The Raptor & the Wren Page 4

  “Same question: they don’t mind you writing a book?”

  “It’s not classified information. I’m not talking Russian spies. This is law enforcement. Everybody’s good with it. I still have friends there and they know I’m not going to make the Bureau look like a buncha dummies.”

  She licks her lips. “This doesn’t go in the book, what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Fine.” He holds up both hands, showing he has no pen, no recorder, no nothing. “What’s the deal?”

  “You know what I can do.”

  “Supposedly.”

  “Supposedly? Remember Vills? Remember Tap-Tap? Arizona? It’s like shaking Santa’s hand and asking him if he’s real as you do it.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Whatever. This thing of mine, it’s more than just the touch, more than just the vision. I have a visitor. I have the Trespasser. It’s a— You know, I still don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a hallucination, but I don’t think so. It knows things I don’t or can’t know. I’ve come around to thinking it’s something else, something separate from me—like a ghost, or a demon. Not that I think those things exist, but . . . shit.” She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes hard enough that she sees fireworks. This fucking sucks. Miriam has gone over this in her own head hundreds, even thousands of times, and none of it makes any sense. Out loud, it sounds bugfuck batshit cray-cray.

  “What’s this thing want?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I think I do know. It wants me to do my job.”

  “Your job?”

  “Yeah. I see how things are supposed to be—people dying according to some invisible destiny. Then I come along and I fuck it all up. I spit in destiny’s eye. The river’s going one way, then I’m the boulder that drops into it, breaks the current in two. I’m meant to be this fate-breaker.”

  “River. As in, the river is rising.”

  “That’s something the Trespasser told me. Before I got involved with the Caldecott School and the Mockingbird killers, the Trespasser appeared to me in a motel room. It looked like me and, ah, it puked up some nasty water and then whispered that to me. The river is rising, Miriam. And that’s exactly what happened. A storm came in. With the rains, the river rose. And then I found Eleanor Caldecott trying to drown a girl named Lauren Martin—Wren. I went into the river after them, and me and the girl almost died.” But my friend Louis pulled us out. Louis, who will in six months murder his own bride. Something I have not yet told him. And why is that, exactly? Why hasn’t she told him? That is a rock she is unwilling to overturn. Instead, she keeps talking: “Caldecott died. Which I’m sure you know.”

  Grosky nods. “Yeah. The Bureau’s still after whoever did all that. Left behind quite a mess there. Eleanor Caldecott. Carl Keener. Earl, Beck, Edwin. That whole family tree cut down. Not that it wasn’t rotten from the inside. The evidence stacked up against them—we knew they were a whole clan doing nasty work. But the Bureau never did figure out who killed the killers.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not then. Only later. After meeting you.”

  “But you didn’t tell.”

  He smiles. “In the Behavioral Unit, we always had pet theories that, ah, governed how we did things. But psychic shit, no. I had no proof. Only thing I had was meeting up with you. And I’d already written you out of the Vills narrative. Couldn’t easily write you back in.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. I didn’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I did it because I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t fit you to any of it without all of this nonsense. The death visions. The birds. I’d have tanked my career.”

  She shrugs, and sips the coffee. “So, what now?”

  “Here’s the thing. That dead guy in the cabin up in Falls Creek, he’s not the only one. We have more bodies. Bodies I don’t think link to you. But they do pair up with other sightings of the Angel of Death.”

  “The myth of me.”

  “Right.”

  “So, someone’s out there killing in my name.”

  “Or at least in your style.”

  “Whoever is doing it, they know about the Trespasser.” Or they are the Trespasser. An icicle sticks her right through the heart with that thought. Is that even possible? What if the Trespasser isn’t a vision at all?

  What if he’s someone else?

  Another psychic? Someone who can get in her head.

  Her hand shakes. She quick-gulps the coffee to burn out the cold feeling that’s started to nest in the shallows of her chest. “I want to go there.”

  “Go where?”

  “Falls Creek.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just do. It just happened, didn’t it? If someone’s pretending to be me”—someone who may have tapped a line to the Trespasser too. Or who may be the Trespasser—“Maybe whoever did this left something behind. Or is still there. Plus, if those fuckwhistles online are starting to put it together, it won’t be long before one of your law enforcement buddies starts putting pieces together, too. This’ll wash up on my shore, and I don’t want it to. Whoever is doing this . . . they need to stop.”

  “And you’re going to stop them?”

  She finishes her coffee. “Yes.”

  “Let’s go to Falls Creek. I’ll book us a flight.”

  “No,” she says, the word so abrupt she almost gags on the last drops of coffee. She wipes her mouth. “God, Jesus, no. No planes.”

  “Bad experience on one?”

  “You could say that. We drive.”

  He nods. “Get your stuff together. We leave on your word.”

  SEVEN

  A FEATHER, MISSING

  Miriam has not yet colonized her mother’s bedroom. She sleeps there, yes. But the bed is the only acreage of the room she can call her own—the rest remains firmly her mother’s, regardless of the woman’s unliving status. She’s never really had the interest (never had the guts, a small voice chides her) in going through her mother’s remnants. The dresser still has her mother’s clothes in it, and now Miriam has the less-than-envious task of looking through those drawers. Tearing through them, actually, as she looks for something that has gone missing.

  In the drawers she finds beachy T-shirts, old lady capri pants, giant granny panties that you could use as a parasail, huge underwire bras the color of wet sand and sadness. None of these things are the things Miriam is looking for.

  What she is looking for is this:

  Back in the hospital, in Tucson, the doc pulled something out of her body—from within one of her wounds, he excised a long black feather. (Even just thinking about it—the flock of birds stuffing her wounds with grass and stones and stitching her up out there in the desert when she was supposed to die—the memory hits her like a Mac truck going eighty. She has to regain her footing lest she drop to the floor.) That doctor took that feather and put it in a narrow jar with a cork in the top of it.

  She took that jar with the feather in it and brought it here.

  She put it somewhere, and now she can’t find it.

  It’s with her stuff. Her stuff sits in a heap by the dresser, and she went through it like a biologist fishing for the keys he lost in a pile of steaming elephant dung. Now she wonders, did she put it in one of her mother’s drawers? Could it be in there? In a drunken fit, did Miriam hide the feather jar amidst her mother’s things?

  So far, no. One drawer, then the next, then the next, and then—

  Miriam’s hand flies to her mouth.

  “No,” she whispers.

  Her gorge rises when she sees what waits for her in the bottom drawer:

  A vibrator. And a bottle of lube.

  She gasps and steps back. “Aw, c’mon,” Miriam says, making the face of someone who just ate a bug. It probably smells like cigarettes and Febreze. With a toe, Miriam gingerly eases the drawer back in, wincing until the demon is once more contained in its eternal prison.

  Outside the room, s
he hears a door open and close.

  “It’s Rita,” comes a voice.

  “In here.” Finding my mother’s diddle-rod.

  Rita pokes her head in wearing one of those tinted visors that poker players wear. “You lose the suit?” she asks.

  “He wasn’t wearing a suit.”

  “Not on the outside, but on the inside.” She taps her chest, over her heart. Rita sneers, then lights a cigarette. “He was a cop, wasn’t he?”

  “A Fed.”

  “Even worse.” Her puckered wrinkle-slit lips drag on the cancer stick and loose a plume of smoke into the room. “I can smell ’em. I always had a gift. I can spot a cop a mile away. They’re like a tiny little shitstain in an otherwise clean pair of undies. Fuck that pig. He onto us?”

  “Rita-Rita-Eat-a-Pita, you’re a hardcore motherfucker. And cool as a cucumber.” Just the same, she feels the woman’s stare poking holes in her—like a pin lancing blisters. “No, he’s not onto us.”

  “Good.” She sniffs. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Looking for something. You see a jar around here? With a long black feather in it?”

  “Sorry, hon.”

  “Shit.”

  Rita’s gaze drifts from Miriam and the dresser to the bag there on the floor. “So, you leavin’ me?” Rita asks.

  “I am.”

  “Gotta run from the law, huh.”

  “No.” Not yet, anyway. “I’ve got business to take care of up north. Some things to do with my mother’s estate. My friend—”

  “The pig.”

  “Yeah, the pig, he and I are taking a road trip.”

  Rita narrows her gaze. “This isn’t about me and you stealing meds?”

  “No.”

  “Good. But I guess this means our little operation is dried up already.”

  Miriam turns and leans against the dresser. “I have one more name on the list. Someone I know is gonna bite it, if you want the gig.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “A little quid pro quo first.”

  “Go on.”

  “I want to know who the hell you are. Or were.”

  Rita plays it coy. “I don’t follow. I’m just an old New York broad put out to the Florida pasture, is all.”

  “Bullshit. You’re something else. You play cards like a hit man. Then all this talk of pigs and whatever? C’mon. There’s a story there.”

  “Not a big one.”

  “I’ll take whatever it is.”

  Rita shrugs. “Back in the day, I ran with Ari Monk and Sticky Goldstein—you know? Kosher Nostra? Sticky ran cons on Orthodox men who were unfaithful, got them to pay him to keep their secrets. Ari ran diamonds. I was Ari’s girl for a while, until he got plugged in the Heights by what they say was the Jamaicans but I know was the Italians. So, I took over his business for a little while. Made some money. Had a good time. Now I’m retired.”

  “You used to run illicit diamonds for the Jewish mob?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rita-Rita-Packin’-Heat-A.”

  “More like Rita-Rita-Let’s-Keep-It-Discreet-A. Or Rita-Rita-Turn-You-to-Dead-Meat-A, huh?”

  “Hey, fair enough.”

  “Quid pro quo. So. Spill it. Who’s gonna suck a shoe?”

  Miriam lowers her voice—why, she doesn’t know, but it feels more respectful, as if not to taunt death or the soon-to-be-dead. “You know that creepy scarecrow-looking guy down on Mangrove? The one with the picket-fence teeth? Always wears the tan jacket with the red pocket square?”

  “Malcolm, ennnh, Barnes? Burns?”

  “Burnside.”

  “Uh-huh. Right, right. One creepy fuckin’ weirdo right there. He’s like a mummy, that one. Always walking around with his arms out a little bit, a tiny moan coming out of his mouth like he’s happy but also sad, and definitely gassy.” Rita does a fast, spot-on impression of him: her eyes wide, arms stiff, a dead smile on her face as she goes, “Eyyynnnhhh.”

  “That’s the one. He’s got bone cancer.”

  Rita blinks. “Oh. Well, aren’t I a real shithead.”

  “Everybody dies, Rita. The guy’s eighty-seven. He had a good run.”

  “You’re right. Fuck him. That mummy asshole. I bet he’s got good pills.”

  “I leave it to you to find out.”

  Miriam sighs, then starts stuffing clothes into a duffel bag in big, unruly handfuls. Rita hovers still. “Lemme ask you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This trip you’re taking. Is it you running away from something, or running toward it?”

  “I don’t know yet.” She stiffens as a strange fear twists inside her. “If I had to lay money on it, I’d say a bit of both.”

  “Can I give you a bit of advice?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “Not without me putting up a fight.”

  “Then please, by all means.”

  Rita takes a last drag off her cigarette before licking her thumb and forefinger and pinching the smoldering cherry to a quick extinction. She licks her lips when she says, “They say life is short, but it ain’t. Life is long. It’s minutes stacked on hours stacked on days, and all that ends up in years that chain together, on and on, and you always think, Here it comes, here’s the end. I can’t live past thirty, or forty, or fifty, sixty, seventy. And yet you do. But all we do is keep kicking the can down the road, hoping one day we can kick it past the point where we kick the can for good, but it doesn’t work out like that. So, you got things to deal with? You got problems to fix? Don’t sit on your hands. Deal with all the shit you gotta deal with, honey, and not because life is short but because life is too damn long and those problems won’t go away. They just get bigger and meaner, and they’ll hunt you like a starving dog. You get me?”

  “I get you, Rita.”

  “Take care, Miriam.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” Then she tosses something to Miriam: a pack of cigarettes. “Just in case you decide to stop being a quitter.”

  “Fuck you, Rita.”

  “Fuck you, too, honey.”

  They smile at each other, and then Rita leaves.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  NORTHERN MIGRATION OF THE PENNSYLVANIA SHITBIRD

  EIGHT

  THE RIVER THAT IS THE ROAD

  Delray Beach, Florida, to Falls Creek, Pennsylvania. Eighteen hours, bare minimum. And with traffic and construction and general highway bullshit, probably more than that. Grosky says they can stop overnight in North Carolina, and Miriam tells him no, hell with that, drive straight through.

  Most of the trip, she stays silent. Her head lies pressed against the passenger-side glass in Grosky’s four-door Ford sedan. She watches the world blur on past, smearing like wet paint. Occasionally, she plants a hand on the dashboard and lifts up her arm at the elbow so to get the air conditioning blasting right up her shirt, into her pits, to cool her down.

  Grosky chuckles when she does it and she gives him a stabbing glance. He asks, “You okay?”

  “Ding-dong-ducky,” she says, her voice black as her last name.

  “You don’t seem okay.”

  “It’s just that this feels like—” It feels like driving around with Louis. Me in the passenger seat. Him driving. The highways and back roads racing underneath us like rivers of dark, churning asphalt. Or her and Gabby, out there in the desert, just driving. To somewhere. To nowhere. The urge arises in her to call one or both of them. “Nothing. It feels like nothing.”

  That unsettles him, it seems. Grosky quiets down and drives the car, hands on the wheel, ten and two.

  But she, too, is unsettled. She feels a great pressure coming up from behind. Something is chasing her, something riding that same asphalt river, hungry for her, eager to tear into her and rip all of who she is apart. An ill wind, a demon racer, the Trespasser riding a bicycle in the night—going as slow or as fast as it wants to, because no matter how slow
or fast she goes, it will always catch up.

  It’s not just the Trespasser. It’s all the shit she’s not dealing with, too. Louis being the worst of her unacknowledged problems. Once again, the clock is ticking for him. Death has found him anew, and this time, he won’t be the victim.

  He’ll be the killer.

  He’ll take his fiancée.

  He’ll drown her in a tub.

  She will struggle. She will fail. And she will die by his hand.

  Now, the rules on this are pretty clear as far as Miriam’s understanding of her curse goes—if she wants to save Samantha, that means she has to kill Louis.

  And that ain’t happening.

  She can’t do it. She won’t do it. Hell, why would she want to? Maybe Samantha deserves it.

  Miriam’s middle tightens. The woman was in obvious pain and fear. Louis was brimming with rage, red in the face like a bag of blood squeezed in an ever-tightening grip. Her first thought is Fuck her, she gets what’s coming to her. The next thought in line is If you just let her die, then you helped kill her. Other thoughts struggle to be heard: if Louis kills her, will he be caught? Will he go to jail? What if it’s not Louis that kills her, but someone with a mask or disguise? Is that even possible? The Mockingbird killers certainly knew how to mimic someone’s voice. She thinks of someone mimicking her out there, killing with her look, carving the Trespasser’s words into the skull of one of the corpses.

  She wants to call Louis. That’s the smart play. Call him, get ahead of this. Wouldn’t take much right now to ring him up, get him out here, tell him what she knows. And yet she doesn’t. She could call Gabby, too, see how she’s doing with Isaiah, maybe get her opinion or her help or another traveling companion.

  Nope. Miriam doesn’t do that, either.

  She tells herself it’s nobler to leave them alone. That old refrain: They’re better off without me. Maybe they are. But the decision is also selfish. Staying away means Miriam can pretend she didn’t change everything for them. She can exist under the delusion that she didn’t leave scars across both. A man without an eye who will one day soon kill his wife-to-be. A young woman with a cut-up face, now in charge of a boy who can kill you just by touching you. Miriam crashed through their lives like a freight train through an orphanage.