* * *
On his last dive, he’d seen one more can of heroin that he didn’t think he had time to get to, but as he ascended, he used the Genesis to pull him over to the brilliant white LEDs, and then went as straight up as he could, pausing for decompression stops, and then all the way to the surface, where he checked the GPS watch and noted the reading.
On this trip, he steered directly west from the drop point, surfaced, made his way to the noted GPS coordinates. Boat lights were approaching from the north, appeared to be a bit off to the west of him, but coming fast, and he vented air from his wing and dropped straight down.
He got lucky. Visibility had improved overnight, and when he activated the light wand at a hundred and thirty feet, he immediately saw LEDs of two cans to the south, and another to the north. He had the southern cans bagged in the first minute on the bottom and could still see the glow from the can to the north. That gave him a solid compass heading for the line of cans, and he picked up the northern can a minute later and could see another beyond that.
He was moving quickly, and slightly lower, now down to a hundred and seventy feet, getting narced, six cans bagged, when his leg was snagged and he was yanked off-line. He would have lost the Genesis if it hadn’t been tethered to his backplate. He struggled against the opposing pulls on his leg and from the Genesis, managed to drag in the machine and turn it off.
He swiveled, gathered himself, let his heartbeat slow, and then used his most powerful flashlight to look at his right leg and fin. He was tangled in a coil of half-inch-wide plastic strap, the kind used to secure boxes for shipping. It rose in a snarl off the bottom, a tangle the size of a government desk. He pulled at it, and found it securely fastened to a lump of something on the bottom. There were a half dozen bright-colored fishing lures hung up in it and tangles of line. What the lump was, he couldn’t tell—maybe concrete, or something metal. Junk, covered with mud.
He’d trained for this. The first rule: stop and think. He did that, then tried to slowly unwrap the tangle from his leg; that didn’t work so well, as the Genesis had pulled the tangling plastic strips into a knot. Moving in slow motion, he took his wire cutter from its pocket on the backplate harness and started cutting.
The stuff was tough, but his wire cutter clipped through it easily enough. He made a half dozen cuts, dropping the scrap pieces to the bottom, and then kicked free. His leg stung, and he took a moment to look at it. He’d cut himself and was bleeding, a trickle of blood from his calf, black in the LED light of his flashlight. He pulled the leg of his wet suit around to one side, so an undamaged section of the suit would cover the cut in his leg; the bleeding seemed to stop.
To the north, he could see the LED lights of another can, and he got himself away from the tangle of plastic straps, turned on the Genesis, and went after it. He fitted six cans in the first cargo bag and had five in the second, when his computer told him that his time was up. His bottom time had been shorter because of nitrogen build-up from the day before, but he’d done good.
He shot squirts of air into the lift bags, and he and the bags rose slowly until the computer told him he was at the first decompression stop. He waited for a full minute, then began the diagonal run back to the pickup, struggling to keep the bags rising as slowly as possible. They wanted to circle each other, and with slightly different amounts of air in each bag, and slightly different weights, they wanted to rise at different rates. Each bag had a release valve, but releasing exactly the right amount of air from each was tricky—as they rose, the air expanded and the bags tried to drag him up.
He hovered a stop at thirty feet, where he rested. He was sucking too much air, he thought, struggling with the lift bags, although his computer said that he had plenty left. His leg itched from the cut, and from the saltwater inside the suit. A boat seemed to be coming toward him, high-speed screws, so probably shallow draft, still some distance off. A sport-fishing boat? He got the Genesis going and headed east, into the ocean, praying that the boat wasn’t trolling. A big hook in the face—or in the bags, for that matter—really wasn’t something he needed to deal with.
He continued pushing east until the boat was well past, then surfaced and checked the GPS. Worried about the boat, he’d overrun the pickup point, so he turned back west and steered over to it, adjusted the lift bags until they sat at the surface, then added air to his wing until his head and shoulders were above water. With nothing but low rollers, he could see red and green boat lights out across the ocean; none seemed to be coming his way. He had twenty minutes to wait. He removed the regulator mouthpiece, and settled in to do that.
* * *
Rae sat on the deck and watched the condo lights go by on shore. A tranquil night, and beautiful, the salt air heavy and soothing in her face. The three men sat back by the cockpit talking; she couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. Then Cattaneo called out to her, “Ally, we’re coming up to the turn.”
“All right.”
Cattaneo was watching the radar for anything that might be Coast Guard. The only thing near them, as they came around, was a radar blob that was closing from the north on a line parallel to theirs, and not far away; they could clearly see the lights getting larger by the moment. When they came around in the turn and headed south, their radio burped, and a woman’s voice said, “Sailboat off Deerfield turning south, this is the powercat Uncaged coming up on your starboard side. If you hold your course we’ll stay well off to starboard.”
Cattaneo got on the radio and acknowledged the other boat’s call, then said, “Goddamnit, I hope Willy’s keeping a good watch. They’re running down the same line we are.”
The boat that went by looked like a fat white wedding cake, a catamaran at least three tiers high. A man on the cat’s flybridge raised a hand to them as it went by.
“Gonna get me one of those,” Regio said, as he watched it go. “Fuck a condo down here. You could live on a boat like that and wouldn’t cost you anything like a condo.”
“That boat cost anywhere between a buck and a half and two when it was new,” Cattaneo said. “You can get a damn nice condo for that price.”
They were talking condo prices when Rae’s phone rang: she took it out of her pocket, looked at it, frowned, and answered. A man’s voice, artificially cheery: “We’re calling to alert you to an opportunity to insure your car against . . .”
Rae said, “Fuck you,” and punched off.
Cattaneo laughed and asked, “What was that?”
“He wanted to alert me to an opportunity,” she said. She felt a chill crawl down her spine, but forced a skeptical grin. “Like Willy and his Salvation Army pot.”
“Got a cousin up in Jersey doing that, phone work,” Lange said, faking a shudder. “You know what they say when somebody listens to the pitch and then declines the offer? They say, ‘Fuck you very much.’ The guy who’s listening never picks it up. They think you’re saying, ‘Thank you very much.’”