Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

But he was unable to ignore the little voice that had begun chattering away in his mind like some fevered ghost on speed. He’s been waiting for you to come home, Jakey. You thought that he was gone. Maybe even dead. Didn’t you?

Well, guess what?

He’s back.

And you, my friend, are fucked.

5

1,260 miles east of Nassau, Bahamas

Every now and then Mother Nature assembles a performance to show off a little. Or a lot. Scripture labels it Judgment, usually laid down by a vengeful God to keep Man humble. But through progress made in earth sciences, it is now known that natural catastrophes are nothing more than a synchronous assembly of coincidental atmospheric conditions. All that is necessary is patience and the right combination of events.

In mid-September, roughly 500 miles southwest of the Azores island chain, a massive thunderstorm stalled over the ocean. This stall was precipitated by three storm fronts moving in on one another, and they pinned the thunderstorm in place.

The water that fueled this malevolent beast had been lifted off the ocean by solar heating, driven up into the atmosphere in the form of condensation. The act of evaporation generated energy that quickly increased wind speeds over the tropical waters, and the faster winds caused increased surface evaporation, feeding the thunderstorm with even more condensation. This hoarding of fuel swelled the pregnant belly of the beast and the storm clouds mushroomed into the atmosphere, forcing more condensation to form, and a self-feeding monster was born.

The system, affected by the earth’s rotation, began to spin, a massive heat-engine with an endless supply of fuel. The metamorphosis from large thunderstorm to hurricane was complete.

There was more heat.

More evaporation.

More wind.

More condensation.

More.

More.

More.

Then the atmospheric pressure dropped several millibars.

And the hurricane began to move west.

On its journey its eye dilated to the largest in history, outsizing Carmen by over sixty miles. In the tradition of political correctness, the storm had been identified as male, and given the title of Dylan.

Hurricane Dylan was now surging toward the American coast and the water in its path was hammered into eighty-foot waves by winds that neared 200 miles an hour. And he hadn’t really started putting on his war paint.

He was saving that for landfall.

6

Day Two

Montauk, Long Island

Jake stood just above the ridge of foam and seaweed that the Atlantic had spent the night laying across the beach one wave at a time. It was still nice out, the Gulf Stream now bringing up a southern current that pulled the warm air along with it. The whole East Coast was having a good day, one of those fall mornings that let you know that summer was not yet gone. There was no taste of the hurricane that was pushing the warm front north.

He had been up early, and ate a piece of bologna on toast over the sink like he had back in his junkie days. It was funny, even back then, when his mind had been dialed to comatose most of the time, he had never become a slob. The apartment was always neat. Of course that was easy when you didn’t own a second pair of shoes and the big-ticket items in the place were the stainless-steel fork and knife that lay proudly on the cardboard place mat on the kitchen counter. Beside the heat-blued spoon and the surgical tubing.

He had walked across the living room in his bare feet, drinking a cup of coffee out of an ancient A&W paper cup that he had emptied of its paintbrushes. Something about the wax and the heat of the coffee on his fingers and the faint smell of turpentine brought out that the world had changed irrevocably. He hadn’t been here in almost thirty years and now, walking through the bright wedge of space, he realized it was as if he had never really left at all. Because our minds are not built to forget, but to ignore.

The craggy man with the flat black eyes and the tattoo he saw looking back from the big mirror beside the piano was nothing like the boy who had left here all that time ago. Twenty-eight years had been swallowed by the clock and the almost-broken piece of machinery he used for a body had changed its cells a full four times since leaving. Except for the electrical impulses stored as memories, Jake Cole was a different man.

Jake didn’t remember getting the tattoo, or even thinking about it. Back then his money had been spent on coke and heroin; he never would have wasted budgetary considerations on something as inane as a tattoo. But one morning he had woken up in the tiny apartment on Spring Street, four months behind on rent and somehow not evicted. He had come to life in the middle of the kitchen floor, his head pulsing like an infection, shivering in a pool of rusty brown water from an overflowed toilet in the next room. He stood, and when he put his arm out to steady himself on the fridge that was no longer there, he saw it, covering his arm like a black silk shirt. The ink blanketed his entire body. From wrists to ankles, ending in a jagged line just below his larynx. Flat and healed at his feet—puffy, red, and fresh at his neck. And he remembered none of it. Four months erased from his life.

He had stood in front of the mirror for hours, the longest period he had could remember going without the nervous twitches without being high. The script was Italian and after deciphering a few names and phrases, he realized what it was.

The twelfth canto of Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Jake knew the story, of course. When he had been a child, it had been his favorite book in his father’s library. A massive leather-bound tome illustrated by Gustave Doré. He had never made any sort of conscious decision about the best parts, but staring at himself in the mirror, watching the ink that snaked over his frame, he knew that he had made the choice. And when he thought about it, the twelfth canto was the inevitable passage. The violent condemned to hell. The story of the Men of Blood. Like the ones he now hunted.

Like the one he now hunted.

After all this time. And just like finding himself back home, it all reeked of that fucking word destiny. Because some things were meant to happen. Some places were supposed to be revisited. And with that he realized that he hadn’t yet gone upstairs.

Of course the upper floor was as bad as the downstairs, worse because the rising heat had no place to go and it had baked the smell of dust and dirt and despair into the walls. The floor up here was bare, the hardwood stripping dented and the varnish beaten through to now dirty raw wood. Along with more utility knives, a few miserable blobs of canvases were stacked up here, too, leaning against the wall. He stopped and picked one up, trying to figure out what had happened to his father’s thinking. Were these exercises? How long had he been painting these things? How long had he been sick? Why had no one noticed?

He wondered what his father had been thinking while he had been painting these lifeless chips of noncolor. Jake had stopped caring about his old man years ago, but he had never stopped respecting his mind. Of all the shitty things you could say about Jacob Coleridge—and there were enough to fill a football stadium one filthy vowel at a time—you could not say was that he was talentless. Not like the rest of the hacks who had cashed in on being in the right place at the right time, back when showing up had been half the battle. When you added this hardwired brilliance to the equation the whole process of slapping paint to canvas had become something special to behold.

While the rest of them were measuring their progress with a backward-sliding pencil mark on the door jamb of self-parody, Jacob Coleridge had been reinventing the way people looked at the world. Looked at canvas and crusted pigment. Looked at themselves. He went deep into the arteries of the beast, until he was at its paint-pumping heart, and his work had been the most original and passionate to come out of the East Coast for a long time. Jacob Coleridge had not been a slouch, not even when it had been in style.

So what the fuck had happened to him in the past what—two?—five?—ten? years?

Jake turned one of the asymmetrical canvases clockwise, then counter-clockwise. His father had never believed in modern art, not as a rubric. And he certainly had never believed in the narcissistic self-indulgent crap that his son was now staring at. So what had happened here? Jake leaned the canvas against the wall and walked on down the hall.

His old bedroom and his mother’s old office were both locked. The master bedroom had a pocket door that slid into the wall. It was cocked about four inches and Jake wrapped his fingers around the edge and tried to pull it open. It barely budged, as if it was mired in wet sand. He peeked through the crack, into the room, and saw that the door was barricaded—there was no other word for it. From the tight view he saw a chest of drawers, an old iron architect’s table, and a giant gilded blackamoor pushed up against the panel. How the hell had his father gotten out of the room after doing that? And what had been going through his head when he had piled the furniture up?

Peeking through the gap, he saw more utility knives laid out on all the surfaces, always one within reach. The room smelled worse than the hospital did, and in the dark it was infinitely more gloomy, if that was at all possible. He’d open it tomorrow—or the next day—it really didn’t matter.

After the tour of the upstairs, Jake headed down to the water. He walked barefoot, his tattooed arms almost the same worn blue as his FBI T-shirt with the cracked yellow letters. He held on to the empty cup; he was never able to litter, to leave any of himself behind. In his job, he had seen it get too many people in trouble. Kay always said that after Jake visited a place, it was as if he had never been there at all. He thought of it as simply another occupational hazard.

The cold sand was in direct contrast to the warm wind but he barely noticed. His mind’s eye flicked between the 3-D model of the Farmers’ bedroom and his father’s accident. Coming here to deal with his father and walking into that house up the highway last night were not coincidences. This was bad no matter how he tried to look at it.

Jake walked up the beach, the cool sand squeezing up through his toes like gritty cake icing, the sensation stirring up vestigial memories. The beach had changed in the last quarter-century. A lot, in fact. Like the town itself, the point used to be a community of two distinct groups: the locals and the summer people. The smaller, more modest homes belonged to the locals and the bigger, newer places belonged to the summer people. Gentrification had swallowed all the available real estate in sweeping gulps, and the locals had been pushed farther and farther from the shoreline until the beach was a well-kept line of resort houses devoid of personality and Montauk risked becoming just another eyesore of the wealthy. Desecrated land with preened lawns and three-car garages that owners called car houses.

By the time Jacob Coleridge had moved to Montauk he had already made a name for himself. Pollock was dead, Warhol was a firm presence, and there was a huge gaping hole in the progression of American painting. Opposed to Pollock’s color overload or Warhol’s trite packaging, Jacob Coleridge laid down a grim vision in sweeping lines of crusted pigment that critics began to notice. Collectors quickly followed.

Like most artists, Coleridge began as a classicist and was, by the age of eleven, a skilled draftsman. He quickly outgrew the need for people to see meaning in his work and began each painting with a technically breathtaking illustration that he would deftly, and some would say criminally, cover with successive layers of pigment until only a small detail of the original photorealist work was left. Unlike the mass of American painters who wanted their work worshipped, Jacob Coleridge covered up the parts he figured people would want to see. The critics lauded him as the only non-narcissist in American painting. Many collectors had their works X-rayed so they could see what they were missing. Eventually he started painting with lead pigment, grinding it with linseed oil so that an X-ray machine would have a hard time getting through. And the more he told them to go fuck themselves, the more they paid for his work.

Jake edged along the surf line, absentmindedly kicking at the thick line of weeds and flotsam that snarled the shore, his inner detective looking for…what? Sea shells? Pirate treasure? Answers? A spotted sandpiper trailed behind him, picking up early-morning insects that his curiosity dislodged.

He hadn’t come home to work—he had come home because his father had set himself on fire and burned off most of the meat of his hands—little more than charred black hooks now. The short of it was he had come home to set things straight so the old man could be placed somewhere. Then he was going to get back into his car, head for New York, and never come back here. It was a simple scenario when it was put in those terms. Only those terms had been blown to pieces when Hauser had called last night.

The sandpiper off his flank raced in and picked up a sand crab he had kicked up, skedaddling away with the coin-sized animal. The bird dropped it onto the beach and stabbed at its belly with controlled jabs of its beak. For a few seconds the crustacean made a valiant effort but it eventually succumbed to the superior firepower and the bird pulled its guts out in a jet of color.

The lighthouse shone weirdly in the early-morning haze and Jake could see two fishing boats heading around the point, to the lee side of Long Island. He figured that every boat in the area would be somewhere else by nine a.m.

As far as he could see both up and down the coast he was the only one out. He turned his head back toward the house, a geometric wedge of black against a blue-orange sky, as if Richard Neutra had designed the Rorschach test. The light off the water bounced red and orange against the glass and the dark line of the horizon crept down the wall of windows that faced the beach. The house looked like it was rising out of the dune and Jake remembered watching the sun come up on the beach with his mother after a night spent eating Mallomars and watching old movie marathons on PBS.

Why was he unable to focus here? What was scattering his concentration? Was it the mess inside the house coming awake in front of him? Was it the memory of his mother? Was it that fucker who had taken the woman and child apart? Was it those creepy little paintings inside the house? Or was it just the plain old fucking fact that he didn’t want to be here? That he wanted to be back in the city with his wife and son, away from a place he had tried to forget for most of his life. After all, how did he have any responsibility here?

As the sun rose, its light crawled down the dunes and Jake felt the damp start to burn off his body. He stood on the sand, watching the edge of the world somewhere off to the east, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave. Not now. Not for a while. I came back to take care of my father’s life, he told himself. And now there’s work to do. There’s a monster here. A monster no one else can handle. A monster no one knows but me. A monster no one else can find.

Skinned.

I came here to help my old man. Not because he deserves it or because I give a shit. But because it is the thing a son should do. And what am I going to do about the past? Nothing. Because it’s not something I can fix.

Skinned.

It’s not a coincidence.

Skinned.

I don’t want it to be him.

Skinned.

Not now.

Skinned.

Not after all this time.

7

Jake stood in the kitchen sipping his eighth cup of fine convenience-store no-name blend topped off with a shoplifted packet of sugar from the coffee stand in the Kwik Mart. His hair was still wet from a hot shower and he felt better. At least comfortable in the doubts department, for whatever the fuck that was worth. From forty feet the endless line of black script tattooed into his flesh looked like a well-tailored shirt. He considered it part of the new him, one that began when he had stopped speedballing his way through life on heroin and cocaine and baby laxative. The end of the before. The end of the drugs and the booze and the heart attack trifecta that he had somehow managed to cheat. The end of the bad times before he had found Kay and Jeremy. Before they buried a cardiac resynchronization appliance under his chest muscle, almost in his armpit, to keep his heart from simply forgetting to beat. Before he had decided that life wasn’t shitty all the time. Before the new and improved Jake Cole.

He still missed the cocaine and the heroin. The booze, too.

But the coffee was good, and he raised his cup in a silent toast to the before, to the memory of his mother. To the good old days. Back before the whole thing had somehow just gone up in flames.

He was pouring another cup when the bell rang. He wondered if it was Hauser’s men or the news—both would be dropping by sooner rather than later. Out of habit, he dragged the cold stainless revolver off the counter, put it into the waistband at the small of his back, and walked to the door with the mug of coffee in his hands and another bologna on Wonder Bread clamped firmly in his teeth. He chomped down on the soft bread and it molded to the roof of his mouth. He tore the welfare sandwich away from his teeth and opened the door in one movement.

The bright panel of sun flooded the dark front hall and the space went from dead grays to dusty wood and chrome. Jake squinted into the figure at the door, haloed in light, features obscured in shadow, only one known quantity: male. The image slowly materialized, like an old-timey dial-up Internet connection, pixels slowly morphing into focus. Jake didn’t recognize the face behind the big Ray-Ban aviators, but he recognized the smile again, still amazed that it wasn’t broken like he had left it the first time they had met.

“Jakey!” Spencer yelled and barreled through the door, enveloping Jake in a bear hug that lifted him off the ground. Jake wasn’t small, but he was eclipsed by the mass of the man squeezing him.

“Jakey!” he hollered again, this time in Jake’s ear.

“Yeah, yeah. Jesus, you trying to make me deaf?” Jake wriggled out of the clinch, spilling coffee and losing the tail end of the sandwich.

His old friend backed away and held up the gun that Jake had put into his waistband. “Not very trusting I see.”

“Not particularly, no,” Jake said flatly and took it back. When it was in his hand, he looked the man up and down, taking in what twenty-eight years had done. “You look good, Spencer.” And he did. Better than the flashing blue-and-red Christmas monster at the entrance to the death house last night.

Spencer nodded, smiled. “Thanks. Yeah. You—” He stopped and looked Jake over, taking in the sinewy build, the tattoos. His eyes slid back to the pistol in Jake’s hand. “—too.” He paused. “Really.” Paused again. “Different. But good, man. Wow.” He grabbed Jake by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length like a client sizing up a painting. “You look just the same. Charles Bronson.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Thanks. Really. Come on in.” He ushered his friend into the house. “Coffee?”

Spencer lumbered by and the floor shook. “Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Holy shit, this place hasn’t changed at all. I mean at all.” He walked through the hall and stopped at the geometric model on the console by the door. It was the size of a library globe. “I forgot about that thing. Now it’s like I was here yesterday.”

Jake followed his eyes to the stainless-steel sphere. “I know what you mean.” Jake walked into the house, took his FBI T-shirt from the back of a chair, and slid it on. “What do you take in your coffee? I got sugar.”

“Black’s perfect. Unless it’s some chocolate vanilla crap, then just get me a glass of water. Tap water. The bottled shit gives you Alzheimer’s and cancer—” He stopped cold, reconsidered his words. “Aw, shit, Jakey. I didn’t mean—”

Jake dismissed it with a shrug. “Fuck it.”

The question of whether or not his father had drunk too much plastic bottled booze was asked by that creepy little voice he had already heard too much of in the past half day. He topped off his coffee, poured one for Spencer—into an old superhero mug that had held brushes for three decades—then slid it across the counter. “Thanks for coming by.” And he meant it, which surprised him almost as much as hearing himself say it out loud.

“You scared the shit out of everyone last night. And I mean everyone.” Spencer stopped and his face grew serious, almost grave. “Even Hauser, and he’s a tough man to get to.”

“Has Hauser briefed you on a media plan?”

Spencer nodded. “He’ll be handling all releases. He called all the reporters on your list and three of them were already in the area on another story. You’ve gained a lot of trust from the department so far.”

“You here on any sort of a mission?”

Spencer waved it away. “I haven’t told Hauser I know you. Not yet. I wanted to be allowed to drop by and have a talk before I was prohibited from dropping by and having a talk.”

“I appreciate it. Especially after Scopes.”

Spencer’s tone dropped an octave. “Everybody’s heard about that, Jakey. Scopes is mean.”

“My kind of mean?”

Spencer looked at him and thought about the question. It was purely academic. They had met in second grade, after Spencer had transferred in from another school. Spencer, in an attempt to carry over his title as resident bully, decided he wanted alms from some of the smaller children. At recess, Spencer informed the eight-year-old Jake that he had to pay fifty cents a day for protection. Jake listened calmly as he stapled a project on leaves together, five or six sheets of construction paper adorned with oak, maple, and elm leaves. When Spencer was through talking, Jake looked up at him, smiled, then knocked his mouth into a bloody mess with two rapid slams of the heavy steel stapler. While Spencer was on the floor, teeth and blood leaking from his face, Jake leaned over and asked, “Protection from what?”

They had stayed best friends until Jake walked out nine years later.

“Nobody’s your kind of mean, Jakey.” He took another sip of his coffee. “Can I ask you why you didn’t let me know you were coming to town?”

It was an honest question—one Jake had expected. He thought about lying, about saying that he had been busy, that he had his hands full with his father’s affairs, that he hadn’t planned on staying around for long. But he had tried to give up lying when he had kicked the drugs and he had gotten pretty good at the truth. At least his version of it. “I spent a lot of time trying to forget this place. You remind me of what I had no intention of coming back to.”

The big cop in the civilian clothes took another sip of his coffee and nodded seriously. “Thanks for not bullshitting me.” He put the mug down. “So what are you going to share, Special Agent Jake Cole?”

“You first. How’s your father?”

Billy’s father, Tiny Spencer, had been a bike racer in the late sixties and early seventies, racing the American circuit for Suzuki. For eight years he traveled the country, chewing up racetracks with the likes of Halsy Knox and the rest of the death wishers. Then his almost record-breaking stint as a corporate rider ended on an August afternoon in Bakersfield, California. The crash tore both legs off at the knee and Tiny’s racing days were over. So Tiny had bought a place in Montauk, because he hated Texas where he was from, and began building custom racing canopies in his garage. Within six months he was making more money than he had as a circuit racer. Jake recalled that the house had always smelled of fiberglass and solvent.

Spencer walked down into the living room and stared out at the ocean and Jake remembered how everybody who came here was always drawn to the same thing—the big line of the Atlantic that didn’t stop until it hit Portugal. “Dad died five years ago. Prostate cancer. He said it was from his ass sitting on wheels all those years. First bikes, then the chair.” Spencer’s shoulders slumped when he saw the weed-covered pool, lily pads and lush algae, a deep green against the perfect blue of the ocean beyond. “I remember when this place was like a TV show. Your mom wiggling around the place in Chanel, getting us sandwiches with the crusts cut off and letting us stay up late on Creature Feature Night. Mallomars and Pop-Tarts. And your dog, Lewis.” He paused, and the silence said he regretted bringing it up. “Remember those days?”

Spencer’s gaze shifted to the algae-lush surface of the pool, a monument to the past. “I remember that pool. Jesus, where did it go?” Of all of Jake’s friends, only Spencer had permission to use the pool owing to that Pablo Picasso had decorated the bottom with a large winking cubist vagina. Spencer had been appreciative of the painting until he had seen his first vagina in real life; he had been perplexed at—and grateful for—its lack of ninety-degree angles.

Jake shrugged. There was no conceivable way to answer the question—rhetorical or not—without opening things he wanted to stay closed. Things like his dog.

Spencer took another sip of coffee to fill the dead zone in the conversation, then said, in a documentary filmmaker’s voice, “How did Billy Spencer become Officer William Spencer? would be the next question. Hauser saved me. And I don’t want any jokes. I am not a born-again anything, Jake. After you left I tried to keep things the same. Kept shucking oysters for the yacht club, chasing the summer girls. You know, the same old same old. But that only worked for so long. So I floated. For a decade. But you know how time has that funny little way of catching up with you? Yeah, well, one night I’m driving home from work and I’m hammered. Hauser pulls me over and has me get out of the truck. I can’t even stand. He can arrest me. Have my truck towed. You know what he does? He gets in my Ford and parks it in a field off the road. Then he drives me home. It was one of those light-bulb moments you hear about; I realized that not everyone in this line of work is out to get people. Some of them—guys like Hauser, I mean—just want to make the place a little better. So a week later I wrote the police exam and did pretty good, well enough that they contacted me to see if I needed any encouraging to go to the interviews. After the interviews they went at me with a background check, psychological profile, polygraph test. I did the twenty-eight-week program, and Hauser hired me right out of the gate. Now here we are.” A lifetime summed up in a few sentences.

They stopped speaking for a few minutes, both listening to the sound of the ocean. Jake finally asked, “What can you tell me about Hauser?” He pulled out a cigarette, brought it to life.

“Born here, played ball for Southampton High. Football scholarship to the University of Texas. First string quarterback for three seasons. Went pro. Number six draft choice for his year in the NFL. Played four solid games for the Steelers before he had his right knee bent ninety degrees against design. You’d probably like him if you got to know him. He’s a capable guy, it takes a lot for him to go green like last night.”

“Last night would be tough on anyone.”

Spencer mulled the statement around for a few seconds, then held out his mug for a refill. “You seemed to be fine with it.”

Jake heard it coming out in his voice. The worry. “It’s what I do.”

Spencer nodded like that had answered it all, but his face was still playing around with a few questions. “History? Wife? That kind of stuff,” he said, changing the subject.

What could Jake say to that? Heroin, a cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillator sewn into my chest, drinking problem. NA, AA. Somehow got through it. Met Kay. Makes me laugh, makes me horny. A boy, Jeremy. “Her name’s Kay.” I figure out the event cascade at a crime scene faster than a team of battlefield anthropologists. “I’ve been with the bureau for twelve years now.” Half of them clean. “A son, Jeremy.” Who I call Moriarty because he thinks it’s a cool name and I am terrified he will someday find out that I don’t know if I am a good man. “Live in New York. Kay plays with the orchestra—cellist.” I am on the road eleven months a year. “I’m back because my father set himself on fire and smashed through the front window.” And pissed off that the bastard didn’t have the courtesy to die.

“I wish you would have said good-bye. Or sent a letter. Something. Anything. I went into the city to find you a couple of times.”

Jake stared at Spencer, wondering if he was supposed to say something here because Spencer had paused, like he wanted some sort of dialogue. Jake rinsed his mug under the faucet and placed it in the rack beside the sink. A few drops of water beaded on its surface.

“Everyone figured you’d come back some day. And here you are. More than half a lifetime later.”

Jake shrugged, as if that was some sort of an answer. He hoped Spencer would let it go.

“What’d you do when you got to New York?” Spencer pushed.

Jake remembered his visit to David Finch—his father’s art dealer. Jake had asked for thirty-one dollars, so he’d be able to stay at the YMCA while he found a job, got on his feet. He promised to pay it back when he could. Finch had said no. That Jacob wouldn’t approve. That he was sorry. And then he had closed the door in Jake’s face.

Two nights of no meals and no place safe to sleep later, Jake had sold a little piece of himself—the first of many. And learned, with an odd mix of horror and pride, that he was a survivor. The next part of his life had faded and been forgotten. The drugs helped. For a very long time they had helped. “Got on with my life.”

Jake’s eyes left Spencer and slid down to the safari pool out on the deck. In a way there was something serene, almost meditative about it. Maybe it wasn’t a sign of neglect after all. Maybe his father had been going Zen.