The Midnight Road

by Tom Piccirilli

  “And so he waits until she delivers the message,” Raidin said.

  “She was the message.”

  Raidin nodded, already on the same track. It made talking out loud so much simpler. He thumped Flynn’s chest again, same spot, a little harder. The way an excited friend might do it. “Sent as a warning. From whom? And what for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see.” Raidin drew out a little plastic bag containing the note. “And why would someone do this do you think? Go to all this trouble to send you a message? What is all your fault?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Raidin turned the bag over and over, holding it out as if he wanted Flynn to take it, like this was some kind of card trick. “You receive the note and she immediately dies.”

  Flynn didn’t know what the hell else to say. He nodded and waited.

  “Have you tussled with anyone recently? Do you have any enemies that you know of?”

  “Who would kill somebody else instead of me? That I don’t know.”

  “How about in general? In conventional terms. In the broadest definition, as it were.”

  They were definitely going to hunt down and interview Marianne and Frickin’ Alvin. Flynn talked about the death threats but didn’t mention the woman whose husband had been tossed into prison. He knew she was just acting out because she felt betrayed, unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt. “In general, you’d have to devote a lot of man-hours. The list is long and varied.”

  “And if you had to abbreviate it?”

  “Christina Shepard’s father might be at the top,” Flynn said.

  Raidin’s features emptied of all human expression. He might’ve been alabaster, his face something you put on for a masquerade. “You believe this connects with the Shepard situation?”

  “I don’t know,” Flynn said. “But maybe, in some way.” He was saying a lot of things Raidin already knew, but the cop was making him say them anyway. An understandable power play. His questions seemed dumb but the man definitely wasn’t. If Flynn wasn’t so sick to his stomach, he might be feeling anxious, even juked up. But Raidin wasn’t going to get very far under his skin today, and the man appeared to know it.

  “The father’s been dead six months,” Raidin said.

  That made Flynn lift his chin. He wanted to know more but didn’t want to question Raidin and get even farther on his bad side. Sierra would find out the facts. “Christina Shepard said he was ill but talked about him as if he were alive. So did the husband. She was afraid of what her father might do if she let her brother free.”

  “Some families, they still lock up the mentally handicapped in their attics, chain children to the radiator for months at a time. They think they’re possessed by Satan. Diseased. Wicked.”

  “I know,” Flynn said. “I’ve seen it.”

  “He’s out of surgery, by the way. Shepard. Critical but stable. He won’t be responsive for a couple of days. Heard you wanted to talk to him.”

  “He wanted to talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you believe he tipped you about the brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe he feels guilty about his wife.”

  “Maybe he’s got a reason. Did you get anything out of him?”

  It was a pushy question but Raidin didn’t mind. “No. His attorneys won’t allow him to talk, and we can’t exactly pressure a guy who has a bullet in his heart.”

  “I guess I can see that.”

  “Now, explain this scene with the boy in the emergency room.”

  That was trickier. Flynn tried to be deliberately vague. He said he’d seen anaphylactic shock before and thought the boy was dying from it. Whatever the cause, the kid had been about a minute away from suffocating. Doing a good deed for an unknown reason made his actions dubious. Nobody was going to pin any medals on him. The mother would never say thank you. The docs would always give him the stink eye. Raidin kept watching.

  “How’s the boy?” Flynn asked.

  “Fine. He just had a bad asthma attack.”

  They stood there like that for a while.

  Then, again with the poking. The thin index finger, rapidly tapping, determining the thickness of Flynn’s sternum. “Half hour with your heart stopped, that’s a pretty long run.”

  “I’ve been informed it’s nowhere near a record.”

  “So what was it like?”

  Flynn thought about it. There’d been no euphoria but no despair. No guiding divine presence but no abominable evil either. He’d seen his brother but he always saw his brother. Danny was forever prevalent in his mind. He’d seen an endless dark road, but every road seemed immeasurable when you were stuck on it.

  “Pretty much just more of the same,” Flynn said.

  FIVE

  In the city, at the Paradigm, the dead dog wouldn’t shut up during the afternoon showing of I Wake Up Screaming.

  Zero commented on how hot Betty Grable was, what a shame a first-rate actor like Laird Cregar couldn’t break wider in his career because he was so overweight and how sad it was that Carole Landis bumped herself off when she had such a nice rack. Zero kept pawing at Flynn’s arm wanting Milk Duds. Flynn was starting to get a little annoyed.

  He didn’t mind the dog talking all the time so much, saying a lot of the same things Flynn felt about the movie, in his own voice. But he damn sure wasn’t going to sit here feeding his Duds to the talking ghost of a French bulldog in booties.

  You had to draw a line with the dead.

  It made a kind of sense that the dog showed up. Flynn was open to hauntings. He’d been chasing his dead brother for most of his life. His ex-wife was still very much on his mind. He relived old cases with eerie repetition. Kids he hadn’t seen for years would show up in his dreams. He thought of his lost son Noel, who he’d never even seen. He fell in love with film noir actresses fifty years dead.

  Zero was right, Betty Grable still had it. Flynn inserted himself onto the screen and elbowed Victor Mature out of the way. He knew how the movie ended, he could save Betty and clear up the mystery in half the time. He could get on with things. The past pulled him backwards.

  “You’re really not going to share the candy?” Zero asked.

  “Really.”

  “Selfish prick.”

  It was okay to talk. The projectionist was some college kid working part-time who spent his hours in the booth studying calculus and advanced physics. He probably never even looked at any of the films he ran, and in six months he’d graduate and start building satellites for the military or cell phone services.

  The real movie buffs, the obsessives and disability cases who couldn’t work a job because they lived inside film stock and nitrate, wouldn’t turn up until the next show ing. It was too early for most of them. They were just waking up now, readying themselves. They’d flood in carrying buckets of chicken and burgers and bottles of wine, and move from theater to theater all night long.

  “You’re just mad because they make you wear sweaters and little booties in the afterlife too,” Flynn said.

  “They don’t let you have anything,” Zero said. “You have nothing because you are nothing.”

  “That’s not what Sister Murteen told us in Catholic School.”

  “I don’t think you should put much faith in what that woman told you. Sister Murteen is a drill sergeant in hell.”

  Every time Flynn shifted in his seat the .38 he’d started carrying on his hip would thunk against the metal arm and an ugly note would chime. Victor and Betty were about to go swimming in a crowded public indoor pool at 2 A.M. The forties were definitely different. Vic showed off his physique, smoking a cigarette. Betty put her hair up in a plastic cap. She showed off the legs that kept a couple million servicemen brimming with hope while they knocked back the Nazis and jungle-wrangled the Japanese.

  Funny, he saw Betty up there taking a dip but he was thinking about Marianne an
d Alvin, frickin’ Alvin, Marianne on top of him, hearing Flynn at the front door and shifting into high gear. How his wife must’ve hated him, and hated Alvin too to put the guy in that position. Maybe she wanted them to throttle each other. It would allow her to walk out free and clear, tiptoeing across the bodies.

  Instead, she’d clamped onto ole Al and turned her chin to look over her shoulder at Flynn stepping into the room. She smiled up at him. Sierra called it a cry for attention. Sierra figured Marianne had been sending up all kinds of flares for years, but Flynn was too stupid to see any of them. It must be true. He’d never noticed she was unhappy with him, not until the day he met Alvin.

  “They’re lying, you know,” Zero said. “It wasn’t asthma. The cops know it. The mother was wrong. As soon as the doctors examined the boy they realized it was a spider bite. The kid and his mother live in an apartment complex that’s being renovated. They’re digging up the foundation. The spiders are migrating all over the building. That’s how the kid got stung. You think there are no spiders in winter? You think they’re all dead or something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, is that what you just said?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Betty would never go for you.”

  Flynn had to swallow down a Dud before he could answer. “Why not?”

  “You lack style. She dated George Raft. She liked bad boys, guys who were mobbed up.”

  “She was searching for someone who’d have a deeper understanding of her pain.”

  “You’re too soft,” Zero told him.

  “But she’d go for you, I suppose.”

  “It’s a well-documented fact that Betty liked dogs.”

  Maybe so, Flynn couldn’t remember.

  He wondered if Christina Shepard might be floating about, just out of eyeshot. Maybe seated in the row behind him, also coveting his Duds. Every now and again Zero would perk his head up and look off in some direction as if he were being called. His nubby tail would wag for an instant and he’d shiver with excitement, and it seemed he only remained with Flynn through a great act of will.

  The movie finished and Flynn rubbed his eyes as the lights came up. Zero followed him out past the poster for next week’s showing of the 1932 classic I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, starring Paul Muni. Zero started running around in happy circles, saying it was one of his favorites, and why didn’t Flynn just buy the DVDs?

  “I like the big screen,” Flynn said.

  “But the seats are murder.”

  Flynn hit the street and had to search the area twice before he spotted the undercover police car parked on the corner. He used a calling card at a pay phone to check in with Sierra.

  She said, “Why is it that you don’t have a goddamn cell phone?”

  “The idea of instant communication bothers me.”

  “I’d think after the past couple of weeks you’d want to have the police, the fire department and your local priest all on speed dial.”

  “Maybe after my next swim in a frozen harbor,” he said. “Anything on Christina Shepard’s father?”

  She paused, and he could hear her flipping papers. “Tell me again. What exactly did she say to you?”

  “Jesus Christ, you and your ‘tell me agains,’ you’re as bad as the cops.” Flynn shut his eyes and ran through the night of his death. “She said, ‘My father has been ill the last few years. He couldn’t care for Nuddin any longer. My brother became my responsibility. It came down to me to shoulder the burden. We take such things seriously in my family. Our name is important. Our history.’”

  “That word for word?”

  “Pretty close.”

  “I’m surprised you can remember, after what you went through.”

  “I remember that night very clearly. Shepard told his wife, ‘Your father’s never been right about anything in his life, that crazy son of a bitch.’”

  Flynn realized Sierra was looking out for him, the way a mother decides what’s good and proper to share with her children.

  She hesitated and cleared her throat. Flynn knew it wasn’t going to be good. She was trying to keep the fear out of her voice but he’d picked up on it anyway. The vibe was strong. He wondered what in the hell could manage to frighten Sierra enough for her to tap-dance around like this.

  “Okay,” Flynn said. “So tell me.”

  “Christina Shepard was born Crissy Bragg. The ‘Crissy’ is official, it’s on her birth certificate. Her father, Martin Bragg, was hard-core military, a lifer. She grew up an Army brat, mostly down South.”

  “I knew I heard the accent.”

  “Mother died of cancer when she was nine. She went out of this world in a bad way, in pieces. Had to have her vocal cords removed, then a lung, both legs. Et cetera.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Ole Marty Bragg retired a colonel three years ago after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Tumors. They wanted to open his skull, but he refused any kind of treatment.”

  Flynn figured he’d do the same when his time came. After seeing his own mother die slowly, surgery by surgery, he’d never go in for radiation or chemo or wait his turn to go under the knife. He didn’t have that kind of strength.

  “And six months ago he croaked?”

  “Two years back he started acting unpredictable in public. The cancer was eating into his brain’s center of rational thought. Wild shifts in personality. He started carrying his guns in public, thought the Russians and the Koreans and whoever the hell else were flying overhead. It became worse over time. He got off a few rounds at a school playground one afternoon. The kids were in class and no one was hurt, but he started yelling about throwing babies in a well and it made the local authorities come down on him. He was arrested but the Army doctors stepped in, got him released. They were going to have him committed, I suppose, but instead he jumped in the Chatalaha River, which branches into the deep cypress swamps. As you might guess, the body was never found. Which is why Crissy Shepard may have spoken about him in the present tense.”

  “Or maybe his corpse showed up at her house one day with Nuddin in tow.”

  “There is that,” she said. “And he might blame you for her death. And he might want revenge. And he is going insane.”

  Flynn said, “There is that.”

  He tried to work out the angles but kept hitting walls. He thought he just wasn’t crazy enough to see his way clear, or at least not crazy enough in the way he needed to be. It was a pretty rude awakening, knowing that his brain damage just wasn’t the right kind. “But if he wanted me dead for killing his daughter, why wouldn’t he just zap me? Why have a pro deliver a note and then whack her instead?”

  “Listen, I dug a little further into their family history. Even though they’re proud of their heritage, the Bragg dynasty is not known for its mental and physical well-being. A lot of it’s just hearsay and rumors, but it’s the kind of thing that winds up in reports and on file. People write down their suspicions, and they’re believed down through the years. Bragg’s forefather slave owners would do naughty things with the field hands out in the tobacco patches, then throw the mixed-race newborns down a well.”

  “Ah-ha.”

  “Ah-ha is right. Who knows what he had in his head at the end.”

  “If it was the end. What’d you dig up on Nuddin?”

  “Nothing. No record of him at all.”

  “How can that be?”

  “You’ve seen it here in New York, for Christ’s sake. People ashamed of their kids, locking them up in cellars, crack babies born in apartments in the Bronx.”

  “But most of them still had birth records and documentation.”

  “Most isn’t all. They were down in swamp country, they do things differently there. Midwives.”

  “Maybe.”

  It was a reach. An Army bigwig wasn’t a burnt-out prostitute living in squalor off the social radar. But who knew what kind of thoughts Bragg had in is head even befo
re the tumors. Flynn hoped Shepard didn’t die in his sleep. He had to talk to him.

  Flynn leaned against the phone and watched the foot traffic through Greenwich Village. There was a Ray’s Pizza stand nearby and he caught a whiff of mozzarella and his stomach rumbled.

  He could hear Sierra shrug in her chair. “I suppose a colonel could have certain documentation destroyed if he wanted. Out of shame. Fear of stigma, maybe. But why go to the trouble of caging him up? Why not just put him away? If Bragg had so much pull and could cover his tracks, then he could’ve put Nuddin away in a facility with no publicity. Nuddin could’ve been helped.”

  “Or Bragg could’ve just killed him,” Flynn said.

  “Yeah, there’s that too. Shepard’s not awake yet?”

  “No, and there’ve been complications. His blood pressure took an almost fatal dip. They’re calling him ‘unresponsive.’”

  “Nicer than saying he’s in a coma.”

  “They say he’s going to wake up, they just don’t know when.”

  “Speaking of unresponsive, you haven’t been in to the office.”

  “Very sweet segue,” Flynn said.

  “Don’t try to divert me. You’ve got cases.”

  “Turn them over to someone else. I’ve got to stay off the map for a while until I figure this thing out. See if Angela Soto was targeted because of me. If it really has to do with Shepard or not. Find out how involved I am. If it really is my fault.”

  “You doing this for us? To make sure nobody hands us little notes to give to you?”

  “Well, let me ask you, do you want a bullet in the face?”

  Sierra let out the laugh that he always dreaded. “As a matter of fact, I’ve already had two,” she told him, which put him back on his heels. You never could get over on Sierra by talking that kind of shit.

  He let it go by and asked, “How are Kelly and Nuddin doing with you?”

  “Kelly was fine until we told her about her mother. It was such a shock that hearing about her father being shot hardly made a ripple. I haven’t mentioned he’s in a coma yet, and she hasn’t asked. I dropped Bragg’s name to her but she showed no recognition. Either he’s just Grandpa to her or she never met him or she doesn’t remember him. She’s withdrawn and a little sullen, but she never broke down and still hasn’t cried.”