The tough had started in on her before she’d had a chance to put the groceries away. He’d slapped her and she’d struggled. There was still some heat in her. He’d clasped on to her arm. She’d torn free and made it three steps away. He’d hauled off and clocked her in the back of the head with a frozen round steak.
Emma’s mouth bled. She glanced up at Flynn without surprise or interest. She looked exactly like Patricia in the car at the end, with blood on her lips. The ripple from thirty years ago was finally reaching them in full force.
Charging with his muscular arms raised, the punk screamed, “Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in my house?”
Flynn waited, and the punk hit the brakes. He’d grown used to Emma running from him, so he expected every one to do it. He didn’t know how to face someone down, he was only good at throwing shit at them. Flynn wanted to smile but couldn’t. The icy air from the freezer blew across his back.
He studied the kid. He thought he could see what initially attracted Emma. Broad shoulders, real fire, his eyes smoky and with a hint of pain. No deep intellect, this one ran on his instincts and moved with the flow of the moment. Slim and trim, exactly how all women liked them, with his long glossy hair shaping his blunt face like a mane. The wild child, a little feral. He was much younger than Flynn and Emma, maybe twenty-five.
His muscles and good looks offended Flynn. Damn near everything about him did.
Flynn figured it was a case of opposites attract. Emma was looking for whatever she felt she wasn’t. She was hoping to find someone to shave the veneer off, to strip away the insulation.
Standing behind the punk were all the men who were just like him, who’d made the same mistakes and compounded them daily with their anger, their ignorance and weakness. Flynn had met this guy a thousand times in a thousand homes with thin walls that never stopped vibrating with fury.
The sneer again. The punk couldn’t help making the face. His features naturally folded into it.
He stood tall, rearing now, trying to broaden himself into a more imposing figure. His eyes darted around the room as he searched for any kind of leverage he could find. You could look in his eyes and see his thoughts wheeling. It amused Flynn. The tough had no idea what to do next. Try to fight, make a run for it? He never once looked down at Emma.
“I said who the fuck are you?”
“I’m Flynn. Who are you?”
“Get out!”
“What’s your name?”
“I live here!”
“It doesn’t sound like you do. It sounds like you’re freeloading.”
“I’m what?”
“Sponging off Emma.”
Flynn walked to her and held his hand out, but she ignored it. She thumbed the blood from the corner of her mouth and stared at him through her hair. Here he was, two feet away, and he still couldn’t really see her.
“I pay my share!”
“You take more than your share, though.”
“What? Get out of here!”
“It’s not all your fault. Some people are just wired in a way that leads them to the worst possible choice. She’s got to work on that. Maybe we both do.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re crazy! You can’t be in here, nobody invited you! I don’t know you! I’m calling the cops!”
“Yeah, you do that. We’ll bust out your cigarette box and have them crawl over this place looking for the rest of your stash. What’s your name?”
Like he had to think about it. “I’m…Chad.”
“Chad?”
Even the name offended Flynn. He glanced at the frozen round steak and thought of what it would be like to smash a man’s skull in with it. Then, the old Hitchcock ploy. Cook the murder weapon and serve it to the investigating homicide dicks.
“Chad, get the fuck out of here.”
“I live here!”
“Not anymore.”
“You can’t—” Chad began doing a little boy gotta-piss dance, sort of hopping in place, his knees bent. “You can’t!”
“You’re moving out. Go crash with one of your burnout buddies.”
This was it. Sometimes you ran up to the moment of truth and sometimes it ran up to you. Here they were. Chad had to jump left or right now. Either come rushing at Flynn or leap on his Harley, he had no other choice. It all depended on whether he had a real reason, in his heart, to fight. For his pride or his home, his woman or his action, or just to protect his pot. If anything pushed him forward, it would probably be the pot.
Chad did his dance some more, swung close like he might take a poke at Flynn, didn’t, then hit the garage door and was gone.
Flynn sighed and went to one knee beside Emma.
He could only see the subtle glimmer of her eyes and a hint of her bloody mouth. Not much else as she peered through her sweaty clinging hair at him. Flynn wanted to reach out with both hands and tenderly brush her hair back, pin it up, tie it in a ponytail, do some damn thing with it. But he kept his distance.
A strange urge to pick up the scattered cans filled him. Put them away in the cabinets, cook her a fine dinner, light a few candles. He thought, This might be the place to start again. Move in, remove the bad memories one at a time, like buffing away fingerprints. Cleaning up someone else’s house was so much easier than cleaning up your own.
He’d come back from the dead for a reason. Maybe she was it.
“Emma?” he said. “Do you remember me?”
He’d been waiting thirty years to hear Emma Waltz speak to him. He hoped they would be words of power and wonder. He hoped that, broken as she was, she would recognize his own cracks and flaws and know how to aid him. He hoped. It was something new.
You got a lot of weird thoughts in the night that picked up speed through the day. His chest heaved and he felt light-headed. He hadn’t killed anybody, he was still in control. He waited for salvation from a woman who’d been knocked down by a steak.
Motion at the window drew his attention. Flynn spun to his feet and got between it and Emma, thinking it was possibly Chad, outside on the lawn with a shotgun, having finally steamed himself into action. Or the shadow in the blizzard making another effort to insert himself into Flynn’s life.
But it was only falling snow weaving across the glass.
He could feel death out there waiting in the wind. Danny outside with Patricia, watching to see what would happen next. Not holding hands, showing no love for each other. Aloof and tied through eternity. Her baby too. His baby as well. His parents in the freezing alley, angry, defeated, disappointed. All the dead cases, his mistakes pooling together.
His hands trembled again, the nerve more alive than he was. The snow blew harder, urging him faster down the midnight road.
“Emma?”
He let his hand slowly waft toward her. She stared at him. Her mouth hung open, tears filling her eyes. They didn’t fall. Perhaps she’d twisted through life full of guilt because she too had never cried when it was most important to do so.
Emma Waltz leaped to her feet, turned, and fled through the front door.
The freezer blew cold air at the back of Flynn’s neck, the open door at his face. He moved to the doorway and watched her get into her car, tear out of the driveway, skid in the street and rapidly advance into the oncoming whiteness.
Flynn still hadn’t heard her voice or seen her face.
FIFTEEN
Shepard’s fresh-faced, delicately featured doctor, making his rounds followed by eight even younger med students, played to the girls and kept showing off his inhumanly white-capped teeth.
He spoke with flourish and seemed overly aware of his glossy curls, constantly fingering and primping them. Flynn didn’t blame him. You couldn’t help preening before beauty, even in a hospital room stinking of astringents and bedsores. Flynn felt the need to do the same thing, tug at his gray hair, try to appear younger than he was.
No matter how close death got you still wa
nted to look good.
The doctor flashed a light in Shepard’s eyes and ears, pulled back the sheets and checked the shunts and stints in Shepard’s chest. The suture bisected him from his sternum to his belly button, a painfully pink line of shining flesh. Flynn expected to get thrown out or told to wait elsewhere, but no one said anything to him.
The doc made inside jokes about medical procedures and serums that Flynn didn’t understand. He didn’t mind. He tried to be amiable. He grinned a lot. It wasn’t helping.
Flynn’s hand flashed out and gripped the doc’s wrist. The kid—he was another kid, they were all kids, this one worth maybe 400k a year—stared down at Flynn’s hand, then looked in his eyes, then looked back down at the hand, then again checked Flynn’s eyes. The students milled out in the hallway uncertain of what to do, what to say, what the next move might be.
“When’s he going to wake up?” Flynn asked.
“It’s impossible to tell.”
“An estimate.”
“I don’t have one.”
“I thought he wasn’t in a coma but only nonresponsive.”
“He is.”
“How can that be? It’s been six weeks.”
“Yes,” the doc agreed. They were always agreeable, terrified of lawsuits, unwilling to say anything of value. “Are you a relative?”
“Yeah, I’m his twin brother. Billy.”
The doc had no file to check, no paperwork in his hands. He glanced over at Shepard and back to Flynn, still not seeing, truly seeing, either of them. An expansive ache filled Flynn’s chest as he thought of his dying mother in a room no different than this, a doctor no different than this, a hopeless situation much the same. Flynn equally helpless, ready to hurl a chair out a window just to see someone scurry.
The doctor said, “I understand your frustration.”
“I don’t think you do. I need to talk with him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s important.”
“I’m sorry.”
Trying to shove off again, almost putting some muscle into it this time, but not really, the doc looked back at the prettiest girl in the hall. He was going to make his move on her soon, cross a line, help her with her exams in the Commack Motor Lodge. Flynn kept his grip tight on the doctor’s wrist, thinking, a couple more foot-pounds of pressure and I could ruin his career. They’d put pins in the joint but it would never be the same.
Sometimes it helped to make a silent threat, to under stand your own power in the face of other storms that brushed you aside.
Sometimes it didn’t. He released the kid, who apologized without meaning again. “I’m sorry.”
The others sensed potential action but had already acquired an M.D.’s carefully established enamel of non-committal expression. They stared. They said nothing.
They all left and Flynn found himself seated on the edge of Shepard’s bed, wanting to thank him for making the final move that put him in the way of his own wife’s bullet. The man had saved Flynn’s life, at least until the big dip. Flynn owed him something, even if it had taken the guy six months to make the right call to CPS.
He put his hand on Shepard’s arm, trying to make contact and reach past the slow death. He’d done the same thing with his mother and failed, watching her dwindle, day by day, until she was out of sight. Until the morning he walked in and the bed was full of more machine than Ma, and he couldn’t even catch a glimpse of flesh beneath the metal and plastic.
“Open your eyes, Shepard, talk to me. Give up your secrets, it’ll lighten your load. You took a stand but you didn’t rise quite high enough. It’s time to try again. Your conscience isn’t clear yet, and neither is mine. I know you can hear me, damn you. Think of your daughter. Whatever’s coming after me might hit her on the way. How do I get us out of this?”
Shepard continued to sleep, floating in some safer harbor, too afraid to come back to the blood.
Saturday morning, Flynn parked in Sierra’s driveway, got out and walked to the front door.
He hadn’t even knocked yet when a child opened it for him and skirted away toward the side of the house. All he saw was a flash of dark eyes and pale skin, coming up to about his belly button, and then it was gone.
He followed. The side gate was open and he walked through, hearing laughter and yelling and whining and crying. It sounded like recess at an elementary school. A vague upset clambered through him because the gate had been left open, because anybody could step into the yard. But you couldn’t expect children to always lock the doors and shut the gates and live in fear.
He passed the garage. The door was down but through dirty, cracked windows he saw the teenager, Trevor, in there pulling plugs out from under a dented, dust-covered hood. Nuddin sat on a stool in the corner, bobbing his scarred head, apparently humming. Trevor seemed to be talking animatedly, showing Nuddin how the engine worked. Flynn was glad the two of them had each other to help them get through whatever it was they’d been, up until now, forced to brave alone.
A girl howled nearby and Flynn turned and narrowed his eyes, checking around. He shouldn’t be here, but he had to see Kelly Shepard and Nuddin again. The need had swelled within him until it forced him here knowing Sierra was going to give him high octane-fueled hell for it. After the fiasco with Mooney, he knew he might really be fired. He hadn’t shown up yet to find out. Whatever she did to him now, it was probably going to hurt.
The yard sprang alive. It was a snow-choked whirlwind of children. They were in the trees, they were charging around igloos. They were throwing snowballs and wailing because they’d lost their mittens. They swirled past him without noticing.
Kelly Shepard, out in the snow again. Wearing the same bright white ski outfit as the first time he’d seen her. She stood chattering with a little black girl about her age. How did Sierra play it? Did she tell them they were sisters now? Cousins? How did she bind them into a family, or did she even bother? Were they all just pals? Was she Mommy?
He couldn’t believe he’d known her for so long and knew hardly anything at all about her home life. How had he messed up so badly that he’d been to his one friend’s house only two or three times over all these years? His mistakes were becoming more obvious. The things that had driven Marianne away more prevalent.
He couldn’t get a count of the kids. There seemed to be more every minute. There were slides and swings and a covered aboveground pool. Neighbor children must pour in and out of the yard in varying numbers as the day wore on. He could see Sierra through the back door storm window. She was making sandwiches and pouring grape juice. Kids clumped in and out, in and out.
Trevor got the engine to almost turn over before it died. The clapboard siding of the garage rattled where it was loose and rotted black.
Flynn heard his name and angled his hip with the holster out a few inches in case he had to pull the pistol.
He turned and Kelly Shepard rushed at him with her arms open and before he knew what he was doing he was moving toward her. She slammed into him and he went to one knee in the snow.
He held her, smiling, going, “Hey, hey there!” like an idiot. “Heya!” He thought, This is what it would’ve been like if Noel hadn’t died. If the world had come down a little differently for me and Marianne and we’d gotten the important things right in the beginning. I’d be holding my child, and the shadow in the blizzard would have a carrot nose and be wearing a top hat. Wouldn’t that be nice?
He wondered how close he might’ve come along the way. If there’d ever been a point when he could’ve cut a half inch left instead of right and everything else would’ve fallen into place. He could maybe blame a lot of it on Danny, his father, and the other dead, but not everything.
“How are you?” he asked.
Her cheeks were bright crimson circles. She smiled and he saw she’d lost one of her front teeth. “I’m very fine, thank you,” she answered, under her breath, knocking the answer out with the unusual poise he’d noticed that first
night.
“Look how big you’ve gotten. You in college yet?”
“No, not quite.”
“Ah, not quite, huh? You sure? I was thinking you were a freshman.”
“No, not yet. I’d like to attend Harvard. My daddy went there.”
“How are things here? You get along with everybody? You like Sierra?”
“Miss Humbold is very nice to all of us. I’ve made some friends.”
“You have, that’s great. I bet you’re the belle of the ball.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“It means you’re the most liked one among the crowd.”
She let out a giggle. “You’re silly.”
He wondered how she’d take the news that her dog was still around, talking to him, urging him to murder. He felt like telling her, Your bulldog, you feel like taking him off my hands? He’s got a bad attitude.
“How’s your uncle doing?”
“Nuddin loves it here,” she said. “We get to see all the storms, standing out here. Miss Humbold lets us. Even if it’s icy, we stand under the patio…me and some of the others, we enjoy it.”
“That sounds very…social.”
“Oh, it is.”
Icicles clattered in the trees overhead. Flynn got a wonky déjà vu feeling, knowing this had happened before, standing out in the snow with this little girl, talking of storms.
She still seemed like a regular, happy kid. He didn’t know how much Sierra had told her about her parents, if she understood what had been wrong in that house. He knew she’d seen her father in the hospital, unresponsive but, they said, not in a coma. The guy hiding within himself. Maybe a few more visits from Kelly could change all that, but Sierra would never let that happen. She had her own hang-ups and it was time for Flynn to address them, to put a few things on the line.
“Flynn, why haven’t you visited sooner?” Kelly asked.
The Midnight Road Page 15