Dead Low Tide by Bret Lott Read Free Book Online Page A

back—then they could have them, because there was a body here, a dead woman who needed to get out of here and be taken wherever she was going to be taken.
    It was the woman I was thinking of. Just give them the goggles and maybe they’d let go this stupid idea that even looking over there was trespassing.
    I bent to the bag, but before I’d even touched it or started in to finish my sentence—
then take the damned things!—
I heard “Freeze!” boom out even deeper.
    I looked up, saw Stanhope with his gun out of the holster and on me, that M4 barrel staring right at me, the second sailor’s head cocked to the sight on it.
    “Ahms up, hands behind your head,” Stanhope said. “Both of you. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney—”
    And heard from behind me, out on the creek and just a few yards off, a voice: “Major Tyler, Department of Natural Resources here. Y’all need to calm down a little bit.”
    The words were even and solid, a deep surprise inside all this surprise of trespassing and guns drawn, and before I could turn around two things happened at once: first came a sudden and huge sweep of bright light—the searchlight this Major Tyler must’ve had on his boat—across the back of a white stucco cottage, and across camo BDUs of sailors with their guns up, and across Grange and Priscilla Cuthbert kneeling now to the once-more-fainted Mrs. Q, the whole crew squinting for that light; and next came the cold hard ratchet of a shotgun pumped: Major Tyler geared up and ready to go.
    “Let’s all of us,” the major said, his words somehow even calmer now, “just put our toys away and square up what’s going on here.”
    “Snuck up on me, Alton,” Unc said, him turned back toward me but still standing, Tyler’s flood full on his face and those sunglasses. “You DNR boys going to have fun with this one.”
    “What’s this I heard about a body?” the major said, and I made to turn and see who this man was Unc seemed to know, and how he’d pulled in so quiet even Unc hadn’t caught it. Of course he’d have switched to an electric outboard before he ever entered the creek for how shallow it was, but he had to be crowded in for how narrow it was back here.
    But before I even made it around to him, I saw her.
    She was right here next to our boat, a pale gray sheen just beneath the surface, like some ghost moored beside us. The pluff mud we’d roiled up had settled for how long we’d been waiting, the water between her and the surface clear, the mud on her washed away even more, her lit like all the rest of us with the floodlight from this DNR boat behind us.
    I could see the cleft between her legs, and her breasts. I could see those two points of her shoulders, her arms and legs anchored, fading off beneath her.
    And I could see now her face, unaided by the goggles: a grimace of teeth, raw pink flesh, the smeared place where her eyes should have been. All of it only a couple inches beneath the surface.
    From somewhere off to my left and a thousand miles away, Stanhope called out “Stand down!” like he was on the bow of a battleship, the whole U.S. Navy waiting for word only from him. Somewhere to my right and just as far away I heard Major Alton Tyler break open the shotgun, then the smallest scratch of sound: him drawing out the two shells in the barrel.
    Then, like a further curse on whoever this woman had been, here came up her shoulder and onto her neck a big blue crab, right there under the water. It paused a moment just below her chin before it reached a tentative claw up, delicately snipped at the ragged flesh of her jaw, and snipped again.
    “Well now,” the major said off to my left, the words quiet. “Well, well, well.”
    I closed my eyes, sat down on the seat here at the transom of the jon boat. Then the push pole, still leaned against the gunwale, gave way, and I heard it slide slowly down the