Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

43

Day Three

Sumter Point

“Jake!”

The single word was filled with such panic, such wrongness, that he was down the hall with the pistol in his hand before he was fully awake.

He stopped at the top of the stairs and looked out at the nave. Jeremy stood in the living room, his back to the staircase, his head canted over at an odd angle as if some of the hydraulic hoses that powered his neck had ruptured. Jake couldn’t see his face but the boy’s body language was foreign, unfamiliar, and with that realization came a little more of the fear he had heard in Kay’s voice.

Kay was on her knees in front of the boy, holding him at arm’s length, her face sculpted tight with shock.

Jake walked down the stairs with the pistol still clamped in his fingers. He was naked.

Kay didn’t look up. Didn’t acknowledge his existence. She was staring at Jeremy with the same eyes she had last night during climax—bulging and glassy. Both of them had hemorrhages now, and the second had burst into a bloody storm that raged around her pupil. She was holding Jeremy and shaking, the tremors traveling down her arms and transferring to his little body, which was vibrating like more hydraulic hoses were about to pop.

Jake moved slowly. “Baby?”

Kay just stared at the boy’s face, and a bright rim of tears formed on her lashes below the hemorrhaged reds and it made her eyes look like they were bleeding.

Jake’s foot hit the bottom stair and this nearness flipped a switch in Jeremy’s head because he shrugged off his mother’s grip and turned around.

His sockets, cheekbones, and the curved line of his jaw were outlined in sloppy red finger strokes. The stitching of the mouth was broad, and went across his face in thick vertical lines that were crooked and unequal. The boy’s face was painted like a skull. The whole thing had the lilt of madness about it, as if his face was a funhouse prop. Jake didn’t need to be told that it was blood—he could smell it.

Jeremy’s bottom lip trembled and he was crying red streaks. Tears dripped down his cheeks and ran to the collar of his T-shirt, slowly turning pink. Jake could see that he was one breath away from flying into hysterics.

Jake scooped him up, covering the back of his head with his hand, and hugged him. “Moriarty, what happened?”

He looked at Kay over the top of the boy’s head. She stood there shaking her head, her red eyes leaking clear tears. The big door to the deck was open a few inches. “We were in here alone, Jake. I opened the door to get some fresh air because it smells so…bad. I turned my back on him for a minute. Maybe less.” She shook her head. “I was making coffee…just making coffee when Jeremy barked—literally barked—like a dog and I rushed over and he was…he was…like that…I…don’t…um…I—” She shuddered and for a second it looked like she would throw up.

Jake looked at the open door. “Moriarty?”

Jeremy squeezed him, his little body quivering.

“What happened?” His voice climbed up a little, and he had to add the words, “It’s okay, son,” to let Jeremy know he wasn’t angry—the natural assumption of someone without fully developed emotions.

“It was him, Daddy.”

Jake pried his son’s head out of the nook in his collar. Jeremy’s little tear-streaked blood-skull leered up at him, teeth outlined, eye sockets darkened, the logo for an album cover. “He said he wants to play with you, Daddy.”

Jake felt his chest tighten again and he sat down on the sofa, his skull-painted boy clinging to him like a lemur.

“Then he touched me,” the little boy said. “He touched my face. And now it smells icky. He said he started a game with you when you were a little boy and he likes playing with you very much. He said you don’t get scared. Is that true, Daddy? You don’t get scared? Because I’m scared. I’m very scared and I want to go home and I don’t want to play with him any more. He’s not nice. He’s mean and ugly and he smells bad and—” The words stopped and he looked around, as if the room were bugged.

“It’s okay, son,” Jake said again.

Jeremy’s eyes widened, two contrasting orbs in black-red sockets. “Remember the time in the park when I found that bird, Daddy? Remember that? I said it smelled yucky and you said that’s because it was dead. Do you remember? And you ’splained that sometimes birds and animals have accidents or get sick and then they are made dead and that makes them smell bad. Do you remember, Daddy? Do you?” There was a fevered, crazed quality to the boy’s voice.

Jake looked over at Kay. She had her back to the window and she was hugging herself and crying, bright streaks streaming down her cheeks. She didn’t see him. Or Jeremy. She was off in the theater behind her eyes watching a test pattern.

“I remember, son.”

“The man in the floor smelled just like that bird in the park, all bad and sick and dead. And he’s not nice any more. Don’t play the game with him. Please promise me that you won’t play the game with him.”

Jake pulled Jeremy in close, cradling his head in his collarbone. He stepped forward and grabbed Kay and the touch of another human seemed to snap her out of the place she had retreated to. She sniffled, looked up, and locked her eyes on him.

“You okay?” he asked.

Kay shook her head. “Do I look okay?” She wiped her nose on the hem of her T-shirt. “I don’t want you staying here. I don’t care what this job is about. I don’t care if this whole fucking place gets washed into the ocean. You are coming home with us.”

Jake nodded.

“They won’t let him on the bus with no pants, Mommy.”

Jake and Kay looked down at his naked body. “You, my friend, may have a point,” Jake said, and reached for the phone to call Hauser.

44

Jake was relieved that the medical examiner was at one of the Olympus microscopes in the corner of the lab instead of headed west in the Long Island Hurricane Exodus. It was obvious that she had been here all night. She was hunched over, her face squinched up with the expression common to microscope-gazers everywhere. He dropped a Ziploc containing Jeremy’s bloody T-shirt onto the table beside her and the noise jarred her from her scientific myopia.

“Special Agent Cole,” she tried as a greeting.

Jake was glad people were laying off the Charles Bronson thing—he hated it. “Dr. Reagan.”

She offered her version of a smile—the same tight line she had shown at Madame and Little X’s the other night. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” There was something about the last word that sounded insincere.

Jake put on his be-nice face, as Kay called it. “Could you please analyze the blood on that?”

She picked up the bag and examined it. It squished against the polyethylene, red like a battlefield dressing. “What is it?”

“T-shirt. There may be some contaminants like mucus and saline from another source but it’s the blood I want analyzed.”

“DNA?”

“First check the typing against all three bodies. Madame and Little X and the Macready woman.”

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“Something smeared it on my son’s face.”

“You mean someone.”

“No.” Jake’s voice sounded a million miles away, even to him. “I don’t.”

45

The doctor’s waiting room looked like every one he had ever been in, the chairs just a little past being presentable and the walls adorned with the unimaginative combination of public health posters and ugly hotel-room art.

Jake sat with his head in his hands, feeling like his brain was filled with ants. He was going over Jeremy’s Misfits makeup, trying to figure out where it had come from. The cop in the driveway hadn’t seen a thing; no one had come via the road, and with the way the house was situated on the property, he would have seen someone approach from three of the sides. Which left the beach as the only viable route.

But by looking at things this way, he was forgetting to ask the most important questions of all: Who was the man in the floor and what did he want?

Jake lifted his head and eased back in the vinyl seat, letting his focus drift to the thought of pulling up stakes and heading back to the city. But he knew that he couldn’t leave—even the thought of it in the abstract felt treasonous; he would stay in Montauk until everything was tied up and nailed shut. And like the old saying about how to eat an elephant, Jake knew that the next step in the process began here, in psychiatrist’s office.

Sobel’s receptionist, a woman of twenty-five with the unhappy face of a burgeoning depressive, busied herself behind the desk. A mother and daughter sat at the other corner of the office. The girl was about twelve, and had the look of someone plugged into a different sensory universe. Jake guessed that she was autistic. She played with a bowl of colored candies. Her mother sat reading a thick paperback that had a beautiful man with beautiful hair embracing a beautiful woman with beautiful hair, and they were wearing beautiful clothes, and back, in the distance over their shoulders—

–like that goddamned lighthouse over Rachael Macready’s shoulder—

—skinned—

–was a beautiful estate filled with their beautiful life. The book was titled The Bluebloods of Connecticut and Jake knew there were horses in the story. Horses with long, well-groomed tails. Probably a private jet. Kisses and muscular embraces. Unadulterated crap.

The girl stared off into the distance, as if watching a movie behind her eyes. She slid the large glass bowl of candies from the center to the side of the coffee table and had cleared all the magazines into a neat pile. As her mother read of the steamy sexploits visited upon the handsome characters of the Connecticut estate, Jake watched the girl mechanically remove candies from the bowl one at a time, then lay them out on the table. She was sitting on the floor and her hand would dip into the bowl, then place the candy on the table. Then she would repeat the process. The table was strewn with candies in no apparent order, most not touching. Her mother was too engrossed with the heavy breathing between the pages of her paperback to notice that her daughter was making a mess.

“Mr. Cole,” the receptionist said, her mouth turned down at the corners. “Please go on in.”

Jake stood up and stepped around the coffee table. Neither the woman nor her daughter seemed to notice.

Dr. Sobel got up from behind his desk and shook Jake’s hand. “I’m sorry about yesterday, Jake. If I thought that your father was a danger to himself, I would have had him restrained before.”

Jake eased into the mail-order-catalog chair and examined Sobel for anything that he could make use of. The psychiatrist’s face was a blank sheet of meat and Jake recognized the clinical training of a man trying to study him for, well, anything he could make use of. Jake put his hands on the knuckles of the chair arms, crossed one booted foot over his knee, and waited. After Sobel’s eyes finished taking him apart, he took a deep breath and opened his hands as if he were trying to sell Jake pet insurance.

“I know how tough this can be.” Sobel did a pretty good job of sounding sincere.

“I’m not having this conversation—I’m not here to have a candle put to my head.”

Sobel seemed to mull this over for a few seconds.

“What’s going on with my father? How do I best take care of his needs right now, in the immediate future, and in the long-term?”

Sobel opened a large file on his desk and Jake recognized the same colored pages and Post-Its from the metal clipboard the day before. “For a man of eighty, your father’s vitals and blood work are spectacular. He’s obviously taken care of himself.”

Jake snorted. “Not that I know of.”

Sobel’s mouth turned down at being contradicted.

How to say this without sounding like a prick? No clean route. “My father has been a raging alcoholic ever since he could raise his arm. He ate for shit. Never exercised. Ran himself ragged. Sometimes he’d stay up for a week solid, fueled on booze and anger. No, I don’t think that your tests have painted an entirely accurate picture.”

Sobel penciled a note onto the page. “What is his domestic life like?”

Jake felt the cold flash of wasted time burst in his head. “Dr. Sobel, I thought you had done an evaluation on my father. You should know all of these things. If you don’t even know who he was, how can you compare that to who he is?”

Sobel stopped nodding and folded his arms across his chest. “I am also trying to get a feel for you, and what you are willing to do for him, Mr. Cole. This is not solely about him. I need to see how much you’re willing to handle. How much you can handle. Your impressions of your father also give me a lot of insight into you.”

“You’re kidding.”

Sobel shook his head.

Jake reached into his jacket and took out a black leather billfold. He opened it to the badge and the ID card, leaned over, and slid it across the desk to the psychiatrist. “Dr. Sobel, I am not open for analysis. I am not interested in analysis. I have more dark secrets locked away in my head than you are ever going to know. But since you ask, I will provide you with a little insight into this classic Freudian situation.

“My father and I have not spoken for nearly thirty years. I do not like the man and, if you really want to get to the bottom of it, for a long time I hated him. No surprise there. Good old Sigmund handled this in his self-justifying twenty-first lecture in A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis. I’m sure you’ve read it, even if it is complete horseshit.

“I may think that how he raised me—or didn’t raise me—was shitty, but his work is something else entirely. I don’t think that money is any sort of a problem but I haven’t spoken to his lawyer. Worst-case scenario, I sell the house and that should buy him ten years wherever he needs. What I want out of you is where those ten years should be.”

Sobel closed Jake’s badge and slid it back across the desk. “Do you want to be involved?”

“I think we are getting a little ahead of ourselves here but the short answer is no. I need to know exactly what is wrong with my father so I can start making the proper arrangements for his future. A future that I have no intention of being involved in.” Jake knew he sounded like a prick but he didn’t care.

Sobel turned his thoughtful nod back on. “Right now your father is still suffering the effects of shock, a little post-traumatic stress disorder, and he’s been taking painkillers. These things combined don’t give me a very stable subject to begin with and when you throw in the classic signs of Alzheimer’s, things get exponentially complicated. He’s confused, he’s irritable, and he’s aggressive.”

Jake held up his hand. “Dr. Sobel, my father has been irritable and aggressive as long as I can remember.”

Sobel signaled that he expected to be allowed to finish. “That painting on the wall of his room—” he paused, and his voice softened, as if he were speaking to himself—“showed no degeneration in his motor skill, which is something I should see in a man at this stage of AD. That piece shows that he is more than capable of abstract thinking—the mere fact that he was able to make a connection between his blood and paint is abstract enough but when we add in the kind of picture he painted, I feel he can clearly think in abstract terms.” The psychiatrist turned back to his notes, flipped through a few pages. “His vocabulary shows no degeneration as far as I can tell. Like I said, I don’t have an evaluation from before his accident, but your father is very well spoken, if somewhat opinionated.” Sobel looked up from the folder and leaned back in his chair. He clasped his hands on top of his head and continued, “Symptomatically speaking, he lies somewhere between early and moderate dementia, stages two and three respectively. There are signs of moderate dementia and yet certain telltale signs of early dementia are missing, and vice versa. This disease is different in each individual but there are certain symptoms that are—or should be—a given.” There was a shift in his voice that told Jake there was something he wasn’t being told.

“Are you saying that he might not have Alzheimer’s?”

“I know you talked this through with his GP but I’m working in a vacuum here.” Sobel shrugged and with his hands knit together on top of his head, it looked like an exercise. “I don’t have a lot of collateral history from relatives or friends, and that is one of the cornerstones of diagnosing Alzheimer’s. Your father spent a lot of time alone and that doesn’t help me. He’s also an artist and artists are eccentric to begin with. I need to know certain things that, at this point, I don’t.”

“What are we not talking about, Dr. Sobel?”

“Excuse me?”

Jake smiled. “I can tell when I’m being left in the dark.”

“Jake, I don’t know exactly what is going on with your father. What I do know is that his neural pathways are not translating the real world into terms that he can always understand. I usually get to see a patient long before they begin to have even minor accidents. Your father set himself on fire and crashed through a plate-glass window. I am having a hard time believing that he managed to get to this point and still be living alone. He should have been here long before this. A year, maybe. Possibly before that.”

“I found sod and keys and paperbacks in his fridge. I don’t know how the hell he managed to live like that. I am not going to sit here and make excuses that you don’t really care about anyway, but I’ve been off the Christmas card list for a very long time.”

Sobel nodded again. “He’s not malnourished. He’s not suffering any deficiencies. And his hygiene, although not perfect, was much better than I expected.” He paused. “I don’t like his nightmares—combined with that painting that he did on his wall—” Did Sobel know that he had taken half the wall down last night? “That portrait came from somewhere deep in his mind. He’s frightened of something and it’s manifesting itself in his dreams and his rantings and he’s bringing it to the surface and trying to show it to the world. All this talk about this man of blood living in the floor has me con—”

Jake stood up. “What?”

Sobel froze, as if he had said something wrong. “This happens a lot. That painting is a manifestation of whatever he fears, and by bringing it out, he’s trying to tell us—”

“Forget the clinical diagnosis. I want to know what he said—exactly.” Jake reached across the desk and tore the file folder from Sobel’s grasp.

The doctor pushed his chair back and stood up. “Jake, I do not—”

“Sit down or call security,” Jake said flatly, and scanned the page of notes. “Here,” he said, pointing to Sobel’s notes. “Read this.” He spun the folder on the desk and held his finger to the page, like a drill instructor showing a drop zone to a cadet.

Sobel leaned over and focused on the writing. “For about fifteen minutes this morning the patient appeared lucid and was aware that he was in the hospital. Blood pressure and heart rate were stable and commensurate with a man of his age and general health. Only signs of the onset of dementia were several comments patient made regarding someone he called the blood man. When asked to explain, patient grew agitated, apologized. Heart rate and blood pressure began to climb and breathing became shallow, panicked. Patient asked the nurse to check the bathroom and the closet. Particularly the floor.” Sobel looked up. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

Jake felt his heart hitch a beat. Then a second time. Jeremy had his ex-friend who lived in the floor. The floor back at his old man’s house. Jeremy had called him Bud. Jake thought about laying it all out on the table, but there was no way a psychiatrist was going to help solve this. Not now. Not in a day. This was going to take a strong stomach and federal resources. What he needed from Sobel was information. “Does he know what happened to the nurse who looked like my mother?” It was a valid question. Maybe he had heard the other nurses talking.

Sobel raised an eyebrow. “She did look like your mother, didn’t she?”

Jake nodded. “A little.”

Sobel shrugged. “I know none of the staff would tell him. And I haven’t heard anyone gossiping. We had two reporters come by this morning but security escorted them from the building pretty fast. So I don’t think he knows. How could he?”

Jake was thankful for that, at least. “Yesterday he didn’t recognize me once during the three times I was here. He’s come apart a little. Maybe this man of blood is just the rantings of a scared old man who made a lot of mistakes in his life. The man of blood could be—” He stopped and triangulated the past few days. Blood man. Blood. Man. Bloodman. Only a three-year-old would say it differently, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t saying Bud, man. He was saying Budman. Bludman. Bloodman.

Bloodman.

Sonofabitch.

Sobel’s face shifted. “Something’s going on inside your father, Jake. Something one part of him wants to verbalize and another desperately wants to keep suppressed. He has opposing emotions about this man of blood—whatever that is.”

Jake thought about the text that covered his skin, about the Canto, about the men of blood that Dante had described. The violent, the viscous, the dangerous. Kept in a lake of fire and blood where their screams echoed and their souls were tortured. Was his old man talking about them? “All you seem to be telling me is that my father may or may not be in the early-to-mid stages of Alzheimer’s—”

Sobel shook his head, held up his hand. “If this talk about the blood man is just a misnomer for something—or someone—that he’s afraid of, it could be that he’s just over-compartmentalized his life in order not to have to face whatever it is that’s scaring him. And he is scared, Jake. The man inside is hiding from something.”

“He’s been doing that since my mother died.” Skinned, the little voice hissed.

“That was the summer of ’78, right?”

Jake nodded. “June sixth.”

Sobel made a note on the chart. “Jesus, how time flies. I’m sorry about your mother, Jake. Besides having a killer backhand, she was a lot of fun. Elegant. Every woman at the club was jealous of her.”

“I remember that. Living with her was like living with Jackie Kennedy. She could make an egg-salad sandwich and a Coke look refined.”

“Could this have anything to do with your mother? Her…accident was never solved, was it?”

Jake shook his head.

“So could it?”

Jake shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. No. All of the above. I’ll figure it out.”

“If all of this is tied in somehow, maybe your father is afraid of something out of his past. Maybe it’s just a flashback to her death. Bad memories coming back.”

“I don’t think so. After my mother’s death, Dad never talked about it. Never seemed to react.” Liar. He sat in front of her car every night with a bottle of booze and wept until he fell asleep.

“The memory is a peculiar place, Jake. It functions under different basic tenets than the rest of the mind. Maybe he is being plagued by ghosts you don’t know about.”

Jake thought about the blank bloody face that he had splattered on the hospital room wall and realized that Sobel had to be partially right. “Maybe he’s had a real struggle,” the psychiatrist added. “Maybe his accident wasn’t an accident at all.”

“Are you saying that he burned off his hands on purpose?”

Sobel’s head clicked from side to side but the grimace refused to be shaken loose. “On purpose is a little strong. Sometimes we do things for reasons we’re not aware of. Maybe your father wanted to leave the house. Maybe a part of him knew that it wasn’t safe for him because of exactly the same reasons you cited—he opened the fridge and saw sod and keys and he couldn’t understand why they were there. The rational part of his brain realized that the environment wasn’t good for him. Maybe he had an accident so he could leave. And maybe the blood man is just his way of lumping his feeling of insecurity into a neat package. I think that something has your father very frightened. Something he’s calling the blood man.”

The receptionist was jammed into her office chair, scowling over the Day-Timer, crossing out appointments with a red marker, the phone pressed to her ear. “Yes, that’s right, Mr. O’Shaunnesy, we have to recalibrate with the storm. I don’t know when we’ll be back but you will be at the head of the line. Of course. Of course. At least four days…”

Jake nodded a thank-you as he walked past her desk.

The little girl was still folded into the lotus position under the coffee table and by now the two-foot-by-five-foot surface was armored with a layer of candies, laid out in a brightly colored mosaic. From beside the receptionist’s desk, Jake saw the wrappers at an angle, a shelf of color. The girl was staring straight ahead, her hand dipping into the bowl like a metronome counting time, not missing a beat. As before, one candy would be placed in an empty slot at the far upper-left-hand corner of the table, the next somewhere in the middle, as if she had a pattern laid out in her head and was merely illustrating it for her mother—but the woman was still engrossed in her shitty book.

Jake’s head swiveled as he passed the girl, scanning the pattern on the table. The mother didn’t lift her eyes from the novel and the little girl kept dipping her hand into the bowl and laying out the candies as single pixels in a digital image.

Jake was almost on top of her when he stopped.

She had laid out a copy—a nearly exact copy, limited by the size of the surface she had to work on and the colors at her disposal—of the cover of her mother’s book. Jake froze in midstep. Two beautiful candy people embraced, a cubist mansion in the background, a tree line behind. The Bluebloods of Connecticut spelled out in cursive sweets.

Each candy was a component.

A speck of color.

A single pixel.

Like Chuck Close’s work.

“She does that all the time,” her mother said in a thick Long Island accent.

Jake looked up, saw the book folded in her lap. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

The mother shrugged. “I s’pose. I try not to get annoyed but it’s hard sometimes. She’ll do this with anything. Playing cards. Scraps of paper. Dead leaves. Thumbtacks—but I try to keep her away from them. She even does it with bits of food. Can’t give her no Froot Loops or nothin’ with color or she’s makin’ pictures of faces and stuff. When you scrape dried raisins off the car seat for the fifth time in a week it gets old real quick.”

Jake was trying to listen but the image of the Chuck Close painting back at the beach house wouldn’t leave him. He saw the sliced-out eyes, the pixilated image of his father’s face staring out of the huge canvas. He thought about the dreary little paintings stacked up in the studio, random nothings that seemed meaningless and incomplete. He thought about the whole often being greater than the sum of its parts.

And suddenly he knew what the canvases stacked in the studio were.