The Midnight Road by Tom Piccirilli Page A

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was an outdated term no one used anymore, but nothing more PC had replaced the term.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