Below (4 page)

 

Sturman looked at his air gauge as he and the other diver reached the exterior of the ship, not slowing as they passed through the opening in the side of the hull and began to arc up toward the surface. Sturman maintained his grip on the woman’s BC vest, since she was still breathing from his air tank. This was going to be a real balancing act, he realized. They needed to surface quickly, but too fast and they would certainly get a bad case of the bends. As it was, they were certain to suffer some ill effects. There wasn’t enough air for a safety stop at fifteen feet.

Far from the anchor line, they began to drift in the current as they ascended in open water. Sturman continued to look at his depth gauge, dumping air from his vest to control the ascent. Ninety feet. Eighty feet. Seventy feet. They were surfacing too fast. He grimaced. This wasn’t going to be good.

He needed to slow them down, since they probably still had two or three minutes of air in his emergency tank—at least at the low pressure of shallow water, where air lasted much longer than at depth. Before they surfaced, they could share the Spare Air as they let the nitrogen that had built up in their bodies escape when they exhaled in the reduced pressure of shallower water. Hell, he thought, they might get out of this unscathed after all.

Without warning, the woman spit out her regulator and kicked for the surface.

Sturman suddenly realized that the air in his main tank, which the woman had been breathing, must have just hit zero psi.

She was out of air.

The woman clawed for the emergency tank suspended just below Sturman’s mouth, ripping it free of his bite. She tried to put in the mouthpiece, but was clearly in a state of panic now. After a moment of fumbling with the miniature tank, she let go of it and kicked upward. Sturman tried to hold on to her with one hand and caught the sinking emergency tank with the other. He couldn’t let her just pop up from sixty feet. The risk was much too great.

Sturman heard a faint metallic clink and felt the woman begin to rise.
Shit.
Her weight belt. She had released her weight belt, and was attempting an emergency ascent.

He glanced down and watched as her thick, nylon belt, laden with twenty pounds of lead weights, slipped past her long blue fins and plummeted toward the wreck below. He quickly dumped the remaining air out of his buoyancy control vest and tried to hold the woman down, but knew they were rising fast as he felt the air in his sinuses and rib cage rapidly expand. They were in for a ride.

Sturman knew he had two choices: try to slow their ascent and put himself at greater risk, or let her go and ascend more gradually himself.

For Will Sturman, there was really no choice.

He squeezed the woman’s vest tighter and raised the Spare Air tank in front of the woman’s face so she could see it, but she was wriggling like a speared fish and her mask was fogged completely over because of her rapid breathing. Her flailing arms hit the small tank away again, and Sturman realized this woman was going to drown if she didn’t get her head above water immediately.

As they accelerated upward over the last forty feet to the surface, escorted by a host of their own expanding air bubbles, Sturman exhaled continuously, calmly, and wondered why in the hell he still chose to be a divemaster.

W
ith his arms outstretched, Sturman could have easily touched both sides of the large, horizontal cylinder.

Even though he was tall, about six-two, with a wide arm span, any space he could reach across with his arms and couldn’t stand up in was much too small for comfort. Semi-claustrophobic, Sturman had first taken a scuba class right after high school to help him conquer his avoidance of confined spaces. It had worked. Well, that and his general fearlessness. He didn’t worry much about dying, never had. Seventeen years later, he could remain relaxed while breathing compressed air through a hose, a hundred feet underwater, at intense water pressure, while swimming through narrow openings in a sunken vessel. But he still didn’t enjoy being confined.

The rapid ascent from the
HMCS Redemption
this morning had ended with them breaching halfway out of the water with the momentum of their ascent. Sturman had looked over at the female diver to see bloody froth coming out of her mouth and bubbling out of her nose into her mask. That had frightened the hell out of him, but the woman had stayed conscious and wide-eyed as he towed her back to his boat. Sturman had realized she must have held her breath on the way up and damaged her lungs.

Besides her lung injury, they had both almost immediately started to feel the first effects of the bends. Sturman had gotten a headache moments after surfacing, and by the time they reached the boat two hundred feet away his face had begun to itch and his shoulders and elbows were tingling.

On his marine radio he had called for an ambulance to meet them at the dock. To prevent serious injury and lessen the pain of the decompression, they had been rushed to the hyperbaric chamber at the hospital in La Mesa. When they had reached the hospital an hour later, Sturman, although primarily concerned with the injured woman, had felt intense pain in his upper joints as the nitrogen gas bubbling up in his tissues wreaked havoc on his nerves. The woman, in greater pain and still bleeding some from her mouth, hadn’t even been able to talk at that point. She had been confused and delirious, and when she had been able to speak through the pain and bloody froth, all she had kept asking was where they were and what was happening.

Now she was unconscious on the floor of the chamber, underneath a light blue hospital blanket. A nurse sat beside her, monitoring her vitals.

“You are suffering from decompression sickness.”

Sturman turned to see the doctor, a middle-aged Indian man, looking at him through one of the five small, circular windows in the chamber. His voice had emanated from a small speaker inside the chamber. On his white coat was a metallic nametag: DR. PESHWAR.

Sturman walked over to the porthole and saw a button labeled TALK next to a small speaker. He pushed it.

“Thanks for the diagnosis, doc. I thought I was in here for the view,” Will replied. As a divemaster, he already knew all about the bends.

The doctor scowled at him and shook his head. “Do you think this is funny, sir? That woman nearly died.”

“I’ve got a helluva headache,” Sturman said. “Say what you’ve gotta say.”

“Your bodies absorbed a lot of nitrogen when you were underwater, and when you surfaced too quickly, the nitrogen didn’t have time to leave your body,” the doctor explained over the small speaker. The chamber walls were too thick to speak to each other directly. “What you are experiencing is the bubbling up of nitrogen in a gaseous form in your blood and tissues, particularly in your joints. Mrs. Buckner also has suffered trauma from an air embolism. Apparently she held her breath on your ascent and ruptured her lung.”

He paused, fixing Sturman with an accusing stare. “She’s lucky to be alive, Mr. Sturman.”

Sturman’s face flushed. “And you think it’s my fault, right?” The doctor didn’t reply. Sturman looked down for a moment, then back at the doctor. “Will there be any permanent damage?”

“It’s hard to say right now. You should be all right, since you made it here so quickly. It’s likely you’ll make a full recovery. As for Mrs. Buckner, we’ll need to keep a closer eye on her. And run more tests once she’s finished in the chamber.”

“So how long ’til we can get out of this contraption?” Sturman asked.

“You’ll need to be in the recompression chamber for twelve hours to be safe. If the symptoms return later, we’ll need to have you come back.”

Sturman watched the doctor leave the room, then sat back down on one of the benches running alongside the chamber. He sighed. The dive charter business had been bad enough lately, because of the lousy economy and the lack of disposable income. And Sturman was getting tired of babysitting people who took too many chances underwater, putting his business at risk.

Maybe it was time to find something new. But diving was all he had.

T
he Lighthouse, a brick-walled pub on a side street two blocks up from the Capistrano Bay harbor, was a favorite haunt of the men who worked on the water. The Lighthouse drew fishermen, sailors, beachside vendors, and divers, who could all be found playing darts, shooting pool, or drinking too much inside the low-ceilinged one-story hangout. Tourists who walked in usually turned around and walked right back out.

This evening it was fairly slow as usual. Sturman was sitting inside the joint on a wooden bar stool, brooding over a beer. He listened to Jimmy Buffett singing “Come Monday” over the speakers on the walls and watched Jill move around behind the bar, halfheartedly focusing on her long, tanned legs and bare midriff.

Jill noticed him looking and smiled. “What you looking at, cowboy?”

Sturman looked away. He knew Jill was interested in him, but he liked things how they were. He didn’t want to complicate his life.

The Lighthouse was the one place besides his boat where he spent a lot of his free time. Too much of his free time, he knew. But what the hell.

He peeled at the wet label on the beer bottle as he thought about the accident that morning and the long day at the hospital. That woman had really screwed up wandering off and leaving her dive buddy like that. She could have gotten herself killed. But Sturman couldn’t let it go; after all, she was the one unconscious, spitting up blood in the hospital.

“She’s lucky to be alive,” the doctor had said.

Sturman set down his beer and covered his face with his hands, rubbing the stubble on his chin, then took off his well-worn cowboy hat and ran his hand back over the matching stubble on his closely shaved head.

Sturman and the sick woman had spent ten full hours in the recompression chamber together, her mostly sleeping off painkillers and sedatives. She had awoken briefly once, asked where she was, then drifted back to sleep. Sturman had stayed awake, fighting off guilt. He knew he’d let her wander too far off in the wreck; he’d given the divers too much freedom to explore. He knew better. When you bring out divers you don’t know well, you always keep them on a short leash. Now he was drinking off some of the guilt, when he knew he should have been headed home for a good night’s sleep.

“Hey, buddy. How you feeling?” A handsome Latino with a dark goatee had just come through the heavy wooden front door and was approaching Sturman, smiling broadly. Joe Montoya wasn’t in uniform, so Sturman knew he was off duty as a sergeant for the county sheriff.

Sturman smiled weakly back at Joe and, replacing the hat on his head, tipped it to his friend. Joe sat down on the stool next to Sturman and spun on it to face him.

Sturman sipped his beer and didn’t answer Joe’s question right away, pausing for effect. “One time right after I moved here we drove down to Tijuana, stayed up all night drinking cheap tequila, and then you took a beatin’ in an alley outside that bar when you tried to leave with some guy’s girlfriend. Remember that?”

Joe nodded and laughed, a loud, contagious laugh. “Yeah, man. You saved my ass.”

“Remember how we felt on the drive home up the Five the next morning?”

Joe smiled.

“Well, that’s about how I’m feeling,” Sturman said. “Hey, amigo, thanks for bringing her back, and for taking care of the dog.”

Wincing, he raised his arm to shake Joe’s hand. His buddy had been there to take care of his two most prized possessions—his boat and his dog. Joe had a family and long hours with the sheriff’s department, but Sturman could always count on his help when he needed him. Joe shook his head. “Man, so you’re really all messed up? You don’t look any shittier than normal. Is that lady gonna be okay?”

“I don’t know. Her husband will probably sue me, even though he’s the one who lost her.”

“No shit. You should’ve just left her ass down there.” Joe raised his hand to the bartender, pointing at himself. “I’ll have what our cowboy’s having.”

“Put everything on my tab, Jill.”

Joe was always making fun of Sturman’s cowboy hat and slight country-boy drawl. Sturman didn’t wear boots much anymore, but he would always be a cowboy.

Joe tried to get the story out of his friend. Sturman knew Joe wanted more details, but he wasn’t much of a talker. When Sturman explained how he had freed the woman from the ship hatchway, Joe said, “Too bad you can’t talk underwater. You could’ve gotten that chick to agree to anything for an escort to the surface.”

“Hell. I’da been happy to just get a tip.”

As was his way, Joe kept up the bad jokes. Beginning to feel the effects of the alcohol, Sturman laughed despite himself. That was Joe Montoya. When he wasn’t working, the man was never serious. Sturman had always figured that was a cop’s way of dealing with seeing gang-war victims and four-year-olds dismembered along highways.

After another round of Dos Equis, the conversation died off. On the other side of the pub, someone struck a cue ball and the racked billiard balls separated with a loud smack a moment later.

“Hey, man, you’ve dove and fished in this area for a long time. You know anything about a big fish called ‘the devil’ or a devil fish or something?”

Sturman was silent for a moment. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Some guy got attacked by a shark or something a few days ago, and the kid we’re holding now claims the guy said something about the devil before he died. Looks like a shark laid into him.”

Sturman sipped his beer. “Some people call mantas ‘devils’ because of the shape of their head. I’ve never heard of a ‘devil fish,’ though.”

“Mantas don’t attack people, right?”

Sturman grinned. “You sure don’t know shit for a cop with a boat. Mantas are sure as hell big enough, but they don’t even have any teeth.”

“Huh. Anyway, this was another one of them coyotes smuggling immigrants by boat. The kid we arrested says he was supposed to pick up a bunch of them and shuttle them back. Can you believe that shit? Some Mexican just dumped them in the ocean, and this other guy was supposed to pick them up.”

“You fuckin’ Mexicans.”

“Fuck you, Sturman. Anyway, kid says only this one dying guy was there when he showed up. Coast Guard went out, but never found anyone else.”

“Not many shark attacks around here. Not many dangerous sharks.”

“True, but not many people float around in the ocean offshore at night. I don’t know. I figure the kid’s probably full of shit anyway.”

A man across the room began shouting at Sturman. “Hey! Hey, shithead! Yeah, I’m talking to you. Fuckin’ cowboy in here again?”

The men looked to the back of the bar at a group playing pool. The tallest of them, a shaggy-haired older man in a muscle shirt, was leaning on his pool cue and staring at Sturman.

“You hear me, shithead? I’ll bet you my left nut I can take you in the next game.” The shouting man grinned, revealing yellowed teeth and a golden-capped canine.

Joe shook his head. “You still hanging out with that lowlife?”

Sturman couldn’t hold it against his friend for not liking Steve Black. He fell into a mother’s category of people you should stay away from. “Steve’s a dirty old man, but he’s been a pretty good friend.”

“He’s a fucking racist, Sturman.”

“Well, nobody’s perfect.” Sturman turned and shouted back at Black. “I’ll take your bet, you dumbshit. But you still owe me from the last time I mopped up this place with your ass.”

Black smiled at Sturman, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

Jill jumped in. “Watch your language in here, assholes.” The room erupted in laughter.

Sturman slid off his stool and made his way toward the pool tables, with Joe reluctantly in tow. He had always thought Steve looked just like an old pirate, minus an eye patch and a parrot. Black was another local divemaster, and had been friends with Sturman for almost eight years. He was a tall, wiry man, with unkempt gray hair and wrinkles creasing a sun-bronzed face. His stained Carlos ’n Charlie’s tank top left his deeply tanned, tattooed arms fully visible, as well as a few prominent scars. He wore three gold chains around his neck and had on worn leather sandals and cargo shorts.

Steve raised an arm to block a mock punch from Sturman, then shook his hand.

“Hola, amigos. Sturman, I didn’t know you were still hanging out with Mexi-melters.”

“Anytime, old man.” Joe looked calm enough as he delivered the invitation, but Sturman saw that his fists were clenched.

“I’m not fuckin’ with the police. I’m not stupid.”

“That’s enough. Keep it nice.” Sturman shot them both a hard look. “You wanna play, Montoya?”

“No. I gotta get going. Girls are home tonight. Sturman, I already fed Bud dinner for you. See you soon.”

After Joe walked away, Steve shook his head. “Why you hang out with that cop?”

“He’s better looking than you.”

“Seriously, son. Last thing we need is Mexican cops here in California.”

“Drop the racist shit, Steve. You got a smoke, you bum?”

Sturman’s body had taken a lot of abuse already today, and he was trying not to smoke as much, but after a few beers a cigarette sounded pretty good.

 

 

Sturman realized he must have smoked at least five or six cigarettes as he lit a final one and stumbled out of the bar after midnight. He’d played a lot of cutthroat with Steve and his biker friends, who were talking more game than they brought. Their usual night at the bar, with Sturman playing well until the liquor convinced him to focus on other things.

After drinking too much beer to win any more games of pool and almost giving in to Jill’s attempts to take advantage of him, Sturman called it a night when he felt the darkness creeping into his head. He left and headed down the dark, empty street to the harbor. As he staggered along the floating dock toward his boat, he could hear Bud barking inside the cabin. His mutt always knew when his master was approaching by the sound of his footsteps, be they sober and measured or drunken and lurching.

Sturman fumbled to get the key in the lock and then let Bud explode out of the cabin. He smiled as the muscular dog, a tan Lab-pit-whatever mix, ran in impossibly small circles on the slippery floor of the boat, slamming into Sturman and sliding into the sides of the boat.

“Hey, buddy. You’ve probably gotta piss worse than I do.” Sturman took the dog for a short walk up the docks, to the grassy area on shore. Then they returned to the boat and he fed Bud and cooked two packs of ramen noodles in the tiny kitchen. Living on a thirty-six-foot dive boat with a full-grown dog was tight, but when the economy had taken a nosedive, Sturman had left his apartment to keep his business and boat. He would never sell the boat.

When his belly was full and he could no longer keep his eyes open, Sturman lay down on his bed in the forward cabin, still fully clothed. Before he passed out, lying alone in the dark, he thought of her. Somehow, he always thought of her.

If he drank enough beer he found that he could sometimes get past it. Tonight the booze did its job, and with Bud curled up next to him, Sturman fell asleep to the gentle rocking of the boat. The last thing he heard as he drifted off was the soft ringing of metal rigging as it clanged against the aluminum masts of sailboats in the harbor.