“Perfect.”
“Will you marry me?”
“No.”
He shrugged.
“Might as well accept your offer just the same, if only ‘cause it’ll get me off the night shift.”
Megan put her hand over the back of his and gave it a fond squeeze.
“Congratulations,” she said.
“And?”
She smiled at him.
“And,” she said, “here’s the catch….”
SIXTEEN
“You looked to make sure?” Cobbs said. He was chewing on a thick wad of gum. “I mean, you were watching, right?”
Dex plucked an imaginary lint ball off his mackinaw. It had been maybe ten minutes since he’d tied up the boat and Cobbs had already asked the question half a dozen times in one form or another.
“I told you, it’s done,” he said. “What more you want me to say?”
The look Cobbs gave him felt like a shove. He was wearing his Smokey hat and warden’s uniform, and held a Remington 870 pump gun with 20-gauge chambering and a collapsible stock. His binoculars hung from a strap around his neck.
“I want you to tell me what you saw,” he said bluntly.
Dex licked his lips. He heard something scrabble across the limb of a tree in the nearby woods and glanced distractedly toward the sound. Perched on the budding maple, a squirrel twitched its bushy tail as it nibbled on whatever morsel of food was in its forepaws, the bright black beads of its eyes warily studying the two humans below.
He turned back to Cobbs.
“Important thing’s what me an’ you ain’t seen,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meanin’ I didn’t see no bubbles from my boat, an’ you didn’t see Ricci’s head bobbin’ up out the water through them binocs of yours,” Dex said.
Cobbs stared at him and chewed his gum. They were in the shade behind the prominent slab of rock that marked their meeting spot on the beach.
“Let’s sum this fucking thing up once more, just to help me picture it right in my mind,” he said.
Dex expelled a deep, tired breath and nodded with resignation.
“You waited while the bubbles was still comin’ up,” Cobbs said.
Dex nodded wearily again.
“And when there wasn’t any more you turned back here.”
Dex nodded a third time.
“So in other words,” Cobbs said, and hefted his Remington, “I won’t need to get in the motorboat and use this shotgun to blow Ricci out of the water.”
“Is the point I been tryin’ to make,” Dex replied, totally wiped out, and more disgusted with his lot than ever before.
Cobbs watched Dex another moment, looking as if he was about to hit him with another round of questions. Then he seemed to change his mind, pushed the chewing gum from the back of his mouth with his tongue, and spat it out onto the pebbly ground.
“Good riddance to one God Almighty asshole,” he said.
Ricci splashed above the water just when he’d felt he couldn’t exhale any longer and would drown within feet of the surface.
Exhausted and gasping, he floated on his back and swooped air into his lungs. Thus far he was feeling no symptoms of decompression sickness, but that didn’t necessarily mean he could dismiss it as a serious concern. The first indications were usually a bone-deep pain in the joints of the arms or legs, and could take minutes or even hours to become apparent. Still, he had fair odds of getting away clean. The nitrogen gas in the bloodstream that caused the bends when you ascended too rapidly after long descents — decompression stops being meant to give it time to dissolve through respiratory processes — tended to accumulate in fatty tissue, and he’d worked hard to stay in peak shape for more reasons than just impressing women at the gym.
He took a few moments to recoup, aware he couldn’t spare too many more. Not safely anyway. The skiff was nowhere in sight, but it was almost certain the water was being scanned for signs of his reappearance — though he did not yet know whether it would be from the island, the skiff, or both. Whichever, he wasn’t going to let himself be spotted.
He glanced around get his visual bearings, then double-checked them on his compass, having no idea how far he’d drifted from the dive site, or which direction the current might have taken him in. He quickly found that he was near the mouth of the cove and within a hundred yards of its southeastern flank. The skiff wasn’t anywhere in sight, not that he’d expected it would be. To the contrary, he thought he could guess where Dex must have brought it.
His breath slow and almost regular now, Ricci allowed himself another twenty seconds to recover his strength, reached into his satchel for the eight-inch J snorkel he’d separated from his spare oxygen canister before ditching it, and put the mouthpiece between his lips. Then he turned facedown and lowered his head underwater, blew into the snorkel to make sure its airway was clear, and began to swim toward shore, his legs loose and straight behind him, his fins stroking smoothly, gliding unseen beneath the surface of the bay.
It was, he thought, a bad run of snake eyes. He’d been set up twice in as many days, and on both instances had felt bound to confront his opposition when it was their two against his one — only this time he couldn’t count on Pete Nimec popping out of nowhere to even the odds.
Crouched low in a clump of juniper bushes perhaps five yards behind the jut of rock he’d noticed from the skiff, Ricci had just heard Cobbs and Dex working out a cover story to account for his “disappearance.” Simple, but it didn’t have to be anything more: Bumptious, know-it-all city boy Ricci had been diving for weeks without letting modest, conscientious local boy Dex properly check and maintain his scuba equipment, and since a tender couldn’t do his job if the diver insisted on being foolhardy, Dex had given up trying to argue the point with him. Divers had gotten into bad fixes before through their own carelessness, and it would surely happen again in the future.
If Ricci’s body didn’t turn up, that would be that. And in the unlikely event it happened to float ashore before scavenging crabs, lobsters, and groundfish picked it apart, even an honest investigator would conclude Ricci had died from an out-of-air accident due to instrument failure, based upon a post mortem exam and the faulty reading on his psi gauge. Why suspect the gauge had been jiggered with by his partner when there was no evidence of a prior falling out between them; indeed, when any of the dealers with whom they regularly did business would attest they’d seemed to get along fine as a team? And besides, considering that Dex would be handing his pile of homespun horseshit to the sheriff or one of his deputies, and would have Cobbs signing off on it, he could probably chalk Ricci’s fate up to a Big-foot attack, alien abduction, or head-on collision with the Flying Dutchman and get away with it, no sweat.
Ricci looked and listened from the concealment of the brush. In their own way they were good, he thought, the only monkey wrench in their scheme being that he was better and savvier. His mistake — and he acknowledged it was significant — had been underestimating how far Dex could be pushed. Ricci had known Dex had his weaknesses, and they’d never quite been friends, but had always gotten on all right as partners. Much as he disliked admitting it to himself, he’d started out being a cop with a deep-rooted core of positivism, and some rudiments of that attitude remained stubbornly lodged inside him despite having spent years exploring the darkest alleys of human nature. He’d been hesitant to think the worst of his partner, and had almost paid for it big-time.
Ricci breathed quietly, motionless, watching the two men stand and talk in the small, pebble-sprinkled clearing around the big rock. He had approached them through the woods at a diagonal, and was more or less behind Cobbs, who was turned toward the beach, with Dex facing inland in Ricci’s general direction. While they had been ironing out the main points of their little deception, he’d put the finishing touches on a plan of his own, and it too was pretty bare. Cobbs had a weapon — not the sharpshooter’s rifle Ricci had speculated about earlier, but a Remington pump, which at close range could pack an even deadlier wallop — and so would have to be taken down first. This time there was no truck door to pin his sorry ass in, but the shotgun would only be a problem if he had the chance to use it. As for Dex… he was unarmed, and would be easy.