Those Who Wish Me Dead

Michael Koryta Those Who Wish Me Dead

Copyright © 2014 by Michael Koryta

This one is for Ryan Easton-from Stout Creek to Republic Peak, with a couple decades and a lot of good miles in between.

Part One: Hidden Witness

1

On the last day of Jace Wilson’s life, the fourteen-year-old stood on a quarry ledge staring at cool, still water and finally understood something his mother had told him years before: Trouble might come for you when you showed fear, but trouble doubled-down when you lied about being afraid. At the time, Jace hadn’t known exactly what she was talking about. Today he did.

It was a sixty-five-foot drop from Rooftop to the water, and Jace had a hundred dollars riding on it-a hundred dollars that he didn’t have, of course-all because he’d shown a trace of fear. It was a stupid bet, sure, and he wouldn’t have made it if the girls hadn’t been there, listening to the whole thing and laughing. But they had been, and so now it wasn’t just a hundred bucks, it was a hell of a lot more than that, and he had two days to figure out how to pull it off.

Not everyone who tried Rooftop succeeded. They’d pulled bodies out of the quarry before, and those were older kids, college kids, maybe even divers, he didn’t know. He was certain none of them had been terrified of heights, though.

“What did you get yourself into,” he whispered, looking behind him at the cut in the wire fence that led out of the old Easton Brothers quarry and into his yard. His house backed up to the abandoned quarry property, and Jace spent hours there, exploring and swimming-and staying far from the ledges. The one thing he did not do in the quarry was dive. He didn’t even like to get too close to the drop-offs; if he edged out just for a quick glance down, his head would spin and his legs would go weak and he’d have to shuffle backward as fast as possible. Earlier in the day, though, all of his hours alone in the quarry had provided the lie he needed. When Wayne Potter started giving him shit about being scared of heights because Jace hadn’t wanted to climb the ladder that some maintenance worker had left leaning against the side of the school, allowing access to the roof, Jace had blown it off by saying that he didn’t need to climb a ladder to prove he wasn’t scared of heights because he did quarry dives all the time, and he was sure Wayne had never done that.

Of course Wayne called him on the bluff. Of course Wayne mentioned Rooftop. Of course Wayne had an older brother who would take them out there over the weekend.

“You’re an idiot,” Jace told himself aloud, walking down a gravel path littered with old cigarette butts and beer cans, out toward one of the wide slabs in the old quarry that overlooked a pool he was certain was deep enough for a dive. Start small, that was his plan. He’d get this jump down, which was probably fifteen feet, and then move on to the next pool, where the jump was a good bit higher, thirty feet at least. He looked across the water and felt dizzy already. Rooftop was more than twice that high?

“Just try it,” he said. Talking to himself felt good, out here alone, it gave him a little added confidence. “Just try it. You can’t kill yourself falling into the water. Not from here.”

Still, he was simply pacing the ledges, giving himself a good three feet of buffer, as if his legs might just buckle and send him sliding down the stone on his face, leave him floating in the water with a broken neck.

“Pussy,” he said, because that was what they’d called him earlier in the day, in front of the girls, and it had made him angry enough-almost-to start up the ladder. Instead, he’d used the lonely quarry to defend himself. In retrospect, he probably should have climbed the ladder.

Thunder cracked and echoed back off the high stone walls and the water, sounding deeper and more dangerous down in the quarry than it would have up on the road. The wind had been blowing hard ever since he got out of school, and it was really gusting now, swirling stone dust, and out of the western sky advanced a pair of pure black clouds, trapped lightning flashing within them.

Bad time to be in the water, Jace thought, and then he latched on to that idea because it gave him an excuse not to jump. “Wayne Potter is not worth getting electrocuted over.”

And so he started back, was almost all the way to the hole in the fence before he stopped.

Wayne Potter wasn’t going away. Come Saturday he’d be there with his brother, and they’d take Jace out to Rooftop and watch him piss down his leg and they’d laugh their butts off. Then Wayne would go back to school Monday and tell the story, assuming he hadn’t called everyone first. Or, worse yet, brought them to watch. What if he brought the girls?

It was that idea that finally gave him some resolve. Jumping was frightening, but not jumping in front of the girls? That was scarier still, and the price was higher.

“You’d better jump it,” he said. “Come on, coward. Just go jump it.”

He walked back fast, because dawdling only allowed the fear to build, so he wanted to go quick, get it over and done so that he knew he could do it. Once that start had been achieved, the rest would be easy. Just a matter of adding height, that was all. He kicked his shoes off, then pulled his T-shirt and jeans off and left them in a pile on the rocks.

As thunder boomed again, he squeezed his nose closed with his thumb and index finger-a baby thing, yes, but he was alone and didn’t care-and then spoke again.

“I’m no pussy.”

Since he was holding his nose, his voice came out high and girlish. He took one last look at the water below, shut his eyes, bent at the knees, and sprang off the ledge.

It wasn’t much of a drop. For all of his worrying, it ended fast, and it ended pain-free, except of course for the jarring shock of cold water. He let himself sink to the bottom-water didn’t bother him in the least, he loved to swim, just didn’t like to dive-and waited for the feel of smooth, cool stone.

It didn’t come. Instead, his foot touched something strange, an object that was somehow soft and hard at the same time, and he jerked back in fright, because whatever it was, it didn’t belong. He opened his eyes, blinking against the sting of the water, and saw the dead man.

He was sitting almost upright, his back against the stone, his legs stretched out in front of him. Head tilted sideways, like he was tired. Blond hair floating in the current Jace had created, strands rising off the top of the dead man’s head to dance in the dark water. His upper lip was curled like he was laughing at someone, a mean laugh, mocking, and Jace could see his teeth. There was a rope around his ankles and it was attached to an old dumbbell.

For a few seconds, Jace floated there above him, suspended not five feet away. Maybe it was because he was seeing it through the dim water, but he felt separated from the scene, felt as if the corpse down here had to be something imagined. It was only when he realized why the man’s head was leaning to the side that the terror he should have felt initially overcame him. The man’s throat was cut, leaving a gap so wide that water flowed through it like an open channel. At the sight, Jace began a frantic, clumsy churn back up. He was no more than fifteen feet down but still he was certain he wouldn’t make the top, would drown down there, his body lying forever beside the other corpse.

When he broke the surface he was already trying to shout for help, and the result was awful; he inhaled water and choked on it and felt as if he’d drown, was unable to get air into his lungs. He finally got a gasping breath in and spit out the water that was in his mouth.