The flesh under her face was puckered and cracked like pudding and her teeth were jagged nubs of white that she had gnashed off on the carpet. Her tongue was a few inches from her face; she had chewed it off and spat it out and it looked like a thick meat slug that had died trying to escape a building on fire.
He opened the closet and stopped. The hangers were empty. In the bright beam of the task lighting, Jake saw eight small indentations on the carpet. “Get these. With measurements.”
“Get what?” Conway asked, staring at the rug.
Jake squatted down, pointed in turn to the eight indentations.
Conway squinted. “I don’t see anything.”
Jake pointed them out again. “There, there, there, there. Then again here, here, here, and here.”
Conway’s face shifted into puzzlement when he saw them. “Holy shit. What are those?”
Jake tried not to roll his eyes.
“Suitcase feet,” Hauser said from behind.
“Suitcase feet?”
“Someone took two suitcases out of the closet.” Jake raised his finger, pointing at the bar above his head filled with the empty wire hangers. “And all the clothes.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Just take the fucking pictures, okay?”
That was when Jake realized that something else was missing—toys. You didn’t go anywhere with a child that size without toys. Even if you were only going for five minutes.
Jake turned away and went over the room with is eyes, taking in every object, surface, and detail, forming the space into a 3-D model in his skull that he could walk through later when he needed something. He ignored the coppery sweet smell of blood mixed with the bitter gag of feces and the smell of his own fear—ignored that he was in a room where a child had been skinned in front of his mother and she had been taken apart like a bloody present. He dismissed that Hauser’s boys were outside probably contaminating the crime scene. He was even able to forget the photographer, squatting down on his static-free haunches and snapping photos, great drafts of incomprehension coming off him like steam. He was even able to forget the dead.
But he was unable to ignore the little voice that had begun chattering away in his mind like some fevered ghost on speed. He’s been waiting for you to come home, Jakey. You thought that he was gone. Maybe even dead. Didn’t you?
Well, guess what?
He’s back.
And you, my friend, are fucked.
5
1,260 miles east of Nassau, Bahamas
Every now and then Mother Nature assembles a performance to show off a little. Or a lot. Scripture labels it Judgment, usually laid down by a vengeful God to keep Man humble. But through progress made in earth sciences, it is now known that natural catastrophes are nothing more than a synchronous assembly of coincidental atmospheric conditions. All that is necessary is patience and the right combination of events.
In mid-September, roughly 500 miles southwest of the Azores island chain, a massive thunderstorm stalled over the ocean. This stall was precipitated by three storm fronts moving in on one another, and they pinned the thunderstorm in place.
The water that fueled this malevolent beast had been lifted off the ocean by solar heating, driven up into the atmosphere in the form of condensation. The act of evaporation generated energy that quickly increased wind speeds over the tropical waters, and the faster winds caused increased surface evaporation, feeding the thunderstorm with even more condensation. This hoarding of fuel swelled the pregnant belly of the beast and the storm clouds mushroomed into the atmosphere, forcing more condensation to form, and a self-feeding monster was born.
The system, affected by the earth’s rotation, began to spin, a massive heat-engine with an endless supply of fuel. The metamorphosis from large thunderstorm to hurricane was complete.
There was more heat.
More evaporation.
More wind.
More condensation.
More.
More.
More.
Then the atmospheric pressure dropped several millibars.
And the hurricane began to move west.
On its journey its eye dilated to the largest in history, outsizing Carmen by over sixty miles. In the tradition of political correctness, the storm had been identified as male, and given the title of Dylan.
Hurricane Dylan was now surging toward the American coast and the water in its path was hammered into eighty-foot waves by winds that neared 200 miles an hour. And he hadn’t really started putting on his war paint.
He was saving that for landfall.
6
Day Two
Montauk, Long Island
Jake stood just above the ridge of foam and seaweed that the Atlantic had spent the night laying across the beach one wave at a time. It was still nice out, the Gulf Stream now bringing up a southern current that pulled the warm air along with it. The whole East Coast was having a good day, one of those fall mornings that let you know that summer was not yet gone. There was no taste of the hurricane that was pushing the warm front north.
He had been up early, and ate a piece of bologna on toast over the sink like he had back in his junkie days. It was funny, even back then, when his mind had been dialed to comatose most of the time, he had never become a slob. The apartment was always neat. Of course that was easy when you didn’t own a second pair of shoes and the big-ticket items in the place were the stainless-steel fork and knife that lay proudly on the cardboard place mat on the kitchen counter. Beside the heat-blued spoon and the surgical tubing.
He had walked across the living room in his bare feet, drinking a cup of coffee out of an ancient A&W paper cup that he had emptied of its paintbrushes. Something about the wax and the heat of the coffee on his fingers and the faint smell of turpentine brought out that the world had changed irrevocably. He hadn’t been here in almost thirty years and now, walking through the bright wedge of space, he realized it was as if he had never really left at all. Because our minds are not built to forget, but to ignore.
The craggy man with the flat black eyes and the tattoo he saw looking back from the big mirror beside the piano was nothing like the boy who had left here all that time ago. Twenty-eight years had been swallowed by the clock and the almost-broken piece of machinery he used for a body had changed its cells a full four times since leaving. Except for the electrical impulses stored as memories, Jake Cole was a different man.
Jake didn’t remember getting the tattoo, or even thinking about it. Back then his money had been spent on coke and heroin; he never would have wasted budgetary considerations on something as inane as a tattoo. But one morning he had woken up in the tiny apartment on Spring Street, four months behind on rent and somehow not evicted. He had come to life in the middle of the kitchen floor, his head pulsing like an infection, shivering in a pool of rusty brown water from an overflowed toilet in the next room. He stood, and when he put his arm out to steady himself on the fridge that was no longer there, he saw it, covering his arm like a black silk shirt. The ink blanketed his entire body. From wrists to ankles, ending in a jagged line just below his larynx. Flat and healed at his feet—puffy, red, and fresh at his neck. And he remembered none of it. Four months erased from his life.