The Cormorant (19 page)

“You seem to think–”

“Ah ah ah.” He silences her. “That is how you teach a lesson to those who steal from you, Miss Black. It show them a lesson. And it show the other thieves what will happen to them if they try. The gull in her hand did not die. Not then. She did not kill it. The bird, he roll around on the balcony until soon he push his way through the iron bars and fall to the ground below.
Then
he died. Mister Gull kill himself. Kill himself from the shame of what had been done to him.”

“I didn’t steal anything from you–”

“You stole our drugs.”

“I didn’t – I didn’t! The thing with the meth wasn’t me–”

“Hey, Jay-Jay,” Tap-Tap says to the one she thinks of as Daddy Long-Legs. The white trash tweaker. “She says meth? Why we talk about meth?”

Jay-Jay just laughs a nervous laugh.

Miriam tries to say something else but–

Tap-Tap grabs her face with his hand and squeezes so hard she thinks her jaw might pop out of its socket. “Meth? This is not meth you stole! You stole cocaine. You kill
three
of my men. You destroy my submersible!”

What. The.

Her mind starts doing panicked acrobatics even as Tap-Tap gives a nod and an impatient gesture at the man standing by her leg, a man she almost forgot about. Goldie suddenly pulls from beneath the table a rusty hacksaw. Miriam squirms, starts to cry out as the man leans hard on her leg and–

Two weeks from now leaning over the front of a bone-white Cadillac, a Ruger Mini-14 resting on the hood, taking shots fast as his finger can pull the trigger,
pop-pop-pop
, and someone, a big someone, hides behind a dune and offers return fire from a boxy pistol. Goldie’s finger pulls one last time and this time the gun just goes click and he makes this face of confusion like he thought maybe he had infinite magical video-game bullets and then just as he starts fumbling for more ammo the man behind the dunes fires again and a round catches Goldie right between the teeth. Gold veneers flip out of his mouth in a pinwheel of blood as his brains eject–

–Goldie rests the teeth of the saw against the top of her leg. The promise of pain bites into her shin-bone.

Cutting off legs.

That was Ingersoll’s trick.

“My old boss,” Tap-Tap says, “he like to cut off body parts. Just like
Maman
break apart that gull. Mister Ingersoll would say,
nature red in tooth and claw
. Then he cut some poor maddafucka’s leg or arm or even his
dick
off. I be honest with you, I let that practice go. Almost like I forgot how much fun it can be! But then we get this tip. This man call me and say, ‘
Oye, Tap-Tap, bro, I know who took your coke. I know who fucked up your submarine and kill those three Columbian boys
.’ And he tell me your name and where you’ll be and when you’ll walk into my club, and then he say, you know what he say? He say, ‘
With her you gotta do it old-school, Tap-Tap. You cut her leg off. Teach her a lesson about what it means to go messing with things she should not be messing with.’”

It’s then her brain stops with the acrobatics.

Because oh, shit.

All the tumblers of this lock fall into place and the door suddenly opens and she figures out just who it is who’s doing this to her.

It’s Ashley Gaynes.

He’s a liar. A con-man. Last time they met, that suave, cocky prick drew her in and next thing she knew he was telling her about a suitcase full of meth he stole. Stole from a man named Ingersoll and his two killers, Harriet and Frankie. An act that lost him his leg to Ingersoll’s hacksaw in the back of an SUV. She knew he wasn’t dead. But she thought he was ruined, beaten, that she’d never see him again.

This is revenge.

Stealing drugs.

Blaming it on her.

Having
her
leg cut off in parallel.

…messing with things she should not be messing with…

She suddenly stammers, “Somebody’s fucking with you, Tap-Tap, playing you for a fool–”

But he obviously doesn’t like that answer and he gives a hard nod to the man at her feet and she tries to pull her leg out–

The man yanks the saw back.

The teeth chew into her leg. Bite into her shin-bone.

Just one pull. Then he stops.

She screams. Blood pools beneath her. Soaks down to her sock.

The plea falls out of her, words strung together with nary a nanosecond between them. “
I know who did it I know who did Jesus shit Christ fuck I know who did it.
”

Tap-Tap sticks out his lower jaw like he’s a boar showing off his tusks. Then he gives a slight shake of the head to Goldie at her feet and suddenly the pressure from the saw-teeth in the wound is gone.

She can’t help it. She gasps. The retreat from immediate pain is a surprising kind of – not pleasure, exactly, but
relief
.

Tap-Tap gets his face close to hers.

She smells garlic and cigar smoke.

“You– you– you–” she stammers, admonishing herself to
get it together, you stuttering idiot, you’re bigger than this, better, tougher, don’t give him the satisfaction of scaring you
, but it’s hard not being scared when someone’s about to take your leg as a trophy. “You don’t really think I could pull off hijacking your submarine and stealing your drugs.”
Play off his chauvinism.
“I’m just a little girl. I barely eat. I got bird bones and broken wings. I’m not even a gull. I’m just a dark little sparrow.”

“Then
who
?”

“His name’s Ashley. Ashley Gaynes. He’s stolen from your… people before. Ingersoll cut off
his
leg. He’s trying to give me to you so he can get away clean. And he wants to punish me. He wants me to hurt the same way that Hairless F–”
Whoa, do you ever watch your mouth?
“The same way Ingersoll hurt him. I… I can confirm it, you just, you just call a man who works for you, his name’s Frankie. Gallo, I think. Frankie Gallo.”

INTERLUDE

FRANKIE

Running through snow ain’t really running at all
, Frankie thinks as he charges through pine trees stuck up through the white expanse like black spear-tips. It’s more like jogging. Jogging with cement on the bottom of your boots and shit inside of ’em.

His feet punch through the crust of snow. Already his legs are on fire from pistoning through the frozen wasteland up here in the goddamn Rocky Mountains, chasing after Dicky Morningdove, a half-Choctaw squirrel-fucker who stole a bunch of government bonds from Wayne Prevette, the man currently employing Frankie to protect his illegal logging operation.

Frankie thinks,
Jesus fuck, how far I’ve fallen
.

He misses the good old days. Horrible as they were.

He misses Harriet. Horrible as she was.

Ingersoll, well, that creepy human mannequin could go fuck a duck. Cutting people up. Saving their bones so he could try – and fail – to see the future. Freaky fuck deserved what he got.

Still. Working for Ingersoll was better than working out here. In the middle of God’s Frozen Nowhere. Chasing Dicky Morningdove: that loser with his lazy eye and his love of pills and those stacks of 1970s biker magazines showing off those 1970s women with their 1970s bushes. Frankie saw a stack of those old magazines while trying to figure out where Dicky got off to, and to him every chick inside those pages looked like she had a Diana Ross afro (or worse, a Donald Trump toupee) between her legs.

Ahead, Dicky is churning through the snow, big bow-kneed legs pumping like he’s a lizard running across a hot parking lot.

Frankie thinks,
Just shoot him
.

He’s got a pistol. A Walther, slung under his arm.

But if he shoots, he might kill the little bastard. And then they’ll never find Wayne’s money.

Instead, Frankie feels at his hip. Got a hatchet hanging there. Up until now he didn’t know what the hell he’d ever do with a hatchet – Wayne just said, “You come up here, you work for me, you carry a hatchet, Gallo. Ain’t no
what
or
who
or
why
about it.” Now, though, Frankie’s thinking maybe Wayne had a point. Because here he is grabbing the hatchet off its loop and cocking his arm back–

He gives it a hard throw.

It whirls through open space. The faint whistle of cold air cut.

And the wooden handle clocks Dicky in the back of the skull.

Thwack
.

It’s a clumsy hit. Wildly imperfect. Just the same, it causes Dicky to stumble – and one leg cuts in front of the other like a rude shopper, and next thing Frankie knows, Dicky’s pitching face-forward into the snow.

Of course, he meant to hit the sonofabitch with the hatchet’s
blade
, but he guesses that’s why they say
the end justifies the means
.

Frankie stomps over as Dicky scrabbles to stand.

Panting, he plants his boot on Dicky’s left shoulder, draws his gun, and fires a shot through Morningdove’s left hand.

White snow, painted red.

The gunshot echoes up the mountain and down.

A murder of crows takes off from nearby pines.

Dicky gulps air and sobs.

Frankie sniffs, pulls back his hood, runs his hands through his greasy hair. “I hate you, Morningdove. I don’t wanna be doing this. Jesus. You stole, what, two grand from Prevette? Worth it? Worth the loss of your hand? Tell you something, Dicky, that other hand is lookin’ mighty good, too. I took your left this time, but next time I’ll shoot the hand you use–”

“I’m a lefty!” Dicky howls.

Frankie rolls his eyes. “Fuck, whatever. Just tell me where you stashed the cash and I won’t hafta–”

His cell rings.

One thing he can say being up here in the mountains. Great cell reception. Shitty radio. But clear signal on his phone.

He looks at the display.

Miami.

Huh.

He answers it. “I’m fuckin’ busy. I don’t work for you anymore. This better be good.”

“I got someone here says she knows you.” He recognizes the twangy voice. Tap-Tap’s man. His second. What the fuck’s that tweaker’s name? Jay-Jay. Stands for John-Jacob or something.

“Like I said, get to it. Fuckin’ busy.”

“Her name is Miriam.”

Frankie stiffens. Panic pulls his puppet strings. “What?”

“Yeah, yeah, Miriam Black. Says you can vouch for her.”

Vouch?
“What’s she sayin’?”

“She’s saying – well, some drama around here about some coke went missing, a whole lotta coke, and she’s saying it’s not her, she got set up, saying you can tell us what’s what. She steal drugs before from Ingersoll? Said she’s being screwed by some other girl named Ashley–”

“Ashley ain’t a girl. It’s a guy,” Frankie says.

“So you know what she’s talking about?”

And here Frankie thinks
, It’s decision time
.

Miriam’s the one who put a bullet through Ingersoll’s head, and by his mileage that’s A-OK. That fuckin’ guy was a monster. Happy to see him go.

But Harriet.

She killed Harriet, too.

Shot her through a bathroom door.

Harriet was a monster, just like Ingersoll. She worshipped the boss. Woulda cut her own feet open and walked across a swimming pool full of lemon juice for Ingersoll. She wanted to
be
him. And yet, she and Frankie worked together. Not just as partners, but like two strange-shaped puzzle pieces that look nothing alike but somehow
fit
perfectly, one next to the other, on every job.

He misses Harriet.

Here, Dicky at his feet thinks he sees a chance and starts to roll over and try to get his feet under him.

Frankie sighs and puts a bullet right in Dicky’s ass. The man howls and screams and thrashes around, blood squirting out of his butt-cheek like he’s one of them water wiggle toys from way back when. Some of it splashes on Frankie’s jeans, and the screams only get louder and louder–

Frankie presses the phone to his chest and puts another round through the back of Dicky’s head. The half-Choctaw thief slumps forward into a pile of his own brains.

Well, shit. Now he’s going to have a hard time finding Wayne’s money. But, then again, fuck Wayne Prevette.