Deep Shadow

swum up through the black water intending to eat the glittering wrapper but had changed its mind.

Goddamn, it was big. Seven or eight feet long, at least.

Perry almost said something to King, but decided no, there was a chance he had imagined it. Could be. He had swallowed two more tabs of Adderall and could feel his edges sharpening, the chemical sparkling through his brain, brightening dark threads and creating halos around trees where wind was blowing the waxy light.

There was another matter Perry had been waiting to address. The topic was creating pressure inside his skull and needed to get out. Perry was still fuming about the way King had almost bolted, back there at the old man’s house, instead of joining in and doing what had to be done. There was something else, too.

“The next time we steal bicycles,” Perry said over his shoulder to King, “I take first pick. I wanted that Trek, but you took it. Didn’t even ask.”

He gave the man a hard look, adding, “Bikes or anything else. The King don’t get first pick anymore. Understand?”

King swallowed without making eye contact, afraid of his cell mate for the first time since Statesville.

“Sure,” he said, “whatever.” He was chewing the fig bar, letting his attitude say, No big deal, settling himself by turning his attention to practical matters. Thinking was his job; Perry was a two-time loser, nothing but a punk.

King took some time to review. How safe was this place?

The hunters’ shed was a quarter mile away, no path cut to the lake—like the hunters didn’t know the lake existed. There was a swamp, remnants of a barbed-wire fence cutting through—private property. Maybe that was the reason.

Today was . . . Monday?

Yes, Monday. He and Perry had food, and they could find a place to sleep beneath the cypress trees. Tomorrow, regular people would be working, no hunters to worry about. With any luck, a couple of Perry-dumb punks had spotted the Subaru on MLK, keys on the dash, and would give the cops something to do besides search the area again with helicopters.

King could picture it, the cops spotting the stolen car—Smart—and he let himself relax a little. Couple of days sleeping near the lake, then back on the bicycles and head south. Key West, just like regular tourists.

Safe. Yeah . . . And it got even better the next morning, Tuesday, when the men with the scuba gear and pickup truck appeared out of nowhere.

Perry and King watched the men from the distance. Watched the skinny hippie, with his ribs showing and ponytail, and the Apache-looking teenager and the nerdy-looking guy with glasses and shoulders take their sweet damn time before suiting up in their scuba gear, wearing short-sleeved wet suits, then walking their fins into waist-deep water before submerging, one by one.

That left the old redneck man, the one who’d been driving the truck, alone onshore.

Perry looked at King, but King took his time acknowledging Perry—back in charge now, and he wanted the punk to know it.

“Dude,” Perry whispered, “I wouldn’t go in that water. No fucking way, dude. What you think they’re after?” He still hadn’t told King what he had seen yesterday afternoon, the large dark shadow swirling beneath the surface.

King didn’t answer. An executive silence, that was the way to handle punks on speed.

“Maybe fishing, huh?” Perry said. “Or looking for something. How long you think they’ll be down?”

King held his hand out until Perry finally figured out what it was he wanted.

“Long enough,” King said, as Perry handed him the pistol. “You know what’s funny? They’re down there having fun, thinking nothing in the world can go wrong. But here we are.”

King was smiling, picturing the divers’ faces when they surfaced, finding their truck gone, and the old redneck dude shot or cut up—probably dead, knowing Perry.

ONE

ON A WINTER AFTERNOON, DIVING AN INLAND LAKE, south of Orlando, every small thing was going right, far better than I had anticipated, but then it all went suddenly wrong in ways I could not have imagined.

That’s the way it happens, when it happens. People like me, the obsessive planners, the compulsive guardians, always say later—if they survive—“It’s the one thing I didn’t think about.”

On the water, though, it’s seldom just one thing that goes awry. A single miscalculation can catalyze a disastrous momentum that no amount of planning can interrupt. Much of life is random. It’s as simple as that, although my spiritually devout friends wouldn’t agree. Some people find the illusion of order comforting.

I don’t. I prefer unencumbered facts even in an arbitrary universe. When plans unravel and the sky begins to fall, I’m all too aware that the tiniest bit of random luck can mean the difference between life and death.

On this winter afternoon, for example.

I was fifteen feet beneath the water’s surface, in what should have been one of the safest little dive spots in Florida, when I heard a clatter of falling rock and looked up just in time to kick free as a ledge collapsed, burying my two dive partners beneath a ton of archaic limestone.

Fossilized bone atop living bone. Water is a relentless and dispassionate reorganizer.

We had been clustered near the ledge when it fell. One of my partners had found a handhold in a rock vent as we peered through masks, studying a yard-long chunk of ivory that was tannin-stained the color of obsidian. It was the tusk of a prehistoric animal, a mammoth. For one million years, the animal had rested here—its calcified scaffolding, anyway. A couple of rib bones lay nearby; possibly a splinter of femur, too.

Then the three of us came along. We disturbed the delicate balance of limestone, causing a million years of history to come tumbling down with inverse irony: the very, very old burying the new.

My partners included my boat-bum hipster pal, Tomlinson, and a troubled teenage Indian kid from Oklahoma via the juvenile court system, William J. Chaser. Will, for short, to the people he’d met around the marina, except for Tomlinson, who called him Will-Joseph—Joseph being the kid’s middle name.

From the beginning, I’d argued against the boy coming along. I’d finally consented, though, as a favor to a high-powered woman—Will’s temporary guardian—and also because Tomlinson had fronted a convincing argument. The boy was a novice diver, true, but he was also an athlete, a high school rodeo star, tough, and as quick as a cat—when he wasn’t stealing horses, selling pot or running away from one detention center after another.

We had been underwater for half an hour. The kid was doing okay—impressive, in fact. He was as confident wearing fins as he was sitting a rodeo saddle. Tomlinson was having fun, and so was I. Old man Arlis Futch—a commercial fisherman and a friend—was miffed because he wasn’t in the water with us, but that was the way it had to be. Someone had to stay topside and watch the truck, right?

We were doing everything by the book—a book I had personally modified to add additional layers of safety net. Then the sky fell. Literally.

Tomlinson had found the spiral of fossilized ivory, and he had waved us over to look. The tusk was, indeed, an ancient and articulate relic to gaze upon. That’s when Will Chaser made a rookie mistake. I compounded the mistake by allowing him to do it. The kid was having trouble neutralizing his buoyancy. To steady himself, he thrust his hand into a rock crater and pulled. The lake’s basin was honeycombed rock, a delicate latticework of limestone. Will’s not a big kid, but he’s all muscle and sinew, and the pressure he put on the latticework was enough.

I didn’t see it coming, nor did Tomlinson. The man is relaxed and at ease in any situation—with the possible exception of an encounter with police—and he has great instincts. But he was in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. A microsecond before I reacted, my pal’s Buddha eyes narrowed, aware and thoughtful, then widened, alerted by sound and the changing water pressure from above. But too late.

In the slow explosion of silt, I was thinking, This can’t be happening, as I kicked free of the landslide.

It happened.