The Cormorant (10 page)

“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.

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–”