Night Diver: A Novel (23 page)

Larry absorbed that, put his hat in place with a tug, and followed Holden down to the dive locker. Kate’s boat was already little more than a white wake pointing toward the shadow that was St. Vincent.

As Holden unzipped the duffel, Larry watched with open interest.

“You expected to dive,” he said finally.

“A camera only tells you what passes within the field of the lens. In case more is needed, I always carry the minimum of dive equipment with me.”

“Makes sense,” Larry said. “As long as you’re not a pro basketball player or a sumo wrestler, dive suits with a reasonable fit aren’t that hard to come by, and water pressure can smooth out a lot of bumps. But a personally fitted mask like yours takes time—and a hell of a lot of money—to replace. Nothing like being able to breathe and talk to the surface at the same time. Righteous dive computer, by the way. I’m hoping to buy that model.”

“It’s a nice piece of kit,” Holden agreed.

He headed for the dive storage room, Larry on his heels. Holden had already decided which suit he would wear if he had to dive. He opened a locker and pulled out a Pinnacle full-body suit that was just about his size. Like nearly everything else on the
Golden Bough,
the suit had survived a good bit of wear in its time. Still sound, though, which was all that mattered.

“I was going to recommend that one,” Larry said. “Thick enough to keep you warm but not so thick you’re too buoyant. You really do know your business.”

Left unsaid was that anyone with money could buy expensive dive accessories and still not know enough to be a decent dive partner.

They took the gear and the cylinders out to the stern to dress. Dive gear was wonderful in the water, and clownishly clumsy out of it. When Holden was fully suited, Larry checked him out. Holden returned the courtesy, right down to two taps on the dive cylinder. They began breathing canned air as they did the awkward shuffle required by fins on a solid surface. Going feetfirst into the water was a relief.

While Larry talked with his grandfather over the com about the siphon’s placement, Holden finned slowly, keeping just beneath the surface. This part of the water column was bright. The sensation of freedom from gravity was as heady as the beauty of the surface bending light into flowing patterns across his arms.

Years of dive training took over, regulating Holden’s breathing. In the first instants below water, the reptilian brain said
hold your breath hold your breath hold your breath.
But that only led to patterns of oxygen conservation followed by hyperventilation, followed by increasing anxiety, followed by conservation—a brutal feedback loop all divers learned to short-circuit. If they didn’t learn, they didn’t dive again.

When Larry finned slowly past him, headed down for the wreck, Holden bent at the waist, put his fins where his head had been, and followed. Getting down to the bottom was the easy part, the compression stops short. Going up, decompression, was another animal entirely, with boredom enforced by stabbing pain for the impatient. Or in Holden’s case, pain no matter how patient he was.

Silvery light gave way to a twilight world as the water filtered out all but the color blue. Everything became a thousand nameless variations on the theme of blue. It added to the feeling of growing chill as the water went from warm to cool to cold. The dark line of the siphon hose swayed all the way back to the blinding silver of the surface, a long, thick line showing the way back to the ship. Between that and the weighted dive line that went from a buoy to the bottom, with fixed markers for decompression stops, a diver would have to be drunk to miss the home ship.

Quite different from a lot of dives Holden had made, where stealth was the first safety rule.

Like the water itself, Holden went down in easy stages, stopping at prescribed depths to compress. The sea was clear, a welcome change from the dives that had taken him through algae soup to search blindly for active mines. Today he could see far enough down to recognize some of the topography from the map. The white plastic pipe of the grid that divided sections of the wreck was the color of bones. The spreading ribs of the ship were darker shadows.

With the ease of long practice, his brain blended the static, one-dimensional maps rendered by photography and cartography into the living, tridimensional landscape of the undersea world. When the blending was complete in his mind he would be ready to find his way around the wreck without needing to come up for an overview.

Even after Holden was certain he was oriented, he stayed for a few minutes more, suspended in the water, studying the wreck and enjoying the luxury of clear water. As he finned toward his designated work area, he ignored the piercing ache in his thigh and wondered if anyone had spotted Benchley lately.

Not that it mattered. If a large tiger shark decided you were food, it would try very hard to eat you. Bad luck happened, but a diver was in more danger from his own mistakes than from any shadow lurking where blue shelved off steeply into water so deep it looked black.

He found his designated grid and went to work. For all the hours a diver spent in the water, only a few included actually working the wreck. The dive computer was a relentless machine, recording elapsed minutes and water pressure and computing how much time the diver would require to decompress.

The ascent will be a right bitch,
Holden thought, looking up to the quicksilver shimmer of the surface.
So few feet. Such a long time.

And his thigh would make him pay for every centimeter.

He accepted it as he had accepted the other factors limiting his dive capability. His body had closed off the last bits of the thigh injury with a cyst, but the interior of that cyst was still subject to the same laws of physics as the rest of him, just more slowly. Until the exterior and interior pressures equalized inside the cyst there was pain. Period.

A silver swirl of fish flashed in the sunlight far above, gathering around the thick siphon hose. Then Holden focused on the blue world around him instead of on his thigh. The bumpy, always-changing coral growths gave way to the geometric grid. He settled in to work very carefully, slowly, creating currents by hand that lifted the sand away and reaching with equal deliberation for anything of interest beneath the sand.

Whether intended or not, every motion he made created a temporary swirl of current. So instead of touching interesting bits he spotted, he touched the water around them. Every motion had to be deliberately planned and executed with careful restraint. The simple act of closing a hand around a piece of debris became a carefully synchronized ballet. A good diver didn’t rush anything.

Hours of the careful dance yielded what appeared to be a handful of grapeshot, a hunk of iron so rusted he couldn’t guess at its original function, random bits of waterlogged wood, half of a teacup, and a mangled circle that could have been a gold ring. From what he could hear over his radio, the siphon wasn’t coming up with much of value, either.

If this is a good part of the wreck,
Holden thought,
I’d hate to work a bad part.

Yet that could change in the next second, the next thin layer of sand lifting to reveal a cache of gold or gems or coins. Treasure salvage was like gambling, and like gambling it could be addictive.

Holden’s dive computer told him it was time to head up. Depending on how closely Larry shaved safety margins, he should be heading up too.

I’m staying within my margins,
Holden thought. It was stupid not to.

He signaled Larry, received a curt “Five minutes,” and began to fin slowly up the dive line. At the first decompression stop marked on the line, he checked with his own dive computer and waited with a diver’s patience for the signal to continue. By the time he reached the second stop, his past experience with his injured thigh was confirmed.

Decompression was a right bitch.

When he finally surfaced and got unsuited, the first thing he discovered was that Kate was still ashore.

Trolling dive bars.

Alone.

A
S HOURS WENT
by and Kate visited dive hangout after dive bar after dive café, including a strip club, she began to admit that she was wasting her time. The later the afternoon, the more divers filtered in from various jobs, and the more they drank. The last bar had been peppered with drunks who were way too proud of and anxious to demonstrate body parts she had zero interest in hearing about, much less seeing. Bartenders and bouncers had become her new best friends.

No one had seen Mingo recently.

No one wanted to dive for Moon Rose Limited.

Everyone had heard bad things about the
Golden Bough.

Kate looked at the circles she had drawn on the map. Most had been crossed out. She glanced around an area that probably looked a lot better at night and decided she would try one more place before she went to the cottage and washed the smell of smoke out of her hair and clothes; the enduring mystery of divers was how many of them smoked.

She looked around carefully, choosing where to go. There were always more bars to check, but once the sun went down, a woman alone in some of those bars would be assumed to be looking for more than alcohol. In the end, she selected a bar that was on the wrong side of the line between seedy and disreputable. But it was the closest bar on the map and daylight was wasting.

The sign above the place said
MCNAMARA’S TAVERN
and was decorated with a weathered painting of a red-haired, bushy-bearded, and thoroughly dissolute mariner, head tilted back in laughter. The wind had increased to the point that it rocked the sign on its chains, making it shimmy and swing, lending an air of drunken revelry to what was otherwise an outright shabby, no-tourists-wanted divers’ dive.

I’ll bet Grandpa used to drink in places like this. Probably still does when he’s ashore. Larry, too.

Not that either had helped her to compile her list of dive hangouts. She had done that the hard way, one bartender or waitress at a time, asking after Mingo and divers looking for work, and settling for the names of other dive hangouts.

A man who looked like he had posed for the McNamara’s sign in his youth—and had been a friend of henna ever since—stood at the till, waiting for something to happen.

Must be the infamous McNamara,
she decided.

Since he looked about as friendly as razor wire, she glanced toward the bar. Another man, younger and much fitter, was tending bar. His mixed heritage resulted in cinnamon skin and wildly curly, red-streaked brown hair. He smiled and chatted up patrons, poured refills, and nixed a request from a man who was wobbling on the bar stool.

“Slow down, Javier,” he said easily, pouring tonic with lime for the man, no gin. “If your lover come back to you tonight, you have nothing left.” A wink and a sympathetic smile. “Man want to be ready for his lover, yes?”

Javier drank the tonic down in a few gulps, frowned, but didn’t object when more tonic came as a refill, also without gin.

Kate gave the people in the bar a discreet once-over. As she had expected, the men defied racial and political boundaries, mixing with the camaraderie of alcohol and shared experiences underwater. Gradually she realized that this bar had a different vibe. Not bad, just different. It smelled like gin and pulsed with Lady Gaga.

And more than one man looked surprised to see Kate.

It’s a gay hangout,
she realized.
Thank God. I don’t need to worry about drunks hitting on me.

She made her way over to the long bar, hoping the smiling young man with the mop of hair wouldn’t mind answering a question or three, especially if she put some currency on the bar while she talked.

The bartender did a double take and gave Kate a slow smile that had her rethinking her conclusion about the patrons of the tavern. Or at least this man.

“Are you lost, pretty lady?” he asked.

He watched her with appreciation and a silent promise of restraint that made her feel like an exotic butterfly that had landed on a tiger’s paw.

“Not yet,” she said. “I’m looking for a diver called Mingo. Has he been in here recently?”

The bartender shook his head. “We been expecting him, but . . .” A shrug said Mingo hadn’t come yet.

“How about the men in here now? Are they divers?”

His grin widened. “Nothing but. McNamara’s is best dive bar on the whole damn island. Most tourists take one look and leave.”

“I’m not a tourist,” she said, returning his easy smile. “Anybody looking for salvage work?”

The bartender hollered out, “Any of you looking for salvage work?”

“Which ship?” called a man from the back table.

“The
Golden Bough,
” Kate called back.

A murmur went through the room and the patrons went back to their drinks and gossip. The refusal was as clear as it was final.

“Sorry, miss,” the bartender said.

“So am I. I can’t even find where those rumors came from.”

The fact that the bartender didn’t ask which rumors told Kate it was as bad as she’d feared.