In Too Deep (22 page)

I had a knife on one leg and a speargun on the other. I was wearing twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. There was treasure in the water below me. And Josh Rebstock just kissed me on the lips.

“No regrets,” I said.

He smiled at me, and we put our regulators back in and took long strides forward into the water.

W
e passed a school of barracuda at thirty feet, their silver flashing in the cold blue light. At forty feet, I noticed a snail—its brilliant blue-and-yellow shell the size of a dime—stuck to a gently swaying kelp leaf. Without the regulator’s intermittent drone, I felt more part of the underwater world than ever. And with the LED readout in my mask, I didn’t have to worry about checking any external depth gauges. I forgot about myself, forgot about my equipment, and was able to concentrate on everything around me.

We descended at the border of the kelp forest, directly beneath the boat, our bodies horizontal like skydivers in slow motion. At seventy feet, the ocean floor came into view below us, as did the biggest striped treefish I had ever seen. It left the security of a coral mound and braved the exposed openness long enough to reach a much larger coral formation.

An arching tunnel, wide at the base, narrow at the top, and achingly familiar.

Still descending, I danced my fingers across the computer screen as I scrolled through the images, finally settling on the one I wanted. I held my wrist out in front of me.

There it was. A perfect match.

I screamed victory into my regulator.

Josh screamed, too. I turned to flash him the thumbs-up, but what I saw was so unexpected, I could only process the images as individual pieces of information, not as the parts of a whole.

Josh was still screaming.

He was doubled over, clutching his upper left arm with his right hand.

A silver barb the size of my pinkie stuck out from between the fingers of his right hand, glinting even in the low light of the depths.

A dark cloud seeped from beneath his hand, the maroon liquid dissipating into the water.

A black cable stretched about twenty-five feet behind him and just to the left, where Wayo now hovered. He was holding the body of a speargun. And he was starting to pull Josh toward him.

There was no time to do anything but act. I unsheathed my knife and cut the cable connecting the shaft to Wayo’s speargun.

Wayo was charging now, so I grabbed Josh’s wrist and kicked frantically for cover in the kelp forest behind us.

Josh wasn’t going to like what I did next, but I couldn’t see that we had much of a choice. The shaft extended a good three feet behind Josh, but there was enough of the point sticking out of his biceps for me to wrap my gloved hand around it. I gripped the spear’s barb end and pulled it all the way out, and Josh screamed again.

The spear fell swiftly into the depths. We were in the kelp, hidden for the time being. His wetsuit had closed around the wound, but even so, the blood seemed to flow more freely now that the spear was out. That wouldn’t necessarily have been too bad—at least not for me—except for the shadowy outline that had just meandered into view behind an unsuspecting Wayo.

Classic. There was a freaking shark in the water with us. What was next? Wayo turning into a merman?

I pulled Josh deeper into the kelp forest. He was moaning, so I put my finger in front of the regulator as a reminder. He glared at me but stopped moaning anyway. We sank down lower, at ninety feet now, running silent and bubble free.

It was only a matter of time.

Sooner—not later—either Wayo or the shark would find us. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, a sense of calm swept through me. I knew that everything depended on the next ten minutes. I knew what we had to do; there was no other option. I held Josh’s face in front of mine to make sure that he wasn’t about to pass out. I typed:
fol
low my lead
. He nodded.

And then I did something I could only have imagined the movie version of myself even contemplating.

We were only ten feet above the bottom. Based on where I’d seen the rock formation, I knew we would have to be out in the open for at least a few seconds. I held Josh by his good hand and kicked as hard as I could.

As we bolted from the kelp, I caught a hazy glimpse of Wayo about twenty-five feet above and to the left. He noticed us, and his body tilted down like a dive-bombing falcon.

Josh and I entered the formation no more than three seconds later. It was longer than I’d anticipated—more than a simple arch. From the top of the tunnel to the seafloor was no taller than twenty feet, and while a pair of SUVs could have driven comfortably through, side by side along the bottom, the walls tapered severely up to about five feet apart at the top.

I noticed an indentation in the tunnel ceiling—as if an ice-cream scoop had been taken from the underside of the rock—and kicked up to it. An uneven hole no wider than a basketball allowed a glimpse through to the ocean above. I quickly pulled an emergency buoy and spool from my BC pocket and filled the buoy with a burst of air from my octopus. Then I knifed the spool into the rock and let the buoy float through the hole and up to the surface.

Josh and I, now parallel with the ocean floor, pressed our backs up against the rock. I eased the speargun from its holster and waited.

The buoy spool was no longer spinning, so I glanced back to make sure that my knife was still in place.

There was something on the rock.

My knife had chopped away a crust of coral, revealing what looked like the corner of an embossed design. I reached the tip of the speargun to scrape away the growth, revealing a wing, then another, then a neck. The familiar double-headed bird of the Cortés crest.

It might as well have said, “Ulloa was here!”

I scanned around me for anything else. Anything out of place. Anything that would indicate the location of the Jaguar itself. Wayo would be appearing at any second, but I couldn’t help it. One eye on the opening below, one eye inspecting the formation. It had to be there. Farther down the slope was a line, too horizontal, a shelf carved into the rock.

It was like staring at an anthill, how for a moment it looks like there’s nothing there, but once you see the first ant, you notice all the others, and you wonder how it was possible that you hadn’t noticed them before. The centuries of growth had covered the Jaguar so completely that it appeared to be nothing more than part of the rock. If I hadn’t been looking for it—if the roaring beast hadn’t been seared into my retinas—there’s no way I would have seen it. But now, knowing everything I knew, with the double-headed bird staring me in the face, the silhouette of the Golden Jaguar’s head was unmistakable.

Josh elbowed me, wide-eyed, and pointed angrily down to the mouth of the tunnel.

Wayo. He was too far down to see us, and he wasn’t looking up. Not yet, at least. He moved slowly, kicking so as not to disturb the silt on the ocean floor, and his head scanned to the left, then to the right.

A shadow of the shark swam across the entrance behind him but didn’t come inside. My throat tightened, and I had to force the air back into it.

I turned the speargun back up into the rock and squeezed the trigger from point-blank range. My wrist recoiled slightly, but the bolt buried itself past the barb, and I unspooled the twenty feet of cable below the barrel of the gun.

Josh grabbed my arm, but there was no time to argue or explain. I shrugged him off and—while keeping my eyes on Wayo—motioned for Josh to stay where he was. I arranged my body vertically upside down, so my legs were in a crouch and my heels were pressed against the tunnel ceiling.

When Wayo came almost directly below me, I pushed off as hard as I could. It took me only two strong kicks, and then I was there.

I grabbed his tank valve and leaned back, pressing my knees on either side of his tank and pulling on the valve as hard as I could. It took him just a moment to realize what was going on, and that moment was enough. He started to flail like a turtle on its back, but it was too late; he was helpless. I had him securely in the panicked diver hold, and there was nothing he could do. It didn’t matter how much bigger or stronger he was.

I thought briefly about giving Wayo a little taste of his own medicine, but there was no time to turn off his air. The shark was back. It made another pass across the entrance and turned toward us.

I wrapped the speargun cable around Wayo’s valve as many times as I could while avoiding his thrashing limbs, and when I ran out of cable I jammed the spear pistol itself between Wayo’s tank and BC and pushed off of him and up toward Josh. The shark was closer now, on the other side of Wayo, whose panicked writhing had caused him to become even more entangled in the cable.

Josh came down to meet me at the opposite end of the tunnel, and I grabbed his hand, and we kicked out through the opening as hard as we could. Our computers beeped frantically, warning us that we were ascending too fast, so I flattened us out to a more diagonal ascent without slowing down the kicking. We swam up and away.

It was only when we reached about sixty feet—and when we hadn’t been munched on by the great white—that I had the nerve to turn around to see what was behind us.

Josh and I hovered side by side as we caught our breath. He squeezed my hand, and we watched the coral formation together. It was just at the edge of our visibility, a hazy outline against the deep blue water.

Wayo’s bubbles percolated gracefully up through the hole in the tunnel ceiling. I stared at the tunnel exit for any movement, but there was none. The ocean rocked us gently back and forth—movement that became more motherly and protective with each passing second. After five minutes, I began to breathe easier.

There was no shark. And there was no Wayo.

I
’d always thought I wanted to be famous.

Sure, I’d pretended otherwise. Whenever people swarmed Mimi on the street, hounding her for autographs or quick pictures, crowding me off the sidewalk or against the side of a building as though I didn’t exist—or worse, asking me to take the picture for them—I would scoff at the whole spectacle.

Deep down, though, surrounded as I was by the idea that fame was the ultimate goal, I envied her—as I envied Josh’s mom. I envied all the people at school who never had to introduce themselves to anyone. Fame was the be-all and end-all in part because it seemed so attainable; as the stars of Gracia’s dad’s reality shows had proved, you didn’t even need to accomplish anything in order to get it.

But when I finally had the choice, and when I forced myself to consider the repercussions of that choice, I realized one important fact: there is a difference between a famous person and a real person, and that difference is simple. Famous people do things for recognition. Real people do things for the experience.

The experience, for example, of riding the Golden Jaguar like a horse as an industrial-strength crane lifted it from the ocean floor.

I sat bareback, one hand clutching a rope around the Jaguar’s neck, the other holding the winch controller, watching the excavation area disappear below me as I rose at a safe, gradual speed. Above me, Josh waited on the trawler. Poor Josh, who hadn’t been cleared to join me below because his arm was still in a sling three weeks later.

When it came down to it, I wanted to be a real person. I wanted to be me.

Tempting though it might have been, I even turned down a fawning pitch from Gracia’s dad about what he swore was a “can’t miss” new reality show.
The Real
Adventures of Scuba Girl
, which would follow me and my new team of high school treasure hunters around the world as we searched for history’s most valuable undiscovered shipwrecks. The bulldog agent Larry Schuster, who’d salivated at the chance to represent me, couldn’t believe I’d pass on such an opportunity.

Josh was crushed at first, in spite of what the fame machine had done to his family, and he struggled to understand why I wouldn’t want the whole world to know what I’d done. Maybe it was because fame was all he was familiar with. Or maybe he wanted the cachet, now that he and I were actually “together” or “a couple” or “dating” or whatever we were calling it. Eventually, though, he came around.
Scuba Girl
would have to stay a nickname.

There would be no media event celebrating my fantastic discovery. No paparazzi waiting eagerly on the shore. Josh knew who’d found the Jaguar. My dad knew who’d found it. I knew. That was enough for me.

The credit for the find—publicly, at least—would be given to the students of the Pinedale Academy, but the full story of the Jaguar was yet to be written. Though the statue had been deposited well within American waters, claims had been put in by cultural agencies within the Mexican and Spanish governments.

I’d requested that Father Gonzales be brought in to oversee the restoration. Eventually, once the ownership claims had been settled and the statue fully restored, the Jaguar would go on tour. Starting in California, it would cross the ocean to Spain before completing the circle. Finally, the Golden Jaguar would return home to its original location in Mexico, the heart of the Aztec Empire.

Besides, who needed the credit when we had the finder’s fee? Snow would have gotten his couple hundred million on the black market, but we settled for the customary single-digit percentage. No matter which government it ended up coming from, my share would be enough to take care of the dive shop and set up a college account, with a little extra for the Marine Park Conservancy Fund. Maybe even some more of those magical dresses.

But that would all work itself out. Right now, the Jaguar and I had a few more minutes to ourselves.

At fifteen feet, I pressed the Stop button on the winch controller and typed
safety stop
on my dive computer. Seconds later, my wrist beeped. A message from Josh on the trawler:
You’re milking it.

He was right. Even if only a handful of people ever knew that I’d found the Jaguar, my life was going to be different the moment I broke the surface. It already was, at least to me. Over the past three weeks I’d stopped thinking of myself as plain old Annie Fleet. I had a new full name: Annie Fleet, the Girl Who Found the Golden Jaguar.

And now I was about to ride the Golden Jaguar as it tasted sunshine for the first time in five hundred years.

Snow was tucked safely in jail, charged with all sorts of fun stuff, including the felony kidnapping and aggravated assault of poor Mr. Alvarez on top of some additional parole violations. He wouldn’t be bothering anyone soon, and neither would Wayo.

After a furious six-hour search, the Coast Guard found him bobbing, exhausted, among the waves, over a thousand yards offshore. Wayo might have escaped the great white, but the long arm of the law was another matter, and his premeditated speargunning of my boyfriend had gotten him charged with attempted murder.

Things had been such a whirlwind, what with the permits, the salvage planning meetings with underwater archaeologists and college professors and museum curators, that I hadn’t even had the time to do half my homework, much less look through the folder I’d swiped from Wayo’s boat. All I knew so far was that the fancy Geoprene had done its job. Everything in the folder was readable, even the flash drive.

My wrist beeped again:
You still alive?

I smiled into the regulator and took another moment to enjoy the tranquility, the gentle swaying motion. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, and then I hit the winch and broke through the surface and above, swinging from the crane in the warm Pacific breeze.

The only cameras waiting for us back at the marina belonged to the people who mattered: Mimi, Gracia, Josh’s mom and Violet, the Sugars, and, of course, my parents. Mr. Alvarez was there as well, barking orders with Father Gonzales at crews of marine archaeologists from UCLA. The trawler docked at a spot closest to the street, where a nondescript moving truck idled, ready to take the Jaguar up to the father’s team of restoration experts at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“I never imagined being so proud of my daughter,” Dad said, his delighted gaze bouncing back and forth between me and the Jaguar.

“I’ll try not to let it go to my head.”

My dad hugged me and lifted me off the ground, and he didn’t let go until Mom tapped him on the shoulder.

“Bill,” she said gently, and then, louder, “Bill!”

He released me, then wandered over to the Jaguar, which had been lowered onto the ground next to the truck and was somehow even more breathtaking in person than in my imagination. The tail was bent down and no longer poised like a whip, and the gold was gouged in places, but I could make out the deep ruby eyes and the razor-sharp green teeth of its openmouthed roar.

Dad put his hand up to the midsection and touched it, tenderly at first, as though he feared a burn, but then he rested both palms flat against its body. “It’s beautiful.”

“You want us to give you a moment alone?” Gracia said.

While everyone’s attention was focused on the Jaguar, while they posed for pictures and generally freaked out about its awesomeness, Josh led me off to the side and kissed me. The treasure, the warm sun, the kiss from Josh that was somehow no longer surprising—it would have been hard to imagine my life getting better than that moment.

“We should do this more often,” Josh whispered, motioning to the Jaguar.

“I guess I could get used to it.”

He wrapped his good arm around my neck and pulled me close. “As long as you’re the one who gets shot next time.”

“Deal,” I said. “As long as you promise to save us by being the most awesome diver in the history of the world.”

“I liked you better when you were all mumbly and shy.”

I elbowed him. “No you didn’t.”

“No.” He gave me a squeeze and kissed me again. “No I didn’t.”

“Hey, you crazy kids,” Gracia called out. She ran over and grabbed each of us by the arm. “Group picture before they load this kitty up.”

I unzipped the wetsuit, ducked out of the upper body, and tied the arms around my waist, revealing the blue miracle fabric of Gracia’s bikini.

“Finally,” Mimi said.

Gracia raised her arms in praise. “Can I get an amen!”

“Amen!” Josh shouted. His mom and my parents exchanged a delightfully awkward glance.

With the Jaguar in the center, the rest of us fanned out in either direction, some touching the statue, others squatting down in front of it like in a soccer team photo. Father Gonzales held the camera and backed away until he got us all in the frame. “Everybody say ‘treasure’!”