Bloodman (31 page)

78

Jacob Coleridge woke up in the recovery room, alone; the nurse assigned to him had left to answer a call in surgical ICU, two doors down the hall. Jacob, of course, had no way of knowing this—he just knew that he was alone.

He was not restrained and other than the sharp thud of a mouthful of fishhooks he felt relatively level-headed and strong. He sat up. Beside the IV plugged into his arm he had a tube feeding oxygen down into his lungs through his nostrils. He was lucid enough to realize that this was probably because his mouth was wadded up with cotton and sutures. He had no idea why.

Jacob shimmied down to the end of the bed, managed to get a skinny naked leg between the side rail and the footboard, and pushed the release with his toe. The side rail clunked noisily down and he swung his other leg over the side and stepped onto the cold linoleum.

With one of the batons that did duty as his hands he managed to paw off one side of the tube feeding him oxygen, then he backed up and the tube sluiced out of his nostril with a wet pop. He turned and walked away from his bed and the elastic IV hose stretched, the needle pulled out of his arm with a zing and flew back, flecking the sheets with a spit of blood. There was nothing clandestine or furtive about his movements, he was simply a man with someplace to go, a mission to accomplish.

He shuffled out into the empty hallway, dim and dark and still, found the door to the emergency stairwell, and pushed it open.

The Southampton Hospital, built with hurricanes and storm surges in mind, was designed to be evacuated not merely through the ground floor, but also through the roof—all government buildings built near the ocean have this feature. But Jacob was not following this knowledge, he was just following his logic, and his logic was telling him to climb. So he began.

He made it to the top of the stairwell in a little over two minutes. He stood, breath whistling through his nostrils, the lump of cotton and stitches in his mouth feeling like a sour cactus, until he caught his breath. Then he put his weight against the door.

The alarm for this door was hardwired to sirens and as soon as he pushed on the panic bar, the gloom began to howl.

The storm was on temporary hiatus but the wind up here almost knocked the old man down and he stumbled over the backwash threshold and into the water that had built up. Rain was flushing off the roof in great torrents through the downspouts but the old painter had a foot to wade through and the sharp gravel sliced the soles of his feet.

He thought about his son, about how he had driven the boy away. It had been the only thing to do. And now, clambering through the shin-high water on the roof, he wondered if he had saved the boy at all. He was back here in harm’s way and it hit Jacob that all he had done was prolong the consequences for both of them. A deep thud of despair welled up in his chest as he realized that none of it mattered. Not anymore. The damage had been done.

At least it had been spectacular damage.

David Finch had once told him to
Go big or go home
and in his fractured and terrified mind, Jacob Coleridge felt pride that he had carried that philosophy through to the end.

Even in the lull of the eye, the wind ripped at him, chewed at his robe like an angry dog. He raised his arms and it was gone, pulled off into the night by the hands of the storm. He stumbled on, naked.

Jacob moved cautiously, the good part of his mind knowing that if he fell he would not get up. His feet were bleeding badly and he could feel the warmth seeping from his body.

He was ten feet from the edge of the roof when he heard the door clang open behind him. Flashlight beams shot around. Locked on him. Shouts. He saw his shadow stretch out before him, to the edge of the building, off into the empty darkness beyond.

More shouting.

His name.

He didn’t look back.

Didn’t stop.

His shadow danced. Footsteps sloshed behind. Voices implored him to stop.

Couldn’t they see that he had no choice? That this was what had to be done?

He never doubted his mission, never doubted the reason for this; he knew this was the only way to get away from what was coming. He had lived in fear for too long. No one could save him. Not even Jake. Not anymore.

His progress took all of his strength, all of his concentration, but his mind allowed him one brief image, a picture of Mia sitting on the deck of the sailboat all those years ago. Young, beautiful, when life had been full of potential.

He reached the edge of the roof.

Lifted one bloody foot from the water.

And stepped out into the sky.

79

Jake moved away from Frank’s corpse with slow but fluid movements, as if his bones were not connected to one another. “You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

Hauser stepped down into the sunken living room. “I thought that’s what you did, Mr. Witch-doctor. Figure shit out.” He said it softly, almost kindly, but there was something else, something angry, behind the words. He had his pistol in his hand.

“Where is my wife? My child?”

Hauser moved against the fireplace. The remaining curtains danced like ghosts, tattered and torn. The sheriff looked over at Frank’s misshapen head, disconnected jaw. “I ask the questions, Jake,” he said, bringing up the Sig, and that’s when Jake saw the big trench knife hanging off his belt—a killer’s knife, not a cop’s.

Jake now understood that part of him, the part that knew this was all going to be over relatively soon, had stopped caring. He also realized that back there, in the static of disbelief over how this had unfolded, Kay and Jeremy’s voices had stopped. Along with this came a great weariness. He nodded at the kitchen. “I need a drink.” It was a statement, not a request. He had stopped asking anyone for permission when he had walked out of this place all those years ago and he wasn’t going to start now, not even when he was staring down a nine-millimeter Parabellum.

There was a foot of sand in the kitchen and he had to wrench the door to the cupboard under the sink open. He pulled out a bottle of scotch that had been hiding at the back and poured two fingers into a teacup. His head was buzzing like a shorted bulb and he heard the harsh chirp of electrical circuits simmering. He knew that after the blue-white jolt his heart had taken, he’d need a few minutes to get his think box back on line. Spencer was dead. Frank was dead. While he had been out on the floor, someone had killed them both. No, not
someone
—the man his father had been terrified of. Jeremy’s man in the floor—Bud man. His father’s faceless portrait. The killer. The Bloodman. All of them. “You want a drink?” he asked Hauser.

Hauser nodded wearily, and came forward, the pistol still up. “Why not?”

“You’re on duty,” Jake said, and poured one for Hauser.

“And you’re a recovering alcoholic.”

“Just a drunk between drinks.” He slid the cup across the counter, then raised his own in a toast. He looked at Frank, dead in the chair over Hauser’s shoulder like the lighthouse behind Rachael Macready in that goddamned photograph in the house of the dead. His eyes filled with clear, bright tears.

All he could wonder was,
Why
?

He downed the booze and the fire was sweet and familiar. He closed his eyes, took in the heat and the beauty of the flames in his stomach. How long had it been since he had had a drink? But he knew, down to the minute if he really wanted to think about it—a gift from his perfect memory. Except for those four months he had never been able to buy back—those were gone for good.

He opened his eyes and Hauser was still standing there with that unhappy look welded onto his skull, eyes distant, mouth turned down. He looked like the stickers that Kay put on the chemicals under the sink so Jeremy wouldn’t pour himself an afternoon cocktail of bleach and stainless-steel cleaner.

Kay. Jeremy. Where were they?

The living room was full of sand and debris. The portrait of the man in the floor was gone, covered over. Jake swiveled his line of sight to the pool. The storm had emptied the algae and lily pads and the foundation had all but been swept out to sea. It still hung off the deck, tilted into the ocean, the waterline at odds with the angle of the rim. The water was a dirty brown now. Murky. Lifeless.

And he remembered what Frank had said.
You’re the guy who thinks like a murderer
.
You do the math.

And his head lit up like the lightning that had been coming down all night. He knew where the bastard had put them. Somewhere no one would check, not even the cops when they had combed the property. Someplace so fucking close no one would think of looking there.

Jake came out from behind the counter. Fast.

Hauser flinched but Jake was so fast he was past the sheriff before he understood what was happening.

Jake barreled by, jumped through one of the blown-out windows, and dove into the pool.

The underwater world tasted of salt and mud, not chlorine. Jake kicked for the bottom and felt his hand sink into the muck and garbage that had settled after the storm. He palmed through the silt and his fingers brushed aside pebbles and stones and empty beer cans and scotch bottles.

His pulse throbbed in his ears. He slid his hands back and forth over the bottom, searching the debris. The air in his lungs tried to pull him to the surface, back to the world, but he kicked to keep himself down. He felt a hubcap, a broken plate, more empty cans and bottles. Then the rough form of a cinder block. And below it, something soft and rubbery that could only be skin.

Jake ran his hands over it and it rippled, coiled back onto his knuckles like it wanted to touch him, to let him know that it knew he was there. His index finger slid into a slimy depression—like Braille, it was familiar to his touch—a small, perfect belly button. And beneath that he felt the crescent-shaped ridges created by a single-edged knife. Beneath that, the rough concrete bottom of the pool.

A human skin. Weighed down with a cinder block.

Jake screamed and lost the air from his lungs in one violent roar. He breathed in, sucked in silt and saltwater and despair. Vomited under the water. Instinctively pushed for the surface.

Broke through.

Screamed a long, horror-wracked vowel. Then dove back into the muck.

He found the cinder block, lifted it up, and wrapped his fingers around the oily skin below.

Foraged on the bottom.

Found a second cinder block.

And a second skin.

He wrenched it free, pushed for the surface, and came up in the shallow end.

They were as thick and as heavy as lead-shielded X-ray bibs. Jake stood there, his heart pounding against his ribs, unwilling to look down.

What was left of Kay in one hand.

What was left of Jeremy in the other.

Hauser stood on the deck above him, his mouth still turned down at the corners in such a way that it looked like his face had taken on a permanent set. He turned on his Maglite, flashed it on Jake. On the things in Jake’s hands. Then snapped it off.

Jake went to the steps, stumbled up, and collapsed on the deck.

Kay’s skin unrolled with a meaty slap. Her eyeless, toothless, lifeless face pointed up into the sky and Jake saw that a knife had opened her mouth from ear to ear. The pool had scrubbed her clean and every bruise, every laceration, leered up at him in madness.

“No,” he said so softly that it may not have been spoken aloud at all.

Jake turned to the skin that had covered his son. It was ragged around the edges and scrubbed clean from its time in the pool. There were no ears.

Hauser came over but kept the light off. “Inside, Jake.” The pistol hung loosely in his hand, glimmering like a prosthetic attachment.

Jake picked what was left of his little boy up, and something about it felt sickening. He got an arm under Kay’s torso, and her tattoo of the crossed pistols flashed in front of his eyes.
Tough Love
.

He looked down at her torn, chopped-up hands.
Love. Hate.

Back at the pistols.

Tough Love
, with a jagged line through it.

He remembered the T-shirt she had just purchased with
Don’t Hassel The Hoff!
across the front.

All that was left—slogans.

Jake picked up his family and they sluiced around his thighs, caressing him with long tendrils of skin. Kay’s hair made a rasping noise against his jeans.

He brought them to the living room, laid them out at Uncle Frank’s feet, and sat down on the floor. For a second he just stared.

“Are you here to kill me?” he asked without lifting his eyes from the horror on the floor.

Hauser took a step forward and lifted the pistol. “I guess you’ve figured it out by now.”

80

Scopes slalomed through the debris that littered 27, lights flashing, siren blaring. The world around him looked like the old black-and-white footage of Hiroshima he had seen on the History Channel. But without the frame to hold it in, to cut it down, it was so much larger than anything he could imagine by orders of magnitude. He felt like he was driving through a madman’s dream. Everywhere he looked—for as far as he could see—the world had been kicked apart.

This was the eye of the storm. There was still more to come. Looking around, he wondered why it would even bother coming back? What was left to take?

As of nine minutes ago when he had left the station, the death toll was at fourteen. Of course they would probably find more bodies. Buried in the debris. Hanging in trees. Washed up on the beach. And then there’d be the bodies they would never find. The ones that the storm had dragged out to sea to be swallowed by the Atlantic.

While the other officers back at the station regrouped—catching up on sleep and writing out their wills—Scopes headed to Jacob Coleridge’s beach house. He wanted to talk to Special Agent Jake Cole about a few things. He wanted a little perspective on what was happening. And maybe to hand back a little perspective.

Scopes was not a naturally inquisitive man, but the chewing-out Cole had handed him had been rattling around in his head the past two days and it got him thinking. Thinking about the six murders. About the disappearance of Cole’s wife and son. About the way Hauser was handling the investigation. What Scopes realized no one had clued in to was that this had to be coming from somewhere inside—somewhere close. But close was a matter of perspective, wasn’t it?

Scopes had been on the job for four years, which translated into more than a few shifts hosing chunks of bone and brain off the side of the road after some summer asshole had loaded up on too many Bombay Sapphires and missed a turn on the way back to the beach house; four years of dealing with hysteric widows after their husbands painted the ceiling with gray matter because their stockbroker had pissed their fortune into the pocket of some corrupt CEO; four years of responding to domestic calls where he had to read the Miranda rights to some crying drunk who had just finished his wife off with a tire iron because she had bought the wrong kind of beer. So Scopes was no stranger to punishment and he had always been able to hold his cookies.

But Jake Cole had a tolerance that couldn’t be measured in human terms. At least up until now. Scopes wondered how the Iron Man was holding up now that his family had gone up in a puff of smoke. He had seen him at the station last night, doing his dead man’s walk, trying to act like he was still alive when his guts had to be on fire. Scopes wondered how that felt for him.

He didn’t find any pleasure in these thoughts, but as he threaded his way through the obstacle course that used to be the town he had grown up in, he needed to occupy his mind with something. And Jake Cole and his missing family were a helluva lot more interesting than some fucking storm. He couldn’t do anything about Dylan. But Cole? That was something else entirely.