Bloodman (23 page)

52

In a little over two hours they had captured nearly 1,800 more canvases. Jake held up a painting, Spencer snapped a photo, and Jake pitched it aside. The studio was piled up with a mountain of canvases that looked like preparations for an insurance fire. The building was not as solid as the house and the walls buffeted with the wind. Every now and then some part of the flashing or roof would be torn away in an angry bark.

Spencer stepped back from the camera. “I need two minutes to take a piss and have a drink.” He had to yell to be heard over the wind.

Jake looked at Spencer’s sweat-soaked shirt and tired expression. “We’re out of Coke in here. Let’s go to the house. I need a smoke.”

They left the camera and ran for the house, hammered by the gauntlet of rain and wind tearing in from the ocean. They jumped in through the door to the deck.

Any other time, there would have been swearing. As things stood, Jake went to the fridge and Spencer stretched his shoulders.

The world was a deep gray that pulsed with white stabs of lightning, and the ocean was slobbering in on great rolling swells that were close to being the worst Jake had ever seen. He stopped on the way to the kitchen for a second and tried to see the dim outline of the beach through the rain. The pool shuddered and thrashed with the storm and the lily pads had bunched up against the wall closest to the house, many of them sloshed over the side and thrown up against the window. And this was just the beginning.

“Jake, can I ask you something?” Spencer leaned against the piano, below the Marilyn. Off to his left, blocking the big slate fireplace that stretched up into the rafters like a fossilized tree, was the Oedipal Chuck Close, eyes slashed. Spencer looked at the painting for a second, blinked like an owl, and tried to focus on the damaged canvas.

Jake opened the fridge and pulled out two glass bottles of Coke. The lending library was gone; all that was left was the cold pizza from last night’s dinner, half a loaf of Wonder Bread, and an untouched bowl of tuna salad.

Spencer turned away from the painting. “What happened to you out there?”

Jake popped the caps with a stag-handled bottle opener and held one out to Spencer. “Out where?”

“Wherever you were.”

Jake took a long swallow off the bottle, and for some reason, it tasted good and he was surprised.

“We hung out at the yacht club, smoking weed and chasing city girls on the weekend.” Spencer’s voice changed as he went back in time. “I mean, it all seemed okay to me. One day you’re my best friend, the next you’re gone. There were rumors in town that your dad murdered you and buried you out in that fucking garage, man. Thirty years later you come back some kind of paranormal expert on the John Wayne Gacys of the world looking like Rob Zombie’s stylist.”

Jake paused in the middle of a second swallow and pulled the bottle away from his lips. He felt a headache coming on and thought about a few Tylenol. “I was going for the Tom Ford look.” And then it hit him. Again. Riding in on an image of his wife and son came a jolt in his chest that signaled piston failure. He put his hands on the counter’s edge, wrists turned out, fingers clamped around the worn formica that at any other time he would have noted as cold. Now it vibrated with a low-frequency hum that rattled his teeth and throbbed through his bones. Buried in all of this was the sound of Kay’s voice, laughing. And just below that, Jeremy was making dinosaur roars. There was radio interference and then his antenna lost the signal and their voices stuttered into squelch. Then hissing. And finally silence.

He looked up to see Spencer staring at him with a good dose of
What-the-fuck?
in his eyes. “Jake, what?”

Jake shook his head with a finality that said he wasn’t going to talk about it; if he did, he’d come apart. He couldn’t even think of her, and up until now he had done a pretty good job of it. Sort of. The trick was not to reach out to her in any way. And that was the hardest part.

Jake turned back to the conversation. “Where were we? Oh, yeah. The big
Why?
If I could do it over, I would make different decisions, but leaving’s not one of them.” He rummaged around the kitchen and found the Tylenol in one of the bags from the pharmacy that held essentials. He opened the childproof top, poured three of the pills into his hand, and chased them down with a mouthful of Coke. “Coming home?” He just let the question hang in the air. What else could be said?

The rain outside came straight in off the ocean and hammered the windows, rattling the plywood that filled in for the broken thermo pane. Water leaked through invisible gaps and was gathering on the floor in a slowly expanding puddle.

Jake finished his Coke and walked down into the living room. He looked around for something to sop up the water—or at least put down on the floor to stop it from spreading. He kicked some of the bundled newspapers into the puddle, newsprint sandbags to hold back the flood. They quickly turned gray. On the way back to the kitchen he stopped in the middle of the spot he had just cleared of litter, and froze.

Spencer saw the switches flip in his head. “What?”

Jake stood still, his eyes locked on the floor, taking mental snapshots of the pattern he saw in the mess. “Sonofabitch,” he said, only the sound was lost in the noise of the storm. He began clearing the room.

He shoveled newspapers aside with his foot, swept chairs into corners, upended the coffee table and flung it aside. Jake grabbed the end of the steel-and-leather sofa, lifted it, and dragged it across the floor. The carpets didn’t bunch up because they had been nailed, screwed, and stapled down by his old man. “Come on,” he ordered Spencer.

Spencer, still stuck on confused, picked up the dragging end. “Where are we taking it?”

Jake nodded at the door and barked, “Outside,” like it was obvious.

Jake swung his end of the sofa around, balanced it on his knee, gripped the knob and pulled the door open. He hadn’t been prepared for the wind and it slammed the door in, nearly tearing it off its hinges. They squeezed the sofa through and Jake dropped his end onto the deck. Spencer lost his grip and the sofa banged down and fell over onto its back. They ran back into the house.

“Come on!” Jake threw a footstool into a bronze bust by Rodin, knocking it over. He dug like a dog, flinging things off the carpet. A vase exploded in sharp colored shards when it hit a bookcase. Paintings toppled.

Jake jammed the piano aside and it brayed like a wounded elephant. Within minutes they had cleared the center of the living room, exposing the dull, paint-splattered quilt-work of carpets.

Jake ran up the stairs and turned back to the living room to take it in. His eyes locked on the clear area excavated amid the garbage and furniture. He sat down.

Spencer stumbled up, turned around, and flopped down beside Jake. “Holy fuck,” he said.

Up close it was just a jumble of color, of overlapped carpets and splatters of paint. But from the staircase, with the benefit of distance and perspective, an unmistakable image was visible in the center of the room, like an X-ray of a coffin. It was a portrait of the same eyeless face Jacob Coleridge had painted on the wall of his hospital room.

“What the fuck is that?” Spencer asked.

Jake thought about Jeremy jumping up and down in the middle of the living room when asked to describe his friend Bud. “The man in the floor.”

53

Frank now understood what Jake had been talking about on the phone yesterday: Jacob
was
frightened. “What are you talking about?”

Jacob rubbed his face with one of the cocooned insect pincers that had been sewn on. The movement was unselfconscious, feral. “August 1969, Frank.”

Frank pulled a chair over from the window and the plastic on the bottom of its feet sounded like fingernails against the linoleum. He sat down, just beyond Jacob’s reach, and laced his fingers together behind his head. Not that his brother could do much damage with those soft clubs, but Frank was a cautious man, a quality that years of hunting big game had honed to a second-nature status in his library of life skills. “Jacob, whatever you are going to say, whatever has you scared, is not true. Okay? This is me you’re talking to. Whatever you want me to deal with, I will. Okay? I don’t know how much time you have—
we have
—and I don’t want to piss it away on stupidity. I have things I want to say to you and—”

“Shut up!” The buckles hanging against the bed frame rattled loudly.

Frank recoiled, looked into the fierce black holes of his brother’s eyes. Is this what Jake had been talking about? This background chatter of fear, some sort of subliminal message hidden in the signal of his voice? “Jacob, what are you talking about?”

Jacob was rocking side to side in his bed, something about it disturbing.

“You were there. You know what happened. Mia saw it first. And then she died. And then Jake…began sliding away. I lost him, too, Frank. I promised not to tell anyone. I promised and I kept my word. But I can’t keep a secret like this forever. Not forever. No matter how hard I want to.” His words spilled out like dirty motor oil, flecked with charred bits of his broken brain, and Frank wondered if Jacob had left the room.

“He’s here, Frank.” The black specks of Jacob’s pupils no longer looked focused, or even human; the planes of his eyes had dropped away and he was looking at images inside his head.

“Who is?”

“Him!”

“Jacob, this has nothing to do with the boat. Be rational. How could it?”

Jacob’s eyes came back on like someone had put new batteries into the compartment in the back of his head. “You never went aboard. You didn’t see what happened.” Old ghosts were coming out of the dark now, firing up the fear machine.

“Jacob, what are you talking about?”

The beams of his brother’s eyes crawled across the room and stopped on his face.

Frank wanted to believe that it was Alzheimer’s talking, not a rational human being, but his brother’s voice was calm and even. “Jacob, listen to me. You have to stop talking this shit. Okay? We both know what you’re talking about. We didn’t do anything wrong—you didn’t do anything wrong. There was nothing you could have done differently.”

“We could have left him there.”

Behind the burn marks and stitches and antibiotic ointment Jacob Coleridge looked scared.

Frank shook his head. “He was just a little kid, Jacob. If we would have left him there, he would have died.”

“Better him than all of us.”

54

It was easy to see that the main event was only a few hours off; the world outside looked like it had been scripted for a Hollywood disaster film. By the time Frank pulled into the driveway, Spencer’s cruiser was gone. He ran from the big H1 to the house and the rain clattered against his hood like ball bearings. When he turned the knob the wind ripped the door away from him and slammed it open, sending a pile of mail flapping off into the house like frightened birds.

Jake was suiting up inside the entryway. Beside him, on the Nakashima console—a broad slab of undressed walnut—the weird spherical sculpture of welded steel shafts hummed with the electricity the storm carried, like a static tuning fork. On the floor a little to the left sat Kay’s airline-tag-covered cello case.

“Jake, I gotta talk to you.”

Jake nodded at the door. Or the world beyond. Or maybe at nothing at all—it was hard to tell. “I have to get to Hauser’s. We can talk in the truck.”

Frank pulled the big brass zipper on the Filson rain slicker up to his chin. “Let’s roll, kiddo.”

They ducked out into the storm.

The only sign that life existed anywhere other than the interior of the big metal beast that carried them west was the steady stream of man-made debris that blew over the empty highway and the intermittent flicker of lights in roadside homes. If Jake had been paying attention to these things he would have been surprised that anyone had stayed behind. As things stood, he couldn’t muster up enough interest to notice. The smart ones had left. The rest stayed. That was as far as he got in the equation.

The wind and rain hammered in on a horizontal trajectory and Frank had to continually fight the massive vehicle to keep it on the road. The interior smelled of diesel fuel, shell casings, blood, and wet pencils. Jake unconsciously gripped the handle by the windshield, his mind turning the events of the past few days slowly over.

“This is important, Jake.” Frank had to yell to be heard over the combined noise of the storm and the big diesel engine.

Jake came back to the present, to the world outside the car pulsing with the dark storm, and blinked like a man who was trying out a new pair of eyes for the first time. “What are you talking about?”

“You know I don’t believe in astrology or God or any of the other stupid shit people lie to themselves about because it makes living in fear a little more bearable. Maybe I’m the wrong guy for this. Maybe you need someone who believes in that stuff.”

A plastic patio table scrambled across the road like a spider. When it hit the gravel shoulder it upended and spun off into the dark. Frank reached under the instrument cluster and turned on the LED light bar bolted to the roof rack and the road lit up in underwater hues of blue.

A gust of wind slammed into the side of the Hummer and Frank wrenched the wheel to the left, fighting the vehicle away from the shoulder and the ditch beyond.

In the blue-green light of the basic instrument cluster, Frank’s face drained of a little more color. “I’m an old man, Jake. I’ve seen the world go from astounding to shitty in the course of my insignificant life. And I’ve been part of some of it.” Frank’s face tightened up a little more and he pulled out his smokes—unfiltered Camels—and tapped one out for his nephew. After giving the cigarette to Jake, he took one himself, returned the pack to his pocket, and fired his up with his faithful Zippo. He pulled the tip of the cigarette through the flame, then passed it across the cabin. The flame left a white trail in Jake’s vision and the heavy taste of lighter fluid made the cigarette taste foul and better at the same time. He took in a deep lungful of the tobacco and held it for a second.

Jake ignored the screaming rain outside, the squeak of the big wipers across the two flat front panes, the rattle of the big diesel, and the smell of gunpowder and cedar. He simply watched his uncle, hoping that images of Kay and Jeremy would leave him alone for a little while—long enough for him to figure all of this out.

Frank nodded at the computer sitting in Jake’s lap. “I asked him about the paintings, Jake—about those puzzle pieces.” Jake, the eternal student of behavior, recognized that background static of fear in Frank’s voice. Or was that just the residual taste of the first call he had received from the hospital two nights and a handful of lifetimes ago?

Jake stopped thrumming the top of the laptop case.

“He said that you’d figure it out. That you’d know what to do.” Frank sucked on the smoke and the tip went bright orange for a second. “He was letting go of old baggage, Jakey. I think those paintings are some sort of gift to you. Some sort of—” he paused and the click of the wipers filled a few seconds—“apology.”

“I don’t think Jacob Coleridge knows what an apology is.”

Frank cleared his throat and two jets of smoke spewed out of his nostrils. It was the action of a man trying to build up his nerve. “Part of this story is true, Jakey—I know because I was there for it.” He stopped again, like his clockworks had jammed. “Jesus, if there’s something in here that will help find your wife and little boy, then I don’t mind breaking a promise.”

“Drop the melodrama.”

“I swore I’d never tell you.”

“Swore to who?” Jake almost yelled to be heard over the jet-engine sounds of the world. “My father’s way past caring, Frank.”

“I promised your mother, Jakey. I mean,
really
promised. Swore—on-my-life kind of promised. And I don’t know how well you remember your mom—”

“Perfectly,” Jake said, cutting him off.

“Then you’d know that she’d be pretty pissed with me if I told you. She didn’t think you should know about this. No one did.”

“Frank, this fucker has my wife. My son. If you know something that might help me find him, I better not find out after the fact.” An image of Kay and Jeremy walking on the beach, Jeremy waving to the passers-by, blinded him for a second. “I’m not the forgiving type.”

“I noticed.” Frank sucked on the cigarette again and nodded, smoke hissing out from between his perfect white teeth. “What the hell, we all die sometime, right?”

And he began to break forty-two-year-old promises to the dead.