Shine - Lauren Myracle [99]
If I’d looked up two seconds later, I wouldn’t have seen. If I’d ducked back under, if I’d let the dark water hide me . . .
It didn’t matter, did it?
Beef was shooting at us, and then he wasn’t. He struggled with Christian. His hand flew up, and the momentum made him take several steps backward, to the lip of the cliff. His spine arched. His arms pinwheeled. He cried out, a stunned and terrible howl.
Patrick once took a nasty fall on the steps outside our high school. Someone tripped him, maybe Tommy. The smack of his head against concrete made my insides curl.
The sound of Beef hitting the rocky ledge was a thousand times worse. It was as awful as the crack of a bat against the skull of someone you loved, I imagined. Maybe more so.
There was a great, long stillness. The world was suspended. Then Robert was yanking my arm, wanting to know why I’d screamed. I stared at him, unaware that I had.
“And why do you keep pushing me under the water?” he demanded. “I don’t like that. I don’t like being dunked.”
“I know,” I told him. “I won’t anymore.” I locked my eyes on his so he wouldn’t glance over his shoulder and see my brother retrieving Beef’s pistol. It had flown from Beef’s outstretched fingers, but not far enough. Christian wiped it off with his shirt, then flung it into the middle of the swimming hole, where the water was the deepest. He knelt to gather the bullet casings. He threw them down, too.
Robert turned at the sound of the splashes, but the water had already swallowed everything up.
“I’m sorry I dunked you,” I told Robert. “I guess I was just scared.”
He considered staying mad, but he must have decided it was too much work. He wiped the snot from his nose and said, “Well . . . I guess I was, too.” A more fragile expression furrowed his brow. “But you saved me.”
“Yeah, and you know what that means?” I said. “It means you owe me.”
He laughed.
Bluebirds called from the trees. Water bugs sploshed. Christian climbed carefully from Suicide Rock to the ledge below, stepping around the thing that was there. He sprang off the jumping rock and landed cleanly in the river.
He swam to us, and when he reached the log, he shook his hair out of his eyes that way boys do.
“Where’s Beef?” Robert asked him. His bony shoulders tensed. “That wasn’t nice, what he did. He was playing mean.”
Christian looked at me, and in his eyes I saw what saving us had cost him. Beef was Christian’s friend, just as Patrick was Beef’s friend, and more. We lived in a small town. Almost everybody was a friend, if you let them be.
Robert shook Christian’s shoulder. “Where is he? Is he up there still?”
Christian swallowed. “He . . . he . . .”
“He slipped, honey,” I told Robert.
The last time I was sweet with him, he threw a fit. This time, he said, “On the rock?”
I nodded. “You and I made it. We were lucky.” My voice grew thick. “Beef wasn’t.”
Robert looked up at Suicide Rock. Then he dropped his gaze to the deadly ledge below. From where we were, there was nothing to see, which was a blessing.
“Was that the sound I heard?” he said.
“Yeah.”
His eyes brimmed with tears. Mine did, too.
From the highway, we heard sirens. Jason must have gotten the Malibu turned around. I could just imagine him pushing it down the road, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the open door, then jumping in and popping the clutch to the engine. He must have called for help as soon as his phone got service.
We swam to the pebbled beach of the swimming hole. Sheriff Doyle and his brother, Deputy Doyle, tramped down to us, and we told them what happened.
“Beef fell,” Robert said. “He was being all crazy, and then he fell.”
“Being crazy?” Deputy Doyle said. “Meaning what?”
“You know Beef,” I said. “Always being a goofball, always taking risks.” My throat tightened. “Always having to be the life of the party.”
A shadow crossed Sheriff Doyle’s face. He and Roy were drinking buddies.