The Wild Card (27 page)

Authors: Mark Joseph

BOOK: The Wild Card

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Charlie rushed out of the woods. “Get Sally!” he shouted, pointing downstream. “She's drowning!”

“God
damn
!”

Alex waded toward the deeper middle of the stream, and when the top of her head appeared again on the surface, he dived in and within a few stokes found himself being swept downstream in the current. A step slower, Dean stumbled on a rock and opened a cut on his shin. Swearing and bleeding, he thrashed toward the middle of the river as Charlie arrived on the beach. The tragedy unfurled in curious silence, without shouts or screams, only the bubbling of the river and hiss of the falls.

When Alex reached the spot where Sally had gone down the third time, at the other end of the island near the boat, he discovered the water was only waist deep and stood up. Immediately, he saw her
milky white body no more than ten feet away, unmoving, caught on an underwater snag. He brought her to the surface and a wideeyed, terrified Nelson watched from the
Toot Sweet
as Alex pulled her from the water.

Blood seeped from the side of her head. Limp, lifeless, she'd drowned so fast Alex wasn't sure if she was breathing or not. Frantic, he tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and when that didn't work, he turned her on her belly and pumped her arms and pushed on her back. The truth lay naked on the beach. A few feet away, frozen stiff, mouth agape, Nelson worked his jaw but no sound came from his throat. A moment later, Dean swam ashore and fell to his knees at Sally's side, sobbing.

“Is she all right? Is she okay?”

Alex looked away, shaking his head.

“What happened? What happened?” Nelson demanded.

Charlie rushed up, took one look at Sally's bleeding head and motionless body, and collapsed in a heap.

An owl hooted. Mosquitoes attacked. The moon sank behind the levee, and the night darkened over the eerie falls at Shanghai Bend. The four boys surrounded the dead girl and looked at each other, their scrambled minds teetering between paralyzing shock and the white abyss of true panic. The body that scant minutes before had provoked so much excitement and wonder now inspired only dread.

Flies settled on the corpse. Playing cards floated along the shore of the island, trapped by eddies behind the weird rocks. The remainder of the plastic-coated cards drifted with the current, and over the next week the entire deck would stretch from Shanghai Bend to San Francisco Bay. One card, the five of diamonds, would make it out the Golden Gate and ride the Californian Current three hundred fifty miles south to Los Angeles and wash up on the beach at Santa Monica, the only piece of Sally's soul to make it home.

A red-tailed hawk hunting above the falls would have seen beyond the levees to the farmland, alfalfa to the east and peaches to the west. Only the bravest and most desperate creatures were moving around in the dark. Three hours before dawn the closest human
beings were a family of migrant Mexican farm workers camped in trailers in a peach grove a quarter mile away. A sleepless young mother feeding her newborn heard shouts from the distant river.

Saligetatadariveritsdeincheros.

Gadam.

Jebebicheronimo.

Bobibobi.

The barely audible sounds were rendered in unintelligible English of which she knew not a word, and she forgot about the exchange a minute after she heard it.

Four miles north in Marysville the lone deputy assigned to patrol that section of Yuba County was booking a drunk driver. It was the still of the night, the dark and quiet hours. Traffic on Highway 99 was light, with only truckers and travelers who wanted to beat the heat on the road.

A train hooted through a level crossing miles away. Above, the hawk dove toward a field mouse, made her kill and flew away. Upstream, the Feather spilled over the falls, and downstream the placid river flowed into the Sacramento, the Carquinez Strait and the great bay, past cities and towns and the millions who lived along the shores. The boys clustered around Sally as though to shield her from those millions of eyes. Sudden death was beyond their experience, and they didn't know what to do. Or rather, they knew what to doâtell somebody what happenedâbut were deathly afraid of the consequences.

Whatever grace had existed in their lives was gone. Frightened, still drunk with hangovers rapidly approaching, burned by adrenaline, sick and traumatized, they began to understand that what happened next was up to them.

“What're we gonna do?” Nelson asked.

“We have to tell Bobby first,” Alex said.

“Tell him what?” Dean demanded.

“What do
you
think, Dean?” Alex snapped. “We have to tell him something.”

“He'll kill me,” Dean said, only beginning to realize what he'd done. “He'll say it was my fault.”

“It was,” Alex declared, nodding his head.

“It was an accident,” Dean insisted.

“Horseshit. You'll have to tell him you were in the river and what you were doing there. Her head's busted open, and that doesn't look like an accident,” Alex said.

“I was â¦ confused,” Dean mumbled. “I still am.”

“You're drunk. We all are, and this is really fucked up.”

There was a long moment of silence while they all stared at Sally's body. Dean convulsed once, violently, from misplaced lust and genuine fear, and lay down on the beach, moaning. Nelson's stomach turned over and he thought he was going to be sick. Charlie closed his eyes and rocked on his haunches, feeling only pity and sorrow for the dead girl he'd hardly spoken to. It just wasn't fair, he thought. I won her and maybe I should have just gone off with her and talked.

“Fishermen are going to show up here before dawn,” Alex said quietly. “That's not too long from now.”

“What did you see, Nelson?” Charlie asked.

“I was near the boat. I saw Alex swim down the river and pull her out of the water.”

“That's all?”

“That's what I saw, Charlie. What about you?”

“I saw Alex and Dean fighting in the river, and then I saw Dean hit her and smash her into the rocks.”

“In the water?” Nelson asked, “Dean? Why?”

“I thought she wanted to fuck me.”

“She didn't,” Alex said sharply.

Nelson croaked, “Oh, Christ. You did this?”

Stricken with grief for himself and for Sally, Dean could only nod.

“Keep your heads together,” Alex rasped harshly. “You can't ask your mommies what to do. We're the royal flush, and we have to stick together, including Bobby. Whatever we tell Bobby, we have to tell the cops the same thing.”

“What cops?” Dean asked, a spike of terror lighting up his eyes. “We're in the boonies. We don't even know where we are.”

“They have cops or a sheriff or something. Every place has cops,” Nelson wailed.

Suddenly their parents, humiliated and ashamed, loomed large in their imaginations, and behind the scolding moms and dads were cops, courts, judges, and prison guards. Terrifying headlines danced in their heads.

Alex thought for a long minute and then said, “No matter what we tell them, the cops will think we raped her, and they can prove it because Bobby fucked her. That's for sure. She's not eighteen, and that's rape in the state of California.”

“We're screwed,” Charlie mumbled.

Alex continued, “They won't believe it was just Dean. Look, we can tell Bobby she slipped and fell. He doesn't have to know anything else.”

Dean looked up and stared hard at Alex. “You'd do that?” he asked.

“She's dead and we can't change that,” Alex whispered hoarsely as he began to understand the magnitude of the situation. “We have to protect ourselves. We have to come up with a story and stick to it.”

“Like hell,” Nelson said. “I don't have to protect myself. I didn't do anything. This crazy fuck killed this girl.”

“Nobody will know that unless we tell them, Nelson, and then you can say good-bye forever to Studley, and probably the rest of us as well.”

“Maybe we should put her back in the river and let her float downstream and get the hell out of here,” Charlie said, desperate.

“No way, man,” Alex said, shaking his head. “If we do that, when they find her, it won't be long before they find the guy at the marina in Sacramento, and our ass is grass.”

“Then we can tell them we saw her float by the boat, and when we got to her, it was too late,” Charlie suggested.

“No matter what we say, Bobby will think we screwed her and killed her,” Dean said, voice low and full of despair.

“He'd be half right,” Alex said.

They all looked at Dean.

“I'll tell Bobby I did it and turn myself in. It's the right thing to do.”

“No,” Alex said. “Too risky for all of us.”

“What do you want to do, Alex?” Dean asked, his voice almost breaking. “Put her on the boat and take her with us? What the hell would we do with her?”

“Cops,” Nelson said.

“Parents,” Charlie moaned.

“San Quentin,” Alex said, and the name made them shudder.

“They can't put us there,” Charlie protested.

“Oh, yes they can. We're eighteen. Rape and murder. That's why they built the gas chamber. It's Caryl Chessman time, boys.”

Dean started to weep, and within a minute they were all in tears.

“I think we should tell the truth,” Nelson said.

“They won't believe us,” Alex answered.

“Why not? They have to believe us.”

“No, they don't. They don't have to do shit.”

“Alex is right,” Dean said. “They won't believe us. Bobby is going to jail for rape and me for murder. Or we all go.”

Another long silence, punctuated by more tears.

Alex looked away from Sally toward the woods in the center of the small island, then back at his friends and said, “We can bury her.”

“What?” Nelson screeched. “That's really crazy.”

“Bury her. Make her disappear. She's a runaway from down south. She said she had no family, so she won't be missed, or at least they won't be looking for her here.”

“We can't be sure of that,” Nelson protested. “We don't really know anything about her. We don't even know her last name. Maybe her name isn't Sally at all.”

“It's our only chance,” Alex insisted. “There's a shovel on the boat. I saw it.”

“That's the same as admitting we killed her,” Nelson said. “If they dig her up, we're fucked.”

“That's a chance we have to take. Otherwise, it's the gas chamber for sure,” Alex reasoned. “And look, even if they do believe us and
let us go, everybody will know. Suppose we have a trial and we're acquitted, it'll hang like a cloud over us for the rest of our lives. We'll become pariahs. The colleges won't let us in. Our parents will kick us out. I know my dad will. We'll be fucked. We didn't do anything, but if we bury her and keep quiet, no one will ever know.”

“Unless they dig her up,” Nelson said. “With a broken head, it will look more like murder than if we just tell them now.”

“We'll dig deep. None of this shallow grave in the woods bullshit.”

“I don't know,” Charlie said. “It just doesn't seem right. It's not fair to her.”

“Nothing is going to bring her back.”

“But we're innocent,” Nelson said. “We didn't do anything. Especially Charlie.”

“We wanted to.”

“That's not a crime.”

“It's not what we did,” Alex said. “It's what they'll think we did.”

“You're a cold son of a bitch, Alex,” Charlie said. “I mean, she's dead, it was an accident, but what about her? Maybe she has a family, or friends. If we bury her, she's gone forever and they'll never know.”

“We can't do anything for her, Charlie,” Dean said. “Not now.”

“I don't know. This is fucked.”

“Alex is right,” Dean said. “We have to put her in the ground.”

“What about Bobby? What do we tell him?” Nelson asked. “Bobby's our friend, man. We can't lie to him.”

“Yes, we can, and we have to,” Alex said. “He won't want to screw up the rest of his life any more than we do, so let's not give him the chance.”

“This is really fucked up,” Nelson said.