Free Call Down Thunder by Daniel Finn Page B

say, is that true? My mother cheat and run off, didn’t care nothin ’bout us?’
    ‘Not now.’
    ‘When you goin tell me? You and Theon, how much you keep from us? Everyone else know but we two? You tellin me that?
    ‘No.’
    ‘Everyone think that ’bout her now. Think we got a mother who run with a policeman. Everyone goin say we got that streak. Things bad enough for Mi. What you think this kind of talk
goin do now? Hey. What you think, Tomas. People still goin believe in what she say? People goin give me respect—’
    ‘Tha’s enough! We don’ talk here. You come back out of here.’ He didn’t wait for Reve to answer but turned and headed back towards the village. Reve watched him go.
He wasn’t a dog to trot after him, get a tidbit of knowing when it suited Tomas to throw it his way. He joined Ciele and LoJo.
    Down below them, the skippers were back in their boats, though Pelo’s craft seemed way lower in the water than the others. The sunken powerboat had been dragged up on to the sand and three
men were manhandling the huge outboard engine on to a handcart.
    Pelo called out, ‘What you sellin me, Calde? This boat half full of water.’
    A flashlight played along the boat’s hull and then on to Pelo again; his face looked bloodless and grey in the harsh beam.
    ‘Bail her out.’ A tin sailed down into the boat. ‘She’ll ride high on the way back if you give her speed.’
    ‘I got a choice?’
    The man Moro called Secondo laughed. ‘Everybody got a choice till they stop breathing. You want to stop breathing?’
    Pelo muttered something and then busied himself scooping water from the bilge. He pulled off his shirt and tore it into strips, and used the strips to plug holes in the hull.
    Secondo called out, ‘Time to go.’
    Pelo started the engine; it gave a throaty roar and he raised his hand. One by one the others started up, lines were thrown back on board and the black-hulled boats swung away from the pier in a
wide, creaming curve and headed out to sea, the engines peaking to a howl as the throttles were pushed full down. One boat lagged a little behind the others. Pelo taking it easy, Reve reckoned, but
even his craft quickly disappeared into the dark, leaving phosphorescent lines scratched on the black surface of the sea for a few seconds.
    Señor Moro and his men were already heading for their cars. The rest of the crowd followed. All but Pelo’s wife, and LoJo, who stood by her side.
    Ciele looked like a widow standing on the wall with her son, everyone else gone from her.
    It is a too easy thing, Reve thought, for a family to be pulled apart.
    He thought of Mi down on the beach. She’d be curled up in the car, head covered, not wanting to hear all that thunder, not wanting to see the flames; and Tomas would be up in the shack, a
tin cup of rum in his hand; and then somewhere in the city this shadow person, his mother, living with her policeman who she’d run away with. The taste in his mouth was sour, but when he
tried to spit there was nothing there, just the taste. Shame. That was still there, but his anger had gone.

CHAPTER NINE
    The night was still and the sea hardly moving, as if it was exhausted by all that had happened. The moon was a thin crescent, but the stars were bright and the damp sand
stretched ahead of Reve like a ghostly road into the distance. Sultan trotted along beside him.
    When he had walked back along the wall after everyone else and jumped down on to the beach Sultan had come running from the shack and greeted him like he hadn’t seen him for a week. Reve
knew he would have been hiding all the time there was yelling and noise, and guns going off. He was too smart to be brave – that’s what he told LoJo when he asked how come Sultan never
got in fights like all the other dogs in the village. Reve knew that he too had to be smart, not just run smack into things. He needed to think.
    He stooped and picked up a plastic bottle, added it to the string of