The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  Dead, dark, done.

  Stick a fork in ’em.

  Miriam gives them their money back.

  They protest.

  She tells them to fuck off. They still want to know. She says, “You all die from monkey herpes.” When they still won’t leave, she threatens them with a butter knife and swipes it in the air in front of them while hissing. That does the trick. They retreat. She shoves her plate aside. The meal is ruined. Their deaths stay with her.

  SEVEN

  MIRIAM VERSUS THE FRIEND ZONE

  “Wait up; there’s something I have to tell you,” Jace says, trailing after her in his flannel pants and A-Team T-shirt.

  But she ignores him. “It’s cool. Not like I saved your hides or anything. Oh, wait! Totally did. Guess your little lives aren’t worth as much as I thought. Shoulda let Cracker Factory Santa poison you all anyway. You know he was an escaped mental patient? That he poisoned seven other kids besides you? Don’t I get a gold star?” She glowers.

  “We gave you a place to stay. You were staying under bridges–”

  “Yep, like a troll. Thank you from saving me from my troll-like existence for a short time so that I may walk amongst you virtuous mortals, but now comes the time for you to send me back to my bridge–”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say, everything will be okay–”

  “Yeah,” Miriam says, “it’s all going to be peach fuzz and puppy parades from here on out. Me and the other homeless will tickle-fight one another over who gets the last moldy bread-end. Meanwhile, Cherie the awful whorebag cunt-rag bitch-scag fag-hag – hey, so many rhymes! – will be sleeping on my dumpy-ass futon. A futon I actually bought, by the way, but futons are heavy and I have nowhere to go so I guess I’ll be leaving it behind. I hope she gets bedbugs in her vagina. And they lay eggs. And she becomes the Mother of Bedbugs–”

  As she rants, she tosses items into her backpack. A few pairs of jeans. Handful of white T-shirts. Cigarettes. Bear mace. Tiny minibar bottles of Jameson’s. A Santa hat.

  “I got you a job!” Jace blurts.

  She turns. Makes a poopy face. “Me and jobs don’t play well together. My last real job kind of ended with a shooting. And a stabbing, come to think of it.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of job–” He fishes in the pockets of his flannel surrender-pants, pulls out a folded up piece of paper: the world’s most boring origami. He begins to unfold it. “I ran a Craigslist ad–”

  “I definitely do not want whatever this job is. Particularly if it has the word ‘hand’ or ‘rim’ preceding it–”

  “No, wait, shut up for a second. A couple months back I put up an ad for your… particular talents, the psychic death thing, and for a while I mostly just got a bunch of trolls who thought I was a pimp–”

  “I don’t like where this is going.”

  “But last week I got this email.”

  He thrusts the unfolded paper at her. Like a beaming toddler proud of his dirty diaper.

  She grabs it. Scowls. Reads.

  Her gaze suctions onto a very big number in the middle of the email.

  $5000.

  “Five grand,” she says, looking up. “This guy wants to pay me five fucking grand to tell him how he’s going to die?”

  Jace nods, grinning ear to ear.

  “Are you sure he doesn’t think this is code for sex?”

  “I… I called him.”

  “You called him.”

  “I thought he might think it was about sex, so.”

  “And it’s not about sex.”

  “No, he’s some rich guy in Florida. A little obsessed with his own…” Jace flutters his fingers in the air, a gesture he makes when he’s trying to think of a word. “Demise.”

  “Five grand.”

  “Yep.”

  “Rich nutball.”

  “Yes.”

  “In Florida.”

  “Apparently.”

  “That means I need to get to Florida.”

  He shrugs. “Well. Yeah.”

  “Call him.” She snaps her fingers. “Set it up.”

  “OK,” he says. But he just stands there. Staring at her.

  “What?”

  “What-what?”

  “You’re looking at me.”

  “I think it’s OK to look at you. You can look at me, too.”

  “I am looking at you looking at me, and at this point I’m starting to wonder what’s going on.”

  He shifts nervously from foot to foot. “I just thought you could say, you know… thank you?”

  “Oh. Well.” Miriam clears her throat, loosens some of that tobacco mucus that nests in her vocal cords. “Thank you, Jace. By the way, I hate that name. Jace. Jason – Jason is a good name. Or Jay. I like Jay. It’s like a bird. I like birds. Mostly.”

  “Do you like me?”

  “Huh?”

  “I like you.”

  “Oh, sweet Christ on a crumbcake, really?”

  “Really what? We’ve known each other for a year now and we’ve kind of skirted around each other and flirted–”

  “I did not flirt.”

  “We were flirting,” he says, nodding, smirking. “Sometimes people flirt and they don’t even know it.”

  She narrows her eyes. “Nnnyeah, I think I’d know.”

  “You’re leaving soon.”

  “Pretty much now-ish.”

  He reaches out. Takes her hand. “That bed looks pretty comfortable.”

  She shoves him backward. Not hard enough to crack his skull against the doorframe, but enough to get the message across.

  “Hey,” he says, genuinely stung. “Ow.”

  “Thank your stars and garters I didn’t perform dentistry using your asshole as the entry point.”

  He sighs. “Friend-zoned again. Nice guys finish last.”

  The temperature in her mental thermometer pops the glass. “What did you just say? Are you seriously pulling that nice-guy friend-zone crap? You little turd, how’s that supposed to make somebody feel? That my friendship is just a way station to my pussy? Is that what my companionship is worth to you, Jace?”

  “It’s not like that. I just thought–”

  “You thought what? That because you’re a nice guy, my panties will just drop because you deserve to have my thighs around your ears? Fuck you, dude. Being a nice person is a thing you just do, not a price you pay for poonani. I’m not a tollbooth. A kind word and a favor don’t mean I owe you naked fun time.”

  Now he’s mad. Brow stitched. Lip curled. “Oh, like you’re a nice person? Please.”

  “I’m not! I’m not nice. And this is not news, dude. I’d rather be a cranky bitch who lets you know what she’s thinking than some passive-aggressive dick-weasel who thinks friendship with a girl is secondary to her putting out. You wanted to fuck me? You shoulda just said so. I would’ve at least respected that, and we wouldn’t have to do this boo-hoo woe-is-me pissy-pants guilt-fest.”

  She throws on her jacket and snatches the email out of his hand and slings the bag over her shoulder. A hard elbow to the gut leaves him bent over and oof-ing.

  Miriam heads to the door.

  He trails after like a bad smell.

  Taevon and Cherie watch, goggle-eyed.

  “I’m sorry,” Jace says, rubbing his stomach.

  “You are sorry,” she says, throwing open the door to the hallway.

  “I’m a dick.”

  “A tiny dick. An insignificant dick. Positively microbial.”

  “Can I call you?”

  “Can you… No, you can’t call me.”

  “But you have the same phone if I wanted to?”

  “I’m going to throw it in a bag and burn it.”

  “Wait–”

  “Bye, everybody.”

  She grabs her bee-sting breasts at them. A last fuck you.

  Then she’s out the door, slamming it in Jace’s face.

  PART TWO

  MILE ZERO

  INTERLUDE<
br />
  NOW

  “You kill him?” Grosky asks.

  Miriam rolls her knuckles on the flat of the table, cracking them. Her mouth the flat line of a heart monitor. “We still talking about that poor kid in Philadelphia?” She taps her thumb on the photo, then flips it over.

  Grosky laughs. Vills laughs, too, a half-second too late, like she’s taking her cues from the bigger man. “No, no, I mean Santa.”

  She hesitates. “You’re asking me if I killed Santa?”

  “That’s the best fucking question I’ve ever asked anybody, but yeah. Did you or did you not kill Santa Claus?”

  She pauses. “Girl’s gotta have her secrets,” she says.

  “C’mon. How’d you off the old elf?”

  Hands pull Santa into the alley. Before he can scream she’s slamming his face into the brick. His nose really blooms now, a rose-petal gusher, and the hat comes off his head and the remaining bottles of Natural Ice drop from his hand and clunk against the ground. She smells the garlic sweat and the booze breath and he tries to swipe at her like a bear knocking a wasp’s nest off a tree but he’s old and slow and she’s young and cranked and the screwdriver plunges between the puffy rows of raincloud cotton that line his Santa’s jacket and she sticks it up under his ribcage and into his heart and then she does it a second time and a third for good measure–

  “He fell down a flight of steps,” she says. “With no help from me.”

  “Oh, yeah? Guess you think he deserved it, huh?”

  “He was going to poison those guys.”

  “So you say.”

  “So I jolly well fucking say, yes. I told you, I have the ability–”

  “To see how, when, and where people are going to die. Yeah, yeah, we got that, Miss Black, you told us already–”

  She interrupts: “No, whoa, get it correct, dude. I didn’t say I know where. Just the how and the when.”

  Grosky holds up a pair of surrendering hands. He fakes a look like a child caught sticking peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches into the DVD player. Vills continues her fake laugh, a laugh that quickly breaks apart like a cookie under a boot – it tumbles into a raspy smoker’s cough.

  “I want that cigarette,” Miriam snarls.

  “I told you–”

  “Listen, I know you’re going to give it to me one way or the other. So let’s hop-skip-and-hasten-the-inevitable over here.” Grosky doesn’t say anything. She forces a smirk through the mesh wire of her own anger and sadness and says, “Here’s what’s buzzin’, cousin. You either give me a cigarette now or I clamp up and quit talking. I’ll hiss. I’ll piss myself and kick and scream and bite and gag myself with the cigarette until I puke. I’ll bite my lips and cheeks and spit blood–”

  The whole time she talks, Grosky just eyes her up. Pink tongue pushing on the inside of his lower lip. He snaps his fingers, and Vills gives him another Bic lighter. Newer, by the look of it. Grosky spins it across the table like a stone skipped across pond-water.

  She scoops up the lighter. Returns the cigarette to her mouth.

  Flame strike, paper crackle, lung pull.

  The capillaries in her brain feel like a garden hose suddenly unkinking. Synapses go off like hands twisting a sheet of bubble wrap: pop pop pop. Nicotine rush. Like she can feel every individual hair follicle.

  “The first cigarette after a while without one is…” She beholds the cigarette. A Parliament, by the look of it. “It’s a burger thrown to a starving man, a sunny day to a jailbird who spent a year in solitary, an orgasm when nobody’s tickled the little man in the boat for oh-so-long–”

  “Why’d you kill him?” Grosky quickly says. “Santa. Why him?”

  “I told you, I didn’t–”

  “Let me ask it different-like. Why did you feel the need to save those three boys?”

  “I dunno. It felt right.”

  “Did it feel right to save the yuppie prick from the bus? Andy?”

  Andrew, not Andy. Louis, not Lou.

  She swallows a hard knot. “No.”

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “I got my wires crossed.”

  Vills moans a perceptible sigh of impatience and starts dragging a chair from the back corner of the shack over to the table, the legs juddering on the floor.

  The woman sits. Elbows on table like her arms are a pair of crooked coat hangers. Face in the scoop of her hands.

  “Why,” Vills says, letting that word drag out, giving the space after it a little oxygen like she’s having a hard time conjuring exactly what it is she wants to say, “are you telling us all this? I mean, honey, you’re admitting to murder.”

  “Whoa, I didn’t admit to shit,” Miriam says. Inhale. Exhale. Cancer cloud. “Who are you? Why am I here?”

  The woman’s boozy smile tilts further askew: a sinking ship, a broken shelf. “Normally, criminals aren’t so quick to confess to the Feds.”

  “I didn’t–” Miriam snorts. “You know what? Never mind. You aren’t Feds. Just because you pulled that trick back in the car – looking up the stolen boat, I mean – anybody could’ve done that. Besides, look at you two. Fat Jersey oaf in a tracksuit. Alcoholic iguana with a smoker’s cough. You are the very picture of federal investigation. Let me guess. X-Files, right?” She points at Grosky. “You probably ate Mulder. Just gobbled him up like a Christmas turkey. And you–” now an accusing finger at Vills “–are Scully with a bad liver and a starvation diet. Who does that make me? The Cigarette-Smoking Woman?”

  Grosky pulls out ID. He flips it. Slides it across.

  Thomas Grosky, FBI.

  “I’ve had your people pull the ‘show the ID’ trick before. And they, like you, were thugs working for a criminal organization.”

  Vills bristles.

  “I dunno which organization you’re working for–” Miriam says.

  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Grosky says.

  “The BAU,” Vills says. “Behavioral Analysis Unit.”

  Grosky smiles. “We hunt serial killers.”

  Miriam flinches.

  Vills rolls her eyes, offers a clarification: “We assist local law enforcement on hunting serial killers. It’s far less… rock star than my partner makes it seem.” She pulls the pack of Parliaments, upends a cigarette into the flat of her palm. She grabs the lighter back from Miriam and lights her cigarette. Way she smokes is like she’s trying to slurp a thick milkshake through a too-small straw. “Sorry, honey, we’re the real deal.”

  Even in the wet, clinging Florida heat, Miriam feels a chill coil around her spine: a snake around a sapling.

  She stubs her cigarette out on the table.

  She blows a jet stream of smoke into Grosky’s face.

  “So, what do you want with me, then? You want to ask about the Mockingbird, that it? It wasn’t one killer. Was a whole family of the sick shits. The insane old matriarch, the rapist patriarch, couple of fucked-up boys with one helluva twisted upbringing…”

  The words die in her mouth. Because Grosky and Vills look at each other like they’re sharing a joke between the two of them, a joke with a punchline Miriam doesn’t know.

  Because she’s the punchline.

  “We’re not here to ask about the Mockingbird,” Vills says.

  That’s when she gets the joke.

  “You think I’m a serial killer,” Miriam says, suddenly.

  Grosky snaps his fingers. “Give the girl her gold star.”

  Oh shit.

  EIGHT

  SHAKE ON IT, DARNELL

  “Come on into the office,” the salesman says, bundling up against the dry, bitter wind that comes. Invisible hands bounce a McDonald’s cup across the car lot. The sales office isn’t much to look at. It’s about the size of a shoebox with a few windows carved out of it. An elementary-school diorama. “Got a space heater in there. Can fill out all the paperwork and cross the i’s and tickle the t’s. You got insurance? If not, I know a guy he can do that bare minimum coverage j
ust to get you up on the road and, oh, I’mma need your driver’s license to photocopy – provided the damn thing works. Sometimes you gotta kick it and call it names just to get it to turn on. What am I doing, telling you all this out here? It’s colder than a popsicle up a witch’s–” He seems to catch himself before he says something inappropriate. “It’s cold.”

  Miriam shivers, pulls her thrift-shop camo jacket tighter around her, rubs her black-gloved hands together like she’s hoping they’ll start a fire. “Let me stop you there, Darnell. You got five hundred dollars on the sticker price. I’m not going to pay sticker price because I can’t pay sticker price. I have two hundred–” She starts counting out the money. “Wait, a hundred and sixty bucks. Sorry. I bought cigarettes, and I’m gonna need gas. Anyway. I’m going to give you eight twenty-dollar bills and you’re going to go get me the keys and I’m not going to show you my license or sign any paperwork or do anything in any way that will require more time than it takes for me to drive off this lot in that car.”

  That car is a 1986 sunfire-red Pontiac Fiero.

  Darnell laughs – huh huh huh. “You’re funny, I like you. You remind me of my wife. She’s like a, a, an electrical cord snapping and popping around on the floor. Always making me laugh with her jokes. One time I laughed so hard a piece of buttered corn came shootin’ out my nose. It landed right in the gravy boat, which just made me laugh harder–”

  “I am not joking. That’s my offer.”

  His laughs slow to a crawl and stop – huh, huh, huuuuuh. Like a truck with engine problems, guttering and going still on the side of the road.

  “What? You can’t be serious.”

  “Serious as a slap in the face.”

  “I am not selling you this car off the books for two hundred–”

  “Hundred and sixty.”

  “–bucks and you must be out your damn mind if you think that’s what’s gonna happen here.”