“I only have you for one more day and I want to make it count.” And with that his Spidey sense started tingling. He turned to the porch. “Where’s Jeremy?”
Kay turned with him, following the concern in Jake’s voice. “He’s right—”
But he wasn’t.
He was gone.
Jake sprang to his feet, spilling Kay in a tangle of arms and legs. “Where the fuck is he?”
Jake ran for the deck.
23
Jake’s head automatically swiveled to the pool as he ran across the deck. The algae was undisturbed and still, the line of sludge that rimmed the concrete a straight demarcation around the perimeter.
Jake saw Jeremy from the top of the steps to the beach. He was at the water’s edge, staring out at the ocean. His arms were crossed over his chest as if pondering some important moral question, his body unmoving.
Jake thudded down the ancient weathered planks and raced across the sand. He scooped Jeremy up. “What are you doing out here, Moriarty?” He tried not to sound angry but what he really wanted to keep buried was the panic.
Jeremy tried to squirm out of Jake’s grip with the guttural grunts he reserved for times when language was just too civil for the things he needed to say.
“What is it?” Jake swung his son around. “You’re not supposed to leave our sight. You know that, kiddo.”
Kay came down the steps and ran over. “What the hell is he doing down here?”
Jake shrugged. “He’s being pissy. You ask him.”
Jeremy gave a final squirm and fell limp. When he seemed to be in control of himself, Jake lowered him to the sand.
“What’s wrong?” Kay asked, squatting down on her boots.
Jeremy pointed off into the distance, to the horizon, to the edge of the world.
“What?” Kay asked.
Jake turned to the horizon, scoured the skyline. Then back to Jeremy, examining his face for clues. Then out at the ocean again. “What is it?”
“Elmo!” Jeremy screeched, a voice filled with rage.
And then Jake saw it. Rolling lazily on the deep swell, the red-orange figure of Elmo, face down, spread-eagled in the water. The tide was coming in, not going out, and Elmo was a good 150 feet from shore. Jake held up his hand and felt the steady wind that was pushing straight in at the shore.
Watching Elmo spin lazily in the swell, Kay asked, “How the hell did he—?” And she stopped, because she realized that there was no answer to the question.
The Sesame Street critter bobbed on the waves for a few seconds like a drowning victim. He inched closer, but it would take time for him to close the distance to shore and he’d be lucky if he wasn’t pulled under by the waves breaking on the beach. It didn’t take a physicist to understand that Jeremy could not have gotten him out there; Jake knew even he couldn’t throw him that far, headwind or not.
“How did Elmo get out there, Moriarty?”
Jeremy pretended not to hear for a few seconds. Then he realized that his parents were smart enough to know that Elmo hadn’t swum out there on his own. “He took him.” The boy stood on his toes, his eyes searching for his little red friend. “Carried him into the water, Daddy.”
Jake felt the skin tighten around his bones. “Who did, son?”
“The man.” He looked up, smiled brightly. “Your friend.”
Jake looked into his son’s face, searching for…what? “My friend? Which friend?”
Jeremy looked like he realized that he might be in trouble. He lifted his face to Kay, searching for a cue. Kay nodded. “It’s okay, son. Tell Daddy.”
“He said he was your friend, Daddy. He said he played games with you and your mommy when you were little. And that now he wants to play games with me. He wants to be my friend, too.”
Kay’s features were white now, brittle. “What is he talking about?”
Jake was frozen in place. He tried to shrug, to shake his head—all that came out was a single sentence. “What was his name?”
Jeremy stared out at Elmo lolling on the waves like an orange patch of carpet, well beyond the heft of human strength. “The man. He lives in the floor.” The boy kept his eyes locked on Elmo, waiting for him to come in from his swim. He shrugged and his little T-shirt rose up, exposing a big white tummy with a perfect dent of a bellybutton, like a well-grown albino grapefruit. “You know, the man in the floor—he’s your buddy. He said so. He said he’s your Buddy-Man.”
Jake looked over at his wife and saw her bottom lip trembling a little. “Jeremy,” she said, maybe a little too harsh.
Recognizing the tone, the boy looked up at her.
“You don’t go anywhere without Mommy or Daddy, okay? We’ve talked about this. There are bad people out there. Mean people.”
Jeremy shook his head. “Not the man in the floor. He’s Daddy’s buddy. He said so.” He pointed at the ocean. “Like teaching Elmo to swim.”
Jake turned back to the water. Out beyond the surf line, Elmo still spun facedown in the swell, a few bits of seaweed now clinging to his furry orange ass. He didn’t look like he was swimming. He looked dead.
“The next time he comes to play, you tell Daddy,” Kay said.
Out past the surf line, the swell capped and Elmo was driven down into the black Atlantic.
24
On the way in from a trip to the medical examiner’s office, Hauser stopped at his receptionist’s desk. She was busy putting office supplies into Ziploc bags—her idea of preparing for the storm.
“I need you to get on the phone to the FBI office we went through last night—the one that gave us Jake Cole. I want to speak to this witch doctor’s supervisor or boss or whatever his superior is called. I want him on the phone and I want it done in the next three minutes.”
The phone was buzzing by the time he sat down behind his massive slab of oak. “Hauser here.”
“Sheriff, this is Field Operations Manager Matthew Carradine—Jake Cole’s handler. What can I do for you?”
Handler? What kind of a word was that? Then Hauser remembered Jake’s 3-D crime scene party trick and decided that maybe he was looking at a circus act.
Hauser didn’t start by telling Carradine that he was glad the guy had called back—that would be too much of an aw-shucks way to start a conversation. “Who is Jake Cole?”
“I don’t understand the question, Sheriff Hauser.”
He could have pointed out the tattoos or the clothing or the spooky crime scene Ouija show but all of that was secondary. “Jake Cole creeps me out.”
Carradine let out a low little rumble that sounded like it had weight to it. It was an irritated, bored sound that said Go away. Maybe it worked with people who hadn’t seen de-epithelialized children, Hauser thought bitterly.
“Can you be specific, Sheriff?” Meaning, It’s none of your business.
“Yes, Carradine, I can. What—specifically—does he do? And by that I mean beyond walking through a crime scene with that glazed expression on his face and giving me instructions on how to set up a media plan.”
“The FBI is not in the habit of handing out private details pertaining to our personnel.”
“Mr. Carradine, I am not some lost fuckstick local sheriff who can’t find his cock with both hands. If I am going to work a double homicide with a man, I need to know a little about him.”
Carradine was silent on the other end, probably thinking things through, Hauser realized.