by Bret Lott
And as if I’d planned it, as if I were a part of the whole thing but without thinking on it at all, I put my hand to the switch on the dome light, turned it off, and I leaned over to Tabitha, pulled her down from the window, out of the line of fire.
She took in a gasp, me leaning hard over her now, and I let myself look just above the dash.
Now the bartender had broken free, too, was running right behind her and toward us, and I saw past the two of them the cop with his gun out but pointed up, and starting after them.
Just to the left of this all stood Five, his hands in his pockets and half turned to the whole surprise, the cop he was talking to still with his arms crossed, the two of them watching all this happening just now, just now, too quick for anyone other than those involved to react.
The woman and the bartender, him just behind her and both with their hands cuffed, were across the second driveway now, onto the grass just ten yards or so off the hood of the Range Rover, and here was a sharp “Freeze!” from the cop behind them.
The bartender came even with the woman now, and bumped her hard with a shoulder, made her fall to the ground and slide a couple feet facedown in the grass. He dropped to his knees beside her, and in the blue pulse and shadowed jumble of the two of them collapsing, and of the cop coming up fast behind them, and now the cop Five had been talking to running for the whole thing, too, I saw the bartender lean in close to the woman’s face, and talk at her, words out of him stiff and sharp, though I heard nothing.
I was still leaned over Tabitha, her beneath me but holding still for what she couldn’t see or hear, while the bartender spoke fast at the woman, his head jerking toward her with his words, arms behind his back, him kneeling right beside her. She turned her face away from him just then, and I saw her shoulders heave there on the ground, her hands behind her, the twin tails of her plastic Zip Cuffs poking up in the air.
The cop made it to them and, his right hand holding the gun pointed up, straddled the bartender full speed, rode him down into the grass, the cop’s free hand on the bartender’s neck and pressing down hard, as though the bartender were the one trying to get away.
Which he wasn’t. He’d been the one to stop the woman. Easy as anything to see.
The other cop rushed up, and I heard them through the glass giving hurried words, saw Five jog up, too, stand off to one side as the cop with the gun out holstered it. He pulled the bartender up onto his knees, then stood him up altogether, while the other cop helped up the woman, her shoulders still heaving.
All of this just ten yards off the hood of the Range Rover, drenched in blue.
The cop holding on to the bartender pulled him in close, yanked him toward him, and said something in his ear. The bartender was taller than the cop, so that the cop had to incline his chin, and the bartender leaned over an inch or so, and listened.
It was strange, that moment, what bordered on a kind of intimacy between them in the midst of everything going on right here, right here.
Then the bartender stood up straight, that moment between them gone, replaced just as quick with the cop yanking his upper arm, giving it a shake to show who was in charge, and now that same blue pulse as ever shot across everything, and with the way the cop was turned, his profile to me, and that quick whip of brighter blue suddenly across everything in the world, I recognized him.
The cop: Stanhope.
The master-at-ahms out back of the Dupont place, his sidearm drawn on me when I’d stooped to hand them the book bag with the goggles in it last night, him and Harmon there in their blue and gray digital camo BDUs, placing Unc and me under arrest for an imaginary trespass.
I sat straight up, startled into place, my hands on the steering wheel.
It was him, right here, holding tight the arm of the bartender. Stanhope. His jaw was set, I’d seen in that brighter flash, his teeth clenched, his eyes sharp on the bartender.
It was him.
I took in a breath, felt the blood to my face in an instant, my hands tight on the steering wheel, tighter, because there was nothing other I knew to do, or could.
I was aware now of Tabitha moving beside me, sitting up, but nothing more, my eyes on Stanhope. He turned away from us, the bartender’s arm in his grip, the two of them with their backs to me.
CBP across the back of Stanhope’s jacket, too.
I didn’t know what that stood for. I didn’t even know, and felt my jaw go tight, my teeth clench just the same as I’d seen Stanhope’s, but even harder, and I gripped the steering wheel even tighter, tighter, started rocking now forward and back the smallest way but without any control over it, just rocking there in my seat, and I thought for a second, an instant, that I might explode, might actually feel my heart inside me burst.
Because I knew what was happening. I knew it.
Prendergast had Unc. That was Stanhope right there walking away from us with the bartender, and now the cop who’d been talking to Five and who had hold of the chip-cage woman handed her off to Stanhope too. He grabbed hold of her arm, jolted her a little, all of it with their backs to me, and I saw the woman’s head disappear for her leaning forward. I saw her shoulders heaving again, and again. She was crying.
They had Unc. And now I knew the cop in the CBP jacket who’d walked Prendergast and Unc off across the front yard and away from us had to be Harmon, had to be. They weren’t headed for the paddy wagon. But somewhere else.
I thought of that black Suburban before any of this had gone down, trolling in front of the house, tapping its brakes. Same as the one that’d been parked inside that clot of vehicles out front of Dupont’s. The big black Suburban I’d marked off as being the one the sailors must’ve arrived in.
They had Unc. They had him.
But what for? They had the book bag, and the goggles. They had what they wanted.
No. They didn’t. No one out of the house yet—not any of the cops, or the perps, and definitely not Unc, or Prendergast, or Stanhope or Harmon, if that was him who’d peeled off with Unc and Prendergast—had had a book bag on them, and the goggles themselves, that Borg contraption, were too bulky just to jam in your pocket and walk away with. Even in a windbreaker pocket.
CBP. CBP.
I gripped the wheel so hard now it seemed ready to dissolve in my hands, and I heard myself breathing hard in the silence, in and out and in and out.
Stanhope walked the two of them back to the driveway, the other cop stopping right where he’d been when Five walked up to talk to him, and I watched Stanhope with his CBP jacket move across the driveway, and onto the grass out front of the Whaley place, and away from us.
Tabitha touched my arm, signed something in the dark of the car, something I might have been able to see for the blue that made its way inside here. But what she was doing with her hands meant nothing. Nothing at all. Just her hands, moving.
Now the dome light cut on, and here sliding into the backseat was Five. He closed the door, the light gone.
“Did you see that?” he said, his voice full of wonder and a kind of delight. “Did you see that little piece of action right there? Never a dull moment at Dad’s,” he said.
Tabitha still looked at me, and now Five said, “Why’s the light off in here?”
I looked away from Tabitha. I held the steering wheel.
“Whatever,” Five said behind us, and leaned forward just as he’d done before he’d taken off. Him right here with us.
“I heard Tammy give out this little squeal right when she tore off. Sort of scared the shit out of me for a second. She’s worked for Dad for like eight years. Almost since he started. Then Coburn takes off, too, the bartender. I think he’s her cousin, and then—”
“I saw it,” I said, my voice tight, too sharp: a piece of glass coughed up.
But he didn’t hear, lost in the adventure. “—when that Border Patrol guy hit him, man. Shit! Did you see that? I couldn’t believe that. That dude with his pistolero out. Unbelievable.”
I looked
at him. “Border Patrol,” I said, the words still just as tight, just as sharp.
“Yeah,” Five said, and turned to me. “That’s what that guy was. When the cop I was talking to and I ran up, you could hear Coburn speaking Spanish at her. At Tammy. I think it was Spanish. At least it sounded like it. But when the one I was talking to got right in there with them the CBP guy tells him the two of them are illegals. Tammy and Coburn. That he and his partner’d coordinated with the Mount Pleasant PD to get these two.”
CBP.
Customs and Border Protection.
They had a headquarters here. An academy right down at the old Naval Shipyard, a whole training facility.
But no. They were Navy. Stanhope, Harmon. Prendergast. They weren’t Border Patrol, or Customs, or anything else.
“Get out,” I said then.
It came out buried, I heard. Clouded over with whatever I was already planning to do next, though I had no genuine idea of what that was. Other than first to get them out of here. Tabitha and Five both.
I looked at Tabitha. Her hands were down in her lap. It was dark in here but for that blue streaking through us. But I could see her, and her eyes, looking at me.
Five said from behind us, “But they won’t let me in the house to get the money. Or let me have my car. That’s what the cop was telling me when that all happened. Can’t get into the house until they’re done with it. And every car unattended on this street is impounded. Nobody gets his car until bail has been made. You’re the only one won’t get impounded, so when this starts to clear up you’ll—”
“Get out,” I said again, but this time louder, certain.
Still Tabitha looked at me, and I turned the key in the ignition, the spray of dials and numbers on the dashboard suddenly here, and I tore my eyes from hers on mine to see the last glimpse of Stanhope pushing ahead of him a squat woman named Tammy and a big bartender named Coburn, all three of them at the far end of the Whaleys’ yard, about to disappear in the same direction Unc and Prendergast and Harmon had already gone.
Somewhere up the street was a Suburban. I had to get out of here. I had to follow them.
I had to leave. Now.
“Leave,” I said, and turned back to Tabitha, certain she knew what I was saying, whether or not it was too dark to read lips.
She didn’t move.
“Shit,” Five said, and reached forward, tapped Tabitha’s shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. Selfish son of a bitch.” He looked at me, said, “You’re not going anywhere for a while anyway, my friend. You’re wedged in here tight as anyone else on the block, even if your vehicle isn’t in the process of being impounded. It might be tomorrow morning before this whole thing gets cleared out, but we’re all ending up in the same place one way or the other. At the Mount Pleasant jail.”
He pulled his hand back from Tabitha’s shoulder, and I heard the door open—that light again—and him start to climb back out.
Still Tabitha hadn’t moved.
I put my foot on the brake, put the Range Rover in reverse, still no clue in me of what I was going to do, and heard Five say from behind us and still with the door open, “Quit joking around. You know you’re not going anywhere.”
I looked up at the house. Stanhope was gone. The perp walk was over too, Unc and Prendergast and this Tammy and Coburn the last ones out.
Then I looked up the street for the Suburban. I looked up there for something I could see, something I could glimpse and know what to do about. Even if I were stuck here, and it might be hours before I could get out.
You know you’re not going anywhere, Five’d said. No truer words.
It was just goggles. It was just a set of God damned goggles, Prendergast an asshole from start to finish for having wagered them at all, and to have gotten us to this point, now, when for nothing but a pair of contraband goggles Unc was being hauled off for who knew where. I felt my eyes start to go hot again, felt the wet in them, and I squeezed them shut hard, opened them again, saw only a wavering sea of vehicles in front of me, and no Unc.
Then the fingers on my right hand at the steering wheel began to peel out of their grip, and I felt the warmth of another hand—Tabitha’s, Tabitha’s—taking hold of that hand, and I turned to her, looked at her, took in a shimmering breath.
She was shaking her head: No.
“Go,” I whispered. I nodded, looked out the windshield again, tried to see something, anything, of what might happen next.
And saw in a shard of space between the paddy wagon and a cruiser and way up past them both, maybe a hundred yards away, the flash of a taillight. Only a sliver of bright red, and though I couldn’t be certain it was a Suburban, it was enough.
Then came a sudden hard jostle of movement from the backseat, the surprised word “Uhh” out of Five, and the door pulled closed, the light now off. For just that moment I thought Five’d left, and I turned, looked behind us.
Jessup.
He was sitting in tight next to Five, who was turned to him but leaning away, looking at him as surprised as that word out of him had been, and now Tabitha turned, too, let out a sharp sound for taking in a breath.
He had on a black windbreaker, jeans, no ball cap, and leaned forward same as Five’d done what seemed all night long now, wedged himself right up with us. Tabitha leaned away, and pressed against the door.
Here he was, right here. Like all of us, doused in blue and blue and blue.
He said, “Horry. In,” two distinct words, quiet and even, then, a second later, “Copy,” and I saw the earphone he was wearing, hooked over his ear on this side, a thin cord snaking down his neck.
He turned to me, nodded, and I had no choice but to nod back.
“Huger,” he said.
I swallowed, said, “Jessup.”
He looked away, peered out the windshield. “You don’t get this vehicle out of here in the next couple seconds,” he said, “we’re going to lose them.”
It was Jessup. Jessup.
I blinked one more time, looked out the windshield, saw up there the brake light dim to just a taillight, that piece of red seeming even farther away now.
I looked at the silver Mercedes in front of me, glanced in my rearview at whatever that car was back there. I didn’t have much room. And there were these cruisers beside me, out in the street, right out my door.
“Be resourceful,” Jessup said. “You were planning to leave anyway.”
I glanced at him, saw him still looking ahead of us.
Just past him sat Tabitha, eyebrows up, mouth open, still pressed against the door. Her eyes went from me to Jessup to me again.
I swallowed again. I nodded at her, mouthed Okay.
“Who is—” Five started behind us, but before he could finish I’d let off the brake, eased the Range Rover back until the hard touch of it against the bumper of the car behind me.
I cut the wheel all the way to the right, far as I could turn it, and put it in drive, rough-bumped the Range Rover up the curb and into the lawn of this nice raised home in Hamlet Square, its blue-pulsing clapboard and front porch and joggling board all swinging across the windshield, until out front of us lay a grass runway interrupted by a series of concrete drives: everyone’s lawns straight down the street, out at the curb all the cars of all those players and all the cruisers of all those cops.
I pressed the pedal down, felt the tires search for a grip on this grass, felt the rear end wag, then grab hold hard, and we were gone.
“Shit,” Five whispered, Tabitha breathing hard in and out.
“Watch for residents,” Jessup said beside me, calm and cool, almost as though this were some driver’s ed film, “and as soon as you get back out on the street, take the first right. Sand Marsh Lane.” He paused, said, “Might still have a chance to keep sight of them.”
I took in a deep breath, held the steering wheel as tight as when I’d thought it would dissolve.
And with that breath in I smelled something, small and far away. But not
as far away as when I’d taken it in this afternoon, when Mom came home.
I smelled it: a match strike. A burnt-out sparkler.
Out the corner of my eye I could see Jessup look down, saw him touch his ear.
“Copy,” he said.
Now we’re going somewhere, I thought, and punched the gas hard, stomped the shit out of the pedal.
“Don’t go all the way to the stop sign,” Jessup said beside me. “Pull over a few houses before, and cut your lights. Just wait. There.” He pointed ahead of us to an SUV parked a few yards from where Sand Marsh Lane ended in a T with another street. “Behind that one.”
We’d pulled out a driveway five or six houses down from where I’d done my lawn carving and past where the cruisers ended, then flown to the end of that street, turned right onto Sand Marsh, all four of us silent, and now I pulled over, closed in on the bumper of the red Chevy TrailBlazer Jessup’d pointed out. I turned off the lights, put it in park.
A streetlamp stood at the corner up there, filled the Range Rover with hard shadows and what seemed bright light after all that blue, and I glanced in the side- and rearview mirrors for any cruisers roaring up behind us. Of course they’d seen me pull out across someone’s yard, haul off away from them.
But cops following us, it came to me right then, wasn’t something I had to think on. They had their hands full, and I didn’t even need to waste a brain cell worrying over them.
Because right now Jessup was beside me, in the Range Rover with Tabitha, and with Five. Right now Unc was in a Suburban with Prendergast and Stanhope and Harmon. Two possible illegals named Tammy and Coburn.
Right now we were in the middle of something.
That was when the questions exploded.
“What in the fuck is going on?” Five said too loud from the backseat, and Tabitha leaned forward, eyes on me, started hammering away with her hands, words so quick I could only pick out Who and law and safe before Five let out “Who is this dude? Why did you just fucking rip up Mr. Walpole’s yard? Who is this dude?” while still Tabitha hammered away: Quick and start and light.
