Rick Riordan - The Devil went down to Austin

I went below deck.

The music was louder in the galley-set to a volume to be heard above deck. I found two glasses, prepared one for her.

I was already feeling nostalgic. Of all of them-even Adriennethis one had been the most interesting. She seemed put together from shards of ice. You always had to avoid the points, the sharp edges. And she was sure of herself. I'll give her that.

The terms she'd offered on the phone-it was touching, how much she was willing to pay. Millions in stock, everything I'd offered her-as if that money would have ever been hers. She wanted to use it as a bargaining chip, give it all up, promise to keep a secret for me-the secret that mattered the least. All she wanted in exchange was a different victim to throw to the idiot wolves.

How could I refuse? She was so sure I could not. After all, she'd done everything I'd asked.

Everything.

She couldn't know how I'd practiced, how I'd stood over her friend in the dark, studying that wasted, grizzled face, thinking what an unlikely choice. What a perfect choice.

She couldn't have seen me with my makeshift tools the night before-field stripping a weapon for practice, comparing the firing surfaces. Just a few nicks. So easy. She couldn't have known all the other pieces I'd laid out for the puzzle, not knowing whether they'd been found or not. I'd once heard George Lucas say in an interview that he wasn't afraid to spend four months on a scene that might be on screen for five sec onds, or might not make the final cut at all. That's what made a man a genius.

I let her be optimistic on the phone. I soothed her. It had been easy to win back her faith, even easier than after the shooting. This time she was rational. She was desperate. The two things together made me certain she would operate under the delusion that I play by rules.

I poured champagne.

When I went above, she had just made the discovery. She was staring at my wet prints on the deck, my bag.

I called to her and her eyes widened. It took her a moment to decipher my shape, silhouetted in the light from below. She seemed surprised to find me smiling. To find me so close.

I couldn't help the warmth in my voice, the friendliness, the tone of absolute confidence that everything would now be all right.

"This is a celebration," I told her."I have a plan to solve your problem."

"If she's down there," the lieutenant said, "we'll find her."

I gave him credit for trying to drink coffee while standing on Mansfield Dam. The morning wind was strong enough to knock the breath out of us and make the lieutenant's hair do a Medusa number. But with every bout, he corrected his balance like an old ship's captain and kept drinking.

The clouds were laced with lightning on the eastern horizon. Vic Lopez, Maia, the lieutenant, and I stood on the twolane pedestrian road that ran atop the milewide dam. We were about a third of the way out from the east end, where the cement railing turned to riveted steel.

On the west end, the slope to the water was a gentle mountain of gravel, but here it was a sheer drop two hundred feet. Below, the lake's surface rippled in windsheets of green and silver. Lower Colorado River Authority and Travis County Sheriff's boats made a dotted line from shore to shore. Marker buoys and diverdown flags bobbed in the wind.

I had a clear view of Point Lone Star-the marina, Ruby McBride's tower on the hill.

The point would be a steep but short hike from here, down the hill through underbrush and woods.

"The Ruby, Too left from there," the lieutenant said. "We found it moored over yonder-Defeat Hollow."

He pointed toward a small wooded cove. "My men dived the area around the boat, then moved down here and started working a compass pattern upcurrent."

"Too rough for a jackstay?" Lopez asked.

The lieutenant nodded.

"Can they search in the rain?" Maia asked him.

"Rain, yes. Not lightning. We've got about fifteen more minutes before I have to pull them out. But a storm is good. It brings bodies to the surface."

The observation failed to comfort me.

I thought about Ruby McBride in her bloodsmeared clothes, barefoot, the small automatic pistol slipping from her purse. "She could be somewhere else. Not even on the lake."

Lopez and the lieutenant exchanged glances.

The lieutenant said, "You gentlemen excuse me? Miss Lee."

He walked back toward the east end of the dam, the wind flicking tiny brown waves off his coffee cup.

Lopez said, "Cheer up, Navarre. Maybe you're right."

He spoke with all the optimism of a Russian economist.

Down on the lake, the tiny blackhooded head of a diver came to the surface. Then another. I might've mistaken them for turtles or snakes. Neither diver made any sign that they'd discovered anything, but my stomach tightened anyway. I walked across the road to the opposite railing.

This was the Colorado River side. Here the hills were dotted with luxury homes, garlanded with power lines. A whitecolumned highway bridge spanned the river to the south.

Maia leaned next to me on the railing. "Don't beat yourself up."

"I let her go," I said. "I could've stopped her."

"That wasn't your job, Tres. It wasn't your decision to make-it was Ruby's."

The problem was, I didn't agree with her. Some guilty, chauvinistic part of me believed that maybe, this one time, the damsel really had needed a knight. And perhaps she'd run straight into the arms of the wrong one.

Lopez joined us. "I'll need to get a list of Garrett's friends. Also his hangouts."

"You're treating him as a fugitive?"

Lopez rubbed his chin. "Well, let's see. He's out on bail for murder. His own lawyer can't locate him."

"You don't believe your own case anymore," Maia told him. "You know Garrett didn't kill anyone."

"What I know is that the machinery is in motion. It's not about me anymore, counsellor.

I couldn't stop it if I wanted to."

The river was so clear I could see the bottom-a series of broken limestone sheets that looked like a submerged set of child's blocks. Against the base of the dam, a multicoloured beach ball bobbed and dipped, stopped from its meanderings by three million tons of concrete.

"Ruby's boat," I said. "I want to see it."

Lopez looked over. "You want to say why?"

I didn't answer.

He sighed. "I'll see what I can do. They should be through processing it by this afternoon."

"What are the odds they'll find her, Vic?"

He planted his elbows on the cement wall. "The waterline is low. That works in the divers' favour. I don't know… the area they're searching, the current…"

"You used to dive recovery?" Maia asked.

"When I was a cadet. Sounded like a cool cop thing to do, right? Search and recovery.

You think that before you run into your first body underwater. Most frightening thing I've ever done-a hundred and thirty feet deep in some places, down in the old river basin-"

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"Another landmark?"

His expression hardened. "The reason I got out of recovery was a kid who drowned.

Down that way-the public park, just before Point Lone Star."

"Kids must be the hardest," I said.

"Thirteenyearold son went into the water after lunch-I mean, this is a small swimming area, marked with buoys and everything. He went in, and the family said it was like he was sucked underneath. Family was Asian. They kept trying to tell us about some Chinese superstition-a dragon got him, an evil spirit or something."

"That's an old belief." Maia's eyes were on the beach ball, trapped and still pushing against the dam. "Every body of water has its own spirit. You always run the risk that the spirit will take a liking to you, make you pay a visit to the bottom."