In Too Deep (38 page)

“
Ben said Gav was drunk, reeking
of Jack Daniel’s. He likely didn’t make it this—” Noah’s phone
trilled Bob Marley’s “Bad Boys.” He answered, listened, and then
quick-fired instructions. Disconnecting with an, “On it,” Noah
swore. “Old Smitty’s just called it in. He found Gav’s dinghy
drifting about a mile offshore.”

“
No Gav?” Piper said.

“
No Gav,” Noah agreed. He shoved
the phone back into his pocket. “Right. I’ve got to go back to base
and coordinate with Search and Rescue and organize the locals so
they aren’t buzzing aimlessly all over the bays.” He glanced at
Piper. “I know you’re not on duty, but can you contact the dive
squad and put them on alert?”

Piper’s lips thinned into a pale
line, but she nodded. “I’ll get on it.”

West hooked an arm around her
shoulders. “Count us in with the water search, Noah. We’ll take my
Daisy.”

“
Thanks.”

Once Noah left, West tugged Piper
into his arms. For a few moments, her body strained against his,
but then she relented, threading her arms around his waist and
holding on.

With anyone else he’d come up with
platitudes like, “Maybe Gav swam back to shore,” or “Perhaps Trent
got it wrong.” He stroked a hand over her hair, felt the shudder
sweep through her. But Piper knew better than anyone the likelihood
of finding Gavin-the-bloody-idiot Reynolds alive.

Chapter 18

A cool breeze
ruffled Piper’s damp hair as the launch chugged to the next search
area. She squinted past her boss’s shoulder into the darkening sky.
Sunset was an hour away and this would be their last dive of the
day.

The Police Dive Squad had arrived
this morning, after yesterday’s land and sea search failed to
locate Gav. Locals scoured the bays and beaches for hours,
grim-lipped with the knowledge the ocean’s low temperatures meant
Gav’s survival would be a major miracle.

Piper had greeted her buddies at
the airfield and drove them to Oban’s tiny police station for their
first briefing. A cluster of locals watched as the five men climbed
out of the borrowed van and Oban’s one official police utility
vehicle. Everyone knew when police divers hit town, the search
switched from locate and rescue, to body retrieval. If they could
even find him.

Her hands hadn’t stopped trembling
since she first donned her wetsuit earlier.

“
You okay for the last shift,
Piper?” Tom leaned back on the bench and took a swig from his water
bottle.

Had he missed her shaking hands
each time she’d resurfaced? Did he buy her “freaking cold water”
explanation? Maybe.

Piper slicked back her hair and
shrugged. “Totally. I don’t know if Buck can handle another one
though—looks like he’s been hitting the KFC while I’ve been away.”
She jabbed her elbow into the rock-solid abs of the officer
slouched next to her.

“
You’ll keep, girlie.” David
“Buck” Rogers, a six-foot something Maori, lifted his mirrored
shades long enough to send her a wink.

Laughter and good-natured heckling
erupted around her. She’d missed her guys—Buck, Paulie, Mac,
Trigger, and even Tom. The five of them—half of their squad
remained in Wellington in case another call came in—had worked
through some awful cases together. While none of them would claim
to be world-class divers, they prided themselves in their ability
to get the job done as a team.

Ten minutes later Piper dived with
Buck and Trigger at her side. The wind had picked up, stirring sand
and sediment through the water, so visibility was iffy. All part of
the job—it was a rare day when the squad could claim the luxury of
ideal conditions.

Piper finned toward the sea bed.
Their last grid search would take place in water fifty feet deep
and according to Tom’s calculations, if they didn’t find Gav before
the tides turned again, the recovery odds grew even slimmer. Piper
didn’t want to be the one to relay this fact to Peter Reynolds, who
still scoured the beaches hoping to find his son alive.

Foveaux Strait had taken many
lives and sometimes the dead never returned from her volatile
depths, her father a classic example.

Piper thrust that thought from her
mind. Thinking of her dad’s death was almost a knee-jerk reaction,
given what she was now doing in this stretch of ocean. In her time
on the squad she’d never been assigned to a recovery operation
further south than Invercargill. She imagined that Tom, who knew
her history since he’d been one of the divers searching for Michael
Harland, had engineered that.

When she met him at the airfield
he’d given her the look. The
are you up to this kid
look.
And she’d nodded, knowing before he even requested her assistance
what he’d planned.

She could do this. She’d
trained
to do this. She just had to focus.

Steadying her breathing, she
continued to sink into the murky depths.

Piper reached the sea floor, her
fins stirring up even more silt. Visibility? What visibility. This
dive would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, or finding
Where’s Waldo?
—every sarcastic cliché she could think of to
distract her mind from what she was doing: hoping to discover the
body of a man she’d known since childhood.

Time became meaningless as Piper
worked the grid. She relied solely on her sense of touch, because
outside her mask swirling eddies of sand and silt clouded what
little vision she had in the light of her dive torch. The currents
buffeted her, the harsh rasp of her breathing and the blood
soughing past her eardrums the only sounds.

Her right hand, sweeping in a slow
arc, nudged something solid. She moved her left hand to join the
right and it skimmed over the distinctive shape of a foot. Moving
closer, Piper squinted through the haze. She didn’t need the visual
confirmation, but the ghostly flicker of a white shirt in the light
of her torch confirmed it anyway. She’d found Gav.

With three sharp tugs of her
swim-line, Piper signaled that the victim had been located. Tears
pricked in the corners of her lids and she kept them back by sheer
will, but the icy clutch of panic waited for a sliver of
opportunity to rip years of training from her grasp.

Sucking air like she was down to
her final few ounces, she whipped her head around at a flash of
black to her left. It was only Trigger and Buck finning to her
side, but the loaded bolt of adrenaline blazing through her system
made her want to vomit.

She gripped the torch, the handle
ridges jabbing into her palm even through the layer of
neoprene.

She had to get out of there,
before millions of tons of seawater crushed her to a
pulp.

Her movements jerky, Piper
floundered and grabbed Buck’s arm, signaling with her other hand
that something was wrong. She owed it to her team to let them
know—this time she’d swallow her pride.

Buck took one look at her, and
after ascertaining her equipment functioned correctly, gave her a
thumbs up instruction to ascend. She didn’t consider
arguing.

Trigger indicated he’d stay with
the victim until a fresh diver could be sent down and Buck signaled
on the swim-line to let Tom know divers were heading up. Buck
watched her like a mother cat as they finned toward the surface,
and the solidarity of his presence along with his paw-like grip on
her hand acted like a shot of sedative. At the safety stop, she
returned his querying “okay?” with an almost honest “okay” signal
of her own.

But the cavernous churning in her
stomach signaled a truth she didn’t want to accept.

She couldn’t do this job
anymore.

***

Piper had been sequestered in
Oban’s tiny police station for hours. And West was prepared to wait
until she’d finished all her official crap, even if it meant
sitting out here on his bike for another hour. Or two.

He’d spoken briefly to her earlier
back at the wharf when she’d returned with her grim-faced squad
after delivering Gav’s body to the undertaker on the mainland. One
look at Piper’s gaunt face and West wanted to hold her and kiss her
until those hazel eyes lost their defeated look. Something other
than finding Gav happened out there. But she denied it, squeezing
his hand and telling him she needed to accompany her squad back to
the station.

She walked away, surrounded by her
cop buddies. One of the men—a big Maori bastard with a crew cut and
the posture that came with military training—popped him the
assessing eyeball as he walked past, glued protectively to Piper’s
side.

West refused to let the big guy
intimidate him.
Yeah, you look after her, mate
. Because he
knew Piper belonged with them. A fact slammed home when the man
bent and murmured something in her ear and she offered him a weak
smile.

She should be with her squad. Not
here with him, stuck in the place she once described as the
Greenbelt of Hell. Yet, he’d asked his parents to close for the
night and brought his bike to wait for her—so she wouldn’t have to
walk alone in the dark.

West scrubbed a hand down his
face, his fingers rasping against two days’ growth of stubble. He
was pathetic. Fucked up in love with a woman who was leaving in a
week’s time—and he’d known it from the start.

The station door opened and Piper
walked onto the small deck, warm light from inside spilling onto
her, bringing out the auburn highlights in her hair. She was
dressed once more in black jeans and combat boots and his heart
give a little flip as she jogged down the steps and walked over to
him. West jammed his helmet on. God, he’d be spouting love sonnets
at her in a second.

He held out the second helmet.
“You gonna argue this time?”

Piper shook her head and took the
helmet, shadows masking her features. “Take me on a ride somewhere,
West. I don’t want to go…back, not just yet.”

His jaw tensed under the helmet’s
chin guard. A little hesitation before the word “back.” Couldn’t
she say the word “home,” or perhaps she didn’t feel it. His place,
him
—well, neither of them were home to Piper.

West twisted the key hard and
thumbed the starter button. The bike’s engine roared to life. Piper
tugged on the helmet and climbed on. Her arms slid around his
waist, her thighs snug against his. One of her hands stroked his
abs before stilling, clenching onto the thin fabric of his shirt.
He gunned the bike and pulled away, picking up speed as they hit
the long strip of road to Oban’s tiny airfield.

They rode in silence and each time
they leaned into a curve Piper hugged him tighter, her breasts
pressed into his back. It near killed him when her chest hitched,
the jerk followed by a stealthy sniffing sound.

Goddammit to hell.

West drove onto the tiny airstrip,
abandoned and empty after the last flight left for the mainland
hours ago. He killed the bike engine and hauled off his helmet.
Behind him, Piper climbed off and placed her helmet on the ground.
She stalked away, swiping her fingers across her cheeks. West
kicked the bike stand down and went after her.

He came up from behind and touched
her shoulder, then stroked his hands down her folded arms. “Talk to
me.”

Piper’s lips pinched shut, her
chin pointed along the runway, the breeze ruffling her hair as it
raced down the wide clearing.

“
I found him,” she
said.

“
I’m sorry—” He tried wrapping his
arms around her but she ducked out of the way and whirled, holding
up her hand.

“
Gavin Reynolds was a complete
prick, but still, it’s irrelevant how I felt about him. Once the
water claimed him, he was my responsibility.” Her chest heaved and
the hand she’d extended shook. “Mine. And I let him down, and
worse, I let my team down.”

She swiped her wrist beneath her
nose and refolded her arms. “I panicked, West. I panicked when I
touched his foot and if it hadn’t been for Buck and Trigger, I
could’ve got into serious trouble.”

Icy tentacles wrapped around his
guts and squeezed. He could’ve lost her. The bends could’ve claimed
her, or worse. “Fuck.”

“
Yeah, and it’s not the first time
it’s happened.” She cut him a glance. “I lied when I said the shark
didn’t scare me—that I didn’t panic.”

“
I kinda figured.”

She snuffled out a watery laugh,
wiped her cheeks again. “Yeah, well, an incident happened before I
came south. A teenager drowned while water-skiing in Lake
Tikitapu.”

“
I heard about that on the news.
Were you one of the divers who found him?”

“
Yep.”

West closed the distance between
them. Tears glittered and spilled over her lashes.

“
I was
the
diver who found
him. And I saw something in him that resembled you at the same age.
I nearly lost it.”

This time when he laid gentle
hands on her, she didn’t pull away. “You’re solid, Piper. You
reacted by the book when I blacked out and I think you’re selling
yourself short.”

She sighed and ran a trembling
hand through her hair. “Yeah? Well, maybe I am, because what else
is there for me?”