A Superior Death

The Coggins-Clarkes had been floating in darkness and silence-feeling the lake breathe, they said- several miles off Kamloops Point. Near as Anna could figure, she had swum just over a mile.

Free of tanks, mask, and flippers, but still swaddled in the dry suit, she lay like a landed fish amidships of the little runabout. At his own request-transmitted via Tinker- Oscar had been zipped inside her suit. Not without great risk of wetting his fur, as the little bear had pointed out.

After the surreal quality of the dive, Tinker and Damien arguing good-naturedly with a stuffed bear in a rain jacket didn’t strike Anna as even moderately peculiar. Given the choice between a bat-blind airless dimension nearly two hundred feet below and this gentle insanity, she gave the latter more credence.

Half sitting, she leaned against Tinker’s knees. She could feel the other woman’s long slender fingers resting along the side of her head. To keep it from rolling off, Anna thought foolishly and was comforted. Tinker’s other hand was at the tiller of the seventy-five-horsepower outboard motor.

Anna’s arms and legs felt heavy as stone. She could scarcely move them, yet, without her volition, they twitched occasionally, knocking with loud violence against the side of the aluminum boat. When Anna talked her voice sounded far away and the tale she was telling of Patience and the wine and the Kamloops, absurd.

Damien, head bent over a compass strung around his neck on a cord, was navigating the little craft through the black and drifting waterscape. A flashlight duct-taped to the bow provided all they had of running lights.

“Watch it!” Anna barked suddenly. She’d sensed as much as seen a shape in the fog beyond Damien. Immediately Tinker cut what little power the engine produced and helped Anna as she struggled to sit upright.

“Oops!” Damien said cheerfully as the nose of the runabout bumped into the floating obstacle. “A boat,” he announced.

“Of course a boat,” Anna growled peevishly as she tried to get her useless legs folded underneath her.

Tinker noted the cranky tone: “You’re feeling better,” she approved.

Anna laughed and was alarmed at the sharp pain it caused in her left lung, near her heart. “Yes,” she said, her breath coming in a gasp. “Unh!” The grunt was to alleviate the pain in her right knee as she pulled herself up holding on to the gunwale of the vessel they’d run against.

Standing half erect, she could see over the gunwale onto the stern deck. “It’s the Belle Isle. She must have been cut loose. Give me a boost.”

Damien wedged a shoulder awkwardly under her rump and managed to spill her over into the Bertram without overturning his own boat. Tinker and he scrambled aboard with more agility and tied the aluminum runabout to the stern cleat.

On unsteady legs, Anna staggered to the helm. Restored to life, the surface, and her patrol boat, her vision had tunneled: she would find Patience Bittner.

Tinker and Damien settled quietly on the bench across from the pilot’s and, hands intertwined, watched the drama unfold with great interest but no apparent surprise or concern. Soon Anna forgot they were there.

Her mind, usually a fairly tractable organ, was hardly clearer on the surface than it had been under the confusing effects of Martini’s Law at thirty-two fathoms. Waves of dizziness shook her and it seemed as though her eyesight was blurred at the edges, though it was difficult to tell with the sinuous fog moving through her running lights. She didn’t care to hazard a guess which problems were internal and which external. Definitely internal was the intense, sharp aching in her knee and left shoulder. The bends: Anna had been down too long, gotten too cold, ascended too fast.

Trusting the radar to keep her from ramming any night-crawling fools, she nudged the throttles further open. Never had time been so much of the essence as it had been this day. Ascent time, bottom time, decompression time, time immersed in frigid water, now-if she’d been down much too long, or come up much too fast-time till she could reach a recompression facility. For deep-water divers, tempus not only fugited but killed.

“I’ll leave you in Rock.” Anna remembered her passengers as she rounded Blake’s Point and started down the protected channel between Edwards Island and Isle Royale.

“We’ll stay till you’ve got somebody else,” Tinker said.

“You’ll get out at Rock,” Anna reiterated.

“No.”

Anna didn’t pursue it. She’d seen women like Tinker, fragile, gossamer creatures, chain themselves to trees, lie down in front of bulldozers, tangle themselves in the nets of tuna boats till it took half a dozen burly policemen to dislodge them.

“Two-oh-two.” Anna tried to raise Scotty on the radio. He didn’t respond and she glanced at her pocket watch tethered to the depth finder where she’d left it for safekeeping when she’d donned her diving gear. “Past cocktail hour,” she observed sourly. “He’s turned his radio off.”

“Somebody else, then,” Tinker suggested.

Refocusing on her radar screen, Anna forbore comment. The fog in her peripheral vision was definitely internal and she was unable to blink or wish it away.

Rock Harbor was as quiet as she had seen it since early in the season. Half a dozen boats, as still in the flat water as if they were set in concrete, lined the dock. The only one showing any sign of life was the Spirogyra. Her rear deck was strung with paper lanterns that made diffused spots of pink and yellow and green in the fog. Disembodied laughter floated from her direction.

The low growl of an engine starting up intruded. The sound was clean and high-pitched: a motor that had been souped up. “The Venture,” Anna guessed aloud. “She decided not to hang around until the body turned up.” She glanced sharply at Tinker and Damien on the bench still handfast like teenagers on a date.

“No,” Tinker said firmly.

“Damn,” Anna breathed. Undoubtly Patience would be headed for Canada with a good chunk of cash and all the evidence in an improbable-and, without the wine, possibly unprovable-theft of historical artifacts. Even with the evidence, Denny’s death would be tough to pin on Bittner beyond a reasonable doubt. A good defense attorney could easily make the attempt on Anna’s life sound like an accident.

“Damn,” Anna said again.

“Go,” Damien urged. “The Windigo has found modern form: greed. It feeds on the human spirit.” His eyes were sparkling, more boy than magician at the thought of this adventure.

“Cut that damn sea anchor loose,” Anna ordered and he ran to loosen the runabout.

Shifting one engine to reverse, the other forward, Anna turned the Belle Isle in a tight, hard circle and was rewarded by yelps of protest emanating from the heavily waked and fog-bound Spirogyra.

There was just the one moving blip on the radar screen. She followed. Either Patience had holed up in the few seconds it had taken to turn the Belle Isle and been replaced by another vessel, or the lime-green blot moving south down Rock Harbor was the Venture. As Anna pushed the throttle forward, she sent up a prayer to a god so vague it and hope had come to mean the same thing, that the waterway harbored no half-submerged snags.

Catching Patience in the channel was her only chance. Once the Venture hit open water she would be lost. The Bertram was a powerful, well-built boat but she wasn’t particulary fast, not when compared to the reworked engine replacing the standard-issue on Bittner’s Chris-Craft.

If Patience realized she was being pursued, even in the close quarters of the channel she could make a successful run for it.

“There are a few advantages to being dead,” Anna mused. “It’s a good cover.”

“Yes,” Tinker agreed and Anna wondered what it would take to surprise the Coggins-Clarkes.

“Tinker, my three fifty-seven is just inside the door to the bow on the bench to the left under my trousers. Get it.”

Without a word, Tinker hopped down from the bench and opened the small door. Seconds later she reappeared holding the revolver on both palms like a sacred offering. “This will be a complication,” she said as Anna set the revolver on the dash between the depth finder and the radar screen. Tinker spoke with such assurance Anna wondered if she could see, along with things corporeal and existential, the immediate future.

The green mark on the radar grew larger. Reaching across Damien and his wife, curled together again like