Kay brushed her hands off on her thighs. “I’ll get some garbage bags. We’ll be sleeping in your father’s room.”
Jake watched her walk down the hall and head for the stairs. As she passed Jeremy he watched her gingerly lift her foot above the invisible crowd he was plowing his car through. When she was out of sight he turned his head back toward the bedroom at the end of the hallway. A single question looped through his head: Why would he barricade the door?
26
Hauser sat on a stool by the counter dividing the kitchen from the open room that made up most of the ground floor and the exposed hallway that ran overhead. He sat back, his Stetson on his knee, stoically fingering the rim of his coffee cup. He felt better about Jake, more at ease, after talking to Carradine. They had a case to get to. But first Hauser felt like he needed to apologize.
Jake stood behind the counter, leaning against the bank of drawers that hid more of the creepy little paintings. Kay and Jeremy were upstairs in the bath, cleaning off. The sound of the water running was almost overpowered by a radio belting out Sesame Street tunes, Jake’s attempt at making up for Elmo’s mysterious drowning.
“I called Carradine.” Hauser’s finger stopped tracing the rim of the hand-thrown mug and his eyes lifted.
Jake took a sip of his own coffee, pausing the lip of the cup below his chin. “What did he tell you that you think I wouldn’t have?”
Hauser loosened up a little. “I’m sorry, Jake. I am not used to working with outsiders. It was a mistake.”
Jake shrugged. “I have a predictable effect on people. I’m sure Carradine told you this is more than some sort of Freudian fantasy to find my mother’s killer.”
Hauser shifted uncomfortably in his seat, lifted his hand. “I didn’t say—”
“I did,” Jake said very calmly. “This is not some subconscious quest to make things right in the universe so I can put the little frightened boy that still lives inside me at ease.”
“That sounds like therapist speak.”
“It is. I’ve spent a lot of my time in the offices of people who spend their time listening to other people’s problems. I had to. I wasted too much of my life being angry and self-medicating.”
“The booze?”
Jake laughed. “When I was roaring, the booze was the least of my vices.” Something in Jake’s eyes turned off and the light coming in through the big windows was no longer reflected in his pupils. “The booze was how I pressurized, how I medicated in public. Problem with me is that I inherited my old man’s metabolism. I have an LR that’s in the basement—meaning little reaction to alcohol—and that goes for anything I put in my body.” Jake shook his head. “And I put everything you can imagine into the machine. I have a pacemaker in my chest, Mike. I did so much heroin they’re not sure my heart will beat without a mechanical aid. I used to do speedballs for breakfast.”
The sheriff shifted in his seat; he was a man who was used to people trying to hide their secrets from him.
“Whenever my heart rate rises above—or drops below—a certain point, I get zapped by the little plastic juice-box they wired into my sternum.” He shrugged, like it really didn’t matter one way or the other. “In a lot of ways, it is a drug of its own—the lets-me-know-I’m-not-yet-dead drug.”
Hauser finished his coffee in a big gulp and slid the mug across the counter, declining a refill with the shake of his head. “I thought you were some sort of a paranormal freak.”
Jake’s mouth flattened a little. “There are no psychics. It’s called cold reading. Remember the Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four?”
“I’m more of a movie guy.”
Jake smiled. “Watson hands Holmes a watch and asks what can be deduced by observation. Watson feels that as a mass-produced item, it reveals nothing of the owner. Holmes examines the piece, hands it back, and rattles off a litany of details about the previous owner—who he says is Watson’s brother. The man was a drunkard, he was often broke, and so on and so forth à la the smug bastard everyone knows Holmes to be. Watson gets pissed and accuses Holmes of contacting his family to learn the history of his poor brother.” Jake took a sip of coffee. “The deductions were simple. Holmes saw the initials and knew that it had belonged to Watson’s father, after which it was handed down to the eldest son—as was customary. There were pawn numbers scratched into the case that pointed at the brother falling in and out of debt—otherwise he would neither have pawned the watch, nor been able to pick it up. The keyhole was scratched and Holmes figured that no sober man would miss the hole as consistently as was evident. To Holmes it was obvious. Watson thought it was witch-doctory.
“There is no contacting the other side. It’s bullshit like tarot card reading and palmistry and tea leaves and faith healing. Like Sagan was kind enough to point out, there is zero data. There are no psychics, Hauser. And anyone who believes in them is ill-informed or stupid.” He had given the monologue enough times that it was stage-honed.
“I’ll go with ill-informed on this one,” Hauser said slowly and Jake could see the wheels in his head turning.
Jake smiled. “A vast segment of the population out there believe in stupidity. John Edward, that guy who dupes people into thinking he’s talking to their dead loved ones, should have his fucking head cut off on live TV.”
“A little harsh.”
“Just truth. There is no afterlife. There are no leprechauns, or religious visions, or extraterrestrial visitors. There are only psychotic breaks from reality, chemical-induced hallucinations, and good old-fashioned fucking lying which is the one that I see employed more than anything else.”
Jake went to the big doors that opened up onto the beach. He pulled the latches and accordioned them open. The air in the house changed with one big pulse and all of a sudden everything smelled fresher, newer.
Hauser was still leaning against the counter. “You believe in the Devil?”
Jake put his hands on his hips and eyed Hauser for a minute. “Every culture has a name for the bogeyman and when you look at shit like that,” he said, pointing at the files on the coffee table, “I understand why.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
Jake locked him in another stare. “Guys like Francis Collins think that God had to have a hand in our design because morality exists. I look around at our species and I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck he’s talking about. The history of this world—especially the religious history—is one big disgusting bloodbath.” Jake shook his head. “So no, I don’t believe in the Devil. I don’t need to, man has done enough horrible things to impress me. You give human beings the opportunity to be monstrous and you will never be disappointed.” His point made, he turned to the horizon. “What’s the news on the storm?”
Hauser swiveled, keeping his butt in the seat. “Landfall is right here.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, well, that’s one way to put it.” Hauser lifted his mass out of the modern stool and came over to the window, put his hands on his hips—the right automatically resting on the grip of his sidearm, the leather holster creaking with the contact. “I spoke to the Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center this morning. Dylan’s a strong Category Five and there’s a good chance that it stays a five. I don’t know shit about hurricanes and even less about categories in particular, but I looked it up and five is bad, worse than 1938 and that thing wiped out the highway, the railroad, destroyed half the houses here, washed buildings out to sea, snapped our power poles like they were straw, and killed seventy people in the area. The shoreline was rearranged like a shovel going at a carton of eggs.” Hauser’s lips pursed for a minute, and he shook his head. “And it’s electric.”