by Bret Lott
“I know Jessup,” I shouted then, way too loud. But that’s how the words came out: the big answer to everything it seemed the two of them were asking, sharp enough to silence them both. “He works Security at Landgrave Hall. Where we live. He’s a friend.”
Though as soon as I’d said that last word, I knew the real truth was that he had been a friend a long time ago, when we were both kids in school and sitting with our pals on the tracks at the end of Marie in North Charleston, sharing Colt 45s and doing nothing. Back before 9/11, when Jessup split for the Army, and before Unc sold a chunk of land. Before we were what we are now: a Landgrave Hall resident, and a Landgrave Hall security guard.
But there was another truth, one I had no clue to, and that I needed an answer for as well: why he was here, now. The same person who’d been in the shadows just off the end of my driveway last night, tailing Harmon tailing me. Right to where Prendergast had been.
He wasn’t here about Landgrave Hall. He wasn’t tagging along just in case, here to check in on how I was doing. He was here for something else.
I felt my hands still just as tight on the steering wheel. I heard Five breathing behind me, saw Tabitha looking at me, hands touching the dash, waiting.
And Jessup right there between us, the center of us all, watching out the windshield. An earphone on, a cord snaking down his neck.
“Jessup,” I said, “what are you doing here?”
“And why’d you just make him drive through someone’s yard?” Five shot out, then said, “I’m out of here.”
I heard the pop open of a door, and Jessup disappeared from between us. But then the dome light went out as soon as it went on: Jessup had pulled closed the door Five had opened.
“No,” he said to Five, his voice solid and cold. “No one driving past here’s going to see a pedestrian out on the street.” Then, to me, “Watch. There’s no outlet for him other than here. They’re coming.”
I heard him move again back there, the thin scratch of the windbreaker material, and a snap. “You want to know who I am, then here,” he said to Five, and I heard some small movement back there, a couple seconds of silence, then Jessup again: “I’m authorized to show that to you. That’s it. And nobody’s getting out the vehicle.”
A moment later he leaned forward between Tabitha and me, her still with her hands just touching the dash, and handed her what looked in the dark like a thin wallet.
“Watch, Huger,” he said to me, and I quick turned to the intersection, there beyond this TrailBlazer in front of me.
“You’re an agent,” Five whispered behind me. “Okay.”
Out the corner of my eye I could see Tabitha slowly take what Jessup held out to her, lean to the window. She held it open to the light from the lamp out there, and I went ahead and looked.
It was a badge, and ID card.
“If this is about Tammy and Coburn, I can tell you my dad didn’t know they were illegals,” Five said, his voice thin, edged up: contrite. “Those two are just—”
“Wouldn’t have needed the vehicle,” Jessup cut in, and Five shut up, “if someone hadn’t called in a report on an illegal poker game going on. I was doing fine until D-Day. Happened to park for observation beside a brick mailbox stand big as an outdoor barbecue. Then the Mount Pleasant force descended, blocked me in. That was that. Somebody’s big idea of community service.”
He touched his ear again, seemed to lean even farther between us, looking to the right out the windshield, and I knew in his moves—no glance at me or shake of his head—that he didn’t know Unc was the one to call it in. And I wasn’t going to tell him.
Tabitha turned, Jessup’s head and shoulders between us. She leaned forward, looked at me, and held out to me the wallet, lying open.
But before I could take it, Jessup whispered, “There he is,” and I looked up, saw a black Suburban cruise past.
We sat there, watched it for just that second or so it took to pass through our field of vision, and then the dome light came back on: Five’s door again.
“Now you get out. Everybody,” Jessup said. He was gone from between us, Tabitha still with her hand out holding his badge and ID, and I looked behind me.
Jessup had opened Five’s door this time, and I saw Five looking at him, hands up and against his chest. His mouth was open, eyes squinted. He didn’t move.
Jessup leaned forward, took the badge from Tabitha, then held it open to me only a couple inches from my nose. Here it was, bright gold even in the dim light. And the ID card: a black-and-white photo of Jessup up close, his mouth a tight line, beside it a round logo with an eagle, the words Special Agent Jessup Roderick Horry, Federal Protective Service, Department of Homeland Security.
He slapped it closed. “This vehicle is being appropriated by the Federal Protective Service,” he said. He stuffed the badge into his windbreaker pocket, then looked at Tabitha, at me again. He nodded. “Two lines of egress from this development, and if I don’t see which one they take, they might be gone. Now. Out.”
I heard Five turn from him, heard the scuff of a foot on the pavement out his door.
I looked at Tabitha, nodded. She reached for the handle on her door. Then she stopped, turned to me.
“Go,” I said to her, then over my shoulder, “You too, Five,” but I could see he was already out, the door standing open. Only Jessup back there now.
I looked at him, said, “I’m staying.”
He shook his head. “No way. This is FPS business. You have no choice. This isn’t TV. This isn’t Xbox.” Here he was between us, reaching across Tabitha now and for her door, trying to open it to boost her out.
But then he stopped, touched his ear, sat back fast. “Copy,” he said. “Ten seconds. Subject headed east on Old Marsh Drive,” then, to me, “If you do not get out now, we will lose them.” He put a hand on my shoulder, held it hard. “We have no intel on where they’re going. Do you understand?”
“If you know anything at all about me,” I said, “you know I’m not leaving Unc.”
I looked again at Tabitha, mouthed Go, nodded at her door.
She didn’t move.
So I let go the steering wheel, lifted my hands from the vise grip I’d held them in all this time, and turned to her. I pointed both index fingers above and then straight at her, then pinched the fingers and thumb of my right hand together, touched the corner of my mouth and then my cheek. Same as she’d given me on a sidewalk in Palo Alto at the end of a fifty-two-hour drive.
Go home.
“Tabitha,” Five shouted from behind me and just outside the open door, “let’s go!” As though she’d hear him.
She tapped her chest, pointed at me.
“We have to go now,” Jessup said.
“Okay,” I said, and nodded at Tabitha.
She touched a hand to the dash, looked out the windshield, and I put the Range Rover in drive, even if the dome light was on for the door open back there.
Then I heard Five grunt out, “Shit, this is a bad idea,” as he rolled into the backseat, and the door slammed shut, the dome light off.
Jessup, his voice sharp steel, whispered, “This is out of regs. This is so out of regs,” then, the words suddenly clipped and cool, “Copy. Yessir. Situation as determined.” He paused. “Now in pursuit.”
They were gone. No sign of them in front of me on this winding stretch of homes I’d turned left onto. The street was wider here, a main drag through the development that led back to the entrance off of Rifle Range Road, maybe a mile away. One of the two lines of egress Jessup’d meant, though it was the only one I knew of, the only way Unc and I had ever taken in here.
“No visual,” Jessup said beside me, leaning in again, that finger to his ear. Then, “No sir. Yessir.” He pointed ahead, said, “Turn right up here. On Sound View. He’ll be taking Porchers Bluff Road. The other way out. Trying to avoid any more officers arriving on scene.”
Here came a corner, the lot a large spread of lawn with a big clap
board house same as all the others, and I swung to the right, realized as I did my headlights were still off, nothing any clearer out the windshield as I pulled onto this next street. I reached down, turned on the headlights, but saw spread before us only better-lit pretty houses and lawns, a better-lit asphalt path between them.
“My dad really didn’t know they were illegals. Really,” Five tried to offer again. “He just hired them to work for him. We don’t really need to go all nuclear with this.”
“Then he’ll have all their W-2s in order, I’m sure,” Jessup said. “For Thursday night poker.”
I drove, and felt suddenly that this wasn’t actually real, Five’s concern about his dad and who he’d hired to make drinks and cash out chips, Jessup’s quick and snarky answer back to him. I felt for a second we were four friends in a vehicle driving too fast in a neighborhood at night, late maybe to the house of another friend. I could feel the adrenaline up in me, higher even than when Jessup’d climbed into the car, and felt still my neck on fire, my mouth dry. But I was only driving a vehicle, in a neighborhood.
And no Suburban in front of us, no cars on the street at all other than the ones parked now and again along the curbs, this mission we were on hollow and dumb for this fact. The houses we drove along were so clean, and sharp, and ready-made for families that it seemed there was nothing could go wrong here, nothing worthy or even in the offing that involved whatever we were rolling toward.
But Unc was out there, and I hoped we hadn’t already lost him.
“You never answered my question,” I said then. “Why are you here?”
“Sound View hits a traffic circle up here at Treadwell,” Jessup said right back, “then he’ll have peeled off one of two ways. Only three streets lead out of the circle, the one we’re on one of them. But they’re not going to come back this way for the cops they might run into.” He paused, nodded ahead of us, and I glanced at Tabitha, saw she had a hand touching the dash still, but her head turned toward him so she could try and read his lips. “The only way out without coming back here,” Jessup went on, “is onto Porchers Bluff, through the other side of this part of the development. So we just have to chance it, take one or the other of these feeders off the circle, make our way back through the streets and hope we see him before he sees us. And before he makes it to Porchers Bluff.”
Fifty yards ahead was the traffic circle, a lamppost at the corner up there, in the circle a clutch of palmettos, a ONE WAY sign pointing to the right. Out my window and Tabitha’s both the big yards and houses had stopped of a sudden, beside us now only black: woods. This was a separate part of Hamlet Square, a part Unc and I had never been before.
“How do you know all this shit?” Five said. His voice was quiet, but seemed somehow more gathered to itself. More like the Five I knew, the smart-ass one. “I mean, how exactly do you know the layout of this whole place? Where I live?”
Jessup didn’t answer him, only leaned forward, peered out the windshield, said, “Copy.”
And he still hadn’t answered my question, either: What are you doing here?
“Are you even talking to anyone on that thing?” Five said.
We were almost to the circle now. “Which street?” I said.
“One or the other,” Jessup said. “It’s a kind of maze of streets back here, but they all—”
Tabitha tapped hard at her window then, and I turned, saw through the edge of woods we were coming out of into the circle a sharp chip of bright red light, and then the taillight itself.
We cleared the trees, and I could see a vehicle on the first street off the circle, maybe a hundred yards away, and then the taillight disappeared, gone for the houses between us, that street curving away to the left.
“Take the second right,” Jessup said.
“But they’re going that way,” I said, and pulled into the circle. “They took—”
“Second right.” He didn’t look at me. “We don’t want to sit on their butts. We don’t want them to see us. And these streets lead out only one way.”
I pulled into the circle, for a second eased off the gas as though I might very well follow after Unc—he was down there, he was right down there—but then I gave it the gas again, passed that street and its houses.
Tabitha quick turned to me, tapped hard at the glass again, shook her head: That way. That way.
But I went on around the circle, in my headlights the landscaped common areas around it, with their azaleas and vinca and more palmettos. And I took that next right, the only one other than the street we’d driven in on and the one Unc and Prendergast had taken, and we peeled off into more houses, and more lawns.
“What the fuck are we doing?” Five whispered hard, and I heard him move back there, then Jessup shoot out “No,” and a jostle, a tug, then Jessup between the front seats again, and a quick chink of sound at the console. I looked down.
A BlackBerry, there with Unc’s cellphone and his wallet, the bag of golf balls.
“We are not calling in anyone,” Jessup said. “No nine one one, no texting BFFs, no nothing.”
I could see Tabitha look down at the cellphone, then up at me, out her window again.
I sped up now, because I wasn’t going to let wherever they were in this part of the development be lost to me. I wasn’t going to lose Unc, and I thought again of Stanhope and his gun drawn on those two illegals, the one running away, the other stopping her, tackling her in the yard.
But losing him for what?
What was it a pair of goggles could hold over Prendergast that he’d risk kidnapping Unc?
And I thought of Jessup climbing into the back of the Range Rover, his calm words—Be resourceful—as I’d sat there knowing already but without any guts for it that the only way out to follow the Suburban would be to pull into that yard, and to get away fast.
He had his ID and badge. He’d tried to kick us out of the vehicle so’s he could take over, follow them wherever no intel could figure.
What would a special agent be doing at a stupid Mount Pleasant poker game? And why take over the Range Rover to follow someone military, no matter what a shit Prendergast was?
Jessup’d been in the Army all those years I’d been wallowing in the lucky shit of my own life. He’d left the day after 9/11, like it’d been something he was waiting for, some sign to him he could just stand up from his desk in homeroom and give his life meaning, because he could serve the country.
He’d been to Iraq twice, and to Afghanistan. And though I’d thought he was done with that, done serving the country, now here he was: a special agent with Homeland Security. Something called Federal Protective Service. Nothing I’d ever heard of.
“Bryden Lane,” he said in his microphone voice as we moved past a street on the right. He looked out Tabitha’s window, and though Jessup only leaned a few inches toward her, I could see she was pushing herself as deep into her seat and away from him as she could, as though he meant to touch her by peering out that window. Then we were past the street—no headlights coming at us, no taillights—and Jessup eased back, looked out the windshield.
I said, “Talk to me, Jessup.” I gripped the wheel, pressed a little harder on the gas. “Why are you here?”
“Listen,” he said, and I could hear him breathe a little easier suddenly, as though he were relieved, “I’m authorized to show you my ID. Authorized to appropriate this vehicle.” He paused, said, “Clancy Road,” as we passed the next empty street, then said, “Official statement: The mission of the Federal Protective Service is to render federal properties safe and secure for federal employees, officials, and visitors in a professional and cost-effective manner by deploying a highly trained and multidisciplined police force.”
“What does that have to do with a poker game?” Five said behind us, his voice lower, unimpressed. “All’s we’re doing is playing Texas hold ’em, and if my dad has two illegal aliens making drinks and cashing chips, what in the hell does that have to do with Homeland Security
and some half-assed car chase in my own stupid neighborhood?”
Jessup said nothing, only looked ahead of us. Tabitha leaned forward in her seat, waved to get my attention, then shook her head, pointed at her eyes: she couldn’t see his lips to read them.
I said, “Federal Protective Service. Security for federal property and people,” and looked out the windshield: houses, and houses. The street started to curve off to the right, and it seemed this was a kind of loop, the rim of a half wheel that had the traffic circle as its hub. If we weren’t careful, I thought, this street would lead us head-on into Unc and Prendergast and company, coming straight at us after having peeled off in what had looked the opposite direction.
“I said, what does all this have to do with a poker game?” Five said again, and I heard him move in his seat, pictured him with his arms crossed and waiting: a kid.
“It doesn’t,” Jessup said, though his voice was so low and quiet beside me it seemed it was more for me than any answer to Five. “It’s about Landgrave Hall.”
“What?” I said quick, but as soon as he’d said it, I’d known. I’d known.
Landgrave. I was wrong. This was about it. This was about a body. That woman. Jessup had been there when Unc and I found it. And he’d followed Harmon, right to my house.
“You don’t think the federal government,” Jessup nearly whispered, “is going to let a piece of marshy real estate wedged between the Naval Weapons Station and the 841st Transportation Battalion sit unattended all these years, no matter it looks like nothing other than a bunch of rich folks whacking at golf balls for fun, do you?” He paused. “Present company excluded.”
I swallowed. I glanced to my right, saw Tabitha leaning forward, shaking her head for being left out altogether from what was being said. But I only looked at her, then out the windshield again.
“Especially with the fact battalion command’s just the window dressing over there. SPAWAR’s only three hundred yards inside the fence from the sixteenth green.” He stopped then, took in a breath.
“The United States Naval Consolidated Brig,” he said, even quieter but as solid as rock, “with all those nasty terrorists holed up in there, is only eleven hundred and seventeen yards in. Not to be too precise.”
