The water was shockingly cold. I let my body go limp, my heavy wet clothes pulling me down. When I didn’t move, the pain was less—maybe, I thought hazily, I should just stay down there in the cold agreeable depths and sleep.
Then my lungs started to burn. My arms were nearly useless. The blackness was closing in, the world was a tunnel. It hurt like hell, but I kicked and flailed my ineffectual arms to struggle to the surface.
Pulling air into my lungs hurt, yet it tasted so sweet.
The Top Ten was about fifty feet away, and the gap was widening. I was thankful for the ebb tide that was sucking me out to sea, away from that fire extinguisher and madman. The fight in me was gone. I just wanted to drift away. The bulky figure on deck pulled the ski mask off, and I didn’t need to see the spiky hair to know who it was. Esposito. He spun around and ran for the gangway.
Because of my sore left shoulder and bruised or maybe broken right wrist, my legs were having to do all the work of treading water to keep my head up. My sodden sneakers were weighing my legs down. I kicked them off and let my legs float. I knew the tide was carrying me alongside the jetty, but I had to rest before I could swim.
Then I heard the high-pitched whine that an outboard makes underwater. Thank God. Some crazy guys are fishing at this hour of the morning. I saw the boat headed out in the middle of the inlet, and I began to raise my arm to wave at them, when I realized the boat looked very much like a certain white Sea Ray I had seen before, only then there had been two divers aboard. Now, a lone man stood at the center console, and he seemed to be slowly searching the surface of the water on either side of him.
Damn.
I ducked my head underwater and pushed my hair forward over my face to cut down on the reflection of the shoreside lights on my white skin. I raised my head just enough to breathe through my nose. And I watched.
He didn’t appear to have seen me, but nonetheless, he was coming straight for me. I waited as long as I thought was safe, slowly hyperventilating. Then I dove.
I don’t usually open my eyes underwater, but I wanted to try to see when it would be safe for me to resurface. But it was just all blackness, everywhere. It made me feel disoriented, as though I didn’t know which way was up, and which was down. Like most women, if my lungs are full of air, I float, so I had to struggle to stay under. Even moving slowly as he was, it should have taken him only a few seconds to pass over me, but the whine of his outboard surrounded me in the water. I had no idea which direction it was coming from. My chest was already starting to constrict. There hadn’t been time to get a proper breath before diving. I swam in the direction that I thought would take me away from the boat, but the outboard whine only grew louder then overpowering. I thought I was going to get hit by the prop. In my imagination, I could see the whirling, slicing blades all around me in the water. Going against every fiber in my body that was screaming out for air I tried to swim deeper or at least in the direction that I thought was down. In a flash, I imagined this was how my mother had done it, walking into ever-deeper water until it closed over her head, the sheer force of her will refusing to answer all the cues and calls and demands of her body. But deep in the cerebral cortex, at the simplest levels, before thought, perhaps even before instinct, resides the species’ imperative to survive. My self-preservation autopilot took over and reversed my direction. The hell with the props. I needed air. Desperately. Now.
I broke through the surface of the water no more than fifteen feet behind his churning outboard. The engine noise was much louder at the surface, thankfully, because I was making a hell of a lot of noise gulping down air in rasping breaths. He seemed to be moving faster, the gulf between us was broadening rapidly. I turned around to swim away from him, thinking I would be swimming back into the inlet, but I saw nothing but dark black sea and sky. The reason he had seemed to be coming from every direction at once above me was because he had been turning his boat around right over my head. Esposito was motoring back into Port Everglades. I was drifting out to sea.
XVI
I could see the lights of Hollywood Beach appearing as I drifted past the end of the breakwater. I estimated the current was running at least two knots. The water grew rougher as the outgoing tide ran into the incoming wind chop. Several waves broke over my head, and I swallowed a mouthful of seawater. My eyes and nose burned, and I still didn’t have much movement in either my left arm or my right hand. There was no way I could swim against that tide.
Lifeguards teach swimmers that if they are ever caught in a riptide to simply relax, let the current carry you out, then swim parallel to the beach and go ashore where there is no outbound current. That would not have been a problem if I had been fresh, but in the exhausted and injured state I was in, I doubted that I would make it back in to the beach. I was having enough trouble just treading water and trying to keep my head above the waves.
On the south side of the channel, I suddenly heard an explosive puff of air, followed by a deep groan. Squinting to clear the water out of my eyes, I made out the green light on a channel buoy. It was farther away than I expected. Clearly, the Gulf Stream was already carrying me north. The buoy’s air horn moaned again as it rose and fell on the waves.
I turned my eyes seaward. There should be another marker, the harbor entrance buoy. The light on that one would be red and brighter, and the buoy itself would be bigger. Maybe, big enough to crawl onto.
On the crest of a swell, I spotted the red light, but it disappeared when I dipped down into a trough between swells. On the next peak, I found the light again, and was alarmed to see how fast I was drifting. I might pass the buoy before the tide carried me out there.
I turned south and started kicking, trying to fight the Gulf Stream, that mighty current that flows with the strength of all those trade-wind seas that pile up in the Gulf of Mexico, only to spill out toward the north. The ebb tide was carrying me out to the buoy, but I had to fight the current from carrying me up the coast before I made it out there.
Trying to ignore the pain, I began to stroke with my left arm, a sidestroke and a scissors kick, trying to hold my hand steady on the wobbly wrist. Half the time I wasn’t even sure I was going in the right direction when for several waves I wouldn’t see the red eye glowing in the darkness. Then it would appear again, I’d adjust my course slightly, and kick with renewed vigor.
The cold water was numbing the pain in my shoulder, and I drank in the brilliant night sky awash in stars, the glistening lights of the coastal condos, the luminous green bursts of the phosphorescent plankton as I stroked through the sea. There was nothing frightening about this night. Some people probably believe right up to the last minute before they drown that they can save themselves, that their efforts will be enough to snatch them back from the precipice. Perhaps they never become aware that it isn’t enough. They fight to the end, and then there is nothing. And then again, there are those, like my mother, who never even try to save themselves.
The next time I saw the light I was startled to see how close it was, and I heard the bell clanging for the first time. I wondered if I had blacked out for a minute or just gone into some kind of dream state. But the buoy was right there. I was slightly to the north of it, though, the stream having pushed me even farther off course than I thought.
My arms and legs felt leaden. The water was so much warmer than the chill wind on my face. The water wrapped me, blanket-like, comfortable, appealing. I wanted to stop swimming, to rest, to sleep. Forget the damn buoy.