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“Yeah, I was listening. Limp-dicked Nazi. He probably was. Gym teachers always spot the weak.” Maybe I would’ve made a pretty good gym teacher, if I could handle the pathetic pay grade and snotty kids. “Then what happened?”
We continued on, trudging toward the trees. “I remember waiting at the principal’s office for one of my parents to show up. Mostly, I remember wondering if I’d get in more trouble once either of them did. Not that my folks were big on punishment—they really weren’t. Basically, all they wanted was for my sister and me to stay out of their way. Like we were the world’s greatest inconvenience. My sister had this big, jagged scar across the back of her arm where she should have had stitches when she was a kid. Fell off her bike into a chain link fence and came home screaming her head off, gushing blood. Damn lucky she didn’t die of tetanus. They didn’t even take her to the doctor. Mom stuck her arm in the sink and told her to shut up, then went and watched the final round of Jeopardy with my father, who hadn’t even bothered to come into the kitchen to see what was going on.”
“Did either of them show up?”
“When?”
“At the principal’s office.”
“Yeah. My mom. She didn’t seem mad—just annoyed. And when the principal was done lecturing her about the importance of physical activity and my lack of respect for authority, Mom suggested that it would be easiest to stop trying to force me into the water. Turns out, when I was a baby, my father decided to give me a swimming lesson by pitching me into a neighbor’s pool. Said he saw it on TV, that babies figure out how to swim naturally.”
Well, there you go. If it’s on TV, it must be true.
“Principal never called in my parents again. For my sister, either, even though they caught her smoking in the bathroom more than enough times to suspend her. Funny. Back then, I thought all the grownups at school were just a bunch of assholes. Now I’ve gotta wonder. Maybe they were doing the best they could. Maybe some of them were even trying to watch out for me.”
“Think so?” I scoffed. “Go ahead and tell yourself fairy tales if it helps you sleep at night. But you’ll be a lot safer to remember that anyone who’s in a position to fuck you over probably will.”
“Suuure. Uh-huh. As if you totally ditched me on the riverbank and let me fend for myself.”
“Don’t read into it. I just wanted another set of eyes.”
Shane had obviously grown up with money. St. Ad’s was a ritzy private school that cost more than my folks made in a year. That school wouldn’t have thrown him out no matter what he’d said—they wanted his tuition. Whereas, in public school, kids’ parents didn’t get called in and lectured to guide their offspring toward the straight and narrow. If a serious enough rule was broken, the school would slap a kid with suspension. Expulsion. The occasional visit from the boys in blue.
Not that it ever came down to something like that for me. My old man had a fondness for “the belt,” and I knew better than to set him off.
Always figured I’d learned that lesson well. Which pissed me off twice as much, wondering how in the hell I’d managed to earn a stiff whack on the head from Carmine Rossi. Once I found my way back to the city, I’d make it my business to find out. Lay low for a couple of days—enough for my head to stop ringing—then call in a few favors and see what was what.
Then again, why stop at that? If I was calling in favors, maybe I could arrange to find myself alone again with Rossi. Only, this time, I’d be the one with a tire iron in my hand.
I’d have to make it look like an accident. Decrepit old men like him, though…their bones are so brittle. One good fall and they practically shatter—
“Speaking of another set,” Shane said with mock breeziness, and my attention was jerked back to the present. “Do I spy with my little eye the same tree we hid behind when we watched that splendor in purple board the boat?”
“It’s a tree. They all look the same.” It came out nastier than I meant it to, because it damn well better not be the same goddamn tree.
But Shane didn’t pay my tone any mind. “True, on the surface, one tree is a lot like another. Trunk. Branches. Leaves. But a particular tree that looks like a pig flying a kite when you cock your head just so….”
I lined myself up with Shane and looked right where he was looking, and….
Well, I’ll be damned. Itwasa pig flying a kite. Or maybe a rhino. It wasn’t until the kid tensed—and then went very still—that I realized I was standing practically on top of him. And that he’d made no move to get away. He would fit just right in the circle of my arms.
Which wouldn’t do either of us a whole hell of a lot of good. He needed to be looked at by a doctor. Not pawed at by some dumb gorilla. I took a step back and grit rasped beneath my heel.
“Shh.” Shane swung around with a finger to his lips, and I realized that whatever reaction I thought I’d picked up from him hadn’t been about how close we were at all. He’d heard something. And now I heard it, too.
The distant whine of an outboard motor.
Shane eased behind a scraggly jut of weeds and I followed suit. He could’ve left more room for me…but he didn’t seem to mind me rubbing up against him. There was no time to consider just how far he was willing to take it, though, this casual contact, when the sound of that damn engine was getting louder.
“I think I know what’s going on,” Shane whispered. “There’s a loop somewhere. Has to be. Maybe something like, I dunno, a big island that splits the river in two. And this boat just keeps trawling around the island. Which is why it’s always coming from the same side.”
I could picture it. Made sense. Except for the part where we’d been walking for half the day. Out in the desert, or in the middle of a snowstorm, sure, I could see getting turned around. But we’d been heading in a particular direction. We had landmarks. So unless the river itself was nothing more than an impossible loop, with us just following it in a circle, this idea of his made no sense at all.
But it was more than I’d managed to come up with.
My head throbbed and the back of my neck prickled as the prow of the black skiff cut through the fog. It looked big. Or maybe like we were closer than I’d thought. Or…hell, I couldn’t tell. Everything was so turned around.
“Listen.” Shane clutched my arm again. Hard. “People.”
