The Midnight Road (7 page)

“How you’re getting on. What life is like for you after your near-death experience.”

He couldn’t quite make out if she was being facetious or not. Being flash frozen for a half hour wasn’t quite the same thing as missing out on a heartbeat or two. He realized it all came down to ego again. Like someone was taking something from him if they weren’t in awe that he’d driven back from the midnight road. Now he had to be called Mr. Miracle Man or what, he’d go pout?

“Life is very much the same,” he told her. He wasn’t sure if he was lying.

“No grand revelation or epiphany on the nature of our existence? How precious each waking moment has become?” She moved out of the seat and weaved about him, lissome, somehow ephemeral, as if she was vanishing and reappearing moment to moment. She was used to putting old men off-balance. She was turning on her appeal and dispensing pheromones. She was poking fun, probing for a deeper truth. “Have you put past regrets and bad blood behind you?”

He thought about it for a minute and said, honestly, “I don’t have much of either.”

“No?”

“No.”

“How about telling me why you conceded to speak to Mark Shepard?”

“It was time.”

“What’s that mean?”

Flynn said, “It means it was time.”

“The press has been treating you like hell, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“What did you think of my article?”

“It was exact. And well written.”

That loosened her lips a little, brought out a real smile. “Thank you. So don’t you think you could trust me to tell your story?”

“I don’t have a story to tell,” he said.

“Everyone does.”

“Yeah? So what’s yours?” he asked.

“Mine’s boring. Twice married, twice divorced, both marriages ending within a year. My fault, mostly. They didn’t want to be married, but I did, and I chased them until they cracked. I know I don’t look old enough to have two ex-husbands, but there it is. I didn’t deserve my position on the paper. My father is a journalism professor at Hofstra University. He’s got a lot of friends and pulled some strings for me. I earned my station pretty fast, though. I’m compulsive. When I see a chance to tell a unique story, I go after it. I chase the truth like my men, no matter where it leads, even if it hurts, and sometimes it does. I’m obsessive. It’s an ineradicable flaw in my character.”

He got the sense she’d been asked the question before and had this all down as a prepared statement. Probably hit on all the proper psychological lures and decoys to get an interviewee to open right up, start spilling his own guts. Flynn had no idea why it wasn’t working on him.

“At least you’re self-aware,” he said.

“Very. Now, what do you think Mark Shepard wants to tell you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you hoping he’ll say?”

“I have no idea.”

“Is there anything you want to say to him?”

“Miss Gray, one of us isn’t taking the hint here.”

She nodded and stood, waited for him to move off first and when he didn’t, she gave a quick flip of that long lovely hair and started down the hall. She was a woman who would always need the final word, and most men wouldn’t mind allowing it.

“I wonder, though, if it’s you or me, Mr. Flynn?”

He decided, Screw Shepard. Maybe it wasn’t time after all. Maybe it would never be time.

Flynn got lost in the hospital. He peeked into rooms and startled the hell out of old people and candy stripers. Memories and associations started peeling up from the back of his head like cheap plastic tiling. Shards struck him and dug in. He turned a corner and looked through an open doorway and saw a woman very much like his mother, hooked up to the same types of machines, and just as dead. Her mind gone, her lungs forced to work on and on, serving no purpose.

He nabbed the elevator and saw a guy in there holding flowers, hunting for the maternity ward. Flynn had been holding candy and a stuffed teddy bear, late for the arrival of his own son. He’d been stuck in traffic, in the snow
—always
stuck in traffic in the snow, forever, forever like Sisyphus and his rock—and had gotten off on the ward to be met by the anemic faces of Marianne’s parents.

Both of them crying. Both of them with their arms open. Both of them trying to hug him. The bear gazing on. The baby in the morgue. Marianne in her room, alone, with the Weather Channel blaring. She held her arms out to him too. She’d named the kid Noel because of all the snow. Frickin’ Alvin out there somewhere in the world waiting to make his way into Flynn’s bed.

Flynn hit the automatic doors and the cold burst against his warm face and he let out a breath that had been pent up for days. He looked for his rental car, a blue Taurus, but the snow was heavy enough that it had blanketed the lot. He started wiping off hoods trying to find the car. He felt embarrassed without reason, and a subtle flush of anger continued to well inside him.

From the street side of the lot a vague shadow of a woman approached, black parting veils of white.

Orchid tattoos twined up her neck and reached out across her jaw, the first thing anyone would notice about her. Knotted ropes of hair hung across her face, these deep dark eyes peering out from the shroud. She had piercings going all around her ears, four or five in each lobe. Her face hung slack, burdened with hard mileage. Fishnets even in winter, a leather jacket a few sizes too large, lots of chains and studs.

Junkie
was an outdated term no one used anymore, but nothing more PC had replaced the term.
Drug dependent
didn’t cut it.
Crack whore
was too glib, but it might prove accurate. Flynn rarely got approached by hustlers on the street anymore because he had enough cred behind him for the girls to smell law. Maybe he was losing the musk now that he was on the wrong side of the cops.

She was too attractive to be one of the under the 59
^th
Street Bridge gals. She looked more Greenwich Village or East Side action. He couldn’t figure what the hell a Manhattan pro might be doing out here in the Stonybrook Hospital parking lot in a snowstorm.

He could see she was stoned. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.

She drew a slip of paper from her pocket and held it out to him. “I have to give this to you.”

“To me?”

“Yeah.”

He was reluctant to take it. He scanned the lot to see if anybody else was around, if this was a setup of some kind. Shepard’s lawyers at work, trying to tap him with kiddie porn. The girl took another step closer. Snow was piling in her hair, the white blotting out her tats. He let out a small groan of frustration, hoping he wasn’t being a sucker. He took the note.

On it were the neatly typed words:

THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT

Flynn glanced up at her and said, “What gag is this?”

“It’s no gag. I mean, I don’t think it’s a gag.”

“Who gave this to you?”

“I’m not supposed to tell.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I can’t.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Don’t you understand?”

He stared at her knowing this was some kind of new game he’d never played before. He frowned in puzzlement and she smiled sadly back at him, and he watched as her black hair billowed as if from a great wind, and the snowflakes dusting her flew off at once, turning pink and then red, and her eyes widened in perfect clarity without reason. Her forehead seemed to jut forward from the center before splitting apart, first in half and then into quarters and many pieces afterward, the orchids coming closer, proffered, as she rose up onto her tiptoes to meet him, lifting further and vaulting into his arms, and then he could see nothing because her brains were in his eyes.

FOUR

The Suffolk County homicide dick looked like a stiletto blade with eyes. The black nerve inside Flynn started throbbing away as he picked up a serious threat vibe. He’d expected to see one of the cops he’d talked to before. Now he’d been turned over to a hard-ass, someone who’d make something stick. Even before the detective introduced himself, he squinted like he thought every word that would ever come out of Flynn’s mouth was bound to be a velvet lie.

Flynn had met a lot of cops. The front line of the donut brigade. The hard-core men of justice who put solving crimes before spending time with their families. The scuzzballs with badges who busted teenage girls so they could spook them into backseat favors. The ones who were a hair away from being career criminals, who liked to pal around with the goombahs and hustlers on their off-hours.

So far, he didn’t know what to make of this one.

They were in the emergency room. The storm had worsened. All the sick folks were pressed together in one half of the waiting area while cops and forensic photographers kept swinging in and out of the hospital nabbing hot chocolate and stomping snow off their shoes.

The sick people kept staring at Flynn. He didn’t blame them. He’d bolted in grabbing at his face and immediately vomited on the floor. The security guy kept calling, “Sir! Sir!” behind him. Flynn had found the bathroom on a blind run and practically drowned himself in the sink washing himself off. His forehead stung with two parallel scratches from flying skull splinters. The dead girl was in his mouth.

Flynn’s clothes were still covered with her blood. A janitor had cleaned up his puke but the stink of it remained heavy in the room.

The security guard was bitching to the police, gesturing to Flynn with his chin and keeping his arms crossed over his chest.

The stiletto stood about five-seven, went maybe one-fifty. He looked light enough to pick up and sail across the room like a paper plane. He was padded in a black raincoat with heavy lining, black gloves, the top third of his black three-piece suit on display. The tie he wore was double-knotted. Hair black, eyes a hazy gray, skin the off-white of a dirty motel sheet.

“I’m Raidin,” the detective said. He had a priest’s soft voice. The name lingered there in the draft. Flynn knew he was supposed to respond but had no idea what to say. He just nodded and hoped it would be enough. The cop continued with a polished politeness. “Could you please go over what happened in detail one more time?”

Flynn did. He told it exactly as it happened, starting with waiting to speak to Shepard and the circumstances with the kid choking in the ER. He wasn’t going to be able to make himself look good. He was going to appear unhinged, which maybe he was. He wasn’t discounting anything. Raidin made heavy, sustained eye contact as Flynn laid it out. Flynn didn’t let it shake him. He realized that as soon as he was done telling his story Raidin would try to knock it down.

“Did you know her?”

“No,” Flynn said. “Who was she?”

“You never met her?”

“No.”

“You never slept with her?”

Flynn gave it a five count, trying to shrug back into his cool. Raidin was going to be one of those cops who wore away at you like Chinese water torture, one drip at a time. “Wouldn’t that constitute knowing her, in its broadest definition?”

“Yes, I suppose it would.” Raidin offered a grin that looked sharp enough to slice paper. “Her name was Angela Soto. Twenty-one. She grew up out here on the Island but she’d been working Manhattan the last couple of years. A known prostitute, both in the city and in Suffolk. In and out of rehab. She’d tried cleaning up her act but kept creeping back into the life.”

“She have any kids?” Flynn asked.

“Why?”

“Maybe the CPS has something on her.”

“We don’t know yet if she had any children.”

“Who’d she work for?”

“Strictly freelance so far as we know at the moment. Every now and again she’d come out here and visit her mother for a few months, wind up working a few side jobs in Centereach. She’s got a detailed rap sheet.”

“She was pretty, and young. I bet a lot of people felt a need to help her.”

Watching the tip of his own finger, Raidin tapped Flynn’s chest gently, prodding the stains. “And nobody could. That’s the way it is.”

“Maybe he was one of her johns.”

“Who?”

“The hitter.”

It made Raidin’s face tighten. “The hitter?”

All the film noir euphemisms slid through Flynn’s head.
Torpedo. Shooter. Button man.
“The guy who shot her. He chose her for a reason. He probably knew her.”

“We’ll check.”

Flynn’s eyes darted around the emergency room. More kids in assorted states of illness and injury stared blank-eyed. Elderly people who wouldn’t last out the winter appeared to know their fates and accept them with a common but assertive dignity.

The smell of the place, and himself, and Angela Soto’s blood and excavated interiors began to swarm up against his face again. He had to put the back of his hand over his nose and wait for the stinging in his nostrils to pass.

“Any idea where the shooter was standing?” he asked.