The Midnight Road (20 page)

“I’m not going to kill him.”

“You want to.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Your hands are trembling.”

“No, they’re not.”

“You’ve been walking up to the line for a while, and now—”

If only it wasn’t his own voice he had to listen to. Always making the fight harder. “Now nothing.”

“It’ll win her over. She’ll sweep into your arms and you can plant one on her lips and she’ll kiss the blood off your hands.”

It was a reference to the worst-titled noir of all time. “Don’t you have a rubber bone you need to go chew on?”

“Think how good it’ll feel to finally get it done. Reach for the .38 and shoot him in the forehead.”

“That’s not how it’s going to go down.”

“First one’s the roughest. Then? It’ll never be as hard again. You’ll get what you’ve always wanted, you’ll be a completely new person.”

“It’s your fault all this happened,” Flynn said. “If you hadn’t run after me, Kelly wouldn’t have followed, and the mother wouldn’t have freaked as badly.”

“I was only trying to help!” the dog told him. “And she wasn’t going to let you take her baby brother.”

Flynn watched the tough for a while, wondering how this kid fit into his own life. He narrowed his eyes trying to see the thread that connected them together. This punk was here only because Danny had gone into the water. One event led to the other, directly, down through time and covering uncountable waves and ripples of life. There were no coincidences, everything tied together in the end. You couldn’t keep the door shut if someone was destined to walk through and find you.

He shut his eyes and listened to the tide of his mind. The past continued to pound away at the shore of the present.

Zero had been right, Flynn’s hands were beginning to twitch. He grabbed hold of the steering wheel and held on until his knuckles cracked. The Charger flushed him with cool.

The tough finished his second joint. Flynn could see him thinking about lighting another but the mutt decided not to. He leaned against the Harley and glanced back at the door and then shook his head, swept his hair from his eyes again, sneered and followed after Emma.

It was the sneer that did it. Flynn could’ve let the rest of it slide, figuring the stoner was too high to get his blood boiling. But you pull a face like that and it’s because you’re letting the monster out of the cage.

Flynn unclipped the .38 from his belt and locked it in the glove box.

“You’ll just use your hands,” Zero told him.

“No, I won’t.”

“Or the base of a lamp. Or you’ll break off a table legor…”

Sometimes you couldn’t keep your dead dogs quiet.

Flynn walked up the driveway into the garage. The heater was still on. He flipped the switch and shut it off. The tough’s angry muffled voice heaved against the wall. Flynn went to the door and didn’t knock. He walked in and followed the shouting to the living room, where the smell of blood was already in the air.

Emma Waltz sat on the floor, her coat still on. She had red trickling from the back of her head, dribbling over her ear. Wrapped meat sat defrosting at her ankle. One of her sleeves had been yanked up past the elbow and an Indian burn welt was growing purple. A line of cans and food products led from her feet to the open freezer.

The tough had started in on her before she’d had a chance to put the groceries away. He’d slapped her and she’d struggled. There was still some heat in her. He’d clasped on to her arm. She’d torn free and made it three steps away. He’d hauled off and clocked her in the back of the head with a frozen round steak.

Emma’s mouth bled. She glanced up at Flynn without surprise or interest. She looked exactly like Patricia in the car at the end, with blood on her lips. The ripple from thirty years ago was finally reaching them in full force.

Charging with his muscular arms raised, the punk screamed, “Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in my house?”

Flynn waited, and the punk hit the brakes. He’d grown used to Emma running from him, so he expected every one to do it. He didn’t know how to face someone down, he was only good at throwing shit at them. Flynn wanted to smile but couldn’t. The icy air from the freezer blew across his back.

He studied the kid. He thought he could see what initially attracted Emma. Broad shoulders, real fire, his eyes smoky and with a hint of pain. No deep intellect, this one ran on his instincts and moved with the flow of the moment. Slim and trim, exactly how all women liked them, with his long glossy hair shaping his blunt face like a mane. The wild child, a little feral. He was much younger than Flynn and Emma, maybe twenty-five.

His muscles and good looks offended Flynn. Damn near everything about him did.

Flynn figured it was a case of opposites attract. Emma was looking for whatever she felt she wasn’t. She was hoping to find someone to shave the veneer off, to strip away the insulation.

Standing behind the punk were all the men who were just like him, who’d made the same mistakes and compounded them daily with their anger, their ignorance and weakness. Flynn had met this guy a thousand times in a thousand homes with thin walls that never stopped vibrating with fury.

The sneer again. The punk couldn’t help making the face. His features naturally folded into it.

He stood tall, rearing now, trying to broaden himself into a more imposing figure. His eyes darted around the room as he searched for any kind of leverage he could find. You could look in his eyes and see his thoughts wheeling. It amused Flynn. The tough had no idea what to do next. Try to fight, make a run for it? He never once looked down at Emma.

“I said who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Flynn. Who are you?”

“Get out!”

“What’s your name?”

“I live here!”

“It doesn’t sound like you do. It sounds like you’re freeloading.”

“I’m what?”

“Sponging off Emma.”

Flynn walked to her and held his hand out, but she ignored it. She thumbed the blood from the corner of her mouth and stared at him through her hair. Here he was, two feet away, and he still couldn’t really see her.

“I pay my share!”

“You take more than your share, though.”

“What? Get out of here!”

“It’s not all your fault. Some people are just wired in a way that leads them to the worst possible choice. She’s got to work on that. Maybe we both do.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You’re crazy! You can’t be in here, nobody invited you! I don’t know you! I’m calling the cops!”

“Yeah, you do that. We’ll bust out your cigarette box and have them crawl over this place looking for the rest of your stash. What’s your name?”

Like he had to think about it. “I’m…Chad.”

“Chad?”

Even the name offended Flynn. He glanced at the frozen round steak and thought of what it would be like to smash a man’s skull in with it. Then, the old Hitchcock ploy. Cook the murder weapon and serve it to the investigating homicide dicks.

“Chad, get the fuck out of here.”

“I live here!”

“Not anymore.”

“You can’t—” Chad began doing a little boy gotta-piss dance, sort of hopping in place, his knees bent. “You can’t!”

“You’re moving out. Go crash with one of your burnout buddies.”

This was it. Sometimes you ran up to the moment of truth and sometimes it ran up to you. Here they were. Chad had to jump left or right now. Either come rushing at Flynn or leap on his Harley, he had no other choice. It all depended on whether he had a real reason, in his heart, to fight. For his pride or his home, his woman or his action, or just to protect his pot. If anything pushed him forward, it would probably be the pot.

Chad did his dance some more, swung close like he might take a poke at Flynn, didn’t, then hit the garage door and was gone.

Flynn sighed and went to one knee beside Emma.

He could only see the subtle glimmer of her eyes and a hint of her bloody mouth. Not much else as she peered through her sweaty clinging hair at him. Flynn wanted to reach out with both hands and tenderly brush her hair back, pin it up, tie it in a ponytail, do some damn thing with it. But he kept his distance.

A strange urge to pick up the scattered cans filled him. Put them away in the cabinets, cook her a fine dinner, light a few candles. He thought, This might be the place to start again. Move in, remove the bad memories one at a time, like buffing away fingerprints. Cleaning up someone else’s house was so much easier than cleaning up your own.

He’d come back from the dead for a reason. Maybe she was it.

“Emma?” he said. “Do you remember me?”

He’d been waiting thirty years to hear Emma Waltz speak to him. He hoped they would be words of power and wonder. He hoped that, broken as she was, she would recognize his own cracks and flaws and know how to aid him. He hoped. It was something new.

You got a lot of weird thoughts in the night that picked up speed through the day. His chest heaved and he felt light-headed. He hadn’t killed anybody, he was still in control. He waited for salvation from a woman who’d been knocked down by a steak.

Motion at the window drew his attention. Flynn spun to his feet and got between it and Emma, thinking it was possibly Chad, outside on the lawn with a shotgun, having finally steamed himself into action. Or the shadow in the blizzard making another effort to insert himself into Flynn’s life.

But it was only falling snow weaving across the glass.

He could feel death out there waiting in the wind. Danny outside with Patricia, watching to see what would happen next. Not holding hands, showing no love for each other. Aloof and tied through eternity. Her baby too. His baby as well. His parents in the freezing alley, angry, defeated, disappointed. All the dead cases, his mistakes pooling together.

His hands trembled again, the nerve more alive than he was. The snow blew harder, urging him faster down the midnight road.

“Emma?”

He let his hand slowly waft toward her. She stared at him. Her mouth hung open, tears filling her eyes. They didn’t fall. Perhaps she’d twisted through life full of guilt because she too had never cried when it was most important to do so.

Emma Waltz leaped to her feet, turned, and fled through the front door.

The freezer blew cold air at the back of Flynn’s neck, the open door at his face. He moved to the doorway and watched her get into her car, tear out of the driveway, skid in the street and rapidly advance into the oncoming whiteness.

Flynn still hadn’t heard her voice or seen her face.

FIFTEEN

Shepard’s fresh-faced, delicately featured doctor, making his rounds followed by eight even younger med students, played to the girls and kept showing off his inhumanly white-capped teeth.

He spoke with flourish and seemed overly aware of his glossy curls, constantly fingering and primping them. Flynn didn’t blame him. You couldn’t help preening before beauty, even in a hospital room stinking of astringents and bedsores. Flynn felt the need to do the same thing, tug at his gray hair, try to appear younger than he was.

No matter how close death got you still wanted to look good.

The doctor flashed a light in Shepard’s eyes and ears, pulled back the sheets and checked the shunts and stints in Shepard’s chest. The suture bisected him from his sternum to his belly button, a painfully pink line of shining flesh. Flynn expected to get thrown out or told to wait elsewhere, but no one said anything to him.

The doc made inside jokes about medical procedures and serums that Flynn didn’t understand. He didn’t mind. He tried to be amiable. He grinned a lot. It wasn’t helping.

Flynn’s hand flashed out and gripped the doc’s wrist. The kid—he was another kid, they were all kids, this one worth maybe 400k a year—stared down at Flynn’s hand, then looked in his eyes, then looked back down at the hand, then again checked Flynn’s eyes. The students milled out in the hallway uncertain of what to do, what to say, what the next move might be.

“When’s he going to wake up?” Flynn asked.

“It’s impossible to tell.”

“An estimate.”

“I don’t have one.”

“I thought he wasn’t in a coma but only nonresponsive.”

“He is.”

“How can that be? It’s been six weeks.”

“Yes,” the doc agreed. They were always agreeable, terrified of lawsuits, unwilling to say anything of value. “Are you a relative?”

“Yeah, I’m his twin brother. Billy.”

The doc had no file to check, no paperwork in his hands. He glanced over at Shepard and back to Flynn, still not seeing, truly seeing, either of them. An expansive ache filled Flynn’s chest as he thought of his dying mother in a room no different than this, a doctor no different than this, a hopeless situation much the same. Flynn equally helpless, ready to hurl a chair out a window just to see someone scurry.

The doctor said, “I understand your frustration.”