The Midnight Road Read Free Page A

cage to steady himself.
    Zero appeared at Flynn’s ankle with the plastic hamburger in his teeth. The booties did a good job of soundproofing his paws. The cellar door creaked and slipped off one of the hinges. Up there, the girl let out a small cry of surprise. Zero circled the room and Kelly appeared on the stairway. She held a handful of cookies wrapped in a napkin.
    She walked down the steps, saw Flynn, but showed no surprise, just a smidgen of irritation. “Did you break the door?”
    “Sorry about that,” he said.
    “You found Nuddin. He’s my uncle.”
    Bending to the cage she handed the cookies through the bars. Nuddin accepted them and chewed them down with joyous noises. He only ate half of each one, then offered each remaining half to Zero, who ate from his hand.
    Nuddin?
    Nothing?
    “How long’s he been here?” Flynn asked calmly.
    “Since before my last birthday.”
    “Okay. When’s your birthday, Kelly?”
    “June. June 15. I was seven. I’m seven and a half now.”
    More than six months the man had been down here.
    Flynn had seen it twice before. Mentally challenged children locked up in back rooms, imprisoned in chains, but that had been in the south Bronx. In areas that looked like they’d been invaded, blitzed, nuked, where the rules dried up and things got savage, and superstitions burned out of control. Roosters ran wild in the streets, kept on hand for Santeria rituals. Maybe it
was
Santeria. New religions were being born every day in the slums. Flynn had seen a lot in his time, but you just didn’t expect a retarded man to be caged in the basement of a million-dollar house out on the North Shore.
    “Kelly, where’s the key?”
    “My mother has it.”
    “We need to get him out of here.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s wrong to keep people locked up like this.”
    “Well, yes, I know that. It’s
often
bad, that’s
usually
the case, but this is different. I bring him cookies…and fudge…and cake sometimes. I gave him a big piece of my birthday cake, it even had a rose on it.”
    “You’re very nice.”
    “My mother says he can’t leave, he might hurt himself. I wouldn’t want that. He’s not only my uncle, he’s my friend.”
    Zero dropped the burger at Flynn’s foot and started pawing at his shoe, trying to get him to play some more. Flynn started back for the stairs, hoping he could get the drop on Christina Shepard, but she was already there, perched halfway down, holding a Smith Wesson .38 trained on him.
    He was beginning to think that the rules he was supposed to handle his business with were really very fucking stupid.
             
    “He’s my brother,” she said.
    “Jesus Christ, lady.”
    “I love him. I love him too much to let him go to one of those homes. You know what they do to them there?”
    “They don’t lock them in three-by-four cages.”
    “My father has been ill the last few years. He couldn’t care for Nuddin any longer. My brother became my responsibility. It came down to me to shoulder the burden. We take such things seriously in my family. Our name is important. Our history.”
    “You’re living in the Middle Ages. Where’s the key, Mrs. Shepard?”
    “We don’t abuse him! We let him out sometimes. He plays. We let him play. You don’t understand. We’re protecting him.”
    “From what?”
    “From the world. From temptation.”
    She didn’t look like a religious nut, but then again, what did a religious nut look like? He’d seen them in all shapes. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
    “You can’t understand.”
    “You’re right.” Always keep someone with a gun pointed at you talking if you could. “What about all his scars?”
    “That’s from—” She clamped her mouth shut, then took a step closer, the revolver aimed at Flynn’s belly. “We let him play. My daughter gives him cookies.”
    “I told him,” Kelly said. The kid was taking it in stride. Her mother holding a gun on a stranger couldn’t