Bloodman

by Robert Pobi

  She laid the ball out on the floor, colored side down, and the hundreds of cuts had reduced it to a flat plane, myriad small irregularly shaped shards barely connected by thin strands of rubber. Jake recognized these shards as a miniature model of the weird little canvases piled up at the beach house. The pieces were not independent of one another, and the gestalt was roughly the shape of a lopsided lobster with odd, clubbed feet and a deformed body, formed by thousands of small interconnecting scales—each denoting one of Jacob Coleridge’s blobs of madness.

  She made her last snip in the ball and lay the scissors gently down on the floor. Then she picked up the markers and began coloring in her handiwork. At one point she stopped and stood up and Jake wondered what was wrong. But she just walked over to the CD player and hit Repeat.

  “She only likes the first four songs,” Mrs. Mitchell offered as explanation.

  Emily returned to the carpet by the sofa and went back to work like a high-speed robot programmed to color.

  It took her another nine minutes of coloring in the loosely connected bits of rubber ball until she was finished. She stopped, placed the markers on the floor beside the scissors, and went back to work on her upside down puzzle.

  Mrs. Mitchell looked over at Jake and shrugged. “I guess that’s it.”

  Jake looked at the ball, laid out like a dissection in a biology class.

  Mrs. Mitchell shrugged. “Looks kind of like some of the pieces on your video.”

  Jake stared into the swirling rubber puzzle, trying to pick out details that made some sort of sense.

  It was Frank who said, “It’s upside down.”

  Jake stood up and walked around to the other side of Emily’s artwork. In the middle of the spider’s body, sprawled out like a gerrymander map, four irregularly shaped pieces of rubber came together and formed the image of a human eye.

  “You sonofabitch,” Jake said through his teeth.

  “What?” Frank came over and stood beside him.

  “It’s a sphere. Jacob meant for this to be assembled into a sphere.”

  “What would be the point?”

  Jake squatted down and lifted one of the legs of the rubber skin; it was cold in his hand. “So you could only see the painting from the inside.” He looked up into Frank’s eyes.

  Frank looked at the model that Emily Mitchell had constructed from her vantage point, way out beyond comprehension. “He really has lost his mind.”

  Jake shook his head and tried not to sound too reverent. “This is brilliant.” He thought of the stainless polyhedron model on the console by the door, the one his father had welded thirty-plus years ago. It was about the same size as the beach ball. In fact, if he thought about it, it was worth betting that it was exactly the same size as the beach ball. Somehow the old man had broadcast on a frequency that Emily Mitchell had received. The idea that the panels back in the studio were actually the mock-up for the real piece of art, which was right here in his fucking hands, was too far-reaching to consider. How could he know that we’d be able to do this? Jake wondered.

  And the answer was, he hadn’t. This was a fluke, a one-in-a-trillion-squared shot that had panned out. The girl had deciphered the panels, and she had somehow stumbled upon—or been magically instructed by the video to find—a beach ball of the right size. Jacob Coleridge’s wire-frame sculpture was just that—a frame. And this piece in his hand, this cold piece of rubber that felt a little too much like human skin, was the tailor-made canvas. This was what the old bastard had wanted. A spherical painting to be viewed from the inside—the perfect way to hide his work. And Jake had somehow stumbled on a solution. It had been an accident, one of those things that you read about every now and then.

  The thought of anything else was simply ridiculous.

  The cold, almost epidermal rubber felt perverse, wrong in his hands. But he had his mug shot.

  Skinned.

  Jake turned to Mrs. Mitchell. “Thank you for your help.”

  62

  Jake and Frank headed for the hospital, fighting into the wind this time, their progress handicapped by the lousy aerodynamics of the big metal beast. With the new lead, Jake had come out of his angry grief enough to be amazed at the force Mother Nature was throwing around. He wondered if the house back at the point was still standing or if it had been snatched from the shoreline in one violent grab of the ocean.

  “You think that’s a portrait of the killer?” Frank jerked his thumb at the mutilated beach-ball skin that lay in Jake’s lap, wrapped in two garbage bags.

  Jake caressed the plastic beneath his fingers, wondering what was in there. “I don’t know.” He thought about the mind it had taken to put this together—a three-dimensional painting that was supposed to be viewed from the inside. How many men were capable of something like that? A handful on the planet at most. Maybe less.

  And he thought about the other part, the part that was a little too freaky-deaky to really examine, because there was no way to put it into any sort of context.

  “Jacob wanted this to be seen from the inside? I don’t understand, Jakey.”

  Jake wasn’t sure he did, either. “All those little canvases at the house—all those little irregular shapes piled all over the place, are parts of a whole—of a bigger piece. Alone, they are nothing. It’s like a digital photograph. Up close—too close—all you see are little squares of color, like tiles in a mosaic. I knew they meant something, I just couldn’t figure out what.”

  “How’d he design it? Did you look at the way that kid chopped up that beach ball? Something like that takes a shitload of smarts.” Frank shook his head and fired up a cigarette.

  “You can fault Jacob Coleridge on a lot of things but you can’t accuse him of being dumb. And I think that this thing was designed to be stretched over that sculpture in the—”

  Frank slapped the steering wheel. “—hallway! Sonofabitch, that’s smart, I mean—” And he stopped, realizing that meant that this had been Jacob’s plan for three-plus decades. “Oh, boy.”

  Up ahead there was a dip in the road that had filled in with water. Jake shifted in his seat. “That looks deep, Frank.”

  “Don’t worry. Got a snorkel,” he said, and tapped the windshield, pointing to a pipe that stuck out of the hood in front of Jake. “Besides, this thing won’t float—it’s designed to fill up with water so we don’t lose traction. Might get your pants wet but do you really give a shit?”

  Jake’s fingers wrapped tighter around the support bar mounted on the dashboard in front of his seat, keeping one hand on Emily Mitchell’s artwork in his lap. He looked to the east, to the waves detonating against the newly gouged shoreline, and tried to ignore that if the storm wanted them to drown, a snorkel wasn’t going to do shit.

  63

  His father stared at the ceiling, making scared little sounds that belonged in a children’s ghost story. “Who is this, Jacob?”

  Jake laid the skin of the beach ball out on a bulletin board he had rolled in from the doctor’s lounge. It was held up with pins, like a prized specimen on a dissection table.

  Jake had other things in the back of his mind. He wanted to ask his father about where he had come from, where he had been found. About who he really was. But he had no time. The storm was raging against the world around him and the Bloodman was raging against the world within. And his entire focus had been reduced to finding his wife and child. “Who, Jacob?”

  Jacob Coleridge stared at the piece, fascinated, something like pride shining in his eyes. Then he shifted his gaze to his son’s eyes, and for a second they were the eyes of a rational, sane man. Maybe even a man who loved him. His mouth twitched in one weak little smile, the kind Jacob had never given his son; I love you, it said.

  Then someone threw the big breaker in his head, his mind shorted out for good, and he fell back onto the pillow, mumbling beneath his breath.

  Jake spent another ten minutes—ten minutes he didn’t have and couldn’t spare—trying to coa
x his father’s mind out of wherever it had retreated to and all he had to show for it were a few mumbled pleas and some crying. Jake finally gave up and steered Frank out into the hallway by the elbow.

  “Give me the keys to the Humvee.”

  Frank fished into his slicker and pulled out his keychain, an old .3030 cartridge with a single car key attached. He tossed it to Jake. “Where you going?” He had an unlit cigarette tucked into his teeth and it bobbed up and down as he spoke.

  “You stay with Dad. See if he says anything else. See if he comes back. Ask him what this is about. Ask him who is doing this. And why.” Jake thought about his father, a frightened figure out of a Gothic horror story, and felt a little part of him inside go cold. “You got a weapon?”

  Frank pulled back the waxed raincoat and an old blued .45 winked out at Jake. “Also got the Ka-Bar,” he said, tapping the hilt of the big trench knife he had carried since Korea.

  They didn’t make men like Uncle Frank anymore.

  Frank was grinning and in the dim emergency lighting he looked like Jacob.

  “Stay with Pop.”

  Frank smiled, his hand still on the hilt of the knife. “Not even the Devil is getting by me, Jakey.”

  Jake stared at him for a few seconds. “He’s going to come, Frank. After you or after me or after Dad. We’re all that’s left, unless Kay and…and…” He let the sentence get drowned out by the wind. Or was that his own scream?

  Frank put his hand out, laid it on Jake’s arm. He felt the muscles under the fabric shift like bunched steel cables. “Jake, you don’t fucking worry about anything. You don’t worry about your dad and you don’t worry about me. I might be old but I ain’t rusty. I’ve killed just about everything out there—including men—in my time, son. I can still kick ass. So go do whatever you have to do to find your wife and your son.”

  Jake wanted to say something, to maybe thank the old man, but he knew that if he opened his mouth he’d only cry. And maybe not stop.

  He took the keys and ducked into the black stairwell.

  64

  It took Jake twenty minutes to negotiate the terrain between the hospital and the sheriff’s office, a trip that under normal circumstances—even in the midst of long-weekend tourist traffic—should have taken five. The big military vehicle handled the deep trenches of water that sloshed over the roads with ease but the wind was an entirely different matter. The Hummer had been designed for slow going over bad terrain—it could climb rocks, riverbanks, and other cars with ease—but heading straight into the 150-mile-an-hour winds that were screaming over Long Island was an effort for the big clumsy truck. A few times he felt the wind get under the front end and try to flip the vehicle. Like Frank, he found himself talking to the Hummer, calling her all kinds of sweet names as she made it from one endurance test to the next.

  It was night now, and the hurricane had blocked out the sky in a roiling canopy of black water that screamed at the earth. The tall cement curbs that kept the lawns free of rain during the big summer rainstorms were funneling water down the streets and it raged and boiled like a river. The entire town was flooded and half the trees were uprooted. Houses were collapsed and there was debris everywhere.

  He saw no one on the roads and wondered how the coast was doing. Was all this water from the rain that belted down or had the ocean made it up onto land? At the intersection of Front and Lang he had to climb over the lawn of the Presbyterian church. The windows were dark, absent even of the flicker of candlelight, and Jake knew that it was empty, with no one inside praying. He found this strange since the holy rollers always like to ask God for protection and help through times like this. To Jake, swearing at the old motherfucker made more sense since wasn’t it the Almighty visiting this shit on them in the first place?

  The parking lot of the sheriff’s office was still empty of official vehicles and he parked near the side door, in the lee side of the wind howling by.

  The cop with the egg sandwich, Wohl, was inside the door, barking at his walkie-talkie with demented enthusiasm. He stopped when he saw Jake, rain-soaked and one hundred years older than two hours ago.

  “Where’s Hauser?” Jake barked.

  Wohl nodded at the two big slabs of arched oak that did duty as front doors, hastily secured with duct tape and two pieces of iron pipe. They flexed and rattled with the wind trying to blow its way in to get to the little piggies. “Trying to help the EMT guys over at the mall. Propane tank at the Denny’s blew up. Custodian got a red-hot doorknob launched through his head.”

  Jake lifted the MacBook. “You got communications up yet?”

  Wohl held the walkie-talkie up with his index and thumb like it was a turd on fire. “You think I’d be screaming at this thing if we had satellites?”

  Jake stopped, took a few seconds to gather his thoughts. “I need a garbage can. Maybe two foot across. Size of a beach ball. And something to eat. You got a vending machine?”

  Wohl smiled, glad that there was something he could do. “How about egg salad with plenty of onions on rye with a little mustard? And coffee. I got coffee. Lots of coffee.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “How you take it? We got no sugar.”

  “In a cup.”

  On his way he passed Scopes, leaning against the wall by the door digging mud out of his boot treads with a big tactical knife. He looked up, saw Jake, and waved with the knife.

  Kay’s face popped up in his head, smiling, freckled, beautiful and alive. Behind her, not far away, Jeremy was there with Elmo, dancing around with a Moon Pie in his hand. Jake blinked and willed the images to stop, to crawl back into the dark.

  Kay blew him a kiss. Then fell away into the shadows.

  Jake shoveled two of Wohl’s sandwiches down followed by two cups of coffee. Then he went to work on the dissected beach-ball skin.

  He didn’t have the time to go back to the beach house to get the stainless-steel frame that sat on the console by the door; right now he needed to jerry-rig something so he lined a large garbage can with paper towels, balled up to make a rough bowl, and set the skin of the beach ball into it. He padded it out, and was surprised that it was a pretty good fit for a half-assed mock-up.

  As he tried to align the parts, which slipped by one another like a handful of guitar picks, he got glimpses of features here and there. Almost a nose. A bit of an eye. A cheekbone. Finally he had it laid out in the bottom of the can enough that all he had to do was push a little more of it together. He fiddled it into shape, held it into place, and looked down at the image that Emily Mitchell had drawn for him.

  It was a portrait.

  A good portrait.

  The girl had done an unbelievable job.

  But Jake knew that it wasn’t what his father had painted on the canvases back at the beach house.

  No hell. No way.

  And for the second time that night, he felt the warm fist of defeat heat up in his stomach. This was it—his last shot at figuring out what his old man was trying to tell him. And behind all the static of grief and anger and frustration, he knew that his father was trying to tell him who had taken Kay and Jeremy.

  Now he would never get them back. Not Kay. Not Jeremy.

  Skinned.

  They were gone.

  Skinned.

  For good.

  Scopes burst into the room. “Special Agent Cole, the medical examiner is on the phone.”

  Without lifting his head, Jake said into his hands, “I thought the phones were down.”

  “Actually, they’re the only thing that’s held up. Push line three.”

  Jake wobbled to the old oak table, the top stained with countless coffee-mug rings and cigarette burns. He picked up the receiver and pressed line three.

  “Cole, here.”

  “Special Agent Cole, Dr. Reagan. Two things. First of all, the blood on the child’s T-shirt you brought in this morning is the same type as the boy from the Farmer house. It hasn’t been sequenced, but it’s AB
negative.”

  Jake remembered Jeremy standing at the bottom of the stairs, his head tilted to one side, pink tears streaking his face. “And?”

  “And the second thing is that whoever killed Rachael Macready cut out her tongue. At first I thought she had bitten it off like Madame X but it wasn’t in the house.”

  “Did you check her stomach?” Jake asked.

  There was silence on the other end of the line while Dr. Reagan swallowed once, loudly. “It wasn’t there, although I hadn’t thought that it might be.” She had that mistrust in her voice now, the one they all got around him sooner or later when they began to understand how well he knew these monsters. “You’ve got more experience than I do in homicides of this type—what do you make of that?”

  Jake ran through the endless parade of murders he had seen in his years hunting down killers. It was usually standard Freudian backlash reasoned out by a psychologically fractured mind. Edmund Kemper was the poster boy for this kind of thinking; he had killed six women before building up the courage to go after the one he really wanted to take out. To understand these men, all you needed was the key. And it was usually pretty simple. He said the first thing that came to mind. “He saw her as a traitor.”

  “Why?”

  His conversation with Hauser that afternoon popped into his head. “She helped me. She helped my fath—” The words clanked to a halt in his throat as an image of Emily Mitchell and her bright yellow barrette flashed in his head. “Oh, God.”

  Jake slammed the phone down and threw his borrowed police poncho on. He ran through the corridor for the back exit, hollering at Scopes. “Get in touch with Hauser. Tell him to meet me at the Mitchell house. Now!”

  He slammed through the back door, out into the gyrating screech of the storm that was taking everything he had left apart, a little at a time.

  65

  The truck threw up thick plumes of water as it barreled down the empty streets of Southampton, enough that the Israelites could have followed in its wake. Since leaving the Sheriff’s Department, Jake had forded two newly-formed storm-fueled rivers that had sprung up in town and both times the water had actually climbed up over the hood—somehow Frank’s snorkel contraption seemed to be doing its job because the engine had not so much as coughed. When he wasn’t resorting to naval tactics, Jake kept his foot down as he ripped through the empty town. After a few blocks he realized that he had to ease off or he’d flip Frank’s gas-guzzling bitch and end up drowning alone in the middle of one of the abandoned streets.