Page 143 of What You Wish For

But all I wanted to do was get Clay out of there.

I started walking toward him, thinking I was going to rescue him somehow—pull him back to the sand where it was safe. “Clay, it’s not safe for you to be here.”

Clay didn’t even look up. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. “Thetide brought him up this far, but it’s going back out now. It’ll be gone by morning.”

I shone my light over toward Alice and she gave me a thumbs-up.

“The police are on their way now,” I said. “They’re bringing your mom, and Babette—”

But Clay was suddenly staring straight at me, looking stricken. “Tell them to keep their sirens off!” he said. It was the first moment I’d seen him stop sawing at the net.

I gave a little shrug. “I’m not sure if we can—”

“Please!” Clay shouted. “Don’t let them run their sirens.” He looked over at Alice.

Alice blinked at him.

“His whole head,” Clay explained urgently, “is a supersonic hearing device. He’s already in distress. A sound like that could kill him.”

Alice nodded, and got back on the phone.

Clay went back to work.

For the first time, I really saw the animal. Its otherworldly gray skin, its deep, black eyes. The blocky shape of its head.

“Wait—Clay, is this a sperm whale?”

“I think so,” Clay said.

“There are sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico?”

Clay sighed. “We’ve already been over this.”

“Is it… a baby?”

“It could be a baby. Or it could be a pygmy sperm whale.”

Wow. “Don’t worry,” I said. “The police will get him fixed up.”

“They need to bring knives to cut this net away,” Clay said. “And they have to hurry.”

“Probably easier to work by the light of day,” I said gently, trying to lay the groundwork for the inevitable moment when the cops dragged Clay away out of the ocean and back to the safety of the beach.

“We can’t wait for daylight. If the tide goes out, he’ll die. Marine animals of this size can’t handle the weight of gravity outside the water. His bones and organs will collapse.”

“But people save whales all the time.”

“No,” Clay said, breaking through a section of net and grabbing another one. “Not this kind of whale. They never make it. They all die.”

“All of them?”

Clay nodded, still sawing at the net. “But,” Clay said, “this might not be a normal stranding. If it’s just the net—if he’s not sick—he might be okay. If we get him back out there fast enough. But if the tide goes out, there’ll be no way we can get him back in the water until the tide comes back in—hours and hours. By then, he’ll be in organ failure.”

“I’m sure we could figure out some way to get him back in the water.”

“Yeah?” Clay challenged, still sawing like crazy at the net. “He probably weighs a thousand pounds. Name one way to drag him back to the ocean that wouldn’t kill him.”

“Bulldozer?” I offered.

---