The Cormorant

Chuck Wendig

THE CORMORANT

To all the foul-mouthed miscreants and deviants who are fans of Miriam, and who make this book possible.

PART ONE

FILTHADELPHIA

INTERLUDE

NOW

“And the Lord said, let there be light.”

A flutter of black fabric, and the hood is gone.

Miriam winces. Blinks. A white wave bleeds in from the edges. The world presses through the blur: shapes emerging from a puddle of milk.

The fat man who spoke sits across from her. Behind him walks the brittle woman, his partner – a boozy, tilted smile stitched between the moorings of two sharp cheekbones. Her hand is bandaged.

“You look like shit,” Grosky, the fat one, says after a low whistle.

“You look like a track suit wrapped around a bunch of trash bags,” Miriam answers. Her voice feels raw.
Sounds
raw. Like bare feet torn on broken shells, abraded by sand, stung by salt.

Ragged, ruined, roughed-the-fuck-up.

Grosky just shrugs. Laughs a little. He’s got a soft voice. Though she knows he can turn the volume up when he needs to. The booming timpani in the barrel well of his chest.

He’s got the box.
Her
box. Right there in front of him. He drums his sausage-link fingers on it. The lid rattles. The padlock judders.

The scarecrow – Vills, Catherine Vills – paces like she’s nervous. Like she’s got something to hide, which Miriam knows she does.

Miriam feels it in her feet as much as she hears it: the tide coming in. Not far away. The hush-and-boom of waves crashing. She looks around. This is just some ramshackle beach hut. Wood walls, leaning against one another as if for emotional support. Thatched roof overhead. Cobwebs hang and sway as a fishy breeze creeps in through open windows.

“Where are we?” Miriam asks.

Grosky doesn’t answer her question. “You want anything?”

“Cigarette.”

“You shouldn’t smoke.”

“You shouldn’t mainline lard and melted cheese. Do you even eat the cheeseburgers anymore, or do you just inject them right into your man-tits?” She tries to mimic said injection, but remembers that her hands are cuffed in front of her, and the shackles are in turn cuffed to the leg of the table. The table is wood. Old. Rickety. She could bust if it if she has to.

But she won’t have to. Not yet, anyway.

“Funny thing about lard,” Tommy Grosky says, “it’s got a bad rap. Demonized with all the other animal fats in the Seventies. But the truth is, it’s the vegetable fats that’ll kill you. Crisco. Margarine. Those, eh, those trans-fatty acids will fuck you up pretty good.” He squeezes a fist like he’s angrily milking a goat’s udder. “Closes your arteries off. Like with a clothespin.”

“That is
fascinating
.” She squeezes the words like a sponge, lets them drip sarcasm everywhere. “Thank you, Surgeon General Fatty McGee.”

“I’m just saying, things aren’t always what they appear.” He pats his chest.
Boom boom boom
. “You look at me and think,
Hey, there’s a blobby bastard right there. Like if Fred Flintstone ate Barney, Wilma, turned that purple dinosaur into dino burgers. Lift up one of his fat rolls, you’ll see a couple Twinkies hidden away.
You think I got an expiration date coming up. That my heart’s like a soup can in an old lady’s pantry: sure to burst before too long. But see, here’s the thing: I’m a forty-two year-old guy who’s as healthy as a sixteen year-old. My good cholesterol is through the roof. My bad cholesterol, shit, I don’t even think I
have
any. Great blood pressure. Perfect blood sugar – I don’t even know how to
spell
diabetes. I eat well. I like a lot of greens. Chard. Kale. Spinach, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“So maybe don’t be so smug.” His mouth hangs open. He waggles his tongue between the two rows of flat Chiclet teeth. It makes a wet, hollow sound. “Because maybe you don’t know what you’re looking at.”

“Maybe you forget, I know how you’re going to die.”

His eyes sit tucked behind folds of flesh that look like someone is pinching the skin shut, but suddenly the eyes go wide and she sees something flash there in the dark of his pupils: anger, bright white, like light trapped in the steel of a knife blade.

“This again,” he says. “Right. I’ll play. So you’re saying it’s my health that kills me? If you can even do this thing that you say you can do.”

“What time is it?” Miriam asks. Her turn to change the subject.

Here Vills looks down at a nice watch. A new watch. Movado. It hangs on her gaunt bone-knob wrist near a bandage. Miriam thinks,
We’ll get to all this soon enough.

“Five after noon,” Vills says. A smoker’s voice. A voice that’s all rust flakes and precancerous nodes, all in the dry thatch eaves of the woman’s scratchy throat. Then Vills drops a cigarette on the table between Grosky and Miriam.

Grosky gives his partner a look.

“Let her smoke,” Vills says. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Fine,” Grosky says. He flicks the cigarette over toward Miriam. It rolls and she catches it: a trap-door spider leaping upon its prey. Vills hands him a lighter but he doesn’t give it over. He twirls it. Grinning.

Miriam screws the cigarette between her lips. Teeth on the filter. Tongue rimming the paper. She wants it. A nic-fit threatens to tear through her like a pack of starving dogs.

Grosky leans across. Strikes the cheap gas station lighter –
flick flick flick.
Just sparks, just empty embers, hollow promises, no flame.

He shrugs. Pulls the lighter away. “Oh well.”

“Try again.”

“I’m not breathing in your stink. I gotta do it with this one–” He jerks a thumb toward Vills. “But I don’t gotta do it with you.”

“I have had a
bad
couple of weeks,” Miriam growls.

“Ooooh. Ho, ho. I know. We’re gonna talk about that.”

“I want my cigarette.”

“You tell me some of the things I want to know, maybe you’ll get that cigarette. And maybe I’ll fix you a plate of greens – it’s good for that sunburn. And –
and
! – maybe you’ll get out of those cuffs, too. Or maybe not. Everything depends on you, Miss Black.”

“Miss Black? So formal. Please. Call me
Go Fuck Yourself
.”

“I want to know about this boy,” Grosky says, grabbing a photo from a folder in his lap. He slides it across the table. Soon as she sees it, it’s like someone yanks something vital right out of her. A child’s hand jerking the fabric from a doll’s chest.

The young man in the picture is dead.

Puffy green Eagles jacket spattered with blood.

Blood is black in the winter slush.

Outside the hut in the here and now, the tides rumble.

Somewhere, seabirds squawk and chatter.

Gannets, maybe
, Miriam thinks.

Miriam draws a deep breath.

And she tells him the story.

ONE

PUT A RING ON IT

The engagement ring is burning a hole in Andrew’s pocket. That’s how it feels, like it’ll burn through the fabric and drop off into the dirty snow of the sidewalk, maybe roll into the sewer grate and disappear into the slurry below. And if that were to happen, how would he feel? He’d feel horrible. He loves Sarah. He wants to marry Sarah. But he can’t marry her with this ring. A ring too big for her perfect porcelain fingers. A big ring with a diamond too small. A ring he inherited from his mother.

Still. The ring’s like a loaded gun. He’s almost proposed five times in the last couple weeks. Part of him thinks,
Just propose, you can get the ring resized, get a new diamond later
.
Before the wedding. Which won’t be for a year anyway. Oh, God, unless she wants to get married soon…

But no. He has to do this right. Her father thinks Andrew does everything half-ass. And her father means the world to her. Andrew has to make this a good show. The ring has to impress her, but more important, it has to impress her father. The problem: even Sarah doesn’t know how bad Andrew’s got it right now. He’s got a good job at a brokerage here in Philly, but he’s thirty thousand in credit card debt. Not to mention the car loan. And the student loans from b-school
and
from grad school. And the rent. The gas bill. The trash bill. The
this
bill. The
that
bill.

He’s got a little money in his pocket but, really, he’s broke.

Which is why he’s out here now. In Kensington at quarter till eleven on a Wednesday night. Walking through a pissy wet snowfall – fat, clumpy flakes not drifting so much as
plopping
to the earth. His nice shoes white from the road salt. His socks wet from the slush.

Derek at work said, “
You want a diamond cheap, I know a place.”
Derek said, “
It’s in Kensington.”
and Andrew said, “
Oh, hell no, Kenzo? Really
?” He said that if he goes down there, he’ll get stabbed. Or strangled. “
Isn’t the Kensington Strangler still around down there
?” Derek just laughed. “
That’s old news. Crime’s down. It’s fine. You want the diamond cheap, or you want to pay jewelry store prices
?”

Andrew thought but did not say, “I
want
to pay jewelry store prices.”

He just can’t afford to.

And so, a pawn shop. Derek said, “
It’s called K&P Moneyloan Pawn, except they don’t speak a lot of English and they misspelled Moneyloan so it says Moneylawn, so at least you’ll know you have the right place
.

Andrew thought he’d get there right after work, 6, maybe 7 o’clock. But suddenly the team of in-house lawyers demanded a new meeting at work, and meetings are like black holes: they eat up the hours, they suck in the light, they gorge on his productivity. Next thing he knew, it was past 10 o’clock and he still had to get to Kensington.

The pawn shop was still open. Thank God.

The guy behind the counter – a guy Derek said was Indian (“
Curry Indian, not Wounded Knee Indian
”) but that Andrew thinks is Sri Lankan – showed him the diamonds and everything looked good; the prices were low enough he almost wondered if they were real, and there he had a small panic attack because wasn’t he supposed to remember something about the three Cs? Color, clarity, cut and… was there a fourth C?

Crap! Whatever. He’s no expert. Neither is Sarah. He picked a princess-cut diamond that looked – well, it looked pretty. It caught the light. It felt heavy. Sharp, too, like it could cut a hole in the storefront window.