“What’s that got to do with me? What do you want from me?”
Zero pawed at Flynn’s ankle and said, “Tell him I said hello.”
Maybe Bragg really had hit the river and been smashed against rocks by the rapids. He could’ve started off crazy and gotten steadily worse. Maybe Bragg was out of his mind, all right, but Flynn couldn’t put the voice together with a military man, no matter how far out of his tree he may have gone. Maybe this was Frickin’ Alvin’s doing. Maybe Chad’s. Maybe Shepard had a brother out there blaming Flynn. Flynn had gotten under somebody’s skin and had infected the hell out of him.
“Thanks for giving me a ring,” Flynn said, a little light-headed. “I appreciate it.” His lips squirmed across his face, he couldn’t be sure what they were doing. “Now listen up. I’m going to put a hot knife through you. I’m going to spit in your blood.”
The connection broke. Flynn waited, still listening, afraid to move. His mother left him. Danny faded back. Zero sat on the couch peering down at the open newspaper. He was checking the Dow.
Flynn touched his mouth and realized he was grinning. He couldn’t help it.
He’d outwaited the bastard. He’d been able to stand it longer than the spook in the shadows. He didn’t have to chase anybody, the bad boy was going to keep coming after him, to him. But that would take time, and Flynn hoped no one else would get murdered.
One way or another it would be over soon. Flynn went back to bed, wrapped his arms around Jessie Gray and had his first good night’s sleep since he’d died.
TWENTY
Mooney sat behind his desk in his leather wingback chair and had a whole new tic going. He toyed with his shaggy beard, brushing it outward from his neck, then smoothing it back into place. Out and back, repetitively, consistently. Giving Flynn the professional cool eye the entire time he jacked his beard.
Flynn tried to ignore all the things he mistrusted about Mooney. He forced himself to look through the man’s issues—layers and webs and veils just like Flynn had himself—and simply see someone who might be able to help him find out what he needed to know about the shadow in the snow.
Mooney stared at Flynn and said nothing. The moment lengthened, the mood remained cool but not altogether cold. Mooney was warming to the idea that Flynn had come back on his own. The initial obscene fascination that Mooney had shown wasn’t there this time around.
“I won’t ask you to lie down,” Mooney said.
“Good, see that? We’re making progress already.”
“I notice you’re wearing your gun today.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’m not comfortable with that.”
“I don’t blame you,” Flynn said, but he didn’t unclip the .38.
Again steepling his fingers, Mooney rested his chin on them. Flynn wondered why Mooney found the position so comfortable and why he himself found it so irritating. Why everything annoyed him in here, even the smell of the leather furniture polish. Somebody had really given the place a serious dousing.
“I’m surprised you’ve come back,” Mooney said.
“Me a lot more than you.”
“But I can appreciate that you’re trying to get to the root of your problems.”
“Actually, I think I need your help with something else.”
“I see,” Mooney said. “All right then. You seem to be under less strain.”
“I know I’ll catch him now.”
“The killer? Why is that?”
“I can outlast him.”
Flynn mentioned the notes and the phone call. The fact that the shadow in the blizzard was unraveling just a little faster than Flynn was himself. Mooney wavered between fascination, self-interest and a genuine desire to help. Flynn knew Mooney must be in analysis himself and wondered what the man’s psychiatrist thought of him.
But he couldn’t let himself become distracted. He caught Mooney’s gaze, looked deep and thought he made some contact. If Mooney was going to be able to help him at all, now was the time.
Flynn asked, “What’s he trying to tell me?”
“On the face it’s self-evident. The subject is in pain.”
“Sure, but what can I do with that? How do I draw him out?”
Mooney quit it with the tics and just sat there, centered, confident. Sitting with Flynn like two guys taking in a beer, watching a ball game. “I’m not absolutely certain that’s applicable. We already know what draws him. You do.”
“Yeah.”
“And he uses others to send his messages. So to bring him forward is to endanger others. We don’t want to urge him out in the same fashion as before.”
Flynn had to rethink it. “No. How do I get him to focus all of his attention on me?”
“You’re assuming I know all the details. I don’t. Start at the beginning.”
You could go back and back and never quite get to the beginning. Flynn decided to take a chance and laid it out, starting with Shepard’s tip. Nuddin in the cage, scarred. Christina Shepard holding the gun, the talk of her father, her husband’s betrayal, the escape into the ice, the wipe-out in the Long Island Sound. The murders. He still kept the dead talking dog to himself.
“Do you have specific questions?” Mooney asked.
“First, why this aggression toward Nuddin? The beatings, the cage?”
“There’s no clear-cut answer of course. The family may have felt humiliated by the fact that they had a mentally challenged person in the family. Or it may have been an attempt at some kind of rehabilitation. Autism is still a vastly unknown disorder referenced with a great many conflicting theories and contradictory forms of treatment.”
“She said she was protecting him. Saving him from the world.”
“Typical of such personality disorder, the need to ‘overprotect’ to the point of harming the individual. It’s fear-related, I believe, not instilled anger, evidence to the contrary. We think of one person hurting another as an act of rage, but it can be an act of love as well, misguided or not. A simplistic example is of a father spanking a child to teach him not to play with matches. A more pertinent illustration might be a mother terrified for her teenage daughter’s safety when the girl doesn’t return all night. In the morning, when the daughter returns home safe and sound, the terrified and frazzled mother smacks her, perhaps beats her mercilessly. The motivation is love and fear entwined. Self-hatred projected outward but catalyzed by you. Implemented through you.”
Flynn whispered, “But what did I do?”
“The subject’s rage at himself…it’s escalating. He’s losing control, the phone call proves that, but he remains immensely patient. Killing the old woman in the theater ladies’ room demonstrates that.”
“He started off by shooting a woman in the head, and now he’s losing control?”
“That’s not where your lives intersected. He chose you before that point for some unknown reason. But in essence, yes. The killer is calculated and involved with your life. Collected, dedicated, forbearing. But his direct communications with you—the letters and the phone call—that is the subject emotionally uncoiling. That’s him at his weakest. He values your participation in these situations. Your opinion must matter to him.”
“Jesus Christ. Why?”
“Perhaps it is someone you know very well.”
Mooney was great at stating the obvious, but hearing it again, out loud, made Flynn think about it even harder. Did he already know who the killer was? Had he seen a glimpse of a face but just wasn’t getting it?
On film they slowed down the movie and did a nice big close-up of the single frame where the killer can be seen. Maybe some people really could remember like that, if they focused and tried hard enough, but Flynn just couldn’t get there.
“I don’t understand how it’s all connected. The suffering and the rage, and the love and the fear.”
“Perhaps it’s not,” Mooney said, throwing it out while stroking his beard again. He was onto something. He felt proud of hi
mself. “Perhaps you’re actually dealing with two individuals here.”
Two shadows in the snow. Two figures bracing him on the road. Getting bumped on either side and squeezed down the middle of the lane.
Frickin’ Alvin and Marianne. Chad and Emma. Mooney and Sierra, teaming up to wipe Flynn out of the game for reasons he couldn’t understand. Sure, why not, you never knew anyone the way you thought you did. You didn’t even know yourself. Maybe Shepard had two brothers. Maybe Bragg had picked up a partner. Flynn saw himself, brain-damaged and bisected, a split personality doing all this to himself, then forgetting about it. Sure, why not, you never knew—
Flynn slumped in the chair and said, “Ah shit, don’t tell me that.” He turned to the window and thought about who might be out there and how many of them there were. Why stop at two? Maybe three. Maybe ten. A hundred cars following the Dodge under the ice. A fucking gridlock on the midnight road.
TWENTY-ONE
The snow kept falling. Flynn worked his cases. The winter got worse. Sierra watched him and made sure he was doing his job, that he wasn’t coasting too lost in his own troubles. She didn’t fully trust him anymore. The wedge was there and might always be there now, and the idea of it saddened him.
He knocked back the files and folders. He worked in a frenzy. He chased down bad dads and mean mommies. He kept his eyes open, wondering when the folks in the snow were going to make their charge. Every time someone passed him in a hallway he looked for a note in their hands. Every time he stepped into a men’s room, he wondered if he’d find a body zapped in the stall. He hounded abusive fathers and stupid mothers and he called in the Suffolk cops more than he ever had before. Maybe he was worried his judgment was off. He was worried about being worried.
Sierra triple-checked his paperwork to make sure he wasn’t fudging details. She held semiclandestine meetings with Mooney and other coworkers. If he’d taken better care of the damn cactus, things might be altogether different.
He read through files at home and spent his off-hours checking on kids. A greater number of bad tips and false leads came in. The rotten weather shook people up. They saw bundled children running into each other with sleds and figured something awful was about to happen. The more ice that layered across their lives, the more bored they got and the more they needed to serve their drama and pained intuition.
Flynn worked through the cases at redline speed. He cleared his stacks and went looking for more. He caught a couple of religious loons who belonged to the same cultish church, a converted two-room schoolhouse that had been around for nearly a century. The whack jobs picked it up for loose change and hammered up a crucifix that showed Jesus even more skeletal and hairier than usual. They were big believers in not sparing the rod. One Sunday Flynn slipped inside to check out the services. He wasn’t there forty minutes when he saw the preacher pick up an eleven-or twelve-year-old boy, shake him violently in front of the congregation for no reason Flynn could see, and toss him hard to the wooden floor. The whole antique structure shook with the force of it. The preacher went into a bout of tongues. So did the boy. It was all very weird.
Flynn was careful about his hands. He waited until services ended and everybody was milling around, waiting for Armageddon. He approached the leader and wrote him up and had everybody in the place screaming except for the boy, who stared at him in mute shock and wonder. More of them started in with the tongues. It almost made him laugh. Somebody got pushy in the name of God and Flynn knocked him down. That really got them tonguing. Somebody tongued 911.
Two cops showed up ready to throw Flynn in the slam until they checked the logs and found a lot of complaints about the place. The creepy congregation slinked off and Flynn made an on-site inspection of the boy’s home the next day. He called two Suffolk cruisers in to park out front for a little extra leverage. He waited for the preacher or somebody to press charges but nobody did.
Sierra triple-checked his report two days later and gave him the stink eye, but didn’t say anything.
The next afternoon he had to haul all the way out to the Hamptons, and every inch of the way he thought of Danny. He refused to go over fifty the whole ride, forcing himself to make it feel leisurely while he waited for his brother to appear in the rearview. He waited for the dog to snap off a caustic comment. He waited for Patricia to make a move and give him the clues to saving Emma. But the whole drive he was alone and couldn’t figure out why.
Once out there, in a beach house built on an eroding coast, with the shoreline moving in on the foundation and probably costing the family everything they owned, he found the father edging into oblivion.
Drunk with his insurance papers and bank statements and two calculators laid out on the living room table, the man refused to take Flynn’s hand. A fireplace designed to perfection for roasting marshmallows burned and crackled.
Inside, the place vibed millionaire, comfort, class, style, home on the heath, beautiful people united against the peasants of industry. Outside, the house was maybe a year from tilting into the ocean.
It would tear anybody up, investing in a castle that wouldn’t last until next Christmas. All your poor cousins laughing at you. Having to crash on your sister’s couch because you blew a few mill buying a disaster area. Flynn could see the guy about to fall into the sea himself.
His name was Kenton. Flynn had done a quick background check and liked that the mook had worked his way up from the bottom of the construction crew world. He’d spent years at a cement mixer and breaking rock with a jackhammer. Kenton’s powerful, muscular body tightened under Flynn’s questioning.
The wife and daughter seeped from the living room corners. Flynn saw plenty of shadowed bruises and black fingerprints on them as they cowered beneath prints of Dutch masters’ paintings. The girl’s left arm had been wrapped in a sling. Flynn stood there wondering why the wealthy had it so bad.
Kenton’s angry talk eventually shifted into threats and devolved into worse. Flynn waited for him to jump. It would happen soon. He didn’t even have to meet another man’s rage head-on, all he had to do was stand there and the poison would pool on the floor.
Flynn just kept listening to him while the snow piled against the windows and the thermostat maintained a perfect seventy degrees and you could feel the place sinking by atoms. The smoky smell of the burning logs filled his mind with childhood memories that weren’t his own. He thought of his parents feeding each other pumpkin pie, laughing as they held each other and swung beneath mistletoe, and he and Danny sat opening presents in front of the fire. The whole family going outside to build an igloo and make snow angels. It was never too late to dream about a happy childhood.
Finally the little girl started to cry and the shushing sounds of her mother filled the room and Kenton started blaming Flynn for making his daughter cry.
“See that!” the man shouted. “See what you’ve done now!”
It was so ludicrous that Flynn couldn’t help letting out a little disgusted laugh. It got Kenton’s eyes bugging, the thick veins in his temples slithering. Flynn shot the mother a sympathetic glance, went to the table, grabbed up a couple of the financial forms and threw them into the fire.
A tidal roar fluttered Kenton’s lips as his face went purple. You’d think he’d have been happy. Flynn had just done what Kenton had wanted to do for months, maybe years. For a large, furious man he moved slowly, warily, knowing he was about to cross a whole new line now.
He stomped forward, waiting for Flynn to throw a punch or dance away, totally confused when Flynn didn’t move at all. Kenton drew back his fist.
The wife let loose a plaintive cry and the girl mimicked her, then they turned toward each other and held on, resigned to death.
Seeing his mother and father on their backs in the snow, waving their arms making wings, Danny going by on a sleigh, it was enough to make Flynn shake his head and realize how carried away you could get no matter the circumstances. The shadow in the blizzard must’ve had plenty of h
appy fictitious memories veering around his skull while he electrocuted Florence. Maybe seeing him self with Angela Soto, loving her and ringed with happy fat children, even while he shot her face off.
Kenton’s swing still not even fully drawn back to the shoulder. Flynn’s mind and muscles were light-years ahead, warping around the sun. He could go home, take a nap, drive back here, get back in place and Kenton’s massive fist still wouldn’t have reached him.
Flynn wanted a wild drag-out. He wanted to take off his clothes and dive into the ocean. He wanted somebody to tell him if his life was making any difference to any body at all except the shadow in the snow, who was the only one who seemed to give a shit.
The girl hiding her face behind the sling, the mother trying to do the same thing. Both of them terrified of Kenton’s raised arm.
Flynn wanted to match wrath and righteous pain.
He wanted to behold the cosmic scales of outrage and misfortune and see how he and Kenton stacked up against each other. Who hurt more. How many dead brothers did Kenton have in his backseat? How many talking ghost dogs knocked out quips and urged him to let go with his worst potential?
Flynn still had plenty of time. He wanted to drag the lug by the ear and dump him in front of his kid. He thought about handing Louisville sluggers to the wife and daughter and letting them pound the crap out of the thug. It would take some creative manipulation of the paperwork, but Flynn figured it would be worth it.
Here came the fist.
But before it reached Flynn it veered and fell and Kenton sank to his knees.
This huge man just hunched there, his eyes wide and seeing some of his mistakes and the extent of his actions, turning to look at his wife and kid. He probably hadn’t cried in more than thirty years either.
Kenton seemed to be meeting himself inside himself. His shoulders sagged and began to shake. The sobbing began down in his throat with a childish wail seeking escape. It rose and he looked puzzled, as if wondering where it was coming from. His rheumy eyes closed as if against a great wind, and when they opened again they were full of tears. Flynn felt a strange and sudden rush of jealousy.
The Midnight Road Page 18