Dead Low Tide Read Free Page B

his life, I sometimes thought. Maybe it was all longing for the badass days when he was on the force. Way back when, in that time when he could see and work. Back before his wife, my aunt Sarah, killed herself by burning down their house over to Mount Pleasant.
    Back before he’d been blinded in that fire when the window he’d been looking in had exploded, his wife, my aunt, inside and herself on fire. Hence those sunglasses, because they cover up the gnarled and shiny skin from where his eyebrows had been on down to his cheeks, the white marbles he has for eyes held in by eyelids just as gnarled.
    I said it was complicated.
    And that’s why it scared me when I saw the IR reflected back at me like this: here were those marble eyes of his, taking me in and sizing me up. Me every time, I knew, coming up short.
    “What?” I whispered.
    He looked at me a second longer, then another. He let out a breath, and I saw him swallow, his mouth a straight line. He seemed about to say something, but then he looked down, those white marbles gone. He cocked his chin again, gripped and regripped the club handle, inched the club head along the ground until it just touched the ball: how he knows where to hit.
    I turned, watched for where the next ball would go.
    But instead of another one of those missiles taking off, I saw to the left, past that red-brick house with its Parthenon pergola, a growing glow through the trees, a moving green swell of light that grew brighter green, bigger and bigger in just that much time. Then here came around the edge of the house twin explosions of light that swung right through my line of sight, for an instant that porthole gone to pure bright white.
    Headlights on a golf cart, speeding along the cart path on the far side of the fairway. Headed for us.
    I flipped up the goggles, took off the hard hat. “Time to go, Unc. The muscle’s here,” I said. Here was Security, us about to get caught one more time.
    I tried for a second to figure out who was driving—most likely, this being early Wednesday A.M. , it’d be either Tyrone or Segundo. If we were lucky it’d be Jessup. But without the goggles on, the worldwas back to its plain old darkness, me stuffing the hat and goggles back in the book bag. Unc didn’t want anyone knowing we had them, because it was illegal as hell to be marching around and watching the world, much less golf balls, with those things on. Golfing after hours was one thing, but possessing Gen 4s was another. And so I couldn’t yet tell from here who it was hauling ass along the path past the red-brick cottage, now the Spanish one, and I turned back to Unc.
    He was gone.
    The club lay on the ground, I could make out in the dark, the ball still teed up too, and I quick looked to my left, saw him already ten yards away, headed fast toward the Dupont house.
    “Unc,” I called, and heard my voice way too loud out here. But I didn’t care, because there he was, walking away. Without me.
    Usually by this time we were picking up, pretending we were finished and headed out anyway. Of course the guard, whoever it was, would pull up and park the cart, then dutifully walk us, Unc holding on to my belt, back along that brick fence and to the boat, the guard all the while reciting the rules: No golf without signing in at the pro shop; no golf except during regular business hours; no golf in the middle of the night.
    Even if you were members. Like us.
    Because we live here—Unc, Mom, and me—at Landgrave Hall Golf and Country Club. In a 4200-square-foot cottage that sits on the green of the seventh hole. We’ve even got a dock off the back of the place, right out into Goose Creek, where we keep the jon boat cradled up in the rafters of the boathouse at the end. A dock where we shove off in the middle of the night and snake our way back along Goose Creek, only to put in at the head of a finger creek and sneak back in to golf.
    As it turns out, we’ve ended up rich. And discovered we are