FIFTY-FIVE
LOST TIME
She’s like a cougar in a cat carrier— snarling and screaming behind a duct tape gag and shouldering the car door and trying to kick at the windows. The heavy-set guy driving has a gold watch biting into the meat of his wrist. The woman next to him is tall and lean, her hair wrestled into a wasp’s nest by all the humidity.
They showed up just outside her mother’s. The woman had a gun. The man had a badge. Said they were FBI, they needed to speak to her.
Miriam ducked, tries to run—
But her body hurt. Sore all over. Her leg, still throbbing from where the saw cut her. Where her own knife stuck in her leg. And the rest of her— a body bag worked over by a young, eager boxer.
That means she was slow.
She screamed for her mother.
But the big fuck and the skinny scribble of ink grabbed Miriam and wrestled her into the car. She kicked and hissed, but one of them clipped her on the back of the head with a gun. The strength went out of her, and then the reality slammed into her like a truck: They could shoot me, and then how will I save my mother? (Though there a grim thought entered her mind: If I let them shoot me, will that be the thing that ends Ashley’s fucked-up quest for vengeance? Could my death end all the other deaths?)
No! No. She can’t think that way. If she dies, that just means Ashley gets to go on living. That can’t happen. That is not fucking allowed.
Her only thought is:
Maybe I can use them. Somehow. Some way.
Now here she sits. In the back of a car driven by people she’s pretty sure aren’t Feds at all. They haven’t read Miriam her rights. They haven’t told her anything about lawyers. She’s got white plastic zip-ties binding her wrists at her back. She growls and struggles.
Tap-Tap’s people? Maybe. They don’t look right for Tap-Tap. But a drug dealer like him probably has all kinds of motherfuckers in his pocket. And she owes Tap-Tap. She owes him what she’ll never pay. Wouldn’t be a surprise to have him snatch her off the street to take what he tried to take the first time: one of her limbs.
If only she saw how one of these two will die.
So many clues in death. So often that death reflects life in some way. Addicts overdose. Fat fucks like this one in the front seat overeat. The violent die violently. Even good people so often die in service to their virtues: Martin Luther King Jr. catches a bullet. Woman trying to rescue a kitten from a tree has the branch break beneath her.
How you die is who you are.
Unfortunately, when these two shoved her in the car, neither of them touched her in a way that afforded her that precious skin-on-skin connection—hands on shirt, on sleeve, on hip, no touch of the neck or arm or hand. She was sure when they zip-tied her hands that she would see something—but oh no, those things are like designed for cuff-use now: two holes for the hands and a ripcord to pull to tighten it.
And now here she is.
An hour later.
In a car heading . . . she has no idea where. But she sees signs—Palm Beach, Port St Lucie—that tell her they’re heading north.
She screams behind the gag.
It’s killing her. Because every hour in the car is another hour it will take to get back. Time taking two steps forward instead of one.
She replays it again and again: Her mother’s face at the window. Ashley behind her. The curtains closing.
Her mother, on a boat.
So many plunges of the knife.
Water and blood and the underside of a boat.
As she watches from a porthole only six feet away.
The heavyset driver nods to the woman, who reaches back and rips the tape off Miriam’s mouth. The very moment it’s off, Miriam explodes:
“Fuck you! You fucking animals! Who are you? Do you know what you’ve done?” She howls at them. A primal velociraptor shriek.
“Where are we going?”
“Calm down,” the big fuck says. “We’re just going somewhere to sit a while, maybe have a chat.”
“Just a chat,” the woman says.
Miriam thinks, I need to get out of this car.
A car going 75 mph on I-95?
Miriam then thinks, I need to stop this fucking car.
But how?
For now: delay.
Use them. Abuse them.
“We can chat now,” she says.
“I’d rather get more comfortable somewhere,” the big guy says.
“It’ll just be a few hours,” the woman says. “Sit tight. You want some music on?” She reaches for the dial but Miriam barks at her like a dog.
“No music. How’d you find me anyway?”
“You gave your name at that crime scene down in Key West five hours ago. Then we caught you on some traffic cams. Checked the car, saw it was registered to Evelyn Black— so we showed up and waited.”
“What do you want from me? You’re not Feds. No way you’re the Feds.”
Big guy laughs. “We’re FBI, I promise.”
“I’ve been told that before.” Find out more about them. Take something from them. These people, she decides, are tools. Tools handed to her for an unknown reason. Fate is trying to fuck her over, and that means it’s time to fuck right back. Hell, she’s seen the future. She knows what fate wants. Fate wants her on that boat. She just has to figure out how to earn that particular outcome. Concentrate on the boat. So she says, “Prove it to me.”
“Prove what?” the woman says.
“That you’re the real-deal Feds.”
“You saw our IDs,” the big fuck says with a laugh.
“I stole a boat,” Miriam lies. “A good-size fishing boat. I stole it from somewhere down in the Keys. Tell me where I stole it from.”
The woman turns around and puts a crooked Ichabod Crane finger to her thin earthworm lips. “Honey. Shhh. We’d hate to have to gag you—”
“Nah, nah, nah,” the big guy says, waving one hand off the steering wheel. “Let’s humor her. Maybe she’ll play nice if we pony up. Am I right, Miss Black? If I give you what you want, you’ll give us what we want?”
“You betcha,” she says, putting on her best golly gee sure officer always happy to help an officer of the peace voice.
The big guy pulls out a crusty old flip phone, pops the clamshell and hits one button. He has a one-sided conversation: “Yeah, hey, Tony. Grosky. Right. No, I don’t . . . Hold up, listen. White fishing boat. Stolen from somewhere in the Keys. Got any data for me? Yeah, I’ll hold.” He gives Miriam a patronizing little smile-and-nod. His neck fat jiggles. “What’s that? Uh-huh. Mariposa Marina. Ramrod Key.” Now he looks back and gives her a cocky, See, I told you I could do it look.
But she interjects: “Name of the boat.”
Him, holding his hand over the phone. “What?”
“I said, what’s the name of the boat I stole?”
Back to the phone. “Tony. What’s the name of that boat?” He holds up a placating finger. “Ah. The Swallow? The Swallow.”
The Swallow.
Of course.
Ashley knows about the Mockingbird Killer. About the Caldecotts. A family of killers who shared the common characteristic of a naval swallow tattoo. Who shared the duties of murders done in service to their mother’s twisted visions.
He’s mocking her.
She should have figured that out. It’s no surprise he chose a boat not just because of its functionality but because of its message for her. And suddenly she feels slow and stupid and behind the eight ball, because no matter where she goes, he’s out there messing with her.
One step ahead.
It makes her angry.
Angry at herself. Angry at him. Angry at everyone in this car.
The big guy turns back around, the ruddy mounds of sweat-shined cheeks pulled back to show the wide white veneers of his smile and he’s about to gloat and say something—
Miriam wrenches her body upward at the hips—
And kicks him with both feet in the face.
His head rocks back and he’s already turning and pawing at the steering wheel like a housecat trying to claw through a closed door— and already the car is losing control and careening left, then right. Then his heavy foot is punching down on the brakes and she hears the tires skid beneath them and the tires of other cars skidding—
She awaits the sound of shearing metal.
She awaits the car being split in half like a soda can hit with a shotgun.
She awaits death and all its accouterments: blood, fire, piss, shit, screams, this time all her own—
But the thought strikes her fast as a lightning whip. I don’t die here.
Fate wants her on that boat.
Ashley wants to give her a show.
The thought strikes her again, this time giddy, mad, a flurry of lunatic bubbles rising up from her heart and into her brain. I don’t die here!
As the car slides to a complete stop, Miriam cries out and pushes past the pain to kick at the back passenger side window—
The big fuck in the driver’s seat is looking around, woozy, trying to get a measure of what’s happening. He tries turning the key again but the car’s engine bitches and moans but doesn’t turn over.
Cars zoom past outside. Honking.
The woman is fumbling for something—
The gun! She’s got the gun pointed over the back seat just as Miriam’s feet crack a spider-web in the glass and knock it out of its frame—
“Stop!” the woman screeches, and Miriam wants to reach up and grab that gun and slap her. But the whole hands-bound thing makes that hard, so she works with what she has, and what she has is her skull.
Miriam moves her body like she’s a dolphin trying to get back into the ocean and tries to smack the top of her head into the woman’s gun-hand. But she discovers a better opportunity instead— she bites down hard on it. Crunch. The woman shrieks. At the same time, the big guy grabs Miriam by the scruff of the neck—