Jake tried to stand up and slipped on the stone floor of the entryway. Then he saw that he hadn’t been lying in a puddle of water at all.
Spencer’s throat had been cut, one neat slightly diagonal line that angled up from his right clavicle to just below the lobe of his left ear. The cut was deep and Jake had seen enough knife wounds to know that it had been done in one quick slash with a very sharp blade; the academic in him noted that it was a right-handed attack, blade facing up. The weapon? Easy-peasy—Frank’s Ka-Bar was sticking out of Spencer’s chest, sunk up to the handle just slightly left of center—a perfect kill. Jake wiped his hands on his pants, sticky with the already coagulating blood, and knew that he had been unconscious for a while. How long? An hour? Two?
Spencer’s arterial spray had pissed on the wall in a wide, graceful arc that had hit two paintings and the Nakashima console where the stainless sphere sat.
Then Jake remembered Frank.
He ran to the living room because of course, Frank was gone. Spencer had untied him and Frank had cut his throat. Why hadn’t he killed Jake? Why hadn’t—
Jake’s flowchart froze.
Frank was still in the chair.
Opaque yellow foam mushroomed from his nostrils and burst from his mouth like the thick roots of a cancerous tree. Beside him, on the floor, lay a can of spray insulation, the handy dispensing straw covered with blood from being forced into Frank’s nose. The thrust of the expanding foam had distorted his head, twisted his sinuses apart, pushed his eyes out, and his jaw hung wide like a python trying to swallow a dachshund. Frank’s neck and throat were distended—puffed out from the expanding death that had choked off his air, clung to his throat and nasal cavity like glue. His skin was white, highlighted with blue veins that shone through like circuit wiring.
The foam was still expanding and it popped and ticked like a cooling car engine as it continued to push his skull apart by degrees.
Jake looked out at the beach. It was still night but the winds and rain and hell of before were on leave as the eye passed overhead. The sky was clear and the bright orb of the moon hung over the water like a camera lens. Stars twinkled. The waves lapped at the shore in a steady rhythm. The beach looked like a barricade had been thrown up to keep the water at bay; everything from fifty-foot trees to upside down boats were woven together in a line of garbage that stretched down the coast as far as he could see.
Jake turned back to Frank. The expanding foam had filled his lungs, stomach, and esophagus, forcing his body tall and straight in the chair, an unnatural position for the dead.
And a sudden sickening realization lit up in his skull—he had been wrong. Wrong about Frank. Wrong about the clues his father had left. Wrong in his interpretation of his father’s fears. Most importantly, wrong about the man who had been doing this. Wrong about everything.
He thought about his father’s Sistine Chapel at the edge of the property, decorated not with an image of God infusing Adam with life, but tattooed with demons—men of blood—put there to give the Coleridge boy a message—a message he had missed. Jake instinctively turned, tried to focus on the building at the edge of the grass. The concrete slab where it used to sit was still there but the building itself was gone.
Jake heard the front door open.
Close.
Footsteps.
Pause (at Spencer’s body).
More footsteps.
Then the beam of a flashlight swung through the doorway, crept over the room, and stopped on Jake.
“Hello, Special Agent Cole,” a voice said from behind the light.
78
Jacob Coleridge woke up in the recovery room, alone; the nurse assigned to him had left to answer a call in surgical ICU, two doors down the hall. Jacob, of course, had no way of knowing this—he just knew that he was alone.
He was not restrained and other than the sharp thud of a mouthful of fishhooks he felt relatively level-headed and strong. He sat up. Beside the IV plugged into his arm he had a tube feeding oxygen down into his lungs through his nostrils. He was lucid enough to realize that this was probably because his mouth was wadded up with cotton and sutures. He had no idea why.
Jacob shimmied down to the end of the bed, managed to get a skinny naked leg between the side rail and the footboard, and pushed the release with his toe. The side rail clunked noisily down and he swung his other leg over the side and stepped onto the cold linoleum.
With one of the batons that did duty as his hands he managed to paw off one side of the tube feeding him oxygen, then he backed up and the tube sluiced out of his nostril with a wet pop. He turned and walked away from his bed and the elastic IV hose stretched, the needle pulled out of his arm with a zing and flew back, flecking the sheets with a spit of blood. There was nothing clandestine or furtive about his movements, he was simply a man with someplace to go, a mission to accomplish.
He shuffled out into the empty hallway, dim and dark and still, found the door to the emergency stairwell, and pushed it open.
The Southampton Hospital, built with hurricanes and storm surges in mind, was designed to be evacuated not merely through the ground floor, but also through the roof—all government buildings built near the ocean have this feature. But Jacob was not following this knowledge, he was just following his logic, and his logic was telling him to climb. So he began.
He made it to the top of the stairwell in a little over two minutes. He stood, breath whistling through his nostrils, the lump of cotton and stitches in his mouth feeling like a sour cactus, until he caught his breath. Then he put his weight against the door.
The alarm for this door was hardwired to sirens and as soon as he pushed on the panic bar, the gloom began to howl.
The storm was on temporary hiatus but the wind up here almost knocked the old man down and he stumbled over the backwash threshold and into the water that had built up. Rain was flushing off the roof in great torrents through the downspouts but the old painter had a foot to wade through and the sharp gravel sliced the soles of his feet.
He thought about his son, about how he had driven the boy away. It had been the only thing to do. And now, clambering through the shin-high water on the roof, he wondered if he had saved the boy at all. He was back here in harm’s way and it hit Jacob that all he had done was prolong the consequences for both of them. A deep thud of despair welled up in his chest as he realized that none of it mattered. Not anymore. The damage had been done.
At least it had been spectacular damage.
David Finch had once told him to Go big or go home and in his fractured and terrified mind, Jacob Coleridge felt pride that he had carried that philosophy through to the end.
Even in the lull of the eye, the wind ripped at him, chewed at his robe like an angry dog. He raised his arms and it was gone, pulled off into the night by the hands of the storm. He stumbled on, naked.
Jacob moved cautiously, the good part of his mind knowing that if he fell he would not get up. His feet were bleeding badly and he could feel the warmth seeping from his body.
He was ten feet from the edge of the roof when he heard the door clang open behind him. Flashlight beams shot around. Locked on him. Shouts. He saw his shadow stretch out before him, to the edge of the building, off into the empty darkness beyond.
More shouting.
His name.
He didn’t look back.
Didn’t stop.
His shadow danced. Footsteps sloshed behind. Voices implored him to stop.
Couldn’t they see that he had no choice? That this was what had to be done?