Dead Low Tide Read online

  But Unc could golf in daylight if he wanted. He could man up and get himself a coach, and quit this cat burglar crap, if he really wanted to.

  I didn’t say a word to him, only turned, stepped out onto that plank, and crossed on over.

  Two steps onto hard ground, and here he’d been behind me, his moves as quick and easy as—maybe even easier than—mine along the length of the boat, then onto and across that plank. He’d taken hold of my belt, cinched onto it for me to lead, and given the smallest push to go.

  I’d glanced at that light in the window at the Dupont house and whatever it might or might not mean, and started the hundred yards or so along the brick fence up from the creek along the property, then out onto the gravel drive. A few strides later we’d been into the grass, before us the wide spread of what in the dark always looked like only a meadow bordered by trees. But there, twenty yards in front of us, lay a little raised flat of grass: the tee box.

  Now here we were, me in my camp chair, Unc swinging away. Though the night-vision goggles gave only a forty-degree line of sight, I could see everything in this dark: the live oak and pine along the fairway on the right, the bright white kidney of a bunker in front of the green 280 yards away—this was the thirteenth, a short par four—and to the left the two cottages on this hole. All of it green, corralled inside a round porthole of sight. One big rifle scope.

  The farther house was red brick and slate-roofed, an outdoor fireplace and stone flower boxes beneath a white-columned pergola trying too hard to look like the Parthenon. Closer in, maybe halfway down the fairway, sat a huge Spanish-style thing, U-shaped with the courtyard facing the fairway. Red-tile roof, stucco, a rim of painted tiles beneath the eaves I could make out even from here.

  Patio furniture sat out at both houses, nice stuff that cost more than the furniture Mom and I used to have inside our house over on Marie Street, back before we moved out of the old neighborhood. Over there, if you put a piece of furniture out in the yard or on a porch, even one of those thin white plastic chairs you can pick up at Wal-Mart for five bucks, you’d better chain it to the ground or it’d be gone the next day. But here they were safe and sound, all this fancy furniture sitting in the dark and smug for it, too: testimony to how secure people figured they were, given their money and how long they’d all had it. And our old neighborhood not even a mile from here.

  I let myself look at that Spanish one a second longer than I should, a mistake I made every time we came out here: the umbrella and wrought-iron table and chairs, two sofas and a chaise lounge parked there in the courtyard. The low brick fire ring built out closer to the fairway, the row of five palmettos spaced evenly along this back line of the property. All that painted tile, and the arched windows, and that stucco.

  I looked at it every time, of course, because the Spanish of it, that stucco and red tile, made it feel too much like what you’ll see in Palo Alto. Specifically, on the campus at Stanford.

  I’d been there once.

  Unc whacked the next ball, and my eyes caught the bright green streak of it blast out even sharper to the right, even deeper into the trees.

  “Jeez, Unc,” I whispered, “what you been drinking?” and turned in the camp chair to face him full-on. “You never slice it,” I whispered.

  Here he was: big and green and filling that porthole of sight. He stood centered at the tee, already had the next ball teed up, the club head down and settled at it, him about to swing back for hit number three.

  He had on his old windbreaker for the cool out here, on the right breast the bright block letters MtPPD, the jacket a prized possession from back when he was on the Mount Pleasant Police Department. He had on his same old khakis, and that Braves cap, the scripty white A sharp above the bill. And there was his face, the sunglasses he always wore, all of him green. He dipped his chin, leaned his head to the left a little, geared up to swing.

  But he stopped, took in a small breath, and looked at me.

  I saw my reflection in his sunglasses then, two white shocks of light the size of marbles: the IR illuminator on my goggles. Infrared light, reflected right back at me.

  For a second it scared me, like it did every time since we’d gotten this new set. It looked like he could see me, like he was just wearing a pair of regular glasses, but his eyes behind them these white fires trying to burn into me something I didn’t know and couldn’t yet figure out.

  The first set of goggles we’d gotten didn’t have the IR illuminator built in. Those were the old Gen 1 things somewhere in the garage right now, buried under the pile of military and security gadgets Unc loves getting hold of for whatever reason he has. He’d won this new set one poker night a couple months ago off a Navy commander pal who’d tapped out early and’d been so convinced of his luck—no matter he’d lost what he’d brought with him—that he’d scrambled outside and gotten the goggles from his truck, then promptly lost the hand. Unc took him with three tens to his two pair.

  “You should have seen him,” Unc’d told me on the way home from poker the night he won them. “I could hear in the way he was breathing when it come to his bet how much he was sweating, all his money gone and him thinking about getting these Gen 4s out of his truck. The dimwit commander says, ‘You want a set of night-vision goggles you can’t get anywhere on any market? Guaranteed nobody anywhere’s going to have these for another three years,’ and I says, ‘Like I could see with them.’ I could still hear him sweating, and I let him twist there for a minute or so more before I nodded I’d take them, and he was gone. Ninety seconds later he plops them on the table, lets out a breath I can hear is some kind of smile for him thinking he’s won the hand. And all he’s got is his piddly two pair.” He’d let out a laugh then, though I remember it wasn’t for any kind of happiness. He shook his head, then’d whispered like it was some punch line only he knew the joke for, “I just wanted to beat the son of a bitch is all.”

  Maybe all this gear and dark-ops night stuff was his way of trying to hold tight to his life, I sometimes thought. Maybe it was all longing for the badass days when he was on the force. Way back when, in that time when he could see and work. Back before his wife, my aunt Sarah, killed herself by burning down their house over to Mount Pleasant.

  Back before he’d been blinded in that fire when the window he’d been looking in had exploded, his wife, my aunt, inside and herself on fire. Hence those sunglasses, because they cover up the gnarled and shiny skin from where his eyebrows had been on down to his cheeks, the white marbles he has for eyes held in by eyelids just as gnarled.

  I said it was complicated.

  And that’s why it scared me when I saw the IR reflected back at me like this: here were those marble eyes of his, taking me in and sizing me up. Me every time, I knew, coming up short.

  “What?” I whispered.

  He looked at me a second longer, then another. He let out a breath, and I saw him swallow, his mouth a straight line. He seemed about to say something, but then he looked down, those white marbles gone. He cocked his chin again, gripped and regripped the club handle, inched the club head along the ground until it just touched the ball: how he knows where to hit.

  I turned, watched for where the next ball would go.

  But instead of another one of those missiles taking off, I saw to the left, past that red-brick house with its Parthenon pergola, a growing glow through the trees, a moving green swell of light that grew brighter green, bigger and bigger in just that much time. Then here came around the edge of the house twin explosions of light that swung right through my line of sight, for an instant that porthole gone to pure bright white.

  Headlights on a golf cart, speeding along the cart path on the far side of the fairway. Headed for us.

  I flipped up the goggles, took off the hard hat. “Time to go, Unc. The muscle’s here,” I said. Here was Security, us about to get caught one more time.

  I tried for a second to figure out who was driving—most likely, this being early Wednesday A.M.,
it’d be either Tyrone or Segundo. If we were lucky it’d be Jessup. But without the goggles on, the world was back to its plain old darkness, me stuffing the hat and goggles back in the book bag. Unc didn’t want anyone knowing we had them, because it was illegal as hell to be marching around and watching the world, much less golf balls, with those things on. Golfing after hours was one thing, but possessing Gen 4s was another. And so I couldn’t yet tell from here who it was hauling ass along the path past the red-brick cottage, now the Spanish one, and I turned back to Unc.

  He was gone.

  The club lay on the ground, I could make out in the dark, the ball still teed up too, and I quick looked to my left, saw him already ten yards away, headed fast toward the Dupont house.

  “Unc,” I called, and heard my voice way too loud out here. But I didn’t care, because there he was, walking away. Without me.

  Usually by this time we were picking up, pretending we were finished and headed out anyway. Of course the guard, whoever it was, would pull up and park the cart, then dutifully walk us, Unc holding on to my belt, back along that brick fence and to the boat, the guard all the while reciting the rules: No golf without signing in at the pro shop; no golf except during regular business hours; no golf in the middle of the night.

  Even if you were members. Like us.

  Because we live here—Unc, Mom, and me—at Landgrave Hall Golf and Country Club. In a 4200-square-foot cottage that sits on the green of the seventh hole. We’ve even got a dock off the back of the place, right out into Goose Creek, where we keep the jon boat cradled up in the rafters of the boathouse at the end. A dock where we shove off in the middle of the night and snake our way back along Goose Creek, only to put in at the head of a finger creek and sneak back in to golf.

  As it turns out, we’ve ended up rich. And discovered we are members of the blue bloods too.

  We live here, and act like perps on our own property. We take the jon boat over when we could very well walk because Unc doesn’t want to chance being seen by any of his neighbors with a golf club in hand. He doesn’t want to be caught, as it were, attempting something he might not be very good at. Something that might make him look like—dare I say it?—a fool.

  But Unc’d never taken off like this, him without even the club to help him tap out what was in front of him. It was always with me. Always.

  Now here was the golf cart beside me, the sharp crunch of gravel on the cart path as it pulled to a stop off to my right, and I turned, saw it was Jessup driving.

  Good. At least he wouldn’t be putting on any airs, talk tough like Segundo and Tyrone did, as though we’d be the ones reporting back to the Homeowners’ Association on what a fine job Security did every time they kicked us off the course.

  But even though it was Jessup, and I really was glad it was him, there was always this awkward thing between us here at Landgrave Hall, because Jessup and I had gone to grade school and middle school and high school together. He was one of the set I used to run with, those friends who used to make fun of getting an edumacation, back when we’d sneak out of our houses at night and sit on the railroad tracks at the end of Marie, and make fun of people who lived in places like this. Now here we were: the landed gentry, and the hired hand.

  “What’s he doing?” Jessup said as he climbed out, him in his black windbreaker and pants, that black ball cap they all wore.

  “I think he’s pissed off about something,” I said, and started after Unc, the book bag over my shoulder.

  Something was wrong, easy enough to see, and I thought of him looking at me as he’d set up for that last shot he didn’t take. I thought of his eyes, those white marbles, and him gripping and regripping the club, saw now the nervous of it all, and those ugly slices the balls had taken. He never hit like that, sometimes only hooked it a little, but usually just hit it straight and high.

  There was something. Had to be. And I thought of that light in the window at the Dupont house turning on as Unc’d poled us in, and then me dropping that block on the hull, giving us away even before we’d gotten out here.

  Maybe that was it: me. Unc finally tired enough of me and the nothing of my life to decide he could just take off back to the boat all by himself, and that I, this deadweight in his life and mine both, could just take care of myself from now on.

  He was across the gravel drive when I got to him, Jessup a little behind me, the two of us walking fast to catch up. I said, “Unc, hey, let’s just relax. It’s Jessup,” and touched his shoulder, made to pull him to a stop. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  But he shook off my hand, walked even faster.

  “Mr. Dillard,” Jessup said, “no use trying to evade the law like this,” and he let out a small laugh. “Suspect fleeing the premises,” he said, and tried at the laugh again.

  “You got you a flashlight, Jessup?” Unc said, and just kept on walking.

  We were at the head of the brick fence that led back to the boat now, the white stucco of the Dupont house to our right on the other side, and as though he could see everything, Unc put out his hand, touched the brick just as he came even with it, let his hand pop along the top of it as he moved.

  “No sir,” Jessup said, and I could hear a kind of embarrassment for it. Of course Unc would make a remark on that, Jessup and I both knew, something along the lines And you call yourself Security.

  But Unc said nothing, just kept going.

  I glanced to my left over at Jessup, made out in the dark him slowly shaking his head.

  “That light still on, Huger?” Unc said, and it hit me, his question to Jessup and me both: he was talking full-voiced, like it was daylight and maybe we were all out on a stroll outside our own cottage, just walking in the yard.

  We were even with the back of the house just as he’d said it, and the timing of it—his knowing right when I’d be able to see that upstairs window at the back of the house—didn’t surprise me a bit. I looked up to my right, saw the window up there. Dark.

  “Nope,” I said, just as loud. “Unc, it’s Jessup, so ease off,” I said, then tried one more time at what I figured had to be the real problem: “I’m sorry,” I said. “For dropping the block.”

  “What light?” Jessup said, then, “Mr. Dillard, I’m just here to tell you you and Huger can’t be out here and—”

  “What time is it?” Unc cut in, his hand still popping along the fence.

  “Unc,” I said, “can’t we just—”

  “Time?” he said. He was slowing down now, his steps the smallest way more tentative. The end of the brick fence was only a few feet ahead of us, and I could see beyond him now the low spread of the marsh, the tree line across it, and here was the narrow gray slab of the plank out to the jon boat, still shoved up into the cordgrass.

  I knew then why he was asking for the time: he wanted to know how far off dead low tide we were, so he’d know where the waterline might be for the tide coming in. He didn’t want to get his feet wet before he stepped onto that plank.

  “Quarter to three in the morning,” I said, and stopped walking. “But I’m betting you knew that.”

  He stopped, turned to me. It was a sudden move, and though I’d been ready, it caught Jessup, who nearly flinched for it. He stopped, too, and we three stood looking at each other there at the end of a waist-high brick fence in the middle of the night, the tide creeping in.

  “Maybe two feet in by now,” I said. “No more than that. Plank’s still on dry ground. I bet you knew that, too.”

  Unc looked away then, and out to the marsh. He reached up, touched the back of his neck again.

  “You may think this is all about you, Huger,” he said, “but the sooner you figure out it ain’t, the better.”

  “I said I’m sorry,” I said. “You just tell me what more you want and we can—”

  “We got to get to this now,” he said, and turned, took a few more steps toward the marsh before he stopped again, touched the toe of his boot ahead of him, looking for the plank. “You w
ant to give me a hand here, either of you, I’d be obliged.”

  “Mr. Dillard,” Jessup said, “it’s just the rules out here. I’m just doing my job.”

  “We’re going,” I said to Jessup. In the dark I could see him look at me a long second, then nod once.

  “I’ll get that camp chair you left out there,” he said, “have it up to the guardhouse tomorrow.”

  “You at least got your radio on you, Jessup?” Unc said, and I turned. He was already across the plank and out in the boat, back at the transom. He had the pole out already, too, and was standing there, waiting. “And I need one or the other of you two lug nuts to give me a hand, and I mean now.”

  “Just stop being a jerk, Unc,” I said, and stepped to the plank, balanced my way across it, my arms out to either side, the book bag in my left hand, and heard Jessup say behind me, “I got my two-way up to Segundo at the gate, sir. But I’m not calling this in.”

  I stepped in, felt the bow of the boat still stuck hard on the pluff mud, even though I could see the waterline had come in a foot or so, and I said, “What the hell is your problem?”

  “Just pull in the plank,” he said, and here he was poling us out, digging in hard to warp us off the mud. Then we were free, and I squatted, set down the book bag and dragged at the plank, heaved it in and under the center seat.