by Bret Lott
He paused. “You don’t know how valuable the land you live on is. Agents of the Federal Protective Service have been parked at Landgrave since the Navy jumped the creek and bought the weapons tract. Nineteen forty-one. So you may think Tyrone and Segundo and I are glorified rent-a-cops. But you’d be wrong. We’re standing watch. And because of the high-value target this place is, and how important it is to keep it secure, we take this very seriously.”
“So what are you, some kind of spy?” Five said, and I couldn’t quite tell if he was being a smart-ass now, or if he meant it. But I knew I wanted him to shut up.
Here came another street, and we all looked down it to nothing, though there might have been in this moment the sense this was of course what we’d see. Nothing.
Where were Unc and the Suburban?
“Zinser Lane,” he reported, then, quieter, “No. No spy.” He turned toward me the smallest way again, said over his shoulder to Five, “But I do know, from fact sheets passed around regarding known affiliates of soon-to-be visiting dignitaries, that you graduated Duke with a 1.78 GPA, you been through six jobs as a glorified bank teller in five years, and the only reason you can afford that loft condo on Hill Street up in Charlotte on your punk-ass thirty-two grand a year is because Warchester Four made the down payment and splits the monthly with you.” He paused, shook his head. “And I know if I turn more than ninety degrees away from Dorcas Lydia Galliard, better known as Tabitha, she can’t read my lips and hear all this data about said affiliates, all of which she knows nothing about.”
Five was silent, didn’t even move.
Jessup faced front, and I looked at him. He nodded, said, “Eyes on the road.”
I turned, but glanced at Tabitha again, hands palms up in front of her: What is happening?
I shook my head, my hands to the wheel.
See my mom, Tabitha’d said was why she was here, but then Five’d put in She’s here for an interview, and made the lame joke she’d have to kill me if she told me.
She was here for SPAWAR. To become a computer somebody at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command.
Ahead of me was a street, only knowable as far as the reach of my headlights. Around me were homes of people I didn’t know, and most likely never would. Somewhere someone was taking street names from Jessup, and giving him orders. And somewhere between this moment of asphalt beneath my tires and whatever back way that led out to another street called Porchers Bluff Road was Unc, held hostage.
Somewhere someone had a fact sheet on Tabitha and all known affiliates, prepping to lead her into a life inside the fence at the bottom edge of Landgrave Hall, and I gave myself the luxury inside the middle of this all to wonder what facts there might be lined up about me.
Driver, I saw. Follower. Errand runner.
Thursday night Maps app monitor. Golf ball retriever.
Viewer of a dead body.
I blinked, blinked again, felt this idiot adrenaline in me rushing up again, felt my breaths coming quicker at the vision one more time of that woman bathed in green, a crab picking delicately at her jaw.
And now the neighborhood around us was changing: next to the landscaped house out my window stood an unfinished one, wrapped in torn and faded Tyvek, same as the condos out to Hungry Neck since the developers gave up and went home. Out Tabitha’s side sat a house only framed up, the dirt yard littered with trash, pieces of wood.
We’d come to the far end of the development world now, us moving through unfinished homes in various forms of decay, the live ones suddenly behind us. Some of these houses were framed, some just foundations, some with clapboard halfway up the walls. But all of them dead. The place where life at Hamlet Square cut off, us just this quick inside the handbasket the whole real estate world had gone to hell in.
And the place where at any second we ought to see a black Suburban coming at us.
“Yep. Everyone over at SPAWAR knows Tabitha’s the one,” Jessup said, and now my stomach was starting to tighten. I looked over at Tabitha, Jessup leaning in between us, and saw she was reading his lips now. It was darker in the car, those streetlamps and lit-up houses gone. But there was still the dull glow of the dashboard lights, and I could see by them her mouth was shut tight, her eyes open wide.
I looked ahead. Houses were disappearing altogether now, just empty lots on either side up there. “She’s here for an interview, but there’s no interview to do,” Jessup said, still looking straight ahead. He touched his ear, said, “Copy. As determined,” then to us, “The postdoc she’s doing fits like a shell in a chamber for SPAWAR. Data Visualization and Probabilistic Function in Aggregate Encryption.” He paused. “Now she’s a spy,” he said. “Or sure looks like she’ll be one soon.”
Tabitha tapped hard the dash, and I looked at her, saw her shake her head, then three times in a row put her hand to her mouth and sweep that hand down and away. Tough little moves, and fast.
Bad bad bad.
I quick looked at the street, thought to gun it, to do something fast, because I understood her, and knew this was bad, whatever we were in.
But there, up ahead and at the outermost edge of where the headlights reached, I could see a row of trees, the strip of asphalt we were on heading straight at them. Trees up there, like a line of men on horseback, waiting.
“But that’s not even the real story,” Jessup whispered. “That’s gravy, sure, having her with us. But that’s not why I’m here,” and I heard again that thin scratch of windbreaker material, heard that snap of a button. “That’s not why we’re here,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” Five said from nowhere, his voice a quiet shock. I’d forgotten him, and heard him move now. “I know where we are. I know where this goes.” He paused. “This is a dead end.”
“Like I told you, the real story,” Jessup said, “is Landgrave.”
He disappeared from between us again, and I heard in the same moment a solid thump of sound from behind us, a dull groan of air out of Five, and the slow slide down of him against the backseat.
And next a cold jab at the side of my neck: a pistol barrel, the instant of its fact coming at the same moment I saw the end of the street in the headlights, the cul-de-sac I’d driven us straight into. Trees all around. No homes anywhere, dead or alive.
Tabitha screamed, a high and dark shock of strangled noise, the sound maybe the only surprise to come at Jessup this whole night long, and I felt the barrel quiver an instant at his turning to her, heard the word “No” solid and cold.
Here in the rearview came a pair of headlights.
“No heroics,” Jessup whispered.
I could give it the gas hard, circle back around them coming up from behind us, just drive like hell away from here.
But Jessup would still be here in the Range Rover with a gun on me, Tabitha and Five with us and ready to be shot. And Unc would still be in the Suburban.
I pulled to a stop in the middle of the cul-de-sac, put it in park. Dull green pines stood in the headlights, in front of them pavement edged with a concrete curb, poured at the direction of some developer who’d counted on houses going up forever. Like everything we knew would never end.
Tabitha breathed fast beside us, and I cut my eyes to her, barely shook my head for the pressure of the barrel against my throat.
“Good,” Jessup said. “Tell her to keep quiet.” I could feel him turn to look behind us then, and saw in the rearview the headlights disappear beneath the rear window. In my side-view, the Suburban’s door opened, someone climbed out, the door closed.
Prendergast, I could see, their headlights banging off the back of the Range Rover.
Tabitha took in thin snatches of air, her back pressed hard against her door, each breath the brink of a scream.
Then I said it, because I wanted to know. Because knowing would seem to give some reason to this whole thing. There needed to be a reason.
I said, “Who killed her?”
“Not me,” he said, and gave a small lau
gh. “Oh no. Not me.”
I heard another car door close, saw in the side-view Prendergast look across the hood of the Suburban, nod.
I said, “Do you know about the goggles?”
The barrel against my neck, I could feel the way Jessup was moving, looking out his window, then out Tabitha’s side, waiting. But he stopped, pressed the barrel even tighter into me. “Know about what?” he said.
Then came a sharp knock at Tabitha’s window. She jumped, seemed to scatter to pieces for what she’d felt, turned and pushed away from the door with both hands, legs stiff against the floorboard until her back was to us and against the console, and Jessup took the gun from my throat, hit the side of her head, a quick pop of his hand, the gun right back at my neck just as quick.
“No!” I shouted, and reached a hand out, even with the barrel jammed as far against my throat as it could go.
She slumped forward, her legs folding beneath her so that she seemed to pour down the seat until she filled the leg well, her in a kind of ball on the floorboard.
“Now here’s our man,” Jessup said.
I tried to breathe, looking there at Tabitha. I tried to get air into me, but only felt a kind of quiver in my chest, a shallow nothing in and out.
Then I looked up.
There stood the bartender in his white shirt and black vest, bent to the window for how big he was. Coburn, who’d tackled the chip-cage girl, then’d spat words in her ear.
He was smiling, nodding.
“Unlock the door,” Jessup said, and I reached to the dash, pressed the button.
Because I wasn’t here. I wasn’t here.
The dome light came on, and Coburn leaned in, still smiling.
He looked at Jessup, and spoke, friendly words out of him. It wasn’t anything long, these words from him, just a handful of syllables that flowed out of him as calm as any of us would say hello to a friend.
I didn’t understand them.
They sounded familiar, sounded for a moment like Spanish. But not. These were sounds that came from back in his throat, hashed up and shimmed in. But still only a handful of syllables, and I thought in this moment I’d heard wrong, that it was me with the problem.
Because I wasn’t here.
I could feel Jessup nod, then words from him right here beside me, words in that same calm tone, and with those same hashed sounds.
Wallay koom sallem, it seemed he said, though I had no idea. They were sounds, syllables, a friendly greeting. That’s all I knew.
Coburn looked at me, the smile gone.
“Situation as determined,” he said, and in the instant I saw him raise his fist and reach across the seat toward me, inside just that moment before the world went black, it seemed a remarkable thing, how suddenly I understood what he’d said, how these words were as clear and available to me as some kid speaking them to me on the tracks at the end of Marie as he handed me the communal Colt 45.
These words were English, it came to me at the same moment as his fist, and those others were Arabic.
Water moved against the hull. Wind touched at my face and in my hair, only enough to let me know we were moving, that we were going somewhere. An outboard motor droned, just easing us along.
I felt the slow nod of it all, of everything. I felt the boat, and the water, and the air, and the calm.
I was home: in a boat, out on water.
“Might’ve broken his cheekbone,” a voice in close said loud, and slammed through me, exploded in my head.
My left eye hurt. But more than that, more than pain. It was a kind of white light blossoming in me, filling me, and then it wasn’t only my eye, but my ear, and down to my jaw, the laser white pain of it suddenly down into my lungs too and pulling even deeper. I tried at a breath, a good one, but felt my mouth taped closed, the air in through my nose another shallow nothing of a breath.
My hands were together and behind me, my wrists bound tight. I knew I was sitting up, my legs straight out in front of me, my shoulders against the hull. I knew these things.
But my hands wouldn’t move, or my legs. Nothing, and I tried at another breath in, felt the tape pull at my lips and jaw and below my ears and at my hair, all the way around my head.
And then, like it was some ragged curtain rising, my right eye opened.
A shadow squatted a couple feet away from me, haloed by the night sky: Prendergast.
I was in the bow of a boat, nothing more than a good-sized bass boat with the platforms stripped out. Just beyond Prendergast I could see two others sitting across from me, black shadows huddled against the hull on that side, legs drawn to their chests. Just lumps, dark masses against the lighter gray of the hull.
“Wish I’d hit him harder, killed him outright,” another voice said, away and to my right. “Save us the trouble.”
I worked to turn my head, to see who’d said this, because I hadn’t yet recalled it had been a big tanned bartender who’d hit me. Because a part of me, even inside the white sear of pain and the hard jolt of words, even inside seeing this shadow squatting beside me and knowing who it was, and knowing too that the shadows across from me were Tabitha, and Five—even inside all of that, a part of me was still out in a boat on water. A part of me was still home, and I wanted to know what this interruption was, the scope and breadth of it, and how I might banish it. I wanted to know how I could get back to that calm, that nod through water in the someplace else I’d been.
I turned my head a couple inches toward that second voice, the shock of pain at my eye suddenly sharper for it, then gave in to the move altogether, let my head loll that way.
There stood another shadow against the night sky, this one behind the console only a few feet away, the wheel in his hands. I could see the white arms of his shirt, the rest of him black for that vest.
Oh yes. Him: Coburn.
Prendergast’s shadow clicked on a flashlight, and light stabbed into me, a dagger deep in my head. I squeezed my eye shut, the pain in me ten times bigger in just that move.
“He’s awake,” Prendergast said, and the flashlight clicked off.
And then I kicked at him, swept my leg low along the deck with everything I had toward that voice. I swung my leg at him, the move without plan or measure, simply what I knew I had to do, because here was the sudden recollection in me of Jessup hitting Tabitha, and of Coburn’s fist fast at me, and of the groan of air out of Five in the seat behind me, and of Unc being hauled away by Harmon.
Here was the bright memory of Unc telling me what Prendergast had done to my mom.
My leg hit him hard, and I felt contact just above my ankle, felt his leg bend in, his own ankle folding away. I opened my eye, saw he’d stood up after he turned off the flashlight, but now that shadow was twisting, falling backward.
He let out a sharp piece of sound, tried to gain his balance, and I drew my legs up fast, out of the way as he sort of hung there in mid-collapse. Something fell out of his hand and hit the hull—the flashlight—and then he was full on his way down, his legs giving out beneath him, and he slammed to the deck.
But he was up on his elbows soon as he hit, whispered loud, “Son of a bitch!” through gritted teeth.
I heard a squeal of sound from the shadow on the right across from me: Tabitha. I saw the other shadow push away with his feet, try to jam himself into the hull as far from Prendergast as he could: Five.
I heard a dark and heavy grunt from somewhere to my right, back at the stern.
Unc.
And I wondered: Why hadn’t I listened to him, when he’d told me to stay put?
Had he known Jessup was in on anything?
And what was the all of this, anyway?
If I’d stayed, it would only be Unc here, and not Five, and most important not Tabitha.
But Jessup had jumped in, and I’d listened to him instead.
Jessup.
I tried again to turn that way, toward the console and Coburn, to see if I could somehow spot Unc back there, but th
e move made the pain in my eye blast everything to pieces, a knife prying open an oyster jammed just under my skin, so that I lost my breath for it, felt my stomach spasm and go tight, the air in me out hard through my nose, the tape around my head a sudden band of metal cinched tight.
Here was Coburn, stepping around the console, and moving toward me, and here now was his foot, and I closed my eye just as he kicked me in the stomach.
I came around, still on a boat, still with an outboard droning, still with water coursing beneath me across a hull.
But there was nothing about this that was anything like home. Not now.
I was on my side, my knees drawn up near to my chest, the deck cold beneath my right cheek. My stomach felt hard somehow, like it was made of concrete, but with none of the strength of concrete. Just dull and thick and pointless, buried somewhere inside it another pain I didn’t even care to think on, a pain different from that of my eye and jaw and ear. My stomach felt hard, felt over and done with.
I tried to breathe in again, but the air was even shallower now.
“Should’ve killed all of them on the spot,” Coburn said.
“We’ve got the plan,” Prendergast said, and it sounded as though they were both back at the console. But Prendergast’s words came out squeezed and tight, his teeth still clenched. “We stay on the plan.”
I opened my eye, saw from where I lay Coburn still at the console. To the left of him sat Prendergast on the gunwale, a hand down at his ankle and rubbing it, and I wondered where Jessup was, and what had happened to Stanhope and Harmon, too. And the chip-cage girl, Tammy, who for a second seemed maybe not to have anything to do with any of this.
But then I remembered it was Coburn who’d knocked her down, nearly tackled her once she’d tried to run away, then whispered hard those words in her ear, Five climbing back into the Range Rover to tell us it sounded like Spanish, what Coburn’d been saying to her. And Stanhope hauling her away right alongside Coburn.
