Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

23

Jake’s head automatically swiveled to the pool as he ran across the deck. The algae was undisturbed and still, the line of sludge that rimmed the concrete a straight demarcation around the perimeter.

Jake saw Jeremy from the top of the steps to the beach. He was at the water’s edge, staring out at the ocean. His arms were crossed over his chest as if pondering some important moral question, his body unmoving.

Jake thudded down the ancient weathered planks and raced across the sand. He scooped Jeremy up. “What are you doing out here, Moriarty?” He tried not to sound angry but what he really wanted to keep buried was the panic.

Jeremy tried to squirm out of Jake’s grip with the guttural grunts he reserved for times when language was just too civil for the things he needed to say.

“What is it?” Jake swung his son around. “You’re not supposed to leave our sight. You know that, kiddo.”

Kay came down the steps and ran over. “What the hell is he doing down here?”

Jake shrugged. “He’s being pissy. You ask him.”

Jeremy gave a final squirm and fell limp. When he seemed to be in control of himself, Jake lowered him to the sand.

“What’s wrong?” Kay asked, squatting down on her boots.

Jeremy pointed off into the distance, to the horizon, to the edge of the world.

“What?” Kay asked.

Jake turned to the horizon, scoured the skyline. Then back to Jeremy, examining his face for clues. Then out at the ocean again. “What is it?”

“Elmo!” Jeremy screeched, a voice filled with rage.

And then Jake saw it. Rolling lazily on the deep swell, the red-orange figure of Elmo, face down, spread-eagled in the water. The tide was coming in, not going out, and Elmo was a good 150 feet from shore. Jake held up his hand and felt the steady wind that was pushing straight in at the shore.

Watching Elmo spin lazily in the swell, Kay asked, “How the hell did he—?” And she stopped, because she realized that there was no answer to the question.

The Sesame Street critter bobbed on the waves for a few seconds like a drowning victim. He inched closer, but it would take time for him to close the distance to shore and he’d be lucky if he wasn’t pulled under by the waves breaking on the beach. It didn’t take a physicist to understand that Jeremy could not have gotten him out there; Jake knew even he couldn’t throw him that far, headwind or not.

“How did Elmo get out there, Moriarty?”

Jeremy pretended not to hear for a few seconds. Then he realized that his parents were smart enough to know that Elmo hadn’t swum out there on his own. “He took him.” The boy stood on his toes, his eyes searching for his little red friend. “Carried him into the water, Daddy.”

Jake felt the skin tighten around his bones. “Who did, son?”

“The man.” He looked up, smiled brightly. “Your friend.”

Jake looked into his son’s face, searching for…what? “My friend? Which friend?”

Jeremy looked like he realized that he might be in trouble. He lifted his face to Kay, searching for a cue. Kay nodded. “It’s okay, son. Tell Daddy.”

“He said he was your friend, Daddy. He said he played games with you and your mommy when you were little. And that now he wants to play games with me. He wants to be my friend, too.”

Kay’s features were white now, brittle. “What is he talking about?”

Jake was frozen in place. He tried to shrug, to shake his head—all that came out was a single sentence. “What was his name?”

Jeremy stared out at Elmo lolling on the waves like an orange patch of carpet, well beyond the heft of human strength. “The man. He lives in the floor.” The boy kept his eyes locked on Elmo, waiting for him to come in from his swim. He shrugged and his little T-shirt rose up, exposing a big white tummy with a perfect dent of a bellybutton, like a well-grown albino grapefruit. “You know, the man in the floor—he’s your buddy. He said so. He said he’s your Buddy-Man.”

Jake looked over at his wife and saw her bottom lip trembling a little. “Jeremy,” she said, maybe a little too harsh.

Recognizing the tone, the boy looked up at her.

“You don’t go anywhere without Mommy or Daddy, okay? We’ve talked about this. There are bad people out there. Mean people.”

Jeremy shook his head. “Not the man in the floor. He’s Daddy’s buddy. He said so.” He pointed at the ocean. “Like teaching Elmo to swim.”

Jake turned back to the water. Out beyond the surf line, Elmo still spun facedown in the swell, a few bits of seaweed now clinging to his furry orange ass. He didn’t look like he was swimming. He looked dead.

“The next time he comes to play, you tell Daddy,” Kay said.

Out past the surf line, the swell capped and Elmo was driven down into the black Atlantic.

24

On the way in from a trip to the medical examiner’s office, Hauser stopped at his receptionist’s desk. She was busy putting office supplies into Ziploc bags—her idea of preparing for the storm.

“I need you to get on the phone to the FBI office we went through last night—the one that gave us Jake Cole. I want to speak to this witch doctor’s supervisor or boss or whatever his superior is called. I want him on the phone and I want it done in the next three minutes.”

The phone was buzzing by the time he sat down behind his massive slab of oak. “Hauser here.”

“Sheriff, this is Field Operations Manager Matthew Carradine—Jake Cole’s handler. What can I do for you?”

Handler? What kind of a word was that? Then Hauser remembered Jake’s 3-D crime scene party trick and decided that maybe he was looking at a circus act.

Hauser didn’t start by telling Carradine that he was glad the guy had called back—that would be too much of an aw-shucks way to start a conversation. “Who is Jake Cole?”

“I don’t understand the question, Sheriff Hauser.”

He could have pointed out the tattoos or the clothing or the spooky crime scene Ouija show but all of that was secondary. “Jake Cole creeps me out.”

Carradine let out a low little rumble that sounded like it had weight to it. It was an irritated, bored sound that said Go away. Maybe it worked with people who hadn’t seen de-epithelialized children, Hauser thought bitterly.

“Can you be specific, Sheriff?” Meaning, It’s none of your business.

“Yes, Carradine, I can. What—specifically—does he do? And by that I mean beyond walking through a crime scene with that glazed expression on his face and giving me instructions on how to set up a media plan.”

“The FBI is not in the habit of handing out private details pertaining to our personnel.”

“Mr. Carradine, I am not some lost fuckstick local sheriff who can’t find his cock with both hands. If I am going to work a double homicide with a man, I need to know a little about him.”

Carradine was silent on the other end, probably thinking things through, Hauser realized.

It took him ten seconds to begin speaking. “First off, if you want to know about Jake Cole, you’ll have to ask him. But I’ll tell you what, Sheriff Hauser, I am going to share a little information with you because you can’t afford the luxury of mistrust on this one. You don’t have the time. Of all the police departments in the United States investigating a homicide right now, yours is the luckiest. If Cole’s father wasn’t going through what he is, I’d have Jake out of there so fast you’d think he was a dream. I am not denigrating your situation—I’ve read the file and you have a real problem on your hands—but Jake has other cases that are a lot more pressing than yours.”

“What’s more pressing than a mother and her baby skinned alive?” Hauser asked, reminding himself out loud what was at the center of this whole thing.

“Try nine little boys who have disappeared over the past month and whose parents have been receiving their heads in the mail a few days later—collect. With nails pounded into them. Pre-mortem.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes. Jesus. Look, I understand that Jake Cole does not fit the bureau profile that we have set for ourselves and I’d be lying if I said that you were the first law-enforcement officer to field a call like this. It’s obvious to all parties that Jake’s left of center of our phenotype. He works autonomously for us and we are privileged to have him—you are privileged to have him.” He paused again, as if he was deciding how much to open up to Hauser. “Jake has a rare ability.”

“Is he some sort of a psychic?”

Hauser was surprised to hear Carradine laugh, a hearty roar that echoed for a few seconds. “Sheriff, we are good at what we do because of science. Because of protocols we have developed. Because we understand that data supports data and that the eventual outcome is a solution. Not because of some boojie-woojie evil eye. Again, I’d be lying if I told you that you were the first person who had asked me that, but as a lawman you should know better. There are no mediums. No psychics. No people who speak to the dead. That’s all unsupported unscientific wishful thinking.

“In simple terms, Jake is the most pragmatic problem solver I have ever seen. First off, he has eidetic memory—I mean complete photographic recall. He walks through a room once and he can recall the tiniest detail, as if he has a digital recorder in his head. It’s a little disconcerting because it’s very uncommon. It’s also remarkable. Jake would be the first to tell you about it if you bothered to ask.”

Hauser felt himself drop the classification of Jake as some kind of circus freak to little more than a stupid human trick. “It’s not some weird I-see-dead-people thing?”

Carradine let a little chuckle roll out again. “No, Sheriff, it’s just a very keen power of observation. And if his calm gets to you, please remember that he sees the worst of humanity all the time. It takes a lot to get him flustered.”

Hauser remembered Jake in the ME’s subterranean room, caressing Madame X’s peeled foot.

“Have I answered your questions?” The tone told Hauser that his five minutes were over.

Hauser realized that in a way he now knew less about Jake Cole than before he had made the call. “I guess so,” he said, then added a tired “Thank you,” and hung up.

25

Jake crouched in front of the master bedroom pocket door. He had managed to spread it a few more inches, and the opening was almost large enough for Kay to squeeze her nearly diminutive body through. She stood in front of him, her arm and shoulder already through the crack. From his vantage point, her crotch was in his face and he felt himself staring at the tight V of her jean shorts instead of concentrating on getting the door open.

“Can you get that out of my face?” he said between clenched teeth and gave the door another tug. It moved slowly in, as if the pocket were filled with tightly packed sand.

“What?”

“That,” he said, nodding at her crotch.

“My vagina?”

“I can’t open this door and stare at your camel toe at the same time. It’s too distracting.”

“Camel toe? I have a camel toe? I thought current nomenclature was cooch. When did we go to camel toe?”

“When you put those shorts on.” Jake rolled his eyes. “Now cut it out.”

“Oh, all right.” She squatted down beside him, resting the part of her ass that was hanging out of her shorts on the heels of her boots again. “This better?” she craned her neck theatrically, to see if anything was popping out. “No fur.”

Jake shook his head sadly. “Jesus, where did I find you?” he asked rhetorically.

“AA—us good ones all hang out at AA meetings. We get to meet the cool guys there. The guys who have no jobs, no friends, no self-esteem. Or if they do have jobs, they’re like really creepy jobs that don’t make them happy.” That had been six-plus years now. Before, in the language of their relationship. Before they had fallen in love or had Jeremy or had found the feeling of safety neither had ever experienced but both had recognized on sight. “And in exchange these guys get hot musician babes with no jobs, no self-esteem, and big juicy camel toes.” She leaned forward and kissed him. “Now open this fucking door, Houdini, we need a place to sleep and if we have to crash in the living room, you won’t get to put anything in my warm parts tonight.” Her freckled face scrunched up. “Clear?”

Jake nodded. “I’m working on it, okay?”

Another good tug and it opened enough for Kay to squeeze through.

“Lucky you,” she said. “You’re gonna get some lovin’ later.”

Jake stood up without brushing the dust bunnies off of his jeans. His peripheral vision stayed on Jeremy engineering the death of more imaginary two-inch motorists. “I’m glad he doesn’t pay attention to your mouth.”

Kay managed to squeeze through the crack by putting her hands over her head and sliding sideways. Her breasts made a scraping sound on the wood when they popped through. She flipped a switch and a single table lamp on the floor in the corner sputtered to yellow, feeble life.

“Oh, hey. Here’s why you couldn’t budge the door.”

There was a soft clack and she slid the door back, a two-foot screwdriver in her hand. “Your dad drove this through the wall, into the door.”

Jake rolled the door closed again, and saw the crude hole whittled into it.

“How did he get out, though?”

Kay looked at the doorway, the hole in the wall, the screwdriver, and did some rough calculating. “He could have reached through and locked it from the outside. You’d have to know where this was to get to it but if you’ve got long arms…”

A heavy chest of drawers blocked the opening and Jake slid over the top. The room, like the rest of the house, was cluttered, although this one felt more like a lair. The bed didn’t look filthy but the sheets were crumpled and knotted on top of the mattress in the shape of a human nest. Clothes—mostly his father’s standard work outfit of jeans and white T-shirts—were strewn about. There were empty scotch bottles, cracker boxes, and anchovy tins in the way of garbage. And, of course, a few dozen yellow plastic utility knives.

“This isn’t good,” Kay said in a long, low whisper.

“Let’s jimmy the locks on my old room and my mother’s office.”

His mother’s office was a static photo of what it had been all those years ago—exactly as it had been when Jake left—exactly as it had been for the five years previous to that. More than thirty years of closed air and dust and sadness. His own room was sparse and bare, as if no one had ever lived there at all.

Kay brushed her hands off on her thighs. “I’ll get some garbage bags. We’ll be sleeping in your father’s room.”

Jake watched her walk down the hall and head for the stairs. As she passed Jeremy he watched her gingerly lift her foot above the invisible crowd he was plowing his car through. When she was out of sight he turned his head back toward the bedroom at the end of the hallway. A single question looped through his head: Why would he barricade the door?

26

Hauser sat on a stool by the counter dividing the kitchen from the open room that made up most of the ground floor and the exposed hallway that ran overhead. He sat back, his Stetson on his knee, stoically fingering the rim of his coffee cup. He felt better about Jake, more at ease, after talking to Carradine. They had a case to get to. But first Hauser felt like he needed to apologize.

Jake stood behind the counter, leaning against the bank of drawers that hid more of the creepy little paintings. Kay and Jeremy were upstairs in the bath, cleaning off. The sound of the water running was almost overpowered by a radio belting out Sesame Street tunes, Jake’s attempt at making up for Elmo’s mysterious drowning.

“I called Carradine.” Hauser’s finger stopped tracing the rim of the hand-thrown mug and his eyes lifted.

Jake took a sip of his own coffee, pausing the lip of the cup below his chin. “What did he tell you that you think I wouldn’t have?”

Hauser loosened up a little. “I’m sorry, Jake. I am not used to working with outsiders. It was a mistake.”

Jake shrugged. “I have a predictable effect on people. I’m sure Carradine told you this is more than some sort of Freudian fantasy to find my mother’s killer.”

Hauser shifted uncomfortably in his seat, lifted his hand. “I didn’t say—”

“I did,” Jake said very calmly. “This is not some subconscious quest to make things right in the universe so I can put the little frightened boy that still lives inside me at ease.”

“That sounds like therapist speak.”

“It is. I’ve spent a lot of my time in the offices of people who spend their time listening to other people’s problems. I had to. I wasted too much of my life being angry and self-medicating.”

“The booze?”

Jake laughed. “When I was roaring, the booze was the least of my vices.” Something in Jake’s eyes turned off and the light coming in through the big windows was no longer reflected in his pupils. “The booze was how I pressurized, how I medicated in public. Problem with me is that I inherited my old man’s metabolism. I have an LR that’s in the basement—meaning little reaction to alcohol—and that goes for anything I put in my body.” Jake shook his head. “And I put everything you can imagine into the machine. I have a pacemaker in my chest, Mike. I did so much heroin they’re not sure my heart will beat without a mechanical aid. I used to do speedballs for breakfast.”

The sheriff shifted in his seat; he was a man who was used to people trying to hide their secrets from him.

“Whenever my heart rate rises above—or drops below—a certain point, I get zapped by the little plastic juice-box they wired into my sternum.” He shrugged, like it really didn’t matter one way or the other. “In a lot of ways, it is a drug of its own—the lets-me-know-I’m-not-yet-dead drug.”

Hauser finished his coffee in a big gulp and slid the mug across the counter, declining a refill with the shake of his head. “I thought you were some sort of a paranormal freak.”

Jake’s mouth flattened a little. “There are no psychics. It’s called cold reading. Remember the Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four?”

“I’m more of a movie guy.”

Jake smiled. “Watson hands Holmes a watch and asks what can be deduced by observation. Watson feels that as a mass-produced item, it reveals nothing of the owner. Holmes examines the piece, hands it back, and rattles off a litany of details about the previous owner—who he says is Watson’s brother. The man was a drunkard, he was often broke, and so on and so forth à la the smug bastard everyone knows Holmes to be. Watson gets pissed and accuses Holmes of contacting his family to learn the history of his poor brother.” Jake took a sip of coffee. “The deductions were simple. Holmes saw the initials and knew that it had belonged to Watson’s father, after which it was handed down to the eldest son—as was customary. There were pawn numbers scratched into the case that pointed at the brother falling in and out of debt—otherwise he would neither have pawned the watch, nor been able to pick it up. The keyhole was scratched and Holmes figured that no sober man would miss the hole as consistently as was evident. To Holmes it was obvious. Watson thought it was witch-doctory.

“There is no contacting the other side. It’s bullshit like tarot card reading and palmistry and tea leaves and faith healing. Like Sagan was kind enough to point out, there is zero data. There are no psychics, Hauser. And anyone who believes in them is ill-informed or stupid.” He had given the monologue enough times that it was stage-honed.

“I’ll go with ill-informed on this one,” Hauser said slowly and Jake could see the wheels in his head turning.

Jake smiled. “A vast segment of the population out there believe in stupidity. John Edward, that guy who dupes people into thinking he’s talking to their dead loved ones, should have his fucking head cut off on live TV.”

“A little harsh.”

“Just truth. There is no afterlife. There are no leprechauns, or religious visions, or extraterrestrial visitors. There are only psychotic breaks from reality, chemical-induced hallucinations, and good old-fashioned fucking lying which is the one that I see employed more than anything else.”

Jake went to the big doors that opened up onto the beach. He pulled the latches and accordioned them open. The air in the house changed with one big pulse and all of a sudden everything smelled fresher, newer.

Hauser was still leaning against the counter. “You believe in the Devil?”

Jake put his hands on his hips and eyed Hauser for a minute. “Every culture has a name for the bogeyman and when you look at shit like that,” he said, pointing at the files on the coffee table, “I understand why.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Jake locked him in another stare. “Guys like Francis Collins think that God had to have a hand in our design because morality exists. I look around at our species and I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck he’s talking about. The history of this world—especially the religious history—is one big disgusting bloodbath.” Jake shook his head. “So no, I don’t believe in the Devil. I don’t need to, man has done enough horrible things to impress me. You give human beings the opportunity to be monstrous and you will never be disappointed.” His point made, he turned to the horizon. “What’s the news on the storm?”

Hauser swiveled, keeping his butt in the seat. “Landfall is right here.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, well, that’s one way to put it.” Hauser lifted his mass out of the modern stool and came over to the window, put his hands on his hips—the right automatically resting on the grip of his sidearm, the leather holster creaking with the contact. “I spoke to the Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center this morning. Dylan’s a strong Category Five and there’s a good chance that it stays a five. I don’t know shit about hurricanes and even less about categories in particular, but I looked it up and five is bad, worse than 1938 and that thing wiped out the highway, the railroad, destroyed half the houses here, washed buildings out to sea, snapped our power poles like they were straw, and killed seventy people in the area. The shoreline was rearranged like a shovel going at a carton of eggs.” Hauser’s lips pursed for a minute, and he shook his head. “And it’s electric.”

“No such thing,” Jake said.

“You need new data,” he said, mimicking Dennison from the NHC. “This thing will be pounding lightning around like some kind of science fiction film. We could be the last people to be standing on this spot, Jake. A few days from now, this could be in the ocean.”

“In a few days from now we could be dead,” Jake said, taking the existential statement one step further. “Or the planet could be gone.”

Hauser shifted his gun hand. “You are one grim sonofabitch, you know that.”

Jake shook his head sadly. “Every time I see some broken, discarded person left in a field, or washed up on a riverbank, I think to myself, This is it—this is the last one. Tomorrow I will wake up and people will no longer do this to one another. Yet they do.”

“Is that it? The work? I mean, have you gotten so used to seeing—” he paused, his mind taken back to the skinnings up the beach—“things like last night that you just think all people are bad?”

“It’s like we’re just filling out time until the whole anthill bursts into flames.”

“What about your kid?” As a father, he knew that children could bring a lot of good to their immediate surroundings. He also knew they could bring a lot of sadness to the world. Hauser’s son had been killed by a drunk driver.

Jake walked through the open doors, onto the stained, salt-eaten deck. “Jeremy’s the best. But he’s three and there’s a lot of road between now and the end of his life. He’s never going to grow up into one of the monsters I hunt—I know that for a fact.” At the back of his mind, hidden behind a few crates of bad memories, he felt something twitch in the darkness. “But I can’t guarantee that he’s going to be happy. Or have good self-esteem. Or marry someone who loves him as much as I do. Sure, right now—I mean right now—things are all shiny and bright.” He thought back to Jeremy on the beach that morning, still giddy from riding on the bus, thinking that Moon Pies were better than anything in the world. It would be great if things stayed like that. But what about thirty years from now?

Hauser’s head shifted a few degrees, like a dog listening for a noise it thought it had heard. “One of those glass-is-half-full kind of people.”

Jake shook his head. “Not at all. The glass is what the glass is.”

“You have a unique way of looking at things.”

On the horizon the clouds had thickened. They were not yet ominous, but something about them suggested that they were recon scouts for an approaching army. “Landfall’s not until tomorrow night but the NHC guy said we’ll see the front come in later this evening. The wind’ll pick up and the rain is going to start. It’ll be uncomfortable by tomorrow afternoon. By nightfall hell will be rolling through town.”

Jake thought back to the woman and child up the beach. Skinned. He thought about his father, ramped up on sedatives and scraping portraits onto hospital room walls with fried bones and charred flesh. He thought about the old man’s screams. About how his mother had been murdered. About all the poisonous water that had gone under the bridge in this place. “Hell’s already here,” he said, and walked back into the house.