The Cormorant (26 page)

Always two things.

FORTY-ONE

TWO THINGS

Miriam lights a cigarette. It feels like a cannonball just punched its way through her middle. She tries not to show it. Tries not to think about how she lost something she didn’t even want – a child unborn, a life she misses only in retrospect. What this woman lost is so much worse. Sugar wanted that little girl. All her life. To fix what had been broken in her – to bind a broken wheel, to make it all whole again.

She lost what she thought she would never lose.

Sugar reaches over, plucks the cigarette from Miriam’s lips.

Miriam scowls as the woman flicks it out of sight.

“No smoking,” Sugar says. “You should really quit. It’s bad for you.”

“Everything’s bad for you. Life is bad for you.”

“That attitude is bad for you.”

Miriam licks her lips. “Thank you, Mystical Life Coach. I’m sure you think it’s cynicism, but I think it’s realism.”

“A saying that has long been the shelter of the cynic.”

“Well, what the fuck? How are you
not
a cynic? What you’ve lost… it’s horrifying. You’re no optimist.”

“I’m only an optimist. Because even in dying, life finds a way. An insignificant light is still a light, after all.”

“You’re sick in the head.”

Sugar smiles a soft smile. “Maybe I am.”

“Fine. So tell me my two things, then.”

“I’ll tell you about the thing you don’t know you need first–”

“No, tell me about the–”

“Because if I do otherwise you’ll run off.”

Miriam stares.

Sugar winks. “The thing you’re not looking for is a metal box about this big–” She holds out her hands about a foot apart lengthwise, six inches from top to bottom. “Like a safety deposit box. It is beneath the water, as so many things around here are. Long Point Key is like a finger – its peninsula points the way. Somewhere out there, beneath the tides, this metal box awaits.”

“Great. Metal box.”
Worthless.
“And the next thing?”

“So impatient.”

“You have no idea.”

“The person you’re looking for is on Summerland Key. South of it, actually, on the far side of a small island. He’s camping there. You’ll know the island because of the two wild tamarind trees that look like a pair of hands beseeching the heavens for favor.”

“Poetic.”

“I thought so.”

“I’m going to go now.”

“I figured as much.”

“What do you want for… this?”

“For what?”

Miriam rolls her eyes. “For the whole… psychic thing. You gave me a vision. What do I give you in return? This was an exchange.”

“I don’t do this for gain.”

“So why
do
you do it?”

“I don’t really know. Why do you?”

Miriam narrows her eyes. “Do you see them? The visions? Every time, I mean. Do you know what everyone needs to find?”

“If they look into my eyes, I know.”

“Do you tell them?”

“Almost never. Not unless they want to know.”

“Is it hard? Seeing all that?”

“Not as hard as it must be for you.” She brings the lantern close, bathing one side of her face in the artificial glow. “But it’s still pretty strange. Oh – don’t forget to buy some suntan lotion.”

INTERLUDE

NOW

“So,” Grosky asks, “what’s in the box?”

He knocks on the metal box beneath his hand.
Clunk clunk
.

Miriam sneers. “I don’t know, genius. You interrupted me before I could open it.”

The big guy smiles. “We’re good at that.”

“I noticed.”

“This other woman was a, you know–” he touches both forefingers to his temples, whistles the
Twilight Zone
theme “–psychic lady. She has powers like you. Shit, maybe we shoulda been talking to her this whole time.”

“Why
are
you talking to me?” Miriam asks. Vills watches her the way a cat watches a cockroach and Miriam thinks,
It should be the other way around, asshole
. “What’s your endgame? Because I’m not seeing it.”

“We’ll get there–” Grosky starts to say.

“We have no endgame with you,” Vills says by way of interruption.

Grosky gives his partner a surprised look.

Vills says, “Christ, Richie, this girl is just stringing us along. Don’t you see that? Admitting to all this like it’s no big thing. Pretending she’s a, a, a goddamn psychic? We’re being played, Richie! Let’s just pack up our stuff and hit the bricks–”

“Catherine, lemme handle this. At the very least, we get to sit here in a shack by the beach, a nice breeze coming in through those beautiful broken windows over there, and Miriam here tells us a little story.”

“Richie, sometimes I swear, you have your head up your–”

“Uh-oh,” Miriam says. She affects a little girl’s voice. “Mommy and Daddy are fighting.”

They both shoot her an
eat-shit-and-die
look.

“Cath, just sit down. You gotta remember, I’m the top dog here. I been here longer than you–”

Vills rolls her eyes. “This crap again.”

“It isn’t crap. Don’t call it crap. Don’t diminish what I’m saying to you. Don’t
take away
from my years here in the behavioral unit–”

“Like you’re some kind of
flawless gem
of behavioral analysis. You don’t even have a degree–”

He barks a hard laugh. “
You
don’t have a degree, either!”

“At least I’ve been out there. With the
bad guys
. You totter out into the field with your tracksuit or that ugly Hawaiian shirt with the mustard stain on the collar while the rest of us show up for work dressed for success. When was the last time you even fired your pistol?”

Grosky turns suddenly toward Miriam: the parent beseeching the child to turn against the other. “See, Vills here has only been working with me for a couple years. She got transferred to me–”

“As punishment!” Vills shrieks, face a rictus of inconsolable fury.

“She got transferred to me from–”

Now it’s Miriam’s turn to jump in. “Ooh-ooh, lemme guess: vice. Or whatever the drug unit is for you FBI types.”

Grosky nods. Vills keeps shouting.

“I worked for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, and I lent support to local law enforcement in the country’s HIDTAs – the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas. Albuquerque, Phoenix, New Orleans–”

“Miami,” Miriam adds. Then she taps her head. “See? Psychic.”

Suddenly Grosky is pounding on the table with the side of his fist,
wham wham wham
, the metal box jumping with each punch.

“Shut up,” Grosky says. “The both of you.”

He sits back down. He’s broken out in a sweat. His cheeks are flushed like red water balloons. He takes out a white handkerchief, dabs the perspiration on his upper lip, licks it, then dabs it again.

Miriam whistles a low
uh-oh
whistle.

“Vills,” Grosky says. “Siddown. We’re staying. I’m seeing this through, and then I’ll decide what we’re gonna do with Miss Black. And you, Miriam–”

“Sit down, shut up, watch your mouth. Blah blah blah.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Fine.”
I got what I wanted out of this
, she thinks. Vills’ cage has been successfully rattled. “You wanna hear the rest of the story, or what?”

Grosky nods, but then says, “Hey, by the way, I’m real sorry about your mother.”

Miriam’s stomach drops out of her. She feels suddenly unfixed from the earth, as if she’s on an elevator going up and everything else is going down.

“Thanks,” she says.

Vills looks at her watch.

Miriam continues the story, starting with, “I needed a gun.”

FORTY-TWO

LITTLE LADY HANDS

Miriam needs a gun.

She’s got money, but no gun. She ditched the .38 – the one she used to shoot that robber. Or mugger. (
That poor kid
is who he was.) There’s a difference between the two, isn’t there? Whatever. She can’t be bothered by that right now. And she can’t be bothered by that dumb kid, either – even now, with his face leering back at her, reflected in the streetlight flashes on the windshield glass of the Malibu. His blood-streaked, ashen mouth. He was a murderer. (
You’re a murderer too
, a small voice reminds her – a voice carried around the inside of her head, a ricocheting bullet.)

She can’t mourn him.

He made his choices. She made hers.

That’s how she hardens her heart against it.

Because she has no time to do anything else.

Getting that gun (
don’t you mean the murder weapon?
) took time. She saved up some money from her little WILL PSYCHIC FOR FOOD experiment. Then she went to a gun show north of the city in a place called Oaks. Table after table of people selling ammo, ammo cases, knives, Nazi propaganda, KKK propaganda, Vietnam-era artifacts–

And oh, yeah,
guns
.

Buy from a private seller, slip through the loophole. No background check. No signing anything. Fork over cash, get handed a gun.

Guy at the table was all bro-macho about it. “What’s a little girl like you need with a gun?”

And she got cocky with him. “To make sure I don’t get raped by flannel-wearing survivalist assholes like you.”

She thought:
He’s either gonna get mad and try to break my jaw or he’s gonna tell me to fuck off and buy a gun from someone else.
But all he did was shrug and say, “Whatever, bitch. Your money’s still green.”

That’s how she ended up with a little .38 Smith & Wesson snubnose.

Guy who sold it to her got one last jab in: “Little gun for little lady hands.” She let it slide without pistol-whipping him, a fact she still upholds as a significant achievement and a clear watermark for personal growth.

Now, though, parked in the shadows of a long highway cutting down through the Keys, she doesn’t have that option. No gun show here. Not tonight. And tonight’s when she wants to do this.

No waiting.

Because time’s the wolf at her door.

So, what to do, what to do?

No gun shows right now. But this is Florida. It’s like a hillbilly Hawaii down here. Every time you see the news it’s
Florida Man Did This
and
Florida Man Did That
. Florida Man gorges on bath salts, eats some lady’s face. Florida Man tries to fuck an alligator, gets his dick stuck. Florida Man tries to hang-glide onto a cruise ship and take a shit on the shuffleboard deck. Plus, down here it’s like everyone thinks they’re Charles Bronson from
Death Wish
. So, they have gun shops.

She just has to hope that one of them is open after 10 at night.

A pawn shop, maybe.

For this, she needs to go back to the motel and grab the phone book she saw sitting on the bedside table. That’s not too far from here – another twenty to thirty minutes. Won’t kill her plans.

At the motel, everything’s quiet. Moths and flies and mosquitoes gather around the glowing light of a Coke machine under the stairway to Jerry’s office. Miriam heads around the back end of the property, following the path until she gets to her door – and someone clears his throat behind her.

She wheels.

It’s the burn-out. Sitting on his lawn chair.

Behind him, a zapper sends bugs to their crispy, crackly dooms.

“They call these islands
Los Martires
,” he says, like they’ve been in conversation for hours, like their last conversation never really stopped. “The Martyrs. When explorers came up in the night, they saw these shapes in the moonlight looking like suffering men hunched over the water. Like, prostating themselves before their god and shit.”

“I think you mean
prostrating
.”

“I don’t think there’s a difference.”

“There’s a pretty big fucking difference.”

“Oh. OK. Anyway, so, I think that’s pretty cool. Because this place is all easy like Sunday morning and shit, but even in paradise we suffer, you know? We suffer.”