by Robert Pobi
“Is that what you youngsters are calling it these days?”
Kay was a few months away from her thirtieth birthday—a date she was dreading and Jake found himself secretly looking forward to. Jake hoped that the fifteen-year age spread between them would feel less cavernous if her birth year was only one digit off of his. Besides, Kay looked young for her age and Jake wanted her to be in a new decade so he wouldn’t feel so old. All he thought about now was how she smelled.
“I missed you,” he said into her hair, greedily gulping in her scent. It was clean and laced with a hint of papaya.
“I missed you more.”
He felt her arms tighten and the meaty presence of her breasts push into him. “You feel good.”
“You always say that.”
“Because you always feel good.” He squeezed her a little tighter before they unclenched and headed back to the house, fingers loosely intertwined, Jeremy running circles around them like a whippet, high on MoonPies, the bus ride, and at seeing Daddy.
“I brought you some clothes. Things a little more—” she scoured her vocabulary—“corporate.”
He kissed the tip of her nose, then her lips, and said, “You’re not staying.”
Kay stopped, looked up into his eyes. “I just schlepped my cello on a Greyhound that smelled like piss while managing to keep Jeremy entertained for the three-hour ride and you say I can’t stay. You must be real tired of having sex with me, mister.” She sounded only half serious.
Jake managed a small smile. He leaned over as they walked, kissed the top of her head, breathing in more papaya. “Dylan is rolling in tomorrow night. I have my hands full with Dad.” He paused, hesitated. “And I have a case here that’s going to take—”
“Whoa. Whoa. Back up, Mr. Not-getting-laid. Did you say you have a case?” She stopped and her grip tightened on his hand. He also stopped or he would have pulled her over.
“It just happened.”
“They always just happen, Jake. That’s the way it is. You haven’t told Carradine that you’re quitting?”
“This came up last night. While I was here.” Jake wanted to tell her more, to fill her in on all the things that were crawling around in his skull, flipping the switches and pulling books off the shelves like an angry child. “It’s important.”
“Oh, Christ, don’t start that with me, Jake. I know that it’s important. They’re all important. But we have plans.”
“I just need to get through this thing with my father and the case and I’m done. I can deal with the Utah headhunter from home. If this thing wasn’t here—right in my lap—I would have said no. Carradine wouldn’t have let me pick it up in the first place. Consider it loose ends.”
She listened to the timbre of his voice. “We’ll leave when you leave. I think that’s a fair compromise.”
Jake turned his focus to the horizon. Somewhere not too far away, hell was rolling in on eighty-foot swells and 200-mile-an-hour winds. “You can stay tonight,” he said softly and kissed the top of her head again. “Then I am sticking your ass on a bus and you’re going back to the city.” She opened her mouth to protest when he added, “I don’t want you two here right now. Not with this storm. Not with my work. I don’t need the vulnerability.”
And something in his tone made her stop. “Okay, Jake.” She brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Whatever you need. We’ll sleep wherever you slept last night.”
“The sofa.”
“Sleep on sofa!” Jeremy said, and threw a rock with a clumsy overhand pitch. The stone thunked into the ground at his feet and he picked it up, trying the exercise again, this time making it to the edge of the surf. He nodded appreciatively and went back to scouring the beach for appropriate stones.
Kay was quiet for a few seconds, her calm way of processing information at work. Jake knew what she was doing and appreciated it. It was one of the things that he loved about her—she listened to and believed in him. Maybe it was all they had been through together, but she trusted him to take care of himself. And her and Jeremy. Once again he felt the speed of his brain and body magically slowed by just being around her.
“We can camp on the floor if we have to. Don’t worry about us, Jake, you’ve got your hands full here. I know you’re probably overwhelmed—” She paused, smiled again. “Listen to me—you overwhelmed? When have you ever been overwhelmed?” It wasn’t said cruelly, just matter-of-factly. Her grip on his hand tightened and he waited, knowing that she was in the process of asking a question. “How is your father?” The words were tentative because she knew some of what had happened.
He thought about the way a life that had seemed so ordered a few days ago, had somehow tied itself into a knot when he got the call about his old man. What could he tell her? He’s fine. Except for the terror I see in his eyes each time I talk to him. And he’s painting in his own blood. And I can’t forget to mention that they’ve given him enough morphine to tranq a Tyrannosaurus Rex and he’s still making more noise than an army of hungry zombies. Or the X-Acto knives. Yep, shit is just fucking dandy with my old man right now. “It could be better,” he offered in the way of a healthy compromise.
Kay knew him enough to read between the lines and she simply squeezed his hand again. Jeremy threw another rock, this one actually making it to the water, and he clapped with a fervor that Jake was jealous of. He pulled Kay in closer, her hip pressed against his thigh, and their step fell into a comfortable rhythm.
“We have any food?” she asked.
“Sure. Loads. Tons. Tuna, spaghetti, bologna and mustard sandwiches. A few packets of gas-station sugar. We’re set.”
Kay giggled and dropped her head against his shoulder. “We’ll order pizza.”
A middle-aged couple walked on the beach in chinos and matching cable-knit sweaters. They ambled silently, not talking, barely lifting their heads. Their feet kicked up plumes of sand that the wind carried away. Jeremy stopped lobbing rocks and waved furiously, because on television everyone at the beach was friendly. The couple kept their heads down and continued trudging along, even though they had to have seen the boy; he was in their line of sight.
“That’s rude,” Kay said. “Who doesn’t wave at a kid?”
Jake wasn’t looking. He just shrugged and kept walking. “You two aren’t local, those two people are. They don’t wave to outsiders here.”
“Now you’re bullshitting me.”
“Go ahead, wave.”
So Kay waved.
No response.
A second time.
They kept walking.
“You wave,” she ordered Jake.
“I’m from here. They probably know that somehow.” Jake raised an arm, gave one Nixonesque wave, and put his hand back in his pocket.
Both the husband and wife raised their hands, waved, nodded, and went back to their walk.
“That’s creepy.” Kay sounded disgusted. “Welcome to Purgatory.”
“To them,” Jake offered in the way of an explanation, “You don’t even exist.”
“Wait until I flash the husband my boobies. Then see who doesn’t exist, me or that mummy he’s married to.”
And with that Jake realized how glad he was that she had come. Her view of the world was going to be a big help, if only in the cheerleading department.
Up ahead, Jeremy had stopped in front of Jacob’s house and was squatting down, furiously digging at something in the sand. He pulled it out, held it up to the light, and nodded in approval, his tiny CPU calculating that it was the perfect size for throwing.
For an instant, Jake saw the light hit it, saw it glimmer in his son’s hand. There was a pulse, and a red flash hit his eye as if the thing in Jeremy’s hand were a chunk of glass taillight, then the boy threw it. It arced nicely out over the line of weed and foam that rimmed the ocean’s lip, and plopped into the waves.
“Daddy!” he chirped, thrilled with the improved pitch. He danced around the freshly excavated hole at the water’s
edge, kicking up sand that the wind carried toward the house.
Jake paused where the boy had pulled the object from the earth and bent down, sweeping his fingers over the sand. Just below the surface he brushed a rough object that his touch told him was a rock. He scraped the surface away and saw a piece of what looked like red glass—the same hue as the one Jeremy had launched into the Atlantic. It was not sharp, but globular, amorphous, a melted chunk of red light, dimpled with the acne texture of sand burned into the surface. Jake held it up, squinted into its depths, something about it asking to be investigated.
Inside, neatly suspended in a red translucent cloud, was a small crescent-shaped inclusion. It was light, much lighter than the material it was encased in, and for a second Jake thought he was looking at a human fingernail. Was that possible? What could—
Then Jeremy pulled it out of his hand and threw it at the water.
It arced beautifully, a red drop of light that hung over the surf for a second. Then it plunked into the ocean. “All gone, Daddy,” he said, and ran up the rickety steps to the beach house.
22
While Jake went back to work on the case, Kay dug into clearing out some of the garbage so they’d at least be able to walk from the kitchen to the stairs without having to negotiate an obstacle course. She had opened the doors to the beach and fresh air funneled through the house, swirling motes of ancient dust and cigarette ashes across the floor. She wanted to hang the Persian carpets over the railing on the deck to air them out but for some reason they were nailed and stapled and screwed down to the floor in an overlapping crosshatch—more of Jacob Coleridge’s handiwork.
Kay had locked the hasp on the gate to the low railing that sectioned the pool/swamp off from the rest of the deck and Jeremy was outside, swathed in a white long-sleeved shirt, sunblock, and his little bucket hat, singing one of the happy songs he had learned at daycare. He was busy repeatedly crashing a plastic fire truck into his stuffed Elmo. Sooner than Jake would like, Elmo would be replaced by Optimus Prime. And slowly his son would grow up.
Jake sifted through the autopsy protocols, layering the information into strata, each successive level building on the last. He cycled through the endless photographs; he always learned more from images than other people’s notes. He examined blood spatter from different angles. Studied the macro shots of smeared fingerprints and shattered teeth. The worst was the little boy, a cracked scabbed bundle of muscle and tissue contracted into the fetal position, lidless eyes crossed, little fists tightened into bloody meatballs. At one point he looked away and sucked in a great gulp of oxygen, realizing that he had been holding his breath.
Jake had seen nearly a thousand murder scenes and for him the only common factor between them was the stench of fear. It came in various degrees, depending on what had happened, and like cigarette smoke in a room, it never really left. Spritzing a little Lysol wouldn’t get it out. That stink lingered for a long time. Years. Forever. Maybe longer. Everyone moved out of a house where someone they loved had been murdered. Some people bulldozed it. Others just burned it to the ground. But they all left. Except for the hardcore narcissists; those folks put it behind them and moved on with their lives, going on as if nothing had happened. Working. Drinking. Painting.
The longer Jake stared down at the rigor-mortis contortions of the mother glued to the carpet with her own blood, the more he realized the only obvious truth in the case: this was beyond Hauser’s expertise. Which meant that Jake would be working alone. Going after him.
Jake closed the lid of the MacBook and rubbed his palms into his sockets. Outside, Jeremy was still singing away and playing with his cars. Jake kept his eyes closed and listened to his son, the happy lyrics offset by the brittle snap of plastic cars colliding with one another. In the other part of his brain—the part occupied by murdered children and evidence bags—he was thinking about the house up the beach. The house where two suitcases were missing. Where there were no toys—no fire trucks or Elmo dolls or Optimus Prime figures. The owners were unreachable. And there were another three hundred little things that, taken on their own, didn’t yield any sort of a payback. Yet taken as part of a big picture, they looked a lot like a personal fuck-you. The kind that ended with a woman being skinned down to her muscles.
Jake opened his eyes and Kay was in front of him, staring down, consciously avoiding the photos spread out on the coffee table; she had made the mistake of looking at his work once before and it was not something she would do ever again.
She smiled at him, one hip cocked out, her almost Mohawk tied up with a black bandanna, and the ink on her arms splashing down, around her wrists, ending in L-O-V-E across the knuckles of one hand, H-A-T-E across the knuckles of the other. She had switched into a pair of cutoff shorts and the red-and-black mermaids that were tattooed onto her hips dipped out on both sides of the frayed denim, tails curling around her thighs below the exposed pockets that flapped below the white-cut line. The King Khan and the Shrines wife-beater was pulled tight across her frame, the ribbed fabric pulling taut lines between her breasts. “Can you give me a hand with something?” she asked.
Jake snapped back to the sunny room opening onto the Atlantic, to Jeremy forcing automotive destruction on the imaginary citizens of Make-believe Land, and dropped his eyes to the coffee table, to the images of death spread out like baseball cards. He began to paw the photos and papers into a pile. “Sorry about this, baby.” Back in the city he had an office where he locked everything away in metal filing cabinets when he wasn’t home so Kay or Jeremy wouldn’t walk in and see his pornography of the dead. He put the manila folder over the protocols.
“What can I do?”
“Come help me get into the bedroom. I want to get this place a little better before I put Jeremy down.”
Jake winced—he had always hated that expression, thinking it sounded ugly outside of a vet’s office.
She looked around. “And these booze bottles have to go. We could probably squeeze out enough to start a really good fire, and I don’t need to be around scotch right now.” She chewed her bottom lip. “I can’t speak for you.”
That had been a nice way to ask, he thought, and pulled her into his lap. “Haven’t even thought about it.” He smiled, tapped the breast pocket of his café racer. “Had a few smokes though. And I think I’ll have more.”
“You have smokes?” Her face twisted into the mock surprise of a blow-up doll, mouth round, eyes popped.
He pulled the Marlboros out. “Don’t get cancer on me. I love your playing too much.”
She tapped one out, smelled it as if it were a fine cigar. “Hmmm…fresh.” She patted around in his pockets, her hand finding the rigid lump of the lighter. She fired it up, taking a long haul and exhaling a clean stream straight up. “Fuck, that’s astounding. Keep these things away from me. No matter what I offer you.”
Jake’s eyebrows joined in a single helpless peak. “Sure. No problem. But you never play fair—it’s not in you. You’ll pull those out,” he said, nodding at her breasts, “and I lose. You have too much of an advantage. I declare unilateral neutrality.”
She pulled in another lungful and laughed it out in thin jets between her teeth. “Now, are you going to go all FBI on me and open that door so I can see what we have in the way of supplies? Let’s make sure we have enough bedsheets, water, and shotgun shells.”
“My dad’s room at the end of the hall?”
She nodded. “It’s barricaded like he’s Robert Neville.”
Jake shrugged. “I didn’t go in. Haven’t had time. Maybe it should wait.” There was a brittle edge to his voice, one she was unfamiliar with.
Kay pushed into him. Her flesh was warm and she smelled as good as she had on the beach, that faint whiff of papaya mingling nicely with the Mr. Clean and cigarette smoke. “For what?” she asked, and sucked on the Marlboro.
“For tomorrow. For next week. I don’t know. There’s plenty to do here.”
Her head swiveled
around the vast nave of the living room. Beneath the dust and booze bottles were the bones of a once-beautiful space, like a garden left to time; overgrown neglect that hinted at a former order. “Jake, you never told me about this place, about what it was like growing up here. I mean, look at this.” She swept an arm across the room. “This is something.”
Jake knew what she was talking about. It was impossible not to be in love with this place. Yet he had somehow managed it. He didn’t say anything, but pulled her in closer, slid his hand over the curve of her hip, and rested it on her bum.
“You must have some good memories from here.” Half declaration, half sentence.
“I guess.”
“Don’t dismiss me. I’m being serious.”
He ran his mental fingers over the files in his memory banks. One of the dog-eared folders glimmered and he pulled it up, opened the dry cover. He felt his mouth curl with an involuntary smile and her fingers dug into the back of his neck with encouragement.
Grudgingly, he began. “One night, I guess I was about eight, it was—I don’t know, two, maybe three in the morning—and someone rang the doorbell. My dad’s off in the studio and my mom answers the door in one of her nightgowns—all feathers and silk, looking like a movie star. Andy Warhol’s standing there with this six-foot-five Scandinavian broad and a bunch of people spilling out of the limousine like it’s a clown car. After being thrown out of some club in Manhattan, they had sardined themselves into a Lincoln and headed for the one place they knew they would have a little fun. It was common knowledge that as dedicated to his work as my father was, he never said no to a drink or a good time. I crawled out of bed and my mom put me in a pair of her jeans and I spent the night painting with Warhol while his groupies smoked weed and my dad, the Grand Poobah, held court, discussing art and composition and the usual bullshit with people who couldn’t even begin to understand what he was talking about.
“We painted a cake with icing, and Andy insisted that it was art because I had created it. It wasn’t a matter of mechanics, it was a matter of origin.
