Thomas Perry: Dead Aim

He savored the feeling of invisibility: it gave him a chance to take an unhurried look at her. She was young. He judged her to be about twenty-five, and then detected an unexpected sense of loss. He was forty-eight, and the estimate placed her in a different generation, on the other side of a wall that made a certain kind of adventure not impossible but unlikely and maybe a bit ridiculous. He considered standing up, but he didn’t want to startle her now-certainly not frighten her-so he watched and waited for her to move on.

She was pretty, with long brown hair, and that added to his discomfort because it made him feel like a voyeur. She was wearing a pair of khaki shorts not so very different from his, and a top of the sort with thin straps like strings to hold it up. She took a step. That made him feel better: this would be over soon. She paused, then leaned her body forward. Her left foot moved ahead just in time to keep her from toppling, then her right took a step to compensate, and she was walking. She kept her head down and her legs moving in a determined stride until she reached the firm margin of tightly packed sand just above the tide line, and then kept going into the water.

The first five steps were easy, the waves foaming around her ankles, then her shins. He watched her walking in, an act so familiar that he felt her steps in his own body: the first wave hit her thighs and made her progress stop, then pulled her on with its backwash. The next one hit her at the top of her legs, and made her take an involuntary hop because the cold was reaching the tender spots. She leaned a little to the side when the next wave hit her, then straightened, hugged her arms around her chest, and kept walking. She did not dive under and begin to swim as the next wave approached, although that was what he had been sure she was going to do. She simply let it go over her.

Santa Barbara had always been full of triathletes, marathon runners, and long-distance swimmers, and he decided she must be another sample of one these varieties. She would come up in a moment like a dolphin, swim straight out until she was past the breakers and the long Pacific swells rolled under her. Then she would turn north to swim along the coast for a mile or two, slosh back onto the beach, and run. He was perfectly contented with her. He liked the kind that wore plain khaki or something instead of those unappealing spandex outfits. Then he realized he was getting uncomfortable-short of breath-and he stood up quickly.

When she had gone under, he had unconsciously taken a breath and held it. But this was too long. “Pah!” He pushed it out and inhaled deeply, already running across the sand toward the water. He kept his eye on the spot where she had disappeared, leaping over the first two incoming breakers, then diving over the third and crouching to let the fourth surge over him before he pushed off and began to swim. He swam a hard freestyle, his feet kicking up a wake and his arms stabbing furiously into the water and pulling, his head turning to breathe every sixth stroke.

His mind had begun to enumerate the possibilities: maybe she had gotten tangled in a big clump of kelp, panicked, and gulped water. Maybe she’d had some kind of seizure. He reached the spot where he was almost sure she had gone down. He stroked to raise his body high, pointed his toes, and went under, feet first.

His foot hit something, and in a reflex he pulled it back, unbelieving. He realized that he had been sure he was going to find nothing, touch nothing. The odds that he could find an unconscious person out here were minuscule. He came up for air, dived, and swam straight down. The water was dim and cloudy, yet he saw her, not below but beside him. She was hanging about ten feet down, her limbs glowing white in the murk, her hair swirling in the current, radiating out on all sides. He put his left arm around her torso, stroked with his right, and kicked toward the light.

When he broke the surface, she did not move or twitch or join him in the gasp for air. As he shifted his left arm across her chest and began to tug her toward shore, for the first time he let himself think that she might be dead. He struggled to bring her to shallow water, trying to keep her head up but several times finding that he had failed, had taken a stroke with her head under. Each time it made him swim harder, desperate to get them to the beach, where he could do something.

Then his foot hit sand, and he hauled her in more quickly, finding that he moved faster if he held both her arms and dragged her through the shallow water. When he reached the tide line he beached her on the firm, wet sand, her lower legs still in the water but her head, torso, and thighs out. She still had a pair of sneakers on her feet.

Mallon rapidly went through the preparations for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, reassuring himself with a memory of his first instructor in the Air Force: “If he ain’t breathing and his heart ain’t beating, he’s dead. Anything you do is better for him than that.” He bent her head back, opened her mouth, made sure her tongue was visible. He carefully placed the heel of his hand below her sternum and gave the required ten pushes, then pinched her nostrils shut, leaned forward, placed his lips over her mouth and gave her a breath, then sat up and pushed her chest again.

She gasped, a sound like a whistle, coughed, vomited. He rolled her onto her side so she could keep coughing up water without blocking her airway. “You’re going to be okay,” he said quietly. “That’s right. Cough it up so you can breathe.” He patted her back as he remembered people doing to him when he was choking on something as a child, but a very strong message from the attitude of her body told him that it was not what she wanted.

He said, “Good. You’re going to be just fine.” Then he saw that her eyes were open, and that she was trying to get a look at him, but the sun was in her eyes because he was above her. He forced himself to say something about himself, just to reassure her that he was real, and ordinary, and friendly. “I saw you go under, and I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you.”

She sat up with great effort and stared at him in absolute disbelief, then lay on her stomach, her face pressed into the sand in sorrow.

He stood up, not knowing where to look. Of course. She had not wanted to be saved. She had been trying to die.

No, Mallon thought. Not this. Not again. He raised his head to look up at the ragged crest line of the cliffs above the beach, then turned his whole body to stare anxiously up and down the shoreline, searching for the shape of another human being. There was nobody. He looked down again at the girl lying on the sand, and forced himself to think. They were a half mile from any spot where he could climb the cliffs and get to a telephone. Even if there had been a nearby spot, he could not imagine leaving her here long enough to make a call. She might very well wait until he was out of sight and simply walk back into the water. He had to make his heart stop fluttering and concentrate. His chance to save her wasn’t when he had dragged her out: his chance was beginning now.

He waited for several minutes, until she sat up and looked around again. They were both cold, and she was shivering. He got his backpack, opened it, and wrapped his towel around her shoulders. He said, “Are you feeling well enough to walk yet?”

She nodded. “I’m okay now. Thanks for helping me. But you shouldn’t-”

“Good,” he interrupted. “Come on.” He put on his pack, gripped both her arms firmly, and tugged her to her feet. He kept his tone even and businesslike, trying to hold on to the quickly evaporating authority he had assumed in saving her, the emergency voice. “There’s a set of steps that lead to the road about a half mile this way.”