Authors: John Moss

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Toronto (Ont.), #Police Procedural, #Murder, #Police, #FIC000000

Grave Doubts (37 page)

Miranda took a few breaths from Rachel’s reg, then returned it. Rachel was compliant but disinterested. Morgan offered Miranda the cutters — she had to pry open his fingers to get them. She took them and grasped the steel links between the blades. With a seesaw motion of her free hand, she worked away, stopping periodically to breathe from the octopus, feeling the blades etch into the steel of the cuffs. Morgan tried to take over but could not get a grasp. Miranda resumed cutting. Suddenly, the steel snapped. Miranda withdrew her wrist in a sudden motion.

Morgan took the cutter, took a shallow breath, and dropped down to work away at Miranda’s ankle cuff. He reached twice for air from the mouthpiece she held down to him, and in his third attempt, he gave a mighty heave and the steel broke, setting Miranda free.

Checking to be sure Rachel had a good grasp on her
mouthpiece, Miranda handed off her own mouthpiece to Morgan. Prying the cutters from his frozen fingers she began working through Rachel’s ankle cuff, taking occasional shallow breaths from Morgan, knowing her exertion was increasing consumption of their last few minutes or seconds of air. Morgan tried to help but she pushed him away. He was barely conscious, his body still depleted and wracked with pain. She would get him out of here, even if they had to leave Rachel behind.

Everything was upside down. Her heartbeat pounded in her temples; vertigo threatened with nausea, bile, blurring vision. She tried to focus on steel against steel, rocking the blades in a severing motion until suddenly there was an abrupt snap — the cutters fell apart in her hands.

Miranda swung upright and tugged the octopus mouthpiece from Rachel’s mouth. She needed the air. She needed to manoeuvre. With Morgan shining the light on Rachel’s ankle, Miranda braced against the steel wall with one leg and with the other jammed against Rachel’s leg she grasped the cuff in both hands and concentrated all her diminished strength on the cleft in the steel. There was a long moment of unspeakable pain as the steel cut into the flesh of her hands and the water clouded red with her blood. The steel snapped and Miranda careened into Alexander’s tangled embrace.

Breaking free from the hoses and limbs, she grasped upward, found her dangling regulator, drew a single breath as she ascended, and put the mouthpiece back into Rachel’s mouth. Morgan handed her his. She drew in deeply; there was a rattle and smack as her cheeks collapsed into themselves. Their air supply had expired.

Morgan slid down against the wall as if he were going to take a rest. Miranda pushed against him then swam through the door and drew him abruptly behind her. In the corridor,
she turned and, grasping him by the hair, she shook his head violently. He rocked briefly askew, then, righting himself, motioned her to go first. Miranda pushed him past her and reached back for Rachel, drawing her forward. Morgan had dropped his flashlight and she lost hers in the tumble after Rachel’s manacle gave way. Rachel had retrieved hers from where she had dropped it — her first wilful act in the last quarter hour — and while its beam flashed erratically as she swam it gave them enough light until they entered the dim aura emanating from the hole through the hull. Prodding Morgan from behind and hauling Rachel after her, Miranda engineered their slow progress through the last of the darkness out into the open.

Morgan drifted free from the hull. Miranda grasped the rough steel edge and tried to pull Rachel through. Rachel twisted to the side and Miranda lost her. Miranda could feel her lungs imploding, her heart thudding frantically. She turned to retrieve her grip on Rachel, but Rachel kicked away and slowly receded into the darkness. For an instant Miranda thought of going after. Morgan was drifting in a stupor toward the rocky bottom, gazing back at her with a vacant stare through his mask, which was filled almost to eye level with water. She turned again and peered into the ship’s gaping interior. She saw Rachel move against a shimmer of light and then disappear.

Miranda swooped down to Morgan with a single kick. She still had a tiny reserve of oxygen in her system. She placed her lips over his, prodded between them with her tongue as she had done for Rachel, and expelled a few precious gulps of air into his mouth. He took in the air but did not respond, and settled like a dead weight to the bottom. Miranda shook him and released. If she did not start now, she would never make it to the surface. Instinctively, she kicked away, but
then arced around on herself and grasped Morgan under the arms, trying to pull him away from the bottom. As she hauled Morgan roughly against her breast, she could feel the abrasive material of her BCD scraping the back of the hand that was still bare. She squeezed the BCD against her body, responding to its thickness. She had taken in a few extra bursts of air to compensate for the increased weight when Morgan had given her his tank. Reaching along the inflator hose, she grasped the valve with aching fingers and thrust it awkwardly between distended lips, pressing the deflate button. A rush of air surged into her mouth. She took a deep breath. It tasted foul but sent brilliant lights dazzling in front of her eyes as freshened blood coursed through her body.

She thrust the valve between Morgan’s bruised lips and pressed the deflator button again. Nothing. She squeezed the BCD material against her body and watched air stream from his gaping mouth, then his lips closed and she could see him struggle to breathe. She shifted within the constraints of her vest to free up her weight belt and let it drop among the rocks, giving herself a little more air. She took the deflator valve, drew a trickle of air deep into her lungs, then passed it back, and pressed the button. A brief burst trickled from the sides of his mouth, then nothing was left.

Without weights, they were beginning to drift across the bottom. She drew Morgan to her breast and emptied her lungs into his mouth. Turning him to face away from her, she grasped him under one armpit, pushed with a surge against the rocks, and began to swim toward the two boats overhead, kicking with all her strength and pulling against the frigid water with her free arm while Morgan, when he remembered where they were, fluttered his fins, trying to help as he passed in and out of consciousness.

As she concentrated on keeping Morgan in her grip,
focused on their upward ascent, Miranda felt lethal waves of euphoria sweep through her. She forced herself to think. Rachel was dead. She knew they would find her body with Alexander, their bodies entwined in a miserable reprise of the eternal embrace — one final dramatic tableau of inspired depravity. It would be the fulfillment of Rachel’s desire, although with the wrong partner. Rachel wanted to share death with Miranda and be free at last of her demon lovers. Miranda was sure of that. Nothing was certain. Nothing was sometimes enough.

I hope we live, she thought. He’ll owe me,

The shimmering surface spread above them like an enveloping shroud. Blood pounded inside Miranda’s head with deafening urgency — suddenly drowned out by an unmistakable roaring. Instinctively, she cringed downward as the hull of another boat slid to an abrupt halt immediately overhead. With a last surge of energy, she pulled Morgan off to the side, then reached desperately upward toward the dive platform. A hand grasped her wrist.

Peter Singh and two OPP officers in full scuba gear dragged both of them onto the trawler deck.

“Miranda,” Peter exclaimed in a tremulous voice. “You are rescued. You can release Morgan now.” He tried to pull her hand away but she would not relinquish her grip. When he pried her fingers free so the OPP medic could look after him, she rolled on her side and grasped a handful of his hair.

“Miranda,” said Peter Singh. “It is all right now, you are rescued. Please release Detective Morgan.” He made an incomprehensible gesture of flinging his open palms into the air.

She tightened her grip.

“Damn it, Miranda,” Morgan gasped in a faraway voice. “That hurts like hell.”

She rolled closer so their faces almost touched. Their noses were running with mucus and blood, their eyes were raw, their lips bruised. Her hands were weeping blood from where the steel had cut into her palms; Morgan’s hands bled from being sliced when he grabbed at the cutters. She smiled. Stigmata. Morgan understood; he struggled to keep her in focus, his ears throbbed. He smiled back.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Told you we’d dive together.” He couldn’t hear his own words over the roar of his blood beating against the inside of his skull.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks, buddy.” His smile broadened into an awkward grin.

“You too. Buddy.”

He closed his eyes.

Miranda watched as he drifted into pain-free unconsciousness. His smile faded and his face relaxed as he seemed to turn into a little boy.

She opened her own eyes wide, brown and green and golden in the slanting sunlight, which seemed to wash the rawness and the red away, then shut them and held them closed as she picked out the familiar sounds of her partner’s breathing against the din of rescue activities all around them.