Regio and Lange looked at her, then Lange tipped his head and said, “She was . . . worried about, mmm, the police. The Coast Guard. We thought we were good with her, but she took off and we can’t reach her now.”
“That’s it?” Rae asked. “She split?”
“That’s it, really,” Lange said. “She was good at what she was doing, and I guess she sorta freaked out.”
They sat and looked at each other for a moment, then Virgil asked, “Are you guys really good at this? What you’re doing? Or are you a bunch of fuck-ups?”
“We’re good,” Regio said. “We’re about the best. Our problem with Jaquell—she’s the diver—was a one-time thing. She opted out, and we’re good with that. But we need a diver. We’re hoping you’re it.”
Lange held up the notebook. “You want to see this, or not?”
Rae looked at Virgil and asked, “What do you think?”
Virgil bobbed his head. “Okay. Let’s take a look.”
* * *
Lange had drawn a series of simple sketches on notebook paper. The containers holding the dope were a hundred and fifty feet down on a reef that paralleled the coastline north of Fort Lauderdale. He said they had GPS coordinates for each end of the drop string. Each container weighed about twenty-eight pounds and was a hair less than twenty inches long—fifty centimeters. They had custom lift and cargo bags, designed to take five or six containers at a time. Each lift bag could lift a maximum of two hundred pounds.
“You talked to Jack about using one of the DPV things from a mile out,” Lange said, tapping his sketch. “We won’t have to do a whole mile. A half mile would be good enough, because the containers, the cans, are right on the east edge of where the Coast Guard is searching. A half mile further out, they wouldn’t pay us any attention. Jack’s run up there a half dozen times in his sailboat, never got a look.”
Virgil said, “Let me get my notebook.”
He went into the bedroom and came back with a spiral notebook jammed with loose pages. He got out dive tables and sat at the table peering at them, yanking on an earlobe as he did it, twisting one of the fake diamonds. He borrowed Lange’s pencil and made a couple of calculations, then said, “We’d need a twin set—double tanks. Gonna need a good scooter. Gonna be expensive.”
“You can do it?”
“I can do it, if you can do your part. My part isn’t that hard; yours is the part that scares me.”
“We can do our part. We’ve been in the business for a long time,” Regio said. He looked between Rae and Virgil with a tight smile, and added, “Since our folks left the old country . . . like a hundred years ago.”
Rae said, “Oh. Okay.”
Virgil thought about that, looked at Rae, who nodded, and he said, “If we’re going shopping, I gotta get my certifications.”
“We can wait.”
Virgil went back to the bedroom and returned with a cloth satchel, pawed through it, and came out with a drop-down plastic card file meant for the credit card–addicted, and dangled it up for Regio and Lange. “There you go. Twelve certs.”
“Let’s rock,” Regio said.
* * *
Out the door, the three of them; Rae stayed behind. Regio was driving a Lexus SUV, Virgil got in the back and Regio said, “Safety belt.”
On the way west to Scuba City, Lange asked, “How was Fort Dodge?”
“Oh, you know. Not bad,” Virgil said. “A little primitive, there were like three guys in a cell. Nobody hassled you too much; mostly just chickenshit. Food was okay. Didn’t have to blow anyone, it wasn’t that kind of place. I mean, it was Iowa.”
“I can deal with chickenshit,” Regio said. “I’ll tell you what, though. You want to stay away from New York. I got a friend . . .”
They talked prisons for a while, and both Lange and Regio seemed conversant with prison conditions in the Northeast, including one called the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Delaware, which Virgil thought was a funny name. He goofed on it for a while, in a mildly stoned way, until Regio told him to shut up. “There ain’t nothing funny about Jimmy Vaughn.”
Virgil, in the backseat, leaned forward and said to Regio, who was driving, “I couldn’t help noticing that your fine ride here has inferior wheels. I got four Porsche wheels and the tires are right next to new. N-Specs. They’d really cheer up this, uh, you know, Toyota . . .”
Made Lange laugh. “Toyota.”
Regio: “Fuck you. Lexus. Best car I ever owned.”
Virgil, stoner: “You own this car?”
“Of course I own it. What’d you think?”
“I thought maybe it was your wife’s.”
Made Lange laugh again.
* * *
Scuba City had everything they needed except the diver propulsion vehicle—DPV—and there was a decent tech shop in back. Virgil produced his certification cards and chatted with the salesclerk about their requirements. Regio listened in, while Lange strolled around the place looking at the gear. In the car, Virgil had asked what the budget was, and Lange had said, “There isn’t one. Get what you need.”
“That DPV gonna cost six or seven grand . . .”
“Get what you need.”
“Like Christmas . . .”
“Don’t need to buy the lift bags. We got those, big ones, custom, cost a goddamn fortune,” Lange said. “And we’ve got a top-of-the-line GPS watch. Don’t need to buy one of those, either.”
* * *
Since price was not a problem, Virgil bought a Halcyon backplate and wing, on which the store’s shop would mount twin steel scuba tanks nominally holding a hundred cubic feet of air each, depending on pressure.
When the salesclerk had gone to look something up, Lange said, “Our first diver had something different. Like a life vest, sorta . . .”
“She was diving single tanks, right?”
“Yeah. We could get her right on top of the drop.”
“So she had a standard BC—buoyancy compensator. I need more air because we’re a lot further out. Easier to mount twin tanks on a backplate. The wing is the equivalent of her BC.”
“Okay.”
* * *
Virgil asked the clerk about tank pressure, and she said, “We do standard fills at three thousand psi.”