Allan Leverone - Mr. Midnight

But then Kevin coughed and moaned. His eyes remained closed and his face was still sheet-white but he was alive! Cait steeled herself and turned him over onto his back. She had to examine his wound. She had no idea how long their captor would be gone and doubted she would be allowed to care for Kevin once he returned, so speed was critical.

She lifted his shirt, now soaked and matted with his own blood, and when she did, a sickening gush of it bubbled up and out of his chest. The shirt was acting as a kind of rudimentary bandage, partially restricting blood flow, and it occurred to Cait that Kevin’s loss of consciousness might be the only thing keeping him alive. His heart rate had dropped and was no longer forcing the blood out of his body at such an alarming rate.

But something had to be done. Quickly. She needed to improvise a more effective compress than a piece of cotton resting against the gash. Cait ripped his shirt down the front, scattering buttons across the floor. They bounced around like little rubber balls. She worked his arms out of the sleeves and lifted his upper body as gently as she could off the floor, sliding the shirt out from under his back. His blood dripped down her hands.

She eased Kevin back to the floor and then twisted the shirt into a long, thin bundle of material, wringing the blood out of it like a sponge. She looped it across his chest, pressing it over the wound, and then began to tie the sleeves into a knot.

As she worked, she began to feel a gentle pressure in her brain, like a Flicker trying to gain a foothold, and she slowed down and forced herself to ignore it, to push it away. She had far too much to worry about right now to indulge a fucking mind-movie.

The Flicker was insistent but so was she. She closed her eyes, angry at the waste of precious time, but felt certain that losing a few seconds to fight off a Flicker was far preferable to losing who knew how many minutes if she were to let it in.

Finally the pressure eased and Cait was able to continue. She breathed a sigh of relief, having been uncertain she could actually fight it off. She strained to tie the sleeves together as tightly as possible, hoping sufficient pressure would be applied to the wound to prevent Kevin from bleeding out right here on the floor. But it was a temporary fix at best. He needed medical care and he needed it quickly.

Again the gentle pressure of a Flicker pressed into her brain and again she shut it out, her annoyance growing along with her terror. Dammit! This was the worst time to have to deal with this. Out of her peripheral vision she could see Virginia straining against her bonds, her muffled voice soft, clearly trying to pass along some kind of message. It was quiet and low and completely unintelligible thanks to the duct-tape gag. Cait felt badly for her but her priority at the moment had to be Kevin.

Besides, Milo would undoubtedly be back soon—Cait was surprised he hadn’t already gotten rid of whoever was at the front door. He seemed awfully anxious to get started with whatever torture he had planned for her.

Cait’s head was turned to look at Virginia, willing her to stop twisting and grunting in her chair, fearing Milo’s threat to come back and kill them all. And then Kevin groaned. He remained unconscious, but let loose a long groan, certainly loud enough to be heard around the corner in the hallway.

Kevin groaned again and Cait slapped a hand over his mouth and prayed he would stop. His skin felt clammy and his eyes remained closed. She whispered into his ear, “I’m here, baby, it’s okay, everything’s going to be okay,” knowing she was doing it for herself more than for Kevin, knowing also it was most likely a lie, but she had to do something; it was either this or break down and cry. So she whispered to him.

She whispered again and her voice was drowned out by the impossibly loud roar of a gunshot. Cait had never heard one before—she hated guns and wished every day that there was a way Kevin could do his job without having to carry one—but she recognized the sound immediately, nevertheless. The gunshot was followed by the sound of an intense struggle taking place around the corner and down the hall.

Another shot.

More struggling.

Cait realized she was screaming again but she couldn’t stop herself. Oh, God, she couldn’t stop. This day had turned into a living nightmare and she knew that whatever was taking place out by the front door had only resulted in more horror, more pain and more fear.

She removed her hand from Kevin’s mouth and clamped it over her own, finally stopping the scream, sobbing uncontrollably instead. It seemed suddenly unlikely that silence mattered, but she still worked to get herself under control. She felt like she might puke and swallowed hard, forcing the contents of her stomach back down.

A sliding/scraping/slithering noise came from the hallway.

Cait told herself not to look. She refused to look.

Then she looked. She couldn’t help herself. She glanced up as Milo turned the corner, hunched over, dragging…he was dragging…oh, God, it was a body. He was dragging a body, and the body was dressed in a policeman’s uniform very similar to the one Kevin wore every day when he went to work. And the body was bloody and unmoving.

Then Milo dropped the policeman’s body with a thud. He turned and straightened. He looked at her and smiled.

Boston Police Officer Gina Knowlin eyed the tenement building suspiciously from the front seat of her cruiser. She hated these sorts of calls. Some nutcase had reported a dead body on the third floor—anonymously, no surprise there—and, equally unsurprisingly, had not bothered to offer his name or any other information to the dispatcher who fielded the call.

The discovery of dead bodies was not particularly unusual, especially in this neighborhood, where vagrants, drug dealers, users, gang members, hookers and their johns combined to form a rich stew of potentially deadly violence. But what made this call different, according to dispatch, was the condition of the victim—a young female who had been, if the frantic report was to be believed, “skinned alive by Mr. Midnight,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

The call was bogus, that much was obvious. The police had been getting flooded with Mr. Midnight sightings for months, and they were almost always bogus.

And there was another factor to consider, particularly in this area. Gina had been a Boston patrol officer for over half a decade and had responded to dozens of calls exactly like this one. Some loser with a hard-on for the cops would call in a phony report just to see the authorities run around like chickens with their heads cut off, often using the distraction provided by the response as cover to commit some other felony nearby.

Gina stepped out of the vehicle, scanning up and down the street for the second responder. This was just about the worst place in the entire city to have to investigate a call alone. The building was abandoned, condemned, which meant that anywhere from a couple to maybe as many as a dozen fucking vagrants were using the piece of shit as their home base. And vagrants didn’t like cops, for obvious reasons.

After a couple of instances last year where officers responding to calls exactly like this one had been ambushed, set up to be attacked and then badly injured, the administrative geniuses who hadn’t walked a beat in decades had come to the conclusion—prompted by the patrolmen’s union, of course—that it was too dangerous for officers to answer these types of calls in neighborhoods like this alone.

Now, the revised procedure called for a minimum response team of two officers, which was why Gina stood cooling her heels with one foot on the front bumper of her cruiser, scanning the area, waiting for Tommy Mitchell to join the party. So far, no one seemed to be paying any attention to her, but experience had taught her that could change in an instant.