Three Slices (24 page)

It happens. It happened with Gabby. Drinking plus visions often means...

The dark shape steps forward, at first framed by the light—just a tall, broad-shouldered shadow. But it’s a shape she knows. One cut from big cloth.

Louis.

“Wake up, muffin,” he says, singsongy.

His voice is rich, loamy. Wet, too. Like he’s speaking through a mouthful of moist cake and earthworms. His laugh is rocks in a cup. His breath is wind through dead trees.

“Fuck you,” she tells the Trespasser. “Close the curtains.”

“What are we doing here, Miriam?” he asks, sitting down. It’s been a while since she’s seen him. Now he’s in the light. She sees the black Xs of electrical tape crossing his one eye. Sees the scabby knuckles and the cracked lips. She blinks, and then he’s different: the young black boy from Philly. One untied shoelace. A gun in his hand, shaking with ego and fear. Blink again and now it’s Gabby with her cut-up face, blink again and it’s Miriam’s mother sitting there in the chair with empty eyes and a mouth frozen in an eternal howl.

One last blink and it’s back to Louis.

Or Not-Louis.

“You know what I’m doing,” she groans, and hides under the pillow.

Suddenly, he’s there. Standing over here. He whips the pillow off her head. The light’s bright—too bright. She smells his breath: the smell of rank river water, the stink of fish washed up on a muddy bank. “You can’t get rid of me,” he says.

“I can. And I will. I’m getting close. I can feel it.”

“Is this what you really want? To be shut out from your power?”

She squeezes her eyes closed. Hard. “It’s not
power
. It’s a
curse
. Somewhere out here is the start of a thread. A thread named Mary Stitch. I’m going to pull on that thread and I’m going to follow it. At the end of it, I’ll have a way out. An exit from all this—” And here she thinks but does not say,
An exit that doesn’t include me putting a gun in my mouth or opening my wrists in a hot tub.
“Now fuck off in some other direction and let me sleep.”

“You
are
sleeping,” he says. “And it is a power. I could’ve died. I
would
have died—up there in that lighthouse, a fillet knife in my brain.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have been in that lighthouse if I hadn’t climbed into your rig in the first fucking place. Oh, and you’re not
you
. You’re not him.”

“Yes. That’s right. Louis isn’t here with you, is he?”

The way the Trespasser says it, petulant, mocking, some real
nanny nanny boo boo
bullshit. It ticks her off. She snarls. Launches herself out of bed, claws out, raking them across his face—

Skin peels away. Underneath: mealworms squirming, pill bugs tumbling.

He laughs, reaches for her, gives her a hard pull—

Wham
. She slams against the carpet.

A hard, sucking gasp.

The room is dark. The curtains closed.

The phone is ringing.

Not her cell. The motel phone.

She grunts. Stays on the floor and paws upward, hand feeling along the bedside table. Thump, thump, scrabble—ahh, the phone. Off its cradle, into her hand, against her ear.

“Wuzza,” she mumbles.

“It’s me,” says a voice. A voice that clarifies: “It’s John. I guess we don’t know each other enough to get away with
it’s me
.”

“Muzza.”

“You wanna get some breakfast?”

“Bruhfuss. Yah.”

He’s still talking, but she plops the phone back on the cradle. That one word—
breakfast
—is enough to wake her up. Because mornings may suck, but they are redeemed by the power of motherfucking breakfast foods.

11. Six Days Ago: Bruhfuss, Yah

B
REAKFAST JOINTS
—cafes, coffee shops, diners—are her thing.

But this is the first time she has dined in a bait shop.

Because that’s what it is. A bait shop. Rods and reels hanging from hooks emerging out of wood paneling. An old, dusty, wood floor. An actual refrigerator case of bait just three feet to her left: earthworms, minnows, little cups of chum.

When they enter, she makes a joke: “You know I’m not a largemouth bass, right?” And John laughs a little, and then she says, “You’re supposed to make a joke back at me like, ‘You’re no bass, but you sure got a large mouth.’ Or maybe ‘With as big a mouth as you have, I got confused.’” And he just looks at her like she’s got a dick for a nose, and then they sit because, as it turns out, this bait shop also serves breakfast. One kind of breakfast: breakfast sandwiches
.

Which are some of Miriam’s favorite things.

Because breakfast is amazing.

And sandwiches are amazing.

And when the two of those things have a warm, cheesy, carb-swaddled baby? Well. It’s probably why mankind evolved at all.

So there they sit, near the bait case. Eating sandwiches.

“You guys don’t have pork roll out here,” she says, cheek bulging with food. The words come out more like
You guysh don haf pork roll out here
.

John shakes his head. “No, I don’t think we do.”

“Scrapple, either.”

“We do have elk burgers. And great tacos. And Rocky mountain oysters.”

“Those are testicles.”

He shrugs. “Bull balls. Yep.”

“You’re gross. You’re lucky I got a stomach like a cast-iron cook pot.”

He’s staring out over a bagel sandwich. Not eating it. “You still owe me.”

“Hunh?” She swallows a cheesy, meaty, eggy clot. “Oh. Your death.”

“That’s right.”

“I, ahh. I haven’t figured out what I want to do about that yet.”

He arches a fuzzy, gray eyebrow. “I don’t follow.”

You die in a week, John
, she thinks.
And you die by a hand that is somewhat familiar to me. And I don’t want any part of it. I want to eat this sandwich and I want to run away. I want to leave you to your doom
.

Cold. Horrible. Makes her feel bad for thinking it; and Miriam, she’s not super-used to feeling guilty or shameful. But this is that. John dies on that table, beheaded by some amateur-hour Mockingbird Killer and... c’mon.

But still?
This isn’t why she’s here
. She’s here to get rid of this power. Not get tangled up in someone else’s net. Her getting involved is complicated. Maybe it’s time to just let one slide. Let the rope slip her grip.

The voice of the Trespasser whispers:

You thought you killed the Mockingbird, didn’t you?

Doesn’t that make this a little bit your fault?

“I’ll cut you a new deal,” John says, cutting off her awkward, thinky silence. “Maybe I help you in a way and you still tell me about my death.”

“Help me? How?”

“That number.”

“The number from Madam Safira Scooby Snacks?”

“Safira’s her real name, though obviously Starshine isn’t, but yeah. That’s the number I’m talking about.”

She leans forward, chin in her tented hands. Gaze suspiciously narrowed.

“Go on,” Miriam says.

“It’s nine digits. I worked for a little while at GVP—Grand Valley Power. Meter reader. And out here—hell, maybe in a lot of places—we would go by this thing called the APN: assessor’s parcel number. We didn’t worry about addresses because the APNs were more accurate and meaningful. Out here? Those digits are nine numbers. I thought maybe...”

“Hm. Shit. Maybe.”

“Gimme the number,” he says. “I’ll run it through a real estate friend.”

“And then?”

“I get you what you want, you tell me about my death.”

“I’m in. But be honest: you don’t even really believe I have the power. I can see it in your eyes. You think I’m selling you a case of snake oil.”

He chuckles. “Not exactly. I think
you
believe it.”

“So, why? Why even ask.”

“Honestly? I’m bored, for one. Two, I’m used to getting what I want. I don’t mean that in a childish, petty way, though that’s probably part of it and probably part of why my wife left me and my son...” Here his face twists up like a wrung mop. “Why my son is such a
fuck-up
.” Way he emphasizes that must mean the kid is a real mess. “I haven’t seen my boy in forever and he’s just on the other side of the state—I’m getting off track here. What I’m saying is, you’re dangling something in front of my face. And I want it. That’s what they teach us as interrogators. To go and get, at any cost.”

“So, this is the carrot.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“But we haven’t seen the stick.”

He grins. “I’m too old to give you the stick, sweetheart.” But she’s not sure. There’s a glimmer of something dark there. Like the shine off black hematite. “You want me to call my friend?”

One last bite of sandwich popped in her mouth. Chew, chew, chew. She nods as her jaw works the sandwich. “Do it, dude. Do it up.”

On the way out, she heads to the counter to pay—her treat, she says.

She looks at the extra bits for sale on the counter. Tic-Tacs and keychains and fisherman bric-a-brac. And little knives, too. Huh.

12. Now: K-Hole

W
E ALL
float down here
. A line from a book. A book about a clown that wasn’t a clown. Staring out from under the street, underneath a sewer drain. A giant spider. A preteen orgy.
It
. One of the books that Miriam kept hidden from her mother: that,
The Shining
, a book called
Swan Song
, another one called
Lost Souls
. A Ramones album. A stack of
Batman
comics. Little secrets kept under floorboards in her closet, some kept hidden in a stump out back of the house.
They’ll corrupt you
, Mother said.
All you need is this
. She handed Miriam a Bible as she burned the books, the CDs, the comics—the smell of paper crisping, the smell of plastic melting. The taste of tears and snot. Precious gifts of sounds and story carried away by tongues of flame, and here she thinks,
Why am I thinking about this?
and then,
Oh, right, because I feel like I’m floating
.

Her head thumps against each step. Brought downstairs on a comforter dragged by a woman named Melora. Miriam can’t feel the stairs hitting her at the back of her neck, the base of her skull—like riding marshmallows, like pillows and clouds and other soft things. The woman speaks as she drags Miriam:

“You drowned and I drowned and that’s when we became one. That’s when the door opened and I could see things. I could see through your eyes. I could see the stains of sin on people.”

Miriam tries to speak, but what comes out is a mushy gabble.

“We have to kill him,” Melora says. “I want your blessing. I need it. He’s a bad man. Everyone knows you’ve been seen with him, but this is my chance to do right. To fix broken things. John Lucas is a killer. And a rapist. I have proof. He would’ve done you, too. But I’m saving you. I’m saving us both.”

You bitch, you stuck me with a needle
. She tries to say that but, again, it’s just her mouth working and nonsense sounds coming out. Like she had a stroke and her mouth isn’t connected to her brain. Nothing is. All her limbs have the puppet strings cut. She tries to move. They twitch. Not much else.

Thump, thump, thump.

Bottom of the steps.

Louis, Not-Louis, now hovering above her. In the air like a ghost—arms gone to vapor at the ends, blood-slick hair drifting and splaying like seaweed swaying. His mouth moves but the words don’t speak out loud so much as they appear inside her mind, echoing:
You tried to run away from us, Miriam, but you ran right toward us. Funny how you do that. You think you can avoid going left by going right, but you always come back around, don’t you?

She tries to say,
I have a choice. I am the one with all the choice. I’m the riverbreaker, I’m fate’s foe, I’m—

But Louis just laughs inside her mind.

Then, Melora returns. Didn’t know she was gone but now here she is again, tugging on a hood over her head. A leather hood with a metal beak. Eyes barely seen behind the shine of glass goggles.

“I had this made special,” she says. “Do you like it?”

13. Four Days Ago: Buzzard Creek

T
HE DAY
is warm. The sun is bright and bold, like a fist on the back of Miriam’s neck. She stands on the side of a road, a road without a name, a road with just a number because as John put it,
That’s just what they do here
. Here, on 58 6/10 Road, she looks out at an open property. No house. No driveway. Just a mess of trees—white aspen amongst some scrubby pines—on a bulging berm. In the middle of it, an ill-seen, bubbling creek.