Bloodman (21 page)

47

Hauser had garaged the Charger and was now using the department Bronco. With the weather setting in, the four-by-four offered a lot more in the way of practicality. The vehicle’s traction was a welcome relief from the Hemi-driven muscle car that he recognized as one of the substitutes in the war on his fading youth—the others being his boat, his bird gun collection, and his wife’s new plastic titties—all of which he liked to pull out and play with as often as possible.

Hauser’s speed was down and he negotiated the road slowly, continually correcting for the loose traction he felt with every gust of wind that got under the truck. Night was hours off but Dylan had painted the sky with a tone of metal that was somewhere between gray and black. A long line of headlights stretched out behind him, the bright eyeballs of the evacuating populace, and for a tiny fraction of time he thought about not turning around. About not stopping. About no longer being here. But he took a deep breath and when he blew it out the thought was gone from his mind. Temptation—a cop’s worst nightmare.

The ocean had begun its descent into madness and was throwing the Atlantic at the highway all along the drive. Water sloshed over his windshield and the wipers droned on. The outer rain bands of the hurricane had landed a few hours ago and for the next twenty-four hours, Hauser knew that he would be living in his rain gear except for the brief passing of the eye—a few hours of silence before the whole circus started up again.

Hauser saw the car up ahead hit the brakes for a second too long, fishtail, and barely regain a westbound azimuth. He shook his head and hoped the guy would make it west before paramedics were picking windshield glass out of his eye sockets with tweezers. Hauser was no stranger to what bad driving could do to the human body—professionally or personally. Like any resort-town law-enforcement officer, he had cleaned up his share of asphalt casualties. On a more personal level, he had lost his son to a drunken driver fifteen years back, halfway through the boy’s tenth year. It wasn’t one of those spectacular accidents that had everyone shaking their heads, wondering what the guy behind the wheel had been thinking—just a slight swerve onto the shoulder and the mirror on his Econoline had clipped Aaron (who had been riding his bike into town) on the back of the head. DOA. The driver, to the credit—and benefit—of all drunk drivers that Hauser would pull over from then on, had stopped, gotten out, and called it in.

He no longer carried around that squirming coal of misery he had lived with for so long. Somewhere around the six-year mark it had started to fade and the agony of loss had dulled to a heartburn lump that occasionally gave him a respite when he was doing something he enjoyed, or had to concentrate on. Miraculously, he and Stephanie had managed to use the twelve years they had already chalked up on the fuselage as some kind of a raft when the floodwaters of grief and finger-pointing could have done irreparable damage, and they had somehow stayed married. Concentrated on bringing up their daughter. Moved on.

Hauser missed his son every single day, and an estranged relationship like the one that Jake Cole and his old man shared was something he simply couldn’t wrap his brain around. Families worked it out, they talked it out, even fought it out. But they stuck together. End of discussion.

The red eyes of the brake-happy driver ahead lit up and the car took a dangerous jog to the right, skimmed the shoulder, then regained the water-shrouded asphalt in a sloppy lurch. Hauser shifted his bulk on the seat and the wet slicker let out a fartlike squeal against the leather. He could light up the cherries, pull the idiot over, and give him a talking to, but what good would that do? If the guy didn’t know how to drive, a three-minute course by an angry cop in a storm certainly wouldn’t change things. And with the heavy gypsy-caravan exodus behind him, Hauser didn’t want to risk getting hit by one of the other cars. The turnoff for Mann’s Beach made his mind up for him. Hauser hit the index and the cherries and swung off the highway.

Hell was moving in, something straight out of the Old Testament if the guy at the NHC was even half right—and Hauser believed that he was. After all, those guys were wired up with more satellites and science and shit than you could imagine. He pulled up to the gate that locked the peninsula off from tourists—it was open.

Mann’s Beach was one of the few places usually only frequented by locals—the gate generally kept tourists out (except the striped-bass fishermen that swarmed in every spring and fall—those assholes would swim through lava for the shot at a big striper). Scopes had called and told him to get his ass out to Mann’s ASAP. He had asked him to bring Cole but Hauser had come alone—he wanted to see this with his own eyes, feel it with his own instincts, without Cole’s letter-to-the-editor diction turning the whole thing into an academic exercise.

Besides, the next two days would be a marathon of one major emergency after another, the least of which would be car wrecks, drownings, collapsed houses, and downed power lines. Hauser was aware of these things—as the sheriff he had reserved a large part of his energy for battling whatever the storm was going to throw at him—but they took up a lot less real estate in his psyche than he would have previously believed possible. It was the guy with the knife that really had his attention.

Hauser lit up the overheads and the beach road in front of his car went white. He moved slowly in the rain, both glad and pissed off at himself for sending Scopes out here. The nose of the Bronco swung around a low mass of scrub and a luxury sedan lit up in the glare of the overheads. Scopes stood outside, staring at the vehicle.

Hauser got out of the still-running car and the thump of the wipers was lost in the wind. He pulled his four-cell Maglite from the center console and fired it up. Scopes didn’t turn away from the car or acknowledge Hauser in any way. He stood stock-still with the rain clattering against his police poncho like a swarm of angry termites, his Maglite throwing a tight but now-dim oval of yellow on the bloody sand at his feet. The bulb flickered intermittently, as if the water was shorting it out.

Hauser moved past Scopes, and lit up the car in the beam of his flashlight. It was a Bentley, one of the newer GT Continentals, in a silver or tan—it was hard to discern in the yellow beam of the light. The interior was dark and there was no driver silhouetted behind the wheel. The windows were closed and as Hauser got closer to the vehicle, he saw his own reflection shining back at him, shimmering with the rain cascading over the glass. The beam lit up flashes of the interior. Some sort of rich red. But the windows were splattered with something, like a thin coating of dirt, and the effect reminded Hauser of a terrarium. A micro-ecosystem different from the world in which it sat.

The beam of the Maglite grew brighter when he pushed the lens against the wet glass. That was not dirt on the inside of the windows. It was blood. Black dried blood. Hauser pressed his face to the wet glass, shielded his brow with a gloved hand. He swung the beam over the interior and the terrarium comparison came back to him; a closed-in space where monsters lived.

When he turned back to Scopes, he saw that the man’s expression had gone blank, and it reminded him of the way Jake Cole looked around the dead.
Disconnected
was the expression that came to mind. Only this wasn’t Jake Cole, this was Danny Scopes, and Scopes was still supposed to give a shit. “You call anyone else?”

Scopes nodded. It was a slow nod that took a lot of effort. “Murphy’s coming with the truck. I already photographed the sand here but the rain’s washed all tracks and everything else away.”

Hauser looked down into the red dirt. “Except the blood.”

Scopes nodded again, this time more slowly. “Except that, yeah.”

“You run the car?”

Scopes’s line of sight swung back to the Bentley, rippling with the rain that bounced off its surface. “Yeah.”

“And?”

“And I think Jake might be bad luck.” He turned away, spit into the wet sand.

Hauser nodded and flicked his Maglite off. He looked down. Scopes’s flashlight had died completely, but still hung loosely in his grip. “Someone he knew?”

Scopes nodded again. “The guy sold his father’s art. Name’s David Finch.”

“We can’t leave this here—it’ll be washed away. Get as many photos of the inside as you can—open the lee side front door—then get Murphy to take it to the garage. Use the one that’s up Jarvis. Make sure he covers it up. When you’re done, come to Cole’s. And bring the photos.”

Scopes nodded solemnly. “Photos. Sure. Great.” He reached into his pocket for the camera. “Who would do something like this, Mike?”

Hauser looked out at the angry ocean pounding the beach, then back to the car still lit up red in the spearing eye of his flashlight. He switched it off and all the red went black. “Just some guy,” he said.

And with that he realized that he was getting used to it.

48

Jake was—

—
unconscious
—

Then he—

—
wasn’t
—

There was no fighting back through the turgid layers of in-betweenism associated with sleep and awake. He had been out. Now he was back.

He stood up, naked and sweating, the pistol still knotted into his fingers. There was one single second of gratitude for being awake before the fear came back like ten tons of truck that nearly knocked him out of his skin.

“Moriarty?”

How long had he been out? He glanced at the window and took a mental snapshot of the sky, now dark and flat. Rain washed over the window, and the gray clouds shimmered.

“Moriarty?”

He raced out, down the steps. He flipped lights on. Tore through the living room.

“Moriarty!”

Where is he?

“Moriarty!”

And that ugly old whisper started up.

Skinned
, it said.

Jake ran through the house naked, knocking over chairs, lamps, screaming his son’s name.

Where was he?

He stopped at the front door, beside the Nakashima console. Where was his son? What had happened to Jeremy?

Then he remembered Kay handcuffed to the bed upstairs.

He covered the steps three at a time and ran down the hall.

The door was half closed and he slammed it into the pocket where it clattered off its track. He flipped on the light and the crisp white sheets on the bed fired to life.

The handcuffs hung from the headboard, dead still and empty.

49

Jake stood at the foot of the bed with a knot of snakes writhing in his head, the sound of their scales scraping against his skull overpowering the voice of the storm outside. The pistol hung from his hand and he stared at the empty bed, the black stabs of ink that covered most of his body gleaming with the sweat of panic that had replaced the earlier sweat of sex.

Not them.

Anything but them.

Please.

He ran down the steps, jumping almost all of them.

“Kay!” he roared.

Sand and rain clattered against the window and the sheet of plywood. Outside, something was banging against the side of the house. Jake raced down the hallway to the front door.

He ripped it open, slamming it into the wall. The handle punched through the sheetrock and a white cloud of dust puffed out and showered to the floor.

Out on the driveway. “Kay!”

He ran to the road, snapped his eyes up and down the empty highway. Rain came down in waves, shimmering on the asphalt like live insects.

The cruiser was still parked on the shoulder. Jake stepped toward it, saw a figure in the front seat, head back, mouth open. It wasn’t Scopes—it wasn’t anyone Jake recognized. He yanked the door open and pulled the man out into the wind and the rain.

“Where the fuck is my wife? My son?”

The cop looked confused. “I…I…don’t—” His eyes dropped to Jake’s naked body and his expression flattened out like he understood what was going on. “Have you been—?”

“I’m not drunk or stoned, you fucking moron!” He shook the man. “My wife and son are gone.”

The cop tried to wriggle free. “I didn’t see—”

“You were out here sleeping.” Jake pushed him away and stared at him for a few seconds. “Do you know what’s happened?”

The cop stared back for a few seconds. “I’m sure—”

Jake lashed out with the pistol and the butt of the revolver caught the cop across the bridge of the nose. There was a crack loud enough to be heard above the wind and rain and the man’s legs gave out with a grunt and he crashed to the ground in front of his car.

Jake ran around the house, through the garden, to the building at the edge of the property.

He burst in and snapped the lighting to life, illuminating the army of faceless men that climbed out of the walls. He tore through the studio, the garage, even the small cabinets where he knew Jeremy could hide.

Nothing.

Empty.

Gone.

Where?

Skinned
, the voice hissed sweetly.

Not my family.
Anything but my family.

Please.

PLEASE!

Then where are they?
the ancient voice in his head asked.

He ran out onto the grass, jumped down the drop-off to the beach. Waves rolled up past the surf line of a few hours ago, sloshing his legs with foam and stinging sand and bits of weed. He snapped his head around like a dog searching a scent. First up the beach, then down.

The beach was alive with the ocean and the black tangled masses of seaweed thrown up looked like bodies washed up at the water’s edge. Small ones, Jeremy. Slightly bigger ones, Kay. Some moved in the wind. Others were pushed by the waves. He ran to one, ripped at it with his hands. Cold, wet, lifeless. Then another. Hopeful. More nothing.

They were gone, he could feel it.

Knowing
.
Was. The. Worst. Part.

Where?

Skinned
, the ugly little voice crooned again, letting the Ns roll out, and Jake screamed at it to
shut the fuck up!

No. No. No no no no no.

Jake stood in the surf, rain and sand and spray stinging his skin. He stared up at the house, windows lit up like an angry drunk. Big planes of white amid the dark modern architecture.

Something inside moved.

Movement
.

Movement meant life.

Jeremy?

Kay?

But even through the rain, Jake could see that it was a man. Someone else. Him.

Him who?

HIM.

Jake raced up the steps to the house, across the deck. He tore the patio door open and jumped inside. The door clacked against the frame, stuttering with the buffeting force of the wind. A man stood in the middle of the living room. He started to turn.

Jake raised the pistol. Cocked the hammer. Went running forward, blood and horror and rage in his mind.

The man turned to face him.

Jake lowered the pistol.

And stared into his father’s eyes.