count them.
As his impatience grew, he clanged the tank harder and harder—a mistake. Sound waves have a potent physical energy. It was something that Tomlinson knew, of course, but he didn’t pause to consider.
As he banged away at the tank, the corrosive sound loosened the limestone. Tomlinson was thinking,
Beside him, Will Chaser yelled, “’Ummm assss!,” as the floor beneath them collapsed and the vacuum sucked them deeper.
Tomlinson wrapped his arms over his head, anticipating the crushing weight, as the world went black again.
SEVEN
AS I WADED ASHORE, THE MAN WITH THE PISTOL WAS grinning but sounded jittery as he called, “You need some help, Jock-o? We heard you yelling. Drag your ass up here, tell us all about it. Me and Perry, we’re full of ideas.”
Perry, an intense man, was leaning toward me, his cheek pressed to the rifle. I felt my abdominal muscles constrict. Any second, his finger could slip . . . or he could pull the trigger intentionally.
I recognized the weapon. It was a battered Winchester 30-30, a classic carbine favored by cowboys and at least one alligator hunter. It was Arlis Futch’s rifle. Arlis being Arlis, I knew the weapon was loaded.
Obviously, the two men had already been inside the man’s pickup truck. It was parked behind them, beneath cypress trees, the driver’s-side door still open. I wondered what they had done with our cell phones and the handheld VHF.
The edge of the lake was moss coated and slippery. I was carrying fins but kept my hands at chest level. As I walked, my eyes shifted from Arlis to the man with the rifle—Perry—then to his partner, who held the little silver automatic. “Pistol”—it became his designation, a way to differentiate between the two because they looked so much alike. They were of similar height, one a decade older than the other, but both men skinny in slacks. Perry wore a short-sleeved shirt, Pistol wore a jacket so wrinkled that it looked like he’d slept in the thing. Maybe he had. The men might have been brothers were it not for differences in facial structure.
So far, Pistol had done all the talking, and I now listened to him ask, “Why were you yelling for Gramps to call nine-one-one? One of your buddies get eaten by a shark?”
Gramps—he meant Arlis.
I said, “There’s no need for guns. I’ve got two friends in trouble. If you help us, maybe we can help you.”
Pistol replied with a mocking grin, and said, “Of course we’ll help you. But, Jock-a-mo, we need you to do us a favor first. We want the keys to that cowboy Cadillac. The old man says he doesn’t know where they are.”
The man nodded toward Arlis’s black diesel truck: twin cab, four-wheel drive, tow-rigged with mud flaps, a bumper sticker that read EAT MORE MULLET
I didn’t respond.
As I drew closer, the man pressed, “Maybe you didn’t understand. I’m trying to be friendly. It can be dangerous out here in the sticks, you know.”
I was looking at Arlis, seeing his left eye swollen purple, his mouth busted, lips the color of grapes. Normally, Arlis is a talker. He’d been badly beaten. It explained his silence.
Pistol was getting mad, which broadened the vowels of his Midwestern accent. “You got a hearing problem, mister? I want those goddamn truck keys!”
When Arlis signaled me with a slight shake of his head—
Arlis buckled forward and fell. Because his hands were taped behind him, he couldn’t break his fall. He landed hard, face-first, on limestone.
I tossed my fins onto shore and slogged faster toward Arlis, ignoring shouts—“Stop right there, Jock-o!”—as I used my peripheral vision to process details about the gunmen. I had to read the situation fast and accurately or we would all die, Tomlinson and Will included.
Both men had the bony, wasted look of hitchhikers. The type you see at intersections, holding signs, their displaced expressions as masked as their egos. They had feral, gaunt faces. Long Elvis hair matted from sleeping on cardboard; clothes from some Salvation Army box or maybe pilfered from a trailer-park laundry.
Look into their faces, and I suspected that I would see interstate highways. I would see random crimes.
My mind shifted to the recent murders in Winter Haven, remembering details I’d heard at the marina. Winter Haven was forty miles north. The newscaster, though, had reported that police had caught the killers near Atlanta, driving the maid’s car.
Suddenly, I was unconvinced.
What were the odds of running into the killers? The astrology crowd does not believe in chance intersectings and random meetings. But here, in these two men, was an illustration of randomness incarnate.
They were cons, or ex-cons, I decided. And desperate. They were on the run from prison or from the Winter Haven killings and had bush-whacked to this remote area to hide. Why else were they willing to shoot two men for the keys to a truck?
More than willing. They were eager, in fact. That was evident, too. I perceived it in Perry’s brittle movements, his twitching impatience. He had used the rifle butt on Arlis’s head with an explosive, joyous abandon. I would be next, if I gave him a reason.
Pistol was the mouthpiece, I decided. Perry was the killer.
When I got to Arlis, I knelt beside him. He was trying to roll onto his back. The skin on his forearms felt loose, paper-thin, as I lifted him to his knees, then helped steady him on his feet. The rifle butt had dented the bone below his ear, blood was flowing.
Arlis is seventy, but he had never showed—or acted—his age. Until now. The man moved with a weary, testing fragility. But the fire inside him was still burning. It was in his expression, visible in his eyes. His eyes were pale, smoldering and resolute. They communicated more than an apology when I looked into his face. Arlis Futch was furious—furious at his captors and at himself.
It gave me a little boost.
Arlis spit, then spit again, hacking sand from his ruined mouth. “That son of a bitch,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Cut me loose, Doc. I’d trade ten years at Raiford for ten minutes alone with this Yankee spawn.” He stared at the men, talking loud enough for them to hear.
It earned Arlis a burst of jittery laughter. “Whoa, listen to Grandpa! Still talking like a hard-ass!”
Perry, with the rifle, wasn’t feeling playful. “What do I care how he talks? He keeps yapping, I’ll do it again!”
Perry couldn’t stand still. His eyes were moving, checking the horizon, scanning the sky. He reminded me of a rodent watching for hawks.
Pistol wouldn’t let it go. “Grandpa, maybe I should make you drop your pants. You get sassy again, I’ll spank your ass good. How’d you like that?”
More laughter.
I caught Arlis when he lunged toward Pistol. There wasn’t time to let him calm down, so I gave him a little shake, and said into his ear, “Listen to me. We’ve got other problems. Tomlinson and Will are stuck down there. They’re alive, but they’re under a ton of rock.”
It stunned him. Because the information required Arlis to think, it displaced his anger.
“They’re trapped?”
“Maybe in a crevice. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway. I tried digging, but we need to rig the jet pump.”
“How deep?” Arlis was favoring his left shoulder, I noticed. Maybe he’d busted a collarbone when he
