Dead Low Tide by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald [MacDonald, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: suspense
Publisher: Gold Medal
Published: 2012-06-08T07:01:15+00:00

Something goes wrong and usually you sleep and wake up and at first you are aware that the world is not right, and you try to think what, and it all comes breaking over you like a wave. But it wasn’t like that this time. I had gone to sleep with the clean knowledge of loss. It was with me while I slept. And I woke up instantly aware of the precise extent of my loss.

When I woke up it was three-thirty and Jack Ryer was standing by my bed, hands on his hips, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I moved my legs over and he sat down on the corner of the foot of the bed, eyes steady.

“How are you making it?”

“Not good.”

“You don’t look good. I wouldn’t want to run into those eyes in a dim alley.”

“Does it show that much?”

“Enough so I’m telling you to watch it. Let Wargler operate. He has his dull moments. At times he’s a little childish. But he eventually gets where he’s going. Right now he wants to know where she was tossed in. Time of death was between midnight and two this morning. Slow tides, and he’s been working it out and figuring, and he is pretty sure she could have been dumped in the creek right here at about twelve-thirty and ended up in the pass right at dead low tide. He knows the area and the waters better than you or I will ever know them. I came out with him. He and George are questioning everybody who lives at this layout, one at a time. When you feel like it, he wants you over there.”

“Where is he?”

“At Christy’s place.”

“He can come here if he wants me.”

“You’re a big boy now, Andy. You can go over there.”

“Why are you riding me? Is this the time and place for that kind of thing?” I was aware, again, of the coldness of his eyes above the rather unexpectedly sweet smile.

“When you feel like it, the Chief said.” He got up, squashed out his butt in the glass ash tray on the window sill, and walked out. I heard the screen door bang behind him. It was an empty sound in the house.

After a while I got up and showered and put on fresh clothes, and dumped the jail-worn stuff in the laundry hamper. I was going to see Mary Eleanor. I was going to see Joy Kenney. But first the Chief was going to see me.

I didn’t let my mind run ahead of me and imagine what it would be like to be in her place. I just took it a step at a time. Ardy Fowler sat on her steps. His hands, coiled and knotted from fifty years of hammer and saw and chisel and plane, rested on his blue-jeaned knees. And tears, which he was perhaps unaware of, ran out of the clear blue carpenter eyes.

He looked up at me, and said sternly, “Goddamn it, Andy. Oh, damn it all.

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