Jake lashed out with the pistol and the butt of the revolver caught the cop across the bridge of the nose. There was a crack loud enough to be heard above the wind and rain and the man’s legs gave out with a grunt and he crashed to the ground in front of his car.

Jake ran around the house, through the garden, to the building at the edge of the property.

He burst in and snapped the lighting to life, illuminating the army of faceless men that climbed out of the walls. He tore through the studio, the garage, even the small cabinets where he knew Jeremy could hide.

Nothing.

Empty.

Gone.

Where?

Skinned, the voice hissed sweetly.

Not my family. Anything but my family.

Please.

PLEASE!

Then where are they? the ancient voice in his head asked.

He ran out onto the grass, jumped down the drop-off to the beach. Waves rolled up past the surf line of a few hours ago, sloshing his legs with foam and stinging sand and bits of weed. He snapped his head around like a dog searching a scent. First up the beach, then down.

The beach was alive with the ocean and the black tangled masses of seaweed thrown up looked like bodies washed up at the water’s edge. Small ones, Jeremy. Slightly bigger ones, Kay. Some moved in the wind. Others were pushed by the waves. He ran to one, ripped at it with his hands. Cold, wet, lifeless. Then another. Hopeful. More nothing.

They were gone, he could feel it.

Knowing. Was. The. Worst. Part.

Where?

Skinned, the ugly little voice crooned again, letting the Ns roll out, and Jake screamed at it to shut the fuck up!

No. No. No no no no no.

Jake stood in the surf, rain and sand and spray stinging his skin. He stared up at the house, windows lit up like an angry drunk. Big planes of white amid the dark modern architecture.

Something inside moved.

Movement.

Movement meant life.

Jeremy?

Kay?

But even through the rain, Jake could see that it was a man. Someone else. Him.

Him who?

HIM.

Jake raced up the steps to the house, across the deck. He tore the patio door open and jumped inside. The door clacked against the frame, stuttering with the buffeting force of the wind. A man stood in the middle of the living room. He started to turn.

Jake raised the pistol. Cocked the hammer. Went running forward, blood and horror and rage in his mind.

The man turned to face him.

Jake lowered the pistol.

And stared into his father’s eyes.

50

Hauser came down the stairs with his mouth sealed in a tight line. He hit the overlapped Persian carpets and turned to Jake, shook his head. Another cop—the one Jake had punched out at the road—hung back in the kitchen, with a broken nose that was quickly turning from pink to purple. Soon it would crawl under his eyes in bruised black scythes. Blood was caked over his lip in a gruesome Chaplin mustache. It turned out that his name was Whittaker. He’d probably press charges but Jake was past caring.

Jake leaned against the piano, his arms folded over his chest, wearing nothing but a pair of Levi’s, the barrel of the big stainless revolver sticking out of the coils of his arm like the head of a steel snake. Another man stood on the deck, on the other side of the swimming pool, framed by the black ocean beyond the beach. He had a rain jacket on and his back to the wind and every time he pulled in a lungful of smoke the glow of the ash lit up his face in a creepy, orange light. He made no movements and if it weren’t for the intermittent jack-o’-lantern glow of his cigarette, no one would have noticed him there.

Hauser walked slowly to Jake and reached out to touch him. For the first time he saw the extent of Jake’s ink, the endless black text that enshrouded his body, from neck to ankles, emphasizing the contours of his musculature. He put a hand on Jake’s shoulder and felt the cold clammy skin twitch at his touch.

Hauser spoke loudly—not out of anger but out of necessity; the storm had grown vocal cords a little while ago and the constant humming of the wind brought the new element of white noise to the world. “We can’t find a thing, Jake. There’s no sign of struggle. No forced entry. No footprints or tire prints or any physical evidence. It’s like they just—”

“Evaporated,” Jake finished, his eyes now black marbles that didn’t seem to move at all.

Jake had torn through the house three times while Frank—his father’s twin brother—called Hauser. Jake had ripped all the closet doors open, taking three off their hinges; overturned the beds; dug through piles of clothing; emptied cupboards. He had flipped the sofa and torn down the shower curtain in the bathroom, scattering the teardrop-shaped rings. He had only put pants on when his uncle had forced a pair of jeans into his hands.

Jake had gone somewhere deep into himself, someplace far away. It was an evil little place filed with rage and violence that he had locked years ago. But the door had been kicked open and the ugly things that had lived in the dark for so long had begun to scamper out. He didn’t know if he would be able to control them. “I am going to find him, Mike.” Jake’s eyes were locked on the breakers beyond the deck but Hauser could see that his mind was someplace else. “I am going to find him and I am going to take him apart.”

The front door opened and someone came in.

He felt Jake’s skin twitch again. “Jake,” he began, then stopped, remembering how he had felt when Aaron had died. His hand stayed on Jake’s shoulder, a man trying to calm a spooked horse through energy transmission—a horse with a coat of smooth, cold porcelain.

“We were leaving in a few minutes—a few hundred seconds,” Jake said with that weird tone that Hauser had heard in front of Nurse Macready’s house.

Out of the corner of his vision, Hauser saw Spencer come in, pause at the edge of the patchwork of Persian rugs, and shake his head—no sign of Kay or Jeremy in the studio, either. Like Hauser, he had a Maglite in one hand and his sidearm in the other.

“I put Jake’s Charger in the garage. Just in case.”

On the porch, Frank finished up his cigarette and came inside. When he walked in, Hauser was amazed at the likeness to Jake’s father—a man he had never met but who held enough points in the local celebrity bank to be recognizable. Frank was still famous from the yacht club all those years ago—Frank Coleridge with his young intelligent women. Frank was a digital copy of his brother, right down to the mean look in his eyes. When he shook off his coat and hung it on a chair Hauser saw that he wore battered chinos, engineer boots, and a flannel shirt with a Remington patch over the breast. Even naked, Hauser would have recognized that Frank Coleridge was an outdoorsman; the sheriff heard a silent language in his movements that spoke louder than the patch on his shirt—everything about him, from the calm gaze to the sure movements of his hands, said that Frank Coleridge was a man who spent time hunting.

When they arrived, Hauser saw Frank’s Hummer parked in the driveway, listing on the slope of the gravel like a sleeping rhinoceros. It was monstrous and no doubt army surplus—Hauser had seen enough of the spoiled city folks drive into town seated behind the wheel of one of the beasts to know a utilitarian one when he saw one; besides, while checking the premises for Kay and Jeremy he had shone his Maglite inside and recognized the sparse metal interior as a working truck that you cleaned out with a hose, not an expensive shampoo job. It had Tennessee plates and the sheriff wondered how many white-tailed deer had been strapped to the hood of the beast, tongue out, throat cut, gutted, a single round from a medium-bore hunting rifle—a .223 or a .277 most likely—mushroomed into the discarded heart.