by Chuck Wendig
“I like it. Whatever. Point is, you can think what you want about fate, but it brought us together today. Here in this little shack on the beach. Nobody else around. Very romantic.”
“Not an official FBI interrogation room,” Miriam notes.
“This one’s off the books,” Vills says.
“For now,” Grosky says.
“So, you two really are Feds?”
They smile, share another of their conspiratorial looks, then nod.
“What do you want with me, then? If I’m a killer, put me away. If I’m a serial killer, throw me in the chair and dissect my brain to find out what’s wrong with it. Trust me, I’d love to see the results. Why me? Why here? What’s your plan, you two crazy kids?”
Grosky grins big and broad. “We’ll get to that, Miriam. Patience.”
TWENTY-ONE
JAILBIRD
She thinks it’s going to be like it is in all the movies: big jail cell with the gray bars and the food slot, rubbing elbows with thugs and killers who see her as nothing more than sexual breakfast. But the reality is, the bars are really just a black chain-link fence making her feel like she’s a German Shepherd in a kennel. And she’s only in here with one other human being: a sluggy Cuban sitting half-asleep on the bench, his double-chin pressed down in the chunky vomit shellacking his own chest. At one point she yells at him, “Did you even chew your food?” but he barely stirs.
Everything goes by in a flash. They bring her in and ask her questions. Take her fingerprints. Take her photo – for which she puts on her most feral stare, like a rabid raccoon startled from its meal. They take everything she has and tow the car to the impound yard voucher for her personal property.
And here she worries about the money. Because nowhere on the voucher does it list eight thousand (er, give or take a hundred) dollars. She hid the money around the car. Did they not search it? It’s a pretty Podunk police station. Do they give a fuck?
She has to summon all of her willpower to tamp down the screaming shit-fit that threatens to overwhelm her. She wants to ask about the money. But that means they’ll find out about the money.
Shitfuck.
Instead, she bites her teeth and nods and smiles.
Along the way, she learns how several officers are going to die.
Officer Dorn Chihuly – he of a Tom Selleck ’stache – is going to die on the operating table in twenty years when they try to remove a mass from his liver. Officer Gale Paltrovich, a woman whose body has the shape of a tackle dummy under a bedsheet, is going to choke on a Brussels sprout when she’s ninety-two. Officer Carlos Mendez is going to get blindsided by a drunk driver in five years, and suddenly she feels bad and tells him she’s sorry, but he doesn’t understand and tells her to shut up.
Arraignment came the morning before a judge who looked like he’d been out drinking the night before, a ragged, rumpled old gent. He told her that the charges were drunk driving, and driving without a license, and driving without insurance. Then it’s all done lickety-split and they shuttle her back to her kennel, where now she once again stands next to the barf-caked Cuban.
Now she waits to find out what’s next.
There comes a point when Officer Chihuly steps in, tells her it’s time for her one phone call if she wants it. He says she won’t need to post bail. Because this is her first offense – and a misdemeanor at that – they’ll release her on her own recognizance.
But, since the Red Rocket’s been impounded and she doesn’t have a license or any money…
Then he hands something to her through the chain link.
A couple of crumpled up pieces of paper.
“These were in your personal effects,” he says.
Three phone numbers.
Steve – er, Peter Lake.
Louis.
And Mother.
She smooshes her head against the chain-link. It mashes her nose. She gnaws on it like a beaver. “Thanks,” she mumbles, and she expects to be led out to a dirty pay phone that smells like chewing tobacco and misanthropy, but instead he just opens the gate six inches and hands in a portable wireless phone. Jail, it turns out, is far less like the movies than she expected.
The cop retreats ten feet, sits on a nearby folding chair.
Goddamnit.
She doesn’t want to call any of these.
She’s definitely not calling Peter. Which leaves her with two.
Calling either of those numbers means blacking out her shame sensors with the heel of a heavy boot – bashing them until they no longer recognize guilt as a speed bump to communication. That’s hard for her. Pulling teeth hard. Pulling out a wolf’s teeth while wearing mittens hard.
If she had the car, she could just ride on out of here. If she had the money, she’d call a cab. Hello, Rock. Please to meet Hard Place.
She growls.
Louis. OK. If she calls Louis, she’s going to have to tell him – what, exactly? Hey, big fella. Been a while! Remember how I abandoned you and haven’t called or written? I’ve really made some forward progress. Did I mention that I’m calling from jail?
And as for Mother…
Same conversation really. Except she’s been gone much, much longer. Been gone years. So much heinous fuckery to report on. So much disappointment. So much anger and resentment and abandonment. That relationship is a howling ghost in the void, so distant and strange it’s barely even real anymore.
Call Louis.
Or call her mother.
She winces. Like she’s trying to pass a kidney stone.
Fine. Fine.
She makes her choice.
She dials the phone.
PART THREE
VILLAGE BY THE SEA
INTERLUDE
NOW
“I wanna ask you some things,” Grosky says, pulling out a Luna bar and unwrapping it with all the grace of a baboon ripping apart an orange.
“It’s your dime,” Miriam growls.
“Some things about your… gift.”
“It isn’t a gift.”
“OK. Unpack that a little.”
“It isn’t fun. It sucks. The end.”
Vills smirks, and it’s the smirk someone wears when they’re trying to humor you but really they think you’re an asshole in ugly shoes. “That was a real good story, Miss Black.”
Grosky pulls off a little bit of the granola bar – something with chocolate chips in it, though Miriam catches a whiff of mint, too – and then he chucks it to her like he’s feeding an animal at the zoo.
He begins to eat the rest.
She takes it, sniffs it, pops it in her mouth. “Luna bars are for chicks, you know,” she says.
“What?” he says. “No, they’re not.”
“They are. They totally are. They’re marketed to women. They probably have like… estrogen in them or something. They put fluoride in the water, and estrogen in the Luna bars. Look at the wrapper.”
He pulls out the wrapper, peels it back. Starts to say, “I don’t know what you’re–” But then he stops. “Ah. Oh. Yeah, look at that. Love the way your legs look. Black text, pink circle. Huh.” He shrugs, eats the rest of it.
“Your man-boobs are going to grow lush and full of milk,” she says.
“You love to make out like I’m this fat piece of shit,” Grosky says. “But I swear to you, I’m healthy. My wife thinks I’m a handsome guy. I’m strong. I’m tough.”
“So tough you can eat Luna bars unironically.”
“Oh, please, take a look at you,” Grosky says, giving her a flip little gesture with his hand. “Too skinny. Too severe. You’re all corners. Anybody who hugs you must come away bleeding.”
“You have no idea.”
“I don’t, but maybe you’ll tell me. Because despite your efforts to fritter away my time by having me answer your insults, I still got questions. About your gift.”
“Fine, fuck, whatever.”
He leans in. Close enough where she could grab him if she wanted. S
he could lurch up, claw his eyes out – of course, she’d be doing this with fingernails bitten down to the soft tips.
“You ever use the gift to… you know, predict the future?”
“You mean win the lottery and stuff.”
“There you go. Or bet on a sports game before it happens.”
“I’m never that lucky. I never see lottery numbers. Or sports scores. Maybe one day I will but, so far, nope.”
“Still, you must’ve seen some pretty wild shit in the future. I mean, you see someone who’s gonna take the permanent dirt nap in fifty years, you’ve probably gotten glimpses of… what, of flying cars and robots and, I dunno, some real Star Trek stuff.”
“Not really. I’ve seen cars. They’re still cars like you and I know them. They still drive on roads. Clothes are still clothes, and the styles just ape the looks from decades past. Mostly, I see hospital rooms. And hospital rooms are the same dreary, nauseating places in the future that they are now. I don’t know much about the future. I only know how people die.”
“OK, OK,” he says. “That’s a shame. I guess I’m at least happy we’re still around in fifty years. Global warming doesn’t kill us.”
It kills some of us, she thinks but does not say.
“Another thing I don’t understand. So, you find out someone’s gonna die, and you decide you want to stop it, then the only way is to get your hands bloody. Kill the killer.”
She nods. “That’s right.”
“That’s fucked up. You ever try… not doing it that way?”
“I don’t follow.”
“I mean, you ever try to intervene without killing anybody?”
“For years. Dozens of times. Maybe a hundred.”
“And it never worked out.”
“No, it did not.” She doesn’t like where he’s going with this. Doesn’t like him poking. She’s tired of all this. She thinks to ask him what time it is again, because the time, it matters, but he keeps talking. Keeps pushing.
“Can’t you just change the circumstances so the killing becomes impossible? Joey Titsonthebottom is gonna kill Mary-Sue Black-and-Blue, and he’s gonna do it with a Beretta 9mm and so you take the Beretta 9mm and throw it in a furnace.”
“Fate rewires itself to get the job done. There, Joey Tits goes and gets an identical weapon. Or he rescues that one from the furnace – a furnace with fires that went out soon as I tossed it in there because, you know, that’s how fate wants it. I want to save Mary-Sue, Joey’s gotta go.”
“What if you broke his hands? Shattered ’em with a pipe.”
“He’d find a way. He’d push past the pain.”
“What if you… cut his hands off?”
She rolls her eyes. “Then he’d probably die and Mary-Sue would still get to go to the prom or become an astronaut or whatever it was her life had in store for her. And if he didn’t die, he’d probably find a way to shoot her with his mouth, or his feet, or with a pair of fucking robot hands. Fate fights back, Agent Grosky. It twists like a snake in your grip, and the only thing you can do is cut its head off before it bites you. I’ve tried shit like this. You want an example? Fine. Here’s an example–”
She tells him about Delilah Cooper.
“This is a couple years after I left home. I meet this girl. Teenager. Only a year younger than me at this point, and she’s the perfect example of has her whole life ahead of her. About to graduate high school. About to go to Yale in the fall to study environmental law. Has one of those nice-guy boyfriends. Has a family that loves her and cherishes her and isn’t actually a pack of serial rapists keeping women chained up in their basement. Her whole life is this little gift basket of raw potential. And I meet her and I hate her because already at that point I’d seen what the world was like, and I thought, Here’s a girl who’s gonna get thrown into the metaphorical wood chipper soon as real life gets a look at her – you know, she’ll go to school, get hooked on Oxy, start dating one of her professors, and after she flunks out, her parents will disown her and then one day, she’ll be just like me.
“So I wanted to see where she ended up. Like, in a gutter somewhere, track marks up her arm? In the trunk of someone’s car? Or maybe just a sad end to a sad life in some gray fuzzy cubicle. So I reach out and touch her forearm a little – like I’m trying to console her on the life I’ve imagined for her – and then it hits me. She’s dead later that day. She gets in her little sporty black Toyota whatever, she drives too fast, starts texting her nice little boyfriend, clips a guardrail, careens to the other side of the road, flips that guardrail, and boom. The car rolls down the embankment. Hits one tree. She’s still alive, but then the car catches fire and she can’t get out, she’s trapped – smoke and heat and the buckle won’t unbuckle and the fire, if you’ll believe it, starts coming in through the air vents – like little fingers of flame tickling the air, melting the dashboard. She burns alive in the car. And it’s horrible.” She hears her own voice crack. Keep it together, Miriam. “Struggling and screaming. Hair burns. Skin burns. Eyeballs pop.”
Grosky looks pale in the cheeks now.
Vills looks unfazed.
“So I think, I can stop this. I can change this so easy. She dies in her car, and we’re sitting outside a froyo shop and right outside is her car, and I think, this couldn’t be simpler. Remove the instrument of her demise and the demise cannot occur. So, she goes to the bathroom and I go outside to the car, and I take my knife and I squat down and I slash the tires. Or I try to at first – puncturing tires is harder than it looks, but I manage to hit the sidewall and they start hissing air. Then someone sees what I’m doing and my next and only move is to run like a rabbit. So I run.”
“You’re gonna tell me the girl still dies,” Grosky says.
“Hey, spoilers, asshole. But yes. Yeah. In a few hours I walk by the spot where she was supposed to go off the road and lo and behold, cops, ambulances, a charred body pulled from a blackened Toyota.”
“She got the tires fixed,” he says. “Fix-A-Flat.”
“Actually, no. But that probably would’ve worked. Took me a while to piece it together but what happened was, she calls her twin sister. Identical twin sister. And you know what that identical twin sister drives?”
“An identical car.”
“Right as a rimjob, Agent Grosky. The sister – Lila – brings the car, then decides she’s going to stay and have a frozen yogurt with some cute boy, and so Delilah takes her sister’s car. And then… same scenario. Texting. Crashing. Burning alive.”
Grosky breathes hard, nostrils flaring. Like he’s picturing all of it. “I see why that might mess you up a little.”
“The thing is, I don’t know if it was supposed to be that way all along or if… fate stepped in and made a few crucial readjustments. Maybe I was always a part of it. Maybe what she was texting was a message to her sweet boyfriend about the crazy bitch who slashed her tires. Maybe I made it happen. That’s the other trick, Agent Grosky. When I show up like that, I’m the pivot point. The fulcrum. It’s like I’m meant to be there even when I don’t want to be. Like I’m some kind of fucked-up version of Johnny Appleseed, traipsing across the country either causing people’s deaths or stopping them–”
“And you can only stop them by causing other deaths.”
“Yeah.”
“You got quite the mission laid out for you,” he says.
“I guess.”
“You ever wonder…”
“Wonder what?”
“If it’s real?”
“If my gift–” Shit. “My curse is real.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Shut up. I know it is.”
Grosky shrugs. “Because maybe you’re making it all up. Maybe your brain’s just inventing things to patch up the holes in your mental wall. Trauma eats away at us, Miriam. PTSD for some people is like always being on the edge of the knife. But for others, it’s like that knife keeps cutting apart all the things that keep us grounded in reality. And when
we lose parts of ourselves, we fill in the gaps with things that seem sane and real but are so far off the books that… well, you start to have conversations like this one with a guy like me.”
“It’s all real,” she says. Her hands ball into fists. But what if he’s right? She banishes that thought to the wasteland.
“You know who might say that kind of thing?” Vills suddenly asks.
“You frizzy-haired twat,” Miriam says, “don’t you even say it.”
“A serial killer. A serial killer who has invented a complex supernatural justification so she may continue killing and salving the guilt over the act. A serial killer who has come to believe that she is a preternatural agent caught in a cosmic battle between fate and free will and that only she can turn the tides away and loosen the sinister grip of destiny.”
“That’s very poetic,” Miriam seethes. “And once upon a time, I really worried that maybe it was all in my head. But you’ll see. The both of you will see. By the end of all this, when it all shakes out, you won’t doubt me anymore.”
“Sounds like a threat,” Vills says.
“Maybe it is.”
“All right, all right,” Grosky barks, knocking on the table. “Let’s move this along. So, Miriam. You had your one phone call to make. I gotta know: who’d you call?”
TWENTY-TWO
RECOGNIZANCE
Late afternoon. Hot. Like being squeezed in a sweaty fist. Miriam stands outside the Monroe County detention center just northeast of Key West. It’s the sunniest jail building she could imagine: bone white, banded with seafoam. The water’s not far off, and the sound of the sea lapping at earth reaches her ears. A pelican snoozes on a nearby post, shovel beak pressed into damp feathered breast.
The late-day sun glints off a coming vehicle.
A turquoise Chevy Malibu circles the lot a few times like a dizzy shark, then loops around one last time and pulls up next to her.
Evelyn Black gets out of the car.
Her mother.
Jesus.
That woman has always been a dark little sparrow on stumpy legs – a human gallstone, a bitter apple seed, a black cancer shadow on a CT scan. And she’s still that woman with her black hair (now shot through with streaks of gray) and bangs that look like someone cut them with a camping hatchet, with her dark sunglasses, with her pursed lips like she just dry-swallowed an aspirin and is trying to work it down her throat.