“How you do go on, Mr. Hall,” Liz said.
“He’s learning,” Branner said from across the deck. “Slowly, though.”
“I certainly am. Anyway, in the fullness of time, you can share this insight with your erstwhile client. Maybe after she throws her hat in the air and swears the appropriate oath.”
“And tell her what, exactly, Mr. Hall? That you blackmailed the dant into letting her go forward?”
“Call it leverage, not blackmail. Plus it seemed like the appropriate thing to do, counselor. And I guess you can tell her, ‘Welcome to the real Navy, Ensign.’”
Liz started to chuckle. Jim took Branner’s arm. “Come on, Special Agent. It’s tree time in the city.”
They drove back over to Jim’s marina, which was not nearly so grand as the AYC, and then had to hunt for a parking place big enough to accommodate the pickup truck. After much backing and filling, he got the thing wedged in between two much smaller vehicles. Branner then discovered that she couldn’t open her door.
“This damned thing needs tugboats,” she said. “Let me ask you something: You really think Booth’s dead?”
“Shit, I hope,” Jim said with a yawn. “He was a resourceful bastard. I guess you’ll have to get out this side.”
She didn’t move. “I mean, what if those tunnels didn’t collapse? What if that was something else caving in down there?”
“They collapsed when we were running for our lives,” he pointed out.
“So what was that noise this morning? When we were all trying to figure out how not to be the first one to go back down that hole?”
“Um.”
“Yeah. So what was left to cave in down there?”
“Maybe we should call the PWC?” He looked at his watch: 8:15. “They must still have crews down there, restoring power, drying those cabinets out.”
She rolled down her window, looked again at how close the other car was, and shook her head. “Yeah, I think we should. Just in case. Otherwise, we’re assuming. I always get bit right in the ass when I make assumptions.”
“Oh, is that what it takes?” Jim asked, provoking a pained look. My prospects aren’t looking so good, he thought. He said, “Okay,” then put a call in to the chief, who got him patched through to the PWC ops station. They, in turn, put him through to the on-scene coordinator down in the tunnels, a Lieutenant Commander Benson. Jim identified himself and briefly explained his problem. Benson, who said he was near the Fort Severn tunnel doors, told him to hold the line and he’d go take a look.
“Where would he go, if he did get out of that mess down there?” Branner asked.
“Either back into Bancroft Hall, where he could probably hide, for a little while anyway, or into town, where he could go to ground with his Goth crew.”
“Yeah, but they’re just college kids. They’d only hide him until the heat began to build. You said he was ready to grandstand his way into the next world. If that was the case, what else might he do?”
“My brain’s failing and my back hurts like hell. What are you getting at?”
“Would he try again for Markham?”
Jim had to think about that one. The cops had enough, based on what had been captured on tape, to put him away. Not to mention the fact that Booth had fired on the TAC squad officers. But this was Dyle Booth they were talking about.
“He might,” he said. “Just to show us he could. But that hole under Lejeune Hall went to the right-hand magazine. Which we know was flooded. Both those tunnels should have collapsed. I can’t-Wait one. Yeah, Mr. Benson?”
Benson said they’d checked both tunnels left and right. Left was collapsed right up into the anteroom.
“And the right one?” Jim asked, a small tendril of apprehension coiling in his stomach.
“The right one was open,” Benson reported. “All the way down to the right-hand magazine. Lots of muddy mortar, but the ceiling was holding, barely. The cross tunnel had collapsed, and part of the right-hand magazine had collapsed.”
“Which side of the magazine collapsed, as you looked in from the door?” Jim asked, looking at Branner, who now appeared to be wide awake as she listened. Benson said he hadn’t gone down there personally. Place scared him to death. But the cleanup crew’s supervisor said there was apparently a ladder of some kind sticking down out of a hole in the ceiling, if that helped.
Jim sighed, thanked him, and hung up. “Right tunnel held,” he announced.
“Oh shit,” she said. “We’d better alert somebody. And we’d better call Professor Markham, warn him that Booth might be loose.”
“That’s not a call I’d like to get right now,” he said. “Why don’t we go out there, tell him in person, maybe baby-sit the place for the night? Although Booth is probably long gone.”
“You start driving,” she said, pulling out her own phone. “I’ll call my people. All that Washington help is still down here. They can notify the Feebs if they’re still in town. And I guess we need to tell someone in Mother B. that their favorite psycho might still be up and running.”
“And he’s only had all fucking day to get his shit together,” Jim said as he eased the pickup out of its parking place without removing anyone’s mirrors. “Damn it!”
Ev took a cup of coffee and a bottle of scotch out to the dock, where there was a small picnic table and two benches. He turned on the small spots at the water end of the boathouse to attract the bugs and settled down to absorb the darkness. Julie had gone up to her room after an awkward good night at the bottom of the stairs. The night was clear and almost warm, with only a few spring mosquitoes buzzing. In another month, it won’t be possible to come out here at night, he thought. The summer mosquitoes would first rip up the dock planks, take away the table and chairs, and then come back for the humans.
There were other dock lights twinkling across the still black waters of the creek, and at least one unhappy outside dog was trying to wear his owners down with a steady, incessant barking. After the past couple of days he knew he ought to be sleepy, but he wasn’t, and sitting out here was preferable to staring at the ceiling in what had been his and Joanne’s room. He poured some scotch into the coffee and recapped the bottle. He noticed he was drinking more these days, and enjoying it more, too.
His and Joanne’s room. Well, not anymore, and that was one good thing to come out of all this. He’d found a woman to fill that gaping hole in his life, tiny as she was. The fact that she could talk about Joanne and his prior life made it even better, because if she could accept it, then maybe so could he. Liz was in so many ways a sweet woman, but there was some steel in there, too. He wondered how many other lawyers had taken a look at her and made some legally fatal underestimations. He felt a vibration along the planks of the dock.
“Is that scotch?” Julie asked, materializing out of the darkness in the penumbra of the boathouse spots. She was wearing a set of Navy sweats and white socks, and she had an empty glass in her hand.
“Didn’t know you liked scotch,” he said, sliding the bottle toward her as she sat down.
“Have to learn sometime,” she said, pouring a half inch into her glass. “Have to do better with booze than I’ve done so far if I’m going to be a naval aviator.” She sipped some and made a face. “Tastes like medicine,” she muttered.
“In my day, a naval aviator’s breakfast was officially a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a puke.”
“Now it’s a Coke, a handful of Midol, and a puke, or so I’m told,” she said.
“You don’t have to drink to fly, you know,” he said.
“On the other hand, I may want to,” she replied, looking out over the black water. Something swirled out in the middle of the creek. “Man. It seems like it was just parents’ weekend.”
“Sweating exams?”
“Not really. This semester was a pretty light load. I could bust them all and still have the QPR I need to leave.”
“Well, what’d you think of it? Your four years at the Academy?”