The Cormorant Read Online Free

lost cat. You can damn sure pony up for me saving your punk-ass life.”
    He scowls. “I need it.”
    “You cheap sonofabitch. Twenty bucks! Give me twenty bucks .”
    He takes a step back. “This is… this is some kind of shakedown. You planned this all along. You even told me. This is some kind of con. Is that guy even dead? Did you know him? You knew him. You crazy–”
    The gun is up before she even realizes she’s lifting it.
    “I did not shake you down,” she says through bared, feral teeth. I just saved the life of a total asshole. “I knew your death was coming. Fate was a train bearing down on you, Penelope Pitstop. I pulled you off the tracks. Your whole life should be unfolding for you right now – some rich country club wedding, some jam-handed yuppie asshole kids, a big ol’ precious privacy fence around a house in the burbs. I chose to save you. That life is mine.” Her mother’s voice springs up like a weed in the loamy dirt of her mind: Don’t do something nice for somebody expecting something nice in return. Whatever. Fuck her. “Least you can do is spot me cab fare home.”
    But all he can do is stare at that gun.
    Then he calls her “bitch.”
    She pulls the trigger.
    He jumps like a spooked squirrel. The bullet digs a furrow in the brick of the building next to his head.
    “Now I don’t want the cab fare,” she says. “I want a saving-your-life fare. I want all the money. All two hundred of it. You give it, you live. You don’t, I kill you and I still take it, and then I take whatever that ring is in your pocket and I pawn it for good cigarettes and bad whiskey. Money! Now.”
    His hand opens. The money flutters to the ground.
    Andrew runs. Slipping, skidding, escaping.
    Somewhere, sirens.
    “Fuck!” she yells.
    She hurries to scoop up the twenties.
    She looks into the dead kid’s blank-slate eyes one last time. Dead black pupils like a bird’s eyes.
    Then she bolts.
     
     

THREE
    INTO THE BLACK
    Miriam’s back at the apartment. The water-stain apartment. The cockroach apartment. The squealing radiator apartment.
    She comes through the door like a black storm, like a funnel cloud sucking up everything it touches. Jace is there. He’s still in his coffeehouse barista-bitch apron and he springs up as soon as he sees her, a mop-top hipster gopher at the hole. He chucks aside his video game controller and says, “Dude, I got news. We need to celebrate tonight.”
    All she can do is shove him back onto the couch.
    She tells him to go fuck his mother.
    Then she shoulders her way into her bedroom.
    She stays there for three days.
     
     

FOUR
    HER HAUNTED HEAD
    He shows up as the first light of the morning sun pools under the cusp of the window like hot magma, and she thinks, It’s him . She’s going to pull her head from under the cave of three pillows and there will be the boy in the Eagles jacket, the top of his head flapping lose –his scalp will be the mouth, slapping and yapping, the words gurgling up out of his convertible skull.
    He doesn’t say anything. But she feels him there. A heavy presence in the room. A frequency. Like a TV on mute. Like a whisper-crackle of white noise coming from the corner.
    She refuses to look. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t .
    Eventually, he speaks.
    “You did a number on that kid, huh?” Louis’ voice asks. Miriam lurches upright. Pillows flumping to the floor. She knows why she looks. Because it’s Louis. Not the real Louis. She hasn’t seen him for over a year. But she’s desperate for a friendly face. Even if it’s a mask worn by a Trespasser who treads on the forbidden burial ground that is her mind.
    This Louis has both his eyes gone. The sockets aren’t covered with black electrical tape, though – they’re half hidden behind a rolled-up purple handkerchief tied tight around his big Frankenstein Monster head.
    “Shut up,” she says. “That shitbag was a killer.”
    “Takes one to know one.”
    “Shitbag or a