The Midnight Road (6 page)

The papers did better by him, but nobody read the papers. He started receiving death threats in the mail and over the phone. He recognized at least one voice, a woman whose husband used to beat her and their eleven-year-old daughter. Flynn had investigated the case and got the husband put away for a nickel. The woman spit venom and used some foul language he’d never come across before. It was spooky. Her vitriol downshifted into broken sobbing when she admitted her name and told him how betrayed she felt, that he was doing the same things her husband used to do. He talked to her for more than an hour before she hung up, furious and calling him a liar. He hadn’t taken a drink in eighteen months but could only fall off to sleep that night after killing a half bottle of Jack.

Despite all he’d seen and survived, Marianne used to call him terribly naive. He was starting to understand what she meant.

He went back to work. He ran two investigations, following up complaints that turned out to be from angry in-laws who didn’t like their grandkids watching too much television. He ran another case and found a father with his belt in his hand beating the shit out of his ten-year-old son for missing a few blades of grass while cutting the lawn. Flynn kept his cool for about eight seconds. He got into it with the guy and broke his jaw. The police kept him for three hours of questioning. They sensed he was going savage.

It took more than a week before he felt ready to face Mark Shepard. It was bad timing. He was too slow off the line. By the time he got to the hospital, Shepard had been under the knife for four hours while surgeons extracted the bullet near his heart. Flynn decided to wait it out.

He wandered the hospital and sat down in the emergency room. He watched the battered and the ill come in by the truckload. Every time a child cried he hiked up a notch in his seat. He tried hard not to think that Christina Shepard had been right and he had piggy thoughts squirming away in some corner of his skull.

Zero hopped around and followed tight-faced paramedics racing through the corridors. The ghost dog had a nose for blood. He discussed Mitchum movies and kept up a running commentary on who might live through the night and who was definitely dead. Zero’s eyes fixed on a coughing kid and he said, “This one, he’s been bitten by a spider and he’s severely allergic. His throat’s closing up fast. By the time they get him on the table, he’ll be going into anaphylactic shock. He’s almost there.”

It wasn’t so bad, really, knowing you were either crazy or haunted. Flynn had felt that way most of his life anyway. Now things had just been kicked up a notch. His mother, on her deathbed, had roused from a coma long enough to lock her eyes onto him. Her hand gripped his shirtfront and proceeded to crawl up his chest until she snagged his collar. Her flesh was bloated and yellow as mustard. Her kidneys had stopped functioning days earlier. A quarter million in machinery did nothing but stare and keep time with its flashes and jazz-riff wails.

His mother’s gaze was distant but clear. She’d had nothing but ice chips for a week, and not even that the last forty-eight hours. Her voice sounded full of dust and silverfish. She said, “Wings like shiny gold coins” and died clutching his shirt.

Danny went out of the game with a beautiful teen girl riding next to him. Flynn didn’t know why he was stuck with a French bulldog, but everyone had to play the hand they were dealt.

He didn’t so much mind that the ghost of a dog spoke to him as he did the fact that Zero spoke with Flynn’s own voice. It was embarrassing.

The coughing kid was getting worse. Maybe Zero had something down right. Flynn watched, getting to his feet for a slow approach. It scared the boy’s mother while she stood at the desk filling out the insurance paperwork. She pulled the clipboard closer to her so he couldn’t see her name or address. He asked her, “Is your son allergic to anything? To insect bites?”

“What?”

“Your son—”

The emergency room had a security guard. Like if you got pushy while you were having a stroke, the guard might arrest you, put you in hospital jail until you learned your manners. Pick a number, get in line. Yo Stroke-boy, settle your ass down.

The security guard braced Flynn. Big guy, no weapons Flynn could see, but the dude was acting like he might yank a taser. “Sir, do you have a medical emergency?”

“This boy, I just wanted to know if—”

“Sir, if you don’t have a medical emergency I’m going to have to ask you to leave the ER.”

A wave of worry passed over the boy’s face as he stared at Flynn, his cheeks growing ashen, tears spurting onto the floor. The mother’s hand reached out and touched her son’s shoulder, turning him away. The guard started getting in close, invading space. Flynn wondered if anybody here would cut him some slack for coming back to life after twenty-eight minutes on the bottom. He was a Miracle Man, after all. Not everybody could do it.

The kid was turning a soft shade of blue. His breathing made it sound like he was whispering backwards.

The room seemed to be getting brighter. Flynn felt his lips drawing back. His teeth dried in the air. He began to grow short of breath. He weakened and nearly went to one knee in front of the guard.

The guard kept repeating, “Sir? Sir?” but wouldn’t lend a hand.

You’d think with a word like emergency right there in the name of the room, they’d take things a little more seriously.

Zero said, “What would Mitchum do, huh?”

Ole Bobby wouldn’t have allowed himself to get into this position in the first place. Neither would Danny. Neither would Sierra. Someone braces you, you slap him down. Flynn was trapped someplace between being too hard and being too soft. He also didn’t trust the dog. He hoped the dog was wrong about the whole situation.

The mother turned in the paperwork to the woman at the desk. She didn’t look like a nurse. Just someone else who worked there not acting official or grim or caring enough. She took the forms and bopped away, ponytail swinging. The boy continued whispering. Flynn was fifteen feet away but he thought he felt a drop of water land on the back of his neck. The kid’s tears were covering ground.

Flynn knew he should fight to win back his cool, but he’d dealt with enough dying children who couldn’t catch a break and he didn’t want to add another one to the list. Not even if he might have to go to hospital jail for a time-out.

He tried once more. “Get a doctor here now!”

“Sir—”

“Get out of my way.”

“Do you need a doctor? Is this a medical…?”

“Get out of my way!”

Flynn backhanded the security chump and watched him drop onto his ass and sit there gaping in fright. Mitchum would’ve been ashamed of Flynn. When you were a hero, you took on the roughnecks and the bootleggers and the mob. When you were on Cape Fear, you took on hotshot attorneys who owed you a debt of years wasted in the joint. You didn’t put the bite on some loser with a cap and no gun, whose bottom lip was trembling.

The boy settled it for all of them. The kid pitched over backwards and, for the first time, Flynn could see that the boy’s throat was so swollen that his coat zipper was gouging into his skin. The mother turned like she was seeing him for the first time, and said, “Jeff? Jeffie?”

Flynn yanked the kid into his arms and broke the zipper apart. It seemed to give Jeffie some relief, let him suck in some air. Flynn held the boy close and kicked through a pair of sage green doors at one end of the waiting room. The hall beyond was lined with beds and patients. Doctors congregated in groups with nurses, chatting. One guy turned to Flynn and actually smiled. It was a leftover leer from some joke one of the other doctors had just finished telling.

Behind him, the mother was screaming, “My baby! My baby!” They really did that, it wasn’t just in the movies.

Flynn put the kid on an empty table and said, “Anaphylactic shock from a spider bite!”

“Who are you? You can’t just come in—”

Flynn thought, Good, he was finally going to get a chance to crack somebody in the head, but one of the other docs, maybe the one who’d been telling the joke, began shouting orders. He questioned the mother and she told him, “I don’t know who that man is or what he’s talking about. My son has asthma! He’s on
Azmacort
but ran out of his inhaler spray!”

Three doctors, two nurses, all of them pointing at Flynn, several voices calmly speaking as one, said, “Get him out of here.”

From behind, someone drew him gently out of the hall. Flynn was surprised at how easily he allowed it to happen, his body responding without his will. He spun and saw a young woman beside him, her hand on his wrist pulling him along. From this angle he could only glimpse the barest hint of her face. She wore her blond hair long and straight, the way women had in the midseventies. He used to watch his friends’ older sisters actually iron their hair on ironing boards to get it that straight. Some of Danny’s girlfriends had done it too. Patricia Waltz. Hers had been the same.

The woman knew the hospital and skirted the emergency room, leading Flynn down halls back toward Shepard’s room. Her purse had weight to it and swung with real momentum. He was scared it might clock him in the crotch. She walked with an angry authority, never turning her chin. He kept waiting to see her face but she never showed it to him.

As they turned another corner he stopped abruptly, hoping to break her hold on him, but she had good reflexes and stopped with him, still gripping his wrist. He started up again and so did she, drawing him on. They entered an alcove waiting area with a view of the parking lot. It was snowing again.

She turned and he recognized her. She was a reporter for
Newsday
and she’d quoted him accurately. Her name was Jessie Gray.

“Was there a reason for all that ruckus?” she asked, sitting on a small love seat, leaving just enough room for him to squeeze in beside her. He remained on his feet.

“Probably,” he said.

She was dressed in jeans, heavy boots and a well-fitted insulated ski jacket. He got the feeling that she was never unprepared, that she always wore exactly what was necessary and was never caught without chains on her tires or sunscreen at the beach. She stared at him with an air of control and influence.

“I was trying to save a kid’s life,” he told her.

“Why did you think he was going into shock from a spider bite? It’s winter, there are no spiders around. Why were you arguing with the doctors?”

“You following me?” he asked.

“I was hoping to interview Mark Shepard again before his surgery but they rescheduled him from the afternoon to the morning. He went in before I arrived.” She gave him a good eyeing, her pert mouth like plastic rose petals, deep twin lines edging out from the corners cleaving her cheeks. She looked young enough to be doing a story for a high-school paper. “Please answer my questions.”

She was pretty, and guys always got pumped up to talk bullshit in front of a cute girl. Jessie Gray had the appealing features of the girl next door even if there’d never been a girl next door like this. His mother would have called her
bonny.
His weaknesses were hot-wired into his head by his brother’s girlfriends. She looked more than a little similar to Marianne, and Flynn felt himself wanting to impress her with his quick wit, even though he didn’t have one.

She stared at him with dark eyes that revealed a glint of indulgent humor. He thought she was probably deciding on the best way to draw out all the hidden facts of his life. He thought she might be carrying a concealed tape recorder that was catching his every stutter and fuck-up.

“I’ve seen the signs before,” he told her. “Nobody was taking the situation seriously enough. The boy was turning blue.”

“I only came in at the tail end of that scene,” she said. “You were scaring hell out of everybody, you know.”

He liked the way she talked. With an in-your-face, whip-snap quality. He liked how she handled herself but Flynn still wasn’t certain he should level with her or any reporter anymore.

“Did you speak to Shepard before he went in?” she asked.

“No.”

“You were finally willing to talk with him?”

“Finally?”

“He’s been asking for you for over a week.”

“I’ve been busy dealing with reporters.”

“And working your caseload. And scuffling.”

“I can promise you,” Flynn said, “I don’t scuffle.”

“Fight, then.
Brawl.
Are those macho terms more to your liking?”

“More accurate anyway.”

The snow was wet and collected on the window in varying patterns that reminded him of hitting the ice. He wondered if the snow wanted in just to finish the job. Marianne would say he was just being paranoid. He’d a ways had a touch of it. It was a way to salve the ego, thinking you were important enough to be on other angry people’s minds. He noticed that in the past two weeks his thoughts had been firing pretty randomly. He didn’t mind the dead French bulldog nearly as much as the fact that he was actually listening to it, doing what it told him. That he had believed in Zero.

“I’d like to do a follow-up interview with you,” Jessie Gray said.

“It’s only been, what, six or seven days? There’s nothing to follow up on.”