The Cormorant (20 page)

Frankie raises the phone.

“I know her,” he says, and he’s honestly about to tell Jay-Jay to do whatever he wants to her because she’s a Sunday paper full of bad news, but then he remembers that last time he saw her. There at the base of that lighthouse. Ingersoll upstairs, about to cut out the trucker’s eyeballs. Miriam showed up. Put a gun to his head. Told him he’s gonna be a grandfather someday. Asked him if he liked this life. He said no. And then, like that, she let him go.

Suddenly he says to Jay-Jay, “She’s not the one. Isn’t her sticking it to you. She’s right. If that Ashley asshole is still alive – we cut off his foot – then it’s him. She didn’t take your drugs.”

Then he hangs up.

He looks down at the body in the snow. Steam rising from blood and brains. He says to the corpse, “I really do need to get out of this life.”

And then he pockets the gun, grabs his hatchet, and heads back down the mountain.

THIRTY

A LOW, LOW OFFER

Jay-Jay hangs up the phone and gives a shrug and a nod.

Tap-Tap makes a look like he’s disappointed, a kid whose parents won’t take him to the circus, and next thing Miriam knows he’s unbelting her hands and Goldie is letting go of her leg.

The big Haitian picks her up and sets her down on the floor.

Her leg almost kicks out from under her. The cut across the shin isn’t a life-ender, but it’s bleeding like a throat-slit pig. Pain radiates out from the wound: ripples of bone-scraped misery. The bass from the club below doesn’t help; she can feel every glitchy dubstep-
wah-wah-wah-boom
in the wound like a fisting heartbeat.

Tap-Tap tosses her a rag from a cobwebby pool table across the room.

“Clean yourself,” he says. “You bleed too much.”

She bites back any snark that threatens the sting of its lash, and takes the dusty rag and presses it against her leg.

Then Tap-Tap strides over. Bowling ball fists on his broad hips. “This is how it work now. You get to keep your leg. You get to keep your
life
. But that is not a gift. It is a deal I’m making. A… how you say? A
bargain
. You will bring me this man with the girl’s name – the one who stole them. If you do not bring him to me, I will come back to you and I will take more than your leg. I will cut your tits. I will stuff you full of snakes and worms. I will turn your head into a candle. Because I have been dishonored. Because the universe likes to be balanced.”

She swallows a hard knot. “Lemme guess. A voodoo thing?”

“Bah.” He waves her off. “Ingersoll believed in ghosts and pigeon guts. I don’t truck with that shit. But I believe in vengeance. I believe that if you take from me I will take ten times from you. Debts will be paid and this debt is now on you, Miss Black.”

He offers her a hand.

What else is she going to do?

She shakes it.

He grinds her knuckles together like he’s trying to make bone flour.

No death vision finds her. Not for him. Not for Daddy Long-Legs over there – Jay-Jay. She’s already seen how both were going to die, and she saved them from that fate.

Now she just has to save herself.

And that means finding Ashley Gaynes.

THIRTY-ONE

GULL HEART

Miriam tries not to panic as she drives, but her emotions are like that poor gull: wings broken, legs twisted from the body, beak snapped. Flopping around and pumping blood.

Before her is the world: the highway, the night, the lights above the rain-slick streets of Miami, and all of it seems hopelessly infinite – earth and road and ocean and sky in every goddamn direction, long shadows stretching across countless miles – and Ashley Gaynes could be hiding in any bolt-hole or doorway along the way. Finding him will be like looking for a clean heroin needle in a pit full of dirty ones.

She has no idea what direction to point the car.

She finds her foot tamping down on the accelerator.

Her speed ticks upward: 55, 65, 75…

She’s pissed. Him.
Him
. Ashley. That asshole. They screwed and she
got
screwed. Getting tangled up with him was like getting snared in a ring of thorns. Hard to get out of, and when you do, you bleed.

Now he’s gravitating toward her once more.

He’s the one who kills that asshole at the Torch Key house.

He’s the one screwing with her.

He knew she’d be at that club. How?
How
?

Was he watching her?

He had to be.

Was he watching her down in the Keys, too?

Could be, rabbit, could be. And that tracks, doesn’t it? If he’s here messing around with Tap-Tap’s drug biz, he’s doing it locally. They didn’t send a cocaine submarine to Canada. It would have been here. Somewhere along the coast.

Maybe even down in the Keys.

That means he’s here. In Florida.

Right now.

Good. That helps. It doesn’t fix the problem, doesn’t deliver him in a bolt of lightning into her passenger seat, but it narrows down her choices from the Entire Known World And Maybe The Moon to Somewhere In Florida. He’s here somewhere. Laughing at her.

75… 85… 95…

He wants to punish her.

She gets that now. He blames her. Doesn’t he? He thought they had something. Last time they were together, he said,
You love me
. She told him he was dreaming. He said she wanted him.
Needed
him. And then Hairless Fucker and his two thugs showed up and that was that. They took them. Cut his foot off. Probably would have cut more off too but Miriam lashed out, started kicking – Ashley tumbled out the door, leaving his foot behind.

She probably
saved his life
.

But that’s not how he sees it, is it?

He thinks she took something from him.

And now he wants to return the favor.

How far would he go?

She tops the car out at 100.

Oh, God.

Miriam suddenly knows where to point the car.

THIRTY-TWO

A TALE OF TWO MIRIAMS

It’s early. Sun’s not even up yet. Miriam comes in the door and finds her mother sitting at the breakfast nook, hands steepled, the note Miriam left sitting in the corral of her arms.

Evelyn Black starts to protest, thrusts her finger up in the air and starts to say something about betrayal and lies, something about running away from your debts and obligations, but Miriam can barely hear the words – it’s like she’s one of the kids in a Peanuts cartoon listening to an adult talk,
wah wah wah waaah wah.

She storms over to her mother.

Her mother stands, frustrated, that finger still waggling, a castigating inchworm wriggling–

Miriam reaches out.

She captures the finger and the hand in her own and–

The ocean moves beneath them. The boat bobs in the surf. Mangroves line a nearby island, the trees standing in water like spiders on tippy-toes, like they don’t want to get their feet wet.

Mother sits bound to a folding chair and to the deck railing behind it. Her nose is busted, streaming twin swallowtails of blood. Her lips are stretched around a tennis ball duct-taped into her mouth – the skin cracking, splitting, bleeding.

Evelyn Black watches her daughter behind a cabin porthole window. Fear courses through her like it’s a living thing.

Poor Miriam pounds on the glass. Her hands are bloody, leaving greasy ketchup streaks behind. The window is unfazed, unbroken.

Ashley walks forward with an unsteady gait.

His knee dead-ends into a black rubber support cup from which protrudes a narrow flagpole of metal. The metal disappears into a dirty gray sneaker. The fake metal leg utters small squeaks and hisses as he walks.

He goes up to the porthole windows where Miriam on the other side screams and punches the glass. He waggles his fingers as if to wave at her.

“A tale of two Miriams,” he says. He points to the bloodied handprints. “This is for you, the Miriam who’s here.” Then he sweeps his arms across the sky. “And this is for you, the Miriam who’s touching her mother and seeing her death. You came for a show, so I sure don’t want to disappoint!
”

He stoops his head. Whispering. Murmuring words unheard. As if conferring with an invisible conspirator.

He laughs. Then he pulls a hunting knife from his belt.

“You know what they did?” he asks suddenly. Each word is laced with vibration – shot through with black veins of fear and giddiness. “They went to my mother. I don’t know if you knew that. That’s how they found us. They went to her and I’d sent a postcard to her and that was how they knew where to start looking. You know what they did to my mother? They shot her. Then they flipped one of the burners on the stove. Then turned up the nozzle on her oxygen tank.” He claps his hands. “Whoosh. My mother was a hoarder. Lot of junk in that house. Tinder for the biggest campfire the town of Maker’s Bell ever did see.”

He takes the knife, sticks the point up under Evelyn’s chin. Evelyn tries to scream around the tennis ball. She thrashes. It’s no use.

“I’m going to take your mother from you, and you’re thinking, but why? And I’m saying to you, it’s because of a thing you already know. Don’t you? An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Your mother for my mother. And I hear your screams from behind that window and I know we’ve already had this conversation but we’re going to have it again for the benefit of–” once more he addresses the sky with the knife before returning it to the pricked skin beneath Mother’s chin “–and I want you to know that I blame you for my mother dying. I put a lot of faith in you. It was because of you that I was even in the Ass-Crack of Nowhere, North Carolina. With all the Waffle Houses and rebel flags and
fixin’s
and
y’alls
. I went to you because I thought you were the one for me. A partner. A real partner. And you fucked me, then you fucked me over, and they fucked me up. My mother died and what did I get out of it? You fawning over that bull-headed trucker. Me losing my leg and getting dumped on the road. And you left me!”

Miriam inside the cabin screams. Her shrieks are dulled by the glass.

She begins to bring her elbow against it.

Slowly, it cracks.
Kkkkk
.
Kssshhh
. Like the ice of a frozen lake beneath someone crossing it. A ribbon of hope twists inside Evelyn: she’s doing it. Miriam’s breaking free.

Ashley shouts, “But now I have my own gift, you dumb cunt. Now I have a machine gun too, ho ho ho. And now I’m going to take what’s owed to me.”

Tears spill down over Evelyn’s broken nose, down over the wrinkled tape, around the margins of the tennis ball. Please, Miriam, please.

Miriam’s elbow crashes through the porthole, her arm studded with glistening, blood-slick glass.

Ashley laughs. And pounces.

He stitches the hunting knife in and out of Mother’s chest. He stabs her so hard it sounds like he’s punching her. The hilt of the knife and the base of his fist pound against her chest,
whump whump whump
. Again and again. Mother’s body spasms, the pain is cold and bright–

Then Ashley stops–

Gets under the chair–

Grabs both front chair legs–

And lifts her up over the edge of the boat and into the water.

The water is dark. It grabs Evelyn, pulls her down. Cold water shoots up her nose. Streamers of blood drift into the blue, diffusing. Above her the boat floats like a white whale clouded in red–

Miriam, I’m sorry–

Evelyn Black dies in the water.

THIRTY-THREE

THE TIDE IS RISING

No no no no–

Miriam jukes left, lurches toward the sink.

She dry-heaves. Strings of spit that taste like Red Bull and salt water. Copper blood and vodka burn and the grit of sand.

“Miriam!” Mother chirps in alarm. She comes over to her daughter’s side and it’s like there’s a barrier gone between them. The woman now touches Miriam’s arm, rubs her back, takes a washcloth, wets it over Miriam’s shoulder, and presses it to the back of Miriam’s neck. “It’s OK. OK. Shh. If you’re drunk, it’ll pass. Every hangover goes back out to sea eventually–” And here Miriam waits for the judgment to come, a drop of poison in a glass of refreshing water. But then Mother says, “I used to have mornings like this. It’s OK.”