Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

52

In a little over two hours they had captured nearly 1,800 more canvases. Jake held up a painting, Spencer snapped a photo, and Jake pitched it aside. The studio was piled up with a mountain of canvases that looked like preparations for an insurance fire. The building was not as solid as the house and the walls buffeted with the wind. Every now and then some part of the flashing or roof would be torn away in an angry bark.

Spencer stepped back from the camera. “I need two minutes to take a piss and have a drink.” He had to yell to be heard over the wind.

Jake looked at Spencer’s sweat-soaked shirt and tired expression. “We’re out of Coke in here. Let’s go to the house. I need a smoke.”

They left the camera and ran for the house, hammered by the gauntlet of rain and wind tearing in from the ocean. They jumped in through the door to the deck.

Any other time, there would have been swearing. As things stood, Jake went to the fridge and Spencer stretched his shoulders.

The world was a deep gray that pulsed with white stabs of lightning, and the ocean was slobbering in on great rolling swells that were close to being the worst Jake had ever seen. He stopped on the way to the kitchen for a second and tried to see the dim outline of the beach through the rain. The pool shuddered and thrashed with the storm and the lily pads had bunched up against the wall closest to the house, many of them sloshed over the side and thrown up against the window. And this was just the beginning.

“Jake, can I ask you something?” Spencer leaned against the piano, below the Marilyn. Off to his left, blocking the big slate fireplace that stretched up into the rafters like a fossilized tree, was the Oedipal Chuck Close, eyes slashed. Spencer looked at the painting for a second, blinked like an owl, and tried to focus on the damaged canvas.

Jake opened the fridge and pulled out two glass bottles of Coke. The lending library was gone; all that was left was the cold pizza from last night’s dinner, half a loaf of Wonder Bread, and an untouched bowl of tuna salad.

Spencer turned away from the painting. “What happened to you out there?”

Jake popped the caps with a stag-handled bottle opener and held one out to Spencer. “Out where?”

“Wherever you were.”

Jake took a long swallow off the bottle, and for some reason, it tasted good and he was surprised.

“We hung out at the yacht club, smoking weed and chasing city girls on the weekend.” Spencer’s voice changed as he went back in time. “I mean, it all seemed okay to me. One day you’re my best friend, the next you’re gone. There were rumors in town that your dad murdered you and buried you out in that fucking garage, man. Thirty years later you come back some kind of paranormal expert on the John Wayne Gacys of the world looking like Rob Zombie’s stylist.”

Jake paused in the middle of a second swallow and pulled the bottle away from his lips. He felt a headache coming on and thought about a few Tylenol. “I was going for the Tom Ford look.” And then it hit him. Again. Riding in on an image of his wife and son came a jolt in his chest that signaled piston failure. He put his hands on the counter’s edge, wrists turned out, fingers clamped around the worn formica that at any other time he would have noted as cold. Now it vibrated with a low-frequency hum that rattled his teeth and throbbed through his bones. Buried in all of this was the sound of Kay’s voice, laughing. And just below that, Jeremy was making dinosaur roars. There was radio interference and then his antenna lost the signal and their voices stuttered into squelch. Then hissing. And finally silence.

He looked up to see Spencer staring at him with a good dose of What-the-fuck? in his eyes. “Jake, what?”

Jake shook his head with a finality that said he wasn’t going to talk about it; if he did, he’d come apart. He couldn’t even think of her, and up until now he had done a pretty good job of it. Sort of. The trick was not to reach out to her in any way. And that was the hardest part.

Jake turned back to the conversation. “Where were we? Oh, yeah. The big Why? If I could do it over, I would make different decisions, but leaving’s not one of them.” He rummaged around the kitchen and found the Tylenol in one of the bags from the pharmacy that held essentials. He opened the childproof top, poured three of the pills into his hand, and chased them down with a mouthful of Coke. “Coming home?” He just let the question hang in the air. What else could be said?

The rain outside came straight in off the ocean and hammered the windows, rattling the plywood that filled in for the broken thermo pane. Water leaked through invisible gaps and was gathering on the floor in a slowly expanding puddle.

Jake finished his Coke and walked down into the living room. He looked around for something to sop up the water—or at least put down on the floor to stop it from spreading. He kicked some of the bundled newspapers into the puddle, newsprint sandbags to hold back the flood. They quickly turned gray. On the way back to the kitchen he stopped in the middle of the spot he had just cleared of litter, and froze.

Spencer saw the switches flip in his head. “What?”

Jake stood still, his eyes locked on the floor, taking mental snapshots of the pattern he saw in the mess. “Sonofabitch,” he said, only the sound was lost in the noise of the storm. He began clearing the room.

He shoveled newspapers aside with his foot, swept chairs into corners, upended the coffee table and flung it aside. Jake grabbed the end of the steel-and-leather sofa, lifted it, and dragged it across the floor. The carpets didn’t bunch up because they had been nailed, screwed, and stapled down by his old man. “Come on,” he ordered Spencer.

Spencer, still stuck on confused, picked up the dragging end. “Where are we taking it?”

Jake nodded at the door and barked, “Outside,” like it was obvious.

Jake swung his end of the sofa around, balanced it on his knee, gripped the knob and pulled the door open. He hadn’t been prepared for the wind and it slammed the door in, nearly tearing it off its hinges. They squeezed the sofa through and Jake dropped his end onto the deck. Spencer lost his grip and the sofa banged down and fell over onto its back. They ran back into the house.

“Come on!” Jake threw a footstool into a bronze bust by Rodin, knocking it over. He dug like a dog, flinging things off the carpet. A vase exploded in sharp colored shards when it hit a bookcase. Paintings toppled.

Jake jammed the piano aside and it brayed like a wounded elephant. Within minutes they had cleared the center of the living room, exposing the dull, paint-splattered quilt-work of carpets.

Jake ran up the stairs and turned back to the living room to take it in. His eyes locked on the clear area excavated amid the garbage and furniture. He sat down.

Spencer stumbled up, turned around, and flopped down beside Jake. “Holy fuck,” he said.

Up close it was just a jumble of color, of overlapped carpets and splatters of paint. But from the staircase, with the benefit of distance and perspective, an unmistakable image was visible in the center of the room, like an X-ray of a coffin. It was a portrait of the same eyeless face Jacob Coleridge had painted on the wall of his hospital room.

“What the fuck is that?” Spencer asked.

Jake thought about Jeremy jumping up and down in the middle of the living room when asked to describe his friend Bud. “The man in the floor.”

53

Frank now understood what Jake had been talking about on the phone yesterday: Jacob was frightened. “What are you talking about?”

Jacob rubbed his face with one of the cocooned insect pincers that had been sewn on. The movement was unselfconscious, feral. “August 1969, Frank.”

Frank pulled a chair over from the window and the plastic on the bottom of its feet sounded like fingernails against the linoleum. He sat down, just beyond Jacob’s reach, and laced his fingers together behind his head. Not that his brother could do much damage with those soft clubs, but Frank was a cautious man, a quality that years of hunting big game had honed to a second-nature status in his library of life skills. “Jacob, whatever you are going to say, whatever has you scared, is not true. Okay? This is me you’re talking to. Whatever you want me to deal with, I will. Okay? I don’t know how much time you have—we have—and I don’t want to piss it away on stupidity. I have things I want to say to you and—”

“Shut up!” The buckles hanging against the bed frame rattled loudly.

Frank recoiled, looked into the fierce black holes of his brother’s eyes. Is this what Jake had been talking about? This background chatter of fear, some sort of subliminal message hidden in the signal of his voice? “Jacob, what are you talking about?”

Jacob was rocking side to side in his bed, something about it disturbing.

“You were there. You know what happened. Mia saw it first. And then she died. And then Jake…began sliding away. I lost him, too, Frank. I promised not to tell anyone. I promised and I kept my word. But I can’t keep a secret like this forever. Not forever. No matter how hard I want to.” His words spilled out like dirty motor oil, flecked with charred bits of his broken brain, and Frank wondered if Jacob had left the room.

“He’s here, Frank.” The black specks of Jacob’s pupils no longer looked focused, or even human; the planes of his eyes had dropped away and he was looking at images inside his head.

“Who is?”

“Him!”

“Jacob, this has nothing to do with the boat. Be rational. How could it?”

Jacob’s eyes came back on like someone had put new batteries into the compartment in the back of his head. “You never went aboard. You didn’t see what happened.” Old ghosts were coming out of the dark now, firing up the fear machine.

“Jacob, what are you talking about?”

The beams of his brother’s eyes crawled across the room and stopped on his face.

Frank wanted to believe that it was Alzheimer’s talking, not a rational human being, but his brother’s voice was calm and even. “Jacob, listen to me. You have to stop talking this shit. Okay? We both know what you’re talking about. We didn’t do anything wrong—you didn’t do anything wrong. There was nothing you could have done differently.”

“We could have left him there.”

Behind the burn marks and stitches and antibiotic ointment Jacob Coleridge looked scared.

Frank shook his head. “He was just a little kid, Jacob. If we would have left him there, he would have died.”

“Better him than all of us.”

54

It was easy to see that the main event was only a few hours off; the world outside looked like it had been scripted for a Hollywood disaster film. By the time Frank pulled into the driveway, Spencer’s cruiser was gone. He ran from the big H1 to the house and the rain clattered against his hood like ball bearings. When he turned the knob the wind ripped the door away from him and slammed it open, sending a pile of mail flapping off into the house like frightened birds.

Jake was suiting up inside the entryway. Beside him, on the Nakashima console—a broad slab of undressed walnut—the weird spherical sculpture of welded steel shafts hummed with the electricity the storm carried, like a static tuning fork. On the floor a little to the left sat Kay’s airline-tag-covered cello case.

“Jake, I gotta talk to you.”

Jake nodded at the door. Or the world beyond. Or maybe at nothing at all—it was hard to tell. “I have to get to Hauser’s. We can talk in the truck.”

Frank pulled the big brass zipper on the Filson rain slicker up to his chin. “Let’s roll, kiddo.”

They ducked out into the storm.

The only sign that life existed anywhere other than the interior of the big metal beast that carried them west was the steady stream of man-made debris that blew over the empty highway and the intermittent flicker of lights in roadside homes. If Jake had been paying attention to these things he would have been surprised that anyone had stayed behind. As things stood, he couldn’t muster up enough interest to notice. The smart ones had left. The rest stayed. That was as far as he got in the equation.

The wind and rain hammered in on a horizontal trajectory and Frank had to continually fight the massive vehicle to keep it on the road. The interior smelled of diesel fuel, shell casings, blood, and wet pencils. Jake unconsciously gripped the handle by the windshield, his mind turning the events of the past few days slowly over.

“This is important, Jake.” Frank had to yell to be heard over the combined noise of the storm and the big diesel engine.

Jake came back to the present, to the world outside the car pulsing with the dark storm, and blinked like a man who was trying out a new pair of eyes for the first time. “What are you talking about?”

“You know I don’t believe in astrology or God or any of the other stupid shit people lie to themselves about because it makes living in fear a little more bearable. Maybe I’m the wrong guy for this. Maybe you need someone who believes in that stuff.”

A plastic patio table scrambled across the road like a spider. When it hit the gravel shoulder it upended and spun off into the dark. Frank reached under the instrument cluster and turned on the LED light bar bolted to the roof rack and the road lit up in underwater hues of blue.

A gust of wind slammed into the side of the Hummer and Frank wrenched the wheel to the left, fighting the vehicle away from the shoulder and the ditch beyond.

In the blue-green light of the basic instrument cluster, Frank’s face drained of a little more color. “I’m an old man, Jake. I’ve seen the world go from astounding to shitty in the course of my insignificant life. And I’ve been part of some of it.” Frank’s face tightened up a little more and he pulled out his smokes—unfiltered Camels—and tapped one out for his nephew. After giving the cigarette to Jake, he took one himself, returned the pack to his pocket, and fired his up with his faithful Zippo. He pulled the tip of the cigarette through the flame, then passed it across the cabin. The flame left a white trail in Jake’s vision and the heavy taste of lighter fluid made the cigarette taste foul and better at the same time. He took in a deep lungful of the tobacco and held it for a second.

Jake ignored the screaming rain outside, the squeak of the big wipers across the two flat front panes, the rattle of the big diesel, and the smell of gunpowder and cedar. He simply watched his uncle, hoping that images of Kay and Jeremy would leave him alone for a little while—long enough for him to figure all of this out.

Frank nodded at the computer sitting in Jake’s lap. “I asked him about the paintings, Jake—about those puzzle pieces.” Jake, the eternal student of behavior, recognized that background static of fear in Frank’s voice. Or was that just the residual taste of the first call he had received from the hospital two nights and a handful of lifetimes ago?

Jake stopped thrumming the top of the laptop case.

“He said that you’d figure it out. That you’d know what to do.” Frank sucked on the smoke and the tip went bright orange for a second. “He was letting go of old baggage, Jakey. I think those paintings are some sort of gift to you. Some sort of—” he paused and the click of the wipers filled a few seconds—“apology.”

“I don’t think Jacob Coleridge knows what an apology is.”

Frank cleared his throat and two jets of smoke spewed out of his nostrils. It was the action of a man trying to build up his nerve. “Part of this story is true, Jakey—I know because I was there for it.” He stopped again, like his clockworks had jammed. “Jesus, if there’s something in here that will help find your wife and little boy, then I don’t mind breaking a promise.”

“Drop the melodrama.”

“I swore I’d never tell you.”

“Swore to who?” Jake almost yelled to be heard over the jet-engine sounds of the world. “My father’s way past caring, Frank.”

“I promised your mother, Jakey. I mean, really promised. Swore—on-my-life kind of promised. And I don’t know how well you remember your mom—”

“Perfectly,” Jake said, cutting him off.

“Then you’d know that she’d be pretty pissed with me if I told you. She didn’t think you should know about this. No one did.”

“Frank, this fucker has my wife. My son. If you know something that might help me find him, I better not find out after the fact.” An image of Kay and Jeremy walking on the beach, Jeremy waving to the passers-by, blinded him for a second. “I’m not the forgiving type.”

“I noticed.” Frank sucked on the cigarette again and nodded, smoke hissing out from between his perfect white teeth. “What the hell, we all die sometime, right?”

And he began to break forty-two-year-old promises to the dead.

55

August, 1969

121 Nautical Miles Due East of the British

Virgin Islands

They were heading north, lazily making their way back to US waters after a summer spent island hopping. The trip had lasted a little over twelve weeks and the sybaritic retreat had done them good. Jacob had immersed himself in his work, trying his hand at watercolors and doing some good studies of lush island vegetation and crystal waters; Mia had learned to scuba and fish and perfected her skills with a barbecue; Frank had nursed yet another broken heart back from the dead. They were all browned by the sun and running on that late-August glow that comes from a summer well spent.

This was the third vacation they had taken as a threesome but twelve weeks penned up in a boat with his brother and wife was making Jacob squirrely; at least, that’s what he had thought at the time. It wouldn’t be until later, with the clarity of hindsight, that he’d understand that wrong had indeed been waiting for them at the edge of the horizon.

Mia was on the foredeck, stretched out in the sun, reading a paperback. Jacob was at the wheel wearing nothing but a pair of worn Bermudas, eyeing the compass and working his way through a bottle of Johnnie Walker—his make-do alternative to the Laphroaig he couldn’t find anywhere in the islands except Bermuda. Frank was below deck in one of the staterooms, sleeping off another failed attempt to keep up with his older brother, the resident champion, the night before.

Jacob watched Mia stretched out, the bikini hiding very little of her body. He loved her skin, its smoothness, and he took great pleasure painting her whenever she felt like sitting still long enough for him to commit his impression of her to canvas. He took a swig of the bottle and ran his eyes over her form, taking in her proportions, her musculature. They had been together for a few years now, and he could see small signs of aging starting to creep in. She was younger than him—they had met in a New York tavern when her date had been late and Jacob’s was back at the table. He had barreled up to the bar, demanded a bottle of scotch for his table, and insisted the beautiful woman to his left try a nip of Laphroaig before he carted it away. It had been an instant given that they were meant for one another. Within a week he was painting her. Within two she had moved in.

The weather was right and they were making good time. They had a southern wind pushing them home like an invisible hand and with the exception of a few small patches of sargasso weed that they had managed to steer around, there was nothing to slow their progress. Mia kept glancing starboard, following a pair of bottlenose dolphins that seemed to be finding pleasure in their company. She was adjusting the strap on her bikini when something to the east caught her eye. It wasn’t much, little more than a glimmer of light, but it was enough to make her reach for the binoculars.

“Jacob.” In the language of married people that single word was a whole sentence.

He lifted his eyes and followed her arm to the east. It was a little after one in the afternoon and the sun was at its peak overhead. Jacob squinted in the direction she was pointing, then took off his sunglasses. It was a small triangle of white in the ocean, two miles off, maybe more. He didn’t know how Mia had seen it; it was the kind of thing that if you didn’t know was there, you could easily miss.

“Give me the binoculars.”

Mia came down into the cockpit, handed the binoculars to Jake, and climbed back up on the deck and around to the pushpit. She steadied herself on the backstay, raised her hand to her brow. “It’s a boat,’ she said.

Jacob brought the binoculars up and swept his field of vision across the water to the east. Mia was right, it was a boat—a good-sized monohull—sticking out of the water at a bad angle. Jacob had nothing as a reference point but by looking at the pulpit, then following her line back and seeing the top third of the mainmast sticking out of the water a good distance back, he guessed that the boat was at least a forty-five-footer, maybe more, with three-quarters of her length under water.

“Get Frank,” he said, loosened the main halyard, and spun the wheel. The boat leaned heavily to port and came around in a tight arc.

A minute later Frank came topside, bleary-eyed and wet from the cold water he had splashed in his face. “What is it?” he asked.

Jacob handed the binoculars over. “There’s a boat in trouble out there. Dead ahead. Mile—mile and a half.”

Frank climbed up on the cabin, put his foot up on the mast step, and peered through the field glasses. The craft was white and blue and had the sleek lines of one of the new Dutch fiberglass yachts. The bow stuck up at an odd angle, like a missile aimed at the horizon. Thirty feet back the mainmast stuck out of the water and from the angle Frank knew that the boat hung in the water at a good forty-five degrees. Debris floated around her but at this distance it was impossible to tell just what it was. The boat wasn’t in trouble—it was sinking.

“Jesus,” Frank said and lowered the glasses.

“Get the Thompson,” Jacob said.

Anyone else would have argued but Frank and Jacob operated on that frequency that many siblings share, twins more than most. Besides, Frank knew that these waters were dangerous, which was why they had brought the machine gun in the first place.

“And a mask.”

While Frank was below, Jacob kept his eyes locked on the white triangle of the sinking boat. Mia had moved to the bow and was standing in the pulpit, staring ahead. Jacob couldn’t explain it, and would always wonder about it afterward, but as they approached he consciously wished that Mia had never spotted the faltering craft. Years later, when he had finally wrapped his brain around the incident, he would attach the word Fate to the sighting—sometimes upgrading it to Destiny. But at the time the only feeling he had was that it was a mistake and if they were lucky it would sink before they got there.

He reached under his seat and pulled out his service revolver, an old blued Colt 1911 wrapped in oilcloth and secured with twine fastened in a tight shoelace knot. He pulled one of the tag ends, dropped the frayed fabric to the deck, and slipped the pistol into his pocket.

It took them nine minutes to reach the boat. By the time they were one hundred yards out it looked like it had fallen from the sky—clothing, plastic bottles, a single life vest, and a library’s worth of books floated around her in the debris field. A single shark—a twelve-foot tiger—swam through the litter, nosing larger chunks out of curiosity.

They watched the shark for a few seconds, swimming through the scattered flotsam, her triangular dorsal slicing the blue water. She bumped the life jacket, gave a piece of decking an exploratory bite, then sank out of sight.

“What happened?” Mia asked. She put Jacob’s shirt on over her bikini and it covered her to mid-thigh.

“Something bad,” Frank said softly.

“I’m going aboard,” Jacob said. “You see any other boats on the horizon, fire a round into the air.”

They pulled their boat—a sixty-two-foot Werf Gusto that Jacob had named The Forger—alongside the sinking monohull. Bubbles rose from below the waterline and there was a soft gurgling that seemed to come from everywhere. They lashed a line to a cleat on the other boat and Jacob went over the side. When he set foot on the sinking vessel, he turned back to Frank. “This thing starts going down, wait until the line is tight to cut it.”

“What if you’re still aboard?”

Jacob looked past Frank to Mia and smiled. “If I have to swim free, keep the Thompson ready and shoot that bastard shark if he comes back.”

“Go through the front hatch,” Mia said.

Jacob shook his head. “Can’t. That’s where the air is trapped. I open that and the ocean will rush in and this thing will head straight to the bottom. I want to see if there’s anyone on board.”

Mia gave him a look that said, Be careful.

Jacob stood on the steep angle of the deck, his foot against the cabin front for balance. He dipped the mask into the water, emptied it, then rubbed some spit around the glass to keep it from fogging up. He still had on the Bermudas and the bulge of the gun in his pocket made him look like his leg was bolted on with massive fasteners. With the trench knife on his belt, the mask on his head, standing on the prow of the derelict sailboat, he looked like a shipwreck survivor. He slid down the deck into the water.

The deck of the boat slid by as he moved down to the cabin hatch, using whatever was available as a handhold. He focused on where he was going but paid attention to details in his peripheral vision in case the shark came back. The entrance to the cabin was under the water and he’d have to climb at a forty-five-degree upward angle to get inside her. Jacob made a mental note of this so that he wouldn’t get disoriented when he was inside and drown before he could find a pocket of air. He moved down, through a tangle of lines, and dipped under the lip of the cabin doorway.

The door had been ripped off the frame. More debris floated around the portal. He ducked inside.

Maps, clothing, and bits of wood floated in the zero gravity of the cabin. Jacob headed up into the prow of the boat, toward the air pocket that was keeping her afloat.

He clawed his way up the ladder, which felt awkward and wrong. At the top he found a small reserve of air and he took a few shallow breaths, then filled his lungs and moved farther into the belly of the boat.

From inside, the gurgling sound was louder, more intimate.

Papers, books, bottles, ropes, and clothing floated by, blocking his vision, disorienting him. He moved up, through the kitchen and past two staterooms—both were empty except for the debris that floated everywhere in the flooded craft. He reached the final stateroom and the door was closed. He pulled on it and it was locked.

Jacob put the blade of his old army knife to the crack and hit the pommel with the heel of his hand, driving the blade in between the jamb and the door. He wrenched the heavy blade to one side and the door opened with a loud crack that seemed to shake the whole boat. He swam through the door, up into the main stateroom, and his head broke through the surface, into the air bubble keeping the boat afloat.

A body lay in one of the bunks—bloody and dead. It had been a woman. Now, mouth stretched into a last scream, eyes rolled up, fingers clenched into bloody fists, she was a sculpture of horror. Her throat had been opened up in a violent seesaw slash that ran from one clavicle to the other. Jacob had spent twenty-one months in Korea and was no stranger to death but something about this reached inside of him and opened up a little piece of hell. He turned his head away.

Then saw the second body, this one a man.

He was up against the wall, hanging like a winter coat, held in place by a stainless-steel speargun bolt that fastened him in place. It was buried in his chest, and if it wasn’t through his heart, it was damn close. Blood leaked out and down and the water swirling around him was black and dense. He hung there, head down, the light crowning his head casting a long shadow that almost covered his body. A bloody knife stuck out of the wall beside him. Probably the same knife that had sawed through the dead woman’s throat.

“Jesus,” Jacob whispered.

And that’s when the little piece of hell that was inside him ruptured and a portal to somewhere else—somewhere evil and wrong—opened up and a little noise came scrambling out.

At first Jacob thought that the sinking boat was creaking, some part of its structure giving way, but he was only able to lie to himself for a second before he admitted that it was a human sound. Or an almost human sound. A moan. Soft and fueled by pain.

The man nailed to the wall lifted his head and the light filled his features with detail. His tongue came out, licked his lips. He coughed once and blood drooled out of his nose. He tried to speak but all that came was the sound of air escaping his body, as if it had somewhere else it had to be.

Jacob grabbed the bunk and pulled himself up, toward the man. His feet slipped and he splashed sideways. Fell. Grabbed a railing for balance. Fought his way forward.

The man’s skin was an ethereal blue and the water around him was getting darker with the blood that he had lost.

No wonder that shark was hanging around.

He got to the man, reached up, touched his face. Eyes fluttered open. There was no white to them, only a deep scarlet with single black nails of fear in their centers. “M…m…mio…”

Jacob recognized Italian from his year spent in Florence. “Si?” he said softly and in the cabin it sounded like a hiss.

The man coughed more blood and winced with pain. “Mi…mi…mio figlio,” he said softly, barely above a whisper. My son.

And Jacob went back through his Italian lexicon. “Che cosa?” What?

The man stiffened and his chest heaved once, violently, and he vomited out a rope of blood that spattered into the water. Then his head fell over.

Jacob knew that he was dead. What the hell had he been talking about? His son? What—?

And then he understood. But there was a great groan from somewhere far below the waterline and the boat shuddered and listed a few more degrees. The water in the stateroom boiled up, past Jacob’s nipples, and the dead woman slid off her bunk with a red splash.