Allan Leverone - Mr. Midnight

A little girl hugged her stuffed bear close to her chest as she tried to sleep. She had to go to the bathroom but was trying to ignore it because she didn’t want to wake her sleeping mother.

A man experiencing money problems could not stop worrying how in the hell he was going to make his next mortgage payment, and how long he might be able to stall foreclosure when that payment was missed, as he knew it inevitably would be.

A young woman, newly engaged, was traveling to meet her fianc’s parents for the first time, nervous about the meeting and fearing she was making a mistake. She worried that she didn’t truly love her husband-to-be, and that he wasn’t the one for her. Should she back out of the wedding, and if so, how would she tell her fiancé?

Cait reached over and took Kevin’s hand gently in hers. It was large and it enveloped her smaller one like a big, warm glove. His eyes blinked open and he looked up at her sleepily. He squeezed her hand once and then dozed off again. She had told him she could make the trip herself, that it wasn’t necessary for him to babysit her, that she was a big girl and could handle meeting her mother alone, but he had just smiled and nodded and gotten the time off from work anyway. “You don’t get to have all the fun,” he had said. “I could use a little mini-vacation, too.”

But Cait knew why he had really tagged along. He was afraid that she would arrive at Virginia Ayers’s home and the woman would simply send her away, or, worse, she would agree to talk but would be caustic and nasty, and Cait would be devastated. He was coming along because he wanted to be there in case it became necessary to pick up the pieces.

Cait wondered what she had done to deserve Kevin. How had she gotten so lucky? She knew there was nothing so horrible in the world that you couldn’t face it head-on if you had the right partner. And she had the right partner.

Outside, the lights on the wing continued to wink, the plane moving steadily north over the dark ocean far below, vast and silent and ghostly. The Flickers continued for a while longer, flashing into Cait Connelly’s brain at random intervals, imprinting themselves on her consciousness and then disappearing like scenes picked up by a flashbulb popping in a dark room.

They didn’t bother Cait. Not really. She was used to them.

The problem with hunting at night in the neighborhoods Milo liked to frequent was that there were too damned many potential victims. In addition to the usual suspects—prostitutes, pimps, gang members, petty criminals—there were always plenty of clueless ordinary citizens who somehow felt comfortable walking the streets of a dangerous city alone after dark.

These fools were the people Milo tried his best to stay away from. He wasn’t always successful, but he tried. Ordinary citizens were the ones most likely to cause problems when they vanished. They were the ones with money, with pull, with worried families only too willing to make tearful appearances on the TV news and beg for their loved one’s return. Their cases were the ones the police spent most of their time and efforts trying to solve, and therefore Milo considered them, with rare exceptions, off limits.

Milo was much more interested in the hunt and in the subsequent pleasure he could get out of his victim than in any cat-and-mouse game he might play with the authorities. He wanted to satisfy his cravings in anonymity, not have to spend precious time and effort avoiding capture. That goal had vanished when Carrie Collins of Channel Seven news had coined the term, “Mr. Midnight,” but it was nevertheless still good practice to stay away from publicity. To that end, the people of the night—lost souls similar to himself—made much more logical targets.

And there were plenty of them.

Tonight, having decided upon a hooker as his prey, Milo took his time, stalking the streets patiently. A light drizzle cloaked the scene in an eerie glow, indistinct yellow halos surrounding the streetlights, making the city look more like nineteenth-century London than twenty-first-century Boston.

Cars cruised past, some low-slung and sporty, successful horny middle-aged businessmen with more money than sense out for taboo satisfaction, others boxy and utilitarian, less successful horny middle-aged businessmen out for their own taboo satisfaction. The parade seemed endless. Milo paid them little attention.

The girls, however, were a different story. His tastes weren’t overly particular, but if he was going to go to the trouble of selecting a companion, he wanted to take his time and do it right. There was no point grabbing the first girl he saw and then being disappointed; having to kill her and dump the body and then begin his search all over again.

So the girls he paid attention to. He wandered along the sidewalk, scrutinizing them as they stood in the shadows in groups of two and three. Most often they were bored, passing the time by chatting and joking with each other as they waited for potential customers. When a car containing a john drove by slowly and deliberately, the occupant’s intentions clear, the girls would emerge from the shadows like modern-day vampires, strutting and posturing, offering up the most favorable view of the merchandise.

Sometimes the car would pull to the curb and stop, the driver rolling down a window, chatting nervously with his favorite, negotiating terms. Other times the car would accelerate away, the shopper unimpressed, continuing his search elsewhere, and the girls would retreat into the alley or doorway, resuming their wait for the next potential customer. They never had to wait long.

Milo glided through the night, haunting the streets, occasionally catching a vision as he passed the hookers. Here was an aging pro, prematurely hardened by years on the street, worried about getting beaten by her pimp—again—because her earnings were slipping.

Here was a younger girl, prettier and less hardened but still a veteran of several years, snapping gum, strutting for customers, but in her mind thinking she was going to have to take the next few days off. She felt bloated. Her period was about to start, and that was exactly what she didn’t need. Taking time off would cut into her income stream. She was pissed.

Milo continued, unimpressed with the pickings. He hated the visions, wished for the millionth time in his miserable life he could be a normal guy with a normal brain, unencumbered by the unending onslaught of mental pictures and snippets of the thoughts and conversations of strangers. Then maybe this compulsion to hunt and torture and kill would disappear. Maybe he could finally achieve some peace. Maybe.

But it didn’t matter, because it was never going to happen.

He rounded a corner and saw her. A pretty young thing, new to the game. You didn’t have to be the recipient of inexplicable mental images to see that. The girl stood off by herself, awkward and uncomfortable, differentiated from her peers by the approach she was taking to lure business. Her contemporaries were dressed as provocatively as possible, decked out in micro-minis, fishnet stockings, tight crop-tops, four-inch heels.

They looked like sluts, in other words, and why wouldn’t they? They were sluts. Professional sluts.

But this girl had taken a different approach. Her chestnut hair, straight and lush and shiny in the drizzle, was split into two long ponytails, cascading over her shoulders and down her back over a tight sweater. A short plaid skirt barely covered her ass, and long bare legs, adorned only with white striped knee socks worn over patent leather shoes, drew the eye like yesterday’s trash draws flies.

The schoolgirl look.

Most pros, especially low-rent ones like the girls in this neighborhood, simply couldn’t pull off the look. They were too old, or too hard, or too used up, and weren’t able to effect the look of innocent sexuality it required.