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Shane’s hand was dark with clotty blood. “You’re hurt,” he gasped.
Somehow, I’d managed to forget. Maybe he was right—maybe weweredreaming. But now that he mentioned it, my head throbbed like it was fixing to crack wide open. I backpedaled, resisting the urge to prod at the wound myself. I’d already known it was bad. When that tire iron smacked me, I’d heard my head crunch. I didn’t need to stick my finger in the damn thing and make it worse.
“Let me see,” Shane said.
“Leave it,” I snapped. “I’ll survive.”
5
If anything’ll kill a mood, it’s blood—at least for me. It might be an occupational hazard in my line of work, but I’m not one of those sickos who gets off on it.
Plus, I could tell Shane didn’t feel any better than I did. Probably bleeding on the inside. Shane was a talker, I’d figured out that much. His silence was setting me on edge.
“I’ll get my head seen to,” I told him. Yeah, real big of me, I know. But what more could I promise? “We’ll find the road, and flag down a car.”
Shane pressed his lips together and kept on trudging along with his eyes on the ground.
It only made me more determined to convince him that the plan was solid. “Most people wouldn’t stop for me, but they’d stop for you. So we’ll flag someone down, and we’ll say we were both in an accident.”
“What if there is no road?”
“Whaddaya mean? Of course there’s a road. We got here somehow. Didn’t we?”
“Did we, Gino?” Shane stopped walking, raised his head, and squinted off into the fog. “I’m not so sure.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
“Come on,” I said briskly. “I got a good feeling about this. You’ll see. Any minute now, we’re gonna find the road.”
We’d been walking toward a scraggly stand of trees for ages—or maybe it just seemed that way with Shane being sulky, and me trying to hold on to the way he’d grazed my lower lip with his perfect teeth—when suddenly we were pushing through the undergrowth….
Only to find that fucking river spread out in front of us again.
As if he could sense the fact that I was about to blow my top, Shane put a steadying hand on my shoulder, met my eyes, and raised a finger to his lips for silence. I was trembling with the urge to hit something and keep on hitting, but I focused on him instead—his perfect mouth, his pretty eyes, and damn it, I was falling for him something fierce—and I kept my cool.
With only his eyes, Shane directed my attention to our right. Moving slow so as not to give ourselves away, we eased past the tree line. The ground here was covered in a gray-green moss that was a relief from that persistent crunching sound. But someone else beyond the trees wasn’t quite so lucky.
The crunch-crunch-crunch of someone plodding toward the river came on hard and fast. By the time we cleared the trees, we saw him. A lean, trim guy in a skintight wetsuit and sport sandals. He was tan—really tan—and his damp hair was streaked by the sun. Mirrored shades hid his eyes, and a tether attached to his ankle dragged along behind him. There was no surfing within a day’s ride, so I couldn’t imagine where he’d come from—still wet, no less…so maybe I was the one far from home.
Carmine Rossi must’ve gone to more trouble to dump me than I originally thought.
Surfer Boy crunched up to the pilings on the riverbank. They looked awfully familiar, I thought—but I told myself all pilings look pretty much the same.
I was still selling myself that bill of goods when the whine of an outboard motor cut through the fog. Coming from the same direction it always did.
Surfer Boy crossed his arms expectantly as the black boat came into view. The boatman was a vague black shape at the tiller, like his face was in shadow…but with nothing there to cast it. As the boat eased up to the piling, I could make out more detail. The peeling paint on the hull. The coils of gray rope in the prow. Hell, I could see right down to the rusty rivets holding it all together.
But I couldn’t see the boatman’s face.
Shane’s hand slipped into mine, weaving our fingers together. I squeezed it tight. And together, we watched.
The boatman tossed a coil of rope toward the shore. It was a careless toss, but with an eerie slither, it looped around the piling. Hand over hand, he pulled his craft toward the bank. When the prow hit bottom, it gave off a hiss that made my skin crawl. But Surfer Boy didn’t seem to notice that everything about that damn boat, from the rope to the guy at the tiller, was just plain wrong. In fact, he wanted on.
The boatman…well, he didn’t stand. More like heuncoiled. Once he was towering over the prow, he held out a hand toward Surfer Boy. Not to help him on, either.
No, he wanted something.
Surfer Boy seemed surprised. The fog played havoc with the sound, but bits and phrases of their conversation came through.
