The Midnight Road

by Tom Piccirilli

  “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 a
s 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.

  The papers did better by him, but nobody read the papers. He started receiving death threats in the mail and over the phone. He recognized at least one voice, a woman whose husband used to beat her and their eleven-year-old daughter. Flynn had investigated the case and got the husband put away for a nickel. The woman spit venom and used some foul language he’d never come across before. It was spooky. Her vitriol downshifted into broken sobbing when she admitted her name and told him how betrayed she felt, that he was doing the same things her husband used to do. He talked to her for more than an hour before she hung up, furious and calling him a liar. He hadn’t taken a drink in eighteen months but could only fall off to sleep that night after killing a half bottle of Jack.

  Despite all he’d seen and survived, Marianne used to call him terribly naive. He was starting to understand what she meant.

  He went back to work. He ran two investigations, following up complaints that turned out to be from angry in-laws who didn’t like their grandkids watching too much television. He ran another case and found a father with his belt in his hand beating the shit out of his ten-year-old son for missing a few blades of grass while cutting the lawn. Flynn kept his cool for about eight seconds. He got into it with the guy and broke his jaw. The police kept him for three hours of questioning. They sensed he was going savage.

  It took more than a week before he felt ready to face Mark Shepard. It was bad timing. He was too slow off the line. By the time he got to the hospital, Shepard had been under the knife for four hours while surgeons extracted the bullet near his heart. Flynn decided to wait it out.

  He wandered the hospital and sat down in the emergency room. He watched the battered and the ill come in by the truckload. Every time a child cried he hiked up a notch in his seat. He tried hard not to think that Christina Shepard had been right and he had piggy thoughts squirming away in some corner of his skull.

  Zero hopped around and followed tight-faced paramedics racing through the corridors. The ghost dog had a nose for blood. He discussed Mitchum movies and kept up a running commentary on who might live through the night and who was definitely dead. Zero’s eyes fixed on a coughing kid and he said, “This one, he’s been bitten by a spider and he’s severely allergic. His throat’s closing up fast. By the time they get him on the table, he’ll be going into anaphylactic shock. He’s almost there.”

  It wasn’t so bad, really, knowing you were either crazy or haunted. Flynn had felt that way most of his life anyway. Now things had just been kicked up a notch. His mother, on her deathbed, had roused from a coma long enough to lock her eyes onto him. Her hand gripped his shirtfront and proceeded to crawl up his chest until she snagged his collar. Her flesh was bloated and yellow as mustard. Her kidneys had stopped functioning days earlier. A quarter million in machinery did nothing but stare and keep time with its flashes and jazz-riff wails.

  His mother’s gaze was distant but clear. She’d had nothing but ice chips for a week, and not even that the last forty-eight hours. Her voice sounded full of dust and silverfish. She said, “Wings like shiny gold coins” and died clutching his shirt.

  Danny went out of the game with a beautiful teen girl riding next to him. Flynn didn’t know why he was stuck with a French bulldog, but everyone had to play the hand they were dealt.

  He didn’t so much mind that the ghost of a dog spoke to him as he did the fact that Zero spoke with Flynn’s own voice. It was embarrassing.

  The coughing kid was getting worse. Maybe Zero had something down right. Flynn watched, getting to his feet for a slow approach. It scared the boy’s mother while she stood at the desk filling out the insurance paperwork. She pulled the clipboard closer to her so he couldn’t see her name or address. He asked her, “Is your son allergic to anything? To insect bites?”

  “What?”

  “Your son—”

  The emergency room had a security guard. Like if you got pushy while you were having a stroke, the guard might arrest you, put you in hospital jail until you learned your manners. Pick a number, get in line. Yo Stroke-boy, settle your ass down.

  The security guard braced Flynn. Big guy, no weapons Flynn could see, but the dude was acting like he might yank a taser. “Sir, do you have a medical emergency?”

  “This boy, I just wanted to know if—”

  “Sir, if you don’t have a medical emergency I’m going to have to ask you to leave the ER.”

  A wave of worry passed over the boy’s face as he stared at Flynn, his cheeks growing ashen, tears spurting onto the floor. The mother’s hand reached out and touched her son’s shoulder, turning him away. The guard started getting in close, invading space. Flynn wondered if anybody here would cut him some slack for coming back to life after twenty-eight minutes on the bottom. He was a Miracle Man, after all. Not everybody could do it.

  The kid was turning a soft shade of blue. His breathing made it sound like he was whispering backwards.

  The room seemed to be getting brighter. Flynn felt his lips drawing back. His teeth dried in the air. He began to grow short of breath. He weakened and nearly went to one knee in front of the guard.

  The guard kept repeating, “Sir? Sir?” but wouldn’t lend a hand.

  You’d think with a word like emergency right there in the name of the room, they’d take things a little more seriously.

  Zero said, “What would Mitchum do, huh?”

  Ole Bobby wouldn’t have allowed himself to get into this position in the first place. Neither would Danny. Neither would Sierra. Someone braces you, you slap him down. Flynn was trapped someplace between being too hard and being too soft. He also didn’t trust the dog. He hoped the dog was wrong about the whole situation.

  The mother turned in the paperwork to the woman at the desk. She didn’t look like a nurse. Just someone else who worked there not acting official or grim or caring enough. She took the forms and bopped away, ponytail swinging. The boy continued whispering. Flynn was fifteen feet away but he thought he felt a drop of water land on the back of his neck. The kid’s tears were covering ground.

  Flynn knew he should fight to win back his cool, but he’d dealt with enough dying children who couldn’t catch a break and he didn’t want to add another one to the list. Not even if he might have to go to hospital jail for a time-out.

  He tried once more. “Get a doctor here now!”

  “Sir—”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “Do you need a doctor? Is this a medical…?”

  “Get out of my way!”

  Flynn backhanded the security chump and watched him drop onto his ass and sit there gaping in fright. Mitchum would’ve been ashamed of Flynn. When you were a hero, you took on the roughnecks and the bootleggers and the mob. When you were on Cape Fear, you took on hotshot attorneys who owed you a debt of years wasted in the joint. You didn’t put the bite on some loser with a cap and no gun, whose bottom lip was trembling.

  The boy settled it for all of them. The kid pitched over backwards and, for the first time, Flynn could see that the boy’s throat was so swollen that his coat zipper was gouging into his skin. The mother turned like she was seeing him for the first time, and said, “Jeff? Jeffie?”

  Flynn yanked the kid into hi
s arms and broke the zipper apart. It seemed to give Jeffie some relief, let him suck in some air. Flynn held the boy close and kicked through a pair of sage green doors at one end of the waiting room. The hall beyond was lined with beds and patients. Doctors congregated in groups with nurses, chatting. One guy turned to Flynn and actually smiled. It was a leftover leer from some joke one of the other doctors had just finished telling.

  Behind him, the mother was screaming, “My baby! My baby!” They really did that, it wasn’t just in the movies.

  Flynn put the kid on an empty table and said, “Anaphylactic shock from a spider bite!”

  “Who are you? You can’t just come in—”

  Flynn thought, Good, he was finally going to get a chance to crack somebody in the head, but one of the other docs, maybe the one who’d been telling the joke, began shouting orders. He questioned the mother and she told him, “I don’t know who that man is or what he’s talking about. My son has asthma! He’s on Azmacort but ran out of his inhaler spray!”

  Three doctors, two nurses, all of them pointing at Flynn, several voices calmly speaking as one, said, “Get him out of here.”

  From behind, someone drew him gently out of the hall. Flynn was surprised at how easily he allowed it to happen, his body responding without his will. He spun and saw a young woman beside him, her hand on his wrist pulling him along. From this angle he could only glimpse the barest hint of her face. She wore her blond hair long and straight, the way women had in the midseventies. He used to watch his friends’ older sisters actually iron their hair on ironing boards to get it that straight. Some of Danny’s girlfriends had done it too. Patricia Waltz. Hers had been the same.