Dex frowned, his brow creased in thought. What the fuck was he supposed to do? He had to make a livin’ here, year in, year out, or see his family starve from hunger. Had to be able to walk down the street without lookin’ over his shoulder for Phipps or some other asshole deputy followin’ behind in a sheriff-mobile, ready to bust balls for any lame excuse could be concocted on the spur of the moment.
He took a drag of his cigarette and puffed a swirl of smoke and steam from his breath into the brisk salt air, his comments to Ricci as they’d left the wharf once again recurring to him.
“Regular as you are ’bout where an’ when you dive, buggers ought to have you figured….”
An’ regular as clockwork he was. Lining his gear up on the deck the same exact way every mornin’ they went out, puttin’ it all on in the same order every time, an’ then divin’ to his normal spots, takin’ no longer’n half an hour to fill his first couple totes with what he found on the underwater ledges at the head of the cove. Soon as their markers came to the surface, Dex would haul the bags aboard, knowin’ Ricci was on his way down into the thickest part of the eelgrass forest, where he’d drift with the current ‘stead of against it like divers usually did, so they’d be swept back toward the boat rather than away from it if they lost their bearin’s. Drift divin’, as it was called, was risky business, but by lettin’ the current carry him along, Ricci could cover the most amount a’ bottom area in the least amount a’ time — and it was at the bottom where he’d find the best, plumpest urchins.
Dex, meanwhile, was supposed to lift anchor, throw the outboard into reverse, an’ keep his eyes peeled for Ricci’s bubbles while backin’ up slow an’ easy to tag along behind him. Some divers clipped a float line to themselves so the tender could stay on the lookout for the bright-colored marker rather’n have to keep his eyes peeled for bubbles, which were a helluva lot harder to spot. But in these waters there was so damn much eelgrass that the line would just get tangled up in it.
Dex glanced at his wristwatch. Just a few minutes to go ’fore Ricci was down maybe five, six fathoms. Too far to make it back up without air, an’ right when his air supply would run out. Dex would wait a little while longer, then throttle up the engine in forward, haulin’ ass away from there as fast as he could, knowin’ his partner was drownin’ to death somewhere below, his lungs swellin’ in his chest till they burst like balloons got stuck with a pin.
Yeah, Dex thought, he’d sold Ricci out, no puttin’ it any different. Sold him out, and now good as killed him. But what was there to say?
He’d had no choice, he thought. No choice at all.
Things were as they were, an’ there was really nothin’ more to say about it than that.
Ricci had been at his bottom depth for nearly half an hour when he hit the jackpot.
Having filled two of his three totes with smallish urchins from the upper levels of the slope, he’d sent their floatlines to the surface, left them for Dex to recover, and then descended below the eelgrass canopy. The going proved rough much of the way down. As he had noticed leaving the harbor channel, the changeable winds had produced fairly strong turbidity currents, forcing him to waste a lot of energy fighting the drag, and stirring up so much sand and detritus that he’d been unable to see further than five or six feet in any direction at some points during the dive. Although conditions improved once he neared the floor of the cove and began to go with the drift, his outer field of vision had remained limited to about a dozen yards, making him wonder if he’d have to cut his dive short without bagging any first-rate specimens.
Then the recess had revealed itself to him through pure chance. Hidden from above by a wide ledge of rock, its entrance sheeted over with eelgrass, it would have gone unnoticed had the current not disturbed the fronds just as he’d been swimming past.
He glided closer to investigate, sweeping the area with his flashlight, using his free hand to part the long, serpentine strands of kelp ribboning up to the surface. Schools of silvery herring and other tiny fish Ricci couldn’t name bulleted in and out of the light as he shone it into the opening.
The penetrating high-intensity beam revealed the hollow to be quite small, cutting no more than twelve or fifteen feet into the slope of the ridge, its entrance barely wide enough to admit Ricci in his scuba outfit and tank — a tight squeeze. Still, he felt a surge of excitement over his find. The interior of the cavity was filled with mature, whoppingly big urchins. Urchins galore, clinging three and four deep to every vertical and horizontal surface. The incredible concentration would allow him to stuff his goodie bag to the top just by gathering those nearest the entrance, leaving the rest of the spiny creatures to do whatever they did when they weren’t intruded upon by foraging predators, human or otherwise.
He reached down to his thigh and pulled his urchining knife from its scabbard.
Before getting started, Ricci checked his watch and gauge console, then did some quick mental computations based on the scuba instruction he’d received in the Navy. Though his psi dial showed an ample reserve of air, he was already edging beyond a no-decompression profile and would need to make a decompression stop on ascent. Not atypical for him, but very definitely something to remember.
He swam into the recess, his legs scissoring behind him, taking pains not to scrape his air tanks on the ceiling. Given his imminent plans to kiss his urchin-hunting career good-bye, he found his excitement over the score puzzling, and maybe even a little bit funny. Me in a nutshell, he thought. Never a natural at anything, but bent on giving the job his dogged best to the end. It was the old blue-collar ethic Ricci guessed he’d inherited from his steelworker father, and often wished he could wring from himself once and for all, having learned the hard way that a job well done could just as soon bring on problems as any sort of credit or reward — and worse, that you occasionally wound up getting screwed for your diligence.
Ricci went at his newfound bounty, the tote in his left hand, the knife in his right. The urchins crawling slowly over the backs of those on the rocks were easy pickings, and so plentiful that it took him just a few minutes to fill the mesh bag to a third of its capacity. Pleased with his rapid progress, he got down to collecting the others, sliding the flattened tip of the knife under the suction discs at the tips of their tubular feet, then carefully working them loose from the surfaces to which they were anchored. A slower task than the first, it needed to be performed with some delicacy if he was to avoid cracking their shells — which would be an unfortunate waste, since they were worth zilch to him unless brought up alive.
Ricci had been absorbed in his task for about twenty minutes when his thoughts wandered back to the twinkle of brightness he’d noticed from the skiff. Might have been from something left behind by an ecologically challenged sailor, or a bit of shiny flotsam tossed up onto the island by the surf. Might have. But he couldn’t shake the idea that it also could have been the sun glancing off the lens of a pair of binoculars — or a telescopic gun-sight. Maybe his long years of soldiering and police work had lent undue weight to what ought to have seemed an overly imaginative notion, but why discount it offhand?
And it wasn’t just his experience that had to be considered. Pete Nimec, after all, had nailed Cobbs’s personality type right on the head. Ricci had humiliated him, shaken up his confined little world as if it were one of those snow globes people bought at souvenir shops, and Cobbs would be stewing in his own juices until he regained some of his pride. Word spread fast in a small town, and he’d want to be sure he got even with Ricci before the tale of his ass-kicking found its way into local folklore. It might be that he’d take some time to plot out his reprisal, but Cobbs was a hothead, and sort of crazy. The far greater likelihood was that he’d act while he was still worked up — and try something as extreme as it would be rash.