Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

The dude had not overly clean blond hair falling down to his shoulders. A lazy look seemed permanently fixed to his face, behind multicolored dime-store sunglasses; he had earrings in both ears, fake diamonds that would make an NBA player go over and slap his face. He was wearing a T-shirt, gym shorts that looked like they’d been stolen from a high school locker, and flip-flops, though the predicted high temperature that day was only in the low seventies. He had an earphone plugged into an ear, the other end plugged into what must have been an iPhone Zero. He was listening to music, and tapped his thumb with the beat as he argued with the woman.

The dudette was exactly his opposite: a tall, lithe black woman with close-cropped hair, high cheekbones, and a sexy scar running slantwise across her forehead; maybe, Cattaneo thought, from a knife, or possibly a church key. She had bloody-red nails that looked like the claws on a cheetah, and wore a blue Nike running suit that fit her like a glove. The front zipper was down to a point about two inches above her navel. No bra, and the jacket’s contents were worth looking at. The front of the suit said yale, and Cattaneo thought, “Yeah, right.”

He smiled to himself: what it actually said was ya—cleavage—le. Most guys wouldn’t make the jump.

Cattaneo got his usual, a corned beef sandwich with red onions and Russian hot mustard, fries, and a bottle of Peroni, and carried them back to his booth, where he poured ketchup into the fries cup and went to work on the sandwich and beer and half-listened to the dude and dudette quarrel.

The woman was saying, “Yeah, that worked, didn’t it? We’re lucky we made it out of the state.”

The dude half-whined, “Shut up. I was trying.”

“Try harder. I don’t want to be selling retail. And I won’t be waitin’ two years if you get hooked again.”

“Why not sell? Get a job at the Gap, or whatever. You’re good at it. They like your looks. Get a few bucks, get me back on my feet.”

“You could get on your feet if you’d get off your fuckin’ back. How many dive shops you hit today? One? None?”

“Two. They didn’t need anybody.”

They continued to argue, but now Cattaneo checked them out. The dude was wearing a faded yellow T-shirt that showed a grinning skull wearing a dive mask and a snorkel. He swallowed some sandwich, leaned out of the booth and said, “I couldn’t help hearing what you said. You’re a diver?”

The blond dude looked him over, then said, “Maybe,” which Cattaneo could have predicted he’d say. “What’s it to you?”

Cattaneo shrugged. “I heard a bunch of divers were down here trying to find that Coast Guard treasure. Thought maybe you were one of them.”

The blond seemed to focus. “Coast Guard treasure? What Coast Guard treasure?”

“The Coast Guard has a fifty-thousand-dollar reward . . .”

“Oh,” the woman said to the blond, “that dope thing.”

“Yeah, we know all about that,” the blond said to Cattaneo. “You’d have to be a major dumbass to think that shit’s still out there. That’s long gone.”

Cattaneo’s eyebrows went up. “Yeah? How’d that happen? The Coast Guard’s all over it.”

The blond tapped the tabletop with his knuckles. “I read about it. The Mexicans dumped that shit off a freighter into a hundred and fifty feet of water. They knew exactly where it was.”

“But the Coast Guard . . .”

“The Coasties got no idea, except maybe a general area. That’s what the newspaper said. So what’d the dopers do? Easy. They drove by in some boat maybe a mile farther out from where the Coast Guard is watching, in the middle of the night. They put a diver over the side with a good DPV, maybe . . . a Yamaha or something like it, and a lift bag. He rode the DPV over to where the dope is, towed it back to the pickup spot, hung out twenty feet down until the boat came back, surfaced, and there you are. I don’t know how much was down there, but the paper said millions. It’s gone now, man. Long gone.”

“What’s a DPV?”

“Diver propulsion vehicle? Like a torpedo that you hold on to and steer?”

The chick said to the dude, “Whyn’t you get a ride on a boat, go look for it? If there are boats out looking for it, they’d take an extra diver if it don’t cost them anything. What’d they have to do, give you free air? We could use fifty K.”

“’Cause it’s not there,” the dude said. “That’s why. Because if you cut up fifty K ten ways, it’s five K for risking your neck, because that shit’ll be down deep. Then the IRS wants its taxes. And maybe the Mexicans would make an example out of you; I don’t need that kinda trouble.”

“I think it was Colombians,” Cattaneo said.

The dude shrugged. “Same thing.”

“If you say so,” Cattaneo said. “I don’t know anything about diving. You a pro?”

The dude shrugged again. “Yeah. I worked out in California for a few years. Cold water out there. Hot women, though. Thought I might find a spot down here.”

“He had to leave because he was screwing his Hollywood clients,” the woman said. “And I don’t mean out of money. He finally screwed the wrong housewife.”

Another shrug. Shrugging was apparently his lifestyle, Cattaneo decided, a guy who tended not to be concerned. The dude said, “It was sorta worth it.”

“Unless you need to go back to LA someday and you can’t,” the woman said.

Cattaneo smiled, showing yellowed fang teeth. “You piss off somebody?”

“A cop,” the blond said, head bobbing as he remembered. “He had like this primo old lady. Like a starlet.”

“A starlet whose time had expired. And not just a cop,” the woman said. “The head of LA vice.”

Cattaneo: “Whoops.”

“How was I supposed to know that?” the blond asked.

“He had to go back to Iowa,” the woman said to Cattaneo. Back to the dude: “That sure didn’t work out, huh?”

“You can always walk,” the blond told her.

“I would if I didn’t feel sorry for your hopeless ass,” the woman said. “I walk and you’re on the street. I wouldn’t forgive myself for . . . several hours.”

“Where you livin’ now?” Cattaneo asked.

“Got a place up in Hollywood,” the dude said.

“What are you doing way down here?”

“Seeing the sights,” the woman said, too quickly.

“Tell you what,” Cattaneo said. “Give me your name and address and phone number. I know a guy in the dive business, he might be able to throw something your way. He’s up in Broward, not too far from you.”

“Don’t have the gear anymore,” the dude said.

“Give the man your number,” the woman said. “We can figure out the equipment.”

Now the guy made an effort to look hard at Cattaneo, but it fizzled: “You the man? Because I had some trouble with the man.”

Cattaneo grinned and took a bite of his sandwich and chewed, while he looked from the blond to the woman and back to the poor henpecked sonofabitch. The woman leaned across the table to the blond, and said, heavy whiskey gravel in her voice, “In three weeks, we won’t have enough cash to fuckin’ eat. Give the man your fuckin’ phone number.”

The cantankerous pair finished before Cattaneo, and when they got up to leave, the woman leaned over the booth table to give him a shot right straight down to her belly button, and said, “Thank you very much, sir. If your friend needs somebody, Willy can work really hard. And we need the money.”

“See what I can do,” Cattaneo said, trying not to look sideways under the gap between her breasts and the jacket, and failing. “Maybe it’ll work out for everybody.”

He watched them out of the deli onto the sidewalk. The guy wanted to go south, but the woman wanted to go north. The blond finally gave in and trailed her along the sidewalk to the north and out of sight. Cattaneo went back to the remnants of his sandwich and thought about a slice of lemon cheesecake. He oughta watch his weight, but . . . cheesecake. It is, as a man once said, what it is.