by Robert Pobi
He put his pistol to Frank’s head. “Where’s my family?” he asked calmly.
74
It was as if Wohl had grown extra hands over the life of the storm; for most of the night he had at least five calls going at any particular moment and scribbled down messages faster than he thought possible. The landlines had taken quite a beating but were somehow still going. The cell phone towers had been fried hours ago—failing one after another as the storm rolled in, lightning from the Book of Revelation firing down. He had passed the night inside, with the windows boarded up, but every now and then the world outside would light up white-hot and the cracks around the shutters and paneling would shine sunlight for a second, then blink out. The power grid had been taken out with one monster motherfucking whump that had pretty much fried anything connected to it, including residential appliances. But somehow, magically, the phone lines were golden. When this hurricane was over, Wohl was going to invest in some Bell Atlantic stock—and the cell phone folks could go suck his love pole; he was going analog after this.
He hung up one line and another blinked to life. “Sheriff’s”—the full greeting had been abandoned hours ago.
“This is Matthew Carradine, Field Operations Manager, FBI. Is Sheriff Hauser in the building?”
“Who did you say you were?” Wohl asked.
“Jake Cole’s boss. Can you tell me if Sheriff Hauser is available?” There was urgency in his voice.
The world outside overloaded again and the cracks flashed white. “Hauser’s out. I can try to bring him up on the radio but with the lightning nothing’s working. We’re lucky we still have phones.”
“Who’s next in charge?”
Wohl looked around the station and all he saw were junior officers. Scopes and Spencer were still gone. “I guess I am,” he said.
“Then you better listen to me.”
75
Frank was secured to one of the kitchen stools, ankles duct-taped to the legs, waist fastened with a length of curtain cord, hands cuffed behind his back. Frank didn’t struggle, wasn’t angry or shocked—he simply sat in grim silence, staring at Jake.
“Where’s my wife? My son?” Jake asked, yelling to be heard above what was left of the storm.
“You’re the guy who thinks like a murderer, Jake. You do the math.”
Jake leveled his pistol at Frank’s face. “I’m not going to kill you, Frank, but I am going to make you beg me to.”
Frank shook his head sadly. “Jake, this is me—Frank. The guy who’s been here for you whenever you asked. Like I am now. You’re distraught, Jakey.”
“Do I look distraught?” His voice was even, calm, and his eyes had reverted to those two black spots that looked like they were on loan from a snake. “I passed distraught when my son went missing, Frank. By the time you took Kay, I was well into angry. When I found the top of Emily Mitchell’s head sitting on the newel post in her entryway, I entered murderous. And I think you know me enough to understand that I can be dangerous—but I will do this as my last act as a compassionate human being: if you tell me where my wife and son are—even if they are dead—I will shoot you in the heart. It will be quick.” Jake leaned forward, his hands on his knees, the pistol gleaming bright in the weird dark. “But if you don’t, Frank—if you fuck around and try to plead the fifth and try to step by this, I am going to take that Ka-Bar—” he jerked his head at Frank’s big knife, sticking out of the top of a table a few feet away beside the box of spray-foam insulation and caulking the handyman had left behind—“and I am going to drive it into your eardrum. Just one, because I need you to hear me on the other side while I ask you questions and pry parts of your body off. I have learned from the masters, and it is going to hurt.” He stood up and backed away a little. Outside, the rain was still coming in and he stopped at the edge of its spray. “You won’t believe the toolbox of torture I have in my head.” He tapped his temple with the pistol.
Frank’s eyes were now frightened. “Jakey, Jakey, it’s me. Okay? Why would I want to hurt you or your family?”
“It wasn’t me, Frank. I thought it was, but it wasn’t. I didn’t figure it out until a few minutes ago and I should have. You were in love with my mother, Frank.”
Frank nodded. “Sure I loved your mother, Jakey. Sure I was a little jealous of your old man. So what? Everybody’s jealous of something.”
“Where is my wife? Where is my son?”
Frank shuddered in the chair, testing the restraints. “That’s your territory, Jake. You know all this shit better than any of us—you’re the guy who speaks the language, who reads the signs, who understands the dead. Aren’t they talking to you?”
“Are they dead, Frank?”
Frank shrugged. “Would we be having this conversation if they weren’t?”
There was a crash and the screech of wind as the front door erupted and for a second Jake thought the wind had forced it open. Then it closed and a voice called, “Jake, you here?”
Jake went to the entry. Spencer stood there, beside the welded-steel polyhedron. He was soaked through and had a flashlight in his hand. “What the fuck are you doing here, Jake?” he asked.
“Waiting. You?”
“I wanted to make sure you were all right, that you got the tape out, that the storm didn’t take this place away.”
“I’m busy, Bil—”
The front door kicked in with a massive gust of wind that tore a painting off its hook by the door. There was a bright burst of light as a billion volts rattled out of the sky and hit the Hummer in the driveway. The house rocked on its foundation.
Jake’s CRT-D shorted and he grabbed his chest. He felt his heart stop and he went to his knees.
Spencer lunged, caught Jake before he hit the ground.
Jake wanted to tell him to leave Frank in the chair.
Maybe even to run.
All he managed was a dry croak.
Then passed out.
76
To Hauser, Southampton looked like a junkyard. He hadn’t realized that there was this much plastic lawn furniture in the world. He was finished with the call on Myrtle Avenue—had taken the woman and her little girl to the ER. They had rushed her in and the doctor said that her vision would probably bounce back—most of the blindness had been from blood in her eyes. Score one for the good guys, Hauser thought as he headed back to the station.
He swerved the Bronco around a sailboat jammed into an intersection, sails snapping like cannon fire, when the walkie-talkie on the dash bracket flared to life.
“Unit twenty-two, Emergency. Please respond.” Twenty-two had been Hauser’s number during his four-game career with the Steelers. The voice was garbled by the storm, but discernible.
Hauser picked up the unit and keyed the mic. “Yeah, Wohl. Hauser here.”
“Sheriff,” the voice crackled. “…need…ou…back here…gency.” Even in the static, Hauser could hear that there was something wrong.
“On my way,” he said as the brush guard on the front of the Bronco took out a lawn umbrella that skittered across the road.
Why the hell would they need me at the station? he wondered. If there was an emergency, Wohl should have told him where it was and sent him on his way.
What was going on?
77
The first thing to hit him was the silence. The blare of the storm had gone and all he could hear was a soft wind and the distant sound of waves breaking somewhere nearby. A few seconds later his sense of touch returned. And with it the realization that he was lying in a puddle of water and shivering.
He opened his eyes to black and wondered if his pacemaker had survived the surge—his fingers were still tingly and the unmistakable stench of fried circuits accompanied the dull ache in the middle of his chest. Without moving any of his other muscles he blinked a few times and realized that there was something in front of his face. The shape clarified into the sole of a shoe. No, not shoe—boot. Heavy-treaded. Size thirteen. He pushed himself
up onto his elbows and he saw that the boot was on a foot. Attached to a leg. He pushed himself higher, fought to his knees. And saw that the leg belonged to Spencer.
Jake tried to stand up and slipped on the stone floor of the entryway. Then he saw that he hadn’t been lying in a puddle of water at all.
Spencer’s throat had been cut, one neat slightly diagonal line that angled up from his right clavicle to just below the lobe of his left ear. The cut was deep and Jake had seen enough knife wounds to know that it had been done in one quick slash with a very sharp blade; the academic in him noted that it was a right-handed attack, blade facing up. The weapon? Easy-peasy—Frank’s Ka-Bar was sticking out of Spencer’s chest, sunk up to the handle just slightly left of center—a perfect kill. Jake wiped his hands on his pants, sticky with the already coagulating blood, and knew that he had been unconscious for a while. How long? An hour? Two?
Spencer’s arterial spray had pissed on the wall in a wide, graceful arc that had hit two paintings and the Nakashima console where the stainless sphere sat.
Then Jake remembered Frank.
He ran to the living room because of course, Frank was gone. Spencer had untied him and Frank had cut his throat. Why hadn’t he killed Jake? Why hadn’t—
Jake’s flowchart froze.
Frank was still in the chair.
Opaque yellow foam mushroomed from his nostrils and burst from his mouth like the thick roots of a cancerous tree. Beside him, on the floor, lay a can of spray insulation, the handy dispensing straw covered with blood from being forced into Frank’s nose. The thrust of the expanding foam had distorted his head, twisted his sinuses apart, pushed his eyes out, and his jaw hung wide like a python trying to swallow a dachshund. Frank’s neck and throat were distended—puffed out from the expanding death that had choked off his air, clung to his throat and nasal cavity like glue. His skin was white, highlighted with blue veins that shone through like circuit wiring.
The foam was still expanding and it popped and ticked like a cooling car engine as it continued to push his skull apart by degrees.
Jake looked out at the beach. It was still night but the winds and rain and hell of before were on leave as the eye passed overhead. The sky was clear and the bright orb of the moon hung over the water like a camera lens. Stars twinkled. The waves lapped at the shore in a steady rhythm. The beach looked like a barricade had been thrown up to keep the water at bay; everything from fifty-foot trees to upside down boats were woven together in a line of garbage that stretched down the coast as far as he could see.
Jake turned back to Frank. The expanding foam had filled his lungs, stomach, and esophagus, forcing his body tall and straight in the chair, an unnatural position for the dead.
And a sudden sickening realization lit up in his skull—he had been wrong. Wrong about Frank. Wrong about the clues his father had left. Wrong in his interpretation of his father’s fears. Most importantly, wrong about the man who had been doing this. Wrong about everything.
He thought about his father’s Sistine Chapel at the edge of the property, decorated not with an image of God infusing Adam with life, but tattooed with demons—men of blood—put there to give the Coleridge boy a message—a message he had missed. Jake instinctively turned, tried to focus on the building at the edge of the grass. The concrete slab where it used to sit was still there but the building itself was gone.
Jake heard the front door open.
Close.
Footsteps.
Pause (at Spencer’s body).
More footsteps.
Then the beam of a flashlight swung through the doorway, crept over the room, and stopped on Jake.
“Hello, Special Agent Cole,” a voice said from behind the light.
78
Jacob Coleridge woke up in the recovery room, alone; the nurse assigned to him had left to answer a call in surgical ICU, two doors down the hall. Jacob, of course, had no way of knowing this—he just knew that he was alone.
He was not restrained and other than the sharp thud of a mouthful of fishhooks he felt relatively level-headed and strong. He sat up. Beside the IV plugged into his arm he had a tube feeding oxygen down into his lungs through his nostrils. He was lucid enough to realize that this was probably because his mouth was wadded up with cotton and sutures. He had no idea why.
Jacob shimmied down to the end of the bed, managed to get a skinny naked leg between the side rail and the footboard, and pushed the release with his toe. The side rail clunked noisily down and he swung his other leg over the side and stepped onto the cold linoleum.
With one of the batons that did duty as his hands he managed to paw off one side of the tube feeding him oxygen, then he backed up and the tube sluiced out of his nostril with a wet pop. He turned and walked away from his bed and the elastic IV hose stretched, the needle pulled out of his arm with a zing and flew back, flecking the sheets with a spit of blood. There was nothing clandestine or furtive about his movements, he was simply a man with someplace to go, a mission to accomplish.
He shuffled out into the empty hallway, dim and dark and still, found the door to the emergency stairwell, and pushed it open.
The Southampton Hospital, built with hurricanes and storm surges in mind, was designed to be evacuated not merely through the ground floor, but also through the roof—all government buildings built near the ocean have this feature. But Jacob was not following this knowledge, he was just following his logic, and his logic was telling him to climb. So he began.
He made it to the top of the stairwell in a little over two minutes. He stood, breath whistling through his nostrils, the lump of cotton and stitches in his mouth feeling like a sour cactus, until he caught his breath. Then he put his weight against the door.
The alarm for this door was hardwired to sirens and as soon as he pushed on the panic bar, the gloom began to howl.
The storm was on temporary hiatus but the wind up here almost knocked the old man down and he stumbled over the backwash threshold and into the water that had built up. Rain was flushing off the roof in great torrents through the downspouts but the old painter had a foot to wade through and the sharp gravel sliced the soles of his feet.
He thought about his son, about how he had driven the boy away. It had been the only thing to do. And now, clambering through the shin-high water on the roof, he wondered if he had saved the boy at all. He was back here in harm’s way and it hit Jacob that all he had done was prolong the consequences for both of them. A deep thud of despair welled up in his chest as he realized that none of it mattered. Not anymore. The damage had been done.
At least it had been spectacular damage.
David Finch had once told him to Go big or go home and in his fractured and terrified mind, Jacob Coleridge felt pride that he had carried that philosophy through to the end.
Even in the lull of the eye, the wind ripped at him, chewed at his robe like an angry dog. He raised his arms and it was gone, pulled off into the night by the hands of the storm. He stumbled on, naked.
Jacob moved cautiously, the good part of his mind knowing that if he fell he would not get up. His feet were bleeding badly and he could feel the warmth seeping from his body.
He was ten feet from the edge of the roof when he heard the door clang open behind him. Flashlight beams shot around. Locked on him. Shouts. He saw his shadow stretch out before him, to the edge of the building, off into the empty darkness beyond.
More shouting.
His name.
He didn’t look back.
Didn’t stop.
His shadow danced. Footsteps sloshed behind. Voices implored him to stop.
Couldn’t they see that he had no choice? That this was what had to be done?
He never doubted his mission, never doubted the reason for this; he knew this was the only way to get away from what was coming. He had lived in fear for too long. No one could save him. Not even Jake. Not anymore.
His progress took all of his strength, all of his conc
entration, but his mind allowed him one brief image, a picture of Mia sitting on the deck of the sailboat all those years ago. Young, beautiful, when life had been full of potential.
He reached the edge of the roof.
Lifted one bloody foot from the water.
And stepped out into the sky.
79
Jake moved away from Frank’s corpse with slow but fluid movements, as if his bones were not connected to one another. “You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.
Hauser stepped down into the sunken living room. “I thought that’s what you did, Mr. Witch-doctor. Figure shit out.” He said it softly, almost kindly, but there was something else, something angry, behind the words. He had his pistol in his hand.
“Where is my wife? My child?”
Hauser moved against the fireplace. The remaining curtains danced like ghosts, tattered and torn. The sheriff looked over at Frank’s misshapen head, disconnected jaw. “I ask the questions, Jake,” he said, bringing up the Sig, and that’s when Jake saw the big trench knife hanging off his belt—a killer’s knife, not a cop’s.
Jake now understood that part of him, the part that knew this was all going to be over relatively soon, had stopped caring. He also realized that back there, in the static of disbelief over how this had unfolded, Kay and Jeremy’s voices had stopped. Along with this came a great weariness. He nodded at the kitchen. “I need a drink.” It was a statement, not a request. He had stopped asking anyone for permission when he had walked out of this place all those years ago and he wasn’t going to start now, not even when he was staring down a nine-millimeter Parabellum.
There was a foot of sand in the kitchen and he had to wrench the door to the cupboard under the sink open. He pulled out a bottle of scotch that had been hiding at the back and poured two fingers into a teacup. His head was buzzing like a shorted bulb and he heard the harsh chirp of electrical circuits simmering. He knew that after the blue-white jolt his heart had taken, he’d need a few minutes to get his think box back on line. Spencer was dead. Frank was dead. While he had been out on the floor, someone had killed them both. No, not someone—the man his father had been terrified of. Jeremy’s man in the floor—Bud man. His father’s faceless portrait. The killer. The Bloodman. All of them. “You want a drink?” he asked Hauser.