Free The Cormorant by Chuck Wendig

A big-screen TV on the far wall – big enough you could turn it on its back and use the thing as a dining room table for six people. A ceiling fan of thatched wood turns lazily overhead.
    Steve precedes her, and once he’s inside, it’s like he stops worrying about the crazy road-weary chick with the knife in her hand. Like he just lets go of all his cares, letting them float to the heavens on the wings of pretty-pretty butterflies. He saunters over to a one-person bar in the corner, steps behind it, his shirt open, his hand scratching the salty wire-brush hairs growing up out of his bare chest. He’s so tan Miriam thinks someone should skin him and use his pelt to make a nice set of luggage.
    He reaches down under the bar and she barks – “Hey, hey, hey!” – and he quickly jerks back up again, hands up like he’s a bank teller about to get robbed. He laughs, nervous.
    “Ho now, what’s the problem?”
    “What’s behind the bar?” She waggles the knife at him.
    “Rum.”
    “Rum?”
    “I was gonna make us a couple of daiquiris.” He pats a stumpy bar-top blender. “Kind of a welcome to the Keys drink. Hemingway’s favorite cocktail.”
    “Hemingway was a diabetic. His favorite drink was a dry martini.”
    “Oh. No shit? I didn’t know that. You read a lot?”
    “When I can.” Homeless girls love libraries , she thinks but does not say.
    “I have some vodka and vermouth here.”
    “That’s not a martini.”
    “Why, sure it is.”
    “Jesus, dude, I don’t want to get into a cocktail pissing match with you, but a martini is gin. Always gin. Putting vodka in a martini is like–”
    “Whiskey in a margarita?”
    “It’s like spitting in my mouth and calling it champagne.”
    His mouth seems frozen in a rigor mortis smile. “I don’t have gin.”
    “Then I don’t want whatever it is you would call a martini.”
    “Back to daiquiris, then.”
    “Are you going to poison me?”
    He crosses his arms and leans forward on the bar. Ringlets of beach-blond hair frame his face. “Miriam, I understand your apprehension, I do, but this isn’t anything… weird. I’m cool. We’re cool. Here’s how we’re gonna fix this, OK? Over there on the side table by the patio door, there’s a canvas bag, and in that canvas bag is twenty-five hundred bucks. Half of what I said I’d pay you for the vision. You go over there. You take that money. You can leave if you want to. But if you stay, I got a grill out on the patio and a table out on the dock and we can sit out there and eat some shrimp and mahi I got cooking up – little lime, little cilantro, little mango salsa – and then we can get down to business. By which I mean you tell me how I’m going to die and you get the other half of your money and then you can go on your way with a full belly and a fat sack of cash.”
    “Why?”
    “What?”
    “Why do you want to know how you’re going to die?”
    His easygoing smile falls away like dead leaves off an autumn tree. He searches for words. It’s like he doesn’t even know the answer to that question, which is eventually exactly what he says. “I don’t know. I’ve always been a little obsessed with it. Living life to the… well, to the max. It is my last name and all, so I figure I better live up to it.” Here an awkward laugh like he’s knows it’s super-douchey and not very funny but it’s out there and now they have to deal with it. “I just want to know how much time I got left. I’m on the wrong side of middle age and you’ll see – one day you’ll get older and realize that the ride starts to speed up when you think it should be slowing down.”
    She lets the knife fall to her side and hang there in her hand.
    Miriam goes to the white canvas bag. Hooks a finger around a strap. Lifts. Separates. Sees wads of cash piled haphazardly atop one another, held together with little rubber bands.
    “You can count it,” he says.
    “I’m good. It’s good.”
    “You wanna eat?”
    She