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.