“There is no contacting the other side. It’s bullshit like tarot card reading and palmistry and tea leaves and faith healing. Like Sagan was kind enough to point out, there is zero data. There are no psychics, Hauser. And anyone who believes in them is ill-informed or stupid.” He had given the monologue enough times that it was stage-honed.

“I’ll go with ill-informed on this one,” Hauser said slowly and Jake could see the wheels in his head turning.

Jake smiled. “A vast segment of the population out there believe in stupidity. John Edward, that guy who dupes people into thinking he’s talking to their dead loved ones, should have his fucking head cut off on live TV.”

“A little harsh.”

“Just truth. There is no afterlife. There are no leprechauns, or religious visions, or extraterrestrial visitors. There are only psychotic breaks from reality, chemical-induced hallucinations, and good old-fashioned fucking lying which is the one that I see employed more than anything else.”

Jake went to the big doors that opened up onto the beach. He pulled the latches and accordioned them open. The air in the house changed with one big pulse and all of a sudden everything smelled fresher, newer.

Hauser was still leaning against the counter. “You believe in the Devil?”

Jake put his hands on his hips and eyed Hauser for a minute. “Every culture has a name for the bogeyman and when you look at shit like that,” he said, pointing at the files on the coffee table, “I understand why.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Jake locked him in another stare. “Guys like Francis Collins think that God had to have a hand in our design because morality exists. I look around at our species and I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck he’s talking about. The history of this world—especially the religious history—is one big disgusting bloodbath.” Jake shook his head. “So no, I don’t believe in the Devil. I don’t need to, man has done enough horrible things to impress me. You give human beings the opportunity to be monstrous and you will never be disappointed.” His point made, he turned to the horizon. “What’s the news on the storm?”

Hauser swiveled, keeping his butt in the seat. “Landfall is right here.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, well, that’s one way to put it.” Hauser lifted his mass out of the modern stool and came over to the window, put his hands on his hips—the right automatically resting on the grip of his sidearm, the leather holster creaking with the contact. “I spoke to the Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center this morning. Dylan’s a strong Category Five and there’s a good chance that it stays a five. I don’t know shit about hurricanes and even less about categories in particular, but I looked it up and five is bad, worse than 1938 and that thing wiped out the highway, the railroad, destroyed half the houses here, washed buildings out to sea, snapped our power poles like they were straw, and killed seventy people in the area. The shoreline was rearranged like a shovel going at a carton of eggs.” Hauser’s lips pursed for a minute, and he shook his head. “And it’s electric.”

“No such thing,” Jake said.

“You need new data,” he said, mimicking Dennison from the NHC. “This thing will be pounding lightning around like some kind of science fiction film. We could be the last people to be standing on this spot, Jake. A few days from now, this could be in the ocean.”

“In a few days from now we could be dead,” Jake said, taking the existential statement one step further. “Or the planet could be gone.”

Hauser shifted his gun hand. “You are one grim sonofabitch, you know that.”

Jake shook his head sadly. “Every time I see some broken, discarded person left in a field, or washed up on a riverbank, I think to myself, This is it—this is the last one. Tomorrow I will wake up and people will no longer do this to one another. Yet they do.”

“Is that it? The work? I mean, have you gotten so used to seeing—” he paused, his mind taken back to the skinnings up the beach—“things like last night that you just think all people are bad?”

“It’s like we’re just filling out time until the whole anthill bursts into flames.”

“What about your kid?” As a father, he knew that children could bring a lot of good to their immediate surroundings. He also knew they could bring a lot of sadness to the world. Hauser’s son had been killed by a drunk driver.

Jake walked through the open doors, onto the stained, salt-eaten deck. “Jeremy’s the best. But he’s three and there’s a lot of road between now and the end of his life. He’s never going to grow up into one of the monsters I hunt—I know that for a fact.” At the back of his mind, hidden behind a few crates of bad memories, he felt something twitch in the darkness. “But I can’t guarantee that he’s going to be happy. Or have good self-esteem. Or marry someone who loves him as much as I do. Sure, right now—I mean right now—things are all shiny and bright.” He thought back to Jeremy on the beach that morning, still giddy from riding on the bus, thinking that Moon Pies were better than anything in the world. It would be great if things stayed like that. But what about thirty years from now?

Hauser’s head shifted a few degrees, like a dog listening for a noise it thought it had heard. “One of those glass-is-half-full kind of people.”

Jake shook his head. “Not at all. The glass is what the glass is.”

“You have a unique way of looking at things.”

On the horizon the clouds had thickened. They were not yet ominous, but something about them suggested that they were recon scouts for an approaching army. “Landfall’s not until tomorrow night but the NHC guy said we’ll see the front come in later this evening. The wind’ll pick up and the rain is going to start. It’ll be uncomfortable by tomorrow afternoon. By nightfall hell will be rolling through town.”

Jake thought back to the woman and child up the beach. Skinned. He thought about his father, ramped up on sedatives and scraping portraits onto hospital room walls with fried bones and charred flesh. He thought about the old man’s screams. About how his mother had been murdered. About all the poisonous water that had gone under the bridge in this place. “Hell’s already here,” he said, and walked back into the house.

27

Hauser was gone, and Kay and Jeremy were finishing up lunch, Jeremy’s face bisected by a line of raspberry jam that made him look like the Joker. The clouds on the horizon had grown fatter, and the pregnant belly of the ocean was hazing over. The wind had picked up but it was still little more than a fall breeze, a light little hiss that would soon begin to change into a malevolent beast. Jake stood in front of the studio, another member of the quarter-century club, and wondered what he would find inside Pandora’s building. He felt like he was using his father to avoid the case even though there was very little he could do right now. He had seen the crime scene, talked to the ME, and received Hauser’s protocols. There wasn’t much for him to do now but sift through what he had—and give Hauser all the information he could put together. So he occupied himself with trying to find a way into his father’s studio.

He walked around it a few times, searching for an entry. There wasn’t much in the way of security; the windows were all single-pane, glazed with brittle old putty; the door had a decent lock on it but the top half was glass—all he’d have to do was smash it and reach inside. The weird part—if he could even consider it weird after everything else he had found—was that all the windows had been painted over from the inside. Wherever he tried to see into the building, all he saw was a black mirror reflecting his own image.