“A portrait of you, Jake. Not a mistake. Only you didn’t figure it out, did you?” Hauser tried to look into Jake’s eyes—into the man he had liked, the man who on the surface seemed like he had turned a poisonous past around and had built something for himself. Something beautiful.

He remembered hearing that every culture has a bogeyman.

Jake stared back, and his eyes were deep black; a red hemorrhage blossomed in his left, his right clear and bright.

“Your father wanted you to know that the Bloodman is you.”

Hauser came down and took the big stainless pistol from Jake’s holster. He backed up and emptied it into his palm. He dropped five of the .500-caliber cartridges to the floor and swept them away with his foot, into a puddle. He dropped the sixth into the cylinder, slowly spun it into place, and snapped the weapon shut.

“That’s why you’re so good at hunting killers, Jake. You understand their language because you’re one of them.” Hauser watched Jake, watched the memory walls in his skull come down one after another in the domino effect.

“Remember those two suitcases that disappeared from the Farmer house? The ones that you figured out from the indents on the carpet? Guess what?” He pointed at the corner where Kay’s Halliburton—dented and peeking open like a clam—lay beside the cello case, covered in sand and garbage that had blown in. “There’s the second one.”

“What about Kay’s cello? Why would she come up here for one day and bring her cello? She knew she’d have no time to play it. I bet we call the bus company in a few hours and no one will remember a woman with a cello, Jake. Kay and Jeremy came up in your car. That’s why there’s a baby seat in the back. You stayed at the Farmers’ a little while. And then…” He let the sentence drop off. “Your father wasn’t trying to warn you, he was trying to scare you away.”

Images were jamming up in his brain, tumbling over one another to let themselves out. His father had loved him, had defended him. And when Mia had been murdered, he had given up, crawled into the bottle, and tried to forget that he was still alive. Only he couldn’t stop painting because it was what he had been made to do. And in his painting, in his work, he had let it come out. He had loved his son, had not turned him in, but he had turned his back on the boy. We do things for blood we don’t do for anything else, Uncle Frank had said over the phone.

Hauser held up Jake’s big stainless .500. “There is one round in here.” He tossed the pistol onto the counter and walked past Frank’s body and stepped through a blown-out window into the rising day.

84

Jake stood out past the break of the surf in water up to his waist. What was left of Jeremy floated beside him, undulating in the swell like a rotting sea creature. He held Kay’s flat, shredded hand. The wind was completely gone now and had he not known he was standing in the eye of a hurricane, he would have sworn that it was one of the most beautiful mornings he had ever seen.

Except for the skin of his dead wife and son floating at his side in the brown swells.

Back on the beach, the house was all but destroyed and something told him that the second part of the storm would finish what had been started here. It would wipe the whole place clean.

Jake remembered the men he had been. There had been some good in his life. Maybe more than a little. But it was canceled out by everything he had taken away. Mostly from himself.

He raised his wife’s flattened hand and gave it a kiss, ignoring its smell. Then he kissed his little boy on the cheek, beside the hole where his ear had been.

Then he placed the cold wet barrel of the big stainless revolver against the roof of his mouth and angled it back, so it would do its job. He thought about the woman he had loved, about the boy they had made, and about how it had all amounted to nothing.

He closed his eyes.

And gently pulled back on the trigger.

Half an ounce of pressure later, Jake Cole became a ghost.

85

Hauser stood at the edge of the muddy embankment that used to shelve out onto a nice sand beach. In the early-morning light it was strewn with debris and flotsam, ranging in magnitude from a golf bag to an upside down forty-seven-foot Chris Craft Constellation that looked a lot like his boat. Probably was, if he wanted to guess. Only it was upside down. Not a good week, he realized. Then thought, Fuck it, and decided that he had earned himself a drinking problem.

He turned back to the house where Jacob Coleridge had made his contribution to American painting. He saw the concrete slab of the studio floor, pitted and scarred, the building pulled out to sea. All those paintings, all that creative genius, all that money, gone.

Some families run on love, some run on anger and madness, some run on worse things, Jake had said.

Worse.

Things.

What could be worse than this? Hauser wanted to know. He took in the world that the ocean had littered with all the things it didn’t want, and the stretch of sand as far as he could see was scabbed over with insurance claims. He wondered if his house had made it through the night. His gun collection in the basement. Maybe it—And then he stopped. Because none of it mattered. Not anymore. And he had to save himself for Act II of the hurricane. In another few hours hell would be back.

Minus the Devil, this time.

He half slid and half fell down the new scoop of the beach. He had never really paid attention to the layout here before, but he was sure that the storm had pulled a sixty- or seventy-foot swatch of coast away.

The beach felt like another planet—one no human had ever set foot upon. Hauser was not interested in metaphysics, but he wondered how many people had had their lives irrevocably changed by the last two days of weather.

And worse things.

Sand clung to his boots with weak fingers as he moved down the beach, arms hanging loosely like the quarterback he had been so long ago. Above the gentle wind he heard the whine of an approaching siren—Scopes on his way.

Behind him, the ocean reached out and pulled the ghosts from the shallows, driving them to the bottom and dragging them out toward deep water with the rest of the trophies the storm had taken.

Author’s Notes

Anyone familiar with the area of Long Island where this story occurs will notice that I have taken endless liberties with the locale—I have shifted roads, invented neighborhoods, fabricated streets, and created beaches that do not exist. This was done for the simple reason that I did not want any real-world locations associated with the fictitious events of this novel.

Also, the Southampton Sheriff’s Department portrayed in this story is my own fabrication and has no bearing on any of the law enforcement agencies that serve the communities mentioned.

Acknowledgments

When it comes time to do the blood quantum for any novel, delineating patrimony can be difficult; for a first novel, whittling down the gene pool is impossible. But the following people stand out for going far above and beyond the call of duty: