Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

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 coax 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.

Gunning it through the dark neighborhoods had a creepy, postapocalyptic quality to it. The farther he got from the sheriff’s office—the deeper into Southampton—the more visceral this feeling became. The whole time he barreled toward the Mitchell home, his brain was working on his father’s fragmented portrait. Was it just a symbol of his fractured mind or had he meant for it to be a portrait of the Bloodman? Jake was sure he had left all those faceless portraits for Jake to see, to pique his curiosity, to get him used to thinking. To get him used to looking.

Why hadn’t he just told Jake who the killer was? Left a note? A letter? Why the babushka-doll approach? A riddle hidden inside a riddle hidden inside a riddle hidden inside a…Jesus fucking Christ, it was endless!

Jake ran his mental fingers over the years, trying to find anything in the dust-caked pages that would help make sense of why his father had done this.

Jake knew that he was the one who was supposed to see it; that’s what he did—even his old man would know that. Bury a needle in a haystack, hide the haystack in a field of haystacks, and unleash Jakey with that divining-rod head of his and he’d find it, figure it out, solve the mystery.

Only it wasn’t just a mystery. Not any more. Not a job or a game or even an obsession. It was a need.

Something told him that Kay and Jeremy were alive. Why? Because they hadn’t found any bodies. And this fucker—the Bloodman—liked to leave a little something behind for his fans.

And if Jake didn’t drown or get crushed by a falling tree or get jolted by an electromagnetic pulse, he knew that he would find who he was looking for. He would find him.

At least now Jake would have something to call him when he put the barrel of the revolver to his head and opened it as wide as the sky.

66

Jake pulled up on the Mitchells’ lawn and the 9,000-pound truck settled to the rims in the wet earth. He kicked the heavy door open with his foot and jumped out into shin-deep water. The street was flooding, the neighborhood was flooding, the lawn was flooding. In another hour it could all be washed away. He wondered if Wohl had reached Hauser and if the sheriff was on the way. He wished that Hauser were here, or Scopes, or anyone else, because if that fucker showed up…

He raced across thirty feet of lawn, moving through the current that mired him down like a foot of wet cement. Candles now flickered in a few rooms and it looked like Mrs. Mitchell had fired up the old kerosene Coleman that had been sitting on the hall table. There was movement inside. A shadow passed by the big front window, stopped to look out. Jake recognized the shape of Mrs. Mitchell. His heart leveled out a little.

His foot hit the precast concrete step and he grabbed the iron railing. Mrs. Mitchell opened the door. She smiled for an instant.

And then Jake saw him. Behind her, standing in the kitchen doorway. For an instant he thought that it was his own reflection, but then he moved.

There was a knife hanging from his hand, the gleam of death in the dark.

He was just a dim outline but Jake knew the shape; it was the faceless man that Jacob had splattered on the wall in his blood. The man from the portrait. The man of blood. The Bloodman.

Jake’s hand went under the poncho, into his jacket, and he felt the rubber combat grip of his revolver, warm and dry against his hand.

The thing behind her moved. Twitched.

Jake got his index through the trigger guard and began to draw the weapon. He opened his mouth to scream, to warn her. There was a shift on Mrs. Mitchell’s face as she saw his expression, saw him go under the poncho for his pistol, and she began to turn, to look behind her.

Jake saw the faceless form move in the darkness.

There was deep whump followed by a resonant crack that lit up the sky like a billion-watt generator blowing its magnets. The earth rang as the bolt of lightning impregnated the ground and the soil went supernova, killing every earthworm in a quarter-mile radius.

Jake saw the world overload for a millisecond before the power went out. Then it was just as if nothing existed at all.

He fell back.

Away.

Away from the world.

Away from the steps.

Away from Mrs. Mitchell and Emily and everything else he had promised he would not leave to the Bloodman.

67

Jake stood in the entry with the fractured sounds of the storm battering the house a distant drone that barely penetrated the static swirling around his skull. He stared at the top of Emily Mitchell’s scalp sitting on the newel post, a skullcap of thick black bangs held back with a bright yellow barrette. The bridge of her nose and one eyebrow were visible beneath. The rest lay in the living room in the middle of a cheap imitation Persian carpet sopping with blood and flecked with puzzle pieces. The thing that used to be her mother lay beside her, stretched out and butchered.

Hauser was outside throwing up and Jake hoped he was pointed downwind. It was one of those back-of-the-mind things that came to him while he examined the top of the girl’s head, thrown carelessly onto the newel post like a winter cap, a little lopsided.

Hauser and his deputy had found Jake floating near the road. The drag of the heavy water-filled poncho had acted like a sea-anchor and saved him from being washed away in the surge that sloshed across the lawn. He had been unconscious and Hauser had slapped him, yelled, shook him. His eyes had fluttered open, and that first big breath hit him in the chest like an atom bomb. He sat up, screamed Emily Mitchell’s name. Hauser had run for the house. Taken the screen door off the hinges. Stumbled out fifteen seconds later and barfed in the swamp that used to be a garden.

Jake lifted himself from the water, his brain actually making a cartoon spring sound as he tried to keep the world from spinning. He fought to his feet and lurched across the lawn and fell up the steps like a drunk trying to make it to the toilet in time.

Mother and daughter were in the living room. Mostly.

68

Jake shuffled up the emergency-lit stairs of the hospital on autopilot, his feet taking him from one dim pool of light to the next. He was soaked through now, and the wet leather of his boots rubbed against his shins and every time he took a step the storm squished between his toes to remind him just how unfinished all of this was. He had very little left in him and the only thing that kept his heart beating and his legs pumping was the chance that he could somehow save Kay and Jeremy. He wondered if there was anything remotely rational in this line of thinking or if it was just blind hope. After all, there were no bodies. That was something, wasn’t it? Because this guy liked to leave behind—Jake stopped the image from welling up in his head. He couldn’t—refused to—think like that. Not with his wife and son.

He opened the steel door and stepped out into the hallway.

The third floor of the Southampton Hospital throbbed with the collective voice of the bedridden, the frightened, the infirm. The lights had been reduced to thirty percent power, an engineering decision made to cut strain on the generator. In the dim half-light, the hallway linoleum looked like a cancerous supermarket pizza that couldn’t be identified by the age-old question of Animal, vegetable, or mineral? All the patients who could travel had been moved after a mountain of releases had been signed and those who remained were mostly palliative care and ICU trauma cases. Accompanying the murmur of the patients was the sound of windows shifting in their frames and the unmistakable krang of metal flashing being tortured by the wind somewhere outside.

Frank was at the nurses’ station, trying to get a Tylenol to combat the headache that the incessant wail of the storm and the patients had brought on.

Jake moved by him, the dim light morphing his shadows into a long spiderlike animation that headed down the hall.

The passage was darker than it had been two hours ago and the sounds coming from the rooms were more like the animal grunts at some midnight petting zoo than a place where human beings were sent to mend. The taste in the atmosphere was unmistakable and every breath he took in stunk of fear.

The door to his father’s room was the only one closed. He opened it and Jacob Coleridge was harnessed in, the nylon straps and bright chrome buckles gleaming dementia in the dark room. With the sound of his footsteps, his father’s head turned on the pillow like a lifeless dime-store mannequin being run on rudimentary mechanics. His hair scraped the pillow as his face rotated, his eyes deep screws of terror. The soft shimmer of a noise began at the back of his throat, a low, bubbling sound.

Out of the corner of his eye, at the edge of his peripheral vision, Jake saw the spattered nightstand, something dull and dead on top and the bright gleam of steel. He didn’t deflect his vision, didn’t take his eyes from the old man’s face, although every fiber in his brain was screaming for him to look at the thing at the edge of his sight.

Jacob Coleridge’s face, barely visible in the dim light of the room, was smeared with the same bloody graffiti that had decorated Jeremy that morning. His sockets and cheeks smeared in red-black lines that outlined the skull beneath his flesh. The bloody teeth finger-painted over his mouth unzipped, and his lips formed into a black O, a sightless eye socket. The soft rasp simmering in his throat grew into a howl, like the distant call of an injured animal, and blood bubbled out and down his chin, splattering his chest.

Jake took a step toward his father and the mournful howl rose to a bright scream of panic that was supposed to be the word No, but only came out as a long tortured vowel. Without having to look, Jake knew that Jacob Coleridge’s tongue lay on the nightstand, lines of blood and mucus gleaming on the surface of the safety razor lying in the slop beside it.