Mockingbird

by Chuck Wendig

  Miriam can hear the ticking in her ear. And the rustle of wings.

  "You seem awfully shaken over some girl you don't know."

  Her skin itches. It feels like her teeth are vibrating inside her mouth. All the stresses of the day – her mother in Florida, Uncle Jack's bullshit, whatever-thehell-happened with Beck, and now this – feel like a stiletto at the base of her neck, pressing harder and harder.

  "You got like a… a computer around here?"

  "What? Yeah."

  "I need to use it."

  "I'm sorry, it's private use only."

  "I'll say it again, I need to use it."

  "This isn't a library."

  She reaches in her pocket, pulls out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. Drops the little money boulder onto the counter. "That's my first offer. My second offer is going to be a lot less lucrative and a lot more of me flipping the fuck out. My advice is, twenty dollars in pocket is better than whatever you'll spend on me going apeshit here in your very nice, well-kept, well-lit store. What's a broken display case cost, anyway?"

  He studies her. She wears her crazy, and he must be able to see it glowing there like a giant electric bug zapper. Snapping and crackling.

  "Come on back," he says, warily scooping the twenty into his hand.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Lords of Google,

  Hear my Plaintive Cries

  The computer is a laptop, and it sits on a little side-table next to a reclining hydraulic chair the color of oxblood. It has all the accoutrements next to it: the ink gun, swabs and swaddles, bottle of alcohol.

  Bryan kicks over a small wheeled office chair and Miriam stares.

  "Go ahead," he says.

  "You sit. I want to pace."

  "Seriously?"

  "Serious as a pulmonary embolism. Which is, by the way, very serious. Now make the Google happen."

  She stands, lets him sit. He clicks an icon, a browserwindow pops up.

  Google across it in colorful letters.

  "What am I searching for?"

  "School bus."

  He shrugs, starts to type it in.

  "No, wait. A… type-A school bus. I wanna know what that means."

  He pulls up images of school buses. Then she gets it.

  "It's a short bus," she says. "A tardcart."

  "That's offensive."

  "Oh, sorry, buttercup, I didn't mean to tap-dance on your sensitive demeanor. You want a balm or perhaps an unguent for your rashy vagina?"

  "I'm trying to help you here. You're being very rude."

  "You're being very rude," she retorts.

  He turns toward her and stares. "My niece is mentally handicapped. She didn't ask to be. And she didn't ask to have bullies like you call her names she doesn't deserve. You could stand to be nicer."

  "Oh. Fine. Yes. Sorry." She sees he doesn't believe her. "Sorry. I know. I'm abrasive. I'm a jerk. I am genuinely sorry. Can we just get back to the Googling, please?"

  "What next?"

  She thinks. The school bus in the vision – the vision in which Tavena is killed – could have been a Type-A. But that bus was burned out. "Look up 'bird mask'."

  He does. Again, he pulls up a page of images.

  Tweety Bird, Angry Birds, Mardi Gras masks–

  "There!" She taps the screen.

  Her finger pokes an image – a drawing – of a man in a long leather robe and a bird mask like the one in her visions.

  Click.

  "Plague doctor," Bryan reads. "Also called… let's see. Beak doctors."

  "Because of that scary fucking mask."

  "Looks like. The eyes of the mask were generally glass. The beak has holes in it and was meant to serve as a kind of… medieval respirator."

  She doesn't have to see the screen to know. "They put aromatics in there, didn't they? Dry flowers and whatever."

  "Camphor. Bergamot oil. And yeah, roses and carnations."

  Plague. Beak. Bird.

  School bus.

  Swallow tattoo.

  "The swallow. Google that. Not just that – the tattoo. Google the tat."

  "I don't need to Google the tat. I know the tat."

  "What, do I need to buy you dinner? Didn't your mother ever teach you to share? Tell me what you know, Human Google"

  "Okay. Uh. Used to be a sailor tat. Seamen used to get them–"

  "I'm going to pretend you didn't say 'semen'."

  "–and one of them was the swallow. Reason sailors got swallow tats was to show how many nautical miles they traveled. Like, for every swallow, you'd know the sailor traveled a few thousand few thousand miles. Sometimes it indicated crossing the equator? I dunno. When they die at sea, they say a swallow carries them to heaven."

  A psychopomp.

  Miriam feels an invisible beak picking at her brainmeats.

  He continues. "Eventually guys like Sailor Jerry popularized his version of the design, but it sounds like what you're talking about is older than that."

  Miriam groans. "Okay. Well. Thanks for your help." She says it but she's aware that it sounds like she doesn't mean it. Because she doesn't.

  "No, no, wait, hold on." He stands up, snatches a phone off its charger. Punches in a number.

  "What?" she asks.

  His turn to hold up a silencing finger.

  "Yeah," he says into the phone. "Dad. It's Bry."

  Pause.

  "Hey, I got a question–"

  Pause.

  "Yeah, of course we're still going fishing."

  Miriam is having a hard time imagining this kid with a fly rod.

  "No, I know, dinner after, tell Mom I'll be there – listen, Dad, hold up. Listen. You know how you used to do ink for the officers down at NAVSUP?"

  Pause.

  "I need to know, you ever do any swallow tattoos? The bird. Right, right, with the forked tail."

  Bryan cups the phone, says to Miriam, "He's done a handful."

  "Ask him if any of the guys were… I dunno. Skinny. Ropy. Ooh! Ask him if any of them were a little… cuckoo upstairs, you know?"

  Bryan relays the request.

  Pause.

  Bryan looks to Miriam. Offers a slight nod. "Okay. Yeah. He says there was a guy, everybody thought he was a little off his rocker. This was like, forty-some years ago, though."

  Really? Did the killer look that old?

  Maybe. The darkness in her vision, the uncertainty.

  And that mask…

  Could be, rabbit, could be.

  Besides, it's all she has.

  "I need a name," she says. "An address. Something. Anything."

  Bryan says into the phone: "Hold on." Then to her: "Why?"

  "What?"

  "Why do you need this?"

  She licks her lips. Feels the blood pressure tightens in her neck. "I just do."

  "That's not good enough."

  "Fine. For real? I'm a psychic. I think this guy's out there killing girls and will continue to kill them – by chopping off their heads before cutting out their tongues – unless I do something about it. There. Truth bomb." She mimics an explosion with her hands, puffs her cheeks out. "Boom."

  Bryan's eyes are as wide as the headlights on a bigrig truck. He doesn't look astonished. He looks horrified. Like he just opened the door into a padded room and was dumbstruck by her madness in all its fecal-handprint-screaming-gibbering-fingernails-digging-soresinto-pale-flesh glory.

  And he says into the phone, "I'll talk to you later, Dad."

  And he hangs up.

  Her heart kicks like a cranky mule.

  "Why did you do that?"

  "You need to go," he says. "I helped you. Now go."

  "I'm not crazy."

  "Whatever." He holds his hands up. "Leave. Please. C'mon."

  "Call your goddamn father back. I need this. I need this."

  He says the final word on the matter. "No."

  Before she even knows what she's doing, she's got her knife in her hand – the thumb finds the button an
d the blade springs out like a biting snake. She's got the point against his Adam's apple. A bead of blood dribbles down the hollow of his neck and disappears beneath the V-neck of his tee.

  All the while, she doesn't touch him – not with her skin. She doesn't want to see. She's afraid to see. Afraid that if she learns how he's going to die it'll be by her hand, right now – a slip of the knife as it sinks into his throat, giving him a second smile, a human blowhole.

  "I like you," she says through gritted teeth, "but I'm dangling by a delicate cunt hair, you feel me? I will perforate your trachea in the blink of an eye unless you get on the phone with your father and get me some information."

  He nods, slowly. Eyes wet with fear.

  Bryan takes the phone. Hits redial.

  "Dad. Sorry." Voice shaky. His eyes watch her arm in such a focused way she's afraid he might burn a hole in her skin. "Had a… customer. Do you have any information on that – oh. Okay. Gr-great. Yeah. Great."

  He whispers to Miriam, "Carl Keener. Says he moved off of NAVSUP years ago and moved up around here somewhere. Northumberland, Dad says."

  "NAVSUP. I don't know what that is."

  "Naval Supply. They handle…" He's frazzled. "I don't know. Supplies." He pulls the phone closer to his ear. "Dad says, uh, food service, postal service, some ordinance and munitions… Says Keener worked there in one of the warehouses."

  "Fine." That'll have to do. She steps back. Doesn't lower the knife, but makes sure it's not against his neck.

  The tip of the knife is red as a match-tip. Bryan's blood glistens.

  "Thanks," she says. Calmer now. It does little to soothe him, though. He still looks rattled like a cup full of loose teeth. "Sorry. For whatever that's worth."

  "Is this what you do to people who help you?"

  She can't answer that.

  Or maybe she doesn't want to.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The River-Breaker

  Hi, I'm looking for Carl Keener? He was a Naval buddy of my Dad's. They worked at NAVSUP together and Daddy hasn't seen Carl in maybe twenty years, and now Dad's got prostate cancer and they say it's curable but just the same he's trying to… well, he wouldn't put it this way, but he's trying to reconnect with old friends. Just in case.

  That's the story she spins.

  She caught a cab to Northumberland and now she's wandering down the streets of the wasteland suburbia – duplexes and split-levels and singleranchers and little green lawns all stuffed together on the grid-pattern streets of this nowheresburg – and the sky keeps pissing rain and she's drenched and so are her hopes of having this impromptu plan yield any fruit.

  Nobody knows this guy.

  Not so far, at least. The town's a lot fucking bigger than Ash Creek, that's for sure. And by now the day is crawling into the afternoon, and with every hour – hell, every minute – that passes, Miriam knows that the girl, Annie Valentine, is one moment closer to death. And may already be dead.

  She's wet. Tired. More or less lost. And she hasn't eaten a thing all day.

  Hopeless.

  This is barrel-scraping time.

  Northumberland rests at the crux of the Susquehanna, ten miles north of where the Caldecott School has planted roots. It's like the town of Northumberland is an old god standing in the waters and there he holds out his hands and splits the water. Off to one side shoots the North Branch, and the West Branch to the other. Northumberland ever in the middle.

  The river-breaker.

  And so Miriam backtracks. Back to where she started. She had the cab drop her off at a little park called Pineknotter (with, she noted, no pine trees in sight). From there she walked north under a train trestle overpass and ended up along what must pass for Main Street around here – Water Street, running along the riverside.

  That's where she goes. Back along the river's edge. Back to where the buildings are old Victorian. Back to where she saw a couple places to grab a bite to eat, because if she doesn't put some food into her body, she's going to fall over dead herself. She sees a place, the Blue Moon Deli.

  She starts to go in and collides with someone coming out – a roly-poly accountant-looking dude with a squash-shaped head and a pair of big shop-teacher glasses. She's about to bite his head off, but for once she bites her tongue. (Or he'll cut it out.).

  "Excuse me," she says, and she spills her story – blah blah blah, Daddy, cancer, reconnect, blah blah blah – just as the man's son is coming out. A mop-top teen in an orange vest and a pair of baggy cargo shorts.

  "No," the man says, "I'm sorry, I don't–"

  "You say Keener?" the teen asks.

  Miriam says yes, that's what she said.

  "I dunno if it's like, him, but a guy named Keener works part time at the tech school. Janitor. He's an older guy? Kind of maybe a little…" He suddenly shuts up.

  "A little what?"

  "Well, he's kind of a little weird. Says weird shi… stuff sometimes. And he stares at the girls."

  Creepy janitor. Stares at young girls. Babbles at the students.

  Yes. Yes. Yes! That has to be him.

  "What's the school?" she asks.

  "The tech school."

  "Yeah, but what's the name of it."

  "Sun-Tech," the kid says.

  The father jumps in. "It's not in town here. It's just outside New Berlin. You'll have to go back south on Route 11, then take 15 north to 34 west, if you see the billboard for the hospital it means you've gone too far–"

  "How long a drive?"

  "Oh, twenty minutes or so."

  Miriam feels in her pocket for the remnants of cash lingering there. Six bucks and some change. Enough for a quick meal here at the Blue Moon, or enough to grab another cab and head to the tech school to see if she can – well, she doesn't know what, exactly. Find some employee records, maybe. Get an address.

  Hunger's pretty irrational. Miriam gets cranky when she doesn't eat. Just the same, she doesn't feel like sinking her teeth into a pastrami sandwich and with every bite hearing the plaintive cries of a dying girl. Already in her head she can hear the killer's song, can hear the axe fall, can hear the sound of blade cutting through tongue.

  And, there it is. Appetite gone. Decision made.

  "Thanks," she says, and she lets the accountant and his son go.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Forgive us our Trespasses

  The cab takes an hour to show. That's how it is in these parts. Not like in the city where you just hold your hand out or whack a passing cab with your bag to get the driver's attention. Here you call. Then you wait. And wait some more.

  She calls from inside the Blue Moon.

  She smells the smells from within. Deli mustard. Chicken soup. Bread baked fresh – bread, that yeasty bounty, that carbolicious belly-filler.

  It's enough to put images of murderers and dead girls out of her mind.

  For the moment.

  Someone leaves a half-eaten sandwich on the table. Sitting on a tray. They didn't even bite it – they cut it in half and left the other half alone.

  She sees a glimpse of ham. A tease. Like a girl flashing a little thigh.

  She creeps up on it, a hunter stalking her prey.

  A bell rings. The door opens. The cabbie asks loudly, too loudly, "Hey, who ordered the cab?"

  She holds her hand up, says, "Yeah, just hold on." But by the time she turns back around the smiley happy girl from behind the deli counter is already swooping the tray's contents into a nearby trash can.

  Miriam thinks of cutting her head off.

  Fast forward ten minutes. Miriam sits in the back of a cab.

  Rain batters the windshield.

  The wipers rock back and forth, and since the driver's not turning on the radio, that's all she hears: the back and forth, the click and swipe, the shushing susurration of tires on rain-slick trees.

  She opens the window. Lights a cigarette. Doesn't ask if it's okay.

  Blows a jet of smoke out the window.

  Wishes
suddenly that Louis were here. Even to tell her not to smoke.