“And all for one!” Jeremy hollered from the living room.

“That’s right, Moriarty. Lunchtime. Come wash your hands.”

Half an hour later, Jeremy was down for a nap and Kay and Jake had packed up everything they were taking. They had a bit of downtime before they woke Jeremy for the trip home.

Kay had changed into a dry shirt with Motorhead spray-painted across the front. She wore no bra and her breasts were sliding around under the fabric with her movements. She looked at Jake and asked, “Would it be insensitive of me to ask for a round before we hit the road?” Then began peeling off her clothes.

Twenty minutes later they were knitted into a knot of limbs on the damp sheets. The pheromone smell of sex was thick and the air was electric with the rattle of rain on the window.

Kay had popped another blood vessel in her left eye and Jake knew she’d be wearing sunglasses to rehearsal for the next few days—it had become an accepted side effect of their sex life and with the people who knew them well, she passed it off as an ocular condition. She usually dealt with the occasional bruise or ligature mark on her neck with high collars or big necklaces. The fact was, the sex set off the endorphins in her brain like nothing else she had felt since her drug and booze days. She realized—they both realized—that with their determination to leave their mutual addictions behind, they had stumbled across a new one. One that didn’t involve needles or pills or alcohol or chemicals; a natural high from the ancient blood-powered sex machine between their ears. Their sex life had simply become a replacement for their old addictions.

She was facedown, stretched out like Supergirl, her hands cuffed up through the oak spokes of the bed. “Thank you, baby, I needed that.” Her handcuffs clinked and as Jake kissed the back of her head she pushed up and into him with her bum. “Now uncuff me so we can get the fuck out of here.”

There was a crash somewhere off in the house.

“Daddy!” Jeremy’s voice screeched in the bright shatter of panic.

Jake jumped off of Kay, grabbed his pistol from the nightstand, and pounded down the hallway.

He threw the door to Jeremy’s room open.

Jeremy was gone.

There was a brief instant of complete and absolute silence in his head, as if the circuitry had just frozen in place. He stared down at Jeremy’s empty bed, trying to will his son into it. There was a thick surge in the atmosphere as if the house had been zinged by a bolt of lightning and Jake felt the electric hammer of fear slam into his chest. There was an audible pop as the hot wallop of his resynchronization appliance overloaded his heart. Then silence covered him like a blanket of wet sand.

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.