Mr. Midnight

by Allan Leverone

  It was perfect.

  What was not perfect was the fact that the kid was almost back to the burned-out shell of an abandoned tenement—a building not much different than Milo’s—which served as his gang’s headquarters, only another block and a half away on the left. Once within sight of that warehouse, the kid would be untouchable, as the gang would have a team of sentries posted, young men who were heavily armed and not likely to approve of their runner being taken down before their very eyes.

  Milo knew he had to act now—stealth and surprise would work in his favor. He resumed jogging and wrapped his fingers around the stolen Glock 19 inside the hand-warmer pouch of his sweatshirt.

  In seconds he was couple of feet behind the kid, who was still bopping along to the music in his ears, feeling secure in a way he never would again. Milo pulled the Glock from his pocket and in one smooth motion lifted his arm to smash its butt against the side of the kid’s head.

  The boy had begun to turn at the last moment, some instinct alerting him to the impending attack. His reaction was much too late. He spun around and the gun caught him just above his right eye. He dropped like a felled tree, blood gushing from a jagged gash in his forehead.

  This was the critical moment. Time was precious. The kid moaned and clutched at his skull, almost but not quite unconscious. Milo knelt and reached into the left pocket of his victim’s cargo shorts, withdrawing the hunting knife still secured in its scabbard and jamming it into his pocket. He didn’t really need it, owned plenty of knives already, but he had no desire to find he had misjudged the extent of the kid’s injuries by getting shanked as soon as he turned his back.

  Milo pulled the wad of cash and the cell phone out of his victim’s pants, then stood and began walking briskly away from the tenement building. He made it half a block before the first rough shouts of surprise went up. He didn’t turn around, didn’t glance behind, didn’t do anything. He just kept walking.

  In a matter of minutes, Milo had left the scene of the attack behind and was well on his way to the safety of his “apartment.” He assumed as a matter of course that he had been seen attacking the kid, but the likelihood of being identified was almost nil between his outfit—the uniform of urban anonymity—and the fact that he rarely spent time in that neighborhood.

  To be safe, Milo knew he would have to avoid Washington Street for a good long while, but the prospect didn’t concern him. Boston was a big city and there were plenty of areas suitable for hunting. All one needed was the time to seek out victims.

  And Milo Cain had plenty of time.

  CHAPTER 8

  The private investigator’s name was Arlen Hirschberg and he was hungry. Specifically, he was hungry for a turkey melt with crispy fries and a chocolate shake. Cait knew this because she could see it in her head; the vision exploded into her brain the moment she stepped into Hirschberg’s office. It was not exactly the sort of he-man meal Cait would have expected out of a macho private detective, but she had been on the receiving end of Flickers for her entire life and had never known them to be wrong.

  Hirschberg had called yesterday and scheduled the appointment, saying only that he had some news to share. When Kevin expressed surprise that the PI had obtained results already, he laughed and said he would be happy to sit on the information for a couple of weeks if it made Kevin happy.

  Now, sitting in the PI’s office, it occurred to Cait that her expectations of what a private investigator would look like had been inaccurate all around. She had expected to meet a gruff, burly man wearing an ill-fitting suitcoat over a leather shoulder holster into which would be crammed a big handgun. He would have a booming voice and arms like stevedores and his office would be small and Spartan, with a ceiling fan moving the air around and a metal filing cabinet in the corner behind his beat-up desk. He would be the Hollywood noir cliché of a private detective.

  The reality was almost the complete opposite. The Hirschberg Investigations office was big and airy, with framed, signed prints of American sports heroes adorning the walls. To Cait’s right, Bobby Orr flew through the air, hockey stick held high in triumph, forever celebrating his Stanley Cup-winning overtime goal for the Boston Bruins in 1970. To her left, a young Michael Jordan slammed down a dunk, tongue wagging out of his mouth. Behind her, some NFL kicker she didn’t recognize was booting a football into a raging blizzard.

  Instead of a clichéd cheap suit, the private detective was dressed casually but crisply in tan Dockers and a midnight blue golf shirt. His weapon, if he was sporting one, was nowhere to be seen. There was no ceiling fan, and the filing cabinets weren’t even in this office, they were located behind Hirschberg’s receptionist in the waiting area. Behind his desk, the glass wall offered a breathtaking view of the Tampa cityscape, with the greenish-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico beyond.

  In short, Caitlyn realized this was no down-on-his-luck Hollywood PI. Everything about Arlen Hirschberg screamed competence and success, and Cait supposed that was exactly the point. She wondered how much money Kevin had had to shell out to secure this man’s services. She had asked him that very question on the way over but he refused even to discuss the issue.

  “So,” Hirschberg said after introducing himself and seating them, “can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Sparkling water?”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Cait replied, smiling. If she had held on to any remaining stereotypes about Arlen Hirschberg, the offer of sparkling water pretty much destroyed them. Her adopted father had been a devoted fan of the 1970s TV series The Rockford Files, in which James Garner played a down-on-his-luck private detective. As a child, Cait had watched just about every episode with him on TV Land and she was almost certain he had never once offered sparkling water to anyone.

  “Okay, then, let’s get right to it. You have quite the unusual history, young lady,” Hirschberg said with a smile. “In most cases, when an adopted child wishes to unearth her history, the official records may have been sealed to protect the privacy of the birth mother and thus are not accessible, but there are records.”

  Cait nodded. “I understand. But that’s not the case with me, is it?”

  “No, Ms. Connelly, it’s not. In your case, there were no official records, accessible or otherwise. You weren’t born in the Tampa area, I’m sure you are aware of that much. Do you have any idea where you were born?”

  “The only information I ever got from my adoptive parents regarding my birth history was that I was born somewhere in the northeastern United States. That’s as specific as they would ever get. I got the impression that even they didn’t know exactly where I came from.”

  “And your adoptive parents are now deceased, is that correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Hirschberg crossed his arms and cupped his chin in one hand. “What do you know about the black market baby trade, Ms. Connelly?”

  The question caught her by surprise. She paused and then shook her head. “Um, nothing, really.”

  “You’re not alone. It’s not a subject that gets a lot of media attention. But it should. There is a flourishing market in this country for people who want babies but are not able to have their own and, for whatever reason, cannot or will not go through the normal and accepted—and legal—channels of adoption. This market has existed for decades, centuries probably, and continues to this day. It will likely continue long into the future.”

  “Are you saying I was a black market baby?”

  “It would seem logical, wouldn’t it, given the lack of official documentation regarding the circumstances of your birth?”

  Cait nodded and Hirschberg continued. “This would explain why there seems to be no way to trace your adoption through legal channels. There are no legal channels to speak of.”

  “But you said you had news for me. If there’s no way to trace my history, why am I here?”

  Hirschberg held up a finger. “I didn’t say there was no way to trace your history. I said there was no way to do i
t through legal channels. I’ve worked in law enforcement my entire adult life and over the course of my career have served as a patrol officer, a homicide detective and federal agent, among other things.

  “Over time I developed a fairly extensive network of contacts, as you might imagine. In your case, mining those contacts was problematic due to the fact that three decades has passed since the adoption occurred. Many people who might have been familiar with the circumstances of your case are now dead or moved on years ago and cannot be found. However, ‘problematic’ does not mean ‘impossible,’ and I was able eventually to secure the information you wanted.”

  Cait shook her head, confused. “How in the world could you do that if there are no records?”

  “Oh there are records, Ms. Connelly. There are always records, at least in these sorts of cases. They may not be official government records, all neat and clean and notarized and legally binding, but they do exist. And those records are accurate, certainly accurate enough for your purposes.”

  “So…” After years of dealing with the pain that came from assuming she would never learn the specifics of her familial background, Cait discovered that being on the verge of getting that information was more than a little daunting.

  She took a deep breath and started again. “So, where am I from, Mr. Hirschberg?”

  CHAPTER 9

  The visions pounded through Milo Cain’s head, one after the other, like movie trailers playing non-stop on some cursed screen in his brain. These trailers, though, often made no sense. They were mostly short snippets of lives being lived by anonymous people Milo would never meet. Pointless visions of ordinary actions, like a woman washing the dinner dishes or a man making plans to play basketball the next day. Their very pointlessness made Milo Cain’s torture even more difficult to bear.

  He sat in the tiny shell of an apartment, back propped against the wall—his usual method for riding out the storm of visions—waiting for them to take a break. They always did, eventually, just as they always came roaring back eventually as well. When they finally, mercifully, came to an end, an exhausted Milo Cain considered how to spend his evening.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Milo had survived a traumatic early childhood involving physical and mental abuse, had survived and moved on and deserved better. Up until the age of five, he had lived in suburban Austin, Texas, with his adoptive parents, both executives in the nuclear power industry.

  Normal.

  Respected.

  Abusive to Milo.

  He didn’t remember much of anything about Texas, but one thing he did know was that while living there he could not recall so much as a single episode involving visions blasting into his head.

  Milo remembered with crystal clarity the first time he had ever experienced a vision. When he was five years old, the Cain family moved to Amesbury, Massachusetts, a seaside community on Boston’s North Shore. His mother and father had both received promotions involving higher pay and additional responsibilities to work at the Seabrook nuclear plant located up Interstate 95 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

  The incident occurred at the end of the family’s first day in Massachusetts. Everyone was exhausted from the move, hunkered down in a motel for the night, in bed early because the following day was to be spent conducting a lengthy house-hunting search. Milo lay in the room with his father and mother, almost asleep in his rollaway bed despite the discomfort of the lumpy mattress, when into his head blasted a strange, frightening vision, almost, but not quite a dream.

  In the vision, his parents were lying in bed, and his father was doing something to his mother; it almost looked as though he was attacking her, hurting her somehow. And she must have been getting hurt, because she was moaning, her head thrashing back and forth on the pillow. It was horrifying, and not just because the young Milo Cain didn’t understand what it meant. What made it all the more frightening was that he had no idea where it had come from.

  The disturbing vision had all the qualities of the dream state, the vivid colors and the hyperreality, but it could not be a dream because Milo was not yet asleep. Even five-year-olds know you have to be asleep to dream, and the moment the vision began, Milo opened his eyes wide in mute, helpless terror, mouth agape, waiting for the scene to end.

  When the vision did end—thankfully, this first one was short and to the point, even if Milo didn’t understand the point—his head lolled to the side, and he found himself simultaneously comforted and horrified by the sight of the sleeping forms of his parents in the bed across the semidark motel room.

  That long-ago night in Massachusetts represented the beginning of the visions for young Milo Cain. The family found a home and remained on the North Shore, and as Milo grew, the visions became more and more pronounced, growing ever darker and more disturbed even as his treatment at the hands of his parents became more and more twisted.

  For a short time he tried to describe the horror of the visions to his mother and father, eventually coming to the realization they didn’t believe him, would never believe him, and would not care even if they did believe him.

  After that, Milo simply gave up. He stopped telling his parents about the strange scenes exploding into his head, the visions that now populated more and more of his waking hours. And he began to fall behind in school. His teachers assumed he was daydreaming and uninterested when his features slackened and his eyes glazed over and he stared at the blackboard or out the window, not disturbing anyone or causing trouble but clearly not paying attention, either.

  He became withdrawn and sullen at home, spending all his time in his room, stretched out on the bed staring at the wall, unwilling to discuss his problem but unable to make it stop. Soon after, neighborhood pets began disappearing, mostly cats and a couple of small dogs, the occasional mutilated small-animal carcass thrown carelessly into the woods along the side of the road.

  One morning in midsummer 2001, when Milo Cain was not quite eighteen years old, he walked out of his parents’ Amesbury home and never returned. Over the next decade, Milo wandered throughout New England, traveling as far south as Bridgeport, Connecticut, and as far north as Jonesport, Maine, at times gaining temporary respites from the torture as the visions receded, at other times suffering mightily as they attacked with renewed fervor.

  But they never completely disappeared, and Milo found it easiest to survive inside the sprawling Boston metropolitan complex, where he could disappear, losing himself in the crowds of down-on-their-luck vagrants who, like himself, fit in nowhere.

  There was another advantage to living in Boston. Milo’s compulsion to do things, bad things, horrible, twisted things, had blossomed as the visions increased in frequency and intensity. His need to injure, to destroy, to tear apart based on the information contained in those visions was often overwhelming, and this compulsion was fed most easily in the city. The atrocities he committed were not invisible in Boston, of course, but they were much easier to get away with in the teeming metropolis than in the wide-open spaces of a small town like Amesbury, where everyone had known him and seen him as a freak.

  After years of restless wandering, Milo moved to the city permanently at the age of twenty-two, never staying in one place too long, moving around obsessively. When his compulsions began to attract the attention of the wrong people, he would simply pick up stakes and wander to another neighborhood, from Dorchester to Roxbury to Mattapan to Back Bay, thrilled that by traveling just a few blocks he could begin fresh.

  There was the occasional brush with the law; it was almost impossible to be a vagrant, even in a city as large as Boston, and not catch the eye of the authorities every so often. But to Milo’s continuing amazement, most of the suspicion involved his appearance, his dirty clothes and unkempt hair, those superficial things that made the good citizens of Massachusetts uncomfortable.

  The things that should have been of interest to the police—the abductions, the torture, now of humans rather than animals—never seemed to find their wa
y back to him, despite the fact he rarely made more than a token attempt at disguising his activities, and despite the fact that the media had begun playing up the horrifying exploits of “Mr. Midnight,” the tag a clever television news reporter had hung on him a few months ago, when a trash bag filled with decaying body parts had been discovered behind a restaurant in Chinatown.

  He supposed his visions were largely responsible for his invincibility. Thanks to the images flashing into his head, he was able to select as victims only people who would pose no more than a minor threat to him. The irony of being insulated and protected by the very visions that tortured him day after day and made his life a living hell was not lost on Milo; he appreciated it in the way an entomologist might appreciate being bitten by a particularly poisonous insect: the experience was painful and rewarding at the same time.

  All of this ran through Milo Cain’s mind as he leaned against the bleak apartment wall. He savored the clarity of thought that accompanied his brief respites from the visions. The damned images spent so much time bouncing around inside his brain that when they finally subsided, his head felt large and airy, like a penthouse apartment that has been cleared of all furniture.

  He considered the long night ahead, stretching dark and empty before him. His skin was beginning to feel tight and hot, and his breathing felt ragged and constricted. His obsessions were beckoning again. It was time to play.

  Tonight he would find a streetwalker. Playing with hookers was especially enjoyable. Milo loved taking the hardened, streetwise bitches, with their garish makeup and their superior, sneering attitudes and turning them into helpless victims, begging and pleading for their worthless lives, suspecting but never knowing for certain until the very end what their fate was going to be.