The Midnight Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

guy with the Tabasco breath climbing into the back of a second ambulance, where Kelly and Nuddin were huddled under blankets drinking hot chocolate.
    Flynn said his name and his birthday. The doors slammed shut, the EMT called over his shoulder to the driver and told him to get going. The engine growled and knocked hard. It needed an oil change, was down at least a quart. The siren started up and began its looping whine. They hooked a hard right and supplies on the shelves hit the floor and scattered.
    He was alive.
             
    The next morning, after a pair of hard-edged cops finished shaking him, Flynn heard his boss Sierra’s three-inch heels stomping out there in the halls. He imagined coma patients waking up after fifteen years, rattled out of their sleep by those shoes.
    Sierra stormed in, carrying a cactus. Like that’s what you give somebody just back from the dead, a cactus. Well, all right. She threw it down on the windowsill and stared at Flynn lying there in a foofy hospital gown, a catheter in his crank and a bag of blood-threaded urine hanging from the bed rail. You’d think they could hide the damn disgusting things better, but no, they put it right out there to sink everybody’s stomach.
    Sierra leaned close and peered into his eyes. “They say you might be brain-damaged. Is it true?”
    “It must be,” Flynn said, “for a second there you looked good.”
    “God in heaven, you really are screwed then. Maybe I’ve been setting my sights too high. Instead of looking for a surgeon, I need to prowl around the patients.”
    “The brain-dead ones. It would probably be in your best interest.”
    Sierra Humbold was fifty and looked sixty because some of the plastic work hadn’t completely taken. Due to a crushed cheek, her left eye was significantly lower than the right. The corner of her bottom lip pulled obscenely aside so you always got a look at a couple of her dry, nubby teeth. She wore a different wig every couple of weeks because she’d had some blunt trauma to the head. There must’ve been suture scars, maybe plates. Defensive scars and mottled bite wounds gouged the backs of both hands, forming a flotilla of evil smiles. She had lines dug in by time and more than a few by knives. They diagrammed the blueprints of her past.
    She went two hundred pounds of hard muscle and could kick the ass of a jacked-up rhino, so Flynn had a hard time picturing the mooks who had worked her over. All she ever said was that she was a screwed-up kid who liked bad guys like her father. Her old man got shanked to death at Rikers when she was a child. He was doing an eighteen-year stretch for serial rape. Her last lover put a .22 bullet in her lung. It took her years to find her own hate. Before that, she had swapped it out for love.
    Now Sierra had the difference down cold.
    “You know what happened to you?” she asked.
    “Doctors and nurses come and go, but they haven’t told me anything. Neither did the cops. The paramedic said I snuffed it.”
    “You know another euphemism?”
    It almost made him grin. “Yeah.
Iced.”
    “Flash frozen underwater for about twenty-eight minutes, according to eyewitnesses,” she told him. “If the water had been a degree or two warmer, things might’ve turned out different. By the way, half an hour? It’s nowhere near a record.”
    He opened his mouth to snap out a retort, but he felt the icy water pour down his throat again. He steeled himself and tried to pull away from the memory.
    “You talk to God?” Sierra asked. “See a white light or anything?”
    Flynn yanked his thoughts back from the midnight road. “The kid,” he said. “Kelly Shepard, and her uncle, they called him Nuddin, where are they? The cops wouldn’t say anything.”
    “The cops aren’t going to tell you shit and I’m not going to either until you explain to me exactly what the hell happened.” She drew the only chair in the room over to the bed and sat waiting, her face hard but