The Cormorant (11 page)

“Modulators.”

“Voice modulator, yeah, yeah.”

She sneers. “What were
you
getting out of this?”

“Money.
Money
. He was paying me the s-same thing he was paying you. Five grand.”

Ten grand for this ruse. So whoever he is, he’s got cash to spare.

Miriam leans down. Gets her face as close to his as possible. The knife is now her partner in this, the tip of her nose parallel with the tip of the blade.

“I could rob him of this plunder,” she says. “I could kill you right now. I could steal your death for myself and send
him
a message up through the pipes and tubes of time so a year later he has no message to draw in your blood. And don’t mistake me, Steve. I’m a killer and a thief and this is what comes naturally to a girl like me.”

She echoes the statement in her own mind:
I’m a killer. I’m a thief. I’ll kill you dead, steal your soul and gank your wallet to spend on cigarettes, which I then use to kill myself.

But a smaller voice says,
Is that what you really are?

Is it all a mask?

A magic trick you’ve performed on yourself?

She suddenly stands up. She backs away from Steve, who sits up and crawls into the chair after setting it upright.

“You were going to sleep with me,” she says.

“I…” He rubs his face. “Yeah.”

“Part of the plan?”

“No. No.” He pauses. “He said I could, though. If I wanted.”

If I wanted
. She makes a frustrated animal sound. “That assumes a lot about me. Don’t you think,
Steve
?” His name, dripping with as much septic juice as she can squeeze from it. “Is that even your real name? Steve?”

“It’s… Peter. Peter Lake.”

“Well, Pete. Here’s the news: in one year’s time, the person who hired you to mess with my head is going to find you. He’s going to tie you to
this very patio table
and stick a knife in your neck and then your chest and he’s going to write a message to me
in your blood
as you lie dying. And now you’re in a peculiar position because there’s only one way to stop that from happening: I find who kills you and I kill him first. Them’s the laws,
Pete
. That’s how the universe works,
Pete
. Fate has fixed us all to its collector’s corkboard with sharp little pins, and the only way we wriggle free is by lubricating the pin with someone else’s blood.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll do anything to help you find him, I swear it.”

“You’re not going to do shit. Because you don’t know shit. You’re not even a pawn in this game – you’re just a bug crawling across the chessboard. So sit back.
Chillax
, bro. Do a little snorkeling. Fish off a bridge. Read a book and smoke a cigarette. Let the adults do the heavy lifting.”

She heads back inside. Grabs her keys. Grabs the canvas bag. He follows her inside, staggering like a zombie, like a man who’s already dead. She waves her knife at him. “The rest of my money?”

“What?”

“The other half, asshole! I want the other twenty-five hundred.”

“Oh. Right.” He goes to the bar and comes back up with another bag – this one just a Ziploc gallon freezer bag. Then he fishes for two more just like it and sets them on the bar.

He eases the cap off a bottle of rum. But before he can pull the bottle to his lips she snatches it out of his hands.

“
Mine
,” she says.

She snatches up the cash baggies, too.

“Did he pay you yet?” she asks. It’s like he’s thinking about what the right answer is, but she helps him decide by giving the mini-bar a swift kick. “Tell me the truth now, Pete. Or this could get more complicated.”

He nods. “Yeah. He paid me.”

“Five grand?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. I
want
it. Go fetch, rover.” She watches as he slinks into the living room, opens a chest that looks like a replica of sunken treasure. As he does, she enters the room, kicks over a few couch cushions, tilts a few lamps. Not sure what she’s looking for: a bug? A camera? A little man hiding in the couch with a boom mic?

Ste… er, Pete, holds up a dirty army duffel.

“Five grand. Well. Four grand. I already spent a grand.”

“You’re an asshole,” she says, but swipes the bag anyway. Then she reaches into the bag and pulls another cluster of money and throws it at him. It thuds against his chest and drops to the ground. “There, that’s for you, mop-top. Go nuts. You did your work. Besides, you’ve only got a year left on your lease so take a drive and enjoy the ride.” She sighs and shakes her head. “I can’t believe I actually considered sleeping with you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry’s just a word. Have a nice life.”

And then she’s back outside. White gravel. Dark night. Into the Fiero and back through the scrub and mangrove. Money in the passenger seat. Rum in her hands. Burned sugar on her lips. Fire in her belly.

Foot on the accelerator. The road beneath the wheels. The night in her teeth and a sign in her eyes:
Key West, 25 mi.

INTERLUDE

NOW

“So that’s when you got the DUI,” Grosky says.

Vills jumps in before Miriam can answer. “I read that’s one of the most common crimes down here. Drunk driving. Lots of road fatalities.”

“Yeah, well,” Miriam says, “that’s not
exactly
when I got the DUI. By then it was only 8, maybe 9 o’clock at night. I didn’t get the DUI until – well, I was drunk, but I think it was around four in the morning. Just in case you’re taking detailed notes and keeping track of time.” She watches Grosky drum his fingers on the metal box. “And we should all be keeping track of the time, I think. With our pretty, pretty watches.”

Vills seems to flinch at that. Good. Grosky says, “So, you didn’t get busted then. What’d you do next? Go somewhere? Clear your mind?”

“What do you think I did? I went to Key West to get fucked up.”

EIGHTEEN

BLACKOUT

Three in the morning and Miriam wakes up in a tangle of sheets grabbing her like river weeds and pulling her down, down, down into dark water, into muddy channels where catfish crawl and corpses hide. She lurches up in bed, gasping, wiping the river murk from her eyes. Murk that’s actually sweat. Sweat that stings.

She’s naked.

That’s new.

Someone moans next to her.

Another woman.

Also naked.

Well.

The sheets bunch up over the woman’s hip and leg, showing off a tattoo that starts at the ankle and ends at the curve of the woman’s hip and her surprisingly milk-white ass-cheek.

“You awake?” the woman moans from beneath the pillow above her head.

Miriam
mmms
in response. And she thinks to add,
And I’m still drunk
, because when she moves her head, it feels like her brain takes a half second to catch up. Same with her eyeballs – she points them places and her comprehension of what’s in front of her lags behind like a tired dog.

The woman’s hand slides across the sheets like a searching snake and her fingernails – long and green, green like wet fern – dance up Miriam’s bony hip and trace languid circles there.

A shiver runs across her skin.

All around, the remnants of a night forgotten: an empty rum bottle, an ashtray so full of cigarettes it looks like a cancerous hedgehog, a bottle of Astroglide, a small red dildo. (Here she hears her own voice saying
red rocket, red rocket
, then laughing.)

An odor in the air. The heady scent of expended lube. The pickled scent of sweat. The sweet-sour tang of worked flesh and sex.

Miriam blinks.

It’s been a while.

She got laid and can’t even remember it.

Well, shit.

But then the woman turns over – a spiky mess of blond hair, a streak of red lipstick smeared across cherub cheeks, a bared shoulder with ink of a Kraken reaching up and pulling a boat into the foam-capped waves – and suddenly most of it comes back to Miriam in stuttering fits and shuddering starts–

NINETEEN

RUM, SODOMY AND THE LASH

Driving south-southwest. Down the curved crust of damp bread that is the Lower Keys, through the mangroves, through the dark, watched by black long-necked birds on tall power lines.

Into Key West. Around its edge. Into its heart.

Fast forward: mile zero. End of the line. Money in her pocket, the rest split: some hidden under the seats in the car, some hidden where the spare tire would go in the trunk. Then it’s time to park the Fiero – not drunk yet, no sir, no ma’am, but that’s on the menu. Key West splays before her, limbs out, mouth open, madness everywhere.

Here: an old man dressed like a pirate, foam parrot on his shoulder, eyes caked with too much mascara and eyeliner. There: a pair of cougars on the prowl, no bras, big tits swinging like soft fruits dangling from a bowed branch, skin like sun-baked deer-hide rugs, the two coming up on a lanky barely-legal dude with buck teeth and a lot of gums and a whole lot of drunken slack in his rope and a high likelihood of getting double-teamed by this pair of hungry velociraptors. Across the street: a young guy plays ukulele for money and a pit bull sits next to him with sunglasses strapped to his doggy head. Just ahead: a college-age girl puking in someone’s top hat.
Welcome to Key West, bitches
.

Fast forward: she marches through Mallory Square. Men belch fire and a woman juggles and people sell jams and jewelry and other junk from blankets on the ground. Ahead Miriam sees a woman under a fabric sign that says PSYCHIC READINGS I WILL TELL YOU YOUR FUTURE and Miriam walks by a too-tan woman sitting there with her sun-whitened hair underneath a gypsy headwrap and Miriam sticks out her tongue and thrusts up both middle fingers like a pair of
fuck you
antennae–

Fast forward: Miriam finds a rum bar. That’s what it says on the sign and that’s all they offer and that’s fine by her. Two hundred thirty different rums, they say. From fermented dogshit to artisanal spirits tempered in barrels made from extinct trees and dodo bones. She goes to the bar and the guy behind it is an old salt with long ears and a bent nose and a Hawaiian shirt so colorful it looks like a clown exploded on him and he asks her what she wants and she shrugs and barks, “Rum.” But he tells her he
knows
that already, what kind of rum? And in what? Daiquiri? Mojito? Hurricane? Painkiller? She thinks
painkiller, I need a painkiller stat,
but then a voice, a female voice, pipes up next to her and says, “Give her the root juice, Dan. Give her the
mama juana
.”

Next thing Miriam knows, Dan is plunking down a shot glass on the bar and pouring something from a jug into it, something brown like Coca-Cola, but turbid, too, like pond water stirred with a stick. She looks at him askance and says, “I’m going to need more than that, my colorful barkeep,” and he takes the shot glass and puts down a
pint
glass and fills that up. He laughs. The girl next to her laughs, too. She takes a look at her: chubby-cheeked green-eyed chick with blond hair in floppy spikes, some of them tied off with little pink bows, and the girl is laughing with an open mouth like she knows something Miriam doesn’t.

Miriam drinks.

It tastes like – she doesn’t even know what. It’s got the caramel burn of rum, the sweetness of honey, but it’s like licking tree roots, too, like picking up bundles of whatever you find in the woods – thistle and thorn and bark and branch – and distilling it down to whatever the hell is in her glass. It’s like birch beer spat from Satan’s mouth. She loves it.

She drinks more.

Then she and the woman are laughing together, making small talk that moves fast toward dirty jokes: dicks and sheep and hookers and dwarves and pussies. They’re making each other cry, they’re cracking up so hard, and Miriam thinks,
I want to know how she dies
, which is a fucking goofy-ass thought that hits her out of far left field, and in her increasingly drunken brain she tries to justify it:
When I like people, I want to know how and when they’ll leave me
. But even
that
thought seems off somehow because she doesn’t know this woman and has no reason to feel intimate with her–