The Midnight Road (5 page)

Sierra leaned close and peered into his eyes. “They say you might be brain-damaged. Is it true?”

“It must be,” Flynn said, “for a second there you looked good.”

“God in heaven, you really are screwed then. Maybe I’ve been setting my sights too high. Instead of looking for a surgeon, I need to prowl around the patients.”

“The brain-dead ones. It would probably be in your best interest.”

Sierra Humbold was fifty and looked sixty because some of the plastic work hadn’t completely taken. Due to a crushed cheek, her left eye was significantly lower than the right. The corner of her bottom lip pulled obscenely aside so you always got a look at a couple of her dry, nubby teeth. She wore a different wig every couple of weeks because she’d had some blunt trauma to the head. There must’ve been suture scars, maybe plates. Defensive scars and mottled bite wounds gouged the backs of both hands, forming a flotilla of evil smiles. She had lines dug in by time and more than a few by knives. They diagrammed the blueprints of her past.

She went two hundred pounds of hard muscle and could kick the ass of a jacked-up rhino, so Flynn had a hard time picturing the mooks who had worked her over. All she ever said was that she was a screwed-up kid who liked bad guys like her father. Her old man got shanked to death at Rikers when she was a child. He was doing an eighteen-year stretch for serial rape. Her last lover put a .22 bullet in her lung. It took her years to find her own hate. Before that, she had swapped it out for love.

Now Sierra had the difference down cold.

“You know what happened to you?” she asked.

“Doctors and nurses come and go, but they haven’t told me anything. Neither did the cops. The paramedic said I snuffed it.”

“You know another euphemism?”

It almost made him grin. “Yeah.
Iced.”

“Flash frozen underwater for about twenty-eight minutes, according to eyewitnesses,” she told him. “If the water had been a degree or two warmer, things might’ve turned out different. By the way, half an hour? It’s nowhere near a record.”

He opened his mouth to snap out a retort, but he felt the icy water pour down his throat again. He steeled himself and tried to pull away from the memory.

“You talk to God?” Sierra asked. “See a white light or anything?”

Flynn yanked his thoughts back from the midnight road. “The kid,” he said. “Kelly Shepard, and her uncle, they called him Nuddin, where are they? The cops wouldn’t say anything.”

“The cops aren’t going to tell you shit and I’m not going to either until you explain to me exactly what the hell happened.” She drew the only chair in the room over to the bed and sat waiting, her face hard but expectant. She wasn’t cutting him any slack because he worked under her. Probably less because of it. There were enough internal investigations always going on, everybody suspicious of the guys who worked kid cases. They were right to be.

He gave her the report down to the smallest detail. The house. Nuddin in the cage. The plunge onto the ice, the dog refusing to leave, awakening to a puffy god. Even the way his thoughts seemed to be skittering a little too loosely. He had Marianne on his mind again, for the first time in a couple of years.

“Now tell me where the girl and her uncle are,” he said.

“With me.”

That wasn’t the way it was done. Sierra already had five foster kids, but none of them came from cases she worked. Not even ones she was peripherally involved with. “What? Why?”

“No other family members have been tracked down yet. The police are taking their time on that house. They found the cage in the basement. Your story is checking out, but they’re still worried you may have instigated the whole situation. I figured I’d watch over them to make sure nobody separated Kelly and Nuddin. They could easily get split up in the system.”

“How are they doing?”

Sierra plucked at her wig the way any woman might toy with her hair when she was keyed up. She didn’t show it but Flynn almost dying had left another lasting mark. The case had her knotted up. “The girl’s acting all right, for the time being, but Dale says she’s still in shock. It’ll be a few days before the upheaval begins to display itself. He expects her to go into fits, the way any normal kid would. Right now she’s on vacation. She’s having fun, playing with the other kids. I taught her to make pasta last night. When she realizes she has no home left to go back to, that her mother’s gone forever, she’ll either shut down or act out. He thinks she’s in for some bouts of rage.”

“Who the hell isn’t?”

Dale Mooney was the head CPS shrink. Flynn and Mooney didn’t like each other, which didn’t matter much except during the semiannual psych review. Mooney loved to project. He’d take Flynn to task for handling cases wrong because, Mooney said, fifteen years down the line the kids might evidence severe emotional scars because of something Flynn had done poorly or hadn’t done at all. Flynn thought Mooney was mostly full of shit.

“Nuddin?”

“He’s low-functioning autistic,” Sierra told him. “So separated from the world that it hardly affects him. I wonder if he even felt any of the torture he was going through. He walks on the balls of his feet because there’s more pressure exerted on the nerves that way. He likes to be hugged hard. He can stare into a mirror for hours, unable to fully realize he’s looking at himself. There are certain treatments that can help but he’s too old for most of them. Jackets lined with weights so they can feel the form of their own torso. Heavy boots so they can feel the ground under them.”

“He sings, though. And in the car he understood when I said he had to roll down the window. Can he talk at all?”

“No. I’m not sure how much he understands, but it’s not much. Maybe at a four-or five-year-old level.”

Flynn shut his eyes and a dark wrapping of cool exhaustion tried to take him under again. His eyes snapped open. He had a lot more questions.

“And the husband? I heard the shot. Did he buy it?”

“No,” Sierra said, “he’s at Stonybrook. The bullet wedged under his heart, but it’s one of those things where he’s able to move all right until they open up his chest and go after it.”

“He was the tipster. Has he been talking?”

“He won’t shut up. He talks about the wife, their happy, beautiful home, his job on Wall Street. But when it gets to the dicey stuff, he winds it down and says he wants to talk to you. And he won’t say why. But he seems scared.”

Flynn thought he already knew the answer. He’d learned a lot on the job. Spouses witnessed occasional horrors beneath their roofs. They allowed the secrets to grow and taint them, until they were just as guilty. Sometimes it went on for months or years, until they took a stand. Wives got out the meat cleaver. Older siblings performed ritual patricide. Husbands dropped a call to CPS and drove around the block waiting for their family crimes to be solved by other men.

“He wants to explain why he called in the tip,” Flynn said.

“You sound sure of it.”

“I am. Shepard was a regular mook caught up in something beyond himself. But the wife? She’s the one who ran that show.”

“You don’t have to go.”

“Of course I do, and you want me to anyway.”

“I want to know everything about that guy. If it has to do with Kelly and Nuddin, I want to know about it.” She tugged at a nylon curl and the wig shifted forward. “The newspapers are pretty much split down the middle about you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Half are making you look like a hero. The rest are saying she was only trying to save her kid and died for it. They’re trying to juice the situation up as much as they can.”

Flynn thought about a retarded man in a cage, a crazed woman with a gun, a car chase through the slick back roads, a flip onto the ice, the yawning mouth of an icy hell sucking down a Cadillac SUV, and wondered why the hell anybody out there needed more fuckin’ juice.

“All someone has to do is look at the scars on Nuddin’s body.”

“You make it sound like reporters care about facts and evidence and little stuff like that.”

“I live in hope.”

“You need to forget that now,” Sierra told him.

She was right. The media could massacre him. The cops might scapegoat him. A dead woman’s word held a lot more weight than his own did. She’d been rich and pretty. She’d had a beautiful home, a loving husband, an intelligent and sweet daughter. He was an outsider who trucked in during a storm and blew the American dream off its foundation. Shepard would have high-power lawyers. They could play all kinds of cards. Say that Nuddin was being cared for personally, by family, instead of being sent off to a filthy
asylum
run by uncaring, corrupt attendants and fat, cruel nurses. Before it was over, Flynn could be looking at jail time for manslaughter.

“Do a background check on Christina Shepard,” he said. “She had a thing about her name. She forced me to say it.”

“We’ll run the usual and I’ll go deeper if I have to.”

“You will. She mentioned her father, acted afraid of him. She said he’d become too sick to care for Nuddin. Shepard called him a crazy son of a bitch. I’d guess the father was the one who tortured Nuddin.”

“Okay, I’ll look into it. This is going to be the big ugly story for a while. A crowd of reporters has been waiting for you to wake up so they can tear you to pieces.”

“It’s nice to be loved.”

“You’ll contend with it. Just stay the course. Don’t dodge. You know you were right in what you did, don’t let them deflect you.”

Flynn thought about Sierra’s household. The layout of the place. Big yard, short hedges. You could see the kids playing in back from the street. He wondered how safe it was. “I’m going to drop by now and again.”

“You can’t for the time being. If the cops see you near Kelly, you’ll stir them up even more.”

“I can handle that.”

“But she can’t. Don’t come by until I say it’s all right, you hear me?” She waited for him to answer. When he said nothing, she kicked the bed frame hard enough to make his catheter rattle. “You hear?”

“Jesus Christ, yeah, I hear.”

“Good.”

An oppressive weariness dropped over him. It was the timed pain meds feeding into his system through the IVs, except he wasn’t in any pain. “What about the dog?” he asked.

“The bulldog? Kelly keeps crying about it. They found it in your car when they got the Charger up off the bottom. You’re special. Usually they leave shit like that in the Sound because of the cost, but everybody’s been raving. It was only fifty feet down. They had guys in these super scuba suits going after it with winch lines. Poor bastards nearly froze too.”

“Did they get the Caddy?”

“They got photos of it and brought her body up. She was still holding the gun.” Sierra stood and started for the door. “Are you going to take care of this cactus?”

“You don’t water them, so what’s to care for?”

“I thought that would be your attitude.” She retrieved it from the windowsill, held it close, but not close enough to scratch her. Flynn realized there was a metaphor there, but he was too tired to fully examine it. She gave it another minute’s worth of love and warmth before abandoning it back on the sill.

Sierra put her hand on the door knob and checked the hall before stepping into it. She turned back and said, “Well, it’s good you’re not too brain-damaged anyway. Hey, they’re showing
Out of the Past
at the Paradigm if you want to take it in.”

Iced. For nearly a half hour. And still it wasn’t a record.

But Flynn wasn’t so sure of the brain-damage part.

Because a moment after Sierra shut the door, the dead dog Zero crawled out from beneath the bed where he’d been hiding, still wearing the white sweater and little booties, looked up at Flynn and said, “The Paradigm, huh? I love Robert Mitchum.”

THREE

A different pair of cops came around before he was released. They warned him not to discuss an open investigation with the media. As soon as Flynn was wheeled out the front door of the hospital he covered his ass and talked to every reporter who wanted to listen. He suspected the cops were building a case against him and he wanted his side of the story out there building momentum if they came after him.

The media was hopped up and merciless. Flynn did his best and told the truth, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Nobody wanted to believe him. Rude as the story was, it was even nastier to point the finger at him. It was too difficult for them to come to terms with a beautiful, high-class woman keeping her retarded brother locked in a cage. It was easier to call Flynn a pedo on the prowl working for CPS.

None of the stations came right out and said it. They edited his footage to make him sound thick and a little high. He couldn’t handle the spotlight well and they took advantage of it. Every time they showed his face on television he looked sweaty and guilty as hell. Sierra gave him pointers on how to do it right, but when the lights were in his face and the journalists were sticking their mikes under his nose, he just tried to explain himself and give the facts. He appeared dazed. It was his own fault. All the pretty reporters sounded so sincere that he was easily duped.