“ Can I help you?” He recognized the accent from the phone last night.
“ I’m dead dog tired and I need a room,” Storm said, putting on a smile.
“ Usually we’re booked for the summer, but we had a cancellation yesterday, so you’re in luck. One hundred and twenty a night.” The woman was older than God and her face was covered in rouge.
Storm dropped six twenties on the counter and jumped back when a large cockroach scurried over the bills.
“ Will I be sharing the room with his relatives?”
“ This isn’t the Hilton.” The rouge-faced woman scooped up his money, without asking for ID and handed him a key. “Room twelve, down the hall.” She didn’t ask why he had no bags, but said instead, “You’ll need a bathing suit if you want to go down the river.”
“ Where can I get one?”
“ Sporting goods store across the street.”
Storm thanked her and made his way to his room. The air conditioner didn’t work and he suspected that was the reason for the cancellation. He opened the sliding door and stepped out onto a fenced patio. The room next door had a makeshift clothes line with wet towels and bathing suits hanging on it. He reached over and took a black suit that looked like it might fit.
He was about to slide the door shut and take a shower when he heard a young girl’s voice call out, “Hurry up, Danny.”
He went out on the patio and looked over the fence. A young redhead in a bikini that matched her green eyes was loading the biggest inner tube he’d ever seen on the back of a fully restored ’65 Impala convertible. Another girl was rolling a similar tube toward the car. She was blond, thin, and looked like she’d just stepped off the cover of Vogue. And then he saw Danny Morrow, with both arms wrapped around a tube.
“ Where’s Ronny?” the redhead asked.
“ Bathroom,” Morrow answered. “We’ll have to wait.”
Storm tore his clothes off, jumped into the stolen bathing suit, grabbed a tiny hotel towel and started for his car. But he tripped over a cooler in the hall, landing on the seedy carpet with several cold beers.
“ Hey,” a young man complained. He was carrying a dive tank to the room across the hall. The corridor was littered with his things, scuba gear, a giant inner tube, a suitcase and the spilled cooler.
“ Sorry.” Storm pushed himself from the floor.
“ Why don’t you watch where you’re going? You spilled my beer and ruined the ice.” The boy had an athletic body and an attitude.
“ I said I was sorry,” Storm repeated.
“ Yeah, well sorry doesn’t quite cut it, does it?”
“ Here, let me help you with this stuff.” Storm picked up the beer and put it back in the cooler. Then he carried the cooler into the boy’s room.
“ I can do it!” the boy said.
“ No, I spilled the ice, the least I can do is help you load this stuff into your room and buy you another bag.” He went back to the hallway, picked up the wetsuit and weight belt, carried them into the boy’s room and dropped them on one of the sagging beds. The boy followed with the suitcase. Storm closed the door after him, picked up the scuba tank and brought it down on the boy’s head
There wasn’t any blood.
And now Storm had an inner tube, too.
He had just finished stuffing the tube into the back seat and was getting into the car when Morrow’s friend joined the group. Either I’m a fast killer, he thought, or that boy’s a slow shitter.
Morrow started the convertible and put a tape in the cassette player. Storm heard Bob Dylan, backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, belting out Positively Fourth Street and his blood ran hot. The son of a bitch was playing a bootleg cassette. The son of a bitch was going to die.
He followed them through the small town to a wooded campsite. He stayed behind as they entered the campground, entering only after they were parked and were unloading their car. He parked far enough away that he could watch without being noticed.
The park was full of college kids, waiting in line to jump into the water with their tubes. The slow current carried them down the river. Many of the kids had a smaller tube with a cooler full of beer tied on to the larger one they rode in. It was one giant party.
He saw two men with scuba gear slip into the river and he smiled, remembering the dead boy in the room across the hall. The snot nosed bastard had it coming. It wasn’t Storm’s fault. His attitude killed him.
“ Scuba diving?” Storm heard Danny Morrow say.
“ They go along the bottom and gather up beer cans,” his friend Ron said.
“ They get paid for that?”
“ No. Every summer guys into scuba go down the river and every now and then they pop up and scare the girls. They usually make one or two trips gathering up the cans.”
Storm hadn’t been under in years, but he still remembered how. It was like riding a bike.
He watched the group as they headed for the wooden landing and the river. Morrow’s friend dropped his tube into the water, then climbed down the ladder after it. The two women, younger, were more daring. They threw their tubes in and jumped after them, squealing as they hit the cold water. Morrow was the last in. He went down the ladder with his tube in hand. Storm watched as he slipped into the tube at the foot of the ladder-buttocks in the center, legs draped over one side of the giant donut and resting his back over the other without falling into the water.
“ Didn’t even get wet,” he said.
Storm watched them drift away with the current, then he followed Morrow’s example, climbing down the ladder one handed, with the tube in the other. At the last second he put the tube in the moving water and let go of the ladder aiming his buttocks for the tire’s center. He was a big man and he got wet as he splashed into his target and he enjoyed it.
He paddled against the current, so that the four young people slowly drifted away. Within a few minutes they floated around a bend up ahead and were out of sight. He had no desire to stay with them any longer. He only wanted to learn the way of the river.
Every other minute he was passed by a group of college kids, the smallest consisting of two people, a pair of young lovers, and the largest, a group of about fifteen boys and girls laughing and drinking beer. So early in the morning and so many people, he could imagine the zoo the river would become in an hour or so, when the sun burned off the early morning cloud cover.
He lay back in the tube and watched the clouds go by. Convinced there would be no opportunity to get at Danny Morrow on this trip, he decided to relax and enjoy and the ride.
He studied the backyards of the large shaded Southern homes that jutted up against the riverbank. Places where kids grew up sheltered from the violence of modern America. He watched children swinging from a tree rope into the river. Their laughter and squeals of delight stabbed at his heart and he cursed. There had been no happy home when he had been a child.
He spotted a small pool of still water where two men were fishing from a rubber raft. He paddled over to them.
“ Fishing any good?”
“ In the morning, but once the river fills up it’s slow going,” one of the fishermen said.
“ The water here always this still?”
“ Unless it rains. When the river is up, the current reaches the banks.”
Storm looked across the river and noticed that the man was right. The areas by the riverbank were relatively still.
“ Hey, mister, you going down the chute?” a young boy, about ten, floating by asked.
“ I guess so.”
“ You ever been down it before?”
“ No.” Storm waved to the fishermen and paddled back out into the current with the boy.