Midnight Special (3 page)

Then the door opened and flew away.

CHAPTER FOUR

Matt made one desperate grab for the baby, expecting it and everything in the plane to be sucked out the emergency exit door, like Auric Goldfinger at the end of that James Bond movie. He was as surprised as the stewardess that this didn’t happen.
Another movie myth shattered
,
Matt thought, as the roar of freezing wind from the open doorway, the blaring alarm, and all the buttercup facemasks dropping down from above gave the passengers the signal to panic, vomit, and say their prayers.

Reaching out across the dead woman from Moses Lake to Elaine, her skull-exposed jaw snapping repeatedly like she was saying something that was lost in the blast of wind, Matt grasped hold of the baby. The creature that had been Elaine wrenched her body sideways in a grotesque game of tug-of-war that ended with Matt grabbing the stewardess’s right hand and snapping it off at the wrist. The baby came free and Matt pulled it to his chest as Elaine spit bile at him. Then she lost her footing and tumbled out the door and into the endless blue sky.

Matt was going to be a hero.

He could see all the signs. When he had handed the baby back to her mother, after the plane had landed to the applause of the passengers (what would they have done if the pilot had crashed? booed?), he saw that look of gratitude on her face and he knew he was doomed. He saw it in the faces of the other passengers too. He had done the right thing and they were all amazed.

The baby wasn’t. She just grabbed her mother’s breasts and started to look for someplace to suck. The baby (Matt never learned that she was named Amanda Martin and that, at age twenty-five, in the year 2036, she would gain fame by doing a cover version of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” and set the world record for the shortest period of time between hitting number one on the charts and overdosing on heroin: five hours) knew to look for the next comfort and not to live in the past. Matt wasn’t a hero to her—he was just another set of arms to ride in.

The TSA agents and the airline police held them on the plane for another hour, sorting things out. Everyone agreed that Elaine, the flight attendant, had snapped, grabbed the baby, and headed for the exit door. If it weren’t for that hero in seat 17B, the baby would have gone out with her.

The airline police took Matt off the plane to a windowless room and asked him some more questions for some more hours. Matt was fine with that. Anything to avoid the press he knew was gathering out there in the terminal.

They left him alone in the small room at various intervals, then came back to ask him some more questions. Matt got the feeling they didn’t quite know what to do with him. The third time, they came back with two representatives from the airline who brought with them “a standard release form,” and Matt realized that they were just worried he was going to sue.

“I’m going to sue the airline,” Matt said. “Can I speak with my lawyer?” He was bluffing. If they’d asked him for the name of his lawyer, Matt would have been stumped; the only lawyer’s name he could come up with was Perry Mason. Fortunately they didn’t call him on it but rather tried to settle then and there, figuring they could get him on the cheap. The airline was not at fault, of course, but would a hundred thousand dollars as a good-faith offer be enough to satisfy him?

Matt said he’d think about it. In the meantime, he’d like to get out of here. And he’d like to get out of here without talking to the press.

The airline representatives looked at each other, and Matt thought he’d overplayed his hand. They’d sensed that he didn’t want any exposure—that there was a reason he didn’t want his face plastered all over the twenty-four-hour news cycle. They asked him where he’d be staying, and the only address Matt could think of was 1567 Blue Jay Way. As soon as he said it, he knew they recognized it from the Beatles song.

“That’s a nice area,” the thinner airline representative said.

“Is it?” Matt answered. “I’ve never been there. I’m visiting friends.”

“What friends?”

“I’d rather not say.”

The two airline executives looked at each other again. Then they looked at Matt, and all at once Matt relaxed. He had something they wanted, and they had something he wanted. They could make a deal.

Matt sat in the back of the cab and looked at the sights moving by him. Dark clouds gathered above the suburbs of some great metropolis that never quite showed up. He fingered the five hundred dollars in his pants pocket, which was all he was ever going to see from the airline.

He’d signed the “release form”; they’d given him the cash and let him out the elaborate back way. He’d avoided the press, which he saw gathered around the terminal as he was spirited out. The reporters talked with all of the passengers, who were quite pleased to have their fifteen minutes of fame. Let them have it. Matt had been famous once. Once was enough.

He remembered when the fatter of the two airline representatives had led him to a taxi and, before he shut the door, had asked, “You’re
that
Matt Cahill, right?”

“I suppose there are others,” Matt said.

“But you’re the dead guy, right?”

“I guess I am.”

“I can see why you didn’t want them crawling over you,” he said, eyeing the hordes of reporters that spilled out onto the sidewalk.

“Thanks,” Matt replied, grateful that someone understood at least part of his feelings.

“No reason to give it away for free, right?” the fat rep had chuckled while he fished a card from his pocket. “Here.”

Matt took the card, puzzled. “What’s this?”

“It’s my brother-in-law,” the fat man said. “He’s the best entertainment lawyer in town. He’ll get you a deal that’ll set you up for life.”

“Deal?”

The rep had looked at him with a “don’t kid a kidder” look. “For your life story. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Welcome to LA,” he had said as he shut the cab door.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Traveling Salesman had been a dive hotel once. The sort of place the lower-level television executives or second-string variety show comedians would go to for a quick bang with their secretaries or whores or both. Located in “the heart of Hollywood,” it was a cheap fleapit surrounded by squalor, just across the street from the historic and dingy Farmers’ Market and just down the way from CBS Television City.

Times had changed. CBS, along with the rest of television, had been exiled to the San Fernando Valley, and the Farmers’ Market had been spruced up and turned into the Grove, with all the requisite Victoria’s Secret, Restoration Hardware, and Anthropologie outlets. The area had been gentrified and the Traveling Salesman had been gentrified along with it.

The old neon sign was still out front, but it was retro and ironic now. The walls were freshly painted in bright, primary colors, and flat-screen TVs and iPod docks were installed in every room. The gist of it was that now lower-level executives and second-string comedians had to pay $170 for a lunch break with their secretaries, who were now called assistants, or their whores, who were now called escorts. Inflation was hurting everyone.

Matt pulled the curtain from the window and looked out at the street. The headlights of cars reflected off the rain-washed pavement, and Matt thought,
It never rains in California, but girl don’t they warn ya, it pours.

Great, now he was going to have that song in his head all night. It was six o’clock and already dark this time of year. Back in Harrisonburg it was nine at night. It felt like summer here, but it was winter back…home? It was strange that he almost thought of Harrisonburg as home, as the place he was supposed to be. Matt could have put down roots there, if he hadn’t checked AOL last Saturday night and seen that breaking-news item about the murder in the movie theater in New Orleans. About the word the murderer had scrawled in blood across the screen: “
Mörk
.”

The news reports drew no conclusions from this, and the comments on AOL were full of jokes about the killer being a mad Robin Williams fan. None of them seemed to know or care about the real significance of the bloody word. Why should they? Even if they had known, as Matt Cahill knew, growing up among Swedish Americans in the logging regions of the Pacific Northwest, what
mörk
meant in English, why would they have cared? “Dark” was just a word for the absence of light to them.

There were murders every day, and Matt wasn’t sure why this one grabbed his attention. It wasn’t for the reason that it was the talk of the day—Matt couldn’t care less about texting in a movie theater or the growing rudeness of society or all the other things people were blogging about. To tell the truth, he couldn’t imagine anyone having the time or inclination to blog about anything.

No, it was the ax that drew him in. Matt knew how to use an ax. Knew what it felt like to cleave a skull. Knew what it felt like to draw the ax back, feeling the resistance of brains and bone clinging to it as you pulled it free. So he hesitated on the opening page of AOL, which he’d only visited for the weather report, for God’s sake. And then he read about the bloody word scrawled on the screen.

That, coupled with the ax, made it feel like it was a message sent directly to Matt Cahill from Mr. Dark.

He had been waiting for a message for a long time. Was it three months? Four? All he knew was he was riding a motorcycle (an Excelsior-Henderson cruiser from the 1960s that he’d found in a junkyard and nursed back to health) through the mountains of West Virginia, looking for traces of the evil that lurked in the background everywhere he went, traces of Mr. Dark’s contagion. The rotting flesh and putrid stench that only Matt could sense and that signaled the onslaught of senseless slaughter and mindless carnage.

But it didn’t come.

As he entered the Shenandoah Valley, the bright leaves of summer rolling over the Appalachian Mountains like a green vision of peace, Matt nearly let his guard down. As he rode into Harrisonburg, a sleepy college town nestled in the heart of the valley, he was prepared for any and all attacks from the Dark Side.

None came.

He had run out of money in the middle of breakfast at the C & E Diner, so he told the waitress that she could (a) have him arrested for vagrancy or (b) let him do odd jobs around the restaurant to pay off his bill.

Four months later, he was still working there. Cleaning up, doing dishes, busing tables. Living in the one-room apartment out back. Spending long nights playing checkers with the owner of the diner, a forty-year-old widow with a wicked sense of humor and a glorious, zaftig body. They fell into bed together as they played checkers and watched TV shows on her laptop. Just easy, with a laugh and a sigh.

There was no hunger about Gina, no tragedy lurking in her past. True, she missed her husband, dead in a car accident these four years, but she didn’t pine for him. She lived a healthy, bright, sunny life. She liked fucking like she liked hot fudge sundaes and watching
Jeopardy
. Because it was fun to do and it passed the time.

Matt had never had a fuck buddy before. It felt a little awkward, like he should be bringing her flowers or candy and talking about the future. But once when he came to her house with a single flower, she just laughed and said he didn’t have to do that. All she really wanted was to have somebody to watch
Jeopardy
and play with. And he realized that was enough for now.

It was after a particularly strenuous bout with Gina that he’d gone to her laptop to visit AOL and see what the weather would be like for a picnic they were planning tomorrow. Nothing big, just a few sandwiches and a visit to an abandoned quarry for some skinny-dipping. It was unseasonably warm that week, but still early enough in the year that they would probably be alone—no need to subject others to their non-college-age nudity. They thought they looked pretty good when they were alone, but why compare themselves to actual youth?

When Gina saw Matt read the news item on AOL, she knew he had seen something that bothered him, but how could Matt explain it to her? There was nothing in his experience with Gina that could prepare her for this wild, insane story. His time with Gina had been totally and completely ordinary. How could Mr. Dark fit into this context?