They looked like they shopped in the same menswear boutique: Regio wore a burnt orange Tiger Woods golf shirt, beige no-iron slacks with an Indian-weave belt, cordovan loafers, and a beige linen sport coat. Lange went with stretch jeans, a button-up Tommy Bahama short-sleeve shirt worn loose, and boating shoes. They both were fleshy-faced and sunburnt.
They checked the apartment and the four Porsche wheels lined up along one wall, but didn’t mention them. Lange looked at Virgil and asked, “What kind of diving you done?”
“All kinds, but mostly divemaster stuff. I made sure nobody drowned. Some instruction in night diving and navigation. I worked off a dive boat taking guys out to the Channel Islands.” When the two looked blank, he added, “You know. LA.”
“You ever do any recovery?”
“Some. I mean, a boat would sink out there about once a week, sometimes they wanted to get the fishing gear off it, or personal stuff. Four rods and reels, for those movie guys, that could be five or six grand. I did that a few times, but I gotta tell you, I don’t do ships. I don’t do anything with an overhead. That scares me.”
“What’s an overhead?” Lange asked.
“Caves. Old shipwrecks or boats where you go inside. Stuff where you can’t get straight back to the surface. I don’t do that shit,” Virgil said.
“He’s a little claustrophobic,” Rae said. “Lock him in a closet and he cries like a baby. Tries to kick the door down.”
The two men looked from Virgil to Rae and back again, and then Lange asked, “How often does that happen to you? You get locked in a closet?”
Virgil, sullen, said, “Once.”
Rae said, “Twice.”
After thinking about that for a moment, Regio asked, “What’s the deepest you ever been?”
“I once did a bounce to four hundred on Trimix, with a client who wanted to look at a sunken boat. I won’t be doing that again. That’s just fucked up.”
“A bounce is where you go down and bounce off the bottom and come right back up?” Lange asked.
“Yeah. We were only down there for a couple of minutes, so he could take some pictures. I got a bunch of certifications, but I’m not a real happy tech diver, if you know what I mean.”
“How about a hundred and fifty, hundred and sixty?” Regio asked.
“Do that in my sleep,” Virgil said.
Regio and Lange glanced at each other, then Lange said, “You didn’t mention to Jack you’d done two in that Iowa state prison.”
Now Rae and Virgil looked at each other, and Rae said, “Ah, shit.”
Virgil said, “He didn’t ask.”
The two men peered at Virgil and Regio said, “You’re Willy.” He turned to Rae: “What’s your name?”
“Ally.”
“As in alley cat?”
“I guess.”
Back to Virgil: “You said you did night diving?”
“All the time. Like I said, that’s one of the specialties I used to train people in. Night diving and nav.”
Lange said, “Huh.”
Rae said to Virgil, “Willy, I need to consult with you. In the bathroom.” And to Regio and Lange: “We’ll be right back.”
In the bathroom, she said, “The Marc guy’s got a gun.”
“Yeah, I saw.”
“I think this is where we tell them we’ve figured them out.”
“Okay.”
* * *
Back out in the living room, Rae sprawled on the couch, her head on the gun pillow. Virgil sat at the other end, Rae’s feet on his leg, her red nails like a spray of blood. Virgil picked up the beer, finished it, and said, “Look. You guys . . . you fuckers are the guys who dropped the dope off the coast. You’re looking for somebody to get it for you.”
“That against your principles?” Regio asked.
“I’ll tell you what’s against my principles,” Virgil said. “Getting caught or doing it for free. Or getting shot when the job’s done, to clean up loose ends.”
Regio stared at him for a moment, then looked quickly around the room and came back to Virgil and said, “What we’re thinking is, that shit is out there, and we think we know where and how to get it.”
“Aw, man, if that’s all it is, I told Jack it’s long gone,” Virgil said. “If you’re not the original guys . . . then the original guys, the guys who dumped it, have been all over it by now.”
“Let us worry about that,” Regio said. “You worry about this. If you think you can get to it, using one of these DPV things you told Jack about, we’ll give you . . . seven thousand, five hundred dollars for every can you bring back with you. Give it to you in cash. Every night. There are almost a hundred cans still out there; that’s almost three-quarters of a million to you. In cash. If you recover at least ninety of them, we’ll top off your take for an ice-cold million dollars.”
Rae said, “You are those guys. The originals.”
Neither Regio nor Lange looked at her: they were focused on Virgil, who seemed to be thinking. Then Virgil asked, “When?”
“We were told you need some gear.”
“Yeah. Like all of it. I got nothing left. There’s a big scuba place out west of here. They’d have most of it,” Virgil said.
“You know about GPS?” Regio asked.
“Sure. Used it all the time on the boats.”
“Then, how about we go shopping? Now,” Lange said.
Virgil looked at Rae, who said, “He might be a little stoned.”
“We noticed.”
“Shit, I’m fine,” Virgil said. He looked at Regio and Lange. “I got to dig out my certification cards. That’ll take one minute. You need to tell me what I’ll be doing. How deep I’m going, and how far I’m going to have to motor.”
“We can do that right now,” Lange said. He held up the notebook he was carrying. “I made some sketches based on what we know.”
They sat at the apartment’s shaky kitchen table and Lange opened the notebook and said, “This is all based on our first diver. She’s not with us any longer—she went back home.”
“What was her problem?” Rae asked.
“Not relevant to you,” Regio said.
“Let us decide that,” Rae said.