Because of the watch, Tomlinson was able to mark to the second when it happened. They had been using the tank sparingly, but this time when he placed the regulator in his mouth and attempted to inhale he got nothing. There wasn’t enough pressure inside the thing to open the demand lever in his mouthpiece.
Beside him, he felt Will’s body jolt—the boy had attempted to grab a breath from the primary hose and his regulator had gone dead at the same instant.
It was almost sunset, 5:45 p.m.
They were out of air.
EIGHTEEN
ONE HOUR AFTER SUNSET, AT 7:12 P.M., KING SAID TO
me, “Well, Jock-o, the ball’s in your corner now. Come back with a big fat sack of coins and we’ll say
adios
to you and Grandpa and be on our merry way. But if it turns out you’ve been lying”—King laughed as if he was sure I
had
been lying—“you can’t blame us for being seriously pissed off. Understand what I’m saying?”
He hurled a net bag at me. They had cut me loose, and because the truck was running, lights on, I was able to duck before the bag hit me in the face.
I had resumed the tactic of ignoring King, and was speaking only to Perry. As I Velcroed a spare bottle to a harness, then added a clip-on weight, I said to him, “You can push all you want, but I still need someone in the water to help me with the jet dredge.”
Perry replied, “That’s something we’ll have to talk about.” Sending a private signal to me, possibly. Since King would be the one going in the water, maybe he didn’t want to discuss it in front of his partner. I took it as a good sign.
“When?” I asked.
“Later. But I want some proof this time.”
I said, “Okay—but keep him away from that dredge until I need him. Keep him away from all my gear, in fact.”
King claimed he had repaired the hose. He hadn’t, of course, so I had made the dredge marginally workable by screwing a radiator clamp tight at the end of the hose to constrict water flow. It would cut through sand, but it wouldn’t move rock.
Perry was irritable and tired of making decisions. “You don’t say much, but, when you do, it’s always trouble.”
I told him, “Blame your partner, not me.”
King snapped, “I didn’t break that hose and you know it. Stop blaming other people for your own screwups. That’s a sign of immaturity, Jock-o.”
The man was maddening. I let him see that I wasn’t listening, but he continued to talk, anyway.
“How about this? How about you do what we tell you to do and keep your mouth shut? What’s so hard about that? I think you’ve been around ol’ Perry long enough to know he’s got quite a temper on him when things don’t go our way. Dredge or no dredge, you’d better come back with more coins, Jock-o. If you don’t, Grandpa will end up with a knife in his ribs—and you’re next on the menu.”
I was sitting at the edge of the lake doing a final check of my gear. Everything had to be as solid as I could make it for this dive and I didn’t have much to work with. There were only two tanks of air left, counting the bottle I would use, and one extra regulator. An important additional piece of equipment was a fishing reel I had found in the back of Arlis’s truck. It was an old Penn grouper reel, loaded with a couple hundred yards of monofilament that would be useful if I needed to put down a lay line. Old fishing line was a poor substitute for a thousand yards of nylon cord on a Jasper reel, but it would have to do.
The two cons didn’t know it, of course, but I wasn’t going into the lake to fetch coins. I was going down into that damn drainpipe-sized cave again to search for Tomlinson and Will.
I hadn’t imagined hearing Tomlinson’s shrill whistle. Maybe the boy was still alive, too. They had somehow managed to find an air bell or a breathing space above the water table. It had to be one of the two, and now they were trapped beneath the limestone awaiting rescue.
I went over and over it in my mind, arguing the likelihood. In all my reading, I could remember only a few rare mentions of air bells. Those were in caves formed during the Pleistocene before the water table fell and then rose again—but I had never heard of an air bell in Florida. Limestone was too porous to maintain the watertight seal an air pocket requires, but it was
possible.
More likely, though, they had dug their way close enough to the surface to breathe through a hole or some type of vent yet were unable to break free for some reason.
A disturbing fact nagged at me, though. The whistling sound hadn’t come from beneath the lake. It had seemed to originate in the swamp far beyond the shoreline. But sound plays tricks when filtered through water or when reverberating through limestone. It was also possible that Tomlinson and the kid had followed a karst vein beyond the perimeter of the lake. Even so, I would have to start where they had started—underwater, in that damn tunnel.
It wouldn’t have been an easy operation even with a chopper standing by and a fully manned rescue team. Alone, the difficulties were too many to list. Finding Will and Tomlinson wouldn’t be easy, but, if I did, that’s when the real work would begin. With only one extra tank and regulator, we would have to somehow buddy-breathe through the tunnel, then back to the surface. I couldn’t picture how that was possible in a conduit so narrow, but if I found them we would have to manage.
All I knew for certain was that they were alive and I had to hurry. A true air bell—a pocket of air trapped in a rock chamber beneath the water’s surface—would keep them alive for only a short amount of time. Because of that, it was pointless to dwell on the obstacles. I had an objective. I would move toward it. Sometimes, circumstances demand that you step off the high board and deal with water issues while en route to your destination. Sometimes, difficulties that can’t be controlled become tolerable only when viewed as assets.
Looking at it that way, I had a lot going for me.
I was alone—it meant I didn’t have a partner to worry about. The fact that there was a single spare tank meant that I didn’t have to lug a lot of extra equipment. The tunnel was claustrophobic, it was potentially deadly, but if Will and Tomlinson had made it then chances were good that I could find my way through the maze, too.
King and Perry? I told myself that they were additional motivation. I was tired, my nerves were raw and I was scared—but not of the animal we’d heard banging around in the brush. I was afraid that if I failed underwater, I’d miss the opportunity to deal with King and Perry one-on-one when I returned to the surface.
With that kind of motivation, failure wasn’t an option.
As I stood to collect the last of my gear, Perry asked me, “What do you think that hissing noise was? Seriously.” He was pacing between the truck and the shoreline, the rifle cradled beneath his arm as if he were hunting pheasants. The man’s eyes never stopped moving, and he rammed the words together, talking faster than he had an hour earlier. If he was using drugs, I guessed it was some type of amphetamine. I also guessed that he had amped up recently.
I said, “What’s it matter? You’ve got a gun, and you can always hide in the truck.”
The man nodded, oblivious to the veiled slight.
I knelt to secure the octopus hose on the spare regulator. As I did, King moved close enough to grab my night vision mask, then backed away a safe distance before inspecting it. “How do you turn this gizmo on?”
“Put it down,” I snapped.
He had the mask pressed against his face as he felt around for the switch. “This is a pretty fancy piece of equipment for a nerd like you to be carrying. How much this thing set you back?”
I was walking toward King, intending to take it away from him, when he found the monocular’s switch. After a pause, he said, “Goddamn, Perry, you gotta take a look through this thing! It’s like daylight, all of a sudden . . . And you can see about ten times as many stars!”
The man began turning in a circle, looking at the sky, then he stopped and aimed the monocular into the shadows of the swamp. After a moment, he said, “Holy shit! There’s something out there!” He paused. “What the hell are
those
things?”
I stared into the darkness as Perry said, “What do you see? Is it that animal we heard? Damn it, let me look, it’s my turn!”
They sounded like two kids squabbling over a toy.
In my bag, I had a palm-sized flashlight, an ASP Triad, ultrabright. I switched it on, then listened to King complain, “Dumb-ass, now you scared them!,” as Perry whispered, “Jesus Christ, I see them. There must be three or four. What are they?”
Across the lake, staring back at me, were three sets of orange eyes bright as coals. I thought they were small crocodiles at first. As I watched, the animals turned and crashed through the brush toward the swamp. They were reptilian, low to the ground, like crocs, but their movements were snakelike. All three possessed a dense, four-legged musculature, yet they moved over the ground as if swimming on their bellies. As they ran, they held their heads erect like cobras.
In an amphetamine rush, Perry said to me, “They’re too small to make that crashing sound we heard. Don’t you think? Unless, maybe, they were all running around together. Hey—
Ford
! What do you think they are? Like, little alligators or something?”
With the flashlight, I tracked the animals into the brush before I switched it off. “I think they’re Nile monitor lizards,” I told him. “They’re all about the same size, four or five feet long—so they’re probably from the same hatch.”
“Hatch?”
I said, “Monitors lay eggs.”
King said, “You
think
they’re monitor lizards? What the hell’s that mean?”
I stared at him without answering as Perry said, “
Monitor lizards?
I never even heard of ’em.”
I replied, “Pet-store people started importing monitors from Africa fifteen or twenty years ago and they sold a lot of them cheap. Some escaped, they bred, now they’re all over Florida. In some counties, there’s a bounty on them.”
“No shit! So they’re dangerous? If they pay a bounty, they’ve gotta be dangerous. Maybe there’s a bigger one around. Do they hiss?”
No doubt about it, Perry was speeding his brains out and his tongue had to work fast to keep up. I told him, “They kill small dogs, they eat bird’s eggs. They eat rodents, too—so you better stay on your toes.”
Perry said, “Rodents, huh?” Then he said, “
Hey!
What’s that supposed to mean?”
King was laughing. I didn’t reply.
“Fucking pet stores,” Perry muttered, sounding nervous. “You gotta be shitting me. Are they poisonous? Like snakes? They remind me of snakes, the way they move.”
I wasn’t in the mood to engage in conversation with Perry. I was still staring at King. “Turn off the monocular and give me my dive mask. I’m not going to ask again.”
King said, “Or you’ll do what?” He was still laughing as he pretended to use the monocular to focus on me. “You got a gun or knife hidden somewhere? You’re all talk, Jock-a-mo. If I don’t give you the mask, you’ll do what?”
“Quit screwing around!” Perry yelled. “I’m tired of your shit! Give him his goddamn mask!”
I had taken two steps toward King when he held out a palm, stopping me, then said, “Sure, Jock-o, you can have your mask. Here.” He lobbed it high over my head.
I could hear him laughing as I hurried to retrieve the mask from the lake before it sank.
For more than an hour,
Arlis Futch had not spoken a word, but now he called from the shadows, “Ford! You watch yourself when you go into that lake. You hear me?”
I was in knee-deep water, wearing my BC, bottle strapped on, my night vision mask tilted up on my forehead and my hands full of spare gear. There was something unusual about the old man’s voice, a quality that was menacing, serious and real. It caused even Perry, who had been jabbering nonstop, to go silent.
I called back, “How’re you feeling, Arlis?”
He coughed—returning to his role as a sick old man, maybe—and said, “Those scum ought to at least let you carry a knife. You got your knife?”
No, Perry had my knife. It was still stuck in his belt. I couldn’t tell if Arlis was actually warning me about something dangerous in the water or if it was a ploy designed to rearm me.
King hollered at him, “Shut up and mind your own business, Gramps. What you’d better be worried about is your boyfriend coming back with more of those Cuban pesos.”
I called to Arlis, “I’ll be fine, don’t worry,” before saying to Perry, “We have a deal, right?” Intentionally, I said it loud enough for King to hear.
King said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
What it meant was that he had left Perry and me alone long enough to discuss the jet dredge. I had asked Perry what it would take to convince him that they stood to profit by helping me. More coins is what Perry wanted. Give him proof, he had told me, and he would force King back into the water to handle the hose.
Playing it off, Perry said to me, “Sure, sure, whatever you say. Just do your part.”
As I backed into the water, my fins feeling for balance on the slick rocks, I heard King asking, “What’s he talking about? What deal? Did you two cook up something behind my back?”
I rinsed my mask, fitted it onto my face and flipped the switch on the night vision monocular, the lens of which was hinged tightly against the faceplate.
“Give me ten minutes,” I said, looking at Perry. “I’ll keep my part of the bargain.”
That really galled King. He was still interrogating Perry as I lay back, allowing the buoyancy of water to float me, and began to kick toward the middle of the lake.
I was carrying one oversized LED spotlight and two smaller lights clipped to my BC, but I didn’t need them to see now. My right eye is dominant, but I preferred to wear the night vision monocular over my left. When I closed my right, it was like looking through a magic green tube. The night bloomed bright with details. I could see Arlis sitting up, watching me from the distance. The cypress trees above him were isolated and set apart from the starry skyline, their leaves iridescent and waxy.