Bloodman

by Robert Pobi

  Jacob grabbed the bunk and pulled himself up, toward the man. His feet slipped and he splashed sideways. Fell. Grabbed a railing for balance. Fought his way forward.

  The man’s skin was an ethereal blue and the water around him was getting darker with the blood that he had lost.

  No wonder that shark was hanging around.

  He got to the man, reached up, touched his face. Eyes fluttered open. There was no white to them, only a deep scarlet with single black nails of fear in their centers. “M…m…mio…”

  Jacob recognized Italian from his year spent in Florence. “Si?” he said softly and in the cabin it sounded like a hiss.

  The man coughed more blood and winced with pain. “Mi…mi…mio figlio,” he said softly, barely above a whisper. My son.

  And Jacob went back through his Italian lexicon. “Che cosa?” What?

  The man stiffened and his chest heaved once, violently, and he vomited out a rope of blood that spattered into the water. Then his head fell over.

  Jacob knew that he was dead. What the hell had he been talking about? His son? What—?

  And then he understood. But there was a great groan from somewhere far below the waterline and the boat shuddered and listed a few more degrees. The water in the stateroom boiled up, past Jacob’s nipples, and the dead woman slid off her bunk with a red splash.

  Jacob threw open hatches, pulled out drawers. Most of the stateroom was underwater so he didn’t have many options. He hoped he was right—that he had understood the man. The water rose quickly and blood swirled around him, making it greasy. He searched frantically as water filled the compartment in a big gurgling thrust of pressure. He pulled open doors, drawers, and hatches.

  The boat was going under. He had a few seconds, thirty at most, before the vessel slid below the waterline and began its descent to the trench, nearly 28,000 feet below.

  There was a small box above the main bunk, a closet for pillows and bedding—there was a similar one on The Forger—and Jacob grabbed the handle and yanked it open. It came off in his grip and he flung it aside.

  A small child was curled up inside. A boy, no more than three, splattered with blood. Jacob didn’t think—didn’t have time to formulate any thoughts at all—he grabbed the child by the arm and yanked him out of his hiding place.

  The boat lurched sideways again and Jacob slipped, fell below the water. He splashed up. The child screamed. Slapped his face. Kicked and bit him. Fear coming out in the only way he knew how to express it.

  From somewhere far away Jacob heard Frank yell at him to get out.

  Water billowed into the stateroom. Jacob clambered up onto the bunk where the woman had been murdered, the child clamped to his chest like a football. He reached out and tried the hatch. It was locked. He tried the handle. Twisting it violently. It broke, came off in his hands.

  And the sea filled up the last pocket of air and the boat slipped under the calm surface of the Caribbean.

  There was nothing but black and the greasy feel of blood and the heartbeat of the child held to his chest. Jacob pulled out the Colt, pointed at the porthole, and squeezed off a round.

  He kicked up through the jagged hole he had chopped with the slug, child in one arm, the pistol clamped in his free hand. He moved toward the blue sky over the ocean, toward the world above. The suction of the sinking vessel was all around him, an invisible force pulling debris—and him—down with it. He kicked hard, pushing for the surface. He moved a few feet. Then a few more, putting distance between himself and death.

  Then something grabbed his foot, tightened, and began to pull him down into the black water along with the boat.

  Jacob let go of the pistol, grabbed the knife from his belt, and slashed down in one desperate swing. He had no more oxygen in his lungs, no more fuel in the tank to take him any farther, and he was lucky that the blade arced through whatever had snarled his foot. A vibration thrummed up through his leg, then he was free, kicking for the surface. Up. Toward the light above.

  He broke into the sunny Caribbean afternoon and sucked in a great lungful of air. He coughed and hacked and spit but managed to lift the child and swim for the boat. All around him the water churned and bubbled with air escaping the sinking boat.

  Frank yelled.

  Mia screamed.

  He held the boy up, splashed clumsily for The Forger.

  His wife screamed again, this time a high-pitched shriek that almost froze him in midstroke. It was a single horrific word.

  Shark!

  Jacob spun and his hand came up with the knife. He saw the fish, bearing down on him, the single dorsal rising out of the water as it came in to feed.

  Jacob lowered the knife to get under the shark if it came in on the surface; if it came up from below, there wouldn’t be much he could do. The fish homed in on him and the child he cradled to his chest like a football. He felt the boy in his arms and had no idea if he was conscious or even alive, but he wasn’t going to let him go, not even if it meant going to the bottom of the planet in the belly of a fish. He held the boy protectively, head over his shoulder, and watched the shark coming.

  It was ten feet away when the clatter of Frank’s Thompson split the sky open and the water at the base of the fish’s dorsal exploded. There was a flash of white belly followed by blood. A violent roll in the water. Then the shark banked to one side and disappeared in a widening pool of red.

  Jacob paddled to the boat, keeping the child’s head above water. He passed the boy up to Frank, then clambered aboard. While Mia and Frank tended to the little lone survivor, Jacob found the bottle of Johnnie Walker under the wheel. He dropped down into the cockpit, cracked the bottle, and took a long slug, his old army knife still clamped in his fist.

  Mia had the boy on his side and pumped his ribs to drive the water from his lungs. He coughed, gagged, vomited up a stream of water, and began to cry. She lifted him up, wrapped him in a towel, and held him close.

  Frank turned to his brother. “What happened in there, Jacob?”

  Jacob took another swallow of the scotch. “Something bad.” He turned back to where only a few minutes before the boat had hung suspended in the water. Debris floated in a wide patch, bobbing lazily on the gentle swell. “Something very bad.”

  56

  A jagged crystal of lightning slammed into a telephone pole up ahead, shattering it like a mortar round. The beach was supposed to be one hundred yards to their left but the storm had crawled nearly to the highway and threw up great sweeping swells that smashed at the road. When the waves hit the embankment, a fifty-foot wall of water shot into the air, then crashed down and washed over the pavement in a four-foot drift. Jake couldn’t understand how the road was still there. Or how Frank’s truck made it through.

  A wave slammed into the big diesel beast and it lurched sideways, braying like a dinosaur. Frank hammered down on the gas and the sudden traction pulled it forward; the Hummer was designed for harsh conditions but it wasn’t a submarine. Frank’s knuckles were white.

  Jake was trying to absorb the story his uncle had just told him. He was trying to put it into some sort of context, some sort of focus. But he had too much rattling around under the dome to deal with this now.

  “Jakey?” Frank yelled above the noise.

  Jake moved a little, shifting in the seat. He pried his eyes away from the eerie reflection in the windshield. “Yeah.”

  Frank’s teeth were clamped tightly around his cigarette and he kept his attention on the underwater world crawling under the hood of the Hummer. The tires threw thick reams of water up against the armored undercarriage and it sounded like Roman cavalry. “You okay?”

  Jake’s shoulders shifted with a shrug. After everything else, after his mother and Madame and Little X, Nurse Rachael Macready, David Finch, what did this really change? Of course he wasn’t thinking about Kay and Jeremy—he couldn’t or he’d just stop breathing—so he decided on, “Fucking fantastic.”

  57

 
August 1977

  Sumter Point

  Jacob had spent the morning in the studio, working with the torch. He wore his standard-issue uniform of jeans, a T-shirt, and paint-crusted canvas sneakers that had once been a shade of white. Patti Smith’s Horses was spinning on an ancient Telefunken console stereo salvaged from the garbage up the highway—the same stereo and album Jake and Kay would listen to over thirty years later.

  He had been up for two days now, but had taken a break at six a.m. and gone for an hour-long walk on the beach before a breakfast of some hard-boiled eggs and a piece of cheese dug up from the fridge. Now, four hours later, he was in a different day, a different place, and the piece was finished.

  Somewhere around ten he cracked open the bottle of whiskey and poured himself two solid fingers worth into one of the many stained china teacups he bought at garage sales for his brushes. The great thing about them was their disposability. Of course, sometimes he confused the spirits in the cup and a painting ended up smelling like good scotch. More often, though, he found himself retching up half a swallow of turpentine.

  There had been a lot of work, and to work he needed fuel. So he had fed the furnace with a good supply of booze. Of course he knew he was drinking too much, but wasn’t that the point? What was the point of not having a boss if you couldn’t do what you wanted to, when you wanted to?

  At forty-six, Jacob Coleridge was at his professional apex. He had been making a living as a painter for almost two decades, had been a growing force in American art for his whole working life, and was well past the point where he never had to worry about where the next meal (or drink, hallelujah!) was coming from. And this should have given him some sense of peace. Maybe even a little sense of pride. But it hadn’t. All it had really done was make him a little less at home in his skin, like he was wearing someone else’s body, one that had been tailored with a smaller man in mind.

  He thought about Mia and Jakey and raised his china cup. “All for one, and one for all,” he said aloud. And why not? He had toasted to lesser causes—acquaintances just met in bars being the most common—so he hoisted one to the musketeers. Swallowed. Filled it again. Grabbed another from atop the fridge and spun the cap off. Took a slug. Went outside.

  Back in the studio, sitting in the center of his framing table, sat his single experiment in three-dimensional art—a model of a sphere, perfectly assembled from chunks cut from stainless-steel speargun darts. It was a polyhedron, perfectly executed in nearly 2,200 precision cuts from the chop saw and twice as many hits from the torch. It was precise, complicated, and signed on one of the transepts, Jacob G. Coleridge.

  58

  The sheriff’s office was the kind of place where the ragtag survivors in a zombie film would make their last stand. The building was an Edwardian no-nonsense brick-and-limestone box with wedge-shaped keystones over the windows and an arched double front door. One side of the structure housed the holding cells and county jail, the other a joint office shared by the administration and the Southampton Sheriff’s Department proper. The parking lot was empty and the building looked like it might be deserted. A few lights were on inside but the parking lot was conspicuously bare except for two departmental four-by-fours and a heavy EMT cube-van; the news trucks of yesterday were no doubt out filming the damage being wrought by the Long Island Express Redux.

  Frank parked on the grass, applying the logic that an extra six inches of high ground could make the difference between life and death if a storm surge rolled in. Of course, the higher profile made it an easy target for the vengeful temper of the hurricane. They stepped out into the howling wind and staccato clatter of rain and ran across the road and up the steps to the entrance.

  The lifeless impression of outside was erased as soon as they were through the doors; the station hummed like a beehive, uniformed policemen running back and forth, absorbed in their tasks. Phones rang, radios squawked, coffee brewed. In one corner, an ancient Zenith was tuned to the Weather Network, the sound turned off—a young reporter in a blue rubber raincoat with the network’s logo on the left breast reported from a second-story motel balcony somewhere along the coast. The picture was heavily pixilated—the digital-age version of static. Behind him, huge swells were pounding the beach and his expression transmitted the realization that he was here because he was expendable; the true talent was back in New York, where they would lament his loss on camera if he were unfortunately washed out to sea.

  Jake grabbed Scopes as he ran by. “Hauser?” he said, knowing that need-to-know was the order of business.

  Scopes jerked a thumb at an open doorway halfway down the hall. “If he’s not in there, try the radio room, two doors past.”

  They found Hauser behind his desk, barking into the phone. “Jesus Christ, Larry, listen to your son. You can grow more tomato plants next year. Get in the car and head inland—” He saw Jake and stopped. “I gotta go, Larry. Forget the plants, they’re not worth your fucking life.” He slammed the phone down and stood up. He wore rain bibs but his Stetson, encased in a plastic protector, hung on the back of his chair. His rain poncho was spread out on Bernie’s antlers, dripping onto the floor.

  “Jake, Frank,” he said. “Get the paintings photographed?”

  Jake held up the laptop. “I need your satellite connection. 337 gigs of data. Where’s your comm. room?”

  “Beside the—” There was a terrific crack and the world outside went white for an instant. The lights fluttered, and for a brief instant Jake’s chest tightened up with the electrical pulse of the building. Then the lights died and there was a communal groan from the hive. A half second later the generator kicked in and the offices lit up in bright halogen emergency lighting. “—radio room. Follow me.”

  Jake felt the tingle of electricity in his system. His put his fingers to his chest, and his heart was banging against his ribs as if it wanted to get out.

  “You okay, Jake?” the sheriff asked.

  Jake nodded, took a deep breath, and followed Hauser.

  “Our communication is down,” Officer Nick Crawley said cheerily, as if he were enjoying the adventure.

  “Down? What do you mean down? I need a satellite link, not a telegraph cable. How can they be down?”

  Hauser held a cup of coffee out to Jake and one to Frank.

  Jake took the cup absentmindedly, absorbing the warmth through the pads of his fingers. Frank took a noisy slurp off the top of his.

  Hauser explained. “The atmosphere is filled with the hurricane. There’s no line of sight to the sky. We might get a few seconds here and there but until the rain band has passed over it’s like trying to use a radio from a submarine on the bottom of the ocean—water offers a lot of resistance. And there’s a lot of electricity out there. We still have phone lines but our Internet connection is satellite-based.”

  “Why is it satellite-based?”

  Hauser glanced sideways. “In case of an emergency, we don’t have to depend on phone service.”

  Jake threw his cup of coffee at the trash basket. It hit the lip and sprayed over the floor. He turned and headed for the door. There was another mortar blast of thunder and the emergency lights fluttered nervously.

  “Jake!” Hauser ran after him.

  Jake stopped in the doorway, turned.

  “I’m spread a little thin right now. I don’t have a solution. There’s no other way to figure out what that painting is?”

  Jake shook his head. “Not without an airplane hangar and a month of time. I have 337 gigs of data that I need to get to Quantico. There are five thousand-plus pieces in this puzzle,” he said, tapping the laptop. “And I need the right software and minds to do it—” He stopped cold and that thing he did—that magical process of connecting the dots—kicked in.

  Hauser saw his expression change. “What?” he asked.

  “That girl at the hospital,” he said slowly, deliberately.

  “What girl?”

  Jake told Hauser about the girl in Dr. Sobel
’s office; about the candy portrait laid out on the teak coffee table beside the sailing magazines; about how she was able to create entire portraits with single pixels of information. Maybe she could decipher it. Recreate it. Draw it.

  Hauser waved one of his deputies—a short barrel-chested man who was consuming the last half of an egg-salad sandwich while swearing at his useless cell phone—over. “Wohl, get a Dr. Sobel on the phone—Southampton Hospital staff psychiatrist. We need the name and number of one of his patients—a child that he saw this morning. She may be helpful in the homicide investigation. He is not allowed to mention his involvement to the media.”

  Wohl ducked away, his jaw mashing the last bit of sandwich in great swirling bites.

  A burst of rain shrieked against the entrance and the ten-foot arched oak doors swung in a few inches. A wedge of water spilled through the temporary weakness and fanned out over the marble floor, sprinkled with leaves and another of the ubiquitous Starbucks cups.

  “And tighten up that door,” Hauser barked to the workers of the weather-battered hive.

  Outside, Dylan was in character, and his ugly, offensive nature was shining. He was four hours away from hitting his earsplitting apex, and until then there was weaponry to suck into his belly, monstrous columns of condensation that he slurped off the ocean in million-gallon gulps. He gave a little of this back to the earth as rain. But the rest—the lion’s share of his spoils—was stored in the armory.

  It was obvious that he had no intention of calming down any time soon.

  59

  Frank bounced the clunky Hummer over the curb and up onto a lawn to avoid a tree across the road. He sucked on his cigarette and the end glowed bright orange, then faded to a dull red that was lost in the ash. “You really think that this little girl can help you?”