“Worse than before?”
“I found keys, paperbacks, and sod in the fridge. The house is an ashtray. There are empty bottles all over the place. The rooms are crammed with crap. Some of them are locked and I haven’t been able to get them open. The studio is bolted shut. There is a barricade in the bedroom.” Then he just stopped. If that hadn’t painted reason enough, nothing would. Besides, he hated feeling like he was asking for something almost as much as having no one else to ask.
“You have anyone else helping you out?”
“Kay is supposed to come up from the city but with this storm heading our way, I wouldn’t be surprised if she stayed in New York.”
“What kind of storm?” The question was calm, serious, and showed that Frank was obviously dragging his ass in the television-watching department.
“Category Five Cape Verde. They’re advising evacuation at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came to a forced evacuation.”
Frank whistled and even that sound was dry, brittle. “Another Express.” The New England hurricane of 1938 had gone down in the books as the Long Island Express. “Stock up on water and batteries. Or better yet, get out, Jakey. Get your dad airlifted if you have to. Get him on an ambulance. Go home until this blows over.”
Jake wanted to listen to Frank, but the monkey in the wrench was the woman and child skinned up the beach. He had to be here. It wasn’t a question of choice. “I can’t, Frank. There’s other stuff I got going on.”
Frank’s voice grew distant, flat. “Work?”
“Yeah, work.” It happened again, he wanted to add.
“If you stay, put a survival kit together. Something that will keep you hydrated and fed and maybe even dry for a week if things get as bad as Katrina. The one thing on your side is that you are above sea level. Put a bag together. Handgun with extra ammunition. Seal a bunch of toilet paper in Ziplocs—nothing worse than wiping your ass with a sock. Good solid knife. A Ka-Bar or dive knife. Something you can use for a tool. Antiseptic ointment. Sutures. Gum.”
Jake closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and tried not to be dismissive. Frank was a pragmatic man, which is why Jake needed his help.
Frank had never been married but had always carried on long—and more or less monogamous—relationships with very distinctive women his entire adult life. Some younger, some older, some wealthier, some not. And the relationships had all seemed solid, pleasant. But the inevitable announcement would come that she had left during the night. A brief period of a little too much booze and not enough self-control would follow, and soon another striking woman would begin appearing at his side. Not long after Mia’s murder, Frank had moved away from Long Island. To hunt more. Spend more time with Nature. But Jake knew that he had moved to get away from the memories of all the good that had once been here. He had ended up in the Blue Hills of Kentucky.
Since the brothers were no longer talking, Jake had lost touch with his uncle and things had stayed broken until all those years later when Jake woke up in a quarter inch of cold shitty water on the kitchen floor. He had somehow found Frank. And asked for help.
Jake never forgot that Frank had saved his life. And he was so unused to asking anyone for help that he felt guilty about asking for it now. “This is Long Island, not Zimbabwe.” There was a fondness in his voice that he didn’t have for his own father. He spoke to his uncle a few times a year, mostly when the job was getting to him and he needed to get an outside perspective on the world. Jake had an enormous amount of respect for the man. “I’m a shooter, not a shootee.”
Frank laughed and it sounded like a diesel engine turning over. “Still, get yourself some supplies. You’re a smart boy, Jakey, always have been.” His laugh rattled to a stop. “Although I guess calling a forty-five-year-old man a boy is kind of an insult but when you’re as old as I am, anyone who doesn’t have to tape his balls up so they don’t swing into his knees is a kid.”
Jake smiled, and suddenly realized that he wished he had been able to talk to his father like this. Not all the time, but once would have been good.
“And be careful. It’s acting like things are the same as always when they aren’t that will get you in trouble. You handling this all okay?”
“I’m good, Frank.” He thought back to his father’s kitchen and realized that at least some shopping was in order. “I just need someone who will get things done.”
“And that’s me.”
“And that’s you.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“I can book you a flight, I have air miles. I get free—”
“Fuck free. I’m not flying. I’m driving. I have to finish changing the fuel pump on the truck but I can get that done by supper. Be there within twenty-four hours.” There was a pause as he fired up another cigarette. “He in any pain?”
Jake thought back to the tranquilizer that Nurse Look-alike had pumped into the drip. About his father’s screams. And the points of white mucus in the corners of his eyes. “I can’t tell, Frank. The old Jacob Coleridge is gone. Just gone. He’s confused. He’s scared.”
“You can accuse him of being a lot of things, Jakey, but scared is not one of them. Never. Not when we were growing up. Not when we were in Korea together. Not in bar fights or staring down pirates. Nothing scares your old man.”
An image of the barricaded bedroom door lit up for a second. “He’s scared now, Frank.”
Jake heard Frank pull on the smoke. “Yeah, well.” The old man didn’t sound convinced.
“Thanks for doing this, Frank. I appreciate it.”
“That’s what blood’s about, Jakey. You do things for blood you don’t do for anybody else.”
17
The sheriff’s cruiser was in the driveway when Jake got back to the house. Hauser sat inside, windows open, doing a good imitation of a man trying to sleep and being unsuccessful. As Jake’s sleek Charger entered the drive, the cop got out of the car, leaving his Stetson inside. He came over to the shade of the big pine where Jake parked, his movements loose from lack of sleep, not comfort.
Hauser ran his finger along the line of the front quarter panel, feeling the metal beneath the glossy paint. Then he looked back at his own car, an updated version of the classic American muscle car, and something about the movement seemed tentative. Jake hoped the cop wasn’t about to start talking cars—he hated talking about cars almost as much as talking about the stock market. More, maybe.
Jake shut off the engine, opened the door, and swung out into the afternoon. He nodded a greeting and took the bag of groceries from the baby seat in the back.
“Cole,” Hauser said, trying to sound good-natured but only making it a little past tired. Jake heard something else in his voice. Embarrassment, maybe.
Jake fished his father’s keychain out of his pocket. It was a flat stone with a hole drilled in the center, worn smooth from rubbing against pocket lint and scotch tops for years. “Sheriff.” He figured that Hauser was here to interview him.
Jake had gone through this before—it was part of being the resident interloper with every department he visited. Hauser needed to have faith in his team. So he surrounded himself with reliable people. If Jake was part of that team, Hauser would want to know a little more about him. And if you took this equation a little further, Jake had been interviewing Hauser as well.
Jake balanced the groceries on his knee, turned the key in the lock, and pushed the big door open. “Coffee?”