While Carol and Shannon drink and laugh and play cards at the table in the kitchen nook, Daryl sits in the armchair running a sharpening stone back and forth over the edge of his knife. Daryl's never heard Carol laugh like that with another woman in the Kingdom. He's seen her smile at something Nabila said once or twice, or talk seriously with Dianne about Kingdom business, but Daryl wonders suddenly if she has a single real female friend in the Kingdom. He wonders if, as their ruler, she can ever let herself get close to them.
"Rummy!" Carol shouts and slaps a card on the table with a loud - whap.
"Well you don't have to smack it like you do Daryl's ass in bed," Shannon tells her.
Carol splutter-laughs. She turns and glances at Daryl, who lowers his head and concentrates fiercely on his blade.
"Oh, I'm sorry, did I make your beau blush?" Shannon asks.
"It doesn't take much to make him blush," Carol replies and plucks up her wine glass.
The door to Gary's bedroom creeks open and Bonnie comes out holding her grandson on her hip. "Shannon, Gary's got another one of those monster headaches. Do you have any more of the doctors' special remedy?"
"Oh, damnit, I'm clean out. I'm going to have to go all the way down to the infirmary in the museum and get some. Unless," she tells Carol, "your beau would be a doll and go get it for me."
Carol cocks her head and bats her eyelashes in Daryl's direction. "Would my beau be a doll?" She laughs at Daryl's pained expression. "Please, Pookie?"
Daryl flushes at her use of that nickname she's never said in front of anyone before, stands, and sheathes his knife. "Yeah. Go get it."
"Oh, good," Bonnie says. "What a gentleman." After lowering Gary for Shannon to kiss his little forehead, Bonnie returns to the bedroom with the boy.
"Is the infirmary gonna be open?" Daryl asks as he shrugs into his leather vest.
"There's always someone on duty," Shannon tells him. "Just tell them I need a refill on Gary's headache medicine. They'll know."
"Gotta pay for it or somethin'?"
"They'll mark it down and we'll sort it out."
When Daryl opens the front door, Carol says, "No looking at the half-naked women on your way past the docks."
"Pffft." He shuts the door behind himself, but he can still hear the women laughing inside.
As he walks through the settlement, Daryl waves to Earl, who is patrolling the inside of the fence. The old fort is largely deserted tonight, because of some loud party going on in the Indian Village on the other side of it. There's live music – guitar, fiddle, mouth harp, and washboard, and lots of people – of all ages, it seems - laughing.
For all its strange customs, and its crass captain, Jamestown isn't a bad place, Daryl thinks. The Hilltop is known for its farming, Oceanside for its fishing, the Kingdom for its music and movies and gardens, Alexandria for its extra-fortified fences – but Jamestown has it all. The people are a mixed bag, like people anywhere. He likes Garland and Shannon, though. He likes Earl the baliff-patrolman, Dr. Ahmad, and that veterinarian, Carolyn. He likes the hunters and the irrigation diggers he's met. He likes the manager, Rodrigo, who brought him water while he was working on Thursday. He doesn't know if he likes Grandma Bonnie yet, but he sure does like her strawberry pie.
The music fades into the distance as Daryl walks in the dark, relying on starlight and moonlight, out of the settlement, past the empty farm fields, until he finally reaches the wooden planks of the docks. Beyond the Discovery and the Susan Constant, he can hear the game going on aboard the Godspeed. There's laughter and the occasional bark of manly shouting and women laughing.
As he gets closer, by the lights of all the lanterns on the deck of the ship, he can see a bare-breasted woman walking about pouring beer from the Jamestown brewery. A second topless whore sits on the captain's lap. Daryl can only make out the sheriff by his white Stetson. Garland's pulled it down over his eyes and is concentrating on his cards.
Carol's high school sweetheart, Commander Harold Harrison, appears to be watching rather than playing the game. He stands looking over the manager's shoulder at his cards. The lieutenant commander also stands watching, while three more naval officers sit around the table playing.
Four sailors, clearly not invited to the festivities reserved only for the officers and high-ranking government officials, linger on the dock, stealing glances up at the women, and not observing Daryl's presence. The night patrolman for this section of Jamestown – Hank - is walking down the dock straight in Daryl's direction, but doesn't seem to see him either, masked as Daryl is in the dark shadow of the Susan Constant. Hank stops, turns, and looks up at the serving woman who has now leaned over the deck to shake her tits at him.
Daryl's wondering why she's giving Hank a free show when the sailors suddenly surround the patrolman. Two pin his arms, one covers his mouth, and the fourth slits his throat with a knife. It all happens so fast that Daryl can't shout a warning to the sheriff.
While the sailors are murdering Hank, the whore sitting on the captain's lap drives a knife up and into his throat, and the commander – Harold Harrison himself - slits the throat of the manager. The lieutenant commander is coming in to slit Garland's throat when the stabbed captain rears up with the knife still lodged in his neck and topples both the whore and the poker table. Two officers jump the captain at once, but he throws them off like rag dolls.
In the commotion, the sheriff evades the lieutenant commander's blade and yanks free his revolver, but then has it knocked from his hand by the lieutenant, who lunges for it when it falls to the deck. While the lieutenant scrambles to pick it up, the sheriff leaps overboard, vanishing with a splash into the depths of the water.
Before he can be noticed, Daryl buries himself stomach down in the tall grass alongside the dock and unsheaths his knife. He army crawls toward the Godspeed and then all the way up to the edge of the grass to peer through the blades. The moonlight illuminates the sheriff's white Stetson, which floats on the black, rippling surface of the river.
A coup is unraveling right before his eyes, and there are nine armed men – five on the ship, four on the docks – and perhaps as many as two armed women, if both of those whores have weapons. The men are probably avoiding gunshots, though, so as not to alert the patrolman in the settlement, the patrolman in the Indian Village, or the guards who stand by the iron gate outside the museum.
The officers, as a group, have finally managed to bring the captain down. Just to make sure he's good and dead, Daryl supposes, all five of them, together, heave his mighty, bleeding body into the river where it sends up a waterfall of splashing water.
That means the sheriff is the only man left alive in the line of secession standing between Harold Harrison and the leadership of Jamestown.
Daryl, knife in hand, stomach down, slithers further to the left to get a better look and to await his moment. He figures out where the sheriff has gone, even if the navy men haven't, because he sees him surface just a moment for a breath of air before diving down again in the direction of the wooden docks. Daryl assumes Garland will swim there, surface beneath the wood, hidden by the planks, and tilt his head back, nose just above the water, to breathe the six inches of air between the river and the dock.
"Where the hell did Garland go?" Harold yells at the lieutenant commander. "How could you lose him!"
"How could you trust a whore to be able to kill the captain!" the lieutenant commander shouts back.
Harold leans over the deck of the boat and calls down to the sailors below. "Find him!"
They scurry along the docks, searching the water, as the officers disembark from the ship. They all have guns on their hips, but Daryl's still pretty sure they don't want to use them, not when it could bring men loyal to the sheriff running. Their voices won't travel all the way to the museum or the settlement, but a gunshot surely will.
The two whores on the ship have pulled on their shirts and are throwing back moonshine from mason jars – whichever ones didn't break in the tumult.
"Garland!" Harold calls as he paces along the dock. "If you don't come out here right now, I'm going back to your cabin, and I'm going to fuck that full-time whore you call your wife!"
Harold waits silently, but the sheriff does not emerge. Of course he doesn't. He damn well knows he'll be murdered the second he does, and he'll certainly have no chance of protecting his wife then. Daryl would await his moment too. He is awaiting his moment.
"Don't believe me?" Harold yells. "Fine. I'll go get Shannon now." Harold begins strutting toward the field and stops right in front of where Daryl is hiding. Daryl wills every muscle in his body to still. He almost stops breathing. "I'll drag her back here," Harold calls, "and you can listen to her satisfied screams."
"You're doing what?" the lieutenant commander asks nervously as he stops searching the water and strides over to Harold. "Are you insane? That will draw attention!"
Harold lowers his voice to a near whisper, and Daryl can just barely make out his words. "By now the kid and the mother-in-law will both be asleep. No one will ever know I was there. Almost everyone is at the party in the Indian Village. I'll wait until Earl's patrolling the far side of the settlement, and then I'll bring Shannon here on some trumped-up excuse. I'll make sure no one sees me." Harold has completely forgotten, or perhaps was never told, that Daryl and Carol are staying in that cabin, too.
Daryl seriously considers jumping Harold right here and now, but he knows Carol will handle the bastard if he tries to hurt her or Shannon. She does have a knife now, after all, and he doesn't want to give away his position, not yet, not when it's nine against one. They'll just kill him.
"Once we have her down here," Harold tells the lieutenant-commander, "we scare her good. When Garland hears her crying, I guarantee you he'll come out. Then we kill him, kill her. We blame the mutiny on Garland, Shannon, and Hank. We tell the people they plotted it all so Garland could rise to the top. They killed the manager. Stabbed the captain. In the fight to protect the captain, we killed them all. But unfortunately, the captain fell overboard in the tumult, and he was stabbed so badly…he drowned."
"That's good thinking," the lieutenant commander replies. "This is why you should have always been captain."
"Keep looking for Garland while I'm gone. Break up. Scour the docks. Search the other ships, in case he managed to climb up in one of those. Take a rowboat out on the river. See if you can find out where he swam to."
Harold's footsteps clatter across the wooden dock and disappear on the dirt path beside the fields.