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Well, fuck.
Pain lanced through my head something fierce when I knelt down beside Shane, but I forced myself to ignore it. I was rolling him onto his side to keep him from choking when I saw what he’d puked up, other than the blood. From the center of the red muck glinted a single silver dollar. Now, it was possible the coin could’ve been lying there to begin with, and Shane just so happened to upchuck directly on it. But come on. Something had him all torn up inside. And what the hell did I know about the way bored and privileged Gen-Zers got their kicks these days?
I doubted payphones took silver dollars. I doubted I’d find a payphone way out here in the sticks, anyway. Still, waste not, want not. I pried the coin off the gravel, wiped it on a tuft of graying grass, and tucked it into my pocket. The absence of the coin left a perfect pale circle in the bloody gravel.
Shane didn’t stir. I checked him over to see what else he was carrying. The back pocket on his pants was still tacked shut—either it was a new suit or he was a clothes horse who didn’t want to ruin the line of the garment. But his front pockets were empty too. No phone. No wallet, either. Normally, I’d figure someone rolled him, but most people carry around odds and ends that no one would bother stealing. Change, tissues, sunglasses, gum. The pockets of Shane’s brand new suit, the functioning ones, were completely empty.
Like mine.
I scanned the riverbank for familiar landmarks. There’d be some overpriced real estate nearby, wouldn’t there? Everyone with too much cash was eager to blow it on waterfront property. Except this wasn’t the sort of river where a weekend warrior would moor his jet ski. A dozen yards to my right, a tangle of overgrown weed trees obscured the bank, and to my left, a sharp bend hid the water from my line of sight. The opposite bank was lost in a soupy gray haze.
If there weren’t any houses nearby, wherever we were, there’d at least be a road. Roads hugged rivers until they found a place to cross, even way out in the boonies. I was formulating a plan to flag down a passing driver for their phone and get Shane some help when I heard the distant sound of an engine.
I hadn’t even noticed how freakishly quiet it was until the engine’s whine cut the silence. I also hadn’t considered how incriminating it would look if someone spotted me standing over some fancy kid who was sprawled in a pool of blood. But the engine sound wasn’t coming from the road—or the direction where I presumed the road would be. It was coming from the river.
I needed a murder rap like I needed a hole in the head, so my first impulse was to duck into the trees and let the motorboat pass us by before some fisherman could make any presumptions. But I couldn’t just let the kid drown in his own blood. Whoever was on that boat probably had a phone—or maybe they even knew the lay of the land well enough to get Shane to the nearest hospital.
Gravel crunched underfoot as I hurried to the riverbank. “Hey!” I yelled. The fog wreaked havoc with acoustics and ate up my voice, and the sound of the engine seemed like it was coming from everywhere at once. I looked left and right and started waving my arms around anyhow. “Hey! Stop! Someone’s hurt!”
The small craft came around the bend, emerging from the mists, yet somehow the fog clung to it so I couldn’t get a good enough look at exactly how far away it was. A hundred yards? If that. Close enough to hear me, anyhow. “Stop!” I hollered. “Damn it, stop!”
It was an open skiff, so the guy at the rudder should have heard me, unless the outboard motor was louder than I thought. I jumped around like a lunatic and screamed myself hoarse, but the boat trolled right on by. Head throbbing, I jogged along the bank and paced the boat, straining desperately to wave it down. And just as the vegetation growing along the shore stopped me from running any farther, the guy in the boat turned, and he looked.
At least I think he did. But how could I tell, since he was mostly a backlit shadow, and he’d hardly moved? I dunno, but somehow I knew. His head had swiveled, and only his head. And he’d seen me. I knew that, too.
Behind me, Shane was now making stirring noises against the rocky ground. I forgot about the boat and turned my attention to him. His eyes opened. He squinted and tried to sit up. “Maybe you should take it easy,” I said. He ignored my advice and pushed himself up onto his elbows. I shrugged. “Fine, suit yourself.”
“Why do you care? You’re robbing me.”
“Unless you got a phone stashed somewhere clever, then no. You got nothing I want.”
“Story of my life.” His voice wobbled. One limb at a time, he got to his knees. He looked down at the blood, puzzled, then shook his head and scrubbed at his face. “Where am I?”
“Up shit’s creek, apparently.” Which I didn’t find particularly amusing, since I was right there with him. I took a few steps away from the riverbank, cocking my head to see if I could catch any traffic noises. Other than the receding whine of the outboard motor—nothing. “Look, wherever it is we got ourselves dumped, the only thing to do is find a way out of here. Can you walk, or you want me to go on ahead?”
“No—wait. I can walk.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him, but it’s a free country. If he wanted to try to walk, it was up to him. With my head pounding as bad as it was, I wouldn’t be moving any too fast myself. And another pair of eyes never hurt.
Carefully, Shane stood and brushed himself off. He still looked pale, and kind of shaky, too. But if he did collapse again, at least he’d be closer to the road. “So what do I call you?” he said. “Since we’ve apparently got some ways to go—and since you know my name and all—it’s only fair. Feel free to give me an alias, of course, if robbery is still on the table—”
“Gino,” I said curtly.
His eyes fixed on my mouth as I spoke. “Gino,” he echoed, just a breath. And I pointedly did not think about how something fluttered in my belly as he said it.
We trudged. The sound of our footsteps was way too loud, the gravel powdery and dry. I couldn’t complain about Shane making noise, either, because my own footfalls were even louder than his—heavy, plodding crunches, no matter how lightly I tried to step. We’d walked for a quarter mile, maybe a half, when the piercing ache in my head forced me to take a breather. “Hold on,” I said, and Shane stopped. He stood with his arms clasped tightly around himself, peering into the fog-shrouded trees. “Hear any cars?”
We shut our traps, and we listened.
Nothing.
Once the sickening pain in my head dulled enough for me to walk again, I motioned for him to get going. “There’s bound to be a road.”
Shane waited for me to come abreast of him and fell into step beside me. “But what if there isn’t? Do you have any idea where we are?”
“Do you?”
“I’m not big into the outdoors,” Shane said. “Last I remember, I was at some guy’s house. Didn’t know him personally, but he was a friend of my friend’s cousin, so, y’know. A bunch of us.”
