The Midnight Road (30 page)

A long hesitation, his hands squeezing in fists, then loosening, then tightening. Finally he said, “My parents. Yes.”

“What about them?”

“They—they—” Another pause. He was trying. Despite it all the boy was showing courage. Facing up to his greatest heartache and shame.

“What did they do?”

The words fell out of him like stones. “They never abused me. I hated them. I always hated them. My mother always nagging me with stories of her own life, of all the losers she knew. Her brothers, her father, her boyfriends, holding me up to them. All she knew were scumbags, why should I be different? Trying to make me feel guilty for things they did, for all their mistakes. My old man always staring at me. Both of them looking at me the same way. Coked out of their heads but always looking at me. Him wanting me to be better than him, better than I was, but never good enough, no matter what I did. Always staring, disappointed sometimes, and sometimes proud. He couldn’t make up his mind. They made no sense. They were crazy. And all the time both of them doing coke, like that made everything okay, like that put them above all the losers they were always talking about. Selling enough so it didn’t matter, you know? Always stoned but still going to work, still acting like they were fine middle-class examples, even when the drugs were out on the kitchen table and they were cutting them with baby powder. Screaming at me to cut the lawn, like that was important. Screaming at me to wax the cars. Always screaming. Telling me to do my homework while they put on the twist ties. I’d have to be crazy not to hate them. I had to save myself. It doesn’t matter if nobody else understands, I know I did what I had to do. I got them in trouble. It was easy. I told a counselor at school. He sent me to the nurse’s office to get an examination. You know what the clincher was? I cleaned my mother’s brush and took a few of her hairs and stuck them down my under wear. There it was. They were both busted for that. The narcs and shit came afterward. I had to do it. Fuck cutting the lawn.”

The pressure of the dead increased. It wanted to cave in his chest, crush him down into a square of pulp. He felt the kids he’d failed tightening their hold, the unfulfilled life of Grace Brooks gathering force. They weren’t here to condemn but to offer their own aid, to help him along the course of his purpose.

“What were you going to do, kid?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You were going to clean up, weren’t you? You were going to try to hide her body?” Flynn could barely open his mouth wide enough to speak. His jaws kept tightening, he wanted to snarl. “Could you do that? What, grab a chainsaw? Dump her on the side of Vet’s Highway? Bury her in the backyard?”

“No.”

“Where is he, Trevor? Where is the rotten son of a bitch?”

The footsteps in the snow. Flynn had known there was something a little off about them.

The other shadow in the blizzard, the footsteps in the snow, with the weight on the balls of his feet.

“Where is he? Where is Nuddin?”

The boy chewed his tongue until he got blood going. Whenever he spoke all Flynn could see was more red. “He knows my secret. He was going to tell. It didn’t matter if anyone else listened.”

“Nuddin doesn’t talk.”

“He’s always talking! He never shuts up! He just talks
…quietly.
He knew my secret a few nights after we met. I told him. I needed to tell somebody. I thought he was retarded. I thought he was innocent. I thought he was my friend. But he’s not. He’s smart, or at least, something inside him is smart. A part of him. It can do amazing things. It’s insane. It’s evil.”

Flynn could only think of the joyous smile, the humming, the hugging. “How did they keep in contact?”

“Petersen’s name badge. He’s in the phone book. On the Net. Nuddin knows computers too. Before I came here I had a little side business…nothing big, just ripping off cell phones and minute cards and selling them.”

“You got him the phone.”

“A friend of mine. I still have connections. I didn’t know what he was doing at first. But his talk. He’s got this way. It digs in. It doesn’t let go. I don’t think Petersen even knew who he was talking to at first. But they…brought it out of each other, this craziness, this sickness. Nuddin…he told me, he was always telling me, always whispering about it.”

Flynn grabbed the boy by the throat and lifted. “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

“I couldn’t!”

“You could’ve, damn you! You could’ve saved lives! You could’ve saved Sierra!”

“I couldn’t!”

Flynn threw the kid down again. He wondered if he had the strength to allow his greatest secret out into the world. If he had any secrets left.

“Petersen never fired the rifle, did he? He didn’t kill Angela Soto.”

“He knew her. He fucked her. He loved her. He had sex with her a lot of times and he saved her life when she overdosed once. He found her, tried to help her, but she couldn’t be helped. He loved her, but he hated her because she wouldn’t stop being a hooker. He was crazy about her. He was crazy. He brought her back after her heart stopped and from then on I guess he acted like he owned her life. He always wanted to kill her. But he couldn’t do it, until he met Nuddin.”

“Why in front of me?”

The kid’s eyes were twirling in his head. “You know why. It was your fault. They wanted to hurt you. They wanted you to have blood in your face. They owned you too. He studied you. Researched you on the Net. Archives. He learned all about you. Read the papers, that girl reporter always writing about you. It didn’t matter who brought you the message, so long as someone did. No matter who they killed they were blaming it on you, because you were the one who brought them together, see? You freed him from the cage. You set him loose on Petersen. You sent the sickness out. Nuddin doesn’t like to be alone. He never wants to be alone. That’s why he had me. That’s why he had Petersen. He
needs
someone else with him. And Petersen needed someone to push him over the edge. You brought them together. It was all your fault, right?”

Jesus Christ, the logic of the retarded and the insane. This kid refusing to take any responsibility. Petersen admitted that he’d already been letting people die, but that he’d never fired a gun. Enjoying the ride. And Nuddin…what the hell was Nuddin?

“He found Leo Coleman’s rifle in the garage,” Flynn said, thinking about Sierra’s ex, the bank robber, in a ten-gallon hat, throwing the rifle in Lake Ronkonkoma.

“An old Remington 30.06,” Trevor told him. “All rusted and broken apart. Locked up in a trunk in the garage. That’s the first thing he did when he got here, was go through the whole house, top to bottom, the entire garage, everywhere, every drawer. It was cute, when we caught him, you know, nobody could get mad. Just a retarded guy playing games. But he was just finding what ever he could use. He cleaned the pieces of the rifle and put them together. He’s been trained. He could do it with his eyes closed. Nuddin’s a natural. His father taught him, he said. The thing inside him, whatever part of him it is, it’s good with guns. With cars. He knows an engine better than me. He can drive like a pro racer, but he hates being alone. When he came back today—”

“Sierra never noticed the car missing?”

“No, she’s hardly ever here. She’s always working. She’s not going to think her clunker was gone. She’s not going to notice another set of tire tracks in the snow. And Nuddin, he’s good with people too. They’ll do whatever he wants. He manipulates them. He looks at you and he knows. He gets inside you. We’re the stupid ones.”

Petersen making runs with Nuddin. Setting up kills because after all his time working to bring back the dead and restore the living he’d started to enjoy letting his evil loose. His own words in the Devil’s mouth.

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. But he’s got Kelly.”

“Jesus.”

“He needs someone.”

“Why not you?”

“He doesn’t need me now. He knows you’re coming for him.”

Flynn nodded. They were traveling the circle, heading around the track, coming up behind the place where it had to end, where it had started.

He fingered the .38. “There’s nowhere for you to run, Trevor. It’s all going to come out into the light now. You realize that?”

“Yes. It’s a relief. I never should have been afraid. Nothing’s as bad as having it inside. Call the police. I’ll wait for them.”

Easy as that. Jesus. Flynn checked the children once more and found they were beginning to respond when he shook them. They were snapping out of it. He hoped none of them would fully awaken and see what had happened to Sierra.

He phoned Raidin and told him about the kid and Sierra and how it all tied in. He said nothing about Nuddin. He wasn’t sure Raidin would believe him. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

“Don’t leave the scene,” Raidin said.

“I have to.”

“There are children there who need you to look after them.”

“They’re starting to come around. I can’t do anything for them.”

“Don’t run. It’ll make you a suspect.”

“I’m already a suspect, just not a very good one. You know I didn’t do any of this.”

“Who did?”

“I’ll find out. I’ll finish this. It’ll be over tonight. The kid will explain.”

“You’re going to crack up out there on the streets, the way you’re juiced. Don’t do it.”

“I have to.”

“If you flee, there will be a warrant out for you.”

Flynn figured it was an empty threat. At this point they all were. What could stop him from going the last mile?

“I’ll be out on the road,” he said, and hung up.

He turned to the boy. Flynn said, “You don’t have any more chances left, kid,” then slugged the teen twice in the stomach and clipped him on the chin.

He caught Trevor as the boy flopped over unconscious and laid him on the couch three feet from his dead foster mother.

Flynn touched Sierra once more on the side of the face, dabbing the tips of his fingers in her sticky blood. It was an affirmation of life over death, of friendship and family over lonely steadfastness.

He started for the door when an idea struck him. It was so foolish and bizarre he thought it might actually work. If not, what was one more stupid act? He checked Sierra’s bathroom and bedroom until he found what he needed. Then he got in the Charger and brought all his dead with him.

TWENTY-EIGHT

It took him almost two hours to get there because of the road conditions. The salters and sanders and plows tried to keep up, but even they were being entombed with snow. Flynn welded the front end of the Dodge to the brake lights of eighteen-wheelers and stuck with them, letting them forge the path ahead. It was as safe as it was going to get out here. The radio told him a state of emergency had been issued. It gave him hope that his fate was tied to something besides himself.

By the time he got off the Expressway, heading north, the night having fallen like a black blade slashing through a bucket of ice chips, he was the only car out there. Flynn liked the empty road. He skidded and barreled into the snow-choked shoulder, bounced off, looped into a veering donut and kept heading toward Port Jack. Nothing would stop him.

“You’re going to die tonight,” Zero said.

“No, I’m not.”

“And she’ll die with you.”

“No fuckin’ way.”

The radio whispered about broken records: most consecutive days of blizzard, most snowfall, most consecutive days under twenty degrees. Greatest number of weather-related deaths. Car accidents. Frozen homeless. Sick elderly. The hospitals packed. The worst New York winter since they started collating weather data. The newscasters sounded surprised by the strain in their own voices. Jessie Gray had been right, people just hadn’t been paying attention.

He could beat it. Inside the car he could do almost any thing.

“He’s going to kill you,” Zero said.

“No, he’s not.”

“He’s been waiting, because you’re both just alike.”

“You say the sweetest things, you know that?”

“You both live in your own worlds.”

“Go choke on a chew toy, you little fucker.”

It was almost over. He knew the storm would soon be finished. He and Kelly would drive back down the dark isolated Port Jack streets, and by the time they got back to the South Shore the temperature would’ve gone up enough to start water droplets falling from the icicles.

The dead dog asked, “You know who I really am, don’t you?”

“You’re my brain damage. Nobody can be dead for twenty-eight minutes and not suffer from it.”

“You’re crazy all right, but not from that.”

“Is Sister Murteen really in hell?”

“She practically runs the place.”

Zero moved even closer. “You have no love. There’s no reason for you to stay. Marianne doesn’t want you. Jessie Gray only used you. Emma Waltz…well, you already know that’s just ridiculous.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s no one else. You have no one else.”