After midnight, p.10
After Midnight, page 10
Cait didn’t answer. Virginia had turned her attention to the massive picture window—the magnificent ocean view really was hypnotic—and now she looked back at her daughter. Cait’s hands framed her head as if she was experiencing the onset of a migraine.
“What is it?” Virginia asked.
“It’s…I don’t know…nothing, I guess. You remember I told you about that sensation of pressure I’ve been experiencing on and off inside my head?”
Virginia nodded without speaking.
“It’s back,” Cait said. “And this time it was accompanied by a sharp pain, like an invisible spike was being driven into my skull. The same thing happened last time but it wasn’t quite as intense. This one was more painful and lasted longer.”
Virginia furrowed her forehead and glanced around the dining room. It was a reflexive action, and she wasn’t even sure why she did it. What did she think she was going to see?
Everything seemed perfectly normal inside the restaurant and after a moment she refocused on her daughter. “Are you all right? Do you need a doctor?”
“I guess I’m okay,” Cait said after a moment. “I don’t think I need a doctor; I don’t even know what a doctor could do, anyway. The pain’s gone but the feeling of pressure is still there. It’s very strange.”
“When we get back to Tampa, you’ll need to make an appointment.”
“Yeah, maybe. I guess so.”
“There’s no guessing involved. You’re doing it,” Virginia said firmly. “Maybe I missed the first thirty years of your life, but I’m your mother and you’re going to take care of yourself.”
“Fine,” Cait said reluctantly. “Fair enough. Now, what were you saying?”
Virginia glanced around the restaurant again and then said, “I was mentioning that while many people given up for adoption try to uncover their roots when they get older, you had more of a motivation than most, didn’t you?”
“You know I did,” Cait answered immediately, shaking her head slowly. It was obvious she was still bothered by the odd sensation inside her skull. “I wanted to find out if I was the only one in the world who could experience those little mental movies in my head, those snippets of other people’s lives I called Flickers, or whether that ability was shared by others in my family tree.”
“Exactly,” Virginia said. “That’s perfectly natural. And in addition to discovering you had a twin brother, you learned what?”
“I learned that you had experienced Flickers your whole life, as had many in my bloodline, and I learned the things about twins that you just mentioned. It was much more than I ever expected to discover.”
Virginia nodded in encouragement. “I know it’s hard for you to go back to that afternoon when Milo invaded my home, but think about that for a moment. How did we get out of that horrible situation again?”
“You already know how,” she said, a flash of irritation showing in her eyes.
“Humor me,” Virginia said. “Let’s work through this. There’s a point to the exercise, I promise.”
Cait sighed. “Okay. We got out of it because Milo had kicked your pistol under the couch when he first forced his way inside your house. In the chaos that followed, he forgot all about it. I was able to grab it after I had fallen partway off the couch while he was…slicing the skin off my arm. I…I picked it up and I shot him with it.”
Tears rimmed her daughter’s eyes, her head was down and her breathing had turned ragged.
Virginia hated taking Cait back to that awful day, but Cait’s therapist had said talking it through would eventually allow the young woman to work past what had happened. To move forward with her life. Eventually.
But in this case, there was another reason as well. Virginia persisted: “And how did you know that gun was under the couch? It was mine, not yours, and you had never seen it. You didn’t even know I owned a gun.”
“I knew because…” Her voice trailed away and then she raised her head and looked into Virginia’s eyes. She was suddenly sharp, focused. “I knew because you pushed that knowledge into my head. You had been trying to do so the entire afternoon, but I was so focused on Milo, and on Kevin’s injuries, and the fact he might be dying, that I resisted it. I didn’t allow the information in until I was so weakened and distracted I couldn’t stop it.”
“That’s right,” Virginia said. “This ability to push suggestions into someone else’s head was something you had never experienced, isn’t that right?”
“Never. I was totally unaware of it. In fact, I’ve still never been able to do it.”
“Most of the time I can’t, either. I couldn’t tell you why I was able to do it that day. Maybe it was luck; maybe divine providence, maybe it was brought on by the stress. I don’t know. But the point is…”
“The point is that there are aspects of this…ability…that I may not be aware of. That neither one of us may be aware of.”
Virginia smiled. During their conversation, Cait’s eyes had regained some of their usual intensity. A little color returned to her face and she sat up straighter in her chair, her body language conveying strength and determination now, whereas before she had looked defeated. Hopeless.
Cait continued. “So,” she said, thinking out loud, “the fact that we don’t know how Milo could be involved in Kevin’s attack on me really doesn’t mean anything. He might be manifesting some ability we simply aren’t aware of.”
Virginia nodded, still smiling. “Exactly. That’s not to say he is involved, only that we definitely can’t eliminate it as a possibility. And now that we’re here in New England, we just have to figure out a way to determine the answer to that question.”
18
Milo watched through Caitlyn Connelly’s eyes with a growing sense of anger.
Indignation.
The lack of respect being afforded him by the people who should have been closer to him than anyone else in the world, people related to him by blood, was shocking. It was a betrayal that more than justified every bit of what he had attempted to do last summer.
And it didn’t surprise him, either. Not at all. Very few people possessed the intellectual capacity to truly fathom him and his motives. He was more highly evolved than most—including his blood relatives, obviously—so being misunderstood came with the territory.
But to see it so clearly, to watch the betrayal real-time through the eyes of the main conspirator, was beyond maddening. That, combined with the unavoidable hatred he felt every time he saw or even thought about his twin sister was enough to make his blood boil.
Even though he had vowed not to lose his temper, Milo could feel his control beginning to slip. He wanted to cut and slash, to make that arrogant little bitch and her mother bleed, to watch them suffer, to stab and slice and peel the skin away from their worthless bones while they screamed for mercy, but he would offer no mercy, why should he offer mercy of any kind when they were sitting and conspiring against him, he would do no such thing, he would simply continue cutting and stabbing and slashing until—
No.
Milo forced himself to stop.
He would not fall victim to the unreasoning rage, justifiable though it was, brought on by the sight or the thought of Connelly. He was better than she. Quicker- witted. Smarter. Cleverer.
The effort required to bring himself back from the brink was superhuman. It was beyond what he had ever believed himself capable of. But he managed it. He had nearly fallen into the black chasm of rage, but had stopped himself, a fact of which he was proud. It was one more example—if he needed any more, which he didn’t—of his advanced state of evolution.
Milo took a deep breath and centered himself, choking back his natural revulsion at being connected to the person he despised more than anyone else in the world. He had entered her head to execute a plan, and that was exactly what he intended to do.
When he was done, he would never have to worry about The Evil Bitch again.
He watched dispassionately through her eyes, taking in the surroundings, trying to determine where in the hell they were as he waited for the right moment to strike. It was obviously a restaurant/lounge, obviously in Boston or the immediate surrounding area, but Milo recognized nothing about it.
He knew he had never eaten there. Unsurprising, he supposed, given the fact that his pockets had rarely contained more than a couple hundred dollars at any one time. This place was upscale, right on the waterfront, not the sort of eating establishment typically frequented by people like him—the homeless, the displaced, the mentally ill.
No matter. Milo kept his simmering anger in check as Caitlyn Connelly and their mother—their mother!—dissected the horrible Milo Cain, analyzing the monster’s every perceived fault in painful detail. He forced himself to get past the character assassination and focus on the restaurant’s surroundings, because that was what mattered. That was why he was here.
The tables were arranged in no particular pattern that he could discern. It was like a giant had lifted the roof off the building and tossed a bunch of tables inside and wherever they landed was where they had stayed. Waitressed scurried about, carrying trays of food and drinks through a swinging door to the right and then down a narrow corridor and into the dining room.
On the other side of the restaurant was a bar, and that was where Milo focused his attention. The bar represented the best chance to put his plan in motion.
The lighting was dimmer inside the bar than in the dining area, but with every glance Connelly took in that direction, Milo could see the setup was perfect. A roughly four-foot-high half-wall separated the dining room from the bar, meaning he could see its interior—or at least everything above the half-wall, which was all he cared about anyway.
The tables inside the bar were scattered about in the same seemingly random manner as those in the dining room. All of the tables were occupied, and all by parties of at least two people. Milo ignored them.
A half-dozen or so drinkers were bellied up to the bar, all of them men, ranging in age from late twenties to maybe early fifties. Every time Connelly flicked her gaze in that direction, Milo focused on these men. They were the key.
This was taking too long. Milo knew that. He needed to finish up here and get out of Connelly’s head or risk suffering the extreme exhaustion—ironically, given his situation, the coma-like symptoms—that he experienced before.
Still, the time was right, and the setup was right, so Milo stayed, waiting impatiently for his chance. The problem was that Connelly was engaged in such a serious fucking conversation with Mommy Dearest that most of the time her attention was devoted to the dried-up old biddy seated across the table from her. Only rarely did her gaze shift to the rest of the dining room.
Eventually, though, after what seemed like forever, Milo selected his mark. A middle-aged man, forty-five years old or so, unremarkable-looking. Forgettable. The sort of guy who could walk through a crowded room and go unnoticed by everyone.
The sort of guy Milo Cain used to be.
When he could walk.
When he could move.
When he was conscious.
After settling on the man, Milo waited for Connelly to glance into the bar one more time. It took a few minutes, but when she did, he pushed a suggestion, through her, directed at Mr. Unremarkable.
The man at the bar twitched noticeably, like he had just received a small electric shock, and then he froze for a moment. He turned away from the bar. Took one big glassy-eyed step toward the open doorway separating the bar from the dining room.
Then Connelly’s attention shifted back to her mother and Milo lost sight of the man. But Milo had seen enough to know his suggestion had been implanted. He smiled. He had planned to exit Connelly’s consciousness at this point, but he just couldn’t bring himself to leave when things were about to get…good.
So he stayed in Connelly’s head. He promised himself he would jump away soon, certainly before she died. He wasn’t any closer to knowing what would happen if he was still in her head when she croaked than he had been last Friday, and he had no intention of finding out the hard way.
But he wanted at least to see the beginning of the action.
19
Matt Coyle rarely spent time in places like The Crow’s Nest. He had never eaten here before, and after fifteen years as a Boston police officer, the last seven spent in the Drug Control Unit, he would have bet a hundred bucks that he had chowed down at every last eatery the city had to offer, at least the ones that didn’t insist on suits and ties as a prerequisite for entry.
Matt was more comfortable inside the many dive bars and strip clubs typically favored by Boston’s drug-trade entrepreneurs than the higher-end establishments catering to casually dressed businesspeople and tourists. Much more of his work was done in those places.
But tonight was not a typical night. Tonight, instead of rousting dealers dressed in gang colors, wearing sideways baseball caps and mirrored sunglasses, with baggy jeans sagging off skinny asses, Matt was hoping to come one giant step closer to taking down a major player.
He had spent months working to establish a connection inside Boston’s financial district, where the drug trade was known to be rampant, and carried high hopes into tonight’s meeting. A high-rolling, mid-thirties wheeler-dealer at one of the city’s major brokerage firms, hopelessly addicted, dead-ass broke and with the wrong people knocking on his door in the middle of the night, had agreed to meet Matt and discuss the possibility of trading information—name, dates and other specifics—for immunity from prosecution and protection from the bad guys.
It was the opportunity of a lifetime as far as Matt Coyle was concerned, a potential career-maker, the sort of break that, if handled properly, could lead eventually to awards, publicity, promotions and maybe even high-paying private sector security gigs.
Eventually. If handled properly.
Right now, though, Matt was determined to keep his eye on the ball and stay focused. His potential informant, a slickly dressed weasel Matt had taken an instant dislike to, originally requested to meet at the Four Seasons, a proposal Matt nixed without negotiation. There was no way his bosses would pay for dinner at one of the ritziest—not to mention priciest—dining establishments in town, and Matt wasn’t about to pay out of his own pocket, career-maker or not.
Plus, he had an almost pathological aversion to suits and ties, without which he wouldn’t have been allowed through the door at the Four Seasons. He was in the driver’s seat and he knew it, so his counterproposal had been The Crow’s Nest, one hell of a nice place as far as Matt was concerned, and a restaurant that would not break the bank, either.
The informant’s name was Stan Crafowski, and he sat across the table taking full advantage of the free meal and drinks. Given that Crafowski probably made more money in a week than Matt earned in a year, this went right up Matt’s ass, but he chalked up the aggravation to the cost of doing business.
The potential informant reminded Matt of the stereotypical used-car dealer, oozing the oily charm and easy patter people associated with rip-off artists. In the back of his mind, Matt wondered how anyone could trust this guy with their life’s savings or their retirement accounts.
“So, Stan,” he said. Crafowski had insisted on drinks and then a full dinner before discussing business, and the greasy bastard’s plate was now nearly empty.
Close enough, Matt thought, and continued. “You know what I bring to the table—full immunity from prosecution and your safety guaranteed by the Boston police for as long as you provide us with actionable information and your sworn testimony when the time comes. It’s a pretty good deal the way I see it.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Crafowski said, somewhat reluctantly. He was jittery and sweaty despite the fact the temperature inside The Crow’s Nest was cool and comfortable. Heroin. He looked to Matt like he was in serious need of a fix, and Matt guessed this would be a short meeting.
He decided to push hard before Crafowski got cold feet or so dope-sick he bolted from the restaurant. “You don’t need to guess. Take it from me; it’s a good deal. It’s certainly the best you’re going to get. So let’s get down to brass tacks. What do you have for me? And I want specifics, something I can act on immediately and get results to show my bosses, to prove to them that dealing with you will be worth their considerable trouble and expense.”
Crafowski took a deep breath, shoveled in another bit of food, and began describing a fellow broker, supposedly his drug connection as well as the dealer for dozens of other young, addicted professionals in Boston’s financial district.
As he talked, Matt glanced around the restaurant, making his boredom apparent. He had decided against taking notes, recognizing that to begin scribbling specifics on a notepad in the middle of dinner would be the surest possible way to guarantee his informant would clam up. Instead, he had gotten Crafowski to agree to have his statement recorded.
That particular arrangement had been negotiated last week, when this meeting was being set up, and Matt suspected the strung-out little bastard had probably forgotten all about it by now. But that was his problem. Crafowski’s signature was on a release, all legal and binding, and that was good enough for Matt.
The tiny voice-activated recorder was nestled in the breast pocket of Matt’s dress shirt, saving every last word for posterity. His boredom act was a put-on designed to elicit diarrhea of the mouth from the informant. Matt had long ago discovered that if people thought you weren’t paying attention, they tended to volunteer a lot more information.
So he gazed around the restaurant and his eyes fell on a drunk stumbling out of the bar. It was still early, just past eight p.m., but this dude must have started drinking the minute his shift ended, because he was toasted. His eyes were glassy, his movements slow and lumbering.
Matt hoped the guy was either planning to walk home or call a cab, because getting behind the wheel right now would be a monumentally stupid decision. Had he not been in the middle of one of the most important meetings of his career, Matt might have been tempted to tell Crafowski to hold his thought—his rambling, drug-addled thought—and have a quick word with the drunk, maybe personally call him a cab. Matt had overdone the drinks himself on occasion and been on the receiving end of similar kindness from more than one stranger.
