Mockingbird (2 page)

  "Do people even eat Wheaties anymore? I mean, seriously."

  "–and I don't need a grumpy little slut like you working in my store. Season's over after this weekend anyway, and you're done. Kaput. Pack up your crap and get out. I'll send you your last paycheck."

  
This is real
, Miriam thinks.

  She just got let go.

  Pink-slipped.

  Shit-canned.

  She should be happy.

  Her heart should be a cage of doves newly opened, the free birds flying high, fleeing far and away. This should be a real
the hills are alive with the sound of music
moment, all twirling skirts and wind in her hair. But all she feels is the battery acid burn of rage and bile and incredulity mingling at the back of her throat. A rising tide of snake venom.

  Louis always tells her to keep it together.

  She is tired of keeping it together.

  Miriam yanks her nametag off her chest – a nametag that says "Maryann" because they fucked it up and didn't want to reprint it – and chucks it over her shoulder. The muumuu lady dodges it.

  She goes with an old standby – her middle finger thrust up in Peggy's juiced lemon of a face – and then storms outside.

  She stops. Stands in the parking lot. Hands shaking.

  An ocean breeze kicks up. The air brings with it the smell of brine and fish and a lingering hint of coconut oil. Serpents of sand whisper across the cracked parking lot.

  A dozen gulls fight over bread scraps. Ducking and diving. Squawking and squalling. Drunk on breadcrust and victory.

  It's hot. The breeze does little for that.

  People everywhere. The
fwip-fwip-fwip
of flip-flop sandals. The miserable sob of somebody's child. The murmur and cackle of endless vacationers smelling a season drawing to a close. A thudding bass line booms from a car sliding down the slow traffic of Long Beach Boulevard, and she can't help but think how the beat sounds like
douche-douche-douche-douche
and how it echoes her hammer-fist heartbeat dully punching against the inside of her breastbone. And Walt the "cart boy," who's not really a boy but in fact a developmentally handicapped fifty-year-old man, gives her a wave and she waves back and thinks,
He's the only one here who was ever nice to me
. And probably the only one she was ever nice to, too.

  She thinks,
Fuck it.

  She peels off one of her gloves.

  Then comes the other.

  Miriam pitches both over her shoulder – her hands are freakishly pale, paler than the rest of her body, the fingertips wrinkled as though she's been in a long bath.

  If Louis wanted her to keep it together, he'd be here. And he's not.

  Miriam goes back inside the store, cracking her knuckles.

 

Peggy has taken over from Miriam at the second checkout counter in from the end, and Miriam marches right up to her, taps her on the shoulder, and offers her a hand – ah, the fake handshake, that old trick to get people to touch her, to get one tiny moment of that skin-to-skin contact necessary to get the psychic death-visions a-flowing. She's itching to see how this woman bites it.
Hungry
for it. Desperate like a junkie.

  Miriam's hoping for some kind of ass cancer.

  "I just wanted to say thank you," Miriam lies through clenched teeth.
Thank you with ass cancer
. "Wanted to do this the honorable way and shake your hand."

  But Peggy, she's not buying it. She looks down at Miriam's hand as though it's not a hand but rather a big stinking tarantula.

  
Take my hand, lady.

  
I need this.

  
I need to see.

  It's been so long. Her hands are practically tingling.

  Once she hated her curse.

  She still does. But that doesn't change the need.

  Shake my fucking hand.

  "Get lost," Peggy says, pulling away.

  The buzz, killed.

  Peggy turns her back. Continues checking people out.
Boop, boop, boop.

  "Please," Miriam says. Urgent now. Tremble twitch. "C'mon. Let's leave this as professionals."

  Peggy ignores her. The customers stare.

  
Boop. Boop. Boop.

  "Hey. Hello. I'm talking to you. Shake my damn hand."

  Peggy doesn't even bother turning around. "I said,
get lost."

  Miriam's hands are practically aching. She feels like a dog watching a man eating a steak – the desire, the hunger, it lives in the hinge of her of jaw, a tightness before salivation. She wants nothing more than to pop this cork. "All right, you insufferable twat, I'm going to have to do this the hard way."

  Feet planted firmly on the point of no return, Miriam grabs Peggy, wheels her around, and smacks her with the–

  
Peggy screams. She runs but staggers over a dead body lying face-down on the sand-swept tile of Ship Bottom Sundries. The dead body is Walt, the cart boy. Blood pools beneath Peggy's hands, blood that isn't her own, and out of her throat comes a cry that sounds like the bleating of an animal just before the knife drags across its neck. But Peggy's cry doesn't rise alone; the whole store is people screaming, ducking down aisles, running for the door. And then a thin man parts the crowd – he doesn't belong, what with the dark sunglasses and the black V-neck T-shirt and the khaki pants stained with food or motor oil or whoknows-what – and he raises a pistol, a boxy Glock, and the pistol barks and the bullet peels a piece of Peggy's orangehaired scalp off her skull, and then another bullet punches like a train through her lung and she draws one last guttering gasp.

  –back of her hand, and Peggy's head snaps back, but it's not her who's left reeling. Miriam can hear the blood rushing through her ears, and it makes her dizzy. The world swoons and she doesn't believe that this could possibly be real, that this could really be what she's seeing.

  Peggy has three minutes left to live.

  Three minutes.

  Here. Now. Today.

  
Oh, god.

  The doors open and Walt struggles to bring in an unruly herd of shopping carts, but he whistles a happy tune just the same.

  Peggy gapes. "I'm calling the police."

  Miriam hears her but the words are a distant echo, like they're being spoken by someone underwater. Instead her eyes rove to the back of the line just as a man steps into the queue. A man in dark Ray-Bans. And a V-neck T-shirt. And dirty khakis.

  The gunman.

  Two-and-a-half minutes.

  It's then that Miriam sees movement above. A crow in the rafters, shuffling from foot to foot. The crow has one eye. The other eye is a ruined, featherless crease.

  The bird clacks its beak and, in her head, Miriam hears:
Welcome back, Miss Black.

  She blinks and the bird is gone.

  Peggy tries to restrain her, tries to grab her wrists, but Miriam doesn't have time. She shoves the woman back into the cash drawer with a
ding.

  Miriam has no idea what she's doing. She feels lost. Unmoored. And yet somehow, that wild and wobbly uncertainty feels like home.

  She heads around the back of the line. Like she's on auto-pilot. Buckled into a ride she can't stop. Peggy shouts at her. Miriam can barely hear.

  Those in line ogle her. They move away from her as she gets close. They don't want to give up their place in line but they don't want to be near her, either.

  Two minutes now. Maybe less.

  She sidles up behind the killer. The killer doesn't move. Doesn't blink. Doesn't care.

  Peggy stands aside, looking stunned. Calling for someone to call the cops. Mumbling something about assault. She asks the customers for help. Help restraining Miriam. No one offers. They just want to buy their shit and get out.

  Some set their stuff down and escape.
Too awkward for my blood
, they're probably thinking. Miriam isn't thinking about anything but the killer, the gun, and death.

  "You have a gun," Miriam says to the man in front of her. Her voice croaks when she speaks, her tongue so dry it sticks to the roof of her mouth.

  He turns halfway, cocking his head like a confused dog, like he couldn't possibly have heard what he just heard.

  At the front of the store, Walt sees her again. And waves.

  She waves back.

  The man registers what she said.

  "They want me to kill everyone."

  "They who?"

  "The voices."

  You can't," Miriam says, a hollow plea. A minuteand-a-half left. She knows begging won't help. Nothing she says will matter. That isn't how it works. The rules have been clear ever since she put a bullet in a drug kingpin at the Old Barney lighthouse over a year ago. "Don't. Please."

  What fate wants, fate gets.

  Unless.
Unless.

  Unless she pays the cost. A cost of blood. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. Only an act
that big
will sway fate. To change the course of a raging river, you need a big-ass motherfucking rock.

  "Did the voices send you, too?" he asks

  Miriam shakes her head. "No." She doesn't know who he's talking about, but she sees the way his lips form words he's not even speaking, sees the way his fingers work at the air like the legs of an overturned beetle, can
smell
the stink of sweat and gun oil on the man, and it's all too clear: He's nuts, crazy, a real farking moonbat.

  But he's a moonbat on a terrible mission.

  Before she knows what's happening, he's got the gun out. The Glock.

  His hand moves fast and clips her across the top of the head with it. She sees bright white starbursts behind her eyes as she tumbles backward and falls on her butt-bone.

  The chance to do what must be done is slipping away as she sits dizzy on the floor.

  Everything seems to go slow. She's a flitting mosquito caught suddenly in a blob of tree sap.

  A line of blood runs down the side of her nose.

  She can barely find her feet to put them beneath her.

  The man raises the gun straight up in the air and fires.

  Screams. Movement. Chaos.

  He levels the gun. Another shot. The front door shatters.

  Miriam stands, head pounding, colorful flashes of light dancing in her vision. She's behind him. Her gaze drifts down the man's arm and to the sights of the gun as the weapon tracks Walt behind his row of shopping carts.

  It's now or never.

  Will fate get what fate wants?

  She knows this store. She's been working here since before the beach season started. Who hasn't looked around their work environment and played the, "What around here could be a weapon?" game? Maybe she's alone. Maybe it's just her game. Miriam Black isn't most people. Not anymore.

  She turns. Grabs something off an end-cap.

  A long, stainless steel, two-pronged fork.

  For barbecuing.

  She stabs it into the side of the man's neck as the gun fires.

  Walt screams and falls. A cart drifts away.

  Blood burbles up around the fork like the water in a bubbler fountain. It begins soaking the gunman's neck and T-shirt collar.

  The killer wheels on Miriam. A clumsy pirouette, the fork sticking out the side of his neck, looking like a lever you could pull to power him down.

  She finds herself staring down the barrel of the Glock.

  "You're the one always messing with things," he says, his lips wet with red. The words aren't angry. Wistful, maybe. Sad. Definitely sad.

  A flash from the muzzle. She doesn't even hear it.

  She feels it though. Her head rolls – a burning sensation in the deep of her skull like the searing gaze of Satan himself.

  The man collapses sideways into a rack of shell-jewelry, faux pirate
tschotskes,
and beachy snow-globes filled with swirling sand instead of snowflakes. They shatter as they hit the floor.

  Miriam tries to say something.

  Finds her mouth is no longer connected to her brain.

  For the world, that may be some kind of mercy.

  But for her, it's a certain terror.

  A deep and wretched darkness reaches for her and grabs hold.

 

Miriam sits on the beach, her butt planted on a cheap white plastic chair, her hands steepled on a patio table made of the same, her toes burrowed into cold sand like a row of ostrich heads.

  Sitting across from her is her first boyfriend, Ben Hodges, the back of his head blown out from the shotgun he ate so long ago. Back when they were both dumb horny teenagers in high school. They fucked. She got pregnant. He killed himself. And his mother took out her lonely mother rage on Miriam with a red snow shovel.

  That day. The day Miriam was really born. The nowMiriam. The Miriam with this curse, this gift, this thing-that-she-does.

  Ben clears his throat.

  A pair of dark-winged birds – blackbirds, each with a dime-sized splash of red on each wing – picks at his exposed brain like they're looking for worms.

  The sea slides in, the sea slides out, the ineluctable susurration of the tides.

  "I knew you couldn't stay away for long," Ben says.

  Except Miriam knows this isn't Ben. Once upon a time she would have said he was a figment of her imagination, a shape-shifting tormenter of her own devising, and that may still be true. But now she's not so sure. Maybe she was never sure.

  "I am who I am."

  "That's what we're counting on."