The Midnight Road (23 page)

Swaying around his apartment like she was dancing, she moved around him in tightening concentric circles. He didn’t turn when she slid behind him, then slipped in front. Maybe it was just her game of seduction, maybe it was something all the kids did.

She pressed against his chest and they kissed. He twisted her in his arms and this time there was more passion than before because he was angry. Just as much heat and lust. He was hard and starting to feel a little crazy. Crazier. He knew if they broke apart now she would say something he would regret, and he wondered what it might be.

Flynn pulled back and eased a step away from her.

Jessie Gray, her lips pink from the force of his own, said, “Would you mind if I interviewed your wife?”

There it was. You had to give it to her, boy.

“My ex. You mean you haven’t already?”

“I tried your wife’s place, but I got some guy named Al.”

“My ex. And her new beau. So you talked to Alvin.”

She was digging again, reaching for the deeper story. He wondered why in the hell he’d let her in. Why he’d kissed her, why even now he wanted to take her to bed when he knew she cared nothing for him. When he realized he hardly liked her. Her shallowness must be attractive to him.

He still wanted Marianne, for Christ’s sake. He seriously needed to sit down and examine these bent romantic urges soon.

“Al likes you,” Jessie said. “And your wife discusses you a lot with him, so you’re very much a topic of conversation.”

“Terrific.”

“He talked about your father to me, told me you were very angry about him. He didn’t know anything about your brother though.”

So Marianne told him about the old man, but not Danny. Why would that be?

He stared at Jessie as she continued. “Al follows you in the papers and on the news. He actually turned red when I mentioned your name.”

“Alvin got caught in a bad situation.”

“Yes, I could see that. He mentioned how—”

He cut her off and said, “Do you really think I want to discuss any of this with you, Jessie? My father? My ex?”

You could get backed into a corner and spend all week with people trying to get you to talk about shit you didn’t want to talk about. They acted like you owed it to them, coming clean on every last little feeling. Your secrets were only yours so long as they let you keep them. The dark nerve skewered through him. Jessie Gray was sharp but couldn’t read a person’s face. If she could, she would’ve shut up by now.

She looked confounded. At the zoo or the circus it would’ve been cute. Surrounded by the dead it wasn’t.

She asked, “Why not?”

“Because it’s more rotten, rude things. And don’t tell me that means you like me or want to marry me.”

She took his hand and immediately dropped it. The movement had meaning. Every movement did.

“You didn’t beat him up, though. You didn’t hurt Alvin but you hurt this other guy, Chad Rocco.”

“I didn’t hurt him either. I just kept him from burning his garage down.”

“He reported that you struck him.”

“I didn’t.”

Either Chad was lying to get Flynn in worse trouble or he was covering up for the fact that maybe Emma hadn’t taken a beating without dishing some out.

“I did some checking on your Emma Waltz,” Jessie said. “The sister of the girl your brother killed. She hasn’t led a very happy life.”

“I know.”

“And you want to save her. You want to save her to make up for what Danny did to her sister.”

No point in lying. “Yes, I think so.”

“It’s a very simplistic attitude and it’s set you on a hardline course.”

“That’s me.”

“You didn’t think it through at all. You just run in and bounce the guy around and you didn’t expect him to take it out on her?”

“I didn’t bounce him. I even introduced myself.”

She shook her head, disappointed in him. “Chad Rocco told the cops you beat both of them up.”

“He’s covering his own ass.”

“And she let him, that’s my point. She didn’t see you as a white knight.” Jessie frowned, really giving it to him the way his mother used to. “Did she even recognize you? Your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have some truly goofy issues.”

“I’m well aware of that,” he told her.

She walked to the bedroom and stood in the doorway, checking his bed out. The room was spartan at best. He had one pillow. He had one winter blanket and one comforter. Marianne had taken away all the softness, the comfortable lived-in look of the place. Except for the bed and a single dresser, he’d never bothered to replace any of the furniture she’d taken. Or the once-abundant niceties and color and blithe aesthetic. He didn’t know how.

Jessie turned, hit a nice pose with her hand on her hip, leaning against the jamb, her hair angling over one eye. He’d seen it in five hundred movies, but seeing it now with her it was something totally new. He wet his lips. The area between his shoulder blades began to feel clammy and itchy.

“You still worried about me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m still coming on too strong for you. I can’t help myself. I’m attracted to you. My therapist isn’t helping me at all with you. I talk and talk about you. He’s fascinated by you as well.”

“Maybe you should fire him. He sounds a little nutty.”

“You’re starting to want me, aren’t you?”

She sat on the bed and swung her legs up onto the mattress. She was a little too young to make the come-hither look work, but there was a heat coming off her now.

He scratched at his stubble and she said, “What if it’s true? What if I do like you?”

“I think you need to untangle your wiring and find a husband you’ll stick with. You should stop running after the wrong guys.”

“Sound advice,” she said. “I wonder if anybody’s ever taken it. You only go after the right women?”

“No.”

“Like I said—”

“It’s another of my goofy issues.”

She pulled a face. “Stop obsessing with your white hair, Miracle Man. Jesus Christ, you’re worse than my mother.” She started unbuttoning her blouse and got the smile back into place. The fever in her eyes passed into him.

Still, he didn’t move until she told him, “Now come over here, Miracle Man, and fuck me.”

EIGHTEEN

In the night, Flynn got up and checked the front door, the windows, all the locks. He opened the blinds and stared out at the glowing silver snow, willing a sniper to put him in the crosshairs, thinking he might see the bullet coming and just step aside. Then run out there, his crank hanging, rushing through the ice that had killed him once and saved him once already, hoping it might happen again.

If only he could get his hands on the figure out there, waiting, anguished but holding on.

The empty white walls burned in the darkness. He no longer had the decades of the cool and the hip protecting him in here. Bogie no longer gave him the knowing eye. Betty’s cheesecake that got American GIs through the Pacific Theater wasn’t going to get Flynn through anything anymore.

Sliding back under the blanket, he smoked in the dark and waited to get smart enough to figure out his next move.

He thought Jessie was sleeping but she stirred beside him. He’d left the bathroom light on and it threw just enough illumination for him to see the outline of her lips as she spoke. “I like older men. You all screw like you have something to prove.”

Talk about a left-handed compliment. “We do.”

“I’m glad.”

She couldn’t seem to help herself. Every statement out of her mouth left him sort of cold. He thought she probably planned such comments carefully just to see the reaction. He saw a lot more ex-husbands in her future.

He’d been handling his involvement with Jessie Gray all wrong. She’d been digging into his life when he should’ve been getting her to help him. He’d been saying it since he’d first met her. She was a good journalist. Maybe she could teach him something.

“What do you know about Bragg?” he asked.

“He’s dead.”

“They never found his body.”

“That’s not as uncommon as people are led to believe. You figure if someone throws themselves into the river, they’ll float to the surface and get fished out sooner or later. But the Chatalaha runs into deep swampland and morass. Plenty of people are lost to the gators and other animals in the bogs.”

“Christina Shepard spoke of him like he was alive.”

“Maybe she had a daddy complex. I have one. A lot of my friends do too. They’re pretty common.”

He didn’t want to think about where she might be heading with that and tried to focus on Bragg. He lit an other cigarette.

Christina Shepard, the girl who’d once been Crissy Bragg before making it all the way to a million-dollar house on Long Island, had said, “We take such things seriously in my family. Our name is important. Our history.” The husband had said, “Your father’s never been right about anything in his life, that crazy son of a bitch.” Treating the man like he was alive. Unable to believe he was dead. Was it just the incapacity of two people to forget a forceful personality?

Flynn played it out. Christina Shepard flying down there to maybe care for the man while he was losing his mind? Keeping Nuddin locked up to protect him from the world? Protect the family name? A name already tainted with a bizarre history and a crazy colonel running around shooting up a playground? He thought of what Sierra had told him about autistics. How they had difficulty understanding the contours of their own body. Therapy included weighted vests and special shoes to help keep them from floating off into their own heads. Is that what the beatings were about? Was it possible that Nuddin had done it to himself just to feel something? Jesus. Maybe the cage was their way of continuing with the therapy.

Jessie was still talking. “I did an article once on a woman who slept with her father. They hadn’t seen each other in twenty years, since she was eight or nine years old, and she hunted him down and seduced him without his ever realizing he’d been to bed with his own daughter. She wrote a book about it and did the talk-show circuit. Everybody wanted her at their parties, colleges paid big money to have her lecture.”

Flynn wondered what in the hell a woman who’d fucked her father could possibly say in a lecture besides the fact that she had fucked her father.

“She used a pseudonym to protect him, but I found out their names and tracked him down. He was living in a little burg in North Carolina, but by the time I got down there a couple other journalists had cracked the story and he’d killed himself. Got drunk, climbed up onto a roof and threw himself on one of those wrought-iron weather vanes.”

There it was again, the need to shock. Flynn looked at her. “This is the goddamnedest postcoital discussion I’ve ever had.”

“Well, anyway, I do hope you realize I’m not here with you because you’re older than me. It’s not that kind of complex, not for me anyway. My dad was always away, traveling, chasing stories all over the world. Christina Shepard’s father was one of those guys who put in his time to the Army, rose quickly and distinguished himself early on. He took his family with him everywhere but who knows about Nuddin. That guy could’ve been in a school for years down there, or off with some other family member. Some great-uncle out in the swamps.”

All these investigators, all this wealth of facts at everyone’s fingertips, and when it came down to it nobody really knew shit about anything.

Jessie went on. “He retired a colonel after he was diagnosed with cancer of the brain. He refused to check himself into a hospital or accept any treatment, possibly because he’d seen his wife slowly dying from cancer as well. He started going crazy.”

“Yeah, shot up a playground.”

“You know this already.”

“I know this already. Did you manage to find anything at all on Nuddin?”

“No. And I searched. I should’ve come up with something. Maybe she was lying. Maybe he’s not her brother at all. The police checked to see if there were any missing mentally challenged men but they came up empty. Nuddin’s prints didn’t match anything they had on file.”

“So what’s it mean?”

“I don’t know, but it bothers me.” She said it with some bite, as if finding the truth was a challenge that prodded her ego. She’d missed out on the guy who fucked his daughter, but she didn’t want to get scooped here by anyone. Not the cops, not by Flynn.

She touched his chest, wafted the back of her hand across his belly. Sweeping back and forth, drawing her fingernails lightly all over him in patterns he tried to read. “Do you think you could get me in past your boss to interview Shepard’s daughter?”

“No chance.”

“I could get Kelly’s story.”

“It’s not her story.”

“Or Nuddin?”

“Nuddin doesn’t talk.”

“You don’t even want to try?”

“No.”

“You should,” she said. Her voice took on a harder tone that made him turn his chin to her. “The papers, the media, they’re not just a bunch of animals picking at the living. Headlines have real power. You could turn them to your advantage. We might be able to draw your bad guy out, lead him into a trap.”