Bitter Tide

by Jack Hardin

  Oswald complied. He stepped out into the gusting wind, ducking down to keep his footing, and followed Ringo through the side door of the home. They entered the kitchen, and Ringo pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. “Have a seat.”

  “Say, I am most thirsty. Can I get something to drink?”

  “Like you gave that young man I just saw? Like you gave him something to drink?”

  “Oh, come on, man. That was just business. We didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

  Ringo leaned against the gray granite that formed the top of his kitchen island. He folded his arms and looked Eli square in the eye. He had already decided how to handle this. He had known right after Ellie had handed him off, before she and Tyler and Dawson were even halfway to her truck. Sometimes life gave you lemons. This particular lemon happened to be sweet, and today Ringo would be making lemonade. He wouldn’t even need to add sugar.

  “Eli, you broke one of my rules. You were to receive my product and move it. It’s been, what, less than two months since I decided to start working with you?

  “Are you gonna get me something to drink?”

  Ringo ignored him. “But—forgive me if I’m assuming—you got greedy and so thought that I wouldn’t mind if you packaged my product with your guns.”

  “I’m just out to make a buck. Same as anyone else.”

  “You know, Ronnie Oglesby has been staying here for the last couple weeks. Right here, in this house. He left yesterday with his mother and got off the island.”

  Oswald’s expression changed from smug to disbelief.

  Ringo nodded toward the fireplace. “That painting hanging over the mantel—the one of the shrimp trawler—was done by Ronnie’s mother. She happens to be one of my favorite artists. Jean is a good friend of mine and keeping Ronnie here safely away from you was the least I could do.” He stepped over to the refrigerator, reached in, and grabbed a can of Pepsi. He shut the door, and the aluminum top clicked as he popped the tab.

  “Thank you,” Oswald said sarcastically.

  Ringo took a sip and set it on the counter. “When I decided to let you distribute my goods, I did so full well knowing that you are a radical and espouse certain philosophies that I view as crude and elementary. You’re not half the man that Harlan Tucker was—and I didn’t agree with his view on life either. But I decided to take a chance with you, Eli. To test you out and see how the first few runs went. Did I not make it clear before we even started working together that when you moved my product you were to move it and it only? Did I not make it clear that I did not want multiple government agencies looking for me?”

  Oswald shrugged defeatedly.

  “You start dealing illegal or unregistered arms then you get the ATF on your case. When you kidnap people of even minimal social worth, and do it sloppily, do it in a way that can easily be traced back to you, then you get the local police and the FBI involved. Those are agencies I want to stay off my trail, not be hot on it. I’m not worried about the DEA. Them I can handle. But once you got all these spotlights to shine right on you, you opened up a little portal for them to start snooping around and find a road to me. That’s not difficult to understand, is it?”

  “Suppose not.”

  “I’ve been doing this for a very long time, Eli. I am very good at what I do. I’m very good at it because I am smart. I’m smart and I am not greedy. Greedy people get caught every time because they make foolish decisions and stop doing the thinking that kept them safe in the first place.”

  “That Ellie girl really don’t know that you’re the guy she’s after?”

  Ringo took another sip of his Pepsi and smiled. He looked at Oswald’s hand. “She really cut your thumb off?” It was more a statement than a question.

  “Yeah. That little whore.”

  The word was hardly out of his mouth before Ringo’s heavy fist connected to his jaw. His head snapped to the right and, with the displacement of his weight, his chair tumbled outward, and he crashed into the wall and onto the floor. His wounded hand slammed into the tile, and he howled as the pain radiated through his arm all over again. He lay there, dazed from the furious punch, trying to wish the fire in his hand away along with the throbbing in a broken nose that had been hit three times in as many hours.

  “Get up,” he heard over his shoulder. “Get. Up.”

  Oswald groaned and, slowly pushing off the kitchen floor with his good hand, stood up. He grabbed the edge of the table and steadied himself.

  “Pick up the chair and sit back down.”

  He leaned down, grabbed up the chair, and set it upright. It felt like his jaw might be broken. He sat back down, cowering under the torrent of pain weaving through his body.

  “You want to call my niece a whore again?”

  “Your...niece?” It was barely a whisper spoken across a swelling tongue.

  “It’s not often that I regret doing business with people, Eli. I’m quite good at judging character. Somehow I knew my relationship with you would come to this. I sensed it. But I was willing to take a risk, a risk which I now regret.”

  “I’m sorry, man. You're right. It was stupid.”

  “I didn’t say stupid, did I? No, I said foolish. Stupid implies that you are lacking the capacity to make the proper decision. Foolish, now that is simply choosing the lesser; choosing the option that is clearly not the best. You, Eli Oswald, are a fool, and it is time for our relationship to end.”

  Oswald smiled weakly. “Yeah,” he whispered. “I agree. Let’s just go our separate ways and put all this behind us.”

  “Yes. Let’s.” Ringo opened a closet door off the kitchen and retrieved a rain jacket. He put it on. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Oswald demurred. “A walk? We don’t need to do that. Let’s just get off this island before that storm blows us away.” Oswald’s throat was as dry as a cotton ball.

  Ringo stepped back into the kitchen and paused before a drawer. He opened it and produced a chromed .45 ACP. He lifted a false bottom from the drawer, reached in, and withdrew a suppressor.

  When he saw the gun, when he heard the soft metallic scrape of the suppressor rounding the threads, Oswald made an attempt to protest but found then that his jaw was locked, as if the hinges had rusted out. He couldn’t talk. He thought his bladder might give way.

  When Ringo was finished, he shut the drawer, brought the gun across his chest, and racked the slide. The crisp sound of a round entering the chamber chilled Oswald’s skin. Ringo held the gun down at his side, not bothering to point it at the terrified man sitting at his table. With his free hand Ringo graciously motioned toward the door they had entered earlier. Oswald reluctantly stood up and walked toward it, his breath halting.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  While they waited on an update on Dawson, Ellie and Tyler watched the Weather Channel on the waiting room television. It had been over an hour, and as yet there had been no word from the nurses. Ellie had gone out and checked on Citrus a half hour ago, who was not at all pleased that he was not allowed to go inside and play. She moved her Silverado into the parking garage to keep both truck and dog out of the way of flying debris.

  According to the news, Hurricane Josephine was now cutting west out to sea, with the eye of the storm just leaving Naples, forty miles south of Saint James City. Tyler finally got tired of seeing weathermen standing in ninety-mile-an-hour winds, yelling into the microphone for people to go inside and seek shelter if they were still outside—how are they watching this if they are outside? he’d asked—and walked into the hallway and started pacing. Ellie followed behind him and caught up.

  “I can’t believe someone would do that kind of thing to a man,” he said. “I can’t wait for him to rot in prison.”

  “Yeah,” she said softly.

  “You really took his thumb?”

  She sighed. “Yes. Tyler, he wasn’t going to t—”

  “I don’t need an explanation. I trust your judgment, Ellie. I just...wow. You’re pretty amazing
.” He pointed down the corridor. “That man might live to see tomorrow because of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He stopped and his eyes found hers. “I mean it, Ellie. You did good.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shoot yeah.”

  At the other end of the hall the double doors opened, and a gray-haired doctor wearing surgical scrubs approached them. He introduced himself as Dr. Flynn. “We have Mr. Montgomery stabilized now,” he said. “We’ve sent his blood samples to the lab for group and crossmatching, but it will take another hour to get his blood type. In the meantime we’ve given him saline and O positive. He lost a lot of blood and is severely dehydrated. Once we have the infection under control and the swelling goes down, we can stitch him up.” He flipped a page on his clipboard. “His feet will heal faster than his hands. You told the nurse he had been on a raft in the wildlife preserve?”

  “Yes.”

  “It appears that some salt water made contact with his feet. His socks were heavy with it. The salt, while not preventing a serious infection, did mitigate against sepsis. His hands, however, didn’t fare so well. They are septic, with bacterial inflammation throughout his hands and up into his wrists. If we don’t have to amputate his hands, he’ll be lucky. For now, we have him on IV antibiotics and topical antibiotics. Do you know who did this to him?”

  “Yes,” Ellie replied. Then she added, “The police have been looking for him, but nothing has turned up yet.” She didn’t know how lying to the doctor was going to help anything. It just came out that way.

  “Have the police gotten a statement from you as to how you found him?”

  “No, sir,” Tyler said. “We’ve been waiting, but no one has shown. We assumed the nurses called it in. I think they’re all busy with the storm.”

  After the doctor left, Ellie brought out her phone out again and checked for a signal. Still no service. She had been trying to reach Major ever since they handed Dawson off to the nurses. She knew that he was capable of handling Oswald, and yet an uneasiness hung over her. She shouldn't have gotten him involved. The handcuff key was still resting at the bottom of her pocket, but that didn’t mean Oswald wouldn’t try something. Hopefully Major had already gotten to the police.

  For now though, there was nothing else to be done. They would have to wait out the storm from within the bowels of Lee Memorial Hospital.

  * * *

  It was fascinating, really. In all his years down here, he had never experienced the phenomenon with his own eyes. The waters of Manatee Bay were nearly gone. Only brown sand laced with thin streaks of algae sat where the water was supposed to be, like the tides had short-circuited and once water had reached low tide it just kept draining.

  It was perfect.

  The waterline was now thirty yards out. He guided Oswald into the sand, and it displaced slightly around his feet as he crossed it.

  Oswald’s jaw had finally loosened, and he was busy pleading. “You can’t do this! Your neighbors are going to see you.” Any other day, the man might have been right. But today he was not. He didn’t know that every neighbor on this street had already evacuated. He didn’t know that there was no one left in the entire neighborhood, not even a gerbil or a parakeet. Oswald also didn’t know that when you looked east out of Manatee Bay there was nothing but naturally pristine water and mangroves for two miles and, with the weather like it was, there was no concern of a boat passing unexpectedly. No, they were all alone. Just the two of them. Ringo nudged his hand into Oswald’s back, pushing him along as the younger man tried in vain to provide rational solutions to the disagreement that stood between them. They splashed through a few puddles as they finally neared the edge of the water. After they’d gone a little further, Ringo shoved Oswald one final time until the water was at their knee caps.

  The wind had died down some. The rain, for now, was a light drizzle. Ringo looked out across the shallow water. He took in a deep breath, inhaled the brackish odor of an empty ocean bed. He took a couple steps back. “Please, Eli. Get down on your knees.”

  “M-m-m-man, th-th-th-there's a better way, Ringo.” When Oswald got down on his knees, the water reached up to his chest, and he winced as the salt water washed over his bad hand. He brought his cuffed hands up in a pleading defense.

  Ringo held the gun at his side, held it in a loose grip, like it wasn’t even there. He looked down on Oswald. The man’s black hair was matted to his scalp, half of it drifting into his eyes. His nose was swollen, and blood, crusty and moist, spread around his lips and his chin.

  “Eli,” he said softly. “When I was a boy, oh, I don’t know, maybe about ten or eleven, I was walking through a forest in Ohio, just near where I lived, when I came out into this clearing. In the clearing was a flock of blackbirds—must’ve been a couple thousand of them. They were all laid out over this field; couldn't even see the dry grass. Just blackbirds as far as the clearing went. And you know what? Every last one of them was dead. And when I say dead, Eli, I mean they had been lying there for days. Stank to high heaven and flies buzzing in ecstasy. Now, I have no idea what happened to those poor blackbirds, how they got there. But I do know one thing. That was just surely the sorriest sight I ever did see. And you, Eli Oswald, happen to be the second sorriest.”

  “I didn't mean nothin’ by it all, I swear! I swear I’ll do right by you and help with whatever you need. I swear!”

  “I’m not looking to extract any promises from you, Eli. What’s done is done. The final act, closed curtain, after-party; all over.”

  “Ringo...Ringo,” he choked. “I can pay you. You want money? I can tell you where to get it.”

  Ringo knew it would come to this. If they had it, money always became a topic for discussion at the very end. When the one about to die could no longer see a way out, he turned to the only thing he thought he had left. Ringo had been ready for this. He played along. “Where?”

  “Get me out of here and I’ll take you to it.”

  Ringo didn’t smile. Not this time. “Eli, do you think I am a stupid man?”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  “But you think I will let you take me to your money so that you can find a way to escape?”

  “No, I just—”

  “Then tell me where it is, and I will reconsider. Tell me where it is, and I’ll call Chewy to go retrieve it. If it’s there we could very well have a deal.”

  “Okay. Okay, yeah.” Oswald struggled on his knees, expressed a breath of relief. “It’s ugh, it’s in my hotel room. At the Purple Parrot. Wrapped up in the toilet tank.”

  “How much?”

  Reluctantly, Oswald said, “About sixty thou.”

  “The Purple Parrot, you say?”

  “Yeah. It’s up near Sweetwater.”

  “Thank you, Eli,” he interrupted. “I do hope you’re a man of your word. This brings our relationship to a close, and your days which the Lord has numbered are now complete.”

  “Please no! I...I don’t wanna die!” He shuffled on his knees through the water toward Ringo’s feet. “Please...please…” he said in crying whispers.

  Ringo despised the pleading tears of cowardly men, men that couldn’t—wouldn’t—take their medicine. They repulsed him. Men who could inflict the grossest forms of violence on others but folded beneath the promise that it would be turned back on them. He tucked his gun into the rear seam of his cargo shorts and stepped in behind Oswald, laying two strong hands on his shoulders. He leaned in, said, “You reaped. Now you sow. You sow a reaping. I’m the Reaper.” Then he heaved Oswald’s head beneath the water.

  The brackish, bitter tide found its way into Oswald’s mouth and up through his nasal passages. He could feel strong hands lace their fingers around the back of his head like wicked roots, wrapping into his hair, forced down by sturdy trunks above.

  Memory rumbled through him, accompanied by the salty, briny taste of the ocean, and as the last of the oxygen was milked from his bloodstream and his CO2 levels b
egan to rise, he saw King, the brown Cocker Spaniel he had as a child. That was, until the day the King chewed through his old man’s wallet, leaving the leather in a soggy heap under the dining room table and the cash in tiny pieces all over the floor. His father had taken the dog out back near the tree line and beat it until there was no more yelping, no more breath in the small animal. Oswald had watched the entire thing from the living room window, scared to venture out lest he suffer half the fate of the dog. His father had barreled back a few minutes later and, without looking at his son, said, “Don’t ever ask me for another dog.” Then his father went to the refrigerator, grabbed a Budweiser, and set himself into his easy chair.

  Now, King was running toward him, his ears flopping lazily around his head, his tongue hanging out, his eyes locked happily on the master he hadn't seen in over thirty years. But then, slowly, the dog’s eyes turned a bright green and then shifted into a deep red, and Oswald remembered that he was dying, that in this moment, he was King, his life being taken by the hands of a violent man.

  He felt the fingers on the back of his head relax. This wasn’t supposed to be the way it all ended. He had years to go, a new posse to recruit. He and his brother Drew had even talked about maybe going on a cruise. What cruise line had they talked about again?

  That question was the last thought Eli Oswald ever had.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  At eight o’clock in the evening, an hour after Doctor Flynn had spoken with Ellie and Tyler, as Ellie flipped through a year-old copy of Better Homes and Gardens for the fourth time, and as Tyler was dozing off next to her, the door to the hospital waiting room opened, and Major stepped through, soaking wet, rain water still dripping off his shorts.

  Ellie came to her feet. “Major? What are you doing here?”