Dead Low Tide (27 page)

Then I looked up.

There stood the bartender in his white shirt and black vest, bent to the window for how big he was. Coburn, who’d tackled the chip-cage girl, then’d spat words in her ear.

He was smiling, nodding.

“Unlock the door,” Jessup said, and I reached to the dash, pressed the button.

Because I wasn’t here. I wasn’t here.

The dome light came on, and Coburn leaned in, still smiling.

He looked at Jessup, and spoke, friendly words out of him. It wasn’t anything long, these words from him, just a handful of syllables that flowed out of him as calm as any of us would say hello to a friend.

I didn’t understand them.

They sounded familiar, sounded for a moment like Spanish. But not. These were sounds that came from back in his throat, hashed up and shimmed in. But still only a handful of syllables, and I thought in this moment I’d heard wrong, that it was me with the problem.

Because I wasn’t here.

I could feel Jessup nod, then words from him right here beside me, words in that same calm tone, and with those same hashed sounds.

Wallay koom sallem
, it seemed he said, though I had no idea. They were sounds, syllables, a friendly greeting. That’s all I knew.

Coburn looked at me, the smile gone.

“Situation as determined,” he said, and in the instant I saw him raise his fist and reach across the seat toward me, inside just that moment before the world went black, it seemed a remarkable thing, how suddenly I understood what he’d said, how these words were as clear and available to me as some kid speaking them to me on the tracks at the end of Marie as he handed me the communal Colt 45.

These words were English, it came to me at the same moment as his fist, and those others were Arabic.

Water moved against the hull. Wind touched at my face and in my hair, only enough to let me know we were moving, that we were going somewhere. An outboard motor droned, just easing us along.

I felt the slow nod of it all, of everything. I felt the boat, and the water, and the air, and the calm.

I was home: in a boat, out on water.

“Might’ve broken his cheekbone,” a voice in close said loud, and slammed through me, exploded in my head.

My left eye hurt. But more than that, more than pain. It was a kind of white light blossoming in me, filling me, and then it wasn’t only my eye, but my ear, and down to my jaw, the laser white pain of it suddenly down into my lungs too and pulling even deeper. I tried at a breath, a good one, but felt my mouth taped closed, the air in through my nose another shallow nothing of a breath.

My hands were together and behind me, my wrists bound tight. I
knew I was sitting up, my legs straight out in front of me, my shoulders against the hull. I knew these things.

But my hands wouldn’t move, or my legs. Nothing, and I tried at another breath in, felt the tape pull at my lips and jaw and below my ears and at my hair, all the way around my head.

And then, like it was some ragged curtain rising, my right eye opened.

A shadow squatted a couple feet away from me, haloed by the night sky: Prendergast.

I was in the bow of a boat, nothing more than a good-sized bass boat with the platforms stripped out. Just beyond Prendergast I could see two others sitting across from me, black shadows huddled against the hull on that side, legs drawn to their chests. Just lumps, dark masses against the lighter gray of the hull.

“Wish I’d hit him harder, killed him outright,” another voice said, away and to my right. “Save us the trouble.”

I worked to turn my head, to see who’d said this, because I hadn’t yet recalled it had been a big tanned bartender who’d hit me. Because a part of me, even inside the white sear of pain and the hard jolt of words, even inside seeing this shadow squatting beside me and knowing who it was, and knowing too that the shadows across from me were Tabitha, and Five—even inside all of that, a part of me was still out in a boat on water. A part of me was still home, and I wanted to know what this interruption was, the scope and breadth of it, and how I might banish it. I wanted to know how I could get back to that calm, that nod through water in the someplace else I’d been.

I turned my head a couple inches toward that second voice, the shock of pain at my eye suddenly sharper for it, then gave in to the move altogether, let my head loll that way.

There stood another shadow against the night sky, this one behind the console only a few feet away, the wheel in his hands. I could see the white arms of his shirt, the rest of him black for that vest.

Oh yes. Him: Coburn.

Prendergast’s shadow clicked on a flashlight, and light stabbed into me, a dagger deep in my head. I squeezed my eye shut, the pain in me ten times bigger in just that move.

“He’s awake,” Prendergast said, and the flashlight clicked off.

And then I kicked at him, swept my leg low along the deck with everything I had toward that voice. I swung my leg at him, the move without plan or measure, simply what I knew I had to do, because here was the sudden recollection in me of Jessup hitting Tabitha, and of Coburn’s fist fast at me, and of the groan of air out of Five in the seat behind me, and of Unc being hauled away by Harmon.

Here was the bright memory of Unc telling me what Prendergast had done to my mom.

My leg hit him hard, and I felt contact just above my ankle, felt his leg bend in, his own ankle folding away. I opened my eye, saw he’d stood up after he turned off the flashlight, but now that shadow was twisting, falling backward.

He let out a sharp piece of sound, tried to gain his balance, and I drew my legs up fast, out of the way as he sort of hung there in mid-collapse. Something fell out of his hand and hit the hull—the flashlight—and then he was full on his way down, his legs giving out beneath him, and he slammed to the deck.

But he was up on his elbows soon as he hit, whispered loud, “Son of a bitch!” through gritted teeth.

I heard a squeal of sound from the shadow on the right across from me: Tabitha. I saw the other shadow push away with his feet, try to jam himself into the hull as far from Prendergast as he could: Five.

I heard a dark and heavy grunt from somewhere to my right, back at the stern.

Unc.

And I wondered: Why hadn’t I listened to him, when he’d told me to stay put?

Had he known Jessup was in on anything?

And what was the all of this, anyway?

If I’d stayed, it would only be Unc here, and not Five, and most important not Tabitha.

But Jessup had jumped in, and I’d listened to him instead.

Jessup.

I tried again to turn that way, toward the console and Coburn, to see if I could somehow spot Unc back there, but the move made the pain in my eye blast everything to pieces, a knife prying open an oyster jammed just under my skin, so that I lost my breath for it, felt my stomach spasm and go tight, the air in me out hard through my nose, the tape around my head a sudden band of metal cinched tight.

Here was Coburn, stepping around the console, and moving toward me, and here now was his foot, and I closed my eye just as he kicked me in the stomach.

I
came around, still on a boat, still with an outboard droning, still with water coursing beneath me across a hull.

But there was nothing about this that was anything like home. Not now.

I was on my side, my knees drawn up near to my chest, the deck cold beneath my right cheek. My stomach felt hard somehow, like it was made of concrete, but with none of the strength of concrete. Just dull and thick and pointless, buried somewhere inside it another pain I didn’t even care to think on, a pain different from that of my eye and jaw and ear. My stomach felt hard, felt over and done with.

I tried to breathe in again, but the air was even shallower now.

“Should’ve killed
all
of them on the spot,” Coburn said.

“We’ve got the plan,” Prendergast said, and it sounded as though they were both back at the console. But Prendergast’s words came out squeezed and tight, his teeth still clenched. “We stay on the plan.”

I opened my eye, saw from where I lay Coburn still at the console. To the left of him sat Prendergast on the gunwale, a hand down at his ankle and rubbing it, and I wondered where Jessup was, and what had happened to Stanhope and Harmon, too. And the chip-cage girl,
Tammy, who for a second seemed maybe not to have anything to do with any of this.

But then I remembered it was Coburn who’d knocked her down, nearly tackled her once she’d tried to run away, then whispered hard those words in her ear, Five climbing back into the Range Rover to tell us it sounded like Spanish, what Coburn’d been saying to her. And Stanhope hauling her away right alongside Coburn.

She was one of them too.

But who were they?

And where were we going?

I could see Prendergast now, that dark silk shirt he had on, and khaki pants. I could see the barest features on his face, a grimace, that haircut, and I could see too Coburn, both hands on the wheel right over there, right over there, his eyes straight ahead.

Because here was light again, its sudden presence the same kind of surprise as when those cruisers had pulled up out front of the Whaley place, and I’d been able to see Tabitha’s face in the dark, her smile, her eyes, the way her chin curved just so.

I looked at Tabitha across from me, maybe four feet away and still sitting up against the hull. Her hands were behind her, too, her eyes closed, her chin high, around her head at the jaw a gray band of duct tape. Leaned hard against her was Five, his head on her shoulder, his face down so that his chin touched his chest, his shoulders shaking. He was crying.

I could see all this, the light nothing bright but here all the same, seeped-in and artificial, and I heard a quick double-click of sound from above us, heavy and hollow, here and gone.

And now from behind me and arcing across the sky, moving slow and filling for a moment everything I could see above us, was the underside of a bridge, and here was another hollow double-click: a car across the joints. It was a low bridge, maybe fifteen feet above us, and now as we passed beneath it I could see the metal cage of girders above the roadway, and knew it was the Cainhoy Bridge over the
Wando River, and that the light had to be from Detyens Shipyard just ahead, the small commercial yard where there were always a couple trawlers being worked on. Light had to be coming in off that, and from the Kangaroo mini-mart that sat at the top of the boat ramp beside the foot of the bridge.

The Wando here was maybe three hundred yards wide, the bridge low and hugging it all the way across. A peaceful place, a bridge that marked in my mind where the development in Mount Pleasant stopped, across it Highway 41 launching a straight shot out into the Francis Marion Forest, the all of Mount P and poker parties and Towne Centre and fabulous houses nothing but somebody else’s dream. Once you crossed the Cainhoy Bridge and were headed north out on 41, there was nothing but woods for thirty-five miles, all the way to the Santee River. A stretch of the world I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life driving down, if it meant I didn’t have to be here.

The bridge disappeared behind us, and I knew we were heading toward the Cooper, the Wando and Cooper meeting at the bottom edge of Daniel Island maybe a half hour away. Whatever boat we were on, I figured they’d had to put in at Paradise public landing, not but two or three miles from Hamlet Square and the closest one to the development. And though I couldn’t figure why we were in a boat and not in one or the other of the vehicles that bogus chase had involved, I let myself imagine the route we’d take home from here, how we’d round the thin beach at that bottom edge of Daniel Island, then turn to the right and head up the Cooper past the Naval Shipyard, then under the Don Holt Bridge, that same beam-and-girder skeleton we’d driven over on our way to poker. Then past all the lights of the paper mill, and finally to the mouth of Goose Creek, and on in to our house, where our dock butted up against that silver arc of water.

An idea that seemed stupid, certainly: we weren’t going home. We were going somewhere to die.

I tried at a breath again, made myself take in what I could slowly,
carefully. My stomach still felt hard, that ache still buried deep and waiting to spring from where it hid.

“You may have a plan,” Coburn said then. “But I have obedience. The plan we share is from Allah almighty, and you are only a tool within it, while
ibada
gives me purpose. You are doing nothing Allah almighty hasn’t designed to his glory. But I am glorifying him. I am—”

“Would you just shut the fuck up?” Prendergast shot out, still with his teeth clenched. He sat up straight, both hands to the gunwale now, and looked at Coburn. “We have the plan, you know what the plan is, you’ll comply with the plan.”

“The only reason I work with you is because the plan serves the greater good,” Coburn said. “Surah eight twelve, I am with you: Give firmness to the Believers. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” He looked at Prendergast, a quick glance, then faced forward. “This is my plan. But I should have killed them all on the spot. It wouldn’t have mattered. We’re as close as we are. This time tomorrow—”