Drawn Into Darkness(34)

“Dumb luck is as good as any other kind.”

He tilted his head back in the sand to look at me upside down. “What the heck does that mean?”

“It means I read Nietzsche in college. In other words, it means nothing. How long did Stoat keep hunting?”

“Too damn long. After he gave up on the river, he went into the woods. From where I was, I could see the reflection of his flashlight in the water. Even when I couldn’t see it anymore, I didn’t dare come out.”

“You mean you were still in the river?”

“Of course I was. All night. I finally heard the van drive away around dawn.”

“Then he’s not here now.” Ridiculous, the tsunami of relief this assumption provided me, considering that I remained stranded in the wilderness.

“He probably just went home to eat something and grab another gun. He’ll be back. Heck, he could already be back. When I heard that boat, I thought it was him, so I hid.”

“It wasn’t him. It was two men, but they went right past and didn’t see me.”

No comment. It occurred to me that Justin must have peeked at the boat himself, or he wouldn’t know it wasn’t Stoat and he’d still be hiding.

“Why didn’t you yell?” I asked. “Flag them down?” I would have if I hadn’t been situated too close to a snake.

Justin shrugged. Damn. In some ways he was so much a typical teenager.

“Well,” I said, swallowing my irritation, “if they launched from that same boat ramp, their car will be there.”

“Truck,” Justin said. “You don’t haul a boat with a car.”

Teenager.

“Whatever.” Acting far more brisk than I felt, I got on my feet. “Let’s go have a look.”

Justin didn’t move. “What if Stoat’s there?”

“It’s a chance we’ll have to take. Stoat thinks we’re somewhere down the river, so we’re better off heading back upstream, don’t you think? Justin?”

He just shrugged again.

I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to get parental with him. “We’d better get a move on,” I said in a neutral tone, starting upstream along the riverbank. “Come on, Justin.”

He didn’t say a word, but he got up and followed me.

• • •

The river had taken away Justin’s flip-flops.

There’s an old saying my father liked to recite at annoying times: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost, for want of a rider the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” I guess Dad was a kind of philosopher on that subject. It’s the little stuff that screws you good, like the Columbia’s O-ring or the Crocodile Hunter’s stingray or, according to fractal theory, some butterfly in India fluttering its wings to eventually cause Superstorm Sandy.

I still had my socks and sneakers, sodden but intact on my feet, but with Justin barefoot, for a thousand sharp, pointy, and/or venomous reasons we couldn’t slip into the woods to stay out of sight. We had to walk on the sandy bank of the river, where anybody could see us.

Which explained why, luckily for me, he had been on the riverbank to save my life a second time.

Progressing upriver, we discovered that we shared the bank with several snakes and four alligators, all of which slid into the water before we got anywhere near them.

They weren’t what scared us.

The whole way back to the boat ramp, neither of us said a word. We kept pausing to listen. Warily we rounded a bend in the river, then stopped, glimpsing somebody’s old blue pickup truck through a screen of leaves. If the river curve was the one that had hidden me from Stoat last night, then the blue pickup had to be sitting at the same boat ramp where he had taken us.

The problem was, what if Stoat was there too?

Justin and I stared at each other, silently discussing this. Then, gesturing for him to stay where he was, I headed into the woods to have a look at the boat ramp and its parking area from a hidden vantage point. The rain had soaked and muffled most of the noisy vegetation, so my main stealth problem was to keep my aforementioned big mouth from screaming or swearing as I edged between palmettos that tried to saw my legs off and knee-high Spanish dagger—each long leaf might as well have been a switchblade—and other things that tried to stick major thorns into me. What the hell. My skin was just one big mosquito bite anyway; why should I care if the vegetation now started sucking my blood?

Finally I got to where I had a clear view of the blue pickup, which sat with its nose tilted upward and its rear end partway down the boat ramp. In all the open space around it I could see no other vehicle and no people, least of all Stoat.