Ten Thousand Islands (29 page)

It dropped him to one knee, his face a mess.

I stepped forward to finish him when, behind me, I heard, “Hold it! That’s enough. You stop right
now
, Ford. I’ll take it from here.”

I turned to see Parrish approaching, what looked to me like a 9mm Glock in his right hand. He still had the cigar clamped in his teeth.

Ted and Ivan Bauerstock were a few steps back, walking.

I was breathing heavily and bleeding. “Damn it, Gary! What the hell took you so long?”

He had a little smile on his face. “What, miss a good fight? See Mr. B. J. Buster get a butt-whooping, I’d pay money for that. You handle yourself pretty good, Ford. Got some nice moves on you.”

Behind him, Ivan Bauerstock said in an eerily calm voice, “Detective Parrish, I’m afraid we’ve got a problem. I’m afraid Teddy’s been very bad again.”

Parrish said, “Uh-oh. Been a long time since I heard that, Mr. Bauerstock.”

Buster was dusting sand off his arms, stopping occasionally to spit blood. “Why you tellin’ the man that, boss? After what I saw? You be speaking to a cop, my ass goin’ to the joint, too.”

“You’re well paid, Mr. Buster.”

“Um-huh, you gonna be paying me for a long time, so don’t be runnin’ off the mouth to no cop.”

Parrish said, “B. J. was here?”

“I’m afraid so. And let’s face it, Doctor Ford has become a liability, too.”

I watched numbly and threw my hands up as Parrish pointed his weapon at my face … then swung it suddenly toward Buster and shot him twice in the chest. Buster went down in a fetal position, kicking, moaning.

Parrish shrugged at me, saying, “How you think I afford that cabin in Colorado, live with all those rich skiers?” as Buster began to cry, “Oh man oh man, I’m hurt! I’m hurt bad!”

Parrish stood over him for a moment, Buster staring up. “You got to help me, brother. Swear to Christ, you got to call an ambulance. Leave me with these two, they’ll feed me to them fucking hyenas! That the truth! Put my eyes in the refrigerator and haul me out there to the fields.”

Parrish extended his arm and shot Buster once again, this time to the head. Turned to Ted Bauerstock and said, “You feedin’ people to the jungle animals now, Mr. Ted? Whatever happened to your hee-bee-jeebie hobby, them water burials?”

P
arrish turned and pointed the pistol toward me, holding it at my face, standing close enough that he couldn’t miss. Wind coming off the river, across the lake, whipped the cigar smoke away. “I believe Mr. Bauerstock asked you a question. I figure the drunk hippie, he got one of the tapes. At least, you’d a let him hear it. But what’d you do with the others. Or maybe there
ain’t
no others.”

Ivan Bauerstock had returned to the shade of the pavilion. He’d found his glasses and was holding the totem in the light, inspecting it while Ted Bauerstock bent over Buster’s body. When Bauerstock noticed what Ted was doing, he called, “Teddy?
Teddy
. You get away from him right now!”

Ted stood. He seemed to be holding something in his hand, but hiding it, as if he didn’t want anyone to know. He wore the self-satisfied sneer of a child who knew he could get away with whatever he chose. “I was trying to
resuscitate
the man.”

“No you weren’t, goddamn it! Don’t lie to me. Get rid of that thing. Throw it in the water immediately and go wash your hands! Listen to me, mister—I will
not
have it in the house.”

His hand still cupped, Ted began to walk toward the boat. “You’re imagining things. You’re
always
accusing me.”

Bauerstock made a gesture of frustration and dismissal. “
I
can’t do anything with that boy,” then leaned toward the small brown woman and yelled, “I hope you’re satisfied, you pathetic old bitch.”

Parrish was listening to them, seeing it out of the corner of his eye, as I said, “Do you really want to be associated with this filth? They’re sick, you know. Insane. You don’t know the difference between right and wrong, anymore, Gary?”

“Right and wrong?” He seemed amused. “Man, them’s just words, like … like Chevy or like see-gar. Rules is what rich people break just to show the rest of us there’s a boundary. They decide what’s right.” He took the cigar from his mouth; looked at it with appreciation. “Know what those people decided? Power ain’t sick and power ain’t wrong as long as you got enough of it. Mr. Bauer-stock here, he’s got plenty. This only the third time in fifteen years he ask me to help him, but the man pay me in cash every year, right on time. To me, Doc? That’s somethin’ righteous.” Parrish thumbed the hammer back, his expression changing. “I believe I asked you a question about them tapes. Where are they? You got exactly five seconds to give me an answer.”

My mind was scanning frantically for a way out. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

“That’s right. I’m gonna kill you anyway.”

“Then I’ll talk. I’ll tell you.”

A soft, slow smile of awareness came on Parrish’s face as he said, “No, you ain’t. You just using your brains to buy time,” and he leaned toward me slightly, straightening his arm, and I collapsed into the sand just as he fired—
thWAP
—and scissored his legs out from under him as the gun fired twice more.

From the distance, I heard the voice of Ted Bauerstock yell, “Don’t shoot him in the face!” as I rolled onto Parrish, fighting to control his hands. I smashed his jaw open with a glancing fist still gloved by the heavy mask, but he kept his arms moving, swinging them around, firing randomly—
thwap, thwap, twap
—so close to my head that I was deafened, ears ringing. I had to get some distance between us.

I shoveled a handful of sand toward his eyes, rolled to my feet, sprinting hard toward the lake and dived, pulling myself deep into the water as the trajectory of bullets traced scimitars nearby.

I’d noticed a dock and diving platform on the other side of the lake. It was maybe sixty, seventy yards away—not an easy distance when wearing shorts and a shirt. I didn’t swim fast. I swam with long, slow strokes, conserving my air. Glided until I’d nearly stopped before I stroked again. Didn’t matter. I couldn’t make it the whole way.

I surfaced to grab a breath and Parrish was already shooting at me—now standing on the dock that was my destination. Slugs were slapping the water so close that I could feel the explosion of compressed air as they slammed past my head … then I felt a stunning impact that nearly somersaulted me in the water. I’d been hit….

I swam downward, downward, feeling the dreamy unreality
of shock. I touched my hand to the area of my right ear, a throbbing slickness. No, I hadn’t been shot in the head. My glasses were gone and so was the skin off my ear. I realized the face mask I’d carried had slid far up my arm. I pulled it on and cleared it, looking toward the surface: a lens of light above, a blurry gray sky beyond.

Parrish was waiting up there. Surface, and I would die.

I pivoted and looked below.

What I saw was surreal; a scene from a nightmare.

The interior of the
cenote
was shaped like the mouth of a volcano. The sides were sheer, dropping quickly to thirty or thirty-five feet, the green boulders there creating a second, narrower rim.

On the lip of that rim, spaced at random, were four … no, five decomposing bodies attached to the bottom by cement blocks and anchor chains. Enough flesh and clothing remained to maintain buoyancy, so that the bodies floated upright, arms above their heads as if on crosses.

There were also two cars, both of which had snagged on the ledge as if hanging from a cliff.

One of the cars was black and rusted, had moss growing on it.

The other was a white Honda that I recognized immediately.

It was Nora’s car, air bubbles still escaping toward the surface….

In training, we used to play a game. Dump the spent tanks and work your way to Destination X by finding and breathing trapped residual balloons of oxygen we called air pockets.

Anyplace people dive, you will find air pockets. With conventional tanks, a diver uses less than ten percent of
the air he inhales. The rest is exhausted through the regulator as waste, then vanishes on the surface or is trapped in little caverns of rock, there for the taking by an air-starved swimmer.

A great place to find really big air pockets is a sunken boat … or plane … or car.

I swam down to the car, already aware that someone was inside. The car was tilted forward, its back axle caught on a limestone ridge, the front of the car hanging over the purple abyss. Windows were open.

I got a good grip on the right, rear window and pulled myself down. The glass of my mask had cracked badly, was leaking water. I had to clear it again before I could see the back of a woman’s head, short dark hair undulating in the
cenote
’s updraft.

First things first, though. I turned and looked up into the car, then pulled myself through the window far enough so that my face was pressed against the roof molding and the rear windshield.

There was air there. A couple of cubic feet, anyway. Enough to last several minutes. I hung there breathing, resaturating my lungs, then looked as I touched my fingers to the woman’s hair and pulled her head back. I had to fight the reflex to vomit and an overwhelming horror.

It was Della Copeland, not long dead. But her eyes were gone.

This had been a nice woman. She’d worked at a place where people loved her. More importantly, she was Dorothy’s mother.

Where was Nora?

I looked. Nowhere in the car. I took another few bites of air, then looked outward through the clear water. Was hers one of the anchored bodies?

No….

Judging from their streaming hair, there were three woman and two men, skeletal heads showing mandibles and teeth, cavernous eye sockets tunneling out from pale flesh. One of the men had black, Indian hair; cheap slacks, a white shirt, a red cigarette pack showing through.

Darton Copeland.

Ted Bauerstock had managed to murder the entire family.

The second man was the diver Bauerstock had mentioned. The man, he said, who’d gone down but never resurfaced.

No wonder. The diver was chained by the ankles, still in his dry suit. Considering the circumstances, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Not in this graveyard. No way they could ever let him leave after what he’d seen. They’d lured him in with money, used him, then murdered him. The fact that a supposedly experienced cave diver hadn’t used a dive partner had made no sense. Now I understood.

The diver’s mask was pulled down around his neck, a black hole the size of a dime in his cheek; a black hole the size of a half-dollar on his neck. Entrance and exit wounds. He’d been shot from above, or maybe while he was kneeling. His buoyancy compensator vest had been slashed too … but the BC was built around the black modular walls of a closed-circuit, multigas system known as a rebreather.

The ridged hose of the regulator floated higher than the diver’s head.

What were the chances there was still oxygen left in the tank.

Probably pretty good. One of the big advantages of a
rebreather is that you have a much, much longer bottom time than with a standard, open-circuit scuba rig.

I’d trained with one of the earlier systems, a Drager—a chest-mounted rig. Unlike the newer systems, it was used for shallow-water diving only.

Could I figure out how the thing worked?

I didn’t have much choice. I had to try.

I hyperventilated until the car’s air pocket was nearly spent, then I swam across the black abyss. Got a grip on the dead man’s elbow. The first thing I did was grab the regulator hose and check the valve on his mouth piece. If the valve was open, the system was flooded and ruined for me or anyone else. I’d have to surface and take my chances.

The valve was closed.

Next, I found the standard scuba single-hose pressure gauge. The needle was on zero. He was either out of air, or his tanks were shut off. Attached to the rebreather pack were two spherical canisters slightly smaller than volleyballs. The canister to his right should have been for oxygen, the canister to the left for a diluent gas, maybe helium.

I reached behind him, turned the valve on the oxygen tank and watched the needle jump to 700 psi. On a standard open-circuit system, that wasn’t much air. On a rebreather, it would be good for a couple of hours.

I fitted the regulator into my mouth, opened the valve and snorted out through my nose; snorted again, hoping to hell not to taste caustic soda lime.

Nope, the air was good. Just to be certain, I pulled off the computer panel Velcroed to his wrist. Held the ON button down until the LCD screen activated. Saw that it was 4:09
P.M.
October 5 and that I was at thirty-nine feet
with 708 psi oxygen remaining and an onboard diluent gas supply that was fifty percent maximum.

This guy had been doing some serious deep diving.

I also saw the heads-up light was reading a cautionary yellow, so I hunted around until I found the bypass valve and dumped a little oxygen into the system. I watched a bead of green light replace the yellow, now indicating I was getting an approximate number of oxygen molecules in the mix of gas that the unit was computing.

I floated there for a moment, breathing easily. I didn’t have to worry about them seeing bubbles on the surface because a rebreather exhausts almost none. My mask was still leaking badly, so I took the dead man’s, cleared it with no problem.

What else did he have that I might be able to use?

The knife scabbard strapped to his leg was empty. They’d probably taken that before they killed him.

There was a small strobe light tied to one of the three pockets on his vest. I couldn’t imagine why I’d need that. I opened the first two pockets and found nothing but a tiny bottle of Clear Mask. I opened the third, saw something gold and shiny….

I reached, felt a hard surface that was smooth, warmer than the water, and I pulled out a medallion made of gold, the cross and concentric circles similar to those on the totem. At the top, through the hole, was a broken clasp, one link open.