The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  “Not hungry?” he asks.

  “I’m fine.”

  He pokes at a shrimp, then pushes his own plate away.

  “Pretty night.”

  “I’m not sleeping with you.”

  “Didn’t say you were. Didn’t we already cover–”

  “What is this, anyway? Dinner and drinks on a moonlight patio overlooking the water? Maybe this is a real panty-dropper for the girls you hang with, but I don’t know you and I’m starting to think it’s creepy.”

  Now he’s looking a little irritated. “I just figured you drove a helluva long way and you could use a meal. I had to eat. No reason not to fix two plates. Jeez, you’re an edgy broad.”

  “Maybe it’s that you’re calling me broad.”

  “It’s just a–” He sighs. “It’s just an expression, an old word. Damn, I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. You’re wound too tight. Like a– a– well, like a thing that’s wound too tight.”

  “Nice metaphor, Hemingway.”

  “Cripes, you’re meaner than my mama.”

  She scowls. Narrows her eyes. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  “You know, living down here it’s like… you gotta learn to let things go. Set ’em down on the water and give them to the wind to take out to sea. We’re all about the good times here in the Keys. Take some of the money from tonight and do a little snorkeling. Fish off a bridge. Or just lie around not doing a damn thing except reading books and smoking cigarettes.”

  “I’m not the ‘chillax’ type of girl.”

  A wind comes off the water. The torch-fire ripples and whispers.

  “What type of girl are you?”

  “The type with regrets.”

  “We all have regrets.”

  She smirks. “Not like me, dude.”

  She finally grabs at the daiquiri, figuring, well, if it’s poisoned or roofied or he pissed in it then that’s just a thing she’s going to have to deal with. She bangs it back. It’s sweet. Too sweet. Berry and sugar and citrus. Underneath all the diabetes, though, waits a swift horse-kick of rum. Boom. It runs through her like a ripple of blue flame across a puddle of gasoline.

  Her teeth crush ice. Crunch crunch crunch.

  She sets the empty glass down.

  “You can really put ‘em away,” he says.

  “It’s a skill. I’m a champ.” She puts her hand down on the table, palm up. “Let’s do this. Get it over with. You didn’t hire me to drink your booze and threaten you with knives and snark at you like a snarky snark who snarks, so place your hand in mine and let’s take a hop in the Grim Reaper’s hell-powered stagecoach and see where that bony motherfucker takes us.”

  He stares down at her hand. “You wanna take bets?”

  “Bets on what?”

  “On how I die.”

  “That’s morose.”

  “You seem like the type of girl who likes morose.”

  “I do.” She thinks about it. “Fine. I’ll play along. You’re, what, fifty?”

  “Close. Forty-nine.”

  “Married?”

  “Never once.”

  “So, no heart attack.” She winks. “You eat a lot of seafood?”

  He waves his arms, inviting her to behold the majesty of the world around him. “I live out here. Of course I eat a lot of seafood.”

  “And you got a bit of a poochy belly but no worse than most men your age and, frankly, a little bit better.”

  He chuckles. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said all night.”

  “Can it, Hemingway. Hmm. Let’s see. I vote fishing accident. Boat crash. Shark attack. Fishhook to the jugular. Something like that.”

  “I do like fishing.”

  “Well, there you go.” She bites at a thumbnail. “So, what’s your bet?”

  He pops his lips, drums his fingers. “Cancer.”

  “How boring.”

  “I’m playing the odds.”

  “Smart move. Cancer seems to get us all in the end.”

  “Fuck cancer,” he says, and raises his glass.

  “So. Is this a real bet? We putting money on the table?”

  He cocks his head. “I think the money on the table is already enough. I don’t know that I can do better than five grand. But I like making this a real bet just the same. What do you want if you win?”

  “I want to take that bottle of rum behind the bar home with me.”

  “Deal.”

  “And you?”

  His lips spread into a shark’s toothy grin. “I want you to spend the night with me.”

  “Aaaaand there it is.”

  “You gotta admit, you’re starting to like me.”

  She is starting to like him. A little. Maybe. She doesn’t admit it, though. Not yet.

  “And you don’t think I’m the ugliest duck in the pond.”

  “You’re old,” she says.

  “I’m not old. I’m seasoned.”

  “A little too salt-and-pepper.”

  He leans forward. “I still have a little cayenne pepper going on.”

  “I’m not sure if you’re being gross, or sexy, or just plain oblique.”

  “I don’t know what oblique means.”

  She laughs. “I don’t either.”

  Way the firelight plays off him, way the rum is oiling all her gears, she thinks, Well, hell, why not?

  “I understand if you don’t want to. Probably a bad idea.”

  “Good news for you, I’m very good at bad ideas. I’m in.”

  “Shall we shake on it?”

  She puts her hand back on the table and he reaches out and–

  SIXTEEN

  HELLO, MIRIAM

  In one year’s time, one year to the day–

  It’s night, and Steve Max is bleeding.

  He lies across the patio table of the plantation home, his arms splayed out. His legs, too. They are bound by nylon cord.

  His face is swollen from a beating. One eye shut by a rising hillock of puffy, bruised brow-flesh. The other eye wide with a small cut beneath it on the cheek (not a fresh cut, this, but a scar, pale pink against the tan skin). His lips are split. His teeth are broken or gone. His tongue looks like a diseased fish poking its head out of the ruined coral grotto that is his mouth.

  The torches all around are dark.

  Someone is there with him.

  Someone in a dark jacket. Hood pulled tight.

  Standing there. Holding two things. First, a small pocket knife. Second, a sheet of white copier paper.

  The shadowed figure takes the knife and sticks it in the side of Steve Max’s neck – not a deep plunge of the blade, just a quick in-and-out, like he’s just trying to tap a barrel. It strikes the jugular. Makes a small hole.

  Blood starts to pump like water from a drinking fountain.

  Steve Max screams.

  The person takes the piece of paper and plants it hard against the beaten man’s bare chest.

  He pins it there with a hard stab of the knife.

  The blade crunches down through breastbone.

  This is not a quick in-and-out. The little knife buries to the hilt. It’s a death blow. Steve’s scream is cut short. His body starts to shudder.

  His life starts to fade.

  The blade looks familiar. The blade belongs to Miriam Black. It’s her knife. The lock-knife.

  As Steve Max starts to die, the shadowed figure takes two gloved fingers – first and middle finger – and dips them in the blood still pumping from the neck.

  The wet fingers begin to write on the piece of paper.

  HELLO

  Dip, dip, dip.

  MIRIAM.

  Then the index finger alone returns to the pooling blood – now spilling over the edge of the patio table like a sticky red waterfall – and draws one last little comma between the two words. A curious, crimson curl.

  HELLO, MIRIAM.

  Steve Max belches up a bubble of his own heart’s blood.

  And then he is dead.

&nbs
p; SEVENTEEN

  IT’S NIGHT, AND STEVE MAX IS BLEEDING

  Miriam comes out of the vision like a meteor punching a hole through the atmosphere – a dark rock in the deep cold that suddenly glows orange, red, white, that catches fire as it falls like a heavenly fist toward Earth.

  Her thoughts move a mile a minute, branching, breaking, worming through the maze of Just What The Fuck Is Happening Here – and there Steve Max sits across from her, smiling, eager, genuinely curious. Next thing she knows, her body has made its choice with almost no help from her mind: she’s up on top of the patio table, feet knocking her plate onto the slate-stone patio (crash), and she’s like a wild animal – a mother puma cresting a rock to get at the gazelle, or maybe to tell another cat to get the hell out of her territory. The knife flicks. The blade is out.

  She leaps.

  She knocks Steve Max and his chair over. Lands on his chest like a gargoyle on a ledge.

  Miriam takes the knife and lets its punishing tip hover a half-inch above his wide-open eye.

  “I do not like being fucked with,” she says, snarling.

  “Whuh-whuh-whuh–” He can’t even say the word.

  She can see in his eyes: he doesn’t know what’s happening.

  Of course he doesn’t, she thinks, her brain still playing catch-up. He doesn’t know he’s going to be ritually slain on his own patio.

  In one year. To the day.

  But he knows something.

  He has to. This isn’t just fate. Someone wanted her here. Someone wanted her to see that.

  “Who hired you?” she seethes.

  “What? No – nobody – I don’t–”

  She takes the knife and slices a quick inch-long cut across the cheek – not a fresh cut, this, but a scar, pale pink against the tan skin – and he flinches and cries out and tries to grab at her and pull her off, but again she returns the tip of the knife to just above his eye and she hisses a warning.

  “Lie still or I’ll take the eye, Steve.”

  His arms flop like dead fish.

  His lips purse. Teeth chattering from the fear.

  “Someone hired you to mess with me,” she says. “Someone asked you to bring me here. They wanted me to see how you die.”

  Her head is doing loop-de-loops. A message written in a murder committed in a year’s time. That’s dedication. The killer is bound to fate with lash-rope and tight-knot. But how? How would the killer be able to plan so far ahead? Why a message for her?

  And using her knife to do the deed?

  “I…” He takes a deep breath. Tries to calm himself. “I don’t know who he is. We only spoke over the ph-phone.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He… he… told me to bring you here, to this address. He made it clear that I was not to… spook you, because he said you would be easily spooked but that I needed to calm you down and–” Here he needs to calm himself down, breathing faster and faster. With her knifeless hand she grabs his chin and holds it firm. “I needed to get you to touch me.”

  A new thought occurs to her. “This isn’t even your house.”

  “What? N-no. Just a r-rental from VRBO–”

  The plates. He didn’t know where the plates were.

  She’s kicking herself now. She should have known this was some kind of trap. Just not the kind she thought.

  Whoever’s running these head games is even more committed than she realized: renting the house, looping in this dope, but then renting the house again a year later so it can be used to murder the same dope.

  All in order to send her a message.

  A little wave from the future. A greeting in wet blood.

  Cut with her own knife, or one just like it.

  “Who was it?” she asks.

  “I dunno, I dunno.”

  “Who was it?”

  His deep Springsteen-Diamond voice goes higher-pitched than she would have figured it could. “I swear I dunno! He, he, he spoke through one of those voice… things, voice boxes, changers–”

  “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 f
ew 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.