Bloodman (12 page)

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.

27

Hauser was gone, and Kay and Jeremy were finishing up lunch, Jeremy’s face bisected by a line of raspberry jam that made him look like the Joker. The clouds on the horizon had grown fatter, and the pregnant belly of the ocean was hazing over. The wind had picked up but it was still little more than a fall breeze, a light little hiss that would soon begin to change into a malevolent beast. Jake stood in front of the studio, another member of the quarter-century club, and wondered what he would find inside Pandora’s building. He felt like he was using his father to avoid the case even though there was very little he could do right now. He had seen the crime scene, talked to the ME, and received Hauser’s protocols. There wasn’t much for him to do now but sift through what he had—and give Hauser all the information he could put together. So he occupied himself with trying to find a way into his father’s studio.

He walked around it a few times, searching for an entry. There wasn’t much in the way of security; the windows were all single-pane, glazed with brittle old putty; the door had a decent lock on it but the top half was glass—all he’d have to do was smash it and reach inside. The weird part—if he could even consider it weird after everything else he had found—was that all the windows had been painted over from the inside. Wherever he tried to see into the building, all he saw was a black mirror reflecting his own image.

“Fuck it,” he said aloud, and pulled his elbow back to punch out one of the mullioned panes. Then the voice—the one with the perfect memory—reminded him of the ring of keys back in the fridge.

He ran inside, grabbed them, and came back out—all in a quick jog. He tried a few keys until he found one that worked, then opened the door and stepped inside.

Jake closed the door behind himself, flipped the lock, and slowly moved into the dark.

He cracked the lighting to life and looked around. Like the house, the space had a large main floor and a mezzanine overhead. About a quarter of the downstairs was the garage, and had a single door centered in the wall as access. The rest of the space had been Jacob Coleridge’s studio, but unlike the stasis of the house, the studio had changed. A lot. Jake looked around and sucked in a long, low breath that actually scraped his windpipe as it went down.

Jacob had painted every available surface—including the floor and ceiling—a flat black. He had then decorated this negative space with dozens of portraits of the same bloody man from the hospital wall, filling the dark expanse with anatomical studies out of a Hieronymus Bosch-inspired hell. They were deftly executed and hyperdetailed—anatomically perfect. Except they were faceless. The sense of menace they conveyed could not be ignored.

Jake walked to the center of the studio and spun in place, trying to take in the work. Each figure was frighteningly executed, the flesh breathing, the blood pumping. No matter which figure Jake looked at, it seemed to be watching him back with faceless malevolence.

The ceiling was twenty feet above the painted concrete floor of the studio, hidden in a seamless cloud of shadow and black paint. As he moved beneath the beams the figures painted on the ceiling looked like they were crawling around in the darkness, following him. When he stopped moving, the illusion ceased, and the bloody figures froze in place.

But the strange part—the part that somehow eclipsed Jacob’s garage/studio Sistine Chapel of demented demons—were the canvases piled up everywhere; the same senseless pieces that were scattered all over the house. There were hundreds of them—maybe even thousands—filling every available scrap of space, stacked like valueless cargo. Jake looked around in awe, thinking of the old adage about the manic woodchuck.
How many crazy paintings would a crazy painter paint if a crazy painter could paint crazy paintings?

The answer was, of course,
a shitload
.

Jake picked one up and examined the composition. It was like the ones in the kitchen drawer, or in the upstairs hallway, or under the piano—a lifeless shape of near-color. He flipped through a few. Some were gray, others black, some the color of rotting tumors. More paintings of nothing. Negative space. Dead blobs. But the quantity gave them a communal voice that let him know that there was a point to them. How long had these taken? A year? Two? Ten? He put the canvas back and looked around the studio.

The faceless figures up in the rafters were still following him. His father had never considered himself a classicist, but the three-dimensional representations of whatever the fuck he was looking at were beyond lifelike. They were astounding. Tormented, horrid effigies, that represented…that represented…he swung his head across the black skyline of the ceiling, pulling in the details of the same man Jacob had painted on the wall of his hospital room—just what
did
they represent?

Skinned
, they whispered in unison.

These were a message. A signal. There was a reason behind them. Jake could sense its signal but he couldn’t isolate the meaning. And this bothered him. These lifeless little canvases said something. Like the faceless man of blood on the hospital wall. Like the Chuck Close portrait with the missing eyes. Like the stacks of paintings. Could it be nothing more than madness? Alzheimer’s? Paranoia? All of the above?

Somewhere in the decaying apple of his father’s mind was a worm of a thought that the old man listened to. It had wriggled through his skull, sending him diseased instructions that he deciphered in his own way. How much of that had bled into what he had tried to say here? This couldn’t all be random—there was too much in the way of long-term planning and execution. Someone with Alzheimer’s would have gone off the rails a long time ago. So what was he trying to say?

Jake spun on the floor, his eyes digging into the walls, trying to see around the pillars of canvases stacked like pizza boxes. From a
trompe l’oeil
perspective, it was an engineering feat. Wherever he stood, the faceless watched him.

They were trying to tell him something.

Like the speech of the dead that he deciphered, he needed the code. The common language. That secret way his old man’s mind worked. Which might as well have been written in Easter Island glyphs.

What he did—what he was good at—was figuring out how killers thought. And the killers he hunted were artists. From a societal perspective it was demented, sadistic art, but that was missing the obvious; to
them
it was art. And it was always expressed with a unique voice; the language of the worm firing bursts of code into the rotting apple. Jake’s gift had always been figuring out the artist-specific language of the murderers he hunted, figuring out their own personal symbolism and its subtext. If he could look at a murder scene through the eyes of the psychotic, how much harder would it be to look at this space through the eyes of a man he shared some common ground with? It was a different language—the language of the mad—but it was still
language
. Which meant it was decipherable. What was—?

—And there was a jolt of electricity that came at him out of nowhere, shaking the engine room beneath his ribs. He had time to grab his chest before there was another crackle in the circuitry. Fell to his knees.

Then his stomach.

The floor stretched away into the dark at a right angle to his line of sight, and dust bunnies danced in front of his face with his breath.

How many crazy paintings would a crazy painter paint?
echoed somewhere off in the distance.

Then everything faded away, even the canopy of faceless stares.