Blackbirds (23 page)

  The storage units are bathed in sodium light, but pockets of shadow remain.

  Miriam darts into the heart of the storage unit. Seven rows deep. Five units in.

  The stink of rotten fast food hits her, but she doesn't care; she hunkers down behind a trash can, makes herself as small as she can between the two storage units.

  She waits.

 

  The hairless fuck with the fillet knife. The one who cuts out both of Louis's eyes and stabs him in the brain to kill him.

  Proof positive, yet again, that Miriam is the one who causes this. The chain of events replays out, a cruel and taunting filmstrip, flip, flip, flip, a cascading series of
what ifs
: if she didn't get in that truck with him, if she didn't get hooked up with Ashley, if she didn't
go back
to Louis…

  But still, it isn't coming together. She doesn't understand. Not yet. Louis is gone. They're here. He's not. Why would they connect with him? Unfinished business?

  It doesn't make any sense.

  One thing she knows, though, is that fate never shows its hand early. It always waits till the last possible moment to turn the cards.

  
The show ain't over yet.

 

She's spotted.

  The only weapon she's got is a broken stick she found on the ground behind her, and she thinks,
I'm not going out without a fight
. She'll stick it in someone's eye. For payback. Some kind of first-strike retaliation where the revenge comes before the act committed. Vengeance of the time-traveler, vindication born of prevision.

  "You all right?" comes the voice.

  It's a man. Not Frankie. Not the Hairless Fucker.

  Mid-thirties. Light beard. Glasses. Hair lacquered to his forehead with sweat, baseball hat in hand. He peers over and around the trashcan.

  "Miss?"

  She stands. She doesn't know how long she's been here. A half-hour? An hour? Longer? Sirens have come and gone from the accident. All's been quiet but for a couple-few cars coming in and out of the facility (and with each car, her heart pauses, her breath waits).

  The guy's eyes widen when he sees her.

  "You're bleeding," he says.

  Miriam doesn't know how to respond. She remains sandwiched in the space between the two units; exposure could mean death. It's not death she's worried about. It's what comes before.

  "Yes," she says. Dumb. But it's all she has.

  "Were you in that accident?"

  "Yes," she lies. Though maybe it's not a lie. She was certainly present for it.

  "Do you need help?"

  She fires back with a question of her own: "Do you have a car?"

  "Yeah. I was here just putting a few more things into a storage unit before our move to the new house, and – sorry. You don't really need to know this. My Forester is parked around the corner."

  "Will you take me somewhere?"

  He hesitates. He's not sure, and he's right to be uncertain. Miriam knows that elements don't add up. No glass in her hair. The cuts on her legs aren't from a car accident. He hasn't asked the right questions in his head yet, but he will. She only hopes by the time he comes up short, they're already in the car, driving far, far away from this place.
You're going to get out of this – a rat through a bolthole, almost there, just a little farther…

  "Yeah," he says, finally. "Absolutely. Here, this way. My name's Jeff–"

  She moves to step out.

  The man, Jeff, flicks his gaze left.

  Then his body jerks sideways, accompanied by a spray of blood and a pistol shot.

  Miriam kicks over the trash can and turns to run the other way, to duck between the storage unit and come out the other side.

  That doesn't happen.

  Instead, she comes face to face with Hairless Fucker. He nods.

  "How easily we are sidelined by distractions," he says.

  And then he takes a step back and fires the Taser into her stomach. Every cell in her body lights up like a Christmas tree. Hot and cold. Stinging fire ants. A string of firecrackers. Her bones feel like they might break. Everything is white, bright, and terrible.

 
 

 

Paul's body sits crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. His head is turned at a bad angle, the chin up over the shoulder and pointed at ninety degrees. The eyes, open and glassy. The mouth, closed, as if posed forever in thought. His bag lies a few feet away. A cell phone, a few feet past that.

  Miriam descends the steps.

  A minute ago, she watched him leave the warehouse.

  Philly's chemical stink – a dull, acid perfume that rises with steaming manholes and drifts down with spitting rain, calling to mind a mixture of sewer gas and pesticide – burns her nose and burns her eyes, and she feels herself tearing up, and she convinces herself that's all it is, the stink of the city.

  When he left, Paul crossed the road.

  He checked that calculator watch from a bygone era as he did.

  No cars struck him. No heart attack claimed him.

  He stepped up on the curb. His cell phone rang.

  A set of concrete steps waited for him, and he took his call, and said, "Hi, Mom," and maybe the phone was enough of a distraction, but his foot took the step at a bad angle, more heel and less toe, and he started to fall.

  He would have been fine, but the body and brain don't always play well together. The body would have fallen in a way that was natural, the blow cushioned. The brain freaks out. Fight or flight. Panic response. That's what happened to Paul. He tried to save himself. Stiffened. Tightened. Twisted.

  It didn't save him.

  His body tumbled the rest of the way, and at the bottom, his neck twisted. The bone broke. Miriam will later read that sometimes that's called an "internal decapitation." It was over quickly.

  Miriam didn't need to be there to see it. She'd already seen it play out. This was his hour.

  She walks down the steps. Pauses over his body.

 
 You could've saved him
, that voice says. It always says that. As if on cue, a shadow passes over head – a balloon, she thinks, a Mylar balloon. But when she looks up, it's just a cloud passing over the sun, not a balloon at all.

  "I'm sorry, Paul. I wouldn't have minded you telling the world about me. They wouldn't have believed you, of course. Nobody ever does. But it wasn't meant to be, pal."

  Miriam looks through his stuff. She takes the recorder. She goes through his wallet, like a vulture picking meat off bone. Paul is a wealthy kid, that much is obvious, and he has a couple hundred bucks plus a few gift cards, a couple credit cards.

  With nimble fingers, she undoes the sweet, sweet calculator watch and slides it up over her hand, tightening it too tight against her wrist. The bite of the band will always remind her where the watch came from.

  She sits there for a little while longer. She gets something in her eye, and she wipes it away. Pollen, or dust. Or just the stink of the city.

 
 

 

"I am a businessman."

  These words wake Miriam.

  The voice belongs to Hairless Fucker.

  He's not talking to her. He's talking to Ashley.

  They're in a car. No – an SUV. Cream leather interior. Uppity; it's got DVD screens in the backs of the seats, and USB jacks, a glowing GPS and back-up camera in the console up front.

  Miriam's in the back-back seat. She doesn't know what is covering her mouth, but she wouldn't be surprised to learn it's two strips of black electrical tape in a wide X.

  Her hands, zip-tied. Feet, too. She feels groggy. The world swims. This is more than just the Taser. A faint memory flits through her brain – hands holding her, a pinprick, a syringe, a warm and fuzzy undertow. Pine trees pass outside the car. Dark green against a gray sky. They pass fast, they blur. Whatever the drugs were, they're still not out of her system.

  Ashley is in the seat ahead of her, facing forward.

  Hairless sits next to him.

  Way up in the front, Harriet drives. Frankie's in the passenger seat, cleaning his gun. The smell of gun oil – heady, rich, mechanical – fills the vehicle.

  "Business," Hairless continues, "is a kind of ecology. It has its hierarchies, its taxonomies. It has a food web, a pecking order. It is a natural thing."

  Ashley's mouth is taped shut. Miriam can't see his hands or feet, but the way he struggles tells her he's bound, too. Hands behind back, like her.

  "We think of nature in a certain way. We think of it as balanced. We think of it being fair, in its own way. Nature is not fair. It is not balanced. It is weighted in favor of what we would think of as evil. Cruelty is rewarded. You see? Harriet knows."

  Harriet speaks. She sounds excited. The monotone is gone. The flavorless cardboard drone has been replaced by a bloodthirsty, giddy tenor rising in pitch, growing in sheer delight.

  "Penguin mothers are kind to their children. Wolves are honorable. Chimpanzees are noble and wise. All lies, lies to comfort us. Man wants nature to be noble because it forces
him
to be noble. Man knows that he is above the beasts, and so if beasts can be noble, then man
must
be noble, too. Such a moral, honorable benchmark does not exist," Harriet says. Her words drip with
nyah-nyah-nyah I told you so
contempt. "Animals are vile and cruel. Cats rape each other. Ants enslave other insects, including other ants. Chimps fight in massive gang wars – they kill wantonly, they piss and shit on the corpses of their enemies, they take the babies of their genetic foes and dash them against rocks. They steal the females and force them to breed. They sometimes eat the defeated males."

  Harriet looks back at them, and Miriam sees in her eyes a manic gleam.

  "Nature is brutal and grotesque. That is the only benchmark. That is the precedent. We are animals, and as part of nature, we too must be brutal and grotesque."

  Miriam thinks she sees Harriet's shoulders shake with a tiny paroxysm of pleasure.

  The woman returns to driving.

  Hairless offers a golf clap. Miriam growls against her tape-gag.

  The Hairless Fucker turns to her and extends a long finger against his lips.

  "Shh. Your turn will come. For now, let me speak with your friend." He turns back to Ashley, who is pale and sweaty like a bottle of milk left out on a warm counter. He's staring at something Miriam cannot see, something near him on the seat. "This, Mister Gaynes, is how our time together will work. I have two questions for you. If you answer both of my questions honestly and swiftly, I will not kill you."

  Hairless fidgets with whatever it is that Miriam cannot see. She hears a metal squeak, the squeak of hinges.

  He holds something up.

  This, she can see.

  A twelve-inch, all-metal hacksaw. Brand new. Still has the sticker on it.

  Hairless flicks the blade with his fingernail.
Ting, ting, ting.

  "I am a businessman, as noted, and to be successful I must be cruel, so forgive me this. My first question is about the girl." Hairless turns and gives her a look. She can't read it. Maybe it's because he can't read her – and that puzzlement shows on his smooth, bone-white face. "Is it true, what she can do? Is it for real?"

  Ashley moans against the tape.

  "Oh," Hairless says, chuckling. He plucks the tape off Ashley's mouth.
Rip.

  "I think so," Ashley blurts, gasping for air with a mouth ringed by red, raw skin. "I think it's real. She believes it's real."

  Miriam struggles. She wants to boot him in the face. She wants to bite through her gag and scream for him to shut up, it won't matter, don't give in to these assholes. If given half a chance, she'd bite his tongue off. She'd kick him through the window. Something. Anything.

  Hairless continues with his questioning.

  "Now, my product. My case. My drugs." He pauses, takes a deep breath. "Where are they? What have you done with that which is mine?"

  Ashley spills like a drink.

  And when he does, Miriam's heart goes cold.

  "It's in the truck," Ashley says. "The trucker. Louis. I hid it in his truck."

  Next to Miriam sits Louis, Ghost Louis,
Xs-for-eyes
Louis. He smiles, bites his lower lip like a girl about to be given a pony.

  Miriam's head has been like a box full of puzzle pieces rattling. Now the pieces fall into place.

  Miriam feels warmth on her cheeks. She realizes she's crying.

  Hairless lets out a breath.

  "That was so easy," he says, smiling. "I always worry that it will be difficult. And so often, my worries bear fruit. I thank you for your cooperation."

  Ashley gasps, laughs a little, nods. But then he sees. His eyes dart back and forth, and he starts to stammer – "No, no, c'mon, no. No!"

  Hairless Fucker has the saw. He moves scary-fast.

  This is how it happens: Hairless gets atop Ashley, his back against Ashley's chest. He drives his elbow up into Ashley's jaw, smashing it shut and closing the door on any protests Ashley might make. Hairless keeps that elbow there, like a chair under a doorknob.

  With his free hand, Hairless hoists Ashley's leg so that the foot is propped up against the headrest of the driver's seat. Harriet doesn't seem to mind.

  Hairless tugs back Ashley's pant-leg.

  Ashley thrashes, screams, but Hairless is a fucking pro, and he rides the flailing con artist like a rodeo cowboy.

  "I told you!" Ashley shrieks through his bloody mouth. The words are sloppy, bubbly, and flecks of blood spit up onto the back of Hairless's bald head. "I told you want you wanted!"