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

length of the boat, drop into the water.
    And for a moment I wished somehow I could be just like Unc: blind, disburdened of the visible world.

Major Tyler got on his radio, and I heard that solid voice call in an officer in boat, another in vehicle. He paused, then told the dispatcher to get hold of the dive team.
    The single word “Rescue?” cracked out of the speaker.
    He was quiet a second, said, “No. Recovery.”
    I still had my eyes closed.
    “We’re here on a trespassing charge,” Stanhope called out. “If there’s a body involved, we need to get my commanding officer to—”
    “Your jurisdiction as regards civilians not on U.S. Navy property don’t even exist, comrade,” Tyler said. I heard him step forward on his boat, move toward us, felt the smallest rock of the jon boat for that movement in his own.
    “Well put, Alton!” Unc said loud, on the words a kind of tight glee. “And we wasn’t over on the base. Period.”
    “You were observed,” Stanhope started up, and Unc cut in, “We never set foot—”
    And in the midst of the bitchfest the two of them started up, I heard suddenly down closer than I’d imagined he might be, me still here at the transom and still with my eyes closed, Tyler’s voice yet again, quiet and calm: “Huger, you going to be all right. But you need to move so I can help.”
    I’d never met him before. I’d seen these Department of Natural Resources men out on the water most all my life, one time got written up out on the Combahee, the river edge of Hungry Neck, for having no life jacket in the old jon boat I used to mess around in down there, another time stopped in the channel back behind Capers Island by some overweight geezer in a nineteen-foot Action Craft flats boat complete with a ten-foot tower rigged with all the radar you could want, only to check my fishing license.
    I didn’t know this Major Alton Tyler. And Unc’d never mentioned him.
    Yet I believed him, right then, enough to open my eyes, to see what next I had to do here, and I turned, looked up at him.
    He was squatted there at the bow of his Boston Whaler, the boats most all the DNR drove, its hull almost overhanging the stern of the jon boat. He’d worked some kind of magic getting it in here, the hull pressed into the cordgrass all around, and Unc not hearing or feeling a thing. The searchlight, mounted back at the steering console, made him a silhouette to me, and I could see he had on the ball cap they all wore, and the holster at his hip, the pistol there. He had his elbows on his knees, but beyond that I couldn’t see his face for the light behind him, and for a second I thought of Unc against the night sky before all this had come down, the stars scattered behind him, before us nothing but the dumb idea of golf.
    “Let’s go,” Tyler said, and reached down, touched my shoulder.
    And as though I had no choice but to believe him, I stood up andmoved past Unc in the boat, knelt at the bow, pulled on that ratty nylon rope tied to the cinder block onshore until the boat hit bottom. Unc’d stood tall the whole time, still carrying on with Stanhope—“You come on out to private civilian property,” Unc was yelling, “and try and pass it off like it’s military business, so let’s just see what the courts have to say,” while Stanhope seethed out, “If you continue to disregard our authority, I will have no choice but to further charge you with resisting arrest”—and I hauled out that plank yet again, dropped it and walked back on across, then moved right past Stanhope and his silent partner.
    Stanhope turned from Unc then, said to me as I passed, “You will not leave the premises, Mr. Dillard, until my commanding officer notifies me of the status of our situation.”
    But I just moved on up the lawn at the back of the Dupont house and onto their patio. I pulled one of the wrought-iron chairs from the wrought-iron table, scraped it across the brick pavers out here loud as I could,