Dead Low Tide (18 page)

He stood up a little bit taller, took his hands out of his pockets, and now Unc called out from beside me, “Can’t imagine what it would be like having the job you do.” I turned, saw him leaning across the console between us and looking up and out the window. “Just wanted to stop and say thank you for that.” Unc nodded once, and sat up, faced forward. “We have to head on out now,” he whispered then, low and just the least bit sharp. Just loud enough, I guess he figured, for only
me, and I turned back to my open window to see if Tyrone’d heard him.

But he was inside the gatehouse again, reaching down for something else beneath the window. “Almost missed these,” he said, and stepped out, held a Ziploc bag out to me, inside it four golf balls and a few tees. “They were out with the chair and the club.” He nodded. “With Jessup’s best,” he said, and I took the bag, dropped it in the console tray. I smiled back at him, nodded. “Thanks again,” I said, and pulled forward through the gates.

We’d driven then that same old quarter-mile spit of asphalt edged with overgrown trees to the light at North Rhett. The road into Landgrave Hall we were on was meant to look like a dead end to anyone driving by, even a yellow
ROAD ENDS
warning sign up at the head as soon as you made the turn off North Rhett so that anyone not in the know would think they were headed into the marshy unknown.

I turned left, headed for the on-ramp for the Mark Clark a couple miles down, and just like that we were in the lower intestine of Hanahan: on the right sat an industrial park and its prefab metal buildings with their oddball array of business signs on the sides—
CHARLESTON RUBBER AND GASKET, THE ODLE GROUP, MOTION INDUSTRIES, NORANDEX DISTRIBUTION
—while on the left stood those jet fuel storage tanks, each one big as an airplane hangar, out front of them all a chain-link fence eight foot high with three strands of barbed wire above it. More Navy land.

This was the same fence that separated Landgrave Hall from Perimeter Road, the paved single-lane that encircled the whole Navy property. That fence you could see in winter when you were on the green at sixteen or the tee at seventeen. Here was where it came out of the woods to meet the public proper, cordoning off these storage tanks, and corralling in Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, all those SPAWAR nerd-spies at their computers, and keeping from the civilian world the Army transportation battalion fitting out the
never-ending convoy of MRAPs for Afghanistan and loading those bad boys onto the Navy ships moored at their wharf on the Cooper River.

Just then I saw out my window and off to the left past the tanks the snapping blink of lights on some kind of aircraft, and knew in just that moment, with how slow it was, and the way it was easing straight down, it was one of those Chinook helicopters, making a night landing at the heliport over there.

And out my window too, off to the right and looming high above the fence and a half mile away, stood the stadium lights of the Navy brig, illuminating the world just like they had the fairways when I’d walked them home last night, their light washing the stars out of the night sky.

We passed two more warehouse-like buildings on the right, these for something called Blackhawk Logistics, then Lee Distributors on the left, with its rows of Miller Lite trucks in the lot out front, waiting to be filled for tomorrow’s deliveries. All this military and all this industry, hiding the fact of the homes we lived in, the manicured greens, the docks and picture windows and marshes, and the ghost beneath it all of a history three hundred years old.

And though my head was jammed tight with what we were heading out to do tonight, no matter how ridiculously minor a black-ops mission it was for a blind man and an unemployed rich kid to hand over a pair of goggles, it came to me the fact that someone right then was thinking on an order of gaskets and how to get them boxed and shipped in time tomorrow, and someone else was tallying up the cases of beer to load into one of those trucks. Someone, too, was working through his head the spy specs of the schematic on his SPAWAR computer back at the office, where tomorrow morning he’d pick right back up working on it once he passed through military security at the gate off Remount Road.

And just then, if the rumors always going around were any of them true, a terrorist or two or three were sitting in a cell beneath
those lights right over there, running off in their heads wisdom from the Koran.

Terrorists who wanted to kill any and every American they could get their hands on, only walking distance from here.

All this going on, while my mom sat at home in bed, skimming through commercials with the remote in one hand, in the other, I felt pretty certain, a subcompact Storm. The entire pastoral world out to Landgrave Hall wrapped in the disguise of industry and military, my mom gated inside its refuge.

But only a knock on the door away from practicing what she’d preached out on the shooting range.

We bumped over the railroad tracks just past the beer distributor, passed next the rec baseball field and the Kangaroo mini-mart. The light at the intersection with Remount turned yellow, and I gunned through it, just ahead the on-ramp for the Mark Clark and our path to Mount Pleasant.

That was when Unc said, “Just don’t know what one has to do with the other.”

I moved to the right lane, made the slow swoop onto the ramp and started up, and let myself glance at him even inside the tight circle we were making up to the elevated freeway. “What do you mean?” I said.

He was turned to his window, shaking his head. We were at the top of the ramp now, and I moved left out onto the freeway, ahead of us the metal cage of the Don Holt Bridge shooting high over the Cooper River toward Daniel Island. Below us to the right I could see the 84 Lumber, to my left the paper mill in all its nighttime glory: lights and towers and that smokestack chugging out steam. On the highest tower flew an American flag, lit up with a floodlight from below.

“For some reason I keep tangling these two things one in another,” Unc said. “But it’s two events. Two things.” He paused, and I could see him face forward, above and around us now the beam-and-girder skeleton that was the bridge. “One is a murder,” he said, “plain and
simple. We were the ones who found her. That’s all. The other is, somebody’s out on patrol over to the Naval Weapons Station and sees you wearing a set of goggles civilians aren’t allowed to have. Prendergast’d have to grab his ankles and hold on the rest of his life for the ass-kicking he’d get if someone higher up finds he’s giving out equipment in a poker game, so he sends a couple of his men to get them back. They come on over to Judge Dupont’s place for the goggles, but walk in on a late-night patio party with all these people who weren’t there when they first saw us from over on the weapons tract. The Cuthberts, Mrs. Q. That screaming nurse of Dupont’s.” He let out a quick breath, shook his head again. “Stanhope and Harmon got no choice but to improvise then. That’s when it all turns into this haul-you-in-for-trespassing hoo-ha. Prendergast figures maybe the best thing to do is to make like he’s arresting us, confiscate the goggles, then let us go on home. All there is to it.”

I looked at him. “But somebody was killed,” I said, and thought again of the green scope of sight I had, the woman’s teeth bared and grimacing, the swirl of her hair in the water. That blue crab, there at her ragged jaw. I swallowed, said, “A woman was murdered, and the body was anchored in the pluff mud at Landgrave. Does it matter if it’s only a coincidence?”

“What do you propose we do?” Unc said, on his voice a kind of edge that made me feel twelve years old again, a kid too dumb to reason with. We were off the bridge, the freeway now a long concrete chute four lanes wide and crossing the dredge-dump flats this side of Daniel Island. Above the tree line up ahead I could see the lit-up arc of the bridge over the Wando a couple miles away, the long hump of it that dropped down into the promised land of Mount P.

“We were interviewed by three pairs of detectives,” Unc went on. “Plus Tyler. It’s not like nobody gives a damn. So what if there’s nothing on the news about it. That don’t mean nobody’s working this.” I could see out the corner of my eye him turn full-on to me then. He said, “Do you understand, son?”

“But I saw her,” I said, as though that would explain anything and everything. As if this were the only thing I understood about why I wanted something done to find whoever killed her: I saw her.

Unc faced forward again, folded his hands in his lap. “I got no help for you on that one,” he said, quiet. “And for that I’m sorry. But it’s Prendergast the one we need to deal with right now. It’s him we have to think on.” He stopped, turned to his window again. “It’s him we have to keep from your momma,” he said, “because if we don’t, I’m afraid for what she’ll do to him. Not that I give a damn about Prendergast. But because of what it might mean for your mom. And the law against what she’s got every right to do.”

He looked at me then. “You smelled the range on her, I hope.”

I looked back to the freeway. We were already almost across Daniel Island, on the right the tennis center and its boxy stadium, just ahead the Grace Bridge rising over the Wando. Just ahead, too, lay poker night in Mount Pleasant, and whatever hand we’d play to see this to its end.

“Yes I did,” I said.

A
car slowly cruised past us, a black Audi trolling for his own spot on the street, though there couldn’t have been any more of them this close to the Whaley house, and I leaned forward, looked in my side-view mirror to see how far back the line of cars went. Here behind us was another set of headlights easing up same as the Audi had: yet another player.

I felt a drop of sweat carve its way down the back of my neck and into my collar, and sat back, forced myself to take in a deep breath. There stood the Whaley place fifty yards away, inside it Prendergast. And we were going on in there.

It was a black Suburban coming up on us, slowing down even more the closer he got, and I imagined his Botoxed wife had gotten the Lexus tonight for her Pampered Chef party. He edged past us, touched the brakes a second in front of the house, almost like he was
giving a thought to pulling right up on the lawn, to hell with all this street parking. But then he moved on, prowling for the sacred spot that meant he wouldn’t have to work up a sweat in the armpits of his silk shirt before he stepped into the casino. He’d end up parking on past the house, of course, and I saw beyond him the brake lights on the Audi flare a half dozen houses away, pull to the left and to the curb.

I popped open my door then, the dome light cutting on above us, and turned to climb out.

“No,” Unc said hard beside me, his hand a vise on my forearm just that quick.

I turned to him. The bill of his Braves cap hid his face beneath the dome light, but I could see in the darkness the reflection of me in his sunglasses. Two of me, right there in the dark of his face.

He wasn’t letting me go with him.

“Close the door,” he said.

“Unc,” I started, and made to pull away from him. But his hand on my arm went even tighter.

“Huger.”

I looked at him a couple seconds longer before I slammed closed the door, the two of us in darkness again.

“You listen,” I started in, and felt my jaw go tight for the fight I was going to give him over this. He wasn’t going to leave me out here. No. “You listen,” I said again. “You need me in there. You need me. I’m not just your chauffeur. I’m not just your boy to drive you around and watch you do what you have to do without me there, too. I didn’t come all the way out here to—”

“Huger,” Unc said again, but this time in a whisper.

I took in a breath, surprised at the sound of just that one word. “You need me in there,” I said again, but already there was nothing in it, whatever words I’d lined up already breaking down.

Because he didn’t need me. I knew that. He could just walk along this line of cars, a hand trailing rear fender to hood on each one,
leaving two gaps for the driveways of the houses between us and the Whaley place, then head up the third one, his stick tapping out the length of it. With any luck either the driver of the Audi or the Suburban’d be hustling to the driveway at the same time, help him on up. They all knew him. And once inside he was, like every poker night, his own man. That was when I always went back to the Range Rover anyway, started in on my Maps app wanderings, my cellphone solitaire.

Though I wanted to go in, I knew he was right. He could handle Prendergast all by himself.

He let go my arm, and I took in a couple defeated breaths, closed my eyes.

And then I asked it, one more time. Because it was what I wanted to know of the deep down of all this. It was what I wanted to know, the why of the fact I couldn’t go with him, but Unc had to do this alone.

I thought of my mom, and that gun centered neatly on the table between us.

“What did he do to her?” I whispered.

He took in a deep breath, held it a moment, let it out.

He said, “Back in high school, seven boys on the football team got four girls to go with them after a game to a trailer up past Moncks Corner. Eugenie was one of them.”

He said it with no measure to the words, no emotion at all. Only words out of him.

He paused, took in another breath, and I fit my tongue in the side of my cheek, bit down hard for the feel of it, the pain. It was something I’d done since I was a kid, a distraction I gave myself when I knew the world was about to crash in. Here it came.

“Prendergast the ringleader to it all,” he said.

I’d asked for this. And already I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it, and I bit down harder.

“Got them up there and drugged them. Give them something
in their beers. This was back in ’seventy-six. Before roofies. But this stuff has been going on forever.” He paused, and inside the pain in my tongue I saw up ahead the driver of the Audi come around the tail of his car, cross the street for the house. “The girls wake up the next morning alone in the trailer,” Unc went on. “No car to get them home. Of course no cellphones back then. So they have to walk. And from that point on all four of them have a reputation. All four of them get known for being sluts, because Prendergast and the boys are already home on a Saturday morning and bragging to any school chum who’ll listen what they done to four girls in a trailer out to Moncks Corner.”