you in the
“Denny was a diver. He’d dived all over the world. Australia. Mexico. He’d dived caves. He knew how I’d gotten into the captain’s cabin. He took off his tank, fed it through the porthole.”
Two stars now. Anna could feel herself losing touch and she tried to focus her eyes on the distant points of light. “While you were inside the cabin?” she pursued.
“I was inside. What did he think I’d do? He’d jerk his thumb and I’d follow him docilely up to prison? A fool. I grabbed the tank, pulled it through, yanked the regulator out of his mouth and slammed the port. Two seconds, three at most.”
In her mind’s eyes, Anna saw Denny scrabbling at the porthole with his dive knife. The movements growing jerky as his lungs began to burst. The gush of bubbles, the frantic breath that filled him with water. Drowning. Dead.
“I’d‘ve bolted for the surface,” Anna said. “So would Denny. So would anybody.”
“Denny got the porthole open.”
Anna forced her eyes open. Patience was looking at her, one cheek pressed against the deck, hair falling in strands across her eyes. She looked like a caged animal. “I grabbed his arm when he reached in, cranked it up against the bulkhead and braced my feet on either side till he stopped struggling.” Patience spoke with deliberation. The threat in her words was unmistakable.
Fear stirred Anna’s torpor. Patience was telling her of Denny’s death. That meant Patience thought Anna was going to die. She tried to pull herself up straighter, look alive, formidable. “Then you put the tanks back on his body, surfaced, and cut the
“Rest,” Patience said. “Lie back, Anna. Let yourself sleep for just a second. Nothing bad can happen in a second.”
“Fuck you,” Anna whispered. Taking a fold of flesh from the inside of her cheek, Anna bit down till she tasted salt, hoping this new pain would focus her mind, but it was lost in myriad others.
White light came, surrounded her, surrounded the
“Anna. Anna.” A sweet and gentle voice filled the illumined air; a voice bigger than anything human, a voice booming from all directions at once. A voice so kind Anna knew now, finally, she could let go of this world and glide into the next.
“Damn,” she said. “I’m in for it now.”
TWENTY EIGHT
“…Cut nearly in half. Look: it’s blood, blood in the sawdust.”
“Immortality is in your hands…”
“A needle and thread is all.”
“And a Dustbuster.”
“Put her down there, Dave.
“Carrie…”
Anna’s mind tuned in and out of the world around her. Twice she’d asked: “Whose blood?”
Tinker was there somehow. She’d answered, “Yours. Mixed with his.”
“Sawdust,” Damien had corrected his wife and Anna had lost the thread. She’d felt herself lifted easily, as easily as if she were a kitten, and knew it was not by Damien. Once she’d forced open her eyes and thought she’d seen Pizza Dave’s face, big as a harvest moon, floating above her.
“That can’t be right,” she’d said and heard vaguely someone saying, “Hush. Rest now.”
Somewhere in the distance she thought she heard Patience’s low voice pitched in persuasive tones as if selling something. “Don’t buy it,” she had mumbled, wishing she could speak more clearly.
Then there was Ralph’s voice and engines roaring. Anna came fully awake in a small compartment made up of equal parts noise and darkness. She stared up through a window. The sky was glittering with stars and a half-moon. Her feet were raised and stretched toward a panel lit by subdued, green, circular lights. She lay on her left side, her head lower than her feet.
Every part of her hurt. Her chest burned and sharp points of pain pierced her shoulder and knees. Tentatively, she wriggled her toes. They worked just fine. Over the years she had taken a few tumbles; bones had broken, muscles torn. The terror was always for the spine-paralysis. Again she’d gotten off lightly.
Then she remembered she’d not fallen off a Texas mountain, not been tossed from a horse. The lake had crushed her in its dark embrace. The damage would be internal, as dangerous and inexorable as the deep. “Oh dear…” she whispered.
“ ‘Bout time,” came a friendly voice.
Carefully, so as not to dislodge it from her shoulders, Anna turned her head to see who had spoken. “Ralph.” The District Ranger sat in the seat next to the board she was lashed to. She was glad to see him and felt bad that her voice sounded so dull. To let him know how welcome a sight he was, she tried to pat his knee, but her arm was tied down. “Ralph.” She repeated his name. It was all she could manage.
“It’s okay, Anna. You’re okay. We’re in the seaplane. Sid is flying low as he can so your decompression sickness won’t be made any worse. We’re almost to Duluth. There’s a medevac helicopter waiting there. They’ve got everything-even hot and cold running paramedics. They’ll be taking you to the hyperbaric chamber in Minneapolis. You’re going to be okay.”
“Backcountry…”
Ralph put a warm hand on her forehead to quiet her. “Lucas and I heard your little radio drama,” he said. “We just couldn’t call out. I was for going to bed and letting you fight off the forces of evil alone, but you know Lucas, he’s a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy. Made us do a forced march out in the dark. We got there just as the kids were dragging the bodies back into Rock. Lucas got the perpetrator to take care of. I got you.”
For a second time Anna tried to touch him, to let him know she’d heard, understood, appreciated. “My arm,” she complained, encountering the bandages.
“Routine packaging,” Ralph reassured her. “There’s nothing wrong with your arm. I just bandaged it to keep you from moving it and opening the cut on your chest. Nothing too serious,” he went on. “You’ll still look terrific in a bathing suit. Just a scratch half an inch deep or so and about ten inches long. Looks worse than it is and it bled a lot. You were quite a mess of blood and sawdust when Lucas and I saw you.”
“Sawdust?” Anna remembered hearing the word before. It had made as little sense to her then as it did now.
“Yeah. What were you doing with a teddy bear stuffed down the front of your dry suit anyway? Patience cut it in half. The suit was full of stuffing. Worked, though. She would have done a lot more damage with that fish gaff, maybe killed you. The bear took the blow, then the sawdust stopped your bleeding. Tomorrow I’ll put in a wire to the LAPD. Body armor is out. Toy bears are in for officer safety.”
“Oscar.” Anna turned her head away, felt the tears stinging her eyes, rolling down into her hair.
The paramedics on the medevac helicopter were efficient and kind. Anna was unsurprised. In her brief stay in the northern Midwest, she had found most Minnesotans to be efficient and kind. The helicopter-an Augusta, she was proudly informed-covered the distance between Duluth and Minneapolis in just over an hour.
Ralph stayed beside her. Demoted from primary care-giver to companion, he was strapped into a seat at the foot of her stretcher. “I feel like the mother of the bride,” he joked.
Anna’s mind could not make sense of the remark. “Why?” she demanded.
“Just something to say,” Ralph soothed her. “Seeing you all in white and fussed over, nobody knowing where to put me. Take it easy, Anna. I won’t try to be funny anymore.”
“Good.” As she drifted off, she heard him laughing.
When she reasserted herself in the conscious world, the helicopter was setting down.
“We’re there,” said one of the paramedics, a strong, handsome woman with big teeth and hair badly in need of
