“I—I don’t know!”
Stoat roared, “What the fuck? A baseball bat! I’ll show them how to use a baseball bat.” Damn. He didn’t have his goddamn gun, but he did have a weapon.
I imagined him using the baseball bat like a walking stick, staggering to his feet.
In the total drenching darkness we could not see him and he could not see us. But to find the van, all he had to do was feel his way up the sand slope. And once he turned on the headlights, we were roadkill, if not worse.
Adrenaline is a remarkable stimulant of both body and mind. I said softly, “Justin, can you swim?”
“Of course. Why?”
“We’re going into the river.” I envisioned a Southern, sandy river with no rocks, no white water, and most certainly no waterfalls.
“That’s crazy! Alligators, moccasins—”
Well, yes, there was that.
People down here called the poisonous cottonmouth viper, aka water moccasin, simply “moccasins.” Indeed, some people called all snakes “moccasins,” as if they were terrified by Native American footwear.
I declared, “I’d rather face a snake any day than him.” By Stoat’s constant swearing I could tell that, yes, he was on the move, feeling his way toward the van—and us. “The river, Justin. It’s our only chance.”
I felt his hand grip my wrist the way mine gripped his, so that we forged a strong link. “Okay.” He sounded more brave than desperate. “Let’s go.”
“Quietly.” Instinctively I crouched, keeping my head down. Justin did the same. Like a pair of soldiers under fire we scuttled past the noise pollution that was Stoat—I think we blundered within ten feet of him, and if he had shut his foul mouth, he might have heard us. But he kept stumbling toward the van. Quite blindly in the dark we dashed away from it, toward the hiding place we could not see.
NINE
First I felt water puddling around my ankles, and within a few steps, the river current shoving against my shins. Stumbling, I almost lost my balance, and Justin stood still, bracing his feet and hanging on to me. Now the water reached up to my knees—
Muffled by frogs and distance, I heard a slamming sound.
Slam. Door. Van.
“Down!” I hurled myself into darkness, pulling Justin with me.
We ducked just as the van’s headlights blazed on, blindingly bright for an instant before our heads hit the water.
Had Stoat seen us? Would he see us now? Desperately hoping not, I held my breath and did a pretty good imitation of a log just by keeping still. Clutching my arm and taking his cue from me, Justin did the same. Meanwhile, the river current swirled us around and took charge of us, so by the time I had to raise my head and gasp for air, we were nicely downstream, away from the area where the van’s headlights still shone across the surface of the water.
But not quite far enough downstream to suit me, because the van’s lights also shone on the all-too-familiar figure of a quick, slim man near the flooded river’s edge.
“Uncle Steve!” gasped Justin, bobbing alongside me.
“Stop calling him your uncle! He’s a kidnapper and a pedophile and a rapist and he deserves—” I managed to cease firing from a sawed-off shotgun of rage I hadn’t even realized I had in me. Words badly aimed, scattering, good for nothing. “Sorry, Justin. Are you okay?” I tried to reach for his hand, which had slipped out of mine, but I didn’t find it.
“He knows where we went,” Justin said in the dead voice of someone who has already given up.
Actually, bent over and pacing back and forth at the edge of the water, Stoat seemed to be hunting upstream and down like an old hound dog. And the river carried us farther away from him every moment.
“I don’t think so,” I told Justin. “Our tracks are rained out. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for.”
But he did. He found it, reached down to seize it, and turned it on.
The flashlight.
Justin gulped air and disappeared underwater at the same time I did. Holding my breath and hurrying myself along with the rushing river, I fired some angry mental bullets at myself. Damn flashlight, I didn’t even remember dropping it. Stupid, clueless, what was I thinking, why hadn’t I thrown it into the drink like the gun?
Really, rationally, I did not think it likely that Stoat had seen us when he had turned on the flashlight, but at the same time, I felt an irrational fear that he had, and I knew Justin would be feeling it a hundred times worse, would be absolutely sure his “uncle” knew exactly where he was and would come after him.
A burning feeling started in my lungs. I thrust myself to the surface and gasped for air while trying to clear my eyes of bleary water so I could see.