Dead Low Tide (31 page)

Unc was on his knees ten yards away in the grass, breathing hard. Beside him, on his back, lay Coburn.

Jessup’d shot him. Jessup.

He’d saved me, shot Coburn just as he was about to shoot me.

To the left and a few feet from Coburn stood Five. He was trembling, his hands still behind his back, mouth still taped over. He was looking down at Coburn, his eyebrows sharp together, in his eyes the wild look of fear.

And past them, his back to us and maybe ten yards out from
the end of that cordgrass path, stood Jessup, his gun still out and pointed.

At Prendergast, who stood in the bow of the boat, lit just as clear as the rest of Dupont’s backyard, with Tabitha’s head in a choke hold, his gun at her temple.

“No!” I shouted, and rolled to my knees, tried to stand.

Mom, kneeling beside me, pressed down on my shoulders, held me in place, and Jessup called out, “Please put your weapon down, sir.” He took another step toward them, called out, “We’re all here. You’re zeroed in, sir. It’s over. Sir.”

Even from here, twenty yards away, I could see the charged look in Prendergast’s eyes, his mouth open, the gun tight to Tabitha’s head. And I could see Tabitha’s eyes too, squinted down near to shut, her forehead furrowed sharp, the quick shiver of breaths in and out of her.

I tried to stand. I tried.

But it was Mom who stood, right here beside me, and I watched her walk away from me, and toward Jessup.

Her back was to me, and she moved past Five, still trembling, then past Coburn’s body without a moment’s pause. She didn’t even look at Unc still on his knees as she walked down the lawn, and now she was almost to Jessup, still with his gun out and pointed at Prendergast and Tabitha.

And now I saw her reach behind her and up into the bottom of the white blouse she had on, saw her hand work a second, and pull from there her gun.

A Beretta subcompact.

“Say it,” she said loud. “Say what you did,” she said, and moved past Jessup a few feet, then stopped.

She squared up to the boat, the gun in both hands: perfect form.

“You got to be kidding me,” Prendergast said, and shot out a laugh. “You got to be fucking kidding me,” and he cinched down tighter in just that moment on Tabitha, whose eyes closed altogether. Prendergast
shook his head hard once, blinked, tried at a smile. “Is this a joke?”

“Mrs. Dillard, you need to—” Jessup started, but then a voice cut in from somewhere in the trees to my left, heavy and dark and no one I’d ever heard before: “Put down your weapon, Commander.”

Prendergast looked up quick, squinted at the light as though he could see through it to whoever this was.

“There’s others I know of,” Prendergast said loud. “There’s others out there. Other cells.” He paused, swallowed, scanned the trees. “You make me some guarantees and we can talk.”

“Say it!” Mom nearly shouted now, the gun out and right on him. “You tell them all who you are! You tell them!”

“What in the fuck?” Prendergast said, and looked down at Mom, shook his head once more, like he couldn’t believe she was really there. Like this wasn’t a piece of what was happening right here, this moment.

Like what he’d done so very long ago could ever matter to anyone involved. Least of all him.

He yanked Tabitha up off her feet a moment, nestled his head right down next to hers. His eyebrows were together, mouth open in disbelief at this woman, there with a gun.

“What do you want?” he said. “You want me to kill this bitch over what happened forty years ago?” He paused, shook his head again, then looked up, scanned the trees. “You going to dare me to kill a prize Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command recruit,” he yelled, then looked back at Mom, “because Gloria Deedham couldn’t take someone shitting on her porch and kills herself?”

“Commander,” the voice called out, and I heard Jessup, still with his gun out and pointed at Prendergast, say, “Mrs. Dillard.”

“Say it!”
Mom screamed, and it seemed her arms were out even stiffer now.

“Fuck you and your peashooter,” he said. “You’re a piece of trash and always will be.” He leaned toward Mom, his head away from the
crook at Tabitha’s neck, and for an instant Tabitha leaned away from him, the barrel of his gun no longer at her temple. “So I fucked you when you were passed out in a trailer a hundred years ago. So I—”

“Now,” Jessup said, and I saw Prendergast’s forehead burst, the shot from somewhere else.

The world was silent a moment. Nothing moved.

Mom stood with the gun out, as did Jessup.

Tabitha still leaned away, her eyes still squinted shut above the band of duct tape at her mouth.

Five still trembled, and Unc, not ten feet from me and still on his knees, took in a breath.

And Prendergast, his eyes open and mouth open too, hung in the air a moment, before him a mist of red mixed with bits of matter like a cold breath out in the frozen depths of hell. In this same instant his arms fell limp from Tabitha, and he collapsed into the hull.

Mom dropped the gun in the next moment, and I saw her look at her arms, the spray of blood on her, and then she screamed, Jessup beside her and holding her, and now here was a sailor kneeling beside me in blue and black and gray digital camo, Kevlar and helmet, an M4 on his shoulder.

Harmon.

He nodded at me, and I saw in his gloved hands what looked like nothing more than pruning shears. He reached behind me, cut off in a second the Zip Cuffs, then snipped the duct tape at the back of my neck.

Then he stood, went to Unc, did the same thing, but helped him peel the tape away from his mouth. He patted Unc’s back once, said something to him, then went to Five and did it again.

And now here were more sailors, a swarm of them in from the dark beyond the trees and into this light they’d brought in themselves, lights off the back of four or five MRAPs backed up on either side of the house and hidden behind bushes and trees, all these sailors in BDUs and helmets and Kevlar and carrying M4s, and I watched
while Unc finally stood, and while Five turned from Coburn’s body, around it now a cordon of sailors, and dropped to his knees, touched his face to the grass. Still he wept.

“Huger?” Unc called. He’d lost his Braves cap in all this, a suspender down off one shoulder. Somewhere, too, was his walking stick, but not anywhere here.

Beyond him, down at the boat, I could see sailors standing with Mom, a blanket already across her shoulders. And sailors were up in the boat, helping Tabitha out of it now, the tape away from her mouth and cuffs off, and sobbing as she stepped down off the hull, sailors helping her the whole way.

And I saw come out of the trees, there to my right down at the waterline of the yard, yet one more sailor, and saw at the same moment he emerged Jessup peel away from the sailors surrounding Mom and Tabitha, start toward him.

The sailor had a rifle, different than the others. A sniper rifle: long barrel, thick scope.

The two met, nodded at each other, and the sailor reached up, slipped off his helmet.

Master-at-Ahms Stanhope.

I closed my eye, and saw a woman named Ellen smiling at him, her murdered for such a dishonorable act.

“Right here,” I finally answered Unc, “I’m right here,” though the words didn’t sound like me. They sounded like someone older, like someone sick and frail had said them.

I could open my eyes later, I knew. I could see things then.

But for now I kept the one that worked closed, and I tried to breathe, and tried. Unc stood next to me now, I could feel, and said, “You all right?”

Though I couldn’t see him, I knew his hand was out and looking for me. He didn’t know I was sitting, and I reached out in my own blindness to find his hand, squeezed it hard as I could. “I’m fine,” I said: that same pitiable voice.

Then Unc was on the ground beside me, and put an arm to my shoulder.

“We made it,” he said.

I thought to answer him, if there were any answer to give. I thought to try and put one word with another one, to speak them, to expend the air those words would end up needing. But the work seemed too much at this particular moment, and suddenly two other people—they were medics, identified themselves as such—were here with me, and now they were easing me to my back, talking to me, asking questions, and all of it seemed just fine with me.

Because we made it.

We finish dinner a little early, before us the picked-over carcass of a roasted chicken and remains of a bag salad Mom picked up at the Super Bi-Lo over on North Rhett.

A Thursday evening, Unc and Mom and me at the glass table off the kitchen, out the window a summer marsh, too many greens to name.

A Thursday evening. But we’re not headed for any poker game.

Warchester Four’s still fighting the raid on his house, and hasn’t reconvened anything yet. We see him in the paper and on the news now and again, ranting about the archaic laws of South Carolina, the provincial state of mind we have going on here, the cracker mentality that just keeps holding back this state.

But there’s still no poker. And far as we can tell he still doesn’t know it was Unc to call it in.

Mom leans forward, pinches up a piece of white meat from down near the wishbone, pops it in her mouth.

“You sure you’re ready?” she says to me, and smiles. “The doctor says it’s up to you, but that doesn’t mean you should.”

“Leave the boy alone, Eugenie,” Unc says, and now he reaches to the chicken too, peels off a last bit of dark meat down where the thigh’s been pulled off. “He’s fine. He needs this.”

He sets the piece of chicken, no bigger than a postage stamp, on his plate, then reaches for the salt where we always keep it, there at the empty fourth spot at the table, and tips the shaker, sprinkles what he deems is enough.

But he’s missed the chicken entirely, sprinkled instead the empty space where his salad had been.

He picks up the piece, puts it in his mouth, chews it. “Perfect,” he says, and Mom and I just look at each other, shake our heads yet one more time.

Then: “You buy the airplane tickets to the blind duffers’ golf tournament out to Palm Springs today, like I asked you to do?”

And me: “Not yet. Because we’re not going until you try to golf in daylight.”

And Unc, like always: “One day.”

T
hree months gone already. I had four broken ribs, and a fractured eye socket. The best treatment for which was to just lay low. Just stay home. Just do nothing.

That had sounded all right, until three or so weeks in, and I wanted nothing more than to be out to Hungry Neck on a boat, or driving an ATV out there, or even just taking a long walk somewhere, anywhere.

Tabitha’s come by a couple times. She had to take a leave of absence from her postdoc in order to try and sort out everything that went down. It wasn’t like she could just jump on a plane and fly home to Frisco, start Aggregating Encryptions and Probabilistically Functioning.

At least that’s what she told me when I asked her the second month why she was still here in town.

Actually, it’s been more than a few times she’s been over. And one night two weeks ago, the night before she headed back, we went out together. I took her to Cypress in downtown Charleston. A very nice place. And now things seem closer to possible between us. Or at least the possibility for possibility seems possible.

Because things changed after that night. After all of what happened.

Five went back to Charlotte and that job he has not but a couple days after what happened, for one thing. It’s like he was running away, tucked his tail and took off. Which no one can blame, because we all deal with what we’re dealt in our own way. He hasn’t posted on Facebook once since then, either. And Tabitha turned her status back to single.

Jessup is gone. And somewhere are Tammy and Nina. Maybe in the brig itself.

And though we were debriefed in the days that followed, though we were brought over to the Weapons Station offices across Goose Creek and sat in windowless rooms being asked question and question and question from people in suits who identified themselves as being representatives of, in turn, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, the United States Naval Consolidated Brig, the Naval Weapons Station, Homeland Security itself, and, finally, Federal Protective Service; after all those questions and all those hours and all those suits, the only thing we received was a verbal thanks—and a warning not to tell—from a man with two stars on his shoulder. Not even someone in the Navy, but someone in the Army.

But I had a question myself, for the man in the suit across the table from me who’d told me he was from the Federal Protective Service: “Will you tell Jessup I said thank you?”

He only smiled, one side of his mouth going up, and let his eyes meet mine a moment. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and nodded.

T
he news reported it all as a domestic disturbance that erupted at Judge Dupont’s house when Coburn Graham, a boyfriend of the judge’s in-home caregiver, Nina Sanchez, motored in on the judge’s stolen boat to the property at Landgrave Hall, only to find her there with another boyfriend, Commander Jamison Prendergast. They killed each other. She fled the state when it was discovered that Judge Dupont had in fact passed away seven months before.