by Robert Pobi
He pushed the thought away and tried to snap his mental armor into place but the pieces wouldn’t click home; his mind kept going back to Kay, to the thought of someone tearing her scalp off with a piece of honed steel.
The adrenaline stab of fear had flooded his system and his heart was throbbing like a venomous snake in his rib cage. There were a couple of jolts from the CRT-D sewn into his chest but none of the bright pyrotechnics that had fried his circuitry twice today.
She’s fine.
Skinned.
Jeremy’s fine.
Skinned.
Why did he go after the nurse?
Revenge.
For what?
You’re just not looking hard enough.
It’s a coincidence.
There are no coincidences, you naïve motherfucker!
They rounded the gentle wide arc that was the last bend in the road before Sumter Point and at almost 120 miles an hour it was neither gentle nor wide. Hauser counter-spun the steering wheel and drifted the heavy car through in a blast of noise and gravel.
After the corner, Jake had his seat belt off and his hand on the grip of his pistol. Hauser punched up the last quarter-mile of asphalt with a final burst of power from the big-block V-8 and floored the brake at the last second, pulling into the driveway in a power slide that spewed rocks and dust in a wide arc. Jake was out of the car and through the front door before Hauser had turned off the engine.
Hauser stormed out of the car and ran around back, his Sig out of the holster, safety off, one in the chamber, his finger on the curved sport trigger. He didn’t know how to deal with the aftermath of human skinnings but he was pragmatic with a good old-fashioned meat-and-bones adversary. It had made him a brief success on the football field.
He reached the deck as one of the big glass doors slid open. He raised his Sig, locked on the opening, and centered on the chest of the man coming out.
The figure materialized into Jake holding up a square of notepaper. “They’re in Montauk.”
Jake came out onto the deck and dropped onto the steps that grinned down at the beach like the gray wooden teeth of a funhouse dummy. “Shopping.” He looked at the note for a second, then balled it up and stuffed it into his pocket. He still had the gun in his hand and after Hauser slid the safety home on his own sidearm and returned it to the holster, Jake tucked his away.
With the threat gone, Hauser’s adrenaline dissipated and he collapsed to the steps, resting his elbows on his knees. “Maybe they shouldn’t be here, Jake.”
Jake let out a long breath, leaned back, and stretched. “They’re going home. I don’t want them here for the storm. I don’t want them here for the skinner. I don’t want them near me or in harm’s way.”
Hauser thought back to the house of death back in Southampton where Rachael Macready had been reduced to past tense. “Jake, what do I do about this guy?”
Jake pulled his cigarettes from his pocket, offered one to Hauser who passed, and fired one up with the sterling Zippo. He watched the ocean get darker as the sun began its descent behind them, over the western flange of the island. He wondered how different the ocean would look tomorrow morning, with the storm five hundred miles closer. And how bad would it get tomorrow night? Would it just rip everything out of the ground and set it down in Kansas? “There were two killings last night. Another this afternoon. That’s close. Even for an extreme maniac. Working that fast you make mistakes, bad decisions. It’s as if there’s a time limit.”
“Storm’s coming,” Hauser said, pointing at the ocean.
Jake shook his head and pulled on his smoke. “That’s not it. There’s purpose to what he’s doing. He’s working hard because he has to. We—I—have to figure out why. With the why we will have a lot better chance at figuring out the who.” He sucked on the filter and the paper cracked and sizzled.
“Back at that house, you said it looked like revenge. Why?”
“These guys like what they do. They take pleasure in the act. They cherish it and hold it and drag it out. Not this one. He’s in and out. Or at least he was with the Macready woman. He shows up angry, doles out his punishment, and leaves. Why?”
“Why would he cart off thirty pounds of skin and hair? Is he making jumpsuits in his basement? Lampshades? Wallets? Jesus, listen to me.”
Jake shook his head and let out a cloud of smoke that the wind coming off the water smacked away. “I don’t get that feeling. If he’s punishing them for something, it’s payment. That means a personal motive.”
Hauser held up his hands. “Are you saying that he knows the victims?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I was the guy running this investigation—”
Jake pointed at Hauser. “You are the guy running this investigation.”
“You know what I mean. The only thing I can say for sure is that this sonofabitch scares me—deep-down scares me.”
Jake’s face stayed flat, calm. “Me, too,” he said.
“Is it true that these guys want to get caught?”
Jake smiled, shook his head. “Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Then why the fuck would a killer write letters to the police or keep dumping bodies in the same place? It’s counterproductive.”
“It’s not that they want to get caught—they don’t think they can get caught. You have to remember that these people—if you can call them people—all have severe personality disorders. There is no such thing as a repeat killer who is a well-adjusted human being. It’s all about them. Getting away with a killing builds confidence. Getting away with a second one builds more. All of a sudden the guy thinks that he’s a criminal mastermind. It’s cockiness. Serial killers generally follow the same intelligence guidelines as the population—running the gambit from barely functional to high acuity. But the rule of thumb is that they are maladjusted losers.”
Hauser examined Jake’s face for a few seconds, trying to see behind the skin. “I’m glad you said that.”
“Why?”
“The way you talk about these guys—the way you seem to understand them—makes it look like you have some kind of deep-down respect for them.”
For the first time Jake could remember, something caught him off guard. “This is not big-game hunting where I relate to the animal. I don’t have any respect for these monsters—and believe me, that’s all they are. Social misfits and broken people. The people who romanticize them as anything else are losers of a lesser degree, but losers still. Christ, I fucking hate these guys.” He looked back at the ocean and saw that the weather was building up to go with what was happening here. Maybe he had been right, maybe this was some sort of a German opera.
“Me, too.” Hauser stood up, brushed sand off his seat. “I’ll be back at the Macready house. Get me through the station since I don’t have a cell phone right now.”
Jake’s mouth moved into an embarrassed smile. “Sorry about that.”
“I thought someone was going after my family…” Hauser let the sentence die and he paused at the top of the steps, his eyes locked out on the ocean. “I’ll get a cruiser out here to keep an eye on things.”
“You can’t afford the manpower right now.”
“And you can’t afford to let something happen to your family. Get them out of here in the morning, Jake. You should leave, too.”
“Can’t.” He shrugged again. “Won’t—it amounts to the same thing. My dad. The killer.” He wanted to add the weird paintings over in the studio, the studies of the faceless men of blood. “I have to be here.” He nodded out at the frothing Atlantic where the clouds had woven into a gray blanket that rose from the ocean. The waves were sloshing up on shore and foam and bits of flotsam were kicked around at the water’s edge. “Where’d the birds go?”
Hauser looked into the sky. “If I had a choice, you think I’d still be here?” He turned and walked away.
37
Jake was still sitting on the steps watching the ocean build up its cou
rage for the next day’s big show when Kay walked out onto the deck with Jeremy bouncing along beside her. He was watching the surface of the ocean chop in on gray swells topped with white that slid halfway up the beach, hissing and bubbling, as Jeremy came over and sat down in his lap.
“Daddy, there’s a policeman in the driveway.”
“He’s going to be watching over the house when Daddy’s not here.” The fatigue of the world melted away and for an instant he felt like everything was all right with the universe.
Kay plopped down beside him and gave him a smooch. “How was your afternoon?” she asked.
How could he even think of answering that? Groovy. Except maybe for the poor woman who was scalped and skinned. Probably for no other reason than she had the misfortune to be my father’s nurse. Oh, and the skinned woman and child in the morgue—can’t forget them. “Fine,” he said, keeping what he did from her yet again—another reason he had decided to stop doing this.
She was in a pair of Levi’s and a tight T-shirt that had the smiling face of David Hasselhoff beaming back with the words Don’t Hassel The Hoff! scripted across the curve of her bust.
“Where did you get that shirt?” Jake asked, laughing.
“Nice, huh?” She pointed her breasts at him like gun turrets. “Kind of gets your attention, doesn’t it? Nobody messes with The Hoff!”
“The man in the store said Mommy looked smoking,” Jeremy offered cheerily.
Jake’s laugh blossomed and it felt good. “Smart man.”
Kay smiled over at him. “He was about fifteen. I don’t think he had ever seen boobies this close.” She looked down at the shirt. “He said he thought my tattoos were cool.”
“Cool, huh?”
“When you’re semipubescent and staring at a chick’s cans, you have to say something.”
“Smoking,” Jeremy repeated. “Is Mommy burned?”
Jake hugged his son closer. “No, she’s beautiful.”
Kay’s eyes misted over and she said, “Why are you the only man who has ever called me beautiful?”
Jake shrugged, something he felt he had been doing a lot of lately. “Because you are. And because you used to spend your time with assholes.” Kay had come to her first NA meeting with her arm in a cast. Her last boyfriend had smacked her around while she had been asleep. He broke her wrist—her playing wrist.
“Now I got me a shiny happy nice guy!”
“And I got me a delusional woman.”
She punched him in the arm. “I’m hungry.”
“So go make some food.”
Kay’s talent in the kitchen was an old faded joke between them. When Jake wasn’t working, he did the cooking; otherwise a good chunk of their income went toward restaurants. Jeremy was fond of pizza with anchovies, Reuben sandwiches, and sweet-and-sour matzo-ball soup from the Chinese kosher restaurant down the block from their apartment.
Jake stood up with his son and flipped him around to a piggyback position like a chimp handling its baby. “How about pizza, Moriarty?”
Jeremy’s arms went around his neck. “And apple juice?”
Jake remembered the Angelo’s Pizza Palace flyer mixed in with the pile of mail by the front door. “I think we can do apple juice.”
Supper came half an hour later. The first thing that struck Jake was the single box in the delivery kid’s hand.
“What do I owe you?”
The kid seemed about twelve, his half-beard cropped into a chinstrap that looked like it held down his Yankees cap. “That’s twelve thirty, sir.” He added the last word with a little hesitation.
“For three pizzas, two Cokes, and an apple juice?” Jake reached into his pocket, his hand coming out with a few crumpled damp bills.
Chinstrap’s face went from bored to worried and he examined the bill. “Um, no, there’s just a single pizza and a Coke on the bill.”
Jake just felt the end of a bad day get a whole lot worse. “No, man, I ordered three small pizzas, two Cokes, and an apple juice.”
The kid shrugged. “If I had two extra pizzas in the car I’d give them to you. All they gave me was this.” Chinstrap held up the single box and for a second it went dark in the doorframe like one of Jacob Coleridge’s weird little canvases.
Jake stood with the bills in his hands, trying to decide who had fucked up. Then that little light in his head went off. “One pizza, sure. You mind coming in while I call the restaurant?”
The kid shook his head, stepped over the threshold. Jake closed the door and went to the phone as the boy stood in the entryway, taking in the time capsule to the polymer era. “Cool,” he said, nodding in approval as he looked around.
At the phone, Jake wondered if one of his friends had sold Kay the T-shirt. He hit redial and a girl answered. “Angelo’s Pizza.” There was a distant tinny quality to her voice that hadn’t been there when he called earlier.
“Yeah, hi, I’m on Sumter Point and I just got my order.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. Everything all right?” Her tone said that she didn’t expect any problems with the meal. After all, how could a place called Angelo’s fuck up a pizza?
“It looks like we’re missing two-thirds of the order.”
“I…don’t…see…how…that’s…possible,” she said as she flipped through some papers at the other end. “Here we go. One small pepperoni pizza with anchovies and a Coke. Twelve dollars thirty. What didn’t you get?”
“No. I ordered three pizzas, two Cokes, and an apple juice.”
“One pizza and one Coke. Thirty-two minutes ago.”
Jake thought about Jeremy, upstairs putting on his PJs, looking forward to pizza before bed. And Kay probably hadn’t eaten all day. Did he want to spend his time arguing with a teenage girl on the phone? He pushed it aside and focused on the single bulb glowing brightly in the middle of his mind. “You keep the addresses of everyone who places orders with you?”
“Yes, sir, we keep copies of all orders. That usually includes phone number and address. I’m telling you, I’m looking at your order, sir.”
But Jake wasn’t thinking about his order. He was thinking about Madame and Little X up the road. Maybe they had ordered a pizza. “Thank you.” He hung up.
He went back to the door, gave the kid twenty dollars, asked for two back, and let him out. On the way back to the table with the pizza box he hollered up to Kay and Jeremy. “You guys will have to share this.”
His wife and son appeared at the top of the stairs. Jake smiled when he saw them and realized that he wasn’t that hungry after the day he had had. “No apple juice, Moriarty. They were out. How about a nice glass of milk?”
Jeremy nodded approvingly as he came down the steps in footed felt pajamas. “I like milk. We got ’chovies on the pizza, Daddy?”
Jake thanked the powers that be for reining in his supper fuck-up. “Yeah, we got ’chovies. Lots of ’em.”
“Then everything is groovy,” the little boy said.
Kay and Jeremy went to the kitchen table to start on the pizza and Jake went to call Hauser. Maybe Madame and Little X had received Angelo’s flyer in the mail. Maybe they had ordered a pizza in the past two weeks. Or cheeseburgers. Steamers. Chinese.
Someone had to know their names.
38
Jake was past tired and well into the static-caked fuzz of exhaustion. The last twenty-four hours had been an emotional shock-treatment session and sleep was the only thing that would regenerate his singed nerve endings. But he had experience with this particular type of combat fatigue and knew that needing sleep wasn’t the same as being able to get it. After supper he had gone back to the Macready woman’s house for another walk-through. But unlike other law-enforcement professionals, Jake did the bulk of his work in his head, not a lab, office, squad car, or crime scene. From the Macready woman’s house he had stopped back at the hospital. Now he stood at the foot of his father’s bed, breathing in the smell of sweat and cleaning fluids.
The room was dark, the onl
y light a thin wedge that the hallway fluorescents grudgingly threw across the floor. The hospital lights were dimmed to half power like an airliner cabin at night and Jake had to fight the temptation to snap on the overheads. He kept glancing back over his shoulder, searching for the blank suction of the painting behind him. No blood-painted eyeless face loomed out of the dark; his father had been moved to a new room.
When he had walked in, one of the nurses—Rachael Macready’s replacement—had pulled out his father’s file, clucking her tongue and nodding over the pages clamped to the dented steel clipboard. She handed him Dr. Sobel’s card with a seven a.m. appointment scrawled across the back in sloppy script. Jake had folded the card into his pocket and resisted the urge to tell her that her perfume smelled like vodka.
Tomorrow Sobel would pose the big question: What do we do with Dad? All they really wanted was the bill paid and a chronic-care patient out so that they could hand the bed over to a person who would actually benefit from a stay in the hospital. In reality, it had a little to do with economics and a lot to do with common sense—after all, Jacob couldn’t stay in the hospital indefinitely.
But Jake didn’t see there being all that much to discuss. He’d humor Sobel, pretend to be interested. Sobel would say, We could use the bed. And there’s really nothing further we can do for your father. With the accident, he will need constant supervision. Jake would listen, take a few pamphlets on places Sobel promised would take good care of him. Jake didn’t know how much—if any—money his father had salted away. If necessary, Jake would sell the house and the money could go to his father’s new jailer; Jake didn’t want anything from the estate. He had walked out on all claims at being a Coleridge twenty-eight years ago and as far as he was concerned, they could send the money and all those grim paintings up in one big mushroom cloud of beach house and canvas. There was always the veterans’ hospital; Jacob had served his country in Korea and he was entitled to that much.
Only he couldn’t do that—it wasn’t what his mother would have wanted. Regardless of the man Jacob Coleridge had become, she would have wanted him taken care of. And she would have expected Jake to do the right thing. So here he was, standing at the foot of a $2,700-a-night hospital bed, wondering why he didn’t feel a shred of love for the old man. It wasn’t that he hated him—what had once been an actual emotion had burned down to the cinders of disregard.
