by Robert Pobi
Hauser nodded wearily, and came forward, the pistol still up. “Why not?”
“You’re on duty,” Jake said, and poured one for Hauser.
“And you’re a recovering alcoholic.”
“Just a drunk between drinks.” He slid the cup across the counter, then raised his own in a toast. He looked at Frank, dead in the chair over Hauser’s shoulder like the lighthouse behind Rachael Macready in that goddamned photograph in the house of the dead. His eyes filled with clear, bright tears.
All he could wonder was, Why?
He downed the booze and the fire was sweet and familiar. He closed his eyes, took in the heat and the beauty of the flames in his stomach. How long had it been since he had had a drink? But he knew, down to the minute if he really wanted to think about it—a gift from his perfect memory. Except for those four months he had never been able to buy back—those were gone for good.
He opened his eyes and Hauser was still standing there with that unhappy look welded onto his skull, eyes distant, mouth turned down. He looked like the stickers that Kay put on the chemicals under the sink so Jeremy wouldn’t pour himself an afternoon cocktail of bleach and stainless-steel cleaner.
Kay. Jeremy. Where were they?
The living room was full of sand and debris. The portrait of the man in the floor was gone, covered over. Jake swiveled his line of sight to the pool. The storm had emptied the algae and lily pads and the foundation had all but been swept out to sea. It still hung off the deck, tilted into the ocean, the waterline at odds with the angle of the rim. The water was a dirty brown now. Murky. Lifeless.
And he remembered what Frank had said. You’re the guy who thinks like a murderer. You do the math.
And his head lit up like the lightning that had been coming down all night. He knew where the bastard had put them. Somewhere no one would check, not even the cops when they had combed the property. Someplace so fucking close no one would think of looking there.
Jake came out from behind the counter. Fast.
Hauser flinched but Jake was so fast he was past the sheriff before he understood what was happening.
Jake barreled by, jumped through one of the blown-out windows, and dove into the pool.
The underwater world tasted of salt and mud, not chlorine. Jake kicked for the bottom and felt his hand sink into the muck and garbage that had settled after the storm. He palmed through the silt and his fingers brushed aside pebbles and stones and empty beer cans and scotch bottles.
His pulse throbbed in his ears. He slid his hands back and forth over the bottom, searching the debris. The air in his lungs tried to pull him to the surface, back to the world, but he kicked to keep himself down. He felt a hubcap, a broken plate, more empty cans and bottles. Then the rough form of a cinder block. And below it, something soft and rubbery that could only be skin.
Jake ran his hands over it and it rippled, coiled back onto his knuckles like it wanted to touch him, to let him know that it knew he was there. His index finger slid into a slimy depression—like Braille, it was familiar to his touch—a small, perfect belly button. And beneath that he felt the crescent-shaped ridges created by a single-edged knife. Beneath that, the rough concrete bottom of the pool.
A human skin. Weighed down with a cinder block.
Jake screamed and lost the air from his lungs in one violent roar. He breathed in, sucked in silt and saltwater and despair. Vomited under the water. Instinctively pushed for the surface.
Broke through.
Screamed a long, horror-wracked vowel. Then dove back into the muck.
He found the cinder block, lifted it up, and wrapped his fingers around the oily skin below.
Foraged on the bottom.
Found a second cinder block.
And a second skin.
He wrenched it free, pushed for the surface, and came up in the shallow end.
They were as thick and as heavy as lead-shielded X-ray bibs. Jake stood there, his heart pounding against his ribs, unwilling to look down.
What was left of Kay in one hand.
What was left of Jeremy in the other.
Hauser stood on the deck above him, his mouth still turned down at the corners in such a way that it looked like his face had taken on a permanent set. He turned on his Maglite, flashed it on Jake. On the things in Jake’s hands. Then snapped it off.
Jake went to the steps, stumbled up, and collapsed on the deck.
Kay’s skin unrolled with a meaty slap. Her eyeless, toothless, lifeless face pointed up into the sky and Jake saw that a knife had opened her mouth from ear to ear. The pool had scrubbed her clean and every bruise, every laceration, leered up at him in madness.
“No,” he said so softly that it may not have been spoken aloud at all.
Jake turned to the skin that had covered his son. It was ragged around the edges and scrubbed clean from its time in the pool. There were no ears.
Hauser came over but kept the light off. “Inside, Jake.” The pistol hung loosely in his hand, glimmering like a prosthetic attachment.
Jake picked what was left of his little boy up, and something about it felt sickening. He got an arm under Kay’s torso, and her tattoo of the crossed pistols flashed in front of his eyes. Tough Love.
He looked down at her torn, chopped-up hands. Love. Hate.
Back at the pistols.
Tough Love, with a jagged line through it.
He remembered the T-shirt she had just purchased with Don’t Hassel The Hoff! across the front.
All that was left—slogans.
Jake picked up his family and they sluiced around his thighs, caressing him with long tendrils of skin. Kay’s hair made a rasping noise against his jeans.
He brought them to the living room, laid them out at Uncle Frank’s feet, and sat down on the floor. For a second he just stared.
“Are you here to kill me?” he asked without lifting his eyes from the horror on the floor.
Hauser took a step forward and lifted the pistol. “I guess you’ve figured it out by now.”
80
Scopes slalomed through the debris that littered 27, lights flashing, siren blaring. The world around him looked like the old black-and-white footage of Hiroshima he had seen on the History Channel. But without the frame to hold it in, to cut it down, it was so much larger than anything he could imagine by orders of magnitude. He felt like he was driving through a madman’s dream. Everywhere he looked—for as far as he could see—the world had been kicked apart.
This was the eye of the storm. There was still more to come. Looking around, he wondered why it would even bother coming back? What was left to take?
As of nine minutes ago when he had left the station, the death toll was at fourteen. Of course they would probably find more bodies. Buried in the debris. Hanging in trees. Washed up on the beach. And then there’d be the bodies they would never find. The ones that the storm had dragged out to sea to be swallowed by the Atlantic.
While the other officers back at the station regrouped—catching up on sleep and writing out their wills—Scopes headed to Jacob Coleridge’s beach house. He wanted to talk to Special Agent Jake Cole about a few things. He wanted a little perspective on what was happening. And maybe to hand back a little perspective.
Scopes was not a naturally inquisitive man, but the chewing-out Cole had handed him had been rattling around in his head the past two days and it got him thinking. Thinking about the six murders. About the disappearance of Cole’s wife and son. About the way Hauser was handling the investigation. What Scopes realized no one had clued in to was that this had to be coming from somewhere inside—somewhere close. But close was a matter of perspective, wasn’t it?
Scopes had been on the job for four years, which translated into more than a few shifts hosing chunks of bone and brain off the side of the road after some summer asshole had loaded up on too many Bombay Sapphires and missed a turn on the way back to the beach house; four years of dealing with hysteric widows after
their husbands painted the ceiling with gray matter because their stockbroker had pissed their fortune into the pocket of some corrupt CEO; four years of responding to domestic calls where he had to read the Miranda rights to some crying drunk who had just finished his wife off with a tire iron because she had bought the wrong kind of beer. So Scopes was no stranger to punishment and he had always been able to hold his cookies.
But Jake Cole had a tolerance that couldn’t be measured in human terms. At least up until now. Scopes wondered how the Iron Man was holding up now that his family had gone up in a puff of smoke. He had seen him at the station last night, doing his dead man’s walk, trying to act like he was still alive when his guts had to be on fire. Scopes wondered how that felt for him.
He didn’t find any pleasure in these thoughts, but as he threaded his way through the obstacle course that used to be the town he had grown up in, he needed to occupy his mind with something. And Jake Cole and his missing family were a helluva lot more interesting than some fucking storm. He couldn’t do anything about Dylan. But Cole? That was something else entirely.
81
Hauser sat down on the edge of the hearth and rested the hand with the Sig on his knee. He watched Jake for a few minutes. “Wohl got a call from Carradine—you were right to send your mother’s Benz to the lab.”
Jake looked up at Hauser, his bloodshot eyes filled with tears. “What are you talking about?”
Hauser smiled and shook his head. “This is over, Jake. It stops with you and me.” He raised his eyes to the beach out beyond the windows. “The lab found two prints on your mother’s car. Index and middle finger of a left hand. Under the armrest on the console. Fingerprints in your mother’s blood. They had been wiped off but one of your magicians was able to raise them. Modern science—it’s a hoot, isn’t it?”
Jake felt his stomach tighten on its axis and the room suddenly felt a thousand times too small. Then his guts clenched and he bent over and vomited on the floor, beside his wife’s skin. He retched until he was burping up nothing in convulsive spasms.
“You want to know why the recent murders are so polished in comparison?” Hauser’s eyes slid back onto Jake. “You’ve evolved.”
82
He got Lewis for his eleventh birthday. His father had bought the ugly dog because it was a gift that required little imagination and even less common sense. Jake had tried to like it—actually sat staring at the stupid awkward thing and willing himself to like it—but it was another in a long line of lost causes.
The part that infuriated him the most was how stupid it was. Tell it to sit, and it just stared at Jake as if he had asked it to tell him his telephone number. Shake or high-five was akin to a grammar question. Lie down or roll over was like asking that fucking dog to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. The dog became neglected very quickly.
Then one evening Jake saw a dog play dead on the Dick Van Dyke Show—one of those boring old black-and-white programs that his mother made him watch because she thought humor was good for him. He saw the trick—performed with a German shepherd no less—and he became determined to teach it to Lewis.
By the fifth minute he realized that wonder dog was not going to be playing dead anytime soon. The only thing this dog was good for was smelling bad and pooping.
“Play dead!” the boy snapped, pointing at the ground.
Lewis stood there, eyes vacant, tongue lolling out of his mouth, actually looking like he had a smile on his face.
“I said play dead!”
Lewis took a step forward and got Jake in the mouth with a hot wet tongue.
And that did it. Jake stormed into the kitchen and ripped open the cutlery drawer. He found the big knife—the one his mother used to cut up chicken when she made that greasy slop called coq-au-vin. Jake pulled it out of the drawer, pounded back to the dog, and raised the knife above his head.
“PLAY DEAD!” he screamed at the dog.
Lewis’s ears snapped back and he winced. He knew the boy, knew how he became when his voice changed, and he backed up.
Jake charged the dog, grabbed it by the ear, and opened its throat in a wide swipe of the knife.
The dog made half of a high-pitched squeal, backed up a single step, and collapsed to the deck. Blood pumped out in a rhythmic arc that shrank with each pulse of his dying heart and his legs cycled in a run because his body did not yet understand that it was dead. He looked up at Jake with his big brown eyes.
The boy bent over the dog and spit on it. “THAT’S HOW YOU PLAY DEAD!” he screamed and went back into the house, closing and locking the door.
Of course, his mother knew. She had always known about him. Known how he was. Who he was. But Jacob wouldn’t listen. He’s had a tough start. Give him time. Give him a chance. Give. Give. Give.
His father had ordered her to take Jake out for breakfast, maybe to a movie. And the whole time she had just stared at him, as if examining an insect under a lens, her mouth a hard line, her eyes just a little too narrow. He had eaten a spectacular breakfast with a hearty appetite and when he had asked for more pancakes because they were his favorite, she had run from the table and he heard her sobbing in the restaurant’s bathroom.
After that morning she had always been afraid of him. And his parents’ marriage began to fall apart; it looked like eventually his father would have to make a choice between him and his mother. He had been on the boy’s side up until now, sticking up for him, trying to get her to give him a chance.
But it didn’t take a scientist to figure out that he had burned all of his chances with her—every last one.
As his father began the difficult process of choosing sides, Jake felt the gap begin to widen.
So he decided to improve his odds.
83
Jake was very still, his mind’s eye peering over one of the memory fences slapped up haphazardly between the different parts of himself. The images on the other side were spotlighted like exhibits in a museum—grotesque studies of a self he saw but did not recognize.
He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and it tasted of saltwater, tears, scotch, and vomit. Jake began to protest, to offer some kind of denial, but at that particular instant he saw something out of the corner of his eye, a glimmer on the staircase. He turned his head.
Jeremy sat on the bottom step, wearing the little hat with the dolphin embroidered on it. His son was smiling, hugging Elmo to his chest. He looked so happy. So alive. So real.
Jeremy lifted his little fist, opened and closed it in his own special version of a wave, then brought it back to Elmo. He flickered a little, like a distant television signal.
Tears filled Jake’s eyes. He blinked and they fell away. When he opened them again, Jeremy was gone.
Hauser stood up, circled around Jake. “You sonofabitch.”
Jake looked up, tried to focus on the man he thought of as some kind of an ally, some kind of friend. Did he not—could he not—see that this was a mistake? “I…I…didn’t…I couldn’t…”
“Yes, you could,” Hauser bellowed. “YES, YOU COULD!”
Jake’s defibrillator launched a bolt of electricity to his heart. He flinched, bit his tongue.
“You killed that woman and her child up the beach, Jake. You remember that?”
Jake shook his head. How could Hauser think that he had—?
But the compartments in his head were coming apart and the images were flowing together, creating pictures. Pictures that thrashed and screeched and bled. More pornography of the dead.
Jake had peeled Madame X, a squirming bag of shrieking bloody meat who had chewed off her own tongue. She had squealed and begged and bled and died in his hands. Jake Cole. The Bloodman.
The two television stations in his head were melding, knitting their separate signals into one program. The sequences they transmitted were still a little fuzzy, short on details. Except maybe the color red. There was plenty of that. More than enough to go around.
Hauser stepped to his
right, blocking out Jake’s view of Frank with the yellow foam cracking his head apart. “Carradine told me that they got an ID on Little X, Jake. His DNA was matched through a lateral connection.”
“Through a sibling?” The only time children had their DNA on file was if they had been reported as missing and a sample had been provided to the bureau’s CODIS databank—the Combined DNA Index System. CODIS contained nearly three million DNA samples from missing persons. But a lateral match meant that they were matched through a family member who had their DNA in the CODIS databank—besides the missing persons section, CODIS contained nearly eight million genetic fingerprints of known offenders. As well as government and law-enforcement personnel.
Hauser’s face pulled tight and he looked into Jake’s eyes, the expression a cross between sadness and…what? Hauser walked over to Frank’s corpse, still shifting from the expanding foam. “I know who they are. Madame and Little X.”
Jake stumbled over and leaned against the island. “I don’t want to know.” The bright staccato of a rapid-fire slide show filled his vision. Faces developing out of shadows, like black-and-white photographs in a developing tank, growing clearer by the second.
Hauser shook his head, pulled two computer-printed photographs out of his pocket. He held them out, fanned wide like a pair of losing cards. Jake reached out, took them, and they slowly developed into faces. A woman. A boy. Beautiful. Alive.
His wife.
His son.
“No. No. Nononononononononooooooooooooo.”
Somewhere off in the distance he heard his son’s voice screeching as someone took him apart with a knife.
Not someone.
Him.
