The Midnight Road Read Online Free Page A

don’t ever tell anybody I said that.”
    “Okay.” She laughed. She was having a good time. He knew the feeling. The speed and bluster and action could be appealing to a kid. Even the gunshots. It brought on a powerful sense of wonder and awe. Flynn remembered his brother in the driver’s seat, four cop cars blaring sirens behind with the old-fashioned cherry tops on them, Flynn just a little boy in the passenger seat, strapped in, smiling just like Nuddin.
    The Caddy had all-wheel drive, all-speed traction. It cost a bundle but was worth it in the winter. Christina was chewing up the distance between them. Flynn turned his head, looked at Kelly in the backseat and felt a vast on rush of pity for the girl. What would’ve happened to her in that house over the next few years?
    The next bullet creased the driver’s door. Just a couple of inches over and it would’ve gone into his spine.
    “She’s a perfect shot,” Kelly said. “Normally.”
    “She is?”
    “She’s on the range three times a week. She likes skeet too. I go with her if we don’t have choir or violin practice. We went the day after New Year’s.”
    “It’s good for a family to spend holiday time together,” he said.
    “I think she’s missing on purpose.”
    “It would be nice to believe so.”
    Nuddin started singing, La la la la.
    Flynn wasn’t very familiar with the area but knew they were about ten minutes from Port Jackson. He swung out in that direction thinking maybe he could lose Christina Shepard on the town roads, assuming they’d been cleared enough to travel on and he didn’t wipe out along the way.
    He had to admit, there was more to it than saving the girl and her uncle. Even more to it than running for his own life. Behind the wheel his ego went off the chart. He didn’t like anybody trying to outdrive him, even on streets as bad as these.
    He gritted his teeth. Christina Shepard came up hard and smashed into his bumper. The Charger rocked and bounced, and the wheel bucked wildly in his hands. He tightened his grip until the steering column started to groan.
    Flynn had imagined his brother’s death in this seat ten thousand times during the last thirty years, and now it surfaced again. He checked the rearview and saw an old man’s eyes peering back at him. He’d lived to be twice his brother’s age, but still he thought of Danny as the older one, the sharp one, the hip one, the guy with the moves, slick, tough, cool. What did it say about you when you looked up to a ghost already three decades gone?
    Christina laid on the horn and slammed into them again and the hideous noise of tearing metal ripped through the black-and-white night.
    It was ridiculous. He couldn’t get over the feeling that they were all part of a very stupid joke that was going to end with a duck on somebody’s head. Flynn kept flipping it around in his mind, thinking the answer had to be here someplace, but he simply couldn’t see it, just couldn’t find it.
    They made a series of lefts and rights and eventually came out of the snowy retreat of suburban side roads and into the quaint township of Port Jackson. They were doing sixty on icy streets that would’ve been unsafe at forty on a June day. He kept hoping to find a cop or a sander or a snowplow driver or somebody who might call it in, but no one else was on the road.
    A traffic circle opened up in the middle of the Port Jack pier, a flagpole dead center, some kind of snow-covered statue pointing a cutlass. Flynn knew this was going to be bad. They were too close to the water. If Christina rocked them from behind again—
    But she didn’t. She was nuttier than that, this lady. She swung out to the other side of the traffic circle and came up hard on his left. It was suicide. He saw her face closing in from the shadows, an expression of pained purpose distorting her features. The SUV looked like the beautiful fury of heaven. The cars smashed into each other hard and the ice took them and they