by Robert Pobi
The Bloodman.
Me.
“Jake, I never saw them. No one did. You’ve been in Montauk for two weeks. TWO WEEKS! Jesus. You killed your wife and kid, Jake. Kay and Jeremy. You fucking skinned your wife and son, you sonofabitch. What is wrong with you?”
Jake’s chest thumped again but this was his adrenaline, not the Duracell. He held the photo, vibrating like a leaf in his hand. He saw Kay smiling up at him, then a quick loop of tape played through his head, one where she was on the floor, howling.
“Those horsehairs we found all over the house? They were from a bow. A cello bow.”
Jake could no longer see. His eyes had flattened into crystal lines. He saw light and dark and red but little else. “No. No. No. No.” Over and over. Inside his head, the images were flashing in series now, each one bloodier than the last.
Then Kay’s voice roiled up out of the dark, her screaming so intimately horrible that he clamped his hands over his ears to block it out. Only he realized that it was inside his head, and something about that made it all the more frightening. He began to scream, the sound echoing like a gored animal in a steel tank.
Hauser spat on the floor. “No one saw them, Jake, except you. That morning you and I were discussing Carradine, they were upstairs taking a bath, remember that? Sure, I heard water running. I heard a radio in the bathroom. But you know what I didn’t hear, Jake? Splashing. Talking. Laughing. Or any one of the million other noises you hear when a three-year-old takes a bath. There was no one else here with you, Jake. You were alone with your eidetic memory. You can create crime scenes in your head. You can create anything in your head. You’re like Dr. Frankenstein, blowing life into discarded pieces. You imagined your family.”
Jake’s chest filled with hot lava that seared his vocal cords shut, melted his stomach, sent a boiling burst of adrenaline up into his brain. He doubled over. “Stop this!”
Hauser’s hand was on his pistol and his eyes were humorless old pennies behind the yellow shooter’s glasses. “The two bodies in the Farmer house were your wife and child, Jake.”
“I was with Kay and Jeremy this morning!” he screamed. “Someone took them!” And it sounded like a lie, even to him.
Hauser shook his head but the pennies stayed nailed to Jake. “No, Jake. The woman and child were your wife and son.”
“That woman and boy died three nights ago, Mike! Kay and Jeremy disappeared yesterday!”
Hauser shook his head. “No, Jake. They died three days ago. I spoke to Carradine—the lab at Quantico matched the dead child’s DNA to you. Well, half to you, anyway.”
“I WAS WITH THEM TODAY!”…wasn’t I?
“No, Jake, you weren’t.” Hauser shook his head sadly. “Over the past three days, no one’s seen your wife or son.”
“If they weren’t here, who have I been talking to?” Making love to?
Hauser shrugged. “You don’t act crazy. It’s that memory of yours. Seems more like a curse than anything else. Carradine said you see things that no one else does. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. You pulled them out of your memory.”
Jake thought of the way his mother used to visit him after she died and his fingertips tingled like they were filled with spiders. “Why would they be at the Farmer house?”
“Wohl finally spoke to Mr. Farmer an hour ago. He’s in St. Lucia. He said that the house was rented by Kay River for the first of September.”
Jake was thumped in the chest again and the breath left him with an audible chug. “Do…you…realize…how…crazy…this…sounds?”
“DO YOU? You’ve been alone in here.” Hauser paused, searching back through all the little things he had missed. “Remember the pizza delivery? You ordered a single one for yourself. And a Coke. Because you knew there was no one else here.”
“That’s not true, I called the place to complain…”
“Do you remember placing the order?”
“Sure I—” And then he realized that he didn’t.
“You skinned your own family, then created a memory-generated model so you could—” Hauser paused, tried to understand the thought process involved. “You are so fucked it’s not even funny.”
Nobody’s your kind of mean, Jakey. Spencer’s words Teletyped across his mental TV screen. Spencer, who had not wanted to discuss Lewis. Because he knew. Nobody’s your kind of mean, his no-longer-alive voice repeated.
Then came the images of Kay on the bed with him mere hours before. Then he thought about the empty handcuffs.
He remembered the beach yesterday, Kay holding his hand, Jeremy waving to the couple walking by.
The couple not waving back.
Kay—incredulous—waving.
And the couple ignoring her, too.
Why?
They could not see her.
Or Jeremy.
Because they weren’t there.
“They weren’t locals,” Jake whispered. “That’s why,” this so small he hadn’t said it at all.
“No one saw them in town in the past three days, Jake. No one. And your wife kind of stuck out. No one at the Kwik Mart on Twenty-Seven. No one in the Big Shopper or the Montauk Market saw them. Not the place that sells the Hasselhoff T-shirts.” Hauser stopped, and for a second it looked like he stopped breathing. Then he filled his lungs with a great dirty gasp. “I don’t want this. I don’t want this more than anything in the world, Jake. But you did it. I see it starting to swing around behind your eyeballs. You’ve been in town for nearly two weeks. Two fucking weeks! You rented the place up the beach to take care of your father—you came here before he had his accident. You think I’m making this up?”
Jake shook his head. “I got here three nights ago. The night Madame and…and…Jeremy…and…” His voice trailed off into a sob as the little men in his head pulled the chocks from the wheels and the memories began to roll slowly forward.
“You murdered your wife and son at the Farmers’ house and you cleaned up. Because that part of you—the bad part—has been paying attention to what you know. It may have its secrets from you but you certainly have no secrets from it.”
The pictures arrived from his data-recovery software. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Frame by frame by frame.
He threw up again, a dry wracking spasm that shook his chest. “I don’t—What—? Oh, Christ. Fucking kill me!” The wind throbbed outside and somewhere off in the distance there was a crash of another house falling into the sea. “Please.”
He remembered Kay and Jeremy on the deck the other morning, Kay so proud of her Don’t Hassel The Hoff! T-shirt, Jeremy’s little hat with the embroidered dolphin on it. How could she…how could his son…?
And he saw other, fragmented pictures.
That twitched and shrieked and splattered and kicked.
His stomach convulsed in another violent swirl of acid and reflex and he threw up again, doubling over and retching loudly. Only there was nothing left to come out but pain.
Hauser went on. “After your wife and son, you killed Rachael Macready and David Finch. Then you killed Mrs. Mitchell and her daughter. You were floating in the water to clean yourself off. And that poncho probably protected you from most of their blood in the first place.”
Guess again, a little voice at the back of his head said softly.
Hauser’s jaw pulsed like steel cable. “I found the portrait inside the beach ball that the little girl made—you left it in the garbage can in the interview room. You said it was no good, that we couldn’t use it. Why was that, Jake?”
Hauser left the room, his boots thudding over sand, then thunking on the stone floor in the foyer. He came back with the steel polyhedron cradled under his arm like a football helmet. He stood on the raised step above the living room and tossed the frame to Jake. Jake snatched it in, hugged it to his chest, collapsed over onto it.
Hauser reached inside his poncho and pulled out the scissor-slashed skin of the beach ball that Emily Mitchell had constructed/channeled.
He tossed it to Jake. “Put it together,” he said.
It landed beside him, a little left of the can of spray-foam insulation that had done Uncle Frank in. Jake shook his head. Cleared his throat. Tried to speak. The words came out cracked, broken, like the rest of his insides. “She…she…m…made a mistake. She didn’t read my father’s painting right. She did a portrait of—”
“A portrait of you, Jake. Not a mistake. Only you didn’t figure it out, did you?” Hauser tried to look into Jake’s eyes—into the man he had liked, the man who on the surface seemed like he had turned a poisonous past around and had built something for himself. Something beautiful.
He remembered hearing that every culture has a bogeyman.
Jake stared back, and his eyes were deep black; a red hemorrhage blossomed in his left, his right clear and bright.
“Your father wanted you to know that the Bloodman is you.”
Hauser came down and took the big stainless pistol from Jake’s holster. He backed up and emptied it into his palm. He dropped five of the .500-caliber cartridges to the floor and swept them away with his foot, into a puddle. He dropped the sixth into the cylinder, slowly spun it into place, and snapped the weapon shut.
“That’s why you’re so good at hunting killers, Jake. You understand their language because you’re one of them.” Hauser watched Jake, watched the memory walls in his skull come down one after another in the domino effect.
“Remember those two suitcases that disappeared from the Farmer house? The ones that you figured out from the indents on the carpet? Guess what?” He pointed at the corner where Kay’s Halliburton—dented and peeking open like a clam—lay beside the cello case, covered in sand and garbage that had blown in. “There’s the second one.”
“What about Kay’s cello? Why would she come up here for one day and bring her cello? She knew she’d have no time to play it. I bet we call the bus company in a few hours and no one will remember a woman with a cello, Jake. Kay and Jeremy came up in your car. That’s why there’s a baby seat in the back. You stayed at the Farmers’ a little while. And then…” He let the sentence drop off. “Your father wasn’t trying to warn you, he was trying to scare you away.”
Images were jamming up in his brain, tumbling over one another to let themselves out. His father had loved him, had defended him. And when Mia had been murdered, he had given up, crawled into the bottle, and tried to forget that he was still alive. Only he couldn’t stop painting because it was what he had been made to do. And in his painting, in his work, he had let it come out. He had loved his son, had not turned him in, but he had turned his back on the boy. We do things for blood we don’t do for anything else, Uncle Frank had said over the phone.
Hauser held up Jake’s big stainless .500. “There is one round in here.” He tossed the pistol onto the counter and walked past Frank’s body and stepped through a blown-out window into the rising day.
84
Jake stood out past the break of the surf in water up to his waist. What was left of Jeremy floated beside him, undulating in the swell like a rotting sea creature. He held Kay’s flat, shredded hand. The wind was completely gone now and had he not known he was standing in the eye of a hurricane, he would have sworn that it was one of the most beautiful mornings he had ever seen.
Except for the skin of his dead wife and son floating at his side in the brown swells.
Back on the beach, the house was all but destroyed and something told him that the second part of the storm would finish what had been started here. It would wipe the whole place clean.
Jake remembered the men he had been. There had been some good in his life. Maybe more than a little. But it was canceled out by everything he had taken away. Mostly from himself.
He raised his wife’s flattened hand and gave it a kiss, ignoring its smell. Then he kissed his little boy on the cheek, beside the hole where his ear had been.
Then he placed the cold wet barrel of the big stainless revolver against the roof of his mouth and angled it back, so it would do its job. He thought about the woman he had loved, about the boy they had made, and about how it had all amounted to nothing.
He closed his eyes.
And gently pulled back on the trigger.
Half an ounce of pressure later, Jake Cole became a ghost.
85
Hauser stood at the edge of the muddy embankment that used to shelve out onto a nice sand beach. In the early-morning light it was strewn with debris and flotsam, ranging in magnitude from a golf bag to an upside down forty-seven-foot Chris Craft Constellation that looked a lot like his boat. Probably was, if he wanted to guess. Only it was upside down. Not a good week, he realized. Then thought, Fuck it, and decided that he had earned himself a drinking problem.
He turned back to the house where Jacob Coleridge had made his contribution to American painting. He saw the concrete slab of the studio floor, pitted and scarred, the building pulled out to sea. All those paintings, all that creative genius, all that money, gone.
Some families run on love, some run on anger and madness, some run on worse things, Jake had said.
Worse.
Things.
What could be worse than this? Hauser wanted to know. He took in the world that the ocean had littered with all the things it didn’t want, and the stretch of sand as far as he could see was scabbed over with insurance claims. He wondered if his house had made it through the night. His gun collection in the basement. Maybe it—And then he stopped. Because none of it mattered. Not anymore. And he had to save himself for Act II of the hurricane. In another few hours hell would be back.
Minus the Devil, this time.
He half slid and half fell down the new scoop of the beach. He had never really paid attention to the layout here before, but he was sure that the storm had pulled a sixty- or seventy-foot swatch of coast away.
The beach felt like another planet—one no human had ever set foot upon. Hauser was not interested in metaphysics, but he wondered how many people had had their lives irrevocably changed by the last two days of weather.
And worse things.
Sand clung to his boots with weak fingers as he moved down the beach, arms hanging loosely like the quarterback he had been so long ago. Above the gentle wind he heard the whine of an approaching siren—Scopes on his way.
Behind him, the ocean reached out and pulled the ghosts from the shallows, driving them to the bottom and dragging them out toward deep water with the rest of the trophies the storm had taken.
Author’s Notes
Anyone familiar with the area of Long Island where this story occurs will notice that I have taken endless liberties with the locale—I have shifted roads, invented neighborhoods, fabricated streets, and created beaches that do not exist. This was done for the simple reason that I did not want any real-world locations associated with the fictitious events of this novel.
Also, the Southampton Sheriff’s Department portrayed in this story is my own fabrication and has no bearing on any of the law enforcement agencies that serve the communities mentioned.
Acknowledgments
When it comes time to do the blood quantum for any novel, delineating patrimony can be difficult; for a first novel, whittling down the gene pool is impossible. But the following people stand out for going far above and beyond the call of duty:
My agent, Jill Marr, of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency—she moves continents and commands the dead; Dr. Justin Frank—bon vivant, author, friend, driver of strange little cars, impresario, Chuck Close aficionado—a true 21st century Renaissance man; Sandra Dijkstra, the great Oz, pulling levers behind the curtain.
At my agency: Andrea Cavallaro for smuggling Bloodman over countless borders; Elisabeth James for her endless patience; Elise Capron for getting my manuscript to the right hands; Thao Le for her can-do attitude; Jennifer Azantian for dragging the cart up the hill each day.
At Thomas & Mercer: Andy Bartlett, for always making me feel like the only writer in t
he room; Victoria Griffith, for seeing something in my work that no one else could; and everyone at T&M who helped put Bloodman into a dust jacket.
About the Author
Photo by Christopher Snow
Robert Pobi dealt in fine Georgian antiques for thirteen years before turning to writing full time. He has fished for everything that swims—from great white sharks off Montauk to monstrous pike in northern Finland. He prefers bourbon to scotch and shucks oysters with an old hunting knife he modified with a grinder. In warm weather he spends much of his time at a cabin on a secluded lake in the mountains, and when the mercury falls he heads to the Florida Keys. The critical response to his first short story (written when he was twelve) was a suspension from school. Now he writes every day—at a desk once owned by Roberto Calvi.
Bloodman has been published all over the world.
Visit him at www.robertpobi.com.