Free The Cormorant by Chuck Wendig Page B

puts her hand down on the table, palm up. “Let’s do this. Get it over with. You didn’t hire me to drink your booze and threaten you with knives and snark at you like a snarky snark who snarks, so place your hand in mine and let’s take a hop in the Grim Reaper’s hell-powered stagecoach and see where that bony motherfucker takes us.”
    He stares down at her hand. “You wanna take bets?”
    “Bets on what?”
    “On how I die.”
    “That’s morose.”
    “You seem like the type of girl who likes morose.”
    “I do.” She thinks about it. “Fine. I’ll play along. You’re, what, fifty?”
    “Close. Forty-nine.”
    “Married?”
    “Never once.”
    “So, no heart attack.” She winks. “You eat a lot of seafood?”
    He waves his arms, inviting her to behold the majesty of the world around him. “I live out here. Of course I eat a lot of seafood.”
    “And you got a bit of a poochy belly but no worse than most men your age and, frankly, a little bit better.”
    He chuckles. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said all night.”
    “Can it, Hemingway. Hmm. Let’s see. I vote fishing accident. Boat crash. Shark attack. Fishhook to the jugular. Something like that.”
    “I do like fishing.”
    “Well, there you go.” She bites at a thumbnail. “So, what’s your bet?”
    He pops his lips, drums his fingers. “Cancer.”
    “How boring.”
    “I’m playing the odds.”
    “Smart move. Cancer seems to get us all in the end.”
    “Fuck cancer,” he says, and raises his glass.
    “So. Is this a real bet? We putting money on the table?”
    He cocks his head. “I think the money on the table is already enough. I don’t know that I can do better than five grand. But I like making this a real bet just the same. What do you want if you win?”
    “I want to take that bottle of rum behind the bar home with me.”
    “Deal.”
    “And you?”
    His lips spread into a shark’s toothy grin. “I want you to spend the night with me.”
    “Aaaaand there it is.”
    “You gotta admit, you’re starting to like me.”
    She is starting to like him. A little. Maybe. She doesn’t admit it, though. Not yet.
    “And you don’t think I’m the ugliest duck in the pond.”
    “You’re old,” she says.
    “I’m not old. I’m seasoned .”
    “A little too salt-and-pepper.”
    He leans forward. “I still have a little cayenne pepper going on.”
    “I’m not sure if you’re being gross, or sexy, or just plain oblique.”
    “I don’t know what oblique means.”
    She laughs. “I don’t either.”
    Way the firelight plays off him, way the rum is oiling all her gears, she thinks, Well, hell, why not?
    “I understand if you don’t want to. Probably a bad idea.”
    “Good news for you, I’m very good at bad ideas. I’m in.”
    “Shall we shake on it?”
    She puts her hand back on the table and he reaches out and–
     
     
     

SIXTEEN
    HELLO, MIRIAM
    In one year’s time, one year to the day–
    It’s night, and Steve Max is bleeding.
    He lies across the patio table of the plantation home, his arms splayed out. His legs, too. They are bound by nylon cord.
    His face is swollen from a beating. One eye shut by a rising hillock of puffy, bruised brow-flesh. The other eye wide with a small cut beneath it on the cheek (not a fresh cut, this, but a scar, pale pink against the tan skin). His lips are split. His teeth are broken or gone. His tongue looks like a diseased fish poking its head out of the ruined coral grotto that is his mouth.
    The torches all around are dark.
    Someone is there with him.
    Someone in a dark jacket. Hood pulled tight.
    Standing there. Holding two things. First, a small pocket knife. Second, a sheet of white copier paper.
    The shadowed figure takes the knife and sticks it in the side of Steve Max’s neck – not a deep plunge of the blade, just a quick in-and-out , like he’s just trying to tap a barrel. It strikes the jugular. Makes a small hole.
    Blood starts to pump like water from