Allan Leverone - Mr. Midnight

Trash in life, trash in death. There was a certain symmetry there that Milo very much appreciated.

He understood full well he was taking a calculated risk. Leaving a dead body in his living space after hours of torture was hardly the best way to accomplish a long life span outside a jail cell.

It wasn’t very bright.

In fact, it was more than just “not very bright,” it was incredibly, unbelievably stupid and reckless, and those were two traits Milo Cain had gone to great lengths to avoid during his long and successful run as an amateur practitioner of torture. This foolishness was completely out of character for him.

He knew that. He also could not help himself. He was being driven by a compulsion beyond conscious thought. He needed to find the young woman who had been starring in his recent visions and he needed to destroy her, and he needed to do it in the most exceedingly painful manner possible.

The reasons why he needed to do it were beyond Milo’s comprehension, but that did not make them any less real. The compulsion drove him relentlessly, and he knew that the risk he was taking was a worthwhile one, despite the fact he could not explain, even to himself, why that was the case.

So now he navigated the congested city streets in the middle of the day, driving away from the crowds in Boston and toward the crowds in Everett. He felt conspicuous, like a fish out of water, but hoped he looked like just another schmuck on his way to work to begin just another night shift at the factory.

No one paid the slightest attention to him, as far as he could tell, and the anonymity was reassuring. He would not get caught leaving Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker’s rotting corpse in his apartment because, well, because the rest of the people in the world were so caught up in their own little unimportant lives, with their own little unimportant problems, that he could probably walk down the street with a neon sign strapped to his chest flashing the words I KILLED A GIRL AND LEFT HER COOLING BODY IN MY LIVING ROOM! and no one would pay any more attention to him than they were paying right now.

The vehicle he had jacked was modern and comfortable, containing a built-in GPS unit that squawked out directions to 7 Granite Circle, Everett, providing precise turn-by-turn navigation, leading him inexorably to his destination. The Buick’s silver-haired owner, a little old lady who had to be eighty if she was a day, hadn’t put up a fight. In fact she had seemed almost resigned to losing her car, as if she had suspected sooner or later she was going to be car-jacked and today just happened to be the unlucky day.

And, Milo thought, that might well have been the case. An old lady driving a fancy new vehicle in stop-and-go traffic around a crowded city really should know better. All he had had to do was flag her down with a sheepish smile on his face— Jeez, I’m a poor lost tourist and I need a little help! —and yank her out of the car when she stopped. She rolled her window down a few inches and Milo grabbed a fistful of hair, yanking relentlessly until she popped the locks just to get a little relief from the pain. After that, he had simply slid into her place in the driver’s seat and accelerated away while she stood in the middle of the street and watched, not screaming, not complaining, not saying anything at all. Just watching.

Milo felt a twinge of guilt about the whole thing. Car-jacking was wrong and he had not been raised to be a common thief. But certain things in life were important and thus rendered minor issues like stealing some old bat’s car irrelevant, and this was one of them. Besides, he told himself. I’ll dump the car somewhere when I’m finished and it will be returned undamaged to the old lady anyway. I’m just borrowing it for a couple of hours, that’s all. No harm, no foul.

He spun the wheel and listened to the radio—volume down low, so he could still hear the GPS—and followed the flow of traffic, not speeding, not driving recklessly, not doing anything to draw unwanted attention to himself. As anxious as he was to begin his new adventure, this was not the time to make a stupid mistake.

He sang along with Gladys Knight, riding on the Midnight Train to Georgia, pretending to be a Pip, daydreaming about what he would have done to Gladys some dark night in the back of the tour bus, and before he knew it the GPS informed him, “You have arrived at your destination.”

Milo eased into the driveway and looked the house over and knew instantly that the electronic miracle worker had done its job. The number screwed into the weathered siding next to the front door was the right one, but even without the benefit of the brass “7” he would have known. He would recognize this house anywhere. He had memorized every detail of its exterior from his last vision.

Milo shut off the engine and smiled. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. The girl from his visions wasn’t here, he knew that. After all, he had seen her leave with his own eyes, or at least in his own mind, which was the same thing, practically speaking. But he wasn’t worried. Getting her to return wouldn’t be a problem. Not unless she had a soul as black and bitter as his own, and Milo Cain had never met anyone in his three decades on earth who could make that claim.

Gladys Knight serenaded him inside his head as he hurried toward the front door. He was anxious to get started. Time was wasting.

Franklin Marchand climbed the tenement’s rickety back stairs as quietly as he could. He had no small amount of recent life experience in stealth, it being a necessary prerequisite to survival as a vagrant.

Early in his time on the streets, an older homeless man had taken Franklin under his wing and shown him the ropes—how to panhandle without frightening the mark away, how to pick a cheap lock to find shelter during the bitterly cold nights of winter, how to fade into the background of life to avoid drawing the attention of the police—so sneaking around this drafty old building presented little challenge.

Franklin had seen Strange Dude depart earlier, walking resolutely, with a spring in his step that indicated he had important business to attend to, so there was no danger the man would be inside his apartment when Franklin broke in. But he had no idea where Strange Dude had gone, and thus no idea how long he would be gone. Maybe the guy had only walked to the convenience store on the corner to buy booze and was even now on his way back, the spring in his step only because he was in a hurry to get home and start drinking.

The thought gave Franklin pause. He did not want to be caught by Strange Dude, especially not in his apartment going through his stuff. The guy gave Franklin the creeps, a serious case of the willies, and he had no interest in finding out how the guy would react if he walked into his place to find Franklin with his hands in the cookie jar.

But still, Franklin couldn’t stop thinking about the unsettling situation with the girl last night—Strange Dude forcing her into the tenement building at knifepoint—and all of the other nights when similar things had happened. Something was going on, something bad, Franklin could just tell, and one of the few things he still cared about in this fucked-up world was his little girl. Samantha was twenty-two now, no longer little and not even a girl, she was a full-grown adult woman, but to Franklin she would always be that tiny whirlwind in blonde pigtails running around the house, her bare feet slapping the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor.

If Strange Dude was raping girls Samantha’s age, or, God forbid, raping and then killing them, Franklin knew he could no longer stand by and allow it to happen. Every young girl was someone’s daughter. More to the point, who was to say the next young girl to be ushered up here at knifepoint wouldn’t be his daughter?