Paul Levine - The Deep Blue Alibi

Fish everywhere. Hundreds. . no, thousands. Tenants of the coral condos. Sleek parrotfish with the yellows, reds, and greens of a bird's feathers. A school of silvery jacks, staring at him with huge eyes. Smallmouth yellow-striped grunts that are supposed to make a grunt-grunt sound, but Steve couldn't hear anything over his own breathing and bubbles. A moray eel poked its head out of a crevice, didn't like what it saw, then vanished inside.

A large shadow passed over him. The biggest, fattest grouper he'd ever seen. The one called the jewfish, to Steve's consternation. A jewfish bigger than Ariel Sharon and Harvey Weinstein put together. Maybe seven feet long, at least six hundred pounds, with that underslung jaw. It passed, then turned, its tail scattering a dozen smaller fish. Then headed straight for Steve. Not that it was dangerous. More like a fat lawyer, waddling down the courthouse corridor. Taking up his allotted space, and yours, too. Steve didn't know if the fish would swat him with its powerful tail or serve him with a writ, so he moved to one side.

Steve swam deeper along the slope, the water growing cooler, the surroundings darker. He was at sixty feet when it occurred to him.

Fowles. Where the hell was Fowles?

Looking up, he couldn't see the boat. Would he have heard the engines if it had moved?

What if Fowles left me here?

Steve's breathing became louder, heavier. How long had he been down here? How much air did he have left? He checked the gauge. More than two thousand pounds. Plenty of time, unless his heart started racing.

Okay, calm down. Fowles is a good man, remember? You said it yourself. Yes, and you also said he's possibly a murderer.

Nearby, a steel-gray barracuda swept by and looped back, circling him. Steve swam over a stand of staghorn coral that resembled the antlers of a deer. The barracuda followed like a P.I. on surveillance.

Suddenly, Fowles brought the chariot alongside, motioning Steve to hop aboard. Battery-powered, the chariot had approached stealthily. Unheard by German U-boats in the North Sea, unheard by Steve above the reef. Two seats were sunk into its cigar-shaped body, one in front of the other, like the cockpit of an old biplane. Steve climbed into the second seat, his back resting on the ballast tank near the stern.

Fowles eased the throttle forward, and off they went, a two-man human torpedo. They skimmed the edge of the reef and moved deeper. As the water cooled and the light diminished, the coral thinned out, and there were fewer fish. Then, abruptly, they moved along an upward slope into warmer, brighter waters. Spiny lobster crawled along the bottom, and a school of red copper sweepers whisked by. The coral patches thickened again. Whether it was a continuation of the same reef or the beginning of another one, Steve couldn't tell.

No wonder Delia and her crowd want to protect this. C'mon, Fowles, tell me what the hell went down that day. Did you kill Stubbs because Delia wanted to save the reef? Did you do it for love?

Fowles turned around in the front seat and lifted a magnetic slate from a compartment. With a stylus, he wrote something, then held the slate in front of Steve's face: "12 o'clock high. Stay calm."

Steve looked straight up. Four sharks circled twenty feet above them. He couldn't tell a tiger shark from a nurse shark, though he had a pretty good idea these weren't the thick-bodied bulls known for attacking swimmers. He wondered what two guys riding an old metal tube looked like to the sharks.

Fowles erased the slate, wrote something else:

"Nurses. No problem."

Steve appreciated the sea mail. Nurse sharks were usually not aggressive. Fowles released some ballast and brought back the joystick, and the chariot ascended steeply. Straight through the pack of sharks - C'mon Fowles, is this necessary! — but the nurses parted and let them pass.

They surfaced moments later, and both men pulled off their masks and spit out their mouthpieces. Even from the short dive, Steve's jaw ached. He'd been clenching hard as they came up through the sharks.

"Well, mate, what do you think?"

"Spectacular. I see why you love it, why you want to protect it."

"I knew you'd get it. Delia told me."

"She talked about me?"

"Said you were a decent chap but a lousy boyfriend. …I really love her, mate."

"I thought you might."

"You live like I have, hot-tailing from island to island, dallying with a bunch of spunk buckets, when you meet someone like Delia. ." He paused as small waves broke over the bow of the chariot. "I tried to do the right thing for her."

"How, Fowles? What did you do?"

C'mon Fowles. Tell me about you and Delia and Oceania.

But the Englishman just shook his head and said, "You know where we are now?"

It ain't Kansas, Steve thought.

"Right in the middle of Oceania, if it's ever built," Fowles said. "Building Two, the casino, would be right here, with cables running at an angle eight hundred yards thataway." Fowles pointed into the distance. "The cables would fasten to pilings driven four hundred feet into the ocean floor. You know how much drilling and pile-driving that would take, how much sediment would be displaced?"

Steve recalled the diorama in Griffin's house. The hotel and casino were made up of three floating saucers, anchored to the sea bottom. The saucer nearest the reef had underwater rooms with portholes. In the diorama, the fish had been plexiglass. Here, they were living creatures. "Griffin's studies said the prevailing currents would carry sediment away from the reef."

"Sure, best-case scenario. Doesn't take into account storms or oil spills. And Delia's got some contrary studies."

Delia again. Okay, go for it. If you don't take a lead, you can't steal a base.

"Delia lied, didn't she?" Steve said. "You weren't with her that day, eating oysters and drinking sangria, were you?"

For a moment there was no sound but the slosh of waves against the chariot. Then Fowles said: "I didn't want anyone to get killed. I thought, if someone else paid Stubbs more than Griffin was offering, Stubbs would stop Oceania, but it didn't work out that way."

"How did it work out?"

They both heard it then, a boat in the distance. Steve shaded his eyes from the glare of the sun. He could barely make out a craft in silhouette.

"So how did it work out?" he repeated. "Who paid Stubbs to turn him around?"

Fowles squinted into the sun, trying to get a look at the boat. "Headed our way, isn't it?" Sounding like a man trying not to sound concerned.

"You expecting company?"

Fowles looked back toward the Fowles' Folly, anchored maybe a thousand yards away. He seemed to be measuring the distance and time it would take to get there.

"What's going on, Fowles?"

The chariot rose and fell in the gentle swells. With each dip, the approaching boat disappeared. With each push upward, it appeared closer.

"Talk to me, Fowles."

"I'm a little nearsighted." Fowles gestured toward the oncoming boat. "What can you see?"

"Moving fast on a high plane. Long and thin. Built for speed."

Just like the boat on the satellite photos, the one tailing the Force Majeure.

"Should we get back to the boat, Fowles?"

"Wouldn't make a difference. We can't outrun it." His voice was tight.

The roar grew louder. Steve remembered the Force Majeure approaching the beach at Sunset Key. The sound of an avalanche. This was more of a whine, like

a jet engine.

"Jesus, Fowles. What the hell's happening?"

"Shut your gob and listen, mate. We don't have much time. It happened pretty much the way you said. I took the chariot into the Gulf. A Cigarette picked me up, a Top Gun Thirty-eight. Then dropped me off near Black Turtle Key. I stayed in the water till the Force Majeure got there. When Mr. G was pulling up his lobster traps, I climbed aboard. I went down the hatch to the engine room. In a few minutes, I could hear them both through the salon hatch. Mr. G hands over the hundred thou and Stubbs says it's not enough. Someone else has been bidding for his services. Someone who'll pay ten times that if he'll sink Oceania."