Bloodman (4 page)

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.” W
ho 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.”