Past Crimes (27 page)

“I was saying that Dono would have liked to see this.”

“And do you imagine he’s not? Your man is laughing his ass off right now—don’t you doubt it.” The sweat had finally dried from his hair, and his orange-white curls stood up like he’d touched an outlet.

I screwed the regulator set onto the tank with my good right hand. The tank showed about three-quarter pressure. Maybe twenty minutes’ worth, if I could stay in the shallows.

Hollis sat down heavily in the captain’s chair. “I’m as eager as anyone, boyo, but are you sure this is smart? You don’t look exactly in top form.”

“I’ll be fine. And if I’m lucky, the diamonds will be right where I left them.”

Hollis’s face told me he thought I’d burned through enough good fortune today, but he just cracked the seal on his water bottle and drank from it like it was Bushmills.

“What’s the plan?” he said.

“I’m going to swim out to the speedboat, see if I can get it started, and bring it in close to shore. You strong enough to wade out to it carrying the scuba tank?”

“Yeah, not a problem.”

“We could get you a life vest,” I said.

“Fuck you right back. Try not to run Dono’s boat aground. One a day is enough.”

Within twenty minutes Hollis was setting the anchor of the speedboat above where I’d dropped the diamonds. I was sitting on the bow,
fitting the straps of the scuba tank around my shoulders. The wound in my shoulder had subsided to a dull throb.

“You get those diamonds,” Hollis said, pointing at me, “and you could vanish. So far away that even the fucking army couldn’t find you if they tried.”

I put the mask on. “Maybe there’s a way to have a taste and the bottle to spare.”

He grinned. “That’s one of your granddad’s.”

“I know.” I put the regulator in my mouth and dropped into the water.

W
ITH NO BUOYANCY VEST,
I was pulled down by the weight of the steel tank. I had to start kicking immediately to slow my descent. The cold clutched at me again.

I kicked over to the anchor chain, cupped a hand on it, and let myself sink. The pressure built, and every few yards I tightened my hold on the chain to stop and give my ears some time to adjust.

At thirty feet I felt the tension that thrummed through the chain slacken.

The chain’s slant flattened out, curved, came to rest in one of the loose patches of kelp. Clumps of the thick seaweed waved gently in the current, all their strands pointing toward the open water of the strait.

I looked back up the long curve of the chain. Fifty feet to the surface. Not far, but already I couldn’t see the boat. Just a wide cloud of bluish color in place of the sky.

Hollis and I had dropped anchor at the place where I remembered surfacing, after first seeing the
Francesca
and letting the bundle of cylinders sink to the bottom. If the bundle had sunk straight down from where I’d released it, it should be nearby.

I could see clearly for about eight feet, by the beam of the flashlight held in my weak left hand. Everything beyond fifteen feet might as well
be a solid wall. I swam around the anchor in widening circles, through the storm of mud and silt that my fins stirred up, peering at every thicket of seaweed to see if the black cylinders were hiding within.

Five minutes passed as I traced that spiral path. Ten minutes.

A wave grabbed the flashlight beam, made it quiver. I realized that the wave was my own shivering, strong enough to make my whole arm shudder. I was running out of time.

The cylinders weren’t here. They hadn’t come to rest where I’d dropped them.

So where?

If the current had been strong enough to get the heavy bundle rolling, they would have fallen outward, away from the island, toward the deeper sea.

Toward the drop-off.

I’d seen the numbers on the depth sounder in Dono’s speedboat when I’d first approached the island. The water had gone from near a thousand feet to five hundred to one hundred in the course of a minute. After that, the underwater slope of the island had become much more gradual, up onto the shore where the
Francesca
lay now, beached.

Nine minutes left on the gauge. Time enough for a quick look. I swam in that direction, the flashlight shining feebly into the dark.

Or at least what I’d thought was dark.

When I reached the edge of the drop, I learned what dark really was.

The land fell off at an angle steeper than a ski jump. The depths swallowed the tiny bit of light still present and gave away nothing.

Staring blankly into that void, I realized just how ridiculous my search was. If the bundle had fallen all the way down there, they might as well be on the moon. It would take an atmosphere suit and a lot more diving experience than I had to reach the bottom. I could sense the crushing weight of it from where I knelt, at the tipping point.

A muted flash of yellow. A fish, maybe, darting between the strands of seaweed. No, there it was. Ten feet away. I half swam, half climbed down the slope to it.

A bungee cord. Goddamn. A yellow bungee cord.

I looked around, almost frantic. Where were the rest? If one cord had come off, had they all? Were the black rubber cylinders scattered nearby?

The cord had probably been knocked off when the bundle touched bottom. It wouldn’t have floated far before tangling in the kelp. So that point of impact must be near. If the bundle had stayed intact, it could be just below me.

I checked the gauge again. Three minutes. Less, if I went deeper. And that didn’t count the time to surface.

I had to look.

I swam straight down the slope, sweeping the flashlight from side to side. The pressure increased, mercilessly. I equalized my ears and kept going.

The black was almost overwhelming. Ninety feet. One-twenty. It was too easy, falling down the underwater mountain.

My skull was in a vise. I hadn’t felt a headache this bad since Ranger School, when they’d kept us awake for most of a week, with endless drills and tactical exercises. Droning. That’s what we called it, dead on your feet, eyes wide open. My vision blurred.

Focus. I could go a little farther.

And a little farther still.

Something grabbed me and shook me, not outside but in my mind.

This is stupid, boy.

Right. Absolutely right. I’d never make the surface from here, not if the air ran out. As it was, I’d be ascending so fast I’d risk the bends. Time to leave.

I turned, reaching out to touch the slope, stop my descent, and get myself oriented toward the surface. My hand was numb enough that I barely felt the mud force my fingers apart.

But I did feel the thump of something hard, tumbling in my clumsy wake, bumping against my knuckles.

I picked it up and stared at it hazily for a moment, the thick, hexagonal cylinder throwing off clumps of mud into the flashlight beam. I was dreaming, obviously. Nitrogen narcosis.

No. Here it was.

A treasure, right there in my hand.

And there was another cylinder, a couple of yards up the slope and to my left, standing almost vertical in the mud.

I swam to it. My deadened fingers didn’t want to release the flashlight. I had to drop the light to pick up the cylinder and get it under my other arm, both of them cradled like footballs.

Enough
.

Enough. I kicked hard, my legs reluctantly responding. The glow of the flashlight lying on the ocean floor retreated, became a dot, vanished below me. Nothing in the world but me now, and the black. I kept kicking, exhaling steadily to let the expanding air leak from my lungs. Rising alongside the bubbles, but no faster.

How far had I gone? With my hands full, I couldn’t reach around to grab the gauge. I made myself stop before the sudden pressure change did very bad things to my joints. I couldn’t feel the containers under my arms. Maybe I had dropped them. I looked down to check before I realized I couldn’t see them either.

And then the air hose jerked once, my lungs grabbing at nothing. Hollis’s tank was dry.

The bends would be better than drowning. I kicked again. Air in my lungs swelled and forced its way out of my mouth. The steel tank dragged at me, but there was no time to get myself free of it.

There. The cloud above me was definitely lighter now. Not as bright as the firecrackers exploding in my head. Almost.

I saw a flatness, the underside of the sky.

And then I saw nothing.

“JESUS GOD, KID. YOU
scared the holy shit out of me.”

I was in the water. Mostly. My head was out, and I took my first conscious breath, deep, before coughing it painfully back out. I looked up to see Hollis, leaning way down from the stern of the speedboat. He had a grip on the shoulder strap of the scuba tank and was holding me above water.

Hollis’s voice was strangely high and fast. “You bobbed up next to
the boat, went faceup, and then you started to drift back down. Thank Christ you were close enough for me to snag you with the boat hook.” He shook me. “Are you all right? Say something, you mad son of a bitch.”

Where were the cylinders? My arms were drifting aimlessly at my sides. I looked down dazedly. Maybe I could dive again, catch them before they got too far….

“I’ve got the tubes here, lad. Don’t worry. You were hanging on to them like they were your own babes.”

“Get this damn thing off me,” I said. We managed to undo the straps, and he heaved the tank up into the boat. I followed, with a lot more effort on both our parts. I lay against the side of the cockpit, too tired to even remove my fins. Hollis gave me a towel, and I rubbed at my limbs until they turned a raw pink while Hollis saw to the tank and gear. Before long I felt like I was past the danger of toppling over.

Hollis picked up one of the cylinders. He shook it gently, making a muffled rattle. “Are these what I pray they are?”

“All we’ll get.”

He handed the cylinder to me. The black rubber exterior was dirty and slightly pitted by the seawater. I twisted the end off, exposing a screw cap inside. I opened it and poured some of the contents into my hand.

They weren’t cut or polished, but still unmistakable. Diamonds. Silver-white, the largest about the size of my thumbnail. Ice that would never melt away.

Here
, Dono had said to me, his hand gripping mine.

Not only trying to tell me where the little hunk of madrona wood came from. But
here
, this place that only you and I know.

Here
, this is yours.

After Ondine’s cut I estimated that Dono had walked away with the market value of about four million dollars. Seven cylinders in the cooler. If each cylinder held the same amount of diamonds, that meant I had over half a million dollars in my hand.

Putting it another way, at my current pay grade I was holding about thirteen years’ worth of salary. A quarter of a century, if you counted the other cylinder.

“The loveliest ugly rocks I’ve ever seen,” Hollis said.

“Glad you approve.”

He nudged me in the ribs with his foot. “Don’t ever fucking do that to me again.”

“Next time you go.” I kicked the fins away and eased myself up to sit in the pilot’s chair.

Hollis grunted. “And you said the rest are gone?”

“Not gone. Just way out of reach.”

He thought about it, shrugged. “Still, a damn good day’s work. Maybe if we come back with proper gear and some lights …”

Maybe. Or maybe the diamonds would be of more use to me if they stayed right where they were.

I was beyond tired. I wanted to curl up in the tiny cabin of the speedboat and sleep for a month.

“Let’s take what we need off the
Francesca
,” I said, “and go home.”

We beached the speedboat and waded ashore to Hollis’s boat. We went in the side door, to avoid stepping over Alec’s body again. Hollis began packing up his personal effects, and I raided the
Francesca
’s rapidly warming refrigerator. I was ravenous. When Hollis came back to the main cabin, I was eating cold cuts straight from the plastic bag.

He looked past me to the main cabin. “That’s not mine,” he said.

It was a large brown leather satchel, half buried under one of the piles of clothes and other crap thrown around when the
Francesca
hit the shore.

I retrieved the satchel and opened it. Inside it was clothing, and a Glock pistol, and a canvas bag holding something large and squarish. A leather wallet and some papers—scattered receipts, a Seattle street map, a bus ticket—were tucked in an inside pocket.

“Boone’s,” I said, glancing at the dark, gaunt face on the Illinois driver’s license.

“Shitheel,” said Hollis, going back to forage for his belongings.

Maybe the Glock was the same gun that Boone had fired at me at Julian Formes’s apartment. Any evidence would help. I took out the canvas bag and looked inside.

Bundles of cash. Still in their blue plastic wrap. The spoils that Boone had taken from Cristiana Liotti’s apartment after killing her. I put the canvas bag back into the satchel. A dead woman’s money, shrouded in a dead man’s clothing.

“At least you can get your life in order again,” Hollis called from the forward stateroom. “Get your truck back from the cops, see the house one more time before you have to leave.”

I nodded without really thinking about it, looking around for anything I might take with us, still preoccupied with the cash. There was something bothering me about it, maybe not this money but a different stack of cash. And Hollis had said something too, about the truck….

A cold snake writhed in my stomach.

I walked quickly back to the satchel, opened it again, and took out Boone’s papers. Found his bus ticket. Leaving Stockton at 11:20
P.M
. the past Saturday night. Arriving Seattle 7:40
P.M
. Sunday night.

At least fourteen hours after Dono was shot.

I felt like I was back down in the black again, the pressure caving in my chest.

I’d been blind. Focused solely on Boone and Alec, the stone killers who were right in front of me. I had never questioned if there might be someone else.

But there had to be someone
, the beast snarled inside me.
You just didn’t see it.

Maybe I just didn’t want to.