He knew that. He also could not help himself. He was being driven by a compulsion beyond conscious thought. He needed to find the young woman who had been starring in his recent visions and he needed to destroy her, and he needed to do it in the most exceedingly painful manner possible.
The reasons why he needed to do it were beyond Milo’s comprehension, but that did not make them any less real. The compulsion drove him relentlessly, and he knew that the risk he was taking was a worthwhile one, despite the fact he could not explain, even to himself, why that was the case.
So now he navigated the congested city streets in the middle of the day, driving away from the crowds in Boston and toward the crowds in Everett. He felt conspicuous, like a fish out of water, but hoped he looked like just another schmuck on his way to work to begin just another night shift at the factory.
No one paid the slightest attention to him, as far as he could tell, and the anonymity was reassuring. He would not get caught leaving Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker’s rotting corpse in his apartment because, well, because the rest of the people in the world were so caught up in their own little unimportant lives, with their own little unimportant problems, that he could probably walk down the street with a neon sign strapped to his chest flashing the words I KILLED A GIRL AND LEFT HER COOLING BODY IN MY LIVING ROOM! and no one would pay any more attention to him than they were paying right now.
The vehicle he had jacked was modern and comfortable, containing a built-in GPS unit that squawked out directions to 7 Granite Circle, Everett, providing precise turn-by-turn navigation, leading him inexorably to his destination. The Buick’s silver-haired owner, a little old lady who had to be eighty if she was a day, hadn’t put up a fight. In fact she had seemed almost resigned to losing her car, as if she had suspected sooner or later she was going to be car-jacked and today just happened to be the unlucky day.
And, Milo thought, that might well have been the case. An old lady driving a fancy new vehicle in stop-and-go traffic around a crowded city really should know better. All he had had to do was flag her down with a sheepish smile on his face—Jeez, I’m a poor lost tourist and I need a little help!—and yank her out of the car when she stopped. She rolled her window down a few inches and Milo grabbed a fistful of hair, yanking relentlessly until she popped the locks just to get a little relief from the pain. After that, he had simply slid into her place in the driver’s seat and accelerated away while she stood in the middle of the street and watched, not screaming, not complaining, not saying anything at all. Just watching.
Milo felt a twinge of guilt about the whole thing. Carjacking was wrong and he had not been raised to be a common thief. But certain things in life were important and thus rendered minor issues like stealing some old bat’s car irrelevant, and this was one of them. Besides, he told himself. I’ll dump the car somewhere when I’m finished and it will be returned undamaged to the old lady anyway. I’m just borrowing it for a couple of hours, that’s all. No harm, no foul.
He spun the wheel and listened to the radio—volume down low, so he could still hear the GPS—and followed the flow of traffic, not speeding, not driving recklessly, not doing anything to draw unwanted attention to himself. As anxious as he was to begin his new adventure, this was not the time to make a stupid mistake.
He sang along with Gladys Knight, riding on the Midnight Train to Georgia, pretending to be a Pip, daydreaming about what he would have done to Gladys some dark night in the back of the tour bus, and before he knew it the GPS informed him, “You have arrived at your destination.”
Milo eased into the driveway and looked the house over and knew instantly that the electronic miracle worker had done its job. The number screwed into the weathered siding next to the front door was the right one, but even without the benefit of the brass “7” he would have known. He would recognize this house anywhere. He had memorized every detail of its exterior from his last vision.
Milo shut off the engine and smiled. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. The girl from his visions wasn’t here; he knew that. After all, he had seen her leave with his own eyes, or at least in his own mind, which was the same thing, practically speaking. But he wasn’t worried. Getting her to return wouldn’t be a problem. Not unless she had a soul as black and bitter as his own, and Milo Cain had never met anyone in his three decades on earth who could make that claim.
Gladys Knight serenaded him inside his head as he hurried toward the front door. He was anxious to get started. Time was wasting.
28
Franklin Marchand climbed the tenement’s rickety back stairs as quietly as he could. He had no small amount of recent life experience in stealth, it being a necessary prerequisite to survival as a vagrant.
Early in his time on the streets, an older homeless man had taken Franklin under his wing and shown him the ropes—how to panhandle without frightening the mark away, how to pick a cheap lock to find shelter during the bitterly cold nights of winter, how to fade into the background of life to avoid drawing the attention of the police—so sneaking around this drafty old building presented little challenge.
Franklin had seen Strange Dude depart earlier, walking resolutely, with a spring in his step that indicated he had important business to attend to, so there was no danger the man would be inside his apartment when Franklin broke in. But he had no idea where Strange Dude had gone, and thus no idea how long he would be gone. Maybe the guy had only walked to the convenience store on the corner to buy booze and was even now on his way back, the spring in his step only because he was in a hurry to get home and start drinking.
The thought gave Franklin pause. He did not want to be caught by Strange Dude, especially not in his apartment going through his stuff. The guy gave Franklin the creeps, a serious case of the willies, and he had no interest in finding out how the guy would react if he walked into his place to find Franklin with his hands in the cookie jar.
But still, Franklin couldn’t stop thinking about the unsettling situation with the girl last night—Strange Dude forcing her into the tenement building at knifepoint—and all of the other nights when similar things had happened. Something was going on, something bad, Franklin could just tell, and one of the few things he still cared about in this fucked-up world was his little girl. Samantha was twenty-two now, no longer little and not even a girl, she was a full-grown adult woman, but to Franklin she would always be that tiny whirlwind in blonde pigtails running around the house, her bare feet slapping the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor.
If Strange Dude was raping girls Samantha’s age, or, God forbid, raping and then killing them, Franklin knew he could no longer stand by and allow it to happen. Every young girl was someone’s daughter. More to the point, who was to say the next young girl to be ushered up here at knifepoint wouldn’t be his daughter?
That was assuming his suspicions were even correct. Maybe there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the things Franklin had seen. For the life of him he couldn’t imagine what that explanation might be, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be one.
So he had waited across the street from Strange Dude’s tenement building, sitting on the sidewalk with his back propped against the stained red brick façade of a long-abandoned dry-cleaning establishment, smoking cigarettes and watching, waiting for his morning hangover to subside.
Sometime after noon, Franklin wasn’t sure exactly when—he didn’t wear a watch anymore because time meant nothing when you had nowhere to go—Strange Dude had come out the tenement’s battered front door like he owned the place and turned toward Government Center. Franklin watched him walk briskly away, his form growing smaller and smaller until he disappeared from sight. Then he waited a little while longer before tossing his cigarette into the gutter and rising unsteadily to his feet. He circled the building and entered through the long-abandoned service entrance in back.
Franklin arrived at the third-floor landing and slipped quietly down the shabby hallway. He expected to se
e no one and did not. A series of three doors lined each side of the narrow corridor and for a moment Franklin was stymied. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be more than one possible apartment up here. It seemed obvious now, but he hadn’t given the situation much thought. Hell, he was just some homeless loser, not a fucking private detective.
He stood still, a couple of steps inside the hallway, unsure of how to proceed. Then he smiled. Strange Dude had provided a roadmap straight to his front door. The entire building was understandably in poor condition. After all, it had been deemed unlivable years ago by some anonymous building inspector. But dirt and dried mud caked a path straight to one door—the door roughly one-third of the way along the hallway on the left. It had to be the one.
Franklin reached it in a few steps and studied the cheap lock built into the punky wood above the tarnished brass knob. It was exactly what he had expected to find: worthless protection that would provide no challenge. He fished his lock-picking tools—he had liberated them from his mentor’s coat one morning after discovering the man dead as a doornail on a park bench—and got to work.
Within seconds the tumblers clicked into place and the lock turned and Franklin was in.
29
Cait was not typically one to be bothered by crowds. She liked people, enjoyed being around them, interacting with them, even when they were all strangers. Today was a different story, though. Today she felt out of sorts, thrown off her game by the terrifying Flicker she had experienced back at the hotel room. Seeing the young girl die right in front of her—experiencing the awful torture in a way that was as real as if she had been standing next to the killer—was a completely new and unsettling experience.
The scene had been unlike any Flicker she had ever lived through, graphic and disturbing, and when she walked through the automatic sliding doors leading into the terminal at Logan Airport and saw the throngs of restless travelers she was thrown for a loop. She shrank against Kevin reflexively, covering her mouth with her hand and gasping.
“What is it, babe? What’s wrong?” Kevin held her tightly and his eyes bored into hers. “Is it happening again?”
“No, I’m okay,” she answered with a nervous laugh, making it perfectly clear she was anything but. “I just don’t feel like myself. Everything seems a little…I don’t know…off, I guess.”
“Well, that’s understandable. First you find your long-lost mother, then you discover you have a twin brother you never knew about, a man who, for reasons completely unknown, would like nothing better than to see you dead, then your newly located long-lost mother tells you she never wants to see you again. Then, to top it all off, you have to live through the worst Flicker ever—a horrific, bloody murder.”
A young mother trudged past, pulling a wheeled suitcase behind her with one arm and holding a squalling infant with the other. She looked at them sharply as Kevin’s voice bounced off the walls of the terminal, magnifying the words “horrific, bloody murder.” She shook her head in disgust and leveled a withering stare at them.
“Sorry about that,” Kevin said to the woman, lowering his voice to nearly a whisper. Then he turned to Cait. “But you get my point, right? Anyone would be feeling a little off after the kind of day you’ve had.”
Cait started to giggle and a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob came out. “Yes, I get your point. So does everyone else here in Terminal B. We’d better buy our tickets back to Tampa before the TSA decides we’re terrorists, discussing bloody murders and the like. Much more talk like that and we’ll end up in a holding cell.”
Kevin smiled and they walked to a row of uncomfortable-looking molded plastic chairs. He indicated she should sit and said, “Wait here. I’m assigning you the very important job of keeping an eye on our luggage. Just relax and I’ll get us on the first flight back to sanity.”
Cait slumped in her chair—it really was as uncomfortable as it looked—and wondered how in the hell she could even begin to relax. She decided the chances were pretty good that she would never relax again. She watched Kevin as he waited in line at the ticket counter, fidgeting and glancing back in concern every few seconds. He was big and strong and overprotective and she had never loved him more than she did right now.
Her eyes felt grainy and heavy and began to close, and then what seemed like a second later a hand clamped down on her shoulder and she was being shaken gently awake.
Kevin smiled down at her. “Hey, sleepyhead. Some watchdog you turned out to be. I turn my back for one minute and you fall asleep on the job. Fortunately for you our fancy, expensive luggage is still here, otherwise you’d be out on your ass looking for a new job.”
Cait glanced at the two worn duffel bags, still on the floor at her feet where they had been placed. “Ha!” she said. “Fat chance this ‘fancy, expensive luggage’ would ever be stolen. No self-respecting thief would be caught dead stealing our crappy stuff.”
She forced herself to her feet. Her body felt heavy and slow, filled with a bone-deep exhaustion. All she wanted to do was get on the airplane and go back to sleep. She had no doubt she would be unconscious all the way back to Tampa.
“How long was I out?” she asked, trying to stifle a yawn and mostly failing.
“Almost half an hour. That was the slowest-moving line outside of the DMV I’ve ever had the misfortune of waiting in.” Cait could see the concern still etched in Kevin’s eyes. He was trying to keep the conversation light for her benefit but was clearly worried about her and she loved him for it.
“Let’s get moving,” he said. “We have a date with two coach-class seats on the next flight out of this burg, but if we hurry, we might have enough time for a quick dinner first. Play your cards right and I might even buy you a drink.”
“Ooh, big spender,” she teased halfheartedly.
“If you’ve ever eaten in an airport restaurant, you know just how big.”
“And you’re going to spring for drinks too? What did I do to deserve this?”
“Drink, I said. Not drinks. I want you just buzzed enough to accept my advances but not so trashed you’ll fall asleep before we’re done. Again.”
Cait burst out laughing, something she wouldn’t have believed possible even ten minutes ago. “As if I could ever fall asleep with you at the controls, lover-boy.”
She hooked her arm around his and he shrugged both duffel bags over his shoulder. They moved through the crowd, weaving and bobbing, making slow but steady progress through the terminal until spotting a franchise steak house.
Once again Cait thanked God for her boyfriend. She felt better already. Sure it had been a lousy day, one of the worst ever, but she was ready to put it all behind her. Things were going to be just fine.
30
The neighborhood appeared bleak and deserted. Milo took his time walking toward the house. He wasn’t in any hurry, and as he meandered along the flagstone walkway he examined the homes flanking 7 Granite Circle. All of the yards were empty and so were most of the driveways, their pavement stained and discolored by leaking oil and other automotive fluids. This wasn’t the type of upscale area where the homes had garages, so it was easy to tell that most residents were at work.
All in all, Milo was satisfied. The area was relatively secluded, given its location in densely packed Everett. There were fewer than a dozen homes on the cul-de-sac, all probably constructed at the same time and by the same builder using a cookie-cutter approach more than a half century ago. It had the feel of a solidly blue-collar neighborhood, the kind of place where the husbands and wives both worked full-time, struggling to earn enough money to avoid falling behind on the mortgage. Milo felt there was at least a decent chance that the older lady from his visions was the only person at home in the entire fucking development.
He climbed three chipped concrete steps to the tiny landing and rang the doorbell. He had no particular plan in mind, no elaborate ruse developed with which to gain the trust of the woman. The days were long past, if they had ever
existed at all in a hardscrabble neighborhood like this, when an older woman, living alone, would ever allow a young man she didn’t know into her home unless she had set up a service appointment and the man provided adequate identification, none of which was the case here, obviously.
So why waste the time and effort required to even try sweet-talking his way inside? Milo Cain believed in the straightforward approach. It had worked many times in the past and he had every confidence it would work again today.
He waited after ringing the bell. Nothing happened. He waited a little longer, tempted to ring it again, but the last thing he wanted was to frighten the woman so badly she refused even to open the door. He had visions of her retreating to her phone and calling the cops.
At last his patience was rewarded as the heavy storm door swung inward and an older, frail-looking woman regarded him suspiciously from behind her still-closed screen door. Milo recognized her instantly as the woman from his visions.
“Yes?” she said, clearly not inclined to proceed any further without good reason.
Milo put what he hoped was a harmless-looking smile on his face as he pondered how to proceed. The question he faced was a simple one: Was the screen door locked or not? If it was, getting inside was going to be a problem, maybe even an impossibility. He could break the door down, it was constructed only of flimsy aluminum, but he didn’t think he could manage it quickly enough to prevent the woman from slamming the heavy storm door closed and then locking it.
But how likely was it that the screen door would even be locked? With the storm door closed and locked there would be no reason to lock the lighter screen door as well; it would accomplish nothing in terms of added safety and would be a pain in the ass for the homeowner when it came time to enter or exit. Milo tried to remember one single time his adoptive parents had locked the screen door in their home when he was growing up and could not.
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