The Cormorant (32 page)

One step ahead.

It makes her angry.

Angry at herself. Angry at him. Angry at everyone in this car.

The big guy turns back around, the ruddy mounds of sweat-shined cheeks pulled back to show the wide white veneers of his smile and he’s about to gloat and say something–

Miriam wrenches her body upward at the hips–

And kicks him with both feet in the face.

His head rocks back and he’s already turning and pawing at the steering wheel like a housecat trying to claw through a closed door – and already the car is losing control and careening left, then right. Then his heavy foot is punching down on the brakes and she hears the tires skid beneath them and the tires of
other cars
skidding–

She awaits the sound of shearing metal.

She awaits the car being split in half like a soda can hit with a shotgun.

She awaits death and all its accouterments: blood, fire, piss, shit, screams, this time all her own–

But the thought strikes her fast as a lightning whip
. I don’t die here
.

Fate wants her on that boat.

Ashley wants to give her a show.

The thought strikes her again, this time giddy, mad, a flurry of lunatic bubbles rising up from her heart and into her brain.
I don’t die here!

As the car slides to a complete stop, Miriam cries out and pushes past the pain to kick at the back passenger side window–

The big fuck in the driver’s seat is looking around, woozy, trying to get a measure of what’s happening. He tries turning the key again but the car’s engine bitches and moans but doesn’t turn over.

Cars zoom past outside. Honking.

The woman is fumbling for something–

The gun! She’s got the gun pointed over the back seat just as Miriam’s feet crack a spider-web in the glass and knock it out of its frame–

“Stop!” the woman screeches, and Miriam wants to reach up and grab that gun and slap her. But the whole
hands-bound
thing makes that hard, so she works with what she has, and what she has is her skull.

Miriam moves her body like she’s a dolphin trying to get back into the ocean and tries to smack the top of her head into the woman’s gun-hand. But she discovers a better opportunity instead – she bites down hard on it.
Crunch
. The woman shrieks. At the same time, the big guy grabs Miriam by the scruff of the neck–

INTERLUDE

NOW

“Wait wait wait,” Grosky says. “So you
do
know how we bite it.”

“Bite it. Is that a pun? Because I bit your scarecrow friend here?” Vills looks down at her own hand and frowns. Miriam hisses, “You’re interrupting my story, and that’s very impolite. You’re rude and unpleasant. Like a soccer mom, or a dog fart.”

“We already
know
this part of the story,” Vills says.

“Apparently not, because Big Boy here has questions. And yes, Agent Grosky, I do know how you both die.”

“Come on. Give us a taste.”

“
You
die by choking on a canned ham – still in the can, actually.
So impatient
. She chokes, too, but on a horse dick. Awkward! They’re very big. I think her eyes were bigger than her stomach, don’t you?”

“You little twat, I’m done with–”

But Miriam turns her volume up to drown out Vills. “No, wait wait wait. I remember now. Grosky, you crush your wife during sex – she explodes like an overcooked sausage, it’s totally gross – and the guilt drives you to take your own life. And Vills, you fuck a nasty old zoo chimpanzee and get some kind of zoo-born chimp-flu that covers you in canker sores–”

Vills slams both palms down on the table. “See? This is what we get, Richie. This is what you want to stick around for.
We have to go
.”

Grosky levels his gaze at Miriam. “Tell me how we die.”

Miriam winks. “That’d be cheating. Don’t you like surprises?”

FIFTY-SIX

LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK

Vills screams and yanks her hand away. The gun drops. Miriam gets her feet under her, wrenches her head free of the big guy’s meaty grip–

Then she uses her legs to push her body up and out of the busted backseat window–

–right into traffic.

She lands hard on her shoulder –
oof!
– just as a big-ass cherry-red pickup blasts past so close she can feel the tires’ wind on her hair.

Not gonna die, not gonna die, not gonna die
.

She’s in the middle of a highway. Four lanes.

At the far side, a guardrail.

And over that guardrail–

A drop to another highway. The turnpike, she thinks. Crossing like two ribbons atop a Christmas present.

Miriam sprints across the highway. Cars don’t stop. Drivers don’t give one shit, two shits, a hundred shits – they’ve got places to go and, by golly, this is Florida, where stuff like this must happen all the time. A motorcycle nearly takes her boot off. A white sports car almost cuts her in half.

But then –
wham
, she slams into the guardrail.

She turns around. Faces the gray car. The woman is already out. Gun back in her hand.

Miriam starts sawing the zip-ties back and forth on the ragged, almost serrated edge of the guardrail. Back and forth. Cutting into her hand.

The woman aims the pistol.

The big guy is half out of the car, yelling, “Don’t shoot! This isn’t on the books.
Don’t shoot her, goddamnit
–”

Miriam winces, keeps sawing, feels blood crawling down the sides of her palms.

The woman hesitates pulling the trigger.

A grungy gray box truck blasting booming Reggaeton music charges past.

She fumbles with the gun.

Both halves of the zip-cuff come free.

Miriam looks down over the highway’s edge.

Here’s my chance.

And she jumps.

FIFTY-SEVEN

CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION

Boom
. She cracks hard into an empty swimming pool carried on the back of a flat-bed trailer – a stack of swimming pools, actually, three piled atop one another and held to the truck with wide white straps. The horse-kick of pain transitions swiftly to a dull roar of misery throughout her body.

She gasps, lying on her back. Arms spread out, cruciform.

I really wish the pool had been filled with water first
.

Still. Nothing seems broken. Moving her limbs hurts like a sonofabitch – and yet, they move. Nothing falls off. All her organs remain firmly ensconced inside her body.

She’s going to have a helluva bruise, though.

It’ll match all the others.

This truck heads southbound on the turnpike. Opposite to the direction she had been going in the car with those two so-called Feds.

That means she has to get off this truck. Right? She has to get back to her mother’s, has to stand in Ashley’s way, has to get the Malibu–

But then she thinks,
fate is a river with dark, fast-moving waters
. That’s what she hates about it. The
inevitability
of it. The illusion of choice – paddle left, paddle right, the rapids will still carry you where they want to carry you. She feels a spike of pride that she’s the
riverbreaker
, a big stone that parts the waters, that changes the course of the river, that turns one straight line into two divergent ones.

Today, though, she doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting.

Today, fate is not her foe – it is her friend.

Why fight it? She’s seen the future. She knows where fate takes her.

It puts her on a boat. With Ashley Gaynes. And her mother.

Her mother, who’s probably already gone. Ashley’s taken her already. Miriam feels it like a steel wire threading through her marrow: a grim certainty that she’ll go back to the house and find no one there. And he’ll taunt her with it. He’ll leave a note. Or call her. Something to remind her that she’s always one step behind – a little boy chasing a red balloon right into path of an oncoming SUV.

Fuck that. Instead of fighting it, she’s going to go with it.

Fate is like gravity. If she lets herself go, it’ll always pull her down.

She’ll go all the way to the bottom. Right to the boat. Right to the moment that it matters. She wanted to avoid that, but she’s been struggling against it to no avail. The bottom is where she belongs.

The end is where she
lives
. And she’s learned so much along the way.

Southbound it is, then.

Mile zero, motherfucker
.

Besides, she’s tired. Really goddamn tired. All parts of her feel weighed down – a corpse dragged to the ocean floor by heavy chains.

She curls up in the scalloped edge of the pool. Wads herself up in a fetal ball. Miriam sleeps. And for once, she does not dream.

FIFTY-EIGHT

PREDESTINATION

Coming down off the long side of a bridge, the driver hits the brakes to slow the truck. The jake brake grinds and stutters –
gung gung GUNG GUNG
– and jolts her out of the deathlike sleep that embraced her. It gets her blood hot, her heart pumping. She peeks up over the lip of the pool–

And sees evening settling in over the smooth crystalline bay. Islands – keys – in the distance. Beneath the truck is the Seven-Mile-Bridge, the massive white whale with the bowed back that connects Marathon with Bahia Honda by hopscotching Pigeon Key.

Birds sit along the power lines stretched out over the water. Cormorants. Reclining in the fading light of day. Out beyond is the old defunct bridge – a trestle of rusted bones that looks like it might collapse if even one of those birds decides to land on it.

Perhaps tellingly, no birds land on it.

The truck comes off the bridge and slows as it continues down the last straightaway. It grinds and turns wide toward a pebble-gravel entrance with a sign out front: SMUGGLER’S COVE RV PARK AND RESORT.

The hydraulics squeak and hiss.

And the truck stops.

Fate has brought her back to the Keys.

Now to see what else it has in store.

She grabs the lip of the pool, swings over the edge – her body cries out as she does so, her teeth reflexively gritting to bite back the pain. She uses the other stacked pools like a ladder and drops into the lot. More vibration. More pain. It rises up through her feet. She suppresses a yelp.

The “resort” is no such thing – it’s an agglomeration of campers and RVs hitched to posts and racks. Folks are milling about their respective vehicles, grilling hot dogs and BBQ chicken on little charcoal hibachis. Doves and blackbirds strut around the ground, pecking for leftovers.

A girl in a tie-dyed half shirt sees Miriam and walks gingerly toward her, bare feet padding on the loose pebbles. She’s got a cigarette pinched in the scissors of her thin little fingers.

The freckle-faced girl comes up, says, “You Miriam?”

“What of it?”

“Guy named Ashley’s got a message for you.”

“Does he now? What message?”

“Says he’s…” She takes a moment, as if to remember. “He’s surprised you’re pushing it this far. Says you still got some surprises in you yet.”

The girl takes a hit off the cigarette. Miriam wants one and pulls out her own pack – and before she even plucks a finger in, the girl says, “He said you’d be out and that I wasn’t to give you one of mine. But I’m out too, so I guess it don’t much matter. I got some Hubba Bubba gum, though.”

“I don’t want the gum. Just make with the rest of the message.”

“He told me to collect some things from you. Your boots. Your knife. Your sunglasses. Your phone, too.”

“I’m not giving you those things.”

“He said you’d say that. He told me to ask what you think Eleanor would say to that.”

Miriam’s hands tighten to fast fists. “Eleanor?”

“Sorry. Meant
Evelyn
.” But the way the girl’s smiling, Miriam thinks the slip-up was intentional. The girl’s not an actor. She’s barely legal; this little minnow can hardly keep it together. Ashley told her to say all this. “You gonna give it over or what? Billy’s got brats on the grill and Boone’s Farm in the bucket so I gotta get back.”