The Midnight Road (24 page)

“I think you should sit back and be my go-to man,” Flynn told her. “I’ll front run this thing, you be the behind-the-scenes gal who actually solves the crime. Let me be the Neanderthal.”

“You’re not that tough.”

“You’re right. But help me to figure this out anyway.”

He slumped back on the pillows and Jessie Gray unwound her body across his, running her lips against his throat.

“I’m a beautiful young thing lying in your bed on a snowy night, wanting you, needing you, throwing out all kinds of damn signals so you’ll roll over and screw me again, and you want to keep talking about murder. You want my therapist’s number?”

NINETEEN

After they’d made love again, Jessie fell asleep with her head resting on his belly. She semisnored, puffing quietly through her lips, a strand of hair wafting and falling and drifting again. Flynn lay there watching it, trying not to breathe too hard so he didn’t jostle her, his thoughts turning redder while he knocked out his second pack since midnight.

The phone rang at 2
A.M.

He eased her aside. Jessie didn’t wake. He padded into the kitchen and answered. “Hello?”

He heard nothing, and he almost repeated himself. But the silence soon emerged into the room with him, a great atmosphere of emptiness. The silence stretched on for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, then more than a minute. And then, in a great leap it became some amount of time he couldn’t guess at. He moved through the years and the years moved through him.

This is it, Flynn thought. He’s on the line. If the cops still have me bugged, maybe this is the mistake that’ll reel the shadow out of the snow and into the fire.

But he knew the cops had packed it all up. Maybe for a second time, maybe for a third, but they were gone and Flynn, for all his ghosts, was alone.

Behind him, his dead brother stepped out from some black corner, coming closer until he was nearly next to Flynn and yet somehow still hadn’t reached him.

Zero sat on the rug and stared solemnly at him, his nub of a tail twitching. Flynn shut his eyes and urged himself deeper into the receiver listening for any sound.

His mother came in and put her hand on his shoulder.

His old man, where the hell was his old man? Figures his father wouldn’t show. He was haunting some other family in the house where he’d died, sitting in their recliner, in front of their television, staring down some exorcist hurling holy water at him. The old man just sipping his beer, cursing out the Jets quarterback.

The phone wanted to fly out of his hand. There was a dark power in it, either from the killer or from Flynn or maybe because of them both. You could never tell if the evil urged you forward or if you cajoled it toward you. Flynn thought perhaps God Himself was calling to discuss paying off some old debts.

He clenched the phone tighter. The plastic groaned in his fist. There was only an immense swelling of despair and desolation. So great he never would have believed it before his death.

He almost spoke Emma’s name.

Zero said, “Who is it? Is it for me?”

“It’s you,” he said into the phone. The waiting continued. “You want to tell me what this is all about? Is it Christina Shepard or something else?”

He was there again, in the Charger, watching the water swell across his face, feeling himself dying with numbness first and then the pervasive nothingness that followed. He wondered what it would be like the second time he started down the midnight road. If it would happen in a similar way, in the car, or if would just be a bullet to the head, a taser to the heart.

He started to tremble in the cold, aware of his own weakness. He embraced it because it humanized him. He didn’t take such things for granted anymore. Not after experiencing that instant
before
he returned to life, when he did not exist, and never had and never would.

“Well?” he said.

“I am afflicted,”
a whisper told him.

He couldn’t tell if it was male or female. That wasn’t so easy to do. You always leaned one way or another, but Flynn really couldn’t get any kind of bead.

There was anguish in the voice. The deep sorrow that literally tore people apart, gave them pneumonia, shattered their teeth, sent them to the madhouse. Flynn got the sense that the voice itself had no name, that the thing the person had now become had never been identified. It lurked unseen and unknown, perhaps even to itself.

“What’s that got to do with me? What do you want from me?”

Zero pawed at Flynn’s ankle and said, “Tell him I said hello.”

Maybe Bragg really had hit the river and been smashed against rocks by the rapids. He could’ve started off crazy and gotten steadily worse. Maybe Bragg was out of his mind, all right, but Flynn couldn’t put the voice together with a military man, no matter how far out of his tree he may have gone. Maybe this was Frickin’ Alvin’s doing. Maybe Chad’s. Maybe Shepard had a brother out there blaming Flynn. Flynn had gotten under somebody’s skin and had infected the hell out of him.

“Thanks for giving me a ring,” Flynn said, a little light-headed. “I appreciate it.” His lips squirmed across his face, he couldn’t be sure what they were doing. “Now listen up. I’m going to put a hot knife through you. I’m going to spit in your blood.”

The connection broke. Flynn waited, still listening, afraid to move. His mother left him. Danny faded back. Zero sat on the couch peering down at the open newspaper. He was checking the Dow.

Flynn touched his mouth and realized he was grinning. He couldn’t help it.

He’d outwaited the bastard. He’d been able to stand it longer than the spook in the shadows. He didn’t have to chase anybody, the bad boy was going to keep coming after him, to him. But that would take time, and Flynn hoped no one else would get murdered.

One way or another it would be over soon. Flynn went back to bed, wrapped his arms around Jessie Gray and had his first good night’s sleep since he’d died.

TWENTY

Mooney sat behind his desk in his leather wingback chair and had a whole new tic going. He toyed with his shaggy beard, brushing it outward from his neck, then smoothing it back into place. Out and back, repetitively, consistently. Giving Flynn the professional cool eye the entire time he jacked his beard.

Flynn tried to ignore all the things he mistrusted about Mooney. He forced himself to look through the man’s issues—layers and webs and veils just like Flynn had himself—and simply see someone who might be able to help him find out what he needed to know about the shadow in the snow.

Mooney stared at Flynn and said nothing. The moment lengthened, the mood remained cool but not altogether cold. Mooney was warming to the idea that Flynn had come back on his own. The initial obscene fascination that Mooney had shown wasn’t there this time around.

“I won’t ask you to lie down,” Mooney said.

“Good, see that? We’re making progress already.”

“I notice you’re wearing your gun today.”

“Yes, I am.”

“I’m not comfortable with that.”

“I don’t blame you,” Flynn said, but he didn’t unclip the .38.

Again steepling his fingers, Mooney rested his chin on them. Flynn wondered why Mooney found the position so comfortable and why he himself found it so irritating. Why everything annoyed him in here, even the smell of the leather furniture polish. Somebody had really given the place a serious dousing.

“I’m surprised you’ve come back,” Mooney said.

“Me a lot more than you.”

“But I can appreciate that you’re trying to get to the root of your problems.”

“Actually, I think I need your help with something else.”

“I see,” Mooney said. “All right then. You seem to be under less strain.”

“I know I’ll catch him now.”

“The killer? Why is that?”

“I can outlast him.”

Flynn mentioned the notes and the phone call. The fact that the shadow in the blizzard was unraveling just a little faster than Flynn was himself. Mooney wavered between fascination, self-interest and a genuine desire to help. Flynn knew Mooney must be in analysis himself and wondered what the man’s psychiatrist thought of him.

But he couldn’t let himself become distracted. He caught Mooney’s gaze, looked deep and thought he made some contact. If Mooney was going to be able to help him at all, now was the time.

Flynn asked, “What’s he trying to tell me?”

“On the face it’s self-evident. The subject is in pain.”

“Sure, but what can I do with that? How do I draw him out?”

Mooney quit it with the tics and just sat there, centered, confident. Sitting with Flynn like two guys taking in a beer, watching a ball game. “I’m not absolutely certain that’s applicable. We already know what draws him. You do.”

“Yeah.”

“And he uses others to send his messages. So to bring him forward is to endanger others. We don’t want to urge him out in the same fashion as before.”

Flynn had to rethink it. “No. How do I get him to focus all of his attention on me?”

“You’re assuming I know all the details. I don’t. Start at the beginning.”

You could go back and back and never quite get to the beginning. Flynn decided to take a chance and laid it out, starting with Shepard’s tip. Nuddin in the cage, scarred. Christina Shepard holding the gun, the talk of her father, her husband’s betrayal, the escape into the ice, the wipe-out in the Long Island Sound. The murders. He still kept the dead talking dog to himself.

“Do you have specific questions?” Mooney asked.

“First, why this aggression toward Nuddin? The beatings, the cage?”

“There’s no clear-cut answer of course. The family may have felt humiliated by the fact that they had a mentally challenged person in the family. Or it may have been an attempt at some kind of rehabilitation. Autism is still a vastly unknown disorder referenced with a great many conflicting theories and contradictory forms of treatment.”

“She said she was protecting him. Saving him from the world.”

“Typical of such personality disorder, the need to ‘overprotect’ to the point of harming the individual. It’s fear-related, I believe, not instilled anger, evidence to the contrary. We think of one person hurting another as an act of rage, but it can be an act of love as well, misguided or not. A simplistic example is of a father spanking a child to teach him not to play with matches. A more pertinent illustration might be a mother terrified for her teenage daughter’s safety when the girl doesn’t return all night. In the morning, when the daughter returns home safe and sound, the terrified and frazzled mother smacks her, perhaps beats her mercilessly. The motivation is love and fear entwined. Self-hatred projected outward but catalyzed by you. Implemented through you.”

Flynn whispered, “But what did I do?”

“The subject’s rage at himself…it’s escalating. He’s losing control, the phone call proves that, but he remains immensely patient. Killing the old woman in the theater ladies’ room demonstrates that.”

“He started off by shooting a woman in the head, and
now
he’s losing control?”

“That’s not where your lives intersected. He chose you before that point for some unknown reason. But in essence, yes. The killer is calculated and involved with your life. Collected, dedicated, forbearing. But his direct communications with you—the letters and the phone call—that is the subject emotionally uncoiling. That’s him at his weakest. He values your participation in these situations. Your opinion must matter to him.”

“Jesus Christ. Why?”

“Perhaps it is someone you know very well.”

Mooney was great at stating the obvious, but hearing it again, out loud, made Flynn think about it even harder. Did he already know who the killer was? Had he seen a glimpse of a face but just wasn’t getting it?

On film they slowed down the movie and did a nice big close-up of the single frame where the killer can be seen. Maybe some people really could remember like that, if they focused and tried hard enough, but Flynn just couldn’t get there.

“I don’t understand how it’s all connected. The suffering and the rage, and the love and the fear.”

“Perhaps it’s not,” Mooney said, throwing it out while stroking his beard again. He was onto something. He felt proud of himself. “Perhaps you’re actually dealing with two individuals here.”

Two shadows in the snow. Two figures bracing him on the road. Getting bumped on either side and squeezed down the middle of the lane.

Frickin’ Alvin and Marianne. Chad and Emma. Mooney and Sierra, teaming up to wipe Flynn out of the game for reasons he couldn’t understand. Sure, why not, you never knew anyone the way you thought you did. You didn’t even know yourself. Maybe Shepard had two brothers. Maybe Bragg had picked up a partner. Flynn saw himself, brain-damaged and bisected, a split personality doing all this to himself, then forgetting about it.
Sure, why not, you never knew—

Flynn slumped in the chair and said, “Ah shit, don’t tell me that.” He turned to the window and thought about who might be out there and how many of them there were. Why stop at two? Maybe three. Maybe ten. A hundred cars following the Dodge under the ice. A fucking gridlock on the midnight road.