Bloodman

by Robert Pobi

  “Oh, yeah. Forgot. Sorry. I must be thinking about some other little boy I know.” He bent down, kissed his son, and sent him out of the kitchen with an affectionate pat on the bum. “You go play with your cars and I’ll make us some lunch.”

  Jeremy ran to the living room and plopped himself down on the multicolored tapestry of intertwined rugs. He fished in his pockets, then threw his cars down like a handful of Yahtzee dice. Within seconds the casualties were piling up amid three-year-old dinosaur roars.

  Jake washed his hands and pulled out the loaf of Wonder Bread from the Kwik Mart. He thought about Mallomars. And about what had happened to his mother three-quarters of his life ago. About his old man, terrified to the point of hysteria, screaming about the blood man, fastened to the bed frame so he wouldn’t open up his painter’s tool box and do any more portraits in the medium of dementia. Sobel, sounding a little too much like Vincent Price when he spoke of his father’s terrors, the academic nod of his head somehow giving his old man’s fears more weight than Jake wanted to allow. There was Madame and Little X, Nurse Macready, Hauser and his impromptu hurricane task force. His mother’s Benz, already in the science lab in Quantico, having her honor compromised by the best of modern forensic investigative techniques—being forced to give up her cherry after a third of a century. He thought about the goddamned lighthouse over Nurse Macready’s shoulder in the photo and about the isosceles puddle of black blood in the corner of her kitchen. About the beautiful people of Connecticut, laid out in candy by an autistic girl in a psychiatrist’s office. He thought about the approaching hurricane and about Jeremy’s creepy new friend, the man in the floor, who he wouldn’t discuss. There were the five thousand or so canvases—an obsessive-compulsive’s jackpot—stacked up in the studio. He thought about his wife’s cello and about Jeremy’s Hot Wheels. And he knew that he wanted to get away from here. To go as far and as fast as he could and not look back, not come back, not ever think about the stinking place for as long as he lived.

  But he had a son to feed and he concentrated on that, the simple act of mixing a little tuna with mayo and adding a smidge of salt and pepper. He would have liked to add onions and some celery but like his old man had often said, you can only eat what you kill. So it was going to be boring tuna, a glass of milk, two Cokes, a quick nap, and it was off to the city in an ancient car with—

  “Kay?” he said, simultaneously glopping a scoop of tuna salad onto a square of cancer bread. “We don’t have room for your cello. It won’t fit in the car and if we lash it to the roof rack, it’ll get soaked.”

  “F-U-C-K the cello, Jake,” she said. “I just want us to get out of here.” She stood on the other side of the counter, the T-shirt clinging to her little frame. Beneath the white cotton the calligraphy of her skin moved as if it were a separate living creature. Jake knew how she felt about the instrument—it was the only material item she cared for—and if she was dismissing it so easily, he knew that she wanted to get out of here.

  “It’s supposed to be airtight, right? I’ll duct-tape the seams—maybe that’ll help. It’s one for all—”

  “And all for one!” Jeremy hollered from the living room.

  “That’s right, Moriarty. Lunchtime. Come wash your hands.”

  Half an hour later, Jeremy was down for a nap and Kay and Jake had packed up everything they were taking. They had a bit of downtime before they woke Jeremy for the trip home.

  Kay had changed into a dry shirt with Motorhead spray-painted across the front. She wore no bra and her breasts were sliding around under the fabric with her movements. She looked at Jake and asked, “Would it be insensitive of me to ask for a round before we hit the road?” Then began peeling off her clothes.

  Twenty minutes later they were knitted into a knot of limbs on the damp sheets. The pheromone smell of sex was thick and the air was electric with the rattle of rain on the window.

  Kay had popped another blood vessel in her left eye and Jake knew she’d be wearing sunglasses to rehearsal for the next few days—it had become an accepted side effect of their sex life and with the people who knew them well, she passed it off as an ocular condition. She usually dealt with the occasional bruise or ligature mark on her neck with high collars or big necklaces. The fact was, the sex set off the endorphins in her brain like nothing else she had felt since her drug and booze days. She realized—they both realized—that with their determination to leave their mutual addictions behind, they had stumbled across a new one. One that didn’t involve needles or pills or alcohol or chemicals; a natural high from the ancient blood-powered sex machine between their ears. Their sex life had simply become a replacement for their old addictions.

  She was facedown, stretched out like Supergirl, her hands cuffed up through the oak spokes of the bed. “Thank you, baby, I needed that.” Her handcuffs clinked and as Jake kissed the back of her head she pushed up and into him with her bum. “Now uncuff me so we can get the fuck out of here.”

  There was a crash somewhere off in the house.

  “Daddy!” Jeremy’s voice screeched in the bright shatter of panic.

  Jake jumped off of Kay, grabbed his pistol from the nightstand, and pounded down the hallway.

  He threw the door to Jeremy’s room open.

  Jeremy was gone.

  There was a brief instant of complete and absolute silence in his head, as if the circuitry had just frozen in place. He stared down at Jeremy’s empty bed, trying to will his son into it. There was a thick surge in the atmosphere as if the house had been zinged by a bolt of lightning and Jake felt the electric hammer of fear slam into his chest. There was an audible pop as the hot wallop of his resynchronization appliance overloaded his heart. Then silence covered him like a blanket of wet sand.

  47

  Hauser had garaged the Charger and was now using the department Bronco. With the weather setting in, the four-by-four offered a lot more in the way of practicality. The vehicle’s traction was a welcome relief from the Hemi-driven muscle car that he recognized as one of the substitutes in the war on his fading youth—the others being his boat, his bird gun collection, and his wife’s new plastic titties—all of which he liked to pull out and play with as often as possible.

  Hauser’s speed was down and he negotiated the road slowly, continually correcting for the loose traction he felt with every gust of wind that got under the truck. Night was hours off but Dylan had painted the sky with a tone of metal that was somewhere between gray and black. A long line of headlights stretched out behind him, the bright eyeballs of the evacuating populace, and for a tiny fraction of time he thought about not turning around. About not stopping. About no longer being here. But he took a deep breath and when he blew it out the thought was gone from his mind. Temptation—a cop’s worst nightmare.

  The ocean had begun its descent into madness and was throwing the Atlantic at the highway all along the drive. Water sloshed over his windshield and the wipers droned on. The outer rain bands of the hurricane had landed a few hours ago and for the next twenty-four hours, Hauser knew that he would be living in his rain gear except for the brief passing of the eye—a few hours of silence before the whole circus started up again.

  Hauser saw the car up ahead hit the brakes for a second too long, fishtail, and barely regain a westbound azimuth. He shook his head and hoped the guy would make it west before paramedics were picking windshield glass out of his eye sockets with tweezers. Hauser was no stranger to what bad driving could do to the human body—professionally or personally. Like any resort-town law-enforcement officer, he had cleaned up his share of asphalt casualties. On a more personal level, he had lost his son to a drunken driver fifteen years back, halfway through the boy’s tenth year. It wasn’t one of those spectacular accidents that had everyone shaking their heads, wondering what the guy behind the wheel had been thinking—just a slight swerve onto the shoulder and the mirror on his Econoline had clipped Aaron (who had been riding his bike into town) on the back of the head.
DOA. The driver, to the credit—and benefit—of all drunk drivers that Hauser would pull over from then on, had stopped, gotten out, and called it in.

  He no longer carried around that squirming coal of misery he had lived with for so long. Somewhere around the six-year mark it had started to fade and the agony of loss had dulled to a heartburn lump that occasionally gave him a respite when he was doing something he enjoyed, or had to concentrate on. Miraculously, he and Stephanie had managed to use the twelve years they had already chalked up on the fuselage as some kind of a raft when the floodwaters of grief and finger-pointing could have done irreparable damage, and they had somehow stayed married. Concentrated on bringing up their daughter. Moved on.

  Hauser missed his son every single day, and an estranged relationship like the one that Jake Cole and his old man shared was something he simply couldn’t wrap his brain around. Families worked it out, they talked it out, even fought it out. But they stuck together. End of discussion.

  The red eyes of the brake-happy driver ahead lit up and the car took a dangerous jog to the right, skimmed the shoulder, then regained the water-shrouded asphalt in a sloppy lurch. Hauser shifted his bulk on the seat and the wet slicker let out a fartlike squeal against the leather. He could light up the cherries, pull the idiot over, and give him a talking to, but what good would that do? If the guy didn’t know how to drive, a three-minute course by an angry cop in a storm certainly wouldn’t change things. And with the heavy gypsy-caravan exodus behind him, Hauser didn’t want to risk getting hit by one of the other cars. The turnoff for Mann’s Beach made his mind up for him. Hauser hit the index and the cherries and swung off the highway.

  Hell was moving in, something straight out of the Old Testament if the guy at the NHC was even half right—and Hauser believed that he was. After all, those guys were wired up with more satellites and science and shit than you could imagine. He pulled up to the gate that locked the peninsula off from tourists—it was open.

  Mann’s Beach was one of the few places usually only frequented by locals—the gate generally kept tourists out (except the striped-bass fishermen that swarmed in every spring and fall—those assholes would swim through lava for the shot at a big striper). Scopes had called and told him to get his ass out to Mann’s ASAP. He had asked him to bring Cole but Hauser had come alone—he wanted to see this with his own eyes, feel it with his own instincts, without Cole’s letter-to-the-editor diction turning the whole thing into an academic exercise.

  Besides, the next two days would be a marathon of one major emergency after another, the least of which would be car wrecks, drownings, collapsed houses, and downed power lines. Hauser was aware of these things—as the sheriff he had reserved a large part of his energy for battling whatever the storm was going to throw at him—but they took up a lot less real estate in his psyche than he would have previously believed possible. It was the guy with the knife that really had his attention.

  Hauser lit up the overheads and the beach road in front of his car went white. He moved slowly in the rain, both glad and pissed off at himself for sending Scopes out here. The nose of the Bronco swung around a low mass of scrub and a luxury sedan lit up in the glare of the overheads. Scopes stood outside, staring at the vehicle.

  Hauser got out of the still-running car and the thump of the wipers was lost in the wind. He pulled his four-cell Maglite from the center console and fired it up. Scopes didn’t turn away from the car or acknowledge Hauser in any way. He stood stock-still with the rain clattering against his police poncho like a swarm of angry termites, his Maglite throwing a tight but now-dim oval of yellow on the bloody sand at his feet. The bulb flickered intermittently, as if the water was shorting it out.

  Hauser moved past Scopes, and lit up the car in the beam of his flashlight. It was a Bentley, one of the newer GT Continentals, in a silver or tan—it was hard to discern in the yellow beam of the light. The interior was dark and there was no driver silhouetted behind the wheel. The windows were closed and as Hauser got closer to the vehicle, he saw his own reflection shining back at him, shimmering with the rain cascading over the glass. The beam lit up flashes of the interior. Some sort of rich red. But the windows were splattered with something, like a thin coating of dirt, and the effect reminded Hauser of a terrarium. A micro-ecosystem different from the world in which it sat.

  The beam of the Maglite grew brighter when he pushed the lens against the wet glass. That was not dirt on the inside of the windows. It was blood. Black dried blood. Hauser pressed his face to the wet glass, shielded his brow with a gloved hand. He swung the beam over the interior and the terrarium comparison came back to him; a closed-in space where monsters lived.

  When he turned back to Scopes, he saw that the man’s expression had gone blank, and it reminded him of the way Jake Cole looked around the dead. Disconnected was the expression that came to mind. Only this wasn’t Jake Cole, this was Danny Scopes, and Scopes was still supposed to give a shit. “You call anyone else?”

  Scopes nodded. It was a slow nod that took a lot of effort. “Murphy’s coming with the truck. I already photographed the sand here but the rain’s washed all tracks and everything else away.”

  Hauser looked down into the red dirt. “Except the blood.”

  Scopes nodded again, this time more slowly. “Except that, yeah.”

  “You run the car?”

  Scopes’s line of sight swung back to the Bentley, rippling with the rain that bounced off its surface. “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And I think Jake might be bad luck.” He turned away, spit into the wet sand.

  Hauser nodded and flicked his Maglite off. He looked down. Scopes’s flashlight had died completely, but still hung loosely in his grip. “Someone he knew?”

  Scopes nodded again. “The guy sold his father’s art. Name’s David Finch.”

  “We can’t leave this here—it’ll be washed away. Get as many photos of the inside as you can—open the lee side front door—then get Murphy to take it to the garage. Use the one that’s up Jarvis. Make sure he covers it up. When you’re done, come to Cole’s. And bring the photos.”

  Scopes nodded solemnly. “Photos. Sure. Great.” He reached into his pocket for the camera. “Who would do something like this, Mike?”

  Hauser looked out at the angry ocean pounding the beach, then back to the car still lit up red in the spearing eye of his flashlight. He switched it off and all the red went black. “Just some guy,” he said.

  And with that he realized that he was getting used to it.

  48

  Jake was—

  —unconscious—

  Then he—

  —wasn’t—

  There was no fighting back through the turgid layers of in-betweenism associated with sleep and awake. He had been out. Now he was back.

  He stood up, naked and sweating, the pistol still knotted into his fingers. There was one single second of gratitude for being awake before the fear came back like ten tons of truck that nearly knocked him out of his skin.

  “Moriarty?”

  How long had he been out? He glanced at the window and took a mental snapshot of the sky, now dark and flat. Rain washed over the window, and the gray clouds shimmered.

  “Moriarty?”

  He raced out, down the steps. He flipped lights on. Tore through the living room.

  “Moriarty!”

  Where is he?

  “Moriarty!”

  And that ugly old whisper started up.

  Skinned, it said.

  Jake ran through the house naked, knocking over chairs, lamps, screaming his son’s name.

  Where was he?

  He stopped at the front door, beside the Nakashima console. Where was his son? What had happened to Jeremy?

  Then he remembered Kay handcuffed to the bed upstairs.

  He covered the steps three at a time and ran down the hall.

  The door was half closed and he slammed it into the pocket where it clatte
red off its track. He flipped on the light and the crisp white sheets on the bed fired to life.

  The handcuffs hung from the headboard, dead still and empty.

  49

  Jake stood at the foot of the bed with a knot of snakes writhing in his head, the sound of their scales scraping against his skull overpowering the voice of the storm outside. The pistol hung from his hand and he stared at the empty bed, the black stabs of ink that covered most of his body gleaming with the sweat of panic that had replaced the earlier sweat of sex.

  Not them.

  Anything but them.

  Please.

  He ran down the steps, jumping almost all of them.

  “Kay!” he roared.

  Sand and rain clattered against the window and the sheet of plywood. Outside, something was banging against the side of the house. Jake raced down the hallway to the front door.

  He ripped it open, slamming it into the wall. The handle punched through the sheetrock and a white cloud of dust puffed out and showered to the floor.

  Out on the driveway. “Kay!”

  He ran to the road, snapped his eyes up and down the empty highway. Rain came down in waves, shimmering on the asphalt like live insects.

  The cruiser was still parked on the shoulder. Jake stepped toward it, saw a figure in the front seat, head back, mouth open. It wasn’t Scopes—it wasn’t anyone Jake recognized. He yanked the door open and pulled the man out into the wind and the rain.

  “Where the fuck is my wife? My son?”

  The cop looked confused. “I…I…don’t—” His eyes dropped to Jake’s naked body and his expression flattened out like he understood what was going on. “Have you been—?”

  “I’m not drunk or stoned, you fucking moron!” He shook the man. “My wife and son are gone.”

  The cop tried to wriggle free. “I didn’t see—”

  “You were out here sleeping.” Jake pushed him away and stared at him for a few seconds. “Do you know what’s happened?”