Randy White - Ten thousand isles

Bauerstock made a gesture of frustration and dismissal. "/ can't do anything with that boy," then leaned toward the small brown woman and yelled, "I hope you're satisfied, you pathetic old bitch."

Parrish was listening to them, seeing it out of the corner of his eye, as I said, "Do you really want to be associated with this filth? They're sick, you know. Insane. You don't know the difference between right and wrong, anymore, Gary?"

"Right and wrong?" He seemed amused. "Man, them's just words, like … like Chevy or like see-gar. Rules is what rich people break just to show the rest of us there's a boundary. They decide what's right." He took the cigar from his mouth; looked at it with appreciation. "Know what those people decided? Power ain't sick and power ain't wrong as long as you got enough of it. Mr. Bauerstock here, he's got plenty. This only the third time in fifteen years he ask me to help him, but the man pay me in cash every year, right on time. To me, Doc? That's somethin' righteous." Parrish thumbed the hammer back, his expression changing. "I believe I asked you a question about them tapes. Where are they? You got exactly five seconds to give me an answer."

My mind was scanning frantically for a way out. "You're going to kill me anyway."

"That's right. I'm gonna kill you anyway."

"Then I'll talk. I'll tell you."

A soft, slow smile of awareness came on Parrish's face as he said, "No, you ain't. You just using your brains to buy time," and he leaned toward me slightly, straightening his arm, and I collapsed into the sand just as he fired- thWAP- and scissored his legs out from under him as the gun fired twice more.

From the distance, I heard the voice of Ted Bauerstock yell, "Don't shoot him the face!" as I rolled onto Parrish, fighting to control his hands. I smashed his jaw open with a glancing fist still gloved by the heavy mask, but he kept his arms moving, swinging them around, firing randomly- thwap, thwap, thwap- so close to my head that I was deafened, ears ringing. I had to get some distance between us.

I shoveled a handful of sand toward his eyes, rolled to my feet, sprinting hard toward the lake and dived, pulling myself deep into the water as the trajectory of bullets traced scimitars nearby.

I'd noticed a dock and diving platform on the other side of the lake. It was maybe sixty, seventy yards away-not an easy distance when wearing shorts and a shirt. I didn't swim fast. I swam with long, slow strokes, conserving my air. Glided until I'd nearly stopped before I stroked again. Didn't matter. I couldn't make it the whole way.

I surfaced to grab a breath and Parrish was already shooting at me-now standing on the dock that was my destination. Slugs were slapping the water so close that I could feel the explosion of compressed air as they slammed past my head… then I felt a stunning impact that nearly somersaulted me in the water. I'd been hit…

I swam downward, downward, feeling the dreamy unreality of shock. I touched my hand to the area of my right ear, a throbbing slickness. No, I hadn't been shot in the head. My glasses were gone and so was the skin off my ear. I realized the face mask I'd carried had slid far up my arm. I pulled it on and cleared it, looking toward the surface: a lens of light above, a blurry gray sky beyond.

Parrish was waiting up there. Surface, and I would die.

I pivoted and looked below.

What I saw was surreal; a scene from a nightmare.

The interior of the cenote was shaped like the mouth of a volcano. The sides were sheer, dropping quickly to thirty or thirty-five feet, the green boulders there creating a second, narrower rim.

On the lip of that rim, spaced at random, were four… no, five decomposing bodies attached to the bottom by cement blocks and anchor chains. Enough flesh and clothing remained to maintain buoyancy, so that the bodies floated upright, arms above their heads as if on crosses.

There were also two cars, both of which had snagged on the ledge as if hanging from a cliff.

One of the cars was black and rusted, had moss growing on it.

The other was a white Honda that I recognized immediately.

It was Nora's car, air bubbles still escaping toward the surface…

In training, we used to play a game. Dump the spent tanks and work your way to Destination X by finding and breathing trapped residual balloons of oxygen we called air pockets.

Anyplace people dive, you will find air pockets. With conventional tanks, a diver uses less than ten percent of the air he inhales. The rest is exhausted through the regulator as waste, then vanishes on the surface or is trapped in little caverns of rock, there for the taking by an air-starved swimmer.

A great place to find really big air pockets is a sunken boat… or plane… or car.

I swam down to the car, already aware that someone was inside. The car was tilted forward, its back axle caught on a limestone ridge, the front of the car hanging over the purple abyss. Windows were open.

I got a good grip on the right, rear window and pulled myself down. The glass of my mask had cracked badly, was leaking water. I had to clear it again before I could see the back of a woman's head, short dark hair undulating in the cemote's updraft.

First things first, though. I turned and looked up into the car, then pulled myself through the window far enough so that my face was pressed against the roof molding and the rear windshield.

There was air there. A couple of cubic feet, anyway. Enough to last several minutes. I hung there breathing, resat-urating my lungs, then looked as I touched my fingers to the woman's hair and pulled her head back. I had to fight the reflex to vomit and an overwhelming horror.

It was Delia Copeland, not long dead. But her eyes were gone.

This had been a nice woman. She'd worked at a place where people loved her. More importantly, she was Dorothy's mother.

Where was Nora?

I looked. Nowhere in the car. I took another few bites of air, then looked outward through the clear water. Was hers one of the anchored bodies?

No…

Judging from their streaming hair, there were three woman and two men, skeletal heads showing mandibles and teeth, cavernous eye sockets tunneling out from pale flesh. One of the men had black, Indian hair; cheap slacks, a white shirt, a red cigarette pack showing through.

Darton Copeland.

Ted Bauerstock had managed to murder the entire family.

The second man was the diver Bauerstock had mentioned. The man, he said, who'd gone down but never resurfaced.

No wonder. The diver was chained by the ankles, still in his dry suit. Considering the circumstances, it wasn't much of a surprise. Not in this graveyard. No way they could ever let him leave after what he'd seen. They'd lured him in with money, used him, then murdered him. The fact that a supposedly experienced cave diver hadn't used a dive partner had made no sense. Now I understood.

The diver's mask was pulled down around his neck, a black hole the size of a dime in his cheek; a black hole the size of a half-dollar on his neck. Entrance and exit wounds. He'd been shot from above, or maybe while he was kneeling. His buoyancy compensator vest had been slashed too… but the BC was built around the black modular walls of a closed-circuit, multigas system known as a rebreather.

The ridged hose of the regulator floated higher than the diver's head.

What were the chances there was still oxygen left in the tank.

Probably pretty good. One of the big advantages of a re-breather is that you have a much, much longer bottom time than with a standard, open-circuit scuba rig.

I'd trained with one of the earlier systems, a Drager-a chest-mounted rig. Unlike the newer systems, it was used for shallow-water diving only.

Could I figure out how the thing worked?