Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“You talked to Jack about using one of the DPV things from a mile out,” Lange said, tapping his sketch. “We won’t have to do a whole mile. A half mile would be good enough, because the containers, the cans, are right on the east edge of where the Coast Guard is searching. A half mile further out, they wouldn’t pay us any attention. Jack’s run up there a half dozen times in his sailboat, never got a look.”

Virgil said, “Let me get my notebook.”

He went into the bedroom and came back with a spiral notebook jammed with loose pages. He got out dive tables and sat at the table peering at them, yanking on an earlobe as he did it, twisting one of the fake diamonds. He borrowed Lange’s pencil and made a couple of calculations, then said, “We’d need a twin set—double tanks. Gonna need a good scooter. Gonna be expensive.”

“You can do it?”

“I can do it, if you can do your part. My part isn’t that hard; yours is the part that scares me.”

“We can do our part. We’ve been in the business for a long time,” Regio said. He looked between Rae and Virgil with a tight smile, and added, “Since our folks left the old country . . . like a hundred years ago.”

Rae said, “Oh. Okay.”

Virgil thought about that, looked at Rae, who nodded, and he said, “If we’re going shopping, I gotta get my certifications.”

“We can wait.”

Virgil went back to the bedroom and returned with a cloth satchel, pawed through it, and came out with a drop-down plastic card file meant for the credit card–addicted, and dangled it up for Regio and Lange. “There you go. Twelve certs.”

“Let’s rock,” Regio said.

Out the door, the three of them; Rae stayed behind. Regio was driving a Lexus SUV, Virgil got in the back and Regio said, “Safety belt.”

On the way west to Scuba City, Lange asked, “How was Fort Dodge?”

“Oh, you know. Not bad,” Virgil said. “A little primitive, there were like three guys in a cell. Nobody hassled you too much; mostly just chickenshit. Food was okay. Didn’t have to blow anyone, it wasn’t that kind of place. I mean, it was Iowa.”

“I can deal with chickenshit,” Regio said. “I’ll tell you what, though. You want to stay away from New York. I got a friend . . .”

They talked prisons for a while, and both Lange and Regio seemed conversant with prison conditions in the Northeast, including one called the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Delaware, which Virgil thought was a funny name. He goofed on it for a while, in a mildly stoned way, until Regio told him to shut up. “There ain’t nothing funny about Jimmy Vaughn.”

Virgil, in the backseat, leaned forward and said to Regio, who was driving, “I couldn’t help noticing that your fine ride here has inferior wheels. I got four Porsche wheels and the tires are right next to new. N-Specs. They’d really cheer up this, uh, you know, Toyota . . .”

Made Lange laugh. “Toyota.”

Regio: “Fuck you. Lexus. Best car I ever owned.”

Virgil, stoner: “You own this car?”

“Of course I own it. What’d you think?”

“I thought maybe it was your wife’s.”

Made Lange laugh again.

Scuba City had everything they needed except the diver propulsion vehicle—DPV—and there was a decent tech shop in back. Virgil produced his certification cards and chatted with the salesclerk about their requirements. Regio listened in, while Lange strolled around the place looking at the gear. In the car, Virgil had asked what the budget was, and Lange had said, “There isn’t one. Get what you need.”

“That DPV gonna cost six or seven grand . . .”

“Get what you need.”

“Like Christmas . . .”

“Don’t need to buy the lift bags. We got those, big ones, custom, cost a goddamn fortune,” Lange said. “And we’ve got a top-of-the-line GPS watch. Don’t need to buy one of those, either.”

Since price was not a problem, Virgil bought a Halcyon backplate and wing, on which the store’s shop would mount twin steel scuba tanks nominally holding a hundred cubic feet of air each, depending on pressure.

When the salesclerk had gone to look something up, Lange said, “Our first diver had something different. Like a life vest, sorta . . .”

“She was diving single tanks, right?”

“Yeah. We could get her right on top of the drop.”

“So she had a standard BC—buoyancy compensator. I need more air because we’re a lot further out. Easier to mount twin tanks on a backplate. The wing is the equivalent of her BC.”

“Okay.”

Virgil asked the clerk about tank pressure, and she said, “We do standard fills at three thousand psi.”

Virgil said, “I’m going deep and cold. These are new tanks and perfect. You think your guy could bump that to thirty-three hundred?”

“I could ask him,” she said.

They bought the necessary valves for the two tanks, one left- and one right-handed, the manifold that joined them, harnesses and miscellaneous attachment rings for the plate, a wrench kit that would handle all the various nuts that held things together. They added an “octopus,” which included a breathing mouthpiece and hoses to inflate and deflate the wing, a very expensive Perdix dive computer with an effective electronic compass and two Bluetooth transmitters that would read the tank pressures, a seven-millimeter wet suit, full-length dive skins for warmer water, two short, tight Speedo swimsuits, goggles, fins, snorkel, three flashlights, a titanium line cutter, and, because Virgil once needed them and didn’t have them, a pair of wire cutters.

Lange had been looking at dive knives, but Virgil told him he really wouldn’t have a use for one. Lange was disappointed, so Virgil got the largest, most expensive titanium knife he could find. “In case you run into a barracuda,” Lange said.

“In case I walk by a pawn shop,” Virgil said.

The store could deliver a top-of-the-line Genesis DPV in two days for $8,000.

Regio said that was “fine,” and at the end, he went out to the truck, came back with a briefcase, and gave the saleswoman $13,000 in hundred-dollar bills and $460 in twenties. She looked at the money with something like hunger, and then at Regio, Lange, and Virgil with something like doubt, but said nothing. She took the bills, said, “Give me a few minutes,” went into a back room and came back in a few minutes with a smile on her face. “We’re good,” she said. She gave Regio $6.50 in change. “Where are you guys diving?”

“We’re actually exporting this stuff to a rich guy who’s got this private island over in the Bahamas,” Virgil said. “You ought to see his boat. It’s basically a ship .”

“So it’s not for you?”

“I wish,” Virgil said. “He told me to get the best. We’re the same size, so I can buy it for him, but I’m going to be wearing junk when I give him his lessons.”

They agreed to pick up the two tanks, banded together, filled and certified, when they got the Genesis.

Out in the car, Lange said to Virgil, “Good story about the rich guy in the Bahamas. You’re kind of a natural con man.”

“I try. Listen . . . what you said back in the apartment, about your folks coming from the old country. Are you guys in the Mafia?” Virgil asked.

Regio laughed, and then asked, “What makes you think that?”

“What you said. And you both look sort of Italian, and your name is Regio, which sounds sort of Italian . . .”

Lange: “So what?”

“I dunno,” Virgil said. “I was wondering, if you’re Italian, why don’t you have Italian names? Marc and Matt don’t sound like, you know . . .”

Regio turned to look at Virgil: “My great-grandfather got to New York a hundred and twenty years ago. Nobody’s been back to Italy since then. So what the fuck do you think they’d name me—Pinocchio?”