After donning the belt, Ricci put on his mask, gloves, and fins, then reached into the bag again for his two dive knives and their harnesses. His chisel-tipped urchin knife went into a scabbard secured to his thigh, a pointed titanium backup blade into a similar rig on his left inner arm. Finally he used an elasticized lanyard to hang an underwater halogen light from his wrist.
Once suited up, he opened his second gear bag and extracted three nylon mesh totes, all of which had been packed in long, neat rolls that were held snug with bungee cords. He clipped their float lines to snaplinks on his buoyancy compensator, then raised himself onto the gunwale and sat with his back to the water.
“Don’t forget your spare O2,” Dex said. He took from the well an aluminum canister/snorkel assembly about the size of a bicycle pump, put it into a waterproof satchel, and carried it over to Ricci.
Ricci hung the satchel around his shoulders.
“Okay,” he said. “Ready to go.”
Dex cocked a thumb into the air.
“If you can’t send me up some whore’s pussy, I’ll settle for the eggs she been droppin’,” he said, and grinned as if he’d gotten off a sharp witticism.
Ricci went over the side with a backward roll, swam over to his floating tank, slipped it on, and attached the BC’s narrow low-pressure inflator tube, which would draw air from the tank through a twist valve within reach of his hand. For backup — and lesser, more incremental adjustments in buoyancy than this method easily allowed — his BC also had over its right shoulder strap an oral-inflation assembly consisting of a large-diameter air hose much like that of a vacuum cleaner or automobile carburetor, with a mouthpiece that could be actuated at the touch of a simple button-and-spring mechanism.
The last thing Ricci did before going under was check the submersible instrument console attached to a port atop his scuba tank by yet another rubber hose. On the console were two gauges — a digital readout for measuring depth and temperature, and an analog PSI air gauge below it. The air gauge showed the tank to be at its maxrated 4,000-psi working pressure, with the standard ten-percent safety overfill.
Glancing topside, he saw Dex lean forward over the rail, still grinning and poking his thumb skyward.
Ricci kicked away from the hull of the skiff, dumped air from his BC, and submerged.
Dex’s smile lasted only as long as it took for Ricci’s outline to disappear underwater. Then it, too, vanished. His eyes narrow, his mouth a thin line of tension, he stood at the gunwale watching the bubbles from Ricci’s exhalations reach the surface, the words they’d exchanged earlier that morning suddenly echoing in his mind.
“Regular as you are ’bout where an’ when you dive, buggers ought to have you figured by now,” he’d said to Ricci, before going on with some nonsense about the urchins moving out of town or some such. Just kind of wanting to break the silence between them.
“Can’t figure anything unless you have brains to speak of, ” Ricci had answered. “And they don’t. ”
Well, Dex thought, maybe the urchins didn’t have brains bigger than tiny specks of sand in their heads, didn’t even have heads that Dex could see, but he had smarts enough to do some figurin’ of his own. Not that God had made him a genius; if that was the case he wouldn’t have to be tendin’ boat every winter season, when the bitter mornin’ cold was like to shrivel your balls up into your stomach an’ turn the drip from your nose to icicles. But he knew for sure that Ricci would be thinkin’ about what happened with Cobbs an’ Phipps, and gettin’ to wonder about him bein’ in on the shake-down too. Was maybe even holdin’ onto some suspicions about that already, to guess from how he’d been quieter than usual this mornin’-not that he was any kind of chatterbox in what you might call his sunniest moods.
Still, Dex couldn’t afford to wait for Ricci to go the distance from bein’ suspicious of him to reachin’ any right conclusions, short a hop as that was. Maybe he didn’t run off at the mouth about himself like so many flatlanders did, telling you everythin’ about their lives from A through Z within five minutes of makin’ your acquaintance, but once in a while Ricci would mention something about when he was a police detective down in Beantown, an’ furthermore, Dex’s buddy Hugh Temple, whose girlfriend’s sister Alice worked at the real estate office in town, said she’d heard from her boy-friend worked at the Key Bank that Ricci used to be in some hotshit military outfit like the Rangers or Navy SEALs or maybe the Boy Commandos — whatever the fuck — before his cops-and-robbers days. That particular bit a’ scuttlebutt hadn’t surprised Dex, ’cause there was times when all you had to do was look in his eyes to see that he could be one dangerous son of a bitch to anybody who got on his wrong side.
Dex shook a cigarette from the pack in the breast pocket of his mackinaw, shoved it between his lips, and cupped a hand over its tip as he fired up his Bic lighter. He stood there smoking at the gunwale, his eyes following Ricci’s stream of bubbles. Truth was, he’d got on okay with Ricci, who always gave him an even shake as far as business went, and never treated anybody as if he was their better, the way a lot of folks from out of town did as a matter of course, especially the summer people with their kayaks, canoes, an’ mountain bikes on the roof racks of their whale-sized, showroom-new 4 x 4 wagons.
Those people, they’d stand around the middle of town in bunches of five, six, an’ more, wearin’ white shorts an’ sneakers that matched their perfect white teeth, never movin’ aside to let you pass, talkin’ so loud you’d think every one of ’em was deaf as a board. Cloggin’ the sidewalk as if they owned it, an’ couldn’t damn well see themselves sharin’ the street with anybody, like they was on some kinda movie set that was laid out just for them on Memorial Day, an’ got packed away into storage after they headed south come September, gatherin’ dust an’ cobwebs until the next summer of fun rolled round.
No, Dex hadn’t held any ill feelings for Ricci, not the other day when he’d taken off on him with that bullshit story about havin’ to mind the kids, not even now, after havin’ done his bit of tinkerin’ with Ricci’s air gauge last night, an’ preparin’ to leave him for a goner. But what choice did he have? Way he felt, it was kinda like goin’ to war an’ bein’ forced to shoot somebody you bore no personal grudge against, somebody you might even think was an okay fella if you got to know him over a frosty glass of suds, all because of circumstances that you could no more control than the turnin’ of the world. Havin’ been a soldier, Ricci would prob’ly understand that.
What Ricci could never understand, though, comin’ from away, was the kind of pressure he, Dex, had been under to cut a separate deal with Cobbs. How could he have refused that prick without jammin’ himself up big-time? Cobbs was in so tight with the sheriff an’ town managers, he’d see to it that Dex got cited for some kinda safety violation whenever he turned on the heat in his double-wide, an’ was pulled over, breathalyzed, an’ tossed in the drunk tank every time he drove his pickup home after havin’ put down one or two at the bar.
Ricci, on the other hand, didn’t have any such worries. He’d arrived in town with money enough to buy that nice house on the water, an’ likely had himself a hefty pension from the police force, not to mention military benefits that covered his meds an’ checkups at the V.A. hospital in Togas, plus Lord knows what other cookies the government might’ve tossed him. Ricci was a loner with no wife or kids, an’ it was a sure thing that sooner or later he’d be on his way to greener pastures.