The Midnight Road Read Free

that. It wasn’t a guy singing lullabies to his kids. There was more to it. The man
was
the kid. Flynn’s stomach tightened and his scalp prickled.
    He looked back over his shoulder. Christina and Kelly Shepard were still upstairs in the master bedroom. Zero was still waiting for Flynn to toss him the burger. Flynn did so and the dog went scampering. Flynn looked along the length of the walls and tried to track the vents in the direction he thought the sound might be traveling. He walked past the living room to the large kitchen. There were three doors there. One led to the garage. Another was a huge closet that was like a storeroom, full of massive boxes and gigantic cans and enormous jugs, the kind of oversized packages you get at a cost-cutting warehouse. Even though the places were presumably set up for the middle class, only the rich could ever shop there. Only they had the room to store all this shit.
    The last door led to a cellar.
    Flynn had twenty-seven minutes to live.
             
    He didn’t like the look of it. There were two sets of locks, both open. His bad juju detector was already blaring. He pulled out his pocketknife, worked the hinge pins free and put them in his coat pocket. The way the door hung, it looked exactly the same, but nobody would be able to lock him down there.
    He was playing it all wrong but something kept telling him this was the only way to play it.
    His dead brother’s presence felt so strong around him now that he could imagine spinning fast enough to catch sight of Danny.
    Flynn didn’t have any evidence for the cops or his boss, Sierra, who was already going to read him the riot act for the way he was botching this case. He’d be lucky to stay out of the pokey himself.
    But some things couldn’t be helped. You decided on your course, and you saw it through.
    Flynn hit one of several light switches and descended the stairs.
    The outlandish house had thrown him once more. It wasn’t a cellar, but a damn nice basement that had been turned into a guy pad. It was the kind of room that men without sons spent a lot of money on while awaiting the arrival of their first boy.
    A flatscreen high-definition television sat high against one wall. Shelves were packed with DVDs. An ample L-shaped leather sofa made Flynn think this was the place where all Shepard’s friends watched the Super Bowl and the World Series every year. There were sports collectibles in glass cases all around. Signed photos, footballs, catchers’ mitts, boxing gloves. Mark Shepard had invested a good chunk of change and really liked to show off his collection.
    It would’ve been a hell of a nice place if not for the guy in the cage in the middle of the room.
    Flynn just stared for a second.
    Sometimes you needed an extra breath to help you decide where it was you wanted to go next.
    The cage was pretty small, the size of a boarding kennel for a German shepherd. Bars were half-inch steel, and the frame had been welded together with precision. The door was padlocked.
    Inside sat a naked man with a misshapen head, as if someone had flung him against a cement wall as an infant. His slack lower jaw bent too far to one side and threads of drool slid down his chin. Thick, knotted scars and brandings cross-thatched his entire body, even his inner thighs. His left arm had been broken, poorly set, and now tilted slightly backwards at the elbow. He was still humming, and his gentle brown eyes, which were about an inch too far apart, just kept on watching Flynn.
    “Hey, hello there,” Flynn said, trying to make his voice sound as natural as possible. “I’m your friend. I’m Flynn. Can you talk to me? Can you understand me?”
    The man grinned, his gaze full of bewilderment and delight. Something started to crack in Flynn’s chest. After all he’d been through, the guy was still glad to see another person, still singing. The nerve throbbed so painfully through Flynn he had to put his hand against the bars of the