Blood Relations (57 page)

His weight belt, eleven pounds of lead, would allow buoyancy to fifteen feet. Any deeper, he would sink.

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Excerpt from Criminal Justice 443 When he felt the subtle shift, he stopped kicking. He glided down, eyes closed, ears popping. it would take about twenty seconds to reach bottom. He felt water flowing past, colder now. The mask pressed into his face and a few bubbles squeaked out of his wet suit. He tongued the snorkel out and pressed his lips together.

His father had told him to close his eyes-the brain consumes less oxygen that way. Dan didn’t know how it worked, but it did. On land Raul Galindo had been as ungainly as a wading bird. Underwater, his body achieved a sort of grace, his long fins curling, uncurling, flowing behind him like the tail of a fish.

The light through Dan’s eyelids dimmed, and he sensed the bottom. He flicked his eyes open once, then again. His watch showed twenty-five seconds elapsed. With thirty to get back up, being careful, he would have thirty-five more to lie here. He settled on his stomach in a patch of sand, gloved fingers hooked on a rock to keep from drifting.

The only sound was a slight buzzing in his ears. The headache was gone.

It had been a month since he had been in the water, and not since last summer had he dived with any regularity.

To stay under a minute and a half would be difficult, but possible. As a kid, he had nearly grown gills, catching tropicals for spending money in high school, or going spearfishing on long weekends in the Keys. There were more good fish then. Big, meaty snapper, grouper, and yellowtail. Gradually, though, overfishing and fertilizer runoff had reduced their numbers. Dan remembered, or thought he did, that the waters from Miami to Key West had been full of marine life when he was a kid, but his dad had complained how it had diminished. And now the new residents were saying what a paradise they had found.

Dan clamped his teeth together and tightened his throat.

Already he needed air. He opened one eye. The second hand on his watch gave him twenty-two seconds. Twenty-one, twenty.

of going back up drifted morbidly The thought of n through his mind. In two weeks he would turn thirty-five.

The number was somehow portentous. The halfway point of a man’s allotted three-score-and-ten.

Between hangovers and periods of generalized funk, Excerpt from Criminal Justice when he had dared to reflect on the tattered state of his psyche, Dan slammed up against the horrifying vision that he would never get beyond the ratty office where he worked now, with its cheap, cigarette-burned carpet and wheezing air conditioners. That one day he would be popping Prozacs and swilling bourbon like the lawyer who owned the place. If he drowned, who would give a shit?

His ex-wife had insurance on him. His son, Josh, would get a college education out of it, and the mortgage would be paid. Lisa had the house, a red-tiled, cutesy piece of stucco-in one of the gated areas of a snotty subdivision called Westlake Village. Dan and Lisa had bought it when he was making eighty grand a year at the U.S. attorney’s office. Things had been pretty rosy then. Before he got fired. More accurately, before he was transferred to handle VA claims and civil forfeitures, which amounted to the same thing. So he quit. The career went, then the marriage. Dan moved back to Miami to find a job. A woman he’d worked with at the U.S. attorney’s office got in touch to say she knew a lawyer who needed someone with expertise in criminal cases. Dear Elaine. The charity of friends.

Dan’s chest involuntarily heaved, and his lungs were burning. He had heard that drowning was a pleasant sensation. What if he hooked himself to the anchor with his dive belt? Kathy would haul on the rope, and there he would be, limp as a gaffed squid. Dan checked his watch.

He tried to focus, to remember where on the dial it would reach thirty seconds. He decided to count down from fifteen, A black grouper came closer, checking him out. Its undershot jaw opened and shut, and when Dan made a slight motion, the fish turned abruptly and vanished into the coral.

Thirteen seconds left. Twelve. Eleven.

Dan and his father had been spearfishing off Marathon when a bull shark saw them, an eight-footer. Sharks usually swam on by. This one didn’t. Raul Galindo extended his speargun at arm’s length, pivoting, motioning for Dan to stay behind him. The shark glided closer and he nudged it in the head-easy, not wanting to make it mad. With a flip of its tail, it scooted away. And then came back. Fast.

His father fired, hitting it just above the eye. The shark NIL, Excerpt from Criminal Justice 445 was a thrashing, twisting piece of meat, leaking red. Back in the boat, Raul started the engines and said they should leave the area because of the blood, but as soon as they anchored somewhere else, they would go back in. At twelve years old, Dan screamed “No, Dad, no,” but his father threw him in anyway. Don’t be afraid, I’m here. Raul Galindo died driving home from Key Largo when a drunk crossed the center line.

Dan could see little sparkly lights behind his eyelids.

He was sixty feet underwater. The height of a six-story building. If he passed out, he would stay down here, weighted down by his belt, until his body bloated and the currents lifted him away.

Six. Seven.

At the marina this morning he had seen a notice about a tournament in Cat Cay. Spearfishing. Six weeks away. He had the equipment. Not a boat good enough to make it to the Bahamas, however. Not nearly.

His watch had stopped. Dan looked closer. No, another second ticked by. Eight. Why not go to the Bahamas?

Rent a damn boat. Take Josh with him. Lisa couldn’t say no. Father-son bonding and all that. He could see Josh now, in fact. Josh was seven, a quiet boy with brown hair and eyes. Like mine, Dan thought. Why not join up with some other boats, make a flotilla? Feel the sun and wind on their faces. The boat skimming over the water like a pelican with outstretched wings.

His vision dimmed. He opened his eyes, panicked.

Heart slamming in his chest, he pushed off and began kicking frantically. The surface seemed dark now, impossibly far away, the boat tiny as a matchstick. He rose, feeling the pressure subside. No. He wasn’t going to make it. It was too far. How sad. Unutterably sad. He was too heavy, too tired. He would black out before he reached the surface and fall back to the bottom.

Dan thought of Joshua and his chest lurched, almost a sob. Air burst from his lungs and he gagged on water. Too late, too late. His hands, clumsy in the gloves, fumbled for his weight belt. With his teeth he tore one off. He grabbed for the plastic clip. Then the thing dropped away and Dan kicked, no strength left now, but the light getting nearer.

Excerpt from Criminal Justice There was a splash as he broke through. He dragged in a breath. The rush of oxygen made him drunk, almost euphoric. He rolled over, wheezing, barely keeping his face above the surface. The sun blasted his eyes. He kicked steadily for the boat, reached for it, then a wave lifted it away. When the boat fell back, Dan curled his extended fingers over the gunwale and hung on.

“Kath-!” He tried to yell her name over the music and went into a spasm of coughing. “Kathy, for God’s sake, would you wake the hell up!” He pounded the hull.

She -sat up squinting, looking around, not seeing him.

“Dan?”

“How stupid can you be?” he screamed. “I was diving, goddammit! You have to pay attention when someone’s diving!”

“What happened?” She looked over the side and finally saw him bobbing in the water near the rear of the boat.

“Oh my God, did a fish bite you? Are you hurt?”

“I almost fucking drowned!”

“I’m sorry! Dan, I didn’t know!” wearing only her bikini bottoms, she clambered through the gap in the windscreen. “You didn’t tell me.”

Dan spit saltwater. His aching sinuses were full of it.

When he was fairly sure he had enough strength, he told her to move, he was coming in. He handed her his flippers and mask, then took hold of the dive ladder and shakily hauled himself up past the outboard engine and over the transom, scraping his shin. He flopped to the bottom of the boat like a heavy fish, his sides heaving.

She crouched beside him, pushing her hair behind her ear. “Dan? I’m sorry, okay? What can I do?”

He retched. After a while, he sat up, leaning against the rear bench seat. In over twenty-five years of diving, he had never dropped a weight belt. He had never come that close. He took off his remaining glove and his booties.

“Get me a towel, would you? And turn off the damn radio.”

He dried his face and hair, and when he had stopped shaking, peeled off his wet suit and put his windbreaker back on. Dressed now, Kathy hustled around repacking everything in his dive bag, not saying much. Dan took her hand. “I’m sorry for screaming at you. I was scared.”

Excerpt from Criminal Justice 447 “It’s all right.” She hugged him around the waist.

“Come on, let’s go get some breakfast.”

Engine roaring, Dan turned the boat north. He stood up behind the wheel and let the wind rush into his lungs.

The sky was incredibly, intensely blue, the water a sheet of silver. The boat danced over it. A gull dipped, then swung away. He laughed out loud. He was thinking of Cat Cay again.

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BARBARA PARKER worked as a prosecutor in the Dade County State Attorney’s office and in private practice before completing a master’s degree in creative writing. She has written two national bestsellers, Suspicion of Innocence and Suspicion of Guilt (both available in Signet paperback editions), and was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American Author She has a daughter in law school and a teenage son. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.