Authors: Charlie Price
Mick had never thought much about luck. His dad said you make your own luck. If Mick had thought about it before, he’d have said today was his lucky day, his dream come true. JJ, Grace, and him swimming. Anything could happen, most of it good. Might even get a kiss. Or more.
Grace’s scream yanked him back to the present.
He’d frozen, watching Jon struggle to drag the thing to shallower water. Mick didn’t move till Grace yelled at Jon to let it go, to get away and come back here. That got Mick started and then he was yelling, too. “Don’t touch that!” Mick was splashing through the water to grab him.
“Just a sec!” Jon didn’t turn around, busy tugging. “It’s caught on something. I almost got it.”
Mick could hear Grace clambering behind him. He reached Jon first and pinned the boy’s arms. The body washed around, rubbery-looking. It was a girl, high school or college. Grace reached them and helped Mick break Jon loose. Half wading, half swimming, they pulled him back to the beach side of the river.
“Let me go, damn it!” Jon was kicking at them. “I almost had it. It’s hung up on something.”
Mick held Jon while Grace began picking up anything they had brought. Her jeans and his shirt, a beer can that didn’t even belong to them.
Mick put his face close to Jon’s. “Listen up! We got to get out of here. If the police think we had anything to do with her, even finding her, they might search our places and then everybody’d be screwed big-time.”
Jon looked at Mick for the first time. Considering. He finally got it.
“Crap!” Jon said. “I was going to save her.”
She didn’t stink yet, but Mick knew the girl was way beyond saving. He didn’t say that. He said, “Help us make sure we got everything.”
Mick saw Jon picking up bits of glass and pieces of paper while he brushed away their footprints on the beach, his mind racing. What if the police believed they did it? What if the law searched their places and found his dad’s stash, and guns, and the stolen tools that connected him with thefts in other towns? What if cops found Gary’s dope and who knows what else they kept in that trailer? Their folks would go to jail and Mick and Grace and JJ would wind up in juvie.
Behind him, Grace’s voice broke into his thoughts again. “JJ!”
Right. JJ had split when Grace took off her jeans. Walking somewhere. They all began yelling her name, hoping she wasn’t too far away to hear.
21
W
HILE
J
ON WAS SWIMMING
, JJ was trying to shed her disappointment about Mick and Grace. She had headed away from the gravel beach, upriver past the huge dark rocks that reminded her of buildings, some of them thirty or forty feet tall, carved and polished, and hard to climb but she’d done it before. That day, no, she was just meandering.
In a small clearing she crossed drag marks to the river’s edge. There were gouges in the soil and some broken branches close to the riverbank. A big raft? There was a large enough gap in the brush that something like that could be launched. In the dirt near the edge of the water a bright glitter caught her eye. Kneeling, she found a black jewel, square, inlaid with a silver design, a small diamond in the middle. Never seen anything like it before. It was small, about the size of a stamp, but it was elegant, like something a king would wear. She shined it on her shirt and put it in her pocket.
As she stood again, she saw a slender ghost moon hanging above the western ridge. Its faint glow in the daylight sky lifted her thoughts, back to the familiar daydream, up through evergreens, up above the sparkling river, up through the clouds, her outstretched fingers trailing in the thin blue sky, until space turned dark and the moon became a huge powdered disk.
She didn’t imagine looking down, didn’t want to think of her friends holding hands or kissing. That would drop her, hard, to the canyon floor.
When she reached the moon, she didn’t stop at the glowing part. She never did. She sailed around to that far side nobody sees. She glided to her castle with its stone walls and towers and pointed spires, through the huge arched door, through the great hall under the flickering torches, up to the throne in front of the tapestry. And there, she turned. And sat. And waited for someone. Waited because the throne was wide enough for two, wide enough to lie down with someone and begin a kingdom. She knew it was a fairy tale, but she let herself stay there. Chose to be there. Chose the castle. Safe, comfortable, her other home.
She couldn’t stand to be around Grace and Mick when he was flirting. Couldn’t stand to watch Grace tolerate him. Couldn’t stand to see him so oblivious, to see him sniff around Grace like a dog. It was pathetic.
At some point the yelling broke through her dream and she had to shake her head to clear the images before she could move. She guessed it was some kind of trouble with Jon. She skirted the boulders and took the road back toward the car. Close, she saw them cleaning up the beach area. That made no sense.
“What happened?”
“Found a naked girl!” Jon, proud as punch.
Mick was all business. “Get in. We’ll tell on the way.”
JJ shrugged his hand off her arm. “Who? Show me.”
Jon grabbed her hand and led her to the water’s edge, pointing across the stream to the still eddy under the cliff.
Grace came behind them, getting hold of Jon by his wet shirt. “Doesn’t matter who,” she said, nodding across the water. “We got to go.”
JJ shaded her eyes. “Is that Cassel’s girlfriend?”
That question echoed above the noise of the river. Mick might have grimaced. Not something he wanted to hear.
Grace shook her head and began tugging Jon back to the car. The kid was grinning like the information was a wad of dollars.
22
A
T THE CAR
, Jon was jabbering, full of questions. Grace pushed him into the backseat, hopped in, and pulled the door shut, shushing him the whole time. Mick jumped in the driver’s seat and cranked the engine while JJ piled in beside him, slamming the passenger door. He made the U-turn, stopped, got out, and smudged the tire tracks they’d made parking. It didn’t come to him that he might be wrecking other tracks as well. He tore out, dust barreling behind them.
“Cassel’s!” Jon crowed.
Grace shushed him again, harsh.
“Killed her,” Jon getting the last word. Obnoxious.
“Killed?” JJ asked, looking at Mick.
“We don’t know,” he said. “Could have drowned.”
“Everybody shut up,” Grace said.
Her words held while the engine burred and the gravel sprayed and rattled against the car. After a few minutes they got on the pavement and the noise settled, but there was no more conversation on the ride home.
* * *
When Mick pulled off Main and into their dirt parking lot, Grace kept hold of Jon to keep him from jumping out.
“Nobody says a word about this,” Grace said. “We went swimming right where the main highway crosses the river. Right under the highway bridge there. We never drove up River Road.” She was looking right at Jon when she was saying this. “Promise.”
Jon pulled his arm out of her grip and scowled. Finally nodded his head.
JJ didn’t move.
Grace and Jon got out, walked to their trailer.
Mick turned to look at JJ. “You got something to say?”
She kept looking forward.
“JJ?” he pressed her.
A tear slid down her cheek. “You’re hopeless,” she said. “Blind, but it doesn’t matter now.”
She was wrong. It did matter. Mick should have asked her what she meant. Should have asked her what she was thinking, but he was preoccupied. His mind on what he was going to do next.
Mick waited until JJ was inside the Stovalls’ single-wide before he drove off to find a pay phone and call 911. He wasn’t going to give them his name. Just the real location so the girl could be retrieved and given to her family.
JJ’s words about the floater being Cassel’s girlfriend had really upped the ante. Mick guessed she meant Tim, the son, but she could have meant the father. After their school run-in last spring, JJ had told Mick more about Tim’s dad. Scott Cassel—Montana Highway Patrol officer, based in Portage with particular jurisdiction over the roads in Sanders County and the surrounding area. The man had a reputation. Nobody in a fifty-mile radius messed with Scott Cassel.
Years ago, according to Gary Stovall, a speeder tried to shoot him when he approached the guy’s car to give him a ticket. Gary says he was tough before that. After that, he was just plain nasty. Nasty enough that his wife left him. JJ said she moved across the country. His older son, Larry, was on his own, but his younger son, Tim, was stuck with him.
He
could beat the boy, but no one else was allowed to.
Tim would graduate next year. This year he’d been suspended a week for drinking at school. Barely kept out of jail, so far, by the influence of his dad and Mr. Hammond. Everybody Mick knew was afraid of the Cassels. He thought any of them might be capable of hurting a girl and, if things went wrong, if she made them mad, maybe even killing her.
23
L
UCK
.
F
ATE.
You can have good sense most of the time, take precautions, make good decisions, make a few mistakes and correct them, but once in a blue moon you screw up at the same time that other things go wrong—little things. Maybe Mick had just made a few mistakes, all at once. He could see that it wouldn’t take too many small things to turn his bad luck into a train wreck.
He’d gone to the river park on the east end of town and reported the body. When he got back, he parked his dad’s Pontiac where he remembered it had been. His father noticed these things. People, not so much. Unless they were a danger to him. Being a crackerjack mechanic made it easy for him to get jobs. It also fit his hobby, restoring old cars. The Poncho was his latest, a ’72 Bonneville four-door hardtop that ran like NASCAR and looked like a rusted Batmobile. Ratmobile. The body and interior were always last in his dad’s restoration process and he rarely got to them before he was on to the next car.
Dad, Tighe “Fitz” Fitzhugh, got home a little later than usual, carrying a heavy sack.
Groceries.
“You didn’t work today?” He set the sack on the small table where they usually ate. Lifted out a bag of crushed ice and put it in the cooler on the floor. “Better use that milk tomorrow,” he said. “I’m starting to smell it.”
He pulled a Bosch rotary hammer drill and a heavy-duty DeWalt power saw from the tote.
Definitely not groceries.
Fitz looked out the door to see no one was watching, and then held the saw up to the light, inspecting it. “Barely been used,” he said. He looked around for a place to put it and decided on the canvas duffel where he stored car tools. Saw Mick looking.
“Just left it lying around that work project up there.” He gestured with his head toward north Main where the local chiropractor was adding a room to his office. “Must be broke,” he said. “I’ll fix it later.”
Broke. Right. His dad was starting again, in spite of his promise. Mick wadded up a poem he’d been working on. Why bother? And he still hadn’t met anyone to stay with.
* * *
Years ago, drunk and reminiscing, his dad had told Mick he’d started “finding things” in the army. “Just a little touch now and then to boost my pay.” Usually, his father maintained the fiction that he found things, broken things that others discarded.
Sometimes Fitz ignored that idea like he’d never said such a thing and stole big. The pickup from the mall parking lot, electronic gear from the warehouse where they’d fought the guard, the tool trailer and generator from the construction site.
Mick knew from past experience that since his dad wasn’t doing any carpentry work himself, he could have that saw and drill sold by tomorrow afternoon … unless he was planning to wait and boost the whole battery-powered outfit and move it for a kit price.
Mick never figured out why his dad pretended about the little stuff. He had made Mick go with him twice, so it wasn’t for his son’s benefit. Maybe he couldn’t quite admit it to himself, the kind of person he was. And Mick … could he admit it? Could he live with another family and be done with the man?
“You didn’t work?” his father asked again, sitting down on the cooler and turning to face Mick.
“Stores didn’t need anybody today. Restock doesn’t truck in till tomorrow.”
“You going to make enough to be ready for school? Think they might be charging for extra stuff now.” His dad didn’t usually give him money, like that would undermine Mick’s independence.
“Don’t need much,” Mick said, “only extra is football, far as I know.” He already had five or six hundred dollars in checks under his mattress and thirty or forty cash under his pillow.
“Well,” his dad said, “you’re big enough for football.”
“We found a body today.” Mick didn’t know why he told him. Probably just to goad him. His dad being so smug about stealing—stuck in Mick’s craw.
“The hell!”
“Girl,” Mick added, “maybe drowned, or maybe worse. We cleaned up after ourselves and left. Too late to do anything for her.”
“We?”
“Me and Grace.” Mick didn’t know why he left JJ and Jon out. Oh. Yes he did. If his dad asked Grace, she’d automatically lie to him. The other two wouldn’t. “East, under the highway bridge on the river,” Mick finished.
“Didn’t tell anybody?” his dad asked, again checking out the front door to see if they could be overheard.
Dovey’s trailer was about a hundred feet away, but sometimes she was in the parking area picking up trash the wind had scattered. As clerk, she did most of the paperwork for the justice of the peace and the sheriff’s office. She knew everything that happened in the whole county and his dad thought she was nosy as hell.
Mick shook his head. He didn’t plan to mention the 911 call.
“Don’t say another word. Don’t beg trouble.”
Mick had known that would be his father’s position.
“Let’s eat,” his dad said, standing abruptly and jerking the cooler open. He grabbed the borderline milk and set it down too hard, sloshing some on the table. Snatched the lunch meat and package of cheese, pitched them alongside the milk. “Get the peanut butter and that grape crap.”