by Robert Pobi
The cop stared back for a few seconds. “I’m sure—”
Jake lashed out with the pistol and the butt of the revolver caught the cop across the bridge of the nose. There was a crack loud enough to be heard above the wind and rain and the man’s legs gave out with a grunt and he crashed to the ground in front of his car.
Jake ran around the house, through the garden, to the building at the edge of the property.
He burst in and snapped the lighting to life, illuminating the army of faceless men that climbed out of the walls. He tore through the studio, the garage, even the small cabinets where he knew Jeremy could hide.
Nothing.
Empty.
Gone.
Where?
Skinned, the voice hissed sweetly.
Not my family. Anything but my family.
Please.
PLEASE!
Then where are they? the ancient voice in his head asked.
He ran out onto the grass, jumped down the drop-off to the beach. Waves rolled up past the surf line of a few hours ago, sloshing his legs with foam and stinging sand and bits of weed. He snapped his head around like a dog searching a scent. First up the beach, then down.
The beach was alive with the ocean and the black tangled masses of seaweed thrown up looked like bodies washed up at the water’s edge. Small ones, Jeremy. Slightly bigger ones, Kay. Some moved in the wind. Others were pushed by the waves. He ran to one, ripped at it with his hands. Cold, wet, lifeless. Then another. Hopeful. More nothing.
They were gone, he could feel it.
Knowing. Was. The. Worst. Part.
Where?
Skinned, the ugly little voice crooned again, letting the Ns roll out, and Jake screamed at it to shut the fuck up!
No. No. No no no no no.
Jake stood in the surf, rain and sand and spray stinging his skin. He stared up at the house, windows lit up like an angry drunk. Big planes of white amid the dark modern architecture.
Something inside moved.
Movement.
Movement meant life.
Jeremy?
Kay?
But even through the rain, Jake could see that it was a man. Someone else. Him.
Him who?
HIM.
Jake raced up the steps to the house, across the deck. He tore the patio door open and jumped inside. The door clacked against the frame, stuttering with the buffeting force of the wind. A man stood in the middle of the living room. He started to turn.
Jake raised the pistol. Cocked the hammer. Went running forward, blood and horror and rage in his mind.
The man turned to face him.
Jake lowered the pistol.
And stared into his father’s eyes.
50
Hauser came down the stairs with his mouth sealed in a tight line. He hit the overlapped Persian carpets and turned to Jake, shook his head. Another cop—the one Jake had punched out at the road—hung back in the kitchen, with a broken nose that was quickly turning from pink to purple. Soon it would crawl under his eyes in bruised black scythes. Blood was caked over his lip in a gruesome Chaplin mustache. It turned out that his name was Whittaker. He’d probably press charges but Jake was past caring.
Jake leaned against the piano, his arms folded over his chest, wearing nothing but a pair of Levi’s, the barrel of the big stainless revolver sticking out of the coils of his arm like the head of a steel snake. Another man stood on the deck, on the other side of the swimming pool, framed by the black ocean beyond the beach. He had a rain jacket on and his back to the wind and every time he pulled in a lungful of smoke the glow of the ash lit up his face in a creepy, orange light. He made no movements and if it weren’t for the intermittent jack-o’-lantern glow of his cigarette, no one would have noticed him there.
Hauser walked slowly to Jake and reached out to touch him. For the first time he saw the extent of Jake’s ink, the endless black text that enshrouded his body, from neck to ankles, emphasizing the contours of his musculature. He put a hand on Jake’s shoulder and felt the cold clammy skin twitch at his touch.
Hauser spoke loudly—not out of anger but out of necessity; the storm had grown vocal cords a little while ago and the constant humming of the wind brought the new element of white noise to the world. “We can’t find a thing, Jake. There’s no sign of struggle. No forced entry. No footprints or tire prints or any physical evidence. It’s like they just—”
“Evaporated,” Jake finished, his eyes now black marbles that didn’t seem to move at all.
Jake had torn through the house three times while Frank—his father’s twin brother—called Hauser. Jake had ripped all the closet doors open, taking three off their hinges; overturned the beds; dug through piles of clothing; emptied cupboards. He had flipped the sofa and torn down the shower curtain in the bathroom, scattering the teardrop-shaped rings. He had only put pants on when his uncle had forced a pair of jeans into his hands.
Jake had gone somewhere deep into himself, someplace far away. It was an evil little place filed with rage and violence that he had locked years ago. But the door had been kicked open and the ugly things that had lived in the dark for so long had begun to scamper out. He didn’t know if he would be able to control them. “I am going to find him, Mike.” Jake’s eyes were locked on the breakers beyond the deck but Hauser could see that his mind was someplace else. “I am going to find him and I am going to take him apart.”
The front door opened and someone came in.
He felt Jake’s skin twitch again. “Jake,” he began, then stopped, remembering how he had felt when Aaron had died. His hand stayed on Jake’s shoulder, a man trying to calm a spooked horse through energy transmission—a horse with a coat of smooth, cold porcelain.
“We were leaving in a few minutes—a few hundred seconds,” Jake said with that weird tone that Hauser had heard in front of Nurse Macready’s house.
Out of the corner of his vision, Hauser saw Spencer come in, pause at the edge of the patchwork of Persian rugs, and shake his head—no sign of Kay or Jeremy in the studio, either. Like Hauser, he had a Maglite in one hand and his sidearm in the other.
“I put Jake’s Charger in the garage. Just in case.”
On the porch, Frank finished up his cigarette and came inside. When he walked in, Hauser was amazed at the likeness to Jake’s father—a man he had never met but who held enough points in the local celebrity bank to be recognizable. Frank was still famous from the yacht club all those years ago—Frank Coleridge with his young intelligent women. Frank was a digital copy of his brother, right down to the mean look in his eyes. When he shook off his coat and hung it on a chair Hauser saw that he wore battered chinos, engineer boots, and a flannel shirt with a Remington patch over the breast. Even naked, Hauser would have recognized that Frank Coleridge was an outdoorsman; the sheriff heard a silent language in his movements that spoke louder than the patch on his shirt—everything about him, from the calm gaze to the sure movements of his hands, said that Frank Coleridge was a man who spent time hunting.
When they arrived, Hauser saw Frank’s Hummer parked in the driveway, listing on the slope of the gravel like a sleeping rhinoceros. It was monstrous and no doubt army surplus—Hauser had seen enough of the spoiled city folks drive into town seated behind the wheel of one of the beasts to know a utilitarian one when he saw one; besides, while checking the premises for Kay and Jeremy he had shone his Maglite inside and recognized the sparse metal interior as a working truck that you cleaned out with a hose, not an expensive shampoo job. It had Tennessee plates and the sheriff wondered how many white-tailed deer had been strapped to the hood of the beast, tongue out, throat cut, gutted, a single round from a medium-bore hunting rifle—a .223 or a .277 most likely—mushroomed into the discarded heart.
Frank tapped another cigarette out of his pack and screwed it into Jake’s mouth—Jake took it mechanically, eyes still locked on the breakers slamming the beach—and flamed it to life for him with an old US
MC Zippo. There was the unsaid love of family in the action and Hauser was glad that Frank was here.
“Jake, I need photographs of your wife and son.” He dropped his eyes to his feet, then said, “We’ll get them on the missing persons registry. With the storm coming, and the traffic heading down 27, we can’t put up a roadblock. It would slow things down too much.” Meaning: It could cost more lives.
Jake stood up, uncoiling to his full height, and Hauser expected him to say that he didn’t care, that he wanted his wife and son found.
All he did was shrug. Then he went to his wallet and pulled out a photograph. Kay and Jeremy smiling up, Alice and the Mad Hatter behind them, taken in Central Park back before time had stopped.
For the first time since he had known Jake Cole, Hauser realized that he was afraid of him. Initially it had been the clothes and the tattoos and that creepy way he shrugged everything off, as if horror was an inevitable part of life. But now, watching him face the disappearance of his family with the same grim lack of hope he attached to everything else, he saw that Jake was one of those men who went through life with nothing to lose because it had all been taken from them long ago.
Hauser had read the reports on his mother’s murder, and knew that the impact from an event like that was immeasurable. It surpassed Freud and went straight into Hitchcock country. Besides being afraid of him, Hauser had come to respect and like Jake, and that was odd because Hauser consciously kept a professional distance from the people he worked with—it helped to keep his judgment clear. But behind this atypical fondness was a silent specter of fear, bunched up like an ink-covered creature with cold, dead pupils and a flat voice.
Jake’s eyes had melted into furious black tunnels that bore straight back into his skull. He raised an arm, pointed at the officer with the broken nose and embarrassed posture. “That fucker was asleep on the job.” He turned his head from Hauser to the cop who now looked a little frightened. “I find out that you could have stopped this, and you are going to have to hide on the bottom of the ocean. That’s not a threat, it’s just the way things are.” Jake spat on the floor. “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”
Hauser held up his hand. “Jake, you’re angry. You’re upset. You’re not thinking clearly. I need you to be calm.”
Jake’s head swiveled around and he laid his eyes into Hauser. “Do I sound calm?”
Hauser realized that he did. He turned back to Whittaker and nodded at the door. “See one of the EMT people at the station about your nose.”
The cop opened his mouth to say something but Jake nailed him with another angry look. He closed his mouth and slipped outside.
Jake put his revolver down on the piano. “This all has something to do with my father.”
Spencer looked at Hauser, his eyebrows going up in a quick question mark. Hauser shifted his gaze so Jake wouldn’t catch on to their silent dialogue. It was a subtle, furtive movement but one that Jake’s radar instantly picked up.
“What?” Jake asked.
Spencer looked at his feet.
Hauser looked at Jake. “You know a man named David Finch?”
“My father sells through his gallery. He came by yesterday. Piece of shit.”
“You don’t like many people, do you?”
Jake shrugged. “What does that have to do with David?”
Hauser sat down on the piano stool. “We found him out on Mann’s Beach.”
“Found?”
“In his car. Same as the Macready woman.”
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “When were you going to tell me this?”
Hauser waved his arm through the air. “Like I said, you have your hands full. The car couldn’t stay where it was with the hurricane coming in so I had it moved to a garage. We photographed the interior as best we could—”
“You get Conway to do it?” Jake asked.
“No. Scopes did it with his camera.”
“Scopes?” Jake shook his head. “That car needed to be filmed in place. A trip on a flatbed will rattle it like a cocktail shaker.”
“I couldn’t leave it out on the beach,” Hauser said defensively.
“No, but you could have recorded the crime accurately. Is Scopes some kind of hotshot photographer that I don’t know about?”
Hauser stayed silent.
“When was David killed?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know. Dr. Reagan is with the body right now.”
“Did you take a temperature reading on site?”
Spencer asked, “A temperature reading?”
Jake shook his head like he was monitoring a village idiots’ convention. “A body loses heat at a calculable rate. By measuring the temperature, you can fix a TOD.”
Spencer’s face went a little white. “How do you take a temperature?”
Jake rolled his eyes. “What is this—kindergarten? You use a rectal thermometer. Of course, without an epidural layer the rate of cooling would be different, but you need that reading. If nothing else, you need a timeline for this guy.” Jake looked at Hauser. “Who found him?”
“Scopes,” Hauser said.
Jake and Spencer used to hang out at Mann’s Beach after work sometimes. It was a great place to take girls because no one ever went out there. It was fenced off on a little isthmus of rock that might as well have been the dark side of the moon. “What was Scopes doing out at Mann’s Beach?”
Hauser eyed Jake. “With this coming down,” he said, indicating the storm outside with a jab of his thumb, “I had all the beaches checked. I didn’t want any of those storm-chaser dimwits to get killed while camping out in a pup tent and shooting the storm with a Sony Handicam.”
Finch’s death had no effect on Jake; he was too busy trying to connect dots. “And now Finch. Why is this guy so pissed at my father?”
Frank cocked his head to one side, and if Jake would have been paying more attention he would have seen one of his father’s movements reflected in the genes. “Why do you think this has something to do with your dad, Jakey?” he asked, his voice a near-yell like Hauser’s.
Jake let the shrug roll off his shoulders again. “I’ve been looking for this guy for thirty-three years, Frank. I didn’t know it, but I was. He killed my mother. He killed a woman and her child up the beach. He killed my father’s nurse. He killed David. And now…” He let the sentence fade out.
Jake swiveled his head and locked the black rivets that used to be his eyes on Hauser. “I’d like to say that Madame and Little X were practice. I’d like to believe that. But I can’t. It’s not the way this one would work.” Even talking loud, his voice had that long-distance sound to it again. “My father had something to do with Madame and Little X. This is all about him somehow.” Behind the shock smoldering away in the greasy loops of his guts, Jake felt something else squirming around. He thought about Sobel and the blood man and about Jeremy and the man in the floor.
Hauser nodded fatalistically. “We have someone at the hospital.” With the storm coming in, it was an expensive sacrifice in resources. “We’ll take care of your old man. Don’t worry.”
Jake looked up. “Do I look worried about him?”
“I need to know what’s going on inside your head right now. What are you seeing or not seeing that might help me with all of this? Where are the soft spots? The weaknesses?”
“Weaknesses, Mike?” He handed the photo of his wife and child to Hauser. “There are the weaknesses.”
Hauser took the photo, stared down at Kay, Jeremy grinning goofily along with Alice and her demented friends in the background. “What are you going to do?”
Jake took a T-shirt off the piano and slipped it on, then he snapped the pressure holster onto his belt. The big-bore handgun with the black combat grip was nearly invisible against the black fabric, the stainless frame winking intermittently. He put his bare feet into his boots, and he pointed at Spencer. “I need him for three hours. Pull the guy off my dad at the hospital if you need manpower.”
�
��What do you need him for?”
Jake thought of Sobel and the blood man again. “I think my father knows who is doing this. I think he’s too scared to say it in words but not with paint. He spent years filling that studio out there with about 5,000 weird little canvases. It’s a puzzle. And it means something. I think it’s a portrait of who is doing this. The Bloodman. I need to photograph those paintings and I need to have them analyzed by pattern-recognition software. If they fit together in a certain way, the computer will see it.”
Hauser looked at Jake for a few seconds. “Then what?”
“Then I know who to kill.”
51
Frank parked the massive Humvee at the edge of the lot where he’d be able to four-by-four it over the fence and onto the street if the area flooded. The sky was coming down in a steady stream and the parking lot was covered in dancing rain, a foot deep in some places. A Starbucks coffee cup skittered across the lot, followed by an armada of trash. Frank stepped out of the truck and a plastic Walmart bag floated by like a contestant in a corporate-sponsored jellyfish race. He headed into the hospital, moving steadily through the lot, the water sloshing up the sides of his boots.
Frank Coleridge didn’t recognize the destroyed shadow of a man that used to be his brother, asleep under the yellow rectangle of fluorescent light that hung over the headboard like a grave marker. His face came through like the reflection in a distorted, fire-ravaged mirror. He and his brother had been born identical twins but a lifetime of individual road-wear had left each with different battle scars. Now, after the fire and accident, the resemblance was peripheral at best. Frank was astounded that two bodies constructed from the same molecular building blocks could have turned out so differently.
The destruction to his brother’s earthly vessel had been extensive—his beard and eyebrows had been burned off and an eight-inch scar where a ragged sliver of plate glass had bisected his left brow and cheek gleamed with stitches and opaque antiseptic ointment. Jake told Frank about his hands, but seeing the bandaged batons at the ends of his wrists had hammered home that Jacob’s painting days were—the one creepy blood portrait notwithstanding—over. And whatever physical problems he had been prepared for were negligible when compared to the decay of his mind.