Allan Leverone - Mr. Midnight

Kevin hefted the two duffel bags up to the bin. They barely fit. He struggled with the plastic door, finally slamming it down, and they slid into their seats. Cait sighed wearily. She was still so exhausted she thought she might be asleep before the airplane reached the runway. She hoped the flight attendant wouldn’t be too insulted when she slept through the entire preflight song and dance.

She squeezed Kevin’s hand and closed her eyes. And that was when her cell phone rang.

Milo was astonished when it took more than one fingernail to convince the old bat to part with the information. That crap she tried to sling about not having the number was total bullshit, and he knew it, yet the first nail he ripped out with his trusty pliers accomplished nothing more than establishing that the bitch possessed one hell of a strong set of lungs.

He held the fingernail in front of the broad’s eyes, dripping blood onto her lap, until she opened them and stared at it in horrified appreciation. Then he said, “What’s the number?” and to his utter amazement she shook her head again.

“I can’t do it,” she began, her voice thick with fear and pain, and before she had completed the sentence Milo grabbed her hand again, yanking it out from under her armpit where it had only recently taken up residence. He repeated the impromptu surgical procedure he had just performed on her pointer finger, this time taking the nail from her middle digit. Again she offered up a lusty scream and again he slapped his free hand over her mouth until she lost her enthusiasm. It took even longer this time than it had the last.

“What’s the number?”

The woman let out a groan of misery and this time just nodded.

Milo smiled. “Good girl. I’d like to remind you that this is your own fault. You could have saved yourself all that pain—not to mention saving me precious time—if you had only done what I asked at the beginning, but that’s okay. We all need to learn the hard way sometimes.” He took her by the elbow and helped her to her feet and she staggered to the trash can in the corner of the kitchen.

She reached into the bin and plucked a slip of paper off the top of the garbage with her good hand. Then she passed it to Milo, still without uttering a word besides the occasional soft moan. He looked at it and handed it back to her. “Is this the number I asked for?”

“Yes.” The woman bent over in agony, her face chalk-white, her injured hand once again tucked away in the folds of her armpit. She refused to look at Milo, not that he cared. He was finally getting what he wanted and that was all that mattered.

He placed a finger under her chin and lifted her face until she was forced to look into his eyes. “ I don’t need the fucking number,” he said. “ You do. Call the little bitch and get her back here.”

Milo snapped his pliers open and shut in front of her face for effect. She reached for the telephone and began punching numbers awkwardly, holding the handset with her good hand and using her thumb to press the buttons. Her injured hand stayed out of sight.

Milo watched carefully. He didn’t think this shriveled old bitch would dare pull something stupid, like calling 911 or the local police, but you could never be too careful, and taking care was what had enabled him to stay one step ahead of the authorities with over a dozen grisly murders under his belt.

She punched the numbers faithfully into the phone and when she finished, Milo said, “I don’t care what you have to say to get that chick back here, but your life depends on your success. Don’t fuck this up or what I did to your fingers will be just the beginning. You’ll wish you were dead a hundred times before it actually happens. Do you understand me?”

The woman nodded and Milo told her to hold the telephone’s handset at an angle so he could listen in. Seconds later a tinny voice came through the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hello, Cait,” the woman began, her voice wavering and paper-thin from pain and barely controlled hysteria. “This is…” Milo held his pliers in front of her face and she continued. “This is your mother.”

“I—I know who it is,” the tinny voice said. “What’s wrong?”

Milo narrowed his eyes at her. She hesitated and then said, “Why would you think something’s wrong?”

“Well, I’m a little surprised to hear from you, given what you said earlier. You know, about never coming back and forgetting we ever met. Why are you calling me?”

“I’m so sorry.” Tears began to fall as the woman’s tenuous grip on her emotions loosened. Milo shook his head, his eyes lasering into hers, and she took a deep breath and continued. “I—I think we have more to discuss. A lot more. Would you consider coming to see me again?”

“Of course,” the little bitch replied. “I would love that. I may not be able to make it back up here for a while, though. Money’s a little tight, you know.”

“I don’t mean some time in the future, I mean we need to talk now. Right now.”

“But Kevin and I are on our way back to Tampa. We’ve bought our tickets and we’re sitting on the airplane. We should be pushing back from the gate and taxiing for departure at any moment.”

Milo covered the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand and whispered fiercely, “You do whatever you have to do to get her here!” Then he released his grip and nodded toward the phone.

The woman’s shoulders slumped and she began to cry again, but somehow she kept her voice relatively steady. Milo hoped the bitch on the other end of the conversation couldn’t hear the pain and regret in the woman’s words. He thought the poor quality of the connection might mask it enough to be successful. “No,” she said. “You can’t leave. Please don’t leave yet. Come here, just for the night. We’ll talk and if you still want to leave right away, you can fly back to Florida tomorrow morning. I can pay for your tickets if that’s a problem. Would that be all right?”

The young woman on the other end of the line hesitated, saying nothing. The silence continued for so long Milo began to fear the connection had been lost or that somehow she had sniffed out the danger. At last she said, “I…uh…I suppose so.”

The little bitch was clearly suspicious but Milo was certain that once she had agreed to return, she would follow through. He knew next to nothing about her, only what he had been able to glean through a couple of intense visions, but it had been more than enough to make him recognize her unusually strong will. “Um, we’ll be there in just a little while.”

The old biddy nodded at the telephone handset as if maybe the younger one could see her. Milo spread his hands in a go ahead gesture, and she said, “All right. I’ll see you soon. And I’m so sorry.”

Milo ripped the telephone out of her hand and pressed the button to terminate the call. “Sorry?” he said to her. “You’re so sorry? You’d better hope you didn’t just blow it with that last little bit of stupidity, or you will be sorrier than you’ve ever been about anything in your entire miserable life.”

He replaced the handset on its charger and led the old lady to a kitchen chair, where he pushed her roughly into it and took a seat next to her. “Let’s get to know each other a bit while we wait for our guests to arrive, shall we?”

“That was the strangest conversation I think I’ve ever had.” Cait held her cell phone at arm’s length, staring at it like she thought it might sprout wings and attempt to fly away.

“Who was it?” Kevin asked as the big Boeing 757 jerked backward and began trundling away from the gate.