The Midnight Road (27 page)

The killer was good in high wind. He’d taken out Angela Soto from a hundred yards away, in a storm.

Flynn hissed beneath his breath, his hair and face already covered with a sheen of ice. He searched the other end of the lot and saw nothing but white. With a growl of frustration Flynn turned his head left, wondering if the Goat had backed up or broken through the exit gate. Instead he saw the car parked less than fifty feet away, out in front of the women’s bathroom. The tire tracks slewed up to the wall, then veered and wrapped around. Why?

The driver’s door was open. Flynn cautiously rolled up on the GTO. The rifle lay propped in the empty backseat.

Why didn’t he take it?

Flynn got out. He’d been insane to drive here the way he had, crazier than the killer, who’d slowed down, who’d wanted to live. Maybe that gave him an edge. Maybe it proved the dead dog was right.

Zero hopped down out of the Charger and sauntered through the snow. Flynn drew his .38 and approached the Goat, thinking of movies where the PI crept, slinked, lurked and serpentined to keep from getting blasted out of his socks. The shadow out in this blizzard would probably be on the other side of the snack bar. If he’d taken the rifle, he could have plinked Flynn off with hardly any effort. Why hadn’t he taken it?

A styrofoam box, weighted down by what appeared to be hamburger, flapped its top near the front-left tire. The bad boy had gotten out of the Goat so quickly he’d knocked some of his trash out of the wheel well. Flynn kneeled, extended his arm and stuck the .38 inside the car as he checked it. Nothing. He kept low, blocked by the car door.

He squinted into the storm, the wind burning his eyes. He shielded his face, looked down and saw footsteps leading away.

“What’s that smell?” Zero asked.

She’s got burn marks to the chest. Maybe a taser.

No, not a taser.

A defibrillator. Zap paddles.

They wheeled Florence out on a gurney and put her in an ambulance parked at the curb.

Flynn picked up the styrofoam box, sniffed it and his features, already white and cold as deep-cut ice, hardened further.

He said, “Tabasco.”

TWENTY-FOUR

So what the hell.

No reason to play it safe or go in smart or quiet. He didn’t know how to do it anyway. Flynn started off toward the snack shacks, pressing down the rising memories of summers when Danny would take him out here to bodysurf the waves and dig holes down to where the sand crabs crawled. The very early days when Flynn was maybe three or four, riding his father’s shoulders, his mother dressed in a white one-piece suit and a rubber bathing cap. The old man chugging beer even though it was illegal, always getting into a shouting match with the lifeguards and security.

The footprints grew more visible in the thin snow covering the cement, protected from the driving wind by the angle of the showers’ brick walls.

Despite it all, Flynn felt safe. Stupid but safe. The killer had never come at him head-on. He’d always put the tap on someone else. Always hung up the phone, always run at the first sign of possible confrontation. Never wanting to stand toe-to-toe, always rabbiting as quickly as he could.

So what the hell.

Flynn rushed around the wall, head down, following the tracks. The waves crashed a hundred yards off down the beach. The force of the snow straightened him up for a moment as he struggled against it. Turning, the storm battering him like any other enemy, so that he kept wheeling, waiting.

You had to put the dare out there just to make the other guy jump. He held his pistol up so there’d be no mistake, so the fucker wouldn’t think he was helpless or just coming out here to talk, to get answers.

There.

A shadow in the blizzard, down by the water.

Flynn made for it.

“Hold it!” Flynn shouted, pointing the .38. His hand was so cold it felt welded to the gun metal.

A blur of black motion cut a swathe through the white as the bad boy hurled something out into the water.

Flynn thought, There it goes, the one piece of evidence I’ll need most. I don’t know what it is but because I was a step too slow, the whole thing is botched.

Then he saw the face of God.

The round, eager puffy-faced lord of all creation who smelled like hamburger and Tabasco sauce. Divinity with a gap-toothed smile and an uncivil tongue. Who spoke in a voice of thunder saying that Flynn was the luckiest son of a bitch he’d ever heard of.

Dressed in dark blue, wearing a knitted hat, gloves, his coat zippered up to the collar, insulated.

It was the EMT who’d saved Flynn’s life, the guy who’d brought him back.

“You,” Flynn said as pellets of ice tore at his lips. “You. What the hell did I ever do to you?”

A pudgy-faced god of hurt, perhaps even shame. Flynn got up closer and read it in his eyes, seeing the guy’s embarrassment at having been caught, but trying to keep a cap on it. Sort of calm and resolved about the moment, but thinking of deeper things. No guilt or prodding conscience, nothing like that, just disgrace and loss. He stared back at Flynn, full of grief but almost glad that they’d finally come face-to-face again.

“You let my secret loose,” the guy said, and let out a sad chuckle like he knew it sounded stupid as hell.

“Me? I did?”

“You did.”

“What secret?” Flynn said.

“I met someone as sick as me. Sicker than me.”

“Who?”

“The Devil. He whispers. I’ve done a lot of bad things. I let people die. It’s my job to save them and I let them die. You want to know why? Because I could. No other reason! I just let them fade. I let them go, just because I felt like it. You know how many? Dozens! Dozens over the years! I let them die. Sick, right?”

Flynn said, “Right.”

The EMT let out a broad smile that filled with snowflakes. “But you, I fought for you. Harder than I ever fought for anyone before. I wanted to save you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I let some die, and I try like hell to bring others back. I told you, it’s sick. That’s the way I do it, that’s the power I have. And he knew it. He saw through me and he knew it the second he looked into my eyes. The Devil knows what you do and what you hide.”

“Sister Murteen told us the same thing in Catholic School.”

“He speaks to you in your own voice. With your own words.”

It made Flynn back up a step. He swallowed thickly, couldn’t speak for a moment. Zero, the devil in him, with his voice. Was this guy talking to dead dogs too? “What the fuck do you mean?”

“He knew it immediately. He noticed my hands, saw it in my eyes, the very first minute. He let me know and I was afraid. He didn’t have to tell anyone. All he had to do was whisper it to the world and let my sins out. Do you understand that? That was it, that was all. My evil was down deep where I could pretend I controlled it, instead of it controlling me. My evil was down deep where it was supposed to be, and he unlatched the cellar door. Once that happened, I couldn’t stop. I liked what we were doing too much.”

“Who?” Flynn asked. “Who else is a part of this?”

“I loved Angela. I wanted her dead.”

“What?”

“I loved her so much, you could never understand. She was mine. I could do what I wanted with her.”

“You sick bastard.”

“His voice comes from hell. You can’t resist. It feels too good to let go.”

The EMT pursed his lips and his eyes flitted, his lashes flecked with ice crystals, not looking for a way out but completely focused on some internal dialogue with himself. Maybe seeing how it would all look laid out on the six o’clock news. What he’d have to say to his girlfriend, his brothers, his parents, his aunt Edna, the people he graduated high school with who’d be saying things like
I always knew that one was sick in the head.
All the girls who ever turned him down realizing what a narrow miss they’d had.

And more than that, but Flynn still didn’t know what it was. The EMT’s eyes cleared and he stared over at the water and then at Flynn, his features sagging like he wanted to cry.

Flynn struggled for another question and asked, “What’s it all about?”

The guy wetting his lips, his mouth working but refusing to answer. He was resisting something, trying to overcome it. Flynn wondered how a guy with this much funky wiring had managed to bring him back from twenty-eight minutes down the road.

“Why did you write that you were my brother?”

“I didn’t.”

Flynn swallowed hard. “Who did?”

The paramedic, this mook who’d been his savior, reached into his pocket as Flynn said, “Hey, now, no,” and drew a tiny popgun .32.

The pistol was so tiny it nearly disappeared in his hand. Flynn held the .38 out at arm’s length, pointed at the bad boy who’d gotten him out of the water, and said, “Don’t.”

“Don’t let them bring me back.”

“What? Who?”

“Any of them.”

Flynn got it then as the EMT raised the pistol and shoved the barrel under his chin. The gloves he wore were so nice and thick he could hardly get his finger through the trigger guard. The guy didn’t want to come back from the midnight road, didn’t want anybody trying to save him. Flynn felt stupid holding a gun on a guy about to blast his own brains out but didn’t know what else to do. A strong urge swept through him to get off a shot first. Make sure the bastard died by Flynn’s hand and not his own.

He said, “Wait, hold it, don’t—” His pleas sounded especially weak but the EMT paused a second because Flynn had told him to wait.

Actually listening to him. Standing there eager to hear whatever Flynn might say next.

Flynn came up empty for a second and said, “I don’t even know your name.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Flynn supposed he was right. “How’d you find out about Emma Waltz?”

“You should’ve stayed dead.”

“It’s your fault I came back. Who knows your secret?”

“Everyone will know soon.”

“How’d you learn to fire a rifle so well?”

“I never fired a gun in my life,” the guy answered, and slowly began tugging on the trigger, like he might be able to feel the bullet burrow through him inch by inch, wanting to feel it all the way.

Smiling, two hot tears squirting across his cheeks, carving deep twin channels in the packed frozen crust covering him, he blew the top of his head off.

Flynn checked the EMT’s pockets and found nothing. He was hoping for a cell phone but he thought that was probably what the guy had tossed into the water. So they couldn’t find the Devil.

Flynn walked back toward the Goat, ready to search through it. He needed a name. He couldn’t go around calling this guy the bad boy or God. He made his way to where the Dodge was parked and saw odd tracks in the snow. Footprints but a little off. Flynn couldn’t make it out with the snow still coming down, erasing everything into a world of empty whiteness.

The GTO was gone. Someone else had been around.

That’s why the tire tracks had gone up to the wall of the women’s bathroom and then veered and wrapped back around. The driver had let someone out. Goddamn it, he should’ve realized. Somebody else had run to the far side of the bathroom and come around again while he’d been down on the beach.

“No,” he said, because Mooney had been right.

There were two of them.

TWENTY-FIVE

They surrounded him under the shelter of the empty snack bar and prattled to one another, drinking coffee and taking photos and setting up the little protective lean-to the same way they had when Angela Soto had been murdered in the Stonybrook Hospital parking lot. They were nicer to him this time, maybe because he’d gone through his own rebirth of blood, and now he could be one of the boys.

Acting as if he’d shot the guy, they took away his .38 in an evidence bag and brought him a styrofoam cup of black coffee. They asked if he wanted cream or sugar. He said no. They walked in and out, sometimes laughing.

Raidin liked to cut a path all right, even when it folded up behind him in the swirling snow. He did it now, the other homicide dicks and forensic teams fading back a step or two as he stepped forward, still all in black, black breaking through all the white, looking as ill as he had the first time Flynn had seen him.

He was wearing a fedora. A fucking fedora, Jesus. Talk about a guy with a noir fetish.

He eyed first the bolt cutters laid up against the wall, then the broken lock on the cement beneath the metal shutters of the hot-dog stand. Flynn was impressed. You’d think having a corpse out there in the freeze would be enough to overlook the little stuff, but no, Raidin took it all in, probably to make sure a new lock was bought for the owner of the stand, a letter of apology stamped by the commissioner.

Raidin had a lot to say but had to take a second to frame it correctly. “You’re the one who caused all the pileups and backups on the Southern State. You could’ve killed somebody.”