Dead Low Tide Read Free Page A

how secure people figured they were, given their money and how long they’d all had it. And our old neighborhood not even a mile from here.
    I let myself look at that Spanish one a second longer than I should,a mistake I made every time we came out here: the umbrella and wrought-iron table and chairs, two sofas and a chaise lounge parked there in the courtyard. The low brick fire ring built out closer to the fairway, the row of five palmettos spaced evenly along this back line of the property. All that painted tile, and the arched windows, and that stucco.
    I looked at it every time, of course, because the Spanish of it, that stucco and red tile, made it feel too much like what you’ll see in Palo Alto. Specifically, on the campus at Stanford.
    I’d been there once.
    Unc whacked the next ball, and my eyes caught the bright green streak of it blast out even sharper to the right, even deeper into the trees.
    “Jeez, Unc,” I whispered, “what you been drinking?” and turned in the camp chair to face him full-on. “You never slice it,” I whispered.
    Here he was: big and green and filling that porthole of sight. He stood centered at the tee, already had the next ball teed up, the club head down and settled at it, him about to swing back for hit number three.
    He had on his old windbreaker for the cool out here, on the right breast the bright block letters
MtPPD
, the jacket a prized possession from back when he was on the Mount Pleasant Police Department. He had on his same old khakis, and that Braves cap, the scripty white
A
sharp above the bill. And there was his face, the sunglasses he always wore, all of him green. He dipped his chin, leaned his head to the left a little, geared up to swing.
    But he stopped, took in a small breath, and looked at me.
    I saw my reflection in his sunglasses then, two white shocks of light the size of marbles: the IR illuminator on my goggles. Infrared light, reflected right back at me.
    For a second it scared me, like it did every time since we’d gotten this new set. It looked like he could see me, like he was just wearing apair of regular glasses, but his eyes behind them these white fires trying to burn into me something I didn’t know and couldn’t yet figure out.
    The first set of goggles we’d gotten didn’t have the IR illuminator built in. Those were the old Gen 1 things somewhere in the garage right now, buried under the pile of military and security gadgets Unc loves getting hold of for whatever reason he has. He’d won this new set one poker night a couple months ago off a Navy commander pal who’d tapped out early and’d been so convinced of his luck—no matter he’d lost what he’d brought with him—that he’d scrambled outside and gotten the goggles from his truck, then promptly lost the hand. Unc took him with three tens to his two pair.
    “You should have seen him,” Unc’d told me on the way home from poker the night he won them. “I could hear in the way he was breathing when it come to his bet how much he was sweating, all his money gone and him thinking about getting these Gen 4s out of his truck. The dimwit commander says, ‘You want a set of night-vision goggles you can’t get anywhere on any market? Guaranteed nobody anywhere’s going to have these for another three years,’ and I says, ‘Like I could see with them.’ I could still hear him sweating, and I let him twist there for a minute or so more before I nodded I’d take them, and he was gone. Ninety seconds later he plops them on the table, lets out a breath I can hear is some kind of smile for him thinking he’s won the hand. And all he’s got is his piddly two pair.” He’d let out a laugh then, though I remember it wasn’t for any kind of happiness. He shook his head, then’d whispered like it was some punch line only he knew the joke for, “I just wanted to beat the son of a bitch is all.”
    Maybe all this gear and dark-ops night stuff was his way of trying to hold tight to