you, and what you are willing to do for him, Mr. Cole. This is not solely about him. I need to see how much you’re willing to handle. How much you can handle. Your impressions of your father also give me a lot of insight into you.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Sobel shook his head.

  Jake reached into his jacket and took out a black leather billfold. He opened it to the badge and the ID card, leaned over, and slid it across the desk to the psychiatrist. “Dr. Sobel, I am not open for analysis. I am not interested in analysis. I have more dark secrets locked away in my head than you are ever going to know. But since you ask, I will provide you with a little insight into this classic Freudian situation.

  “My father and I have not spoken for nearly thirty years. I do not like the man and, if you really want to get to the bottom of it, for a long time I hated him. No surprise there. Good old Sigmund handled this in his self-justifying twenty-first lecture in A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis. I’m sure you’ve read it, even if it is complete horseshit.