Read Online The Midnight Road by Tom Piccirilli - Free Book Online Page B

He’d been chasing his dead brother for most of his life. His ex-wife was still very much on his mind. He relived old cases with eerie repetition. Kids he hadn’t seen for years would show up in his dreams. He thought of his lost son Noel, who he’d never even seen. He fell in love with film noir actresses fifty years dead.
    Zero was right, Betty Grable still had it. Flynn inserted himself onto the screen and elbowed Victor Mature out of the way. He knew how the movie ended, he could save Betty and clear up the mystery in half the time. He could get on with things. The past pulled him backwards.
    “You’re really not going to share the candy?” Zero asked.
    “Really.”
    “Selfish prick.”
    It was okay to talk. The projectionist was some college kid working part-time who spent his hours in the booth studying calculus and advanced physics. He probably never even looked at any of the films he ran, and in six months he’d graduate and start building satellites for the military or cell phone services.
    The real movie buffs, the obsessives and disability cases who couldn’t work a job because they lived inside film stock and nitrate, wouldn’t turn up until the next show ing. It was too early for most of them. They were just waking up now, readying themselves. They’d flood in carrying buckets of chicken and burgers and bottles of wine, and move from theater to theater all night long.
    “You’re just mad because they make you wear sweaters and little booties in the afterlife too,” Flynn said.
    “They don’t let you have anything,” Zero said. “You have nothing because you are nothing.”
    “That’s not what Sister Murteen told us in Catholic School.”
    “I don’t think you should put much faith in what that woman told you. Sister Murteen is a drill sergeant in hell.”
    Every time Flynn shifted in his seat the .38 he’d started carrying on his hip would thunk against the metal arm and an ugly note would chime. Victor and Betty were about to go swimming in a crowded public indoor pool at 2 A.M. The forties were definitely different. Vic showed off his physique, smoking a cigarette. Betty put her hair up in a plastic cap. She showed off the legs that kept a couple million servicemen brimming with hope while they knocked back the Nazis and jungle-wrangled the Japanese.
    Funny, he saw Betty up there taking a dip but he was thinking about Marianne and Alvin, frickin’ Alvin, Marianne on top of him, hearing Flynn at the front door and shifting into high gear. How his wife must’ve hated him, and hated Alvin too to put the guy in that position. Maybe she wanted them to throttle each other. It would allow her to walk out free and clear, tiptoeing across the bodies.
    Instead, she’d clamped onto ole Al and turned her chin to look over her shoulder at Flynn stepping into the room. She smiled up at him. Sierra called it a cry for attention. Sierra figured Marianne had been sending up all kinds of flares for years, but Flynn was too stupid to see any of them. It must be true. He’d never noticed she was unhappy with him, not until the day he met Alvin.
    “They’re lying, you know,” Zero said. “It wasn’t asthma. The cops know it. The mother was wrong. As soon as the doctors examined the boy they realized it was a spider bite. The kid and his mother live in an apartment complex that’s being renovated. They’re digging up the foundation. The spiders are migrating all over the building. That’s how the kid got stung. You think there are no spiders in winter? You think they’re all dead or something?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t
know,
is that what you just said?”
    “That’s what I said.”
    “Betty would never go for you.”
    Flynn had to swallow down a Dud before he could answer. “Why not?”
    “You lack style. She dated George Raft. She liked bad boys, guys who were mobbed up.”
    “She was searching for someone who’d have a deeper understanding of her pain.”
    “You’re too