Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“I’ll be ready for that,” Rae said.

Cattaneo called, “We’re set. Marc, you want to cast us off?”

The night was cloudy but windless, and warm enough, in the sixties. There were lights already showing in the marina, and Virgil could hear somebody playing Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Downey to Lubbock.” A woman laughed off in that direction, like a woman might do when she has a martini in her hand and a friendly hand on her ass.

As the boat edged out into the Intracoastal, Virgil and Rae made their way back to the cockpit. “Should be a good night for diving,” Cattaneo said. “About as flat as it ever gets out there.”

“Looks fine,” Virgil said. “I think we got this figured out.”

“You oughta look into investments,” Cattaneo said. “Fidelity, Vanguard. Get some mutual funds so you’ll have some money coming in, when you get to your old age.”

Virgil cocked his head. “What the fuck are you talking about, Jack? You think I’m gonna get to old age?”

Cattaneo thought about it, then said, “Okay, forget it. But. Let’s try to stay alive for a while, okay? Don’t take any chances down there, we’re doing too good to lose you. And maybe you don’t make it to actual old age, but with the cash we’re gonna give you, you could have a hell of a good time before then.”

“Weed, women, and song,” Lange said.

Virgil: “I try to stay away from song. When I try to sing, I sound like a frog.”

They pushed out of Port Everglades into the Atlantic and made the turn north. Nice night, their forward motion creating a soft salt breeze in their faces. Regio and Lange were sitting on the deck, knees up, watching the shore lights; farther out, a freighter was headed west in toward the cut. Virgil, Rae, and Cattaneo were in the cockpit, and Cattaneo asked, “How’d you two get together, anyway? You’re not what I’d think of as an obvious match-up.”

Rae said, “I was hurtin’ in Vegas. I had a hotel job there, cleaning rooms. Temporary thing. They said I stole some stuff from a room, which was a lie, and I got fired. Once you get fired from a Vegas hotel for room theft, you’re shit out of luck. They put your name around and nobody will touch you: they’re like running you out of town.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I was walking around looking in store windows, hoping I might see a ‘Help Wanted’ sign—this was just before Christmas, four years ago—and I’m walking around, and there’s Willy outside a Dollar Store, ringing a bell, with a red pot, raising money for the Salvation Army.”

Cattaneo laughed, looked at Virgil: “You were working for the Salvation Army? Bullshit.”

“That’s what I said, soon as I saw him,” Rae said. “He had this sneaky look around his eyes. I backed off and watched him and when the traffic died off, he took the pot and the pot stand and his bell and he went around the building and got in the Subaru. I knocked on the window and when he lowered it, I said, ‘Can I have some of that money?’ That’s how it started.”

“Where you get the bell and pot?” Cattaneo asked.

“Found them,” Virgil said.

Cattaneo and Rae said, simultaneously, “Right.”

“How much were you taking out?” Cattaneo asked.

“Good day, worked all day, could be four hundred dollars,” Virgil said. “Best day was almost five hundred. Somebody put in three fifties.”

“Why weren’t you diving?” Cattaneo asked.

“Because they pay you shit,” Virgil said. “Dive operators act like you ought to be paying them, because you get to dive. That’s what they say: ‘Hey, we’re giving you the chance of doing what you love.’ Yeah, well, I love eating, too. No way in hell you can stay alive in California on a hundred bucks a day, three days a week.”

They talked about the cost of living for a while, California versus Florida versus New York versus Iowa—“Really low in Iowa, especially out in the countryside. I really liked that place, except their prison sorta sucked.”

“That was a burglary deal, right?” Cattaneo asked.

“I don’t talk about that shit,” Virgil said.

“But Ally stuck with you?”

“She didn’t so much stick with me as look me up afterward,” Virgil said.

“I was working at a Gap in St. Louis. There’s another crap job for you,” Rae said.

They talked off and on about crap jobs, and Regio and Lange chipped in, and then Cattaneo said, “We’re thirty minutes out, Willy.”

“Back to the salt mines,” Virgil said.

Virgil got suited up, did a last check on his tanks, dive computer, weights, and the Genesis DPV, flicked all three flashlights on and off, made sure the two lift bags were correctly positioned, put on his mask and fins, sucked air through his regulator, and a little after six o’clock, right hand pinning his mouthpiece and mask to his face, took the long step into the Atlantic Ocean. When he heard the boat engine start, he oriented himself toward the west, and turned the Genesis on.

On his last dive, he’d seen one more can of heroin that he didn’t think he had time to get to, but as he ascended, he used the Genesis to pull him over to the brilliant white LEDs, and then went as straight up as he could, pausing for decompression stops, and then all the way to the surface, where he checked the GPS watch and noted the reading.

On this trip, he steered directly west from the drop point, surfaced, made his way to the noted GPS coordinates. Boat lights were approaching from the north, appeared to be a bit off to the west of him, but coming fast, and he vented air from his wing and dropped straight down.

He got lucky. Visibility had improved overnight, and when he activated the light wand at a hundred and thirty feet, he immediately saw LEDs of two cans to the south, and another to the north. He had the southern cans bagged in the first minute on the bottom and could still see the glow from the can to the north. That gave him a solid compass heading for the line of cans, and he picked up the northern can a minute later and could see another beyond that.

He was moving quickly, and slightly lower, now down to a hundred and seventy feet, getting narced, six cans bagged, when his leg was snagged and he was yanked off-line. He would have lost the Genesis if it hadn’t been tethered to his backplate. He struggled against the opposing pulls on his leg and from the Genesis, managed to drag in the machine and turn it off.

He swiveled, gathered himself, let his heartbeat slow, and then used his most powerful flashlight to look at his right leg and fin. He was tangled in a coil of half-inch-wide plastic strap, the kind used to secure boxes for shipping. It rose in a snarl off the bottom, a tangle the size of a government desk. He pulled at it, and found it securely fastened to a lump of something on the bottom. There were a half dozen bright-colored fishing lures hung up in it and tangles of line. What the lump was, he couldn’t tell—maybe concrete, or something metal. Junk, covered with mud.

He’d trained for this. The first rule: stop and think. He did that, then tried to slowly unwrap the tangle from his leg; that didn’t work so well, as the Genesis had pulled the tangling plastic strips into a knot. Moving in slow motion, he took his wire cutter from its pocket on the backplate harness and started cutting.

The stuff was tough, but his wire cutter clipped through it easily enough. He made a half dozen cuts, dropping the scrap pieces to the bottom, and then kicked free. His leg stung, and he took a moment to look at it. He’d cut himself and was bleeding, a trickle of blood from his calf, black in the LED light of his flashlight. He pulled the leg of his wet suit around to one side, so an undamaged section of the suit would cover the cut in his leg; the bleeding seemed to stop.