Shades

He dismounted the Schwinn and hurried over to the skittering pile. As he approached, Danny realized the tide would come in by the time he rode to Haverstraw and back. If that happened, the crabs would be gone. He needed to get all that he could now, but he had only the single bucket and it wasn’t large enough. He sure wasn’t going to carry an armload of live, angry blue crabs to Haverstraw.

Shit.

He needed a bigger bucket. Or a cooler. Or a backhoe, freight train, tractor trailer. Danny looked around the shore and saw broken glass, cigarette butts, a discarded condom—but nothing useful.

Shit!

Further up the bike path was a small picnic area with unkempt grass around the picnic table and a stone barbeque. The garbage can overflowed with beer bottles, paper plates, and hot dog package wrappers, but he could dump all that and wash the stink out in the river. It would be a bitch dragging the can all the way up to Haverstraw once it was full, but he figured he could manage, if it brought him closer to his dirt bike…and if it took longer than expected and he got home late, who cared? This was worth getting busted for.

Assuming he got paid before being caught.

Bees and ants swarmed the garbage can. Danny upturned it onto the grass and shooed the more persistent bees. He dragged it down toward the pile of crabs and winced. Something stank. Not just the Hudson or the garbage can. This was something else. Like something had died nearby.

Danny plucked the crabs off of each other, avoiding their snapping claws. He felt something moist and spongy on his fingertips. It repulsed him, that single touch. The stench grew stronger. He wiped his hand on his shirt and looked down at the skittering pile. The crabs were crawling on something. His vision blurred when he tried to see what it was. He let his eyes un-focus, and then focused again. Danny carefully snatched away two of the largest crabs and stared into a red mess.

The dead body had no eyes to stare back at him with—indeed, it had no face at all.

Danny didn’t scream, even when a small crab scrambled out of the corpse’s mouth and threatened him with one angrily waving claw. Instead, he stared—surprise, confusion, disbelief. A dead man, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The scavengers had picked off much of the exposed flesh. Raw, red patches had replaced hair and skin. Yellow clumps of fat waved in the shallow water. Between the mass of crabs were glimpses of bone. Danny couldn’t tear his eyes away. He could see into the throat; watched crabs pick at the inside of the chest. They jammed choice clippings of lung tissue into their tiny mouths. Others scurried under the orange jumpsuit.

Above him, the gulls began to shriek again.

He’d found a dead body.

Holy crap! His mind started catching up to the situation. Orange jumpsuit, like the kind they wore in…

Danny glanced across the river. New York’s most infamous prison stared back at him from the other side, white and foreboding and eerily silent. Sing Sing—home of Ol’ Sparky, the electric chair.

There had been an escape yesterday. It was all over the news but he’d paid more attention to the rumors at school. The escaped con, a murderer, was the brother of Mr. Bedrik, Danny’s teacher. Nobody knew how he’d gotten free. It was like he’d vanished from his cell. And the authorities couldn’t find him, either. Nobody could. Not until now. Could this be him? It had to be. How many other dead bodies in prison inmate uniforms were lying on the bank? It had to be Mr. Bedrik’s brother. But it was hard to tell. The corpse’s features looked more like strips of raw bacon than human.

Danny flinched as another crab swatted at him. He had to tell Matt, Ronnie, Chuck, and Jeremy. After they saw it, he would call the cops, but he had to show them first. Otherwise they would never believe him, think he made the whole thing up. But shit!—they were all still at school.

School! Oh, crap.

If he called the cops, he’d have to explain his truancy and what brought him to the river in the first place. If he told them he was selling crabs, they would tell his mom, and if she found out that he had almost enough money for a dirt bike, she would steal the cash and drink it all, leaving him with nothing. And he’d get in trouble for skipping school, too.

In Jeremy’s immortal words, fuck that noise.

So he had two choices. He could either wait until the guys got out of school to show them, or get the hell out of here with his crabs and pretend like it never happened. Maybe the corpse would be safe until then. If so, then he could report the discovery and get the credit. Be on the nightly news. Be the talk of school the next day. Maybe there was a reward, too. The guy was an escaped convict, after all.

If he left now, someone else might find the body and get all the credit.