Darkside (2002), page 52
“Yeah, but most of them won’t have much either. The money difference doesn’t get big until five years down the pike. Besides, none of them will get to strap on an F-eighteen Super Hornet and go blasting off a carrier. Money can’t buy that.”
“Assuming you make it to jets,” he warned. “Not many do.”
“Hell, Dad, that’s assuming the dant doesn’t change his mind in the next week.” She was quiet for a moment, then turned to look at him. Her face was barely visible in the darkness. “I’m sorry about the lies. Charlottesville. And especially Dyle Booth.”
Ev nodded in the darkness. “Just don’t do that in the fleet,” he said. “You’ll be an officer. You can’t let go like that anymore. And if anybody puts the squeeze on you, go tell your boss. It’s not all Dark Side out there.”
She did not reply, and he felt he’d said enough. He was suddenly glad it was dark. He wondered if it was a porpoise out there as something surfaced again, closer to the pier, just out of the dim cone of light from the spots. He could hear it blowing, but not squeaking. They came into the creek sometimes, hunting.
“I hope so,” Julie said, hugging her knees to her chin. “One of the reasons I turned Tommy off was because of what happened down there at UVA. Plus, I had no one else to tell. What are you looking at?”
“I wonder if that’s a porpoise out there,” he said, leaning forward to listen. He got up to go investigate. Julie got up, too, following him down to the very end of the dock, where the steps were. Ev tilted one of the boathouse spots down as he reached the end of the dock, aiming it down into the water, where he saw a shimmering white face with a huge mouthful of teeth just below the surface. Julie saw it at the same time and screamed just as Dyle Booth surfaced, ten feet off the dock.
For a moment, Ev was frozen in place. He distantly heard a screen door slam next door, and then his neighbor, Jack Johnson, called out to them, asking if everything was all right. At that moment, Dyle raised an ugly black government .45 auto and pointed it at them, drooping the muzzle just enough to drain the water out of it. He was treading water effortlessly, staying just off the dock. He tilted his head in the direction of Johnson’s voice. Ev understood.
“Yeah, Jack, we’re okay,” Ev called.
“Thought I heard a scream,” Johnson said. “Is that Julie with you?” His voice carried with perfect clarity across the water. Dyle was grinning again, but that .45 never wavered. Julie seemed to be still frozen in shock.
“She got a splinter, Jack. We’re okay.”
“All right, Just checking. Night, Ev.” The old man went back into his house. Dyle moved a little closer to the dock. He called Julie’s name, and she slowly, very slowly, looked down at him.
“Thought it was over, didn’t you, TC? Thought you’d dodged a bullet? You forget something, TC? You forget our little deal?”
Julie swallowed and moved closer to her father, but she didn’t say anything. Ev could feel her trembling. “What the hell do you want, Mr. Booth?”
“Fuck you, Professor,” Booth spat back at him, ducking almost all the way back under but keeping the .45 aimed right between them. “You never gave a shit about me. Thought I was some dumb ass kid. I could see it every time I came in. And your precious little girl there. Too good for the likes of me, right, Julie? Except for that once, huh? You thought it was pretty good that night, didn’t you, baby?” He slapped the water hard. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, bitch!”
“She wasn’t thinking at all if you gave her Rohypnol, Booth. That how you get your girls? A little better living through chemistry? Couldn’t get any on your own?”
“Dad, don’t,” Julie murmured, but it was too late, as Dyle stopped his movements in the water and settled back down until only his face and the muzzle of the gun were above water.
“Tough talk from an old has-been who’s ten feet from the business end of this,” he said, waggling the .45 and once again drooping the nose to make sure the barrel was dry. “You were Navy once. You do understand I can drop you both in under a second, right?”
“What the fuck do you want here, Booth?” Ev demanded again, getting angrier by the second. “They know what you did. They know what you are.”
“What I am? What I am? And just what’s that mean, Professor? You have no idea of what I am.”
Ev had been trying to think of what to do, but now he just let his brain ride, his old pilot instincts kicking in. He moved ever so slightly to get closer to Julie. “What you are is a piece of shit, Booth,” he said. “A highly polished turd that got by the treatment plant and into the drinking water. You’re a technogeek, right, Booth? A whiz with the computers?” He moved again, not picking up his feet but just willing his body to ooze its way closer to Julie. He didn’t really know what he was going to do, but he was going to do something. Almost there, arm’s length. He felt his leg come up against his scull, which was lying upside down on the dock. “You know what Gee-Go means in computer talk, right, asshole?”
Booth’s face tightened into a furious rictus. Those huge teeth dominated his entire face. Teeth and burning, clearly insane eyes. Ev was almost to the point of being able to touch Julie, inside of arm’s length now, except the damned boat was in the way. “Gee-go, Booth. You’re the personification of gee-go. G-I-G-O. Garbage in, garbage out. The academy let the barriers down and you slipped over the rim of the bowl like the stinking piece of shit you are, Booth.”
“Dad, stop it,” Julie wailed. “He means it.”
“You tell him, TC,” Booth said softly, dipping again into the black water while his other arm oared his body back into position to keep facing them directly. The boat, Ev thought. Use the boat. Booth dipped down into the water again for just an instant, and Ev backhanded Julie with all his might, a sudden blast of adrenaline pumping him so hard that he knocked her off her feet even as he bent down, grabbed the boat, and in one surprisingly smooth thrust slid it directly at the evil face in the water. Booth fired once, a huge, booming shot that slashed the air where Julie’s head had been an instant before, and then, a split second before the prow of the boat hit him in the face, he fired again, and this one caught Ev in the left side of his chest, spinning him around like a dog under a bus. Ev was conscious of being down on his side, down on the edge of the dock, as Julie scrabbled on hands and knees back up the dock, screaming something at Dyle and then for someone to help them. The gun went off again, this round tearing through the decking, splitting one board into pointed fragments that lashed Ev’s face and hands. Ev lifted his head to look back down into the water, but his neck muscles betrayed him and his face sank back down onto the shards of wood.
Have to get up, he told himself, must get up. He heaved again, trying hard for more air. Something wrong with my lungs. But he managed to get up on his hands and knees, turning deliberately to face the water and ladder, but then Dyle’s glaring face was rising over the edge of the dock. He heard dogs barking somewhere in the background, the sounds of voices, Julie still yelling. He thought he saw lights coming on, but his eyes were focused on Dyle as he came up the ladder. One of Dyle’s eyes was swollen shut and he was bleeding from his nose, where the boat’s sharp prow had hit him squarely, but he was grinning that terrible grin, his open eye focused right on Ev’s face. He stepped up onto the dock, out of the cone of light from the spots, his huge body gleaming, and suddenly he was bending over Ev, grabbing him by the hair and jerking him upward so he could look into Ev’s eyes. Ev grunted as a huge wave of pain washed through his chest, and he heard himself making a gargling noise in his throat.
“She warned you, old man,” Dyle said softly, struggling to hold Ev up so he could push the nose of the .45 under Ev’s rib cage. Ev couldn’t do anything except try to breathe. He was having trouble focusing his eyes, and he couldn’t even look up into Dyle’s grinning face because Dyle’s forearm was in the way. He felt Dyle glance sideways up the pier, where Julie was still yelling for help.
“Goddamn you. We had a deal, bitch,” he hissed, but Ev didn’t think she could hear him. He felt Dyle pull the hammer back. “Not here to do Julie, you stupid fuck, but you? You don’t count, see?”
Ev felt his body sagging, and Dyle had to pull harder on his hair to keep his face up.
“Look at me,” Dyle growled, and Ev tried again to focus. All he could see was a mouthful of teeth, and then he felt his fingers close around a big piece of the shattered dock planking.
“That’s the Look, Pops. Hold still now, don’t move—don’t want to get anything on me, do we?—and then everything’s gonna be all right.”
Ev suddenly felt footsteps running back down the pier, and he heard Julie screaming, “No, no. What are you doing?” as Dyle looked over at her and grinned again. Summoning every ounce of strength he had left, Ev stabbed upward with that stiletto-sized splinter, catching Dyle in the belly and, because of the angle, driving all eighteen inches of it right up into Dyle’s heart. For a terrible instant, nothing happened, and he realized he could feel Dyle’s beating heart pulsing through the piece of wood. Then he felt the stub end of the .45 barrel that had been pressed to his own side fall away, and then Dyle, cross-eyed now, let out a long, wet sigh and collapsed like a huge sack of potatoes, a fountain of blood welling up out of his mouth, past all those devil teeth, until his entire weight was pressing down on top of Ev.
Goddamn, he thought. I was having enough trouble breathing without this shit. Then there were people, hands, lights, and lots of noise. He heard other voices, familiar voices, more feet pounding down the dock. He thought he heard Julie sobbing. Tried to lift his head, tried to tell her it was okay, that Booth was all done, but from the sounds of it, Julie had clearly lost it. He couldn’t get himself upright because the dock was slippery with all the blood. He even thought he heard Agent Branner yelling something.
So do something, Ev, a voice in his head was saying. Take charge here. Talk to her. Call her name. Hell, call any name.
But which name? he wondered dreamily. Julie. Liz. Joanne. Branner? Branner didn’t have a name, now that he thought of it. All these women around him. His own voice was echoing maddeningly in his head. You ought to call one of them, Ev. You really should. This is not time to lose control, not after everything that’s happened. Just say a name. Pick one, Ev. Because if you don’t, you may have to go with Booth.
“Liz,” he croaked.
“Don’t talk; just be still,” a woman’s voice was whispering in his ear, her soft, cool hands on his cheek. Amazingly, he detected a splinter in his other cheek, the cheek that was sticking to the pier. He felt the weight of Booth’s body move farther sideways. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “The EMTs are coming. Just hang on. Stay awake. Keep breathing.”
Keep breathing. Right, he thought. He tried to say something, anything, but he just couldn’t get enough good air down into his lungs, where the pain was, terrible, suffocating pain now. Yet in a way, he wanted to laugh. Here was yet another woman telling him what to do. It figured. Even so, he thought he’d picked the right name. He tried it again, but nothing came out this time but a big red bubble. Then all the noise seemed to withdraw into a rush of darkening echoes. His ears filled with the sound of wind rushing through trees, a veritable roaring, and he decided, Okay, enough’s enough. Just go with it.
Jim Hall and Branner sat in her Bronco in the parking lot outside the Navy and Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, listening to the echoes of the vice president’s voice as he wrapped up his commencement speech. The parking lots were filled with cars and security vehicles. In a few minutes would come the three cheers and the blizzard of white midshipmen’s caps going up again and again as the class of 2002 achieved its freedom.
“Eight minutes,” Branner noted, looking at his watch. “I guess if you have a heart condition, you tend to cut to the chase, even when making a speech.”
“As if they’re listening,” he said. “See all these new cars out here? They belong to the mids. Notice anything about them?”
“They’re all better wheels than I drive,” she said.
“No. They’re all pointed nose out. You’re gonna see a Le Mans start in the away direction here in about fifteen minutes.”
“Why so fast?” she asked. “What are they afraid of?”
“That the Dark Side might change its mind.”
There was a sustained round of applause within the stadium. Then a new voice began speaking. It was hard to make out precisely what he was saying because of the way the speakers reverberated around the stadium and the parking lots.
“I can’t believe you really want to leave all this behind,” Jim said. “Trade quaint Olde Annapolis for the frigging Washington Navy Yard.”
“Well, it’s just about as old as this burg,” she said. “And looks it, too.”
The band began playing some martial music, and then there was the rumble of everyone standing up for the oath of office. They listened through the open windows, waiting for the big cheers. They came a minute later. They could just see some of the hats flying through one of the walk-through arches on the side of the stadium.
“All done,” Jim said. “Now it’s Enswine Julie Markham. Lower than whale shit once more. One moment, a firstie. Now an officer plebe. Funny how that works.”
“At least it isn’t Second Lieutenant Booth,” she said.
“Amen to that,” he said. “And to think he swam all that way, up the river and into that creek. He knew right where to go, too.”
“You’d think the Academy would have seen this coming,” she said, watching the gates. “I finally got his admissions record yesterday, got his personal history.”
She told Jim about Booth’s background. How he’d been born and raised in a Baltimore housing project, apparently never knowing his father. His mother had come to Baltimore from West Virginia, trying to catch up with the man who got her pregnant. She ended up staying because there was little to go back to in the coal hills. She’d gone from welfare to work and back again, having two more children along the way, before getting shot and killed in a convenience store holdup when Dyle was twelve. He’d gone into the system, then was placed in a foster home, where the couple, a retired teacher and his wife, recognized Dyle’s latent intelligence and got him into the Catholic school system, eighth grade right through high school. Some teacher comments alluded to a violent streak, based in part on his size, but they were collectively of the opinion that this problem had been addressed by some of the Dominican brothers in his high school. He’d demonstrated a pattern in high school of excelling in math and science, but sometimes getting C’s in his nontechnical classes. But the combination of mathematical ability and athletic ability had proved irresistible to the Academy.
“All in all, he turned into one scary dude,” she concluded.
“He was when he was doing that vampire thing, I’ll tell you that much. I can still see that face.”
“Well, the professor did exactly the right thing then, didn’t he?”
He shook his head and then took her hand, surreptitiously now, because people had begun to stream out of the stadium. “I’m going to miss you, Special Agent,” he said.
“I was serious about coming to work for NCIS. You’ve impressed Harry Chang, and that’s about all it would take.”
“That would mean having a real job. A career. You know that’s a big step for me, Special Agent.”
“You know these people are going to fire your ass. What else do you have to do?”
He shrugged. “I guess I could sit on my boat a lot, harass my parrot. Cherry-pick the bars, bring young lovelies back to my yacht, ply them with charm and some really good booze, have my way with them all night. You know, the usual. I mean, hell, somebody’s got to do it.”
“So many girls, so little time, huh?”
“Something like that. I may even take the boat out one day. Get up one of those all-girl crews, sail topless out of the harbor, or group moon the AYC. And all because you won’t tell me your first name.”
She clucked sympathetically. “But maybe if you came to Washington…I mean, there’s a marina right next to the old battleship gun factory at the Navy Yard. You get to hear gunfire most nights. You were a Marine—you must miss that. And Jupiter could curse pigeons all day long. Oh, and up there, they’re called women, not girls.”
“Oh. Women. But how do those Washington women feel about unemployed, non-career-motivated wharf rats? Seems to me everyone in D.C. is either on the take or on the make. Not sure Jupiter and I’d fit in.”
She looked over his shoulder. “Incoming,” she murmured.
He turned around and saw Julie Markham, resplendent in her graduation whites and gleaming new one-stripe shoulder boards, pushing her father’s wheelchair toward the Bronco through the flood of fleeing graduates. Liz DeWinter followed behind them, barely visible in a white linen suit, white gloves, and huge floppy hat. Jim and Branner got out to meet them.
“Congratulations, Ensign Markham,” Jim said. “If I were still in uniform, I’d collect that dollar.”
“Our battalion master chief already got it,” Julie said with a little smile. It was traditional that the first enlisted person to salute a newly commissioned officer received a silver dollar. “But thank you both. For everything.”
“Second that,” her father said. Jim thought he looked older and thinner, but losing a lung that way probably contributed. At least he was alive. When Liz put her hand on his shoulder, his face dropped ten years. Jim could relate to that.
“And the records are all cleaned up, right?” Jim asked. “Books closed on the Dell incident?”
Julie’s face grew serious as she nodded. “Admiral McDonald didn’t quite look at me when he handed over my commission, but at least he kept a smile on his face.”
“You meet the new commandant?”
“Nope. And probably never will. Supes, dants, plebes, report chits, BIOs, formations—that’s all in the past now. Thanks to you both. Again.”
Branner shook her hand and then Ev’s, nodded politely at Liz DeWinter, who gave her a cool smile in return, and then got back into the Bronco.
