Frank laughed and it sounded like a diesel engine turning over. “Still, get yourself some supplies. You’re a smart boy, Jakey, always have been.” His laugh rattled to a stop. “Although I guess calling a forty-five-year-old man a boy is kind of an insult but when you’re as old as I am, anyone who doesn’t have to tape his balls up so they don’t swing into his knees is a kid.”
Jake smiled, and suddenly realized that he wished he had been able to talk to his father like this. Not all the time, but once would have been good.
“And be careful. It’s acting like things are the same as always when they aren’t that will get you in trouble. You handling this all okay?”
“I’m good, Frank.” He thought back to his father’s kitchen and realized that at least some shopping was in order. “I just need someone who will get things done.”
“And that’s me.”
“And that’s you.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“I can book you a flight, I have air miles. I get free—”
“Fuck free. I’m not flying. I’m driving. I have to finish changing the fuel pump on the truck but I can get that done by supper. Be there within twenty-four hours.” There was a pause as he fired up another cigarette. “He in any pain?”
Jake thought back to the tranquilizer that Nurse Look-alike had pumped into the drip. About his father’s screams. And the points of white mucus in the corners of his eyes. “I can’t tell, Frank. The old Jacob Coleridge is gone. Just gone. He’s confused. He’s scared.”
“You can accuse him of being a lot of things, Jakey, but scared is not one of them. Never. Not when we were growing up. Not when we were in Korea together. Not in bar fights or staring down pirates. Nothing scares your old man.”
An image of the barricaded bedroom door lit up for a second. “He’s scared now, Frank.”
Jake heard Frank pull on the smoke. “Yeah, well.” The old man didn’t sound convinced.
“Thanks for doing this, Frank. I appreciate it.”
“That’s what blood’s about, Jakey. You do things for blood you don’t do for anybody else.”
17
The sheriff’s cruiser was in the driveway when Jake got back to the house. Hauser sat inside, windows open, doing a good imitation of a man trying to sleep and being unsuccessful. As Jake’s sleek Charger entered the drive, the cop got out of the car, leaving his Stetson inside. He came over to the shade of the big pine where Jake parked, his movements loose from lack of sleep, not comfort.
Hauser ran his finger along the line of the front quarter panel, feeling the metal beneath the glossy paint. Then he looked back at his own car, an updated version of the classic American muscle car, and something about the movement seemed tentative. Jake hoped the cop wasn’t about to start talking cars—he hated talking about cars almost as much as talking about the stock market. More, maybe.
Jake shut off the engine, opened the door, and swung out into the afternoon. He nodded a greeting and took the bag of groceries from the baby seat in the back.
“Cole,” Hauser said, trying to sound good-natured but only making it a little past tired. Jake heard something else in his voice. Embarrassment, maybe.
Jake fished his father’s keychain out of his pocket. It was a flat stone with a hole drilled in the center, worn smooth from rubbing against pocket lint and scotch tops for years. “Sheriff.” He figured that Hauser was here to interview him.
Jake had gone through this before—it was part of being the resident interloper with every department he visited. Hauser needed to have faith in his team. So he surrounded himself with reliable people. If Jake was part of that team, Hauser would want to know a little more about him. And if you took this equation a little further, Jake had been interviewing Hauser as well.
Jake balanced the groceries on his knee, turned the key in the lock, and pushed the big door open. “Coffee?”
“Sure…” Hauser let the word trail off as he walked into Jacob Coleridge’s house. He stopped in the doorway and looked around. He saw the whiskey bottles, the cigarette butts, the paintings stacked like cordwood, and the decades of neglect covered by dust.
Hauser paused by the Nakashima console in the entry, leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, and examined the spherical sculpture that had sat there for decades. It was a wire-frame model of—what? A molecule, Hauser guessed. “Jake, what’s going on?” He sounded more than tired, Jake realized. He sounded frightened.
Jake considered the question as he dumped the groceries out on the counter. He caught a can of tuna before it rolled off the edge. “I don’t know. Not yet.” He examined the can, then surveyed his healthy smorgasbord. Part of him was happy that Kay wasn’t here to see this gastronomical crime; his foray to the Kwik Mart on 27 had yielded him two six-packs of Coke, a can of spaghetti sauce, a package of linguini, two cans of tuna, a loaf of Wonder Bread, a squeeze bottle of mustard and another of mayonnaise, two packs of luncheon meat that resembled packaged liposuction fat, a carton of cream, some club soda, a tin of coffee, and some sugar packets stolen from the coffee counter. He had taken a little of Frank’s advice; in the car were two cases of water, a flashlight, a dozen batteries, and a box of pepperoni sticks. He pulled the tab on the coffee lid and it hissed open with what sounded like a death rattle.
Hauser meandered through the detritus of Jacob Coleridge’s life, unintentionally casing the place, a species-specific habit natural to cops and crooks alike—it was something that Jake both recognized and resented. Hauser stopped in front of the piano and examined a small painting that was part of a larger pile on top of the instrument, ignoring the huge expanse of ocean through the big plate-glass window. On the floor at his feet was the box the handyman had left behind, full of half-used tubes of silicone and a few cans of spray-foam insulation. “Mind if I take a look?” he asked, pointing at one of Jacob Senior’s ugly little canvases.
Jake was at work on the coffee, the twelve-stepper’s surrogate addiction. “Knock yourself out.”
Hauser picked up one of the asymmetrical blobs that was jammed under the dusty Steinway and held it away from himself. He examined the painting for a few seconds, holding it first one way, then rotating it to look at it another, trying to decide which way it went. He flipped it around and looked at the back, as if he had missed something. After a few seconds he shoved it back under the piano. “I don’t know shit about art,” he said. “But if I look at a painting and don’t know what the hell I’m looking at, it’s not for me. I don’t want a painting that represents the plight of man. How the hell can you paint that? Me? I want a field. Or a pretty girl on a swing. Hell, I’d even take dogs playing poker. But I guess I just don’t understand this modern stuff.” He shrugged.
“To quote my father about the only thing I’d trust him on, it’s self-indulgent undisciplined crap.”
“Not a fan?” Hauser sounded a little relieved.
“I like my father’s early work. The stuff he did before he made it onto the college syllabuses. Maybe up until 1975 or ’76. After that…” He let the sentence trail off into a shrug.
In the ensuing silence, Hauser shifted his focus to the big window and the Atlantic beyond. “Helluva view.” The wind had picked up from earlier; the high-pressure blanket that sat over the coast was being slowly pushed away by the advancing hurricane, 1,600 miles and closing.
Jake finished scooping grinds into the basket and flipped the machine on, a little stainless-steel Italian robot that had been bought before the great coffee revolution had swept America and its suburbs into believing that Starbucks knew what it was doing. It started to hiss and he came around from behind the counter. “Are you going to give me the protocols?”