A wave slammed into the big diesel beast and it lurched sideways, braying like a dinosaur. Frank hammered down on the gas and the sudden traction pulled it forward; the Hummer was designed for harsh conditions but it wasn’t a submarine. Frank’s knuckles were white.

Jake was trying to absorb the story his uncle had just told him. He was trying to put it into some sort of context, some sort of focus. But he had too much rattling around under the dome to deal with this now.

“Jakey?” Frank yelled above the noise.

Jake moved a little, shifting in the seat. He pried his eyes away from the eerie reflection in the windshield. “Yeah.”

Frank’s teeth were clamped tightly around his cigarette and he kept his attention on the underwater world crawling under the hood of the Hummer. The tires threw thick reams of water up against the armored undercarriage and it sounded like Roman cavalry. “You okay?”

Jake’s shoulders shifted with a shrug. After everything else, after his mother and Madame and Little X, Nurse Rachael Macready, David Finch, what did this really change? Of course he wasn’t thinking about Kay and Jeremy—he couldn’t or he’d just stop breathing—so he decided on, “Fucking fantastic.”

57

August 1977

Sumter Point

Jacob had spent the morning in the studio, working with the torch. He wore his standard-issue uniform of jeans, a T-shirt, and paint-crusted canvas sneakers that had once been a shade of white. Patti Smith’s Horses was spinning on an ancient Telefunken console stereo salvaged from the garbage up the highway—the same stereo and album Jake and Kay would listen to over thirty years later.

He had been up for two days now, but had taken a break at six a.m. and gone for an hour-long walk on the beach before a breakfast of some hard-boiled eggs and a piece of cheese dug up from the fridge. Now, four hours later, he was in a different day, a different place, and the piece was finished.

Somewhere around ten he cracked open the bottle of whiskey and poured himself two solid fingers worth into one of the many stained china teacups he bought at garage sales for his brushes. The great thing about them was their disposability. Of course, sometimes he confused the spirits in the cup and a painting ended up smelling like good scotch. More often, though, he found himself retching up half a swallow of turpentine.

There had been a lot of work, and to work he needed fuel. So he had fed the furnace with a good supply of booze. Of course he knew he was drinking too much, but wasn’t that the point? What was the point of not having a boss if you couldn’t do what you wanted to, when you wanted to?

At forty-six, Jacob Coleridge was at his professional apex. He had been making a living as a painter for almost two decades, had been a growing force in American art for his whole working life, and was well past the point where he never had to worry about where the next meal (or drink, hallelujah!) was coming from. And this should have given him some sense of peace. Maybe even a little sense of pride. But it hadn’t. All it had really done was make him a little less at home in his skin, like he was wearing someone else’s body, one that had been tailored with a smaller man in mind.

He thought about Mia and Jakey and raised his china cup. “All for one, and one for all,” he said aloud. And why not? He had toasted to lesser causes—acquaintances just met in bars being the most common—so he hoisted one to the musketeers. Swallowed. Filled it again. Grabbed another from atop the fridge and spun the cap off. Took a slug. Went outside.

Back in the studio, sitting in the center of his framing table, sat his single experiment in three-dimensional art—a model of a sphere, perfectly assembled from chunks cut from stainless-steel speargun darts. It was a polyhedron, perfectly executed in nearly 2,200 precision cuts from the chop saw and twice as many hits from the torch. It was precise, complicated, and signed on one of the transepts, Jacob G. Coleridge.

58

The sheriff’s office was the kind of place where the ragtag survivors in a zombie film would make their last stand. The building was an Edwardian no-nonsense brick-and-limestone box with wedge-shaped keystones over the windows and an arched double front door. One side of the structure housed the holding cells and county jail, the other a joint office shared by the administration and the Southampton Sheriff’s Department proper. The parking lot was empty and the building looked like it might be deserted. A few lights were on inside but the parking lot was conspicuously bare except for two departmental four-by-fours and a heavy EMT cube-van; the news trucks of yesterday were no doubt out filming the damage being wrought by the Long Island Express Redux.

Frank parked on the grass, applying the logic that an extra six inches of high ground could make the difference between life and death if a storm surge rolled in. Of course, the higher profile made it an easy target for the vengeful temper of the hurricane. They stepped out into the howling wind and staccato clatter of rain and ran across the road and up the steps to the entrance.

The lifeless impression of outside was erased as soon as they were through the doors; the station hummed like a beehive, uniformed policemen running back and forth, absorbed in their tasks. Phones rang, radios squawked, coffee brewed. In one corner, an ancient Zenith was tuned to the Weather Network, the sound turned off—a young reporter in a blue rubber raincoat with the network’s logo on the left breast reported from a second-story motel balcony somewhere along the coast. The picture was heavily pixilated—the digital-age version of static. Behind him, huge swells were pounding the beach and his expression transmitted the realization that he was here because he was expendable; the true talent was back in New York, where they would lament his loss on camera if he were unfortunately washed out to sea.

Jake grabbed Scopes as he ran by. “Hauser?” he said, knowing that need-to-know was the order of business.

Scopes jerked a thumb at an open doorway halfway down the hall. “If he’s not in there, try the radio room, two doors past.”

They found Hauser behind his desk, barking into the phone. “Jesus Christ, Larry, listen to your son. You can grow more tomato plants next year. Get in the car and head inland—” He saw Jake and stopped. “I gotta go, Larry. Forget the plants, they’re not worth your fucking life.” He slammed the phone down and stood up. He wore rain bibs but his Stetson, encased in a plastic protector, hung on the back of his chair. His rain poncho was spread out on Bernie’s antlers, dripping onto the floor.

“Jake, Frank,” he said. “Get the paintings photographed?”

Jake held up the laptop. “I need your satellite connection. 337 gigs of data. Where’s your comm. room?”

“Beside the—” There was a terrific crack and the world outside went white for an instant. The lights fluttered, and for a brief instant Jake’s chest tightened up with the electrical pulse of the building. Then the lights died and there was a communal groan from the hive. A half second later the generator kicked in and the offices lit up in bright halogen emergency lighting. “—radio room. Follow me.”

Jake felt the tingle of electricity in his system. His put his fingers to his chest, and his heart was banging against his ribs as if it wanted to get out.