The Miko - 02 (39 page)

So Bristol put into effect a plan he had hoped never to use. He loved to fish, he loved being on the water. But being
in
it, far out at sea, was something else again.

Still, he had rented the scuba equipment, had himself checked out by a pimply boy of no more than eighteen, the shop’s pro. He was a mite rusty—it had been some five years since he’d learned his diving—but the basics one never forgot, and after two hours of intensive work in the pink-tiled swimming pool of the beachfront hotel down the street from the shop, the pimply boy tapped him on the shoulder and gave him the thumbs-up signal.

Now Bristol had taken his gear onto his boat, which lay rocking in the oily swells dockside. He double-checked all his gear as he had been trained to do and was bent over fiddling with the regulator when he spied Alix out of the corner of his eye coming down the dock with the Red Monster just behind her.

Bristol’s heart beat faster as he saw her turn in toward her small boat. No pleasure cruise this afternoon with the same round of vacuous friends. It was just her and Red.

The Red Monster freed the aft and bow lines and stepped quickly into the rocking boat, his topsiders squeaking. Alix already had the engine throttled, blue haze of fumes rising from the bubbling aft pipe. She turned the wheel over hard, and they began to glide out of the harbor.

Bristol, his pulse still racing, waited patiently before firing his own engine. He tugged at the bill of his beaten-up cap and headed out after them, squinted his eyes against the fierce glare of sunlight dancing off the water. With his free hand he strung up a pair of dark glasses, wrapping the curled ends of the wire temples around his ears.

This plan was far simpler than his first one but it was also far more terrifying to him. It had taken him six months to work up the courage to take his first scuba lessons and finally only direct orders from above had set him in motion. He was a brave man in most respects. But not this.

His hands shook so much that he dropped the speargun twice after he had unwrapped it from its concealing cocoon. This was not an item he had rented. In fact, he had made a point of telling the salesman at the scuba shop that he had an abhorrence of such things when the man had asked if there was any other item he wanted to rent.

Bristol had bought the speargun in a shop in Boca Chica early one morning while Alix Logan still tossed in her bed. He paid cash, dressed in a ridiculous seersucker suit with an old-fashioned straw hat atop his head and a pair of dimestore glasses with mirror lenses masking his face nicely, blending right in with the bushy mustache he had glued on for the occasion.

On his way back south he had his pick of three chemical plants, most engaged in retrieving nitrates from guano, and choosing one, he broke in easily and took what he needed. He spent the rest of the day on his boat in distant view of the long pleasure craft Alix had chosen to climb aboard that day, working out the rest of his plan.

And now that it was time to implement it, he was as nervous as a rookie on his first day in the business. It didn’t look good, and with the bulk of the tanks settled between his shoulder blades, he paused, feet planted and spread on the rolling deck, trying to slow his breathing and calm his racing pulse.

But all the time his gaze ran away with him, slipping like an uncontrollable kid over the side, drinking in the long, deep swells and the infinite depth through which he would soon have to navigate. He put his hands out in front of him, saw the tremor there, and said, “The hell with it!” out loud as if he were blowing carbon dioxide from his system. He bent and retrieved the speargun, carefully examining the wickedly barbed flechette at its tip.

He stuck two sticks of shark repellent into his weighted belt, double-checked his wrist compass, working out the realignment of vectors now that Alix’s small boat had drifted a bit. He’d have to remember that and not rely solely on the compass.

He went to the railing of his boat and slipped on his powerful fiberglass fins. Then, bringing his regulator over his head and up to his mouth, he made certain the line was absolutely clear. Mentally he ticked off the list of items the pimply kid had gone over with him, partly for safety and partly to keep his mind occupied and off the abyss already lapping at his ankles.

He reached for his mask, washed it with sea water, and then spat heavily into it, smearing the liquid around so that the mask would not cloud up. Fitting it over his face, grabbing the faceplate, his mind a frozen blank, he slid over the side.

The coolness of the sea engulfed him. Even through the protection of the blue rubber scuba suit he could feel the suck of the cold, rising from the ocean’s depths like a physical creature.

Steady, schmuck, he told himself. The last thing you need now is for your imagination to run away with you. You’re safe and warm in your booties and mommie’s coming soon to tuck you in.

Bristol hung in the blue-green depths, going nowhere until he had settled his breathing and had gotten used again to the peculiar form of breathing one was obliged to use underwater.

Strands of sunlight filtered obliquely down from above, giving him the odd sensation of being in a cathedral, and he thought of the old days in Hell’s Kitchen before his father had been slaughtered in the filth and darkness of a neighborhood alleyway.

Then he made the mistake of looking down where the bands of light faded out and could not penetrate, blacker than anything he had ever seen and he realized what was below him, down, down, down.

Convulsively, he made himself look at his compass and orienting himself, he set off in the direction of Alix Logan’s boat. He swam slowly, almost lazily, but that appearance was deceiving for his enormous fins propelled him through the water in great long kicks. He was in excellent shape and he had no trouble, even with the tidal surge that could potentially become a diver’s worst enemy, creating a nausea so strong it could turn even the strongest diver into a mewling baby.

A third of the way there he forced himself toward the surface in order to take a visual fix. He did it in less than three seconds, up and down again into the depths. Checking his compass again, he saw that he was six or seven degrees off and adjusted his course. He plowed on, using the half-leg kick the pimply kid had told him was more economical and less taxing over a long haul than the one he had been originally taught.

He had just come down from his second visual and had again corrected his course slightly when his peripheral vision picked up the shadow almost directly below him. Immediately he ceased his kicking and hung motionless in the water. If it was a shark he did not want its acute vibrational sense picking him up.

But now ahead of him he could dimly make out the bulk of the underside of Alix’s boat and below that the taut fishing line. In reality he could not actually see the line but he was certain it was there. The Red Monster had caught a big one. And that was what Bristol saw.

The fish was hooked solidly, its body whipsawing back and forth. And that was the reason for the shadow cruising below him.

Silently, Bristol cursed the Red Monster. But now, as he glanced back downward, he saw how close the shark was to him. He was no expert but he knew a basking shark from a blue, a nurse from a tiger.

This one was about twelve feet long and, from its marking, was surely a tiger shark, one of the flesh eaters. It was there now because it could sense the blood drooling from the fish fighting the line more than a hundred yards away.

Bristol watched the spotted light play along the rough prehistoric hide of the creature as it wound its way upward. He could not tell whether the thing had sensed him or not but he did his best to parallel its course, keeping on top of it. At a certain point that would have to end and then he would have to see what the shark did.

The tiger rose lazily, almost indifferently, moving so slowly Bristol could make out the score lines crisscrossing its flank. Then, abruptly, it veered to port, launching itself through the green void like a missile. It turned, and now Bristol had no doubt. It had seen him.

His heart pounding painfully in his chest, he willed his body to be still. He hung, suspended, watching the tiny green plankton drift by him in oblique sheets. A strand of seaweed.

Food’s in the other direction, asshole. He spoke silently to the primitive creature. You don’t want any part of me. I’ll just bash your pea brain back into your spine.

The tiger was now turned so that it was head on to him and they faced each other like a pair of gladiators in a vast, surging arena filled with awful silence. The lens of the sea turned it monstrously large.

Against all logic, it moved toward him. Not swiftly as it had when it had sensed him, but cautiously. After all, this was not a creature in distress, its senses informed it. Yet there was distress and blood in the immediate vicinity and the shark wanted to feed unmolested.

Though Bristol was carrying two sticks of shark repellent he had little faith in the chemicals. Still, he inched his right hand down toward his belt. Fleetingly he thought of the speargun but quickly rejected that course of action. He had seen too many shots of sharks with spears through their brains still alive and attacking and he wanted no part of that. He only had one spear.

The tiger was very close now and Bristol could see the wicked sickle-shaped mouth below the wide apart pig eyes. Pink plankton clung to its bottle-shaped snout and three ramoras, two above and one below, mimicked its every twist and turn.

It was still coming on and Bristol gripped one of the sticks with a gloved hand and gently drew it out. He was sweating. Christ, he thought, this bastard’s gonna come all the way in.

Bristol rode with the tidal surge four fathoms down and gripped the stick with a viselike grip. Come on, old buddy, he whispered inside his head. Have I got a surprise for you.

The tiger’s ugly snout nosed in and Bristol abruptly came to life, lifting the stick and slamming it as hard as he could against the shark’s snout.

The creature bucked hard, almost standing vertically on its tail. Then it twisted so quickly it left two of the ramoras temporarily behind and fled into the green depths with a great double wave of its long powerful tail.

For a time, Bristol just hung as he had, feeling the cold sweat drying on his skin beneath his rubber cocoon. Then, replacing the shark repellent in his belt, he got a fix on the boat and moved off toward it.

Twenty-four feet above where Bristol swam and perhaps seventy-five yards distant, Jack Kenneally was having the devil’s own time landing his catch. The Red Monster was no professional fisherman but he originally came from Florida and he had done a lot of deep-sea stuff as a teenager. Now his job was to go after bigger game, and he bitterly resented this half-assed babysitting assignment.

Kenneally spat over the side with disgust. He had saved her tan ass once from oblivion and he wondered just how many times he would have to repeat the feat before this shithouse assignment would end. Privately he wondered whose instep he had trod on to be handed this one. He was top echelon and he chafed to be out and setting prey in the sights of the long gun and not at the end of a fishing line.

He glanced over at Alix Logan stretched out in the skimpiest of bikinis, her burnished skin shining with oil, and cursed softly. Who the hell was she anyway, he asked himself, that I gotta risk my neck to keep her alive and separated from the rest of the world?

Kenneally never did get an answer to that question for, at that moment, light danced off a surfacing faceplate and, in the midst of reeling in his catch, the Red Monster said, “What the fuck—!” and reached for his .357 Magnum, got off a shot just before he heard the plangent
twang!
, the bright rush of wind, the ballooning black object, and then the burning pain in the center of his chest.

“Aggh!” he cried as he staggered back under the shock of force, the rod spinning out of his hands and disappearing beneath the waves. He clutched at the fire burning inside him, trying to rip the flechette from his flesh, but that only caused the curved barbs to bite deeper into him.

His chest was expanding and from his vantage point on the deck he looked up into the burning sun. The slim silhouette of Alix Logan stood over him, her hand to her mouth covering the great O her lips were making. Her beautiful eyes were open wide and Kenneally was suddenly struck by how much those eyes reminded him of his daughter’s. Now why hadn’t he seen that before?

Fingers like swollen sausages and a terrible paralysis beginning to suffuse him, stiffening his limbs, fevering his mind, Kenneally saw the great shade looming up over the side of the boat, flicking sea water from its slick blue skin.

Then his eyes were bulging outward unnaturally and blood ran from his nose, mouth, and ears in bright crimson trickles and his body convulsed twice as the autonomic system shut down for good.

Climbing over the side of the boat, Bristol ripped off his heavy fins, pushed his mask up onto the top of his head, and said, “Alix Logan, I’m Detective Lewis Jeffrey Croaker of the New York City Police Department and to tell you the truth I’ve had the goddamndest time getting to see you.”

Then he vomited all over the running deck.

Justine was numb. The funeral progressed around her like some vast charade which she was fated to witness yet not participate in. The hordes of people from her father’s firm flown in from all parts of the world bewildered her. Their assumedly sincere murmurs of condolence slid off her like rainwater. At times she had no idea what they were talking about.

Her mind was otherwise occupied, but when the clouds lifted far enough for her to think of her father’s passing, it was only with a sense of profound relief.

At some point she became aware that a male presence was close beside her. Looking up, her heart beating fast, thinking that it might, despite what she herself had said, have been Nicholas, she was surprised to see Rick Millar. He smiled and took her hand. Justine might have asked him where Mary Kate was, but if he replied she did not hear him.