Black Water Rising Read Free Page A

feels a slight flutter across his chest, a tiny hiccup of dread.
    Bernie’s voice drops to a whisper. “What in the devil is going on out there?”
    The old man disappears into the captain’s cabin.
    A few seconds later, he emerges carrying a flashlight. Bernie and Jay clear the narrow deck, giving him room to pass as he starts for the rear of the boat. He shines the weak light into the brush on the north side of the bayou, calling out into the dark ness, to a face none of them can see. “You okay out there?”
    There’s no response. The old man waves his light through the trees. They’re traveling at an even clip, creeping slowly, but surely, farther away from her. The old man calls out again. “Hey... you okay out there?”
    A gunshot cracks through the air.
    Jay’s heart stops, everything going still. He has a fleeting, panicked thought that... this is it.
    He actually looks down to see if he’s been hit, an old habit set off by firecrackers and bad muf flers, a holdover from his other life.
    There’s a second shot then. It echoes and rolls across the air like thunder.
    The old man lets out a low, raspy moan. “God in heaven.”
    Bernie mutters a prayer under her breath.
    Jay grabs for his wife’s hand, pulling her toward the door to the main cabin, away from the open deck. Bernie yanks her hand free of his, the movement strong and decisive, the force of it caus ing her feet to slide a little on the slick surface of the deck. She steadies herself on the railing, turning to face the old man in the baseball cap. “Sir, I think you’d better turn this thing around.”
    The old man in the baseball cap stares at Bernie, sure she’s not serious. “I can’t,” he says to her and Jay. “The bayou’s too narrow. ’Sides the basin, ain’t no place to turn her around ’til we get back to Allen’s Landing.”
    “Then stop the boat,” Bernie says.
    The old man shoots a quick glance in Jay’s direction, making it clear that he intends to take no instruction from the pregnant woman, not without her husband’s say-so, which only infuriates Bernie. “Stop this boat,” she says again.
    In the end, the old man relents, starting on his own for the captain’s cabin.
    Jay grabs his arm. “Don’t.”
    “Somebody’s in trouble out there, Jay!”
    “There are two people out there, B,” he says. “The girl and who or whatever it is she’s running from.” He’s picturing a street fight or a knock-down, drag-out between lovers or something worse... much, much worse.
    “Leave it alone,” he hears himself say.
    Bernie stares at Jay, her voice hushed. “What is the matter with you?”
    Her disappointment in him, no matter how it cuts, is not the point.
    “Somebody’s shooting out there, B,” he says. “You got me and him on this boat...” he says, pointing to the only other able body on board, a man almost seventy. “And my wife,” Jay adds, lower ing his voice to match hers, trying to get her to see it his way. “I, for one, am not willing to put you or myself at risk to step into some trouble we don’t know the first thing about. We don’t know that girl, don’t know what kind of trouble she brings,” he says, hearing the cynicism in his voice, hating it, but feeling pressed to speak it anyway. The oldest con in the book, he thinks to himself, is the damsel in distress, the girl with the flat tire by the side of the road, the one with a boyfriend waiting in the weeds to jump you as soon as you stop to help. “Just leave it alone,” he says.
    Bernie stares at him for a long, painful moment, squinting around the edges of her eyes, as if she’s trying to place him, someone she used to know. “Oh, Jay,” she say with a sigh.
    “We’ll call the police,” he says, deciding it just then.
    It’s a good plan: clean, simple, logical.
    The old man is sheepish, slow to move, shuffling the ball of his right foot on the deck’s floor. “We ain’t got a city license to run this thing after