Surface Tension (35 page)

He raised one eyebrow and swung his head back and forth a couple of times, trying to gauge the distance, to decide if what I was describing was really possible.

“Okay, let’s go over there. Tie up to your boat.”

We tied the dinghy off to the midships cleat and climbed over the bulwark. The compressor was chugging on the afterdeck, making too much noise to permit speaking. The air hose led over the side toward the bow. James stayed behind me, the gun still pointed at the small of my back. I leaned over the bulwark and pointed off the starboard bow to a spot where lots of bubbles were breaking the surface.

“He’s still down there,” I shouted over the roar of the compressor. “Right there.”

James nodded, then searched the horizon to the south, probably hoping to see the
Hard Bottom
coming out of the harbor entrance.

“One of us could go down, check it out, see what he’s doing,” I said.

He rubbed his chin, staring at the small patch of bubbles off
Gorda
’s bow.

He motioned with his head. “Rope—where do you keep it?”

“This way,” I said, and passed through the companionway into the wheelhouse. In the passageway heading to the engine room door, I saw that the toolbox was still open on the floor. James was right behind me with the gun, but I reached down and grabbed a big piece of angle iron out of the tin box. I brought the iron up under the gun and tried to carry it through right under his chin.

He was caught by surprise, and as the gun flew up, the noise exploded in the wheelhouse compartment. The starboard wheelhouse window shattered, the safety glass flying in pebble-sized bits and clattering onto the aluminum decks. The gun tumbled to the deck in the wheel- house, and when I tried to duck under his arms and push past him to get at the weapon, his hands twisted me onto my belly, pressing my face to the deck. I was unable to breathe, and he had my left arm behind me, my wrist in his hands. He stepped over me, reaching for the gun. My right hand was free and my fingers could barely touch it, so I pushed it as hard as I could. It skittered across the aluminum deck and slid out the scupper and over the side of the boat. I heard the clunk as it fell into the Whaler tied alongside.

The pressure on my wrist increased, and I waited for the bone to pop.

“I think not.” He pulled me to my feet. “I have something much more interesting in mind for you later. And I want to see your eyes when I do it.”

He used a length of half-inch nylon dock line to tie my hands to the top of
Gorda
’s wheel. When he was sure the rope was tight enough to cut off my circulation, he said, “The
Hard Bottom
will be here soon. The more you struggle,” he told me, pointing to my hands, “the more damage those ropes will do.”

As soon as he left to go back to the dinghy, I reached my foot out toward the bottom drawer under the navigation station. After several tries, I got my big toe through the latch ring that locked the drawers, and pulled. It made a loud clatter when the drawer hit the deck, but the compressor noise covered everything. Each movement seemed to draw the ropes tighter about my wrists. Pain wasn’t about to stop me, though.

I pulled the drawer closer and riffled through the junk with my toes: bolts, shackles, old teak plugs, bits of line, and down in the bottom, the stainless-steel rigging knife

Pit had given me years before. I pushed the drawer over with my foot, spilling the contents across the cabin sole, and I pulled the knife closer to me, sliding it across the aluminum deck. It took several tries before I was able to grasp the thick knife with my toes and pick it up. Leaning my butt back, I lifted my foot toward the hands tied to the locked wheel. My toes reached to within about four inches of my hands with the muscles in my back and legs stretching and straining. When I was almost there, the toes let go, and the knife clattered to the floor.

“Damn!”

Finally, on the third try, I got the knife lodged between my toes in a very firm grip. My fingers plucked it right out of my toes, and though I was losing all feeling in my hands and my fingers felt like fat sausages, I eventually pulled the knife out of the handle. The blade cut through the rope in seconds.

I saw that James had taken the Larsens’ tank but used his own mask and fins. His mesh dive bag, shirt, wallet, gun, and keys were neatly stacked in the stern. I could have sat in the dinghy and waited, but even though Neal was a former Seal, James had the element of surprise on his side, and I figured it was about even odds who would be most likely to surface alive. I wasn’t willing to wait and give either of them that element of surprise over me.

The shorts and big T-shirt I’d borrowed back at the house billowed up around me in the water even as I tried to squeeze the air out of the fabric. I wished I could take them off, but I had nothing on underneath.

The water was exceptionally clear.
Gorda
’s anchor was in the sand off the port side of the wreck, so the tug was floating just over the stern of the freighter. I could make out the superstructure of the Bahama Belle and see the bubbles rising out of her bow. The top of her mast was only about thirty feet down, but her deck level was a good fifty feet below the surface. I swam slowly toward the bow.

In only a few short months, the sea had already started reclaiming the lump of iron that had once been a working interisland freighter. Dark spots that would become the bases for soft corals were starting to grow around and on top of the pilothouse. Parrot fish, grunts, and trigger fish cruised in and out of the holes that had been blown in the aft cabin areas and around the bridge area. A lone barracuda hovered halfway to the surface, up over the bow.

I heard Neal before I saw him. It was a noise that sounded like a monstrous underwater woodpecker. He was down below the main deck level, visible through a hole that the dynamite had blown in her decks when they sank the ship. The air hose fed into the hole where a yellow dive light illuminated the whole compartment. Debris from his work floated in the water around the light, giving everything a fuzzy appearance. Using some kind of an air hammer, Neal was chipping away at the ballast cement in the anchor chain hold. As he worked, bursts of bubbles emerged from the compartment, and he tossed aside large chunks of cement.

I smiled so wide, water leaked in around the edges of my snorkel. Of course—very clever Neal. It wasn’t unusual for ships to add some cement ballast to make the ship float properly on her lines. Neal had probably chipped out the old cement while in the shipyard, stowed the money, and then cemented over it. Add the anchor chain resting on top of the cement, and who would ever know? Obviously not Customs, the cops, or Crystal and his men.

The noise of the air hammer stopped. The yellow light was momentarily covered by Neal’s body as he maneuvered himself around in the cramped space. He seemed

to be straining, trying to pull something out of the hole he was creating.

The barracuda cruised down for a closer look, attracted by the sudden movement in the water.

Down in the murky water, Neal was slowly surrounded by floating shapes. For a moment, I thought it was a school of fish swimming out the forward hold, like the blue tangs that travel in schools so thick they can cast a single dark shadow on the bottom. But these shadows moved too slowly for fish. And there were hundreds, thousands of them, waving in the current like gentle sea fans. Neal swam out and grabbed one, then another, and another. He stuffed them into his trunks. They were bills.

At that moment, I noticed a string of bubbles rising off the port side of the ship, headed toward the bow. James. His dark head appeared over the bulwark, and he paused to watch for a moment as Neal worked both hands down in the forward hold. Neal was so intent on his work, plucking the bills like fruit from the sea, that he didn’t spot James rising over the ship’s gunwale behind him.

I’d already thought Neal was dead once. I’d loved him, mourned him, and almost been killed by him, but I couldn’t sit back and watch him be murdered.

I started hyperventilating, puffing, blowing, in, out, super-oxygenating my system for a long free dive. Neither man had seen me yet. Divers often don’t look up. I sucked in air until my lungs ached, and I was so dizzy I nearly passed out. Then I dove.

They were below me, moving in slow motion, one man gliding up behind the other with a fluid, graceful movement, wrapping his arms around the other like a ballet dancer hoisting his partner into the air. James held Neal from behind, sliding his arm around Neal’s neck.

Neal’s legs splayed, his fists beating on James’s arm and head and body, but the bicep crushing his air supply held firm. James’s head was cocked to one side, and even though I could not see his face, I knew the smile that danced around his eyes.

Ely. God knew how many others. Not Neal.

The borrowed fins flapped loosely on my feet as I kicked and stroked and pulled deeper, faster. As I approached the two struggling men, I swam through the school of money, surprised at the coolness of the paper as I pushed aside the bills with each stroke. Swimming up behind James, I grabbed his air hose, braced my shoulder against his tank, and yanked with all my strength. The regulator pulled free, waving through the water like a dancing serpent, spewing silvery bubbles. His head jerked around as I kicked to distance myself from him. Neal swam off as James grabbed my leg with one hand and with the other reached around for the life-giving hose. I kicked and struggled, but his grip only tightened around my ankle. I had to get to the surface. James pulled me toward him by the leg, grabbing my knee, then my thigh, reeling me in. He clamped his arm around my waist like a metal bar the strength of his embrace so unyielding that my body went limp with fear. His fingers clamped around my throat.

Neither of us had a regulator; neither would last much longer without one.

This was where I would die, drowning, like my mother, I thought. After all these years of being so angry, angry at her, angry at myself, I now saw it differently. I felt sleepy. It would be nice to sleep for a long time. I even thought for a moment that I saw my mother, a shadowy presence swimming out of the darkness to welcome me. My body relaxed, and James let go of my throat to reach back for the regulator. Let him have it, I thought, let me sleep.

Suddenly James jerked and arched his back, squeezing my abdomen. I tried to hold on to what air I had, but bubbles trickled out of my mouth. The faceplate on my mask seemed to be shrinking, the blackness closing in. The water was growing even more murky, with inky trails of darkness, and his arm still encircled me, squeezing away my life like a giant squid. My own arm reached back, more from reflex than thought, to fight, to deliver one last blow, and my elbow hit cold steel projecting out from James’s left side.

It wasn’t ink. It was blood, and James Long was pulling me down, wouldn’t let go, and I knew for certain then I was going to die there with him in that sea of blood and money.

Out of the darkness a hand grabbed my face, pried open my mouth, and inserted a regulator. From years of dive training, I blew out the salt water before I inhaled the cold, sweet air. Neal’s eyes behind the glass of his faceplate peered into mine, checking to see if I was conscious. I stared back and blinked several times, trying to say thank you with my eyes.

Then I heard the muffled whoof, felt the concussion through the water and saw his face jerk and the light go out in those familiar blue eyes as his body convulsed from the blast of the bang stick. I screamed into the regulator as his face disappeared into the dusky crimson water.

XXIX

Whether I lost consciousness or simply went to some deep, dark place inside me, I don’t know, but eventually, I became aware that the grip around my waist had loosened. I pushed the arm aside and slid out of James’s grasp. Through the cloudy water I could make out the rest of his body, resting on the deck of the
Bahama Belle,
his arms floating upward, head slumped forward, looking more like a resting marionette than a dead man. He would not have liked this pose. Tiny silvery fish darted in, pecking at the ragged flesh on his side. Blood continued to spiral from the wound. I fought down the urge to vomit. I was still breathing off the regulator attached to the tank on his back, and now that I was loose from his grip, I had to hang on to his backpack to keep from floating to the surface.

I heard the sound of an engine and propellers through the water. Above, the shadow of a larger hull was pulling alongside the
Gorda
. It had to be the
Hard Bottom
, with Zeke and Crystal. They would surely have dive gear aboard and be ready to splash over the side at any moment. The currents were carrying off the blood in the water around me, and I could see more clearly. Neal’s body was gone—drifted off or perhaps snagged somewhere on the ship out of sight. Bills continued to waft out of the anchor hold. The water all around me was littered with money.

The early morning rays of sunlight slanted down toward the depths, toward the millions of live creatures, plankton, and single-celled animals that swam in the shafts of sun. It was so peaceful down here beneath the taut dome that separated the worlds of water and air. A part of me still didn’t want to return to the surface.

A shadow rising over the
Bahama Belle
caught my attention. At first I thought it might be Neal. Then it passed behind the bridge, and when it emerged on the other side, I recognized the thick-bodied profile of a bull shark. This one was an old fish, his body mottled, pockmarked, and scarred from battles, yet swimming effortlessly. A short, stocky shark, his form dense with pure muscle, he seemed to assert his dominance by actually passing through the bridge deck. They were nasty predators—I’d seen what a bull shark had done once to a wounded baby manatee that washed ashore on the beach off Lauderdale. Today there had been enough blood in the water to attract dozens of them. I could tell from the angle of his fins that he was agitated and excited.

I unlatched the bottle of air from James’s backpack, tucked it under my arm, and began swimming across the bottom, in the direction of the tug’s stern, slowly rising toward the surface. I hoped that what was left of James would be enough to keep the shark’s attention focused below.