Lanny, beside me, flinched.
“Oh, one more thing. Flynn had company on the Destiny—Fred Stavis was also aboard. You just missed him. He's on a Coastie medic boat now.” She waved in the direction of shore. “Got shot.”
We just listened. It was too much. Tolliver opened his mouth to speak and then just shook his head.
“No need to give me that look, Doug. Fred's stable. I got aboard here fast as I could.” Sandy indicated the dive platform and ladder at the stern. “Did first aid, that's all I do, then I phoned the Coasties. And your people. Assume they'll be along soon.”
Tolliver finally spoke. “How did Fred get shot?”
Sandy jerked a thumb at the Sea Spray. “Ask the idiot who shot him.”
The four of us turned to look at Jake. He lounged on the bench at the stern, the bench where Walter and I had sat a week ago preparing to go whale watching, where I'd been sitting when I got my first look at Jake Keasling on the neighboring dock. He looked much the same now, breezy, although his green hair had grown out to show the blond roots.
Jake tipped his head to look up at Sandy. “This idiot saved your life.” Jake shifted to face us. “Never did trust those dudes. Especially after that diver got poisoned — on our beach. I figured if you could prove it was one of the dudes you'd arrest him. Since you didn't I figured it was up to Keaslings to watch out for Keaslings. And that's what this Keasling did. Flynn's on the ladder going down to the dive platform and Sandy's shouting she's gonna call the Coast Guard and then Fred pulls a gun. What else could I do? Self defense.” Jake put his hands in the air. They trembled.
“Jake.” Tolliver struggled to find more words. “Where's the firearm now?”
Jake slowly lowered his hands and picked up a mesh dive bag.
I stared across the water at the mesh bag, sagging with the weight of its cargo. I couldn't tell, from here, that it held a gun. I flashed back to Joao Silva's dive bag on Sandy's boat, a week ago. I hadn't been able to tell, then, what the bag held. Just something colored red. Some kind of weird synchronicity, I thought. Mesh dive bags holding trouble.
I shivered.
Walter was shivering. He said, “I propose that we head back to shore and Doug can continue his questions in a warm office.”
“Works for me.” Jake lifted his hand and splayed his fingers and shook his wrist, giving some sort of okay sign. “You good, Bro?”
Lanny, beside me, was shivering.
I had to speak. “Jake, you're lucky to still have a brother.” It hurt to speak. My throat was raw; breathing canned air; swallowing fear. Swallowing guilt. I looked up at Sandy, still leaning on the Destiny's rail. “And you, Sandy. If you'd shared information instead of building a wall around your castle you might have saved us all a lot of grief.”
Sandy leveled a long look at me, at the four of us on the Breaker, and she said, “I'll live with it.”
We headed back to harbor, Sandy piloting the Destiny and Jake piloting his sister's boat and Tolliver driving the Breaker, throttle opened wide.
Walter and Lanny and I rode in silence, drained to the core.
CHAPTER 48
Back at the pier, as we began to ferry gear off the boat, Lanny asked Tolliver, “Are you going to arrest me?”
We stopped in our tracks.
Lanny clutched his swim fins, one in each hand. His knuckles were white.
Tolliver finally answered. “For what?”
“For helping Mr. Flynn.”
“Son, I'm going to have a lot of questions but now isn't the time to….”
“Yes please I want to say it now.”
Tolliver shrugged, and set down the tank he'd been carrying.
Walter and I set down our gear.
Lanny licked his lips. He faced us all. “I thought the iron seed thing was hurting the ocean so I tried to shut it off and that messed up the big gate in the cavern and then Mr. Flynn told me that a lot of those big jellyfish got out — and I didn't even know about the gates and the jellyfish — so Mr. Flynn told me all about the project and then he said I betrayed him…” Lanny's voice rose, “…and then he said I could fix what I broke and he said the big gate wasn't open that long and it shut again, that's called fail secure, and he said good thing the little gate didn't open and he said he would forgive me if I went back down to put in new numbers to be sure the little gate always stayed closed so the little jellyfish couldn't ever get out. Only Mr. Flynn…” Lanny stopped.
Walter said, very gently, “Mr. Flynn was trying to kill you.”
Lanny said, “I know.”
“You sabotaged his project — and you knew too much — so he sent you to open the gate. You would have been the one to get swarmed.”
“I know.”
I still didn't get it. “What did he tell you about the project?”
“It was going to be good.”
“Good?”
Lanny's eyes pleaded. “Mr. Flynn was going to be a hero and I was going to help him.”
“Didn't you understand what kind of man you were working for?”
He shook his head.
“Lanny.” I had to take in a deep breath. If I'd still been underwater my bubble trail would be off the charts. “Those creatures down there…what part of that was good?”
“That wasn't good.”
“Then what? The devil moons?”
“No that wasn't good, I didn't know that was going to happen, I just knew Mr. Flynn liked to call them devil moons.”
“Then what, Lanny? What could possibly be good about Oscar Flynn's project?”
“He was going to make sick people well.”
CHAPTER 49
Lanny got it half-right. Oscar Flynn was aiming to be a hero.
The other half: he was well on the way to being a devil.
The little cubozoan looked familiar. If I'd run into it in the sea — and I wasn't busy freaking out — I might think I'd encountered it before. But I hadn't. The tank's label said Chironex fleckeri and its occupant bore the reputation of the most lethal jellyfish in the world.
I moved on to the cubozoan in the second tank. It looked so familiar I would swear I'd encountered it before. But I hadn't. The second tank's label said Carybdea marsupialis. Native Californian. Compared to its cousin in the first tank, C. marsupialis was something of a wimp. At least according to Dr. Violet Russell and Wikipedia.
I moved on to the third tank, where the cubozoan I knew floated like a dandelion. It looked a good deal like the little cube in the second tank. It looked exactly like the glassy cubes I'd seen six hours ago in Oscar Flynn's aquarium in the cavern on Cochrane Bank. Here, now, in Flynn's lab, it was confined to a tank as small as a lunch box and thankfully I did not share the same water with it.
I'd hoped to never lay eyes upon such a thing again.
The label on the third tank was a cryptic laboratory notation: CF/CM.3.2. The tank should bear a clearer warning: here is something new, a box jellyfish native to California waters, carrying the enhanced toxin of the most lethal jellyfish in the world. This jellyfish — Oscar Flynn's genetically-tweaked cross between cousins — had cause to usurp C. fleckeri's reputation. Flynn's creation was twice as venomous, at least according to his lab notes. Certainly, according to what we'd witnessed down in the sea.
If I were to slap a warning label on the third tank I'd write: here is something that should not exist.