The Midnight Road Read Online Free PDF

nose.
    That first minute back—what some people would call his miraculous resurrection but which Flynn called his
Holy Fuck I Ain’t Dead
revelation—he felt like he used to after he’d been on a weeklong bender. It hot-wired his memories and dragged them back from great distances. He saw Danny with his forehead propped against the steering wheel, lifelike but utterly lifeless. Next to him, Patricia Waltz’s head had gone through the passenger window, her right ear cut off and a squirt of blood dripping down the outside of the door.
    He spotted Marianne’s face, saw her at the beginning and the end of their marriage. The night he proposed to her, holding out the ring to her at Rockefeller Center a couple hours after they’d lit the big tree. The two of them skating together—ice, more ice—as she slid around into his right arm and he held the ring box in his left palm, sneaking it up to surprise her. Her eyes went wide and then she was leaping at him like a forward end and they both went down on their keesters. The ring flopped out of his hand and she went diving for it, fat kids eating pretzels circling them, Japanese tourists doing figure eights and snapping their pictures. She fell onto his chest and put the ring on and he reached up and held her tight, thinking you live for these moments. She planted a kiss on him that felt like it would never end. It went on and on and on, the back of his head getting frosty but her keeping his lips and his heart so damn hot. The best kiss of his life.
    Then flashing forward as he watched her climb naked from the loins of a cat named Alvin. Marianne even introducing them, saying, This here, this is Alvin. Then Alvin scurrying for his pants folded precisely over Flynn’s desk chair. Alvin dug sharp creases. Alvin going, Oh Jesus, man, I didn’t know, she didn’t, she didn’t tell me. Of course, she wouldn’t have. Marianne had to end a relationship with the broadest stroke possible. She’d shouted and blamed it all on Flynn while Flynn stared at Alvin, frickin’ Alvin, feeling sorry for this guy with his crank hanging out.
    Like life wasn’t tough enough, you had to catch some cat in bed with your old lady and waste your remaining sympathy on the dude. Flynn could taste rum. His past pitched and rumbled. He saw abused and dead children who had been stowed away in carefully sealed compartments at the back of his mind. His own death had blown all the locks.
    Flynn whispered, “…the kid?”
    “Don’t talk.”
    Jesus Christ, the Tabasco stink was like a blast furnace. Flynn hoped like hell he was stabilized because if this guy had to give him mouth-to-mouth, it might flatline him again. “…tell me.”
    “I said shut up. You guys, you come back from the dead, and you always want to talk an ear off. She’s fine. Not even a scratch. I checked them both out. She and the retard are drinking cocoa. They’re going to be staying at Stonybrook for a couple of days of observation. I’m driving them there in a minute, as soon as I finish with you.”
    “The cops—”
    “They got a lot of questions for you, that’s for sure. There were witnesses who caught some of the scene—your spinout, the SUV chasing you.”
    “She was trying to kill us…”
    “Save it for the cops, all right? They’ll be on your case at the hospital after you get checked out.” The smile faded as the paramedic leaned in, the heat of the sauce like an open flame. “Now, why don’t you lie back now, Miracle Man, huh? It’s not every day I drag a corpse up out of hell. I’m feeling good about it, so don’t ruin my high. I really don’t want to think that you were stealing that kid from her mother and the lady died for it, right? So shut the fuck up and let me do my job, and the police can sort it out.”
    The EMT loaded Flynn into the ambulance, where another EMT hauled him forward and started asking him questions. What was his name? His date of birth? Flynn craned his neck and saw the pudgy