He kicked out the bottom corners, wrapped his fingers around the ragged dusty skin that hung in shreds around the holes, and flayed a massive strip off the wall in one clean yank that uncoiled him from a crouch to an overhead reach. He took the painting off in five irregular patches, bits of blood and white dust floating in a small weather system above the floor. A few small scabs of paint and blood remained and he kicked and punched these in.

He folded the five latex-and-blood-covered parchments into a quick ball, kicked the bed away from in front of the door, and snapped the big stainless thumb bolt open.

Out in the unsure light of the corridor, a nurse was bounding toward him, jailer’s keys jingling in her hand. She slowed to a shuffle and barked, “What were you doing in there?” She stopped a few paces away, looking like she’d just realized that she was alone in a dark corridor with a six-foot-two madman who tore up hospital rooms in the middle of the night.

Jake held up the folded skins of the painting. “I was told this was going to be painted over. Not sold. Not salvaged. Painted over.”

“That’s medical waste. The hospital can do whatever they want with it. I was told—”

Jake took a step toward her and she stopped, backed quickly up.

His long arm came up, his finger aimed at her head. “I don’t give a fuck what you’ve been told or what you think you have the right to do, lady. This is going to be destroyed. You grok me, sweetheart?”

Her face shifted emotions for a few seconds before the elasticity gave way to a rigid stare. She stepped aside and Jake walked on down the hall, his boots leaving a dusty trail, the portrait of one of his father’s demons tucked under his arm.

Behind him, the patients who had been jarred awake began chattering like insects.

39

Jake swung into the circular drive and his headlamps lit up the police cruiser sitting on the shoulder, facing west on 27. The cop behind the wheel had a big silhouette and he covered his eyes in the glare of the old muscle car’s lamps. Jake pulled up under the tree, got out, and walked over to the cruiser. When he was a few feet away he saw Scopes grimace and try to wave.

As Jake came up to the cruiser, Scopes rolled down his window. “Special Agent Cole.” He sounded sincere.

“You draw the shitty end of the stick?”

Scopes nodded. “Short straw.” He paused for a minute, looked up at Jake, his face a series of shadows in the moonless night. “I’m sorry about last night. I’m not usually an asshole. I was trying to make everyone feel a little less—I don’t know. Unhappy, I guess.”

Jake waved it away, looked up at the house. “Anything happen?”

“Light’s on in the northeast corner of the house.” He nodded up at the master bedroom. “But nothing’s been turned on or off since I got here.”

“I appreciate it.”

Scopes rolled his eyes. “Making amends.”

Jake turned away.

He walked back to his car and pulled the balled-up blood painting from the passenger seat. It was damp and heavy, like human skin; it was amazing how the salt air out here got into everything, filling the pores with molecules of water that weighed it down.

The lights were off on the main floor and he knew Kay and Jeremy were asleep upstairs, both of them wearing tiny T-shirts and smelling like a life so beautiful he wondered how he had managed to earn it. The painting under his arm somehow felt immediately lighter. And infinitely less important.

He had started asking himself just why he had come back here. His feelings for his old man did not come into play at all and he realized that he really didn’t give a fuck what happened to him one way or another. So what was he doing here? Why had he even talked to the doctor who had phoned him at home in New York? At the first mention of his father he should have said thank you, but we’re not buying, and slammed the phone down. But he hadn’t. And the only reason he could come up with was that his mother would have wanted someone to look after his old man and since there was no one else around to do the job, it had fallen to Jake—the taker of jobs that no one else wants. Like deciphering the last moments of people’s lives.

The part that was getting under his skin—skinned, the voice whispered and he shrugged it off—was that the hatred he had felt for his father, that turpentine-tinted taste of disgust and anger, was long gone. Without the anger, he felt a lot lighter, a lot more flexible, which, when he thought about it, boiled down to better. And wasn’t better the American dream? Everyone wanted to forgive their parents, move on, and build their own fucked-up lives on their own steam. That’s just the way things were done. Amen and pass the doughnuts. So what was the blackness he felt skittering around in the shadows? Why wasn’t he walking around giddy and happy and glad that this was all behind him? The short answer was because something still felt wrong.

The geometry of the studio rose out of the terrain above the beach and in silhouette it looked like the boxes Kay had stacked at the curb that afternoon—asymmetrical, canted to one side, and filled with old booze bottles. Beyond the building, past the horizon at the edge of the world, there was a small break in the clouds and the moon shone through in a single dim spear.

Jake walked past the studio and stood at the edge of the grass where the landscape gave way to a fifteen-foot drop to the beach. The wind was a solid beat now and the ocean was rolling in on ten-foot swells that had finally broken into waves. The swells dropped onto the beach like wet hands, pounding up sand and debris in noisy slaps. Jake absentmindedly scoured the surf to see if Elmo’s corpse had washed up. From the ledge of grass above the water all he saw was black.

Up and down the beach there were no signs of life. From his vantage point on the shelf of grass he could see an easy three or four dozen houses and there wasn’t a light on in the bunch. For a second he felt his chest tighten with the thought that he was the only man left alive, like a character in an end-of-the-world novel, everything around him just wishful thinking. There were no boats out on the water, no planes blinking hopefully in the night sky, no visible signs of life anywhere except for the strobe of the lighthouse to the east. He headed for the studio.

The sight of the three-dimensional bloody featureless men on the walls and ceiling of the studio looked like a backdrop for a magic act and there was something more menacing about them now that it was night. When he dropped the balled-up painting onto his father’s framing table it hit the masonite and tufts of dust mushroomed out. He stared at it, wondering what it was, what it meant, and how the hell he was supposed to deal with his father with the specter of all this extra drama dragging at his heels like some drunken horror-riddled shadow. The ancient Kenmore fridge where his father used to keep enough food and booze to keep the pigment flowing without having to go back to the house was humming like a robot working over a complicated math calculation. Jake pulled it open to get a drink. His eyes swept past the Coke to three big paper bags that contained chunks of lead pigment; his father was old school—the environment on his list of concerns right after a manned mission to the surface of the sun.

He cracked a Coke open on the lip of the tool box and the cap hit the floor and bounced into a corner. He sat down on top of the paint-splattered surface and put half the bottle away in two furious gulps. It was bright and sweet and it brought tears to his eyes and a burp to his throat that he ripped out in one explosive report. He looked around the room to see if he had attracted the attention of any of the bloody men splattered on the space above him.