The Little Friend

He became aware of the kid, craftily, trying to ease out of his grip. Sharply he caught her up again, digging his fingers deep into the flesh of her neck so that she yelped out.

“Listen here, prissy,” he said. “You speak up right quick and tell me who you are and maybe I won’t drownd you.”

It was a lie, and it sounded like a lie. From her ashy face, he could tell that she knew that, too. It made him feel bad because she was just a kid but there wasn’t any other way.

“I’ll let you go,” he said, convincingly he thought.

To his annoyance, the girl puffed out her cheeks and settled down into herself even further. He jerked her into the light so that he could see her better and a beam of sunlight fell across her white forehead in a clammy streak. Warm as it was, she looked half-frozen; he could practically hear her teeth clacking.

Again he shook her, so hard his shoulder hurt—but though the tears streamed down her face, her lips were clamped tight and she didn’t make a sound. Then, suddenly, from the corner of his eye, Danny caught sight of something pale floating in the water: little white blobs, two or three of them, half-sunk and washing in the water near his chest.

He drew back—frog eggs?—and the next instant screamed: a scream that astonished him, that boiled up high and scalding from his very bowels.

“Jesus Christ!” He stared at what he was seeing, unable to believe it, and then up at the top of the ladder, at the shreds of black plastic hanging in ribbons from the top rung. It was a nightmare, it wasn’t real: the drugs spoilt, his fortune gone. Farish dead, for nothing. Murder One if they caught him. Jesus.

“You done this? You?”

The kid’s lips moved.

Danny spotted a waterlogged bubble of black plastic floating on the water, and a howl broke from his throat like he’d stuck his hand in the fire. “What’s this? What’s this?” he screamed, forcing her head to the water.

Strangled reply, the first words she’d spoken: “A garbage bag.”

“What you done to it? Huh? Huh?” The hand tightened on Harriet’s neck. Down—quick—he plunged her head to the water.

————

Harriet had just enough time to breathe (horrified, eyes starting at the dark water) before he pushed her under. Bubbles charged white before her face. Soundlessly, she fought, amidst phosphorescence, pistol shots and echoes. In her mind, she saw a locked suitcase clatter along a riverbed, thump thump, thump thump, swept by the current, rolling end over end over smooth mucky stones, and Harriet’s heart was a struck piano key, the same deep note thumped sharp and urgent, as a vision like scratched sulfur flared behind her closed eyelids, a white Lucifer-streak leaping in the dark—

Pain tore through Harriet’s scalp as splash

, up he jerked her, up by the roots of the hair. She was deafened by coughs; the din and echo overwhelmed her; he was shouting words she couldn’t understand and his face was stony red, swollen with rage and fearful to see. Retching, choking, she beat the water with her arms and kicked out for something to brace herself against, and when her toe struck the wall of the tank, she drew a full, satisfying breath. The relief was heavenly, indescribable (magical chord, harmony of the spheres); in she breathed, in and in until he shrieked and pushed her head down and the water crashed in her ears again.

————

Danny gritted his teeth and held on. Fat ropes of pain twisted deep in his shoulders, and the screeching and bouncing of the ladder had broken him out in a sweat. Against his hand, her head bobbed light and unstable, a balloon that might slide from beneath his hand at any moment, and the kicking and churning of her body made him seasick. No matter how he tried to brace himself, or settle into his position, he couldn’t get comfortable; dangling off the ladder, with nothing solid under him, he kept kicking his legs around in the water and trying to step on something that wasn’t there. How long did it take to drown somebody? It was an ugly job and twice as ugly if you were doing it with only one arm.

A mosquito whined infuriatingly around his ear. He’d been jerking his head from side to side, trying to avoid it, but it seemed to sense, the fucker, that his hands weren’t free to swat it.

Mosquitos everywhere: everywhere. They’d finally found him, and they understood he wasn’t moving. Maddeningly, luxuriously, the stingers sank into his chin, his neck, the trembling flesh of his arms.