Deep Shadow

I wanted to swoop down and grab the things. It was pleasant to imagine myself showing King a fistful of gold while I searched his face for the greed that soon, I hoped, would allow me to lure him into the water, just the two of us alone, King and me.

No, I decided. Retrieving the coins was a bad idea. The desire to collect the things was an emotional response, I realized—a red flag at any depth below sixty feet. I was now at a hundred and ten feet, deep into nitrogen narcosis territory, where spontaneity can be a methodical killer. A few more coins, I decided, were not worth the risk of going even a few meters deeper.

Still using the flashlight, I started up, ascending more slowly than my bubbles, as I continued to search the rubble. I saw several more cattle skulls and another mastodon tusk—this one was a broken brown chunk of ivory, possibly the mate of the tusk that Tomlinson had found. I was tempted to take a closer look, but that, too, was irrational under the circumstances. It was another red flag, and I knew it was time to surface.

A few seconds later, though, I saw something that brought me to a stop. Protruding from beneath a slab of limestone was a lone black swim fin. I recognized it immediately. It was an old-style Jet Fin, similar to the Rocket Fins I wore. They were made of dense black rubber, open-heeled, heavy, wide and functional. I prefer fins that aren’t buoyant, and the same was true with Tomlinson. He had joked that wearing dated old fins was a style statement—our lone similarity when it came to such things.

It was Tomlinson’s fin.

I approached the thing slowly until I saw to my relief that the fin wasn’t attached to a foot. I lifted it, inspected it, then pried away a few layers of rock from beneath it, searching for the remains of my friend. I even banged out a signal on my tank before positioning the fin beneath my arm, then continued my ascent, my mind trying to fix the details of this lake, this moment, in memory.

Underground rivers are also referred to as “lost rivers.” I could think of no better description for this place.

According to my dive computer, I had accumulated a brief decompression stop at twenty feet. The obligation was only two minutes, but I would double that just to be safe. My gauges also told me that my air was low now, redlining at 1000 psi. I had very little time remaining.

As I kicked toward the surface, I looked for a comfortable place to wait while I decompressed. Water was clearer now where the overhang had broken away and that’s where I chose to stop, backing into the crater as if it were a cocoon.

I neutralized my buoyancy and carefully—very carefully—locked my arm into the vent to anchor myself. From that vantage point, I could see the jet dredge above, still unattended, and the mountain of rock below where a good, good man and a very tough kid had ended their lives.

Because I had only one free hand, I decided to store Tomlinson’s fin inside the vent until it was time to surface. I am not an emotional person, but there was something funereal and final about placing my pal’s fin, alone, in a space so dark. I couldn’t make myself do it and I stared at the thing as I battled an overwhelming flood of emotion that I suspected was normal dissemination. Grief, sorrow, guilt and regret. They are all variations on a common theme, and that very human theme is loss. Inexorable, inescapable loss.

The buddy system just gives bad luck a bigger target, Tomlinson had joked—but it was far more profound than a joke because this time he was right.

The man often was.

Three minutes into my decompression, just for the hell of it, I tapped my flashlight on my tank, eight slow bell notes, before clipping the light to my shoulder harness. It was the Morse abbreviation for F-B. Fine business. Everything’s okay. It wasn’t intended as a signal. It was offered as my farewell salute.

A moment later, though, I was shocked to hear—at least, I believed I heard— TAP . . .TAP . . .TAP in response. I was so startled that I dropped Tomlinson’s fin. As I lunged to grab the thing, I heard yet another clanging series of sounds. Much louder, it seemed.

Impossible.

No, the sound was easily explained because the source of the noise was me. I had clipped the flashlight too close to my tank so that metal clanked against metal whenever I moved.

By the time I figured it out, I had been decompressing for nearly five minutes and I was too low on air to waste more time. There would be no more futile signaling, no more imagined replies.

It was time to surface. King and Perry were waiting.

THIRTEEN

KING KEPT HIS DISTANCE AS I SLOGGED TO SHORE, but he couldn’t resist looking at the fin I carried beneath my arm and saying, “Looks like you found your girlfriend. Rescuing her one piece at a time, are you?”

The man’s attempts at humor always had a vile edge.

I shrugged, my expression blank. I said, “Where’s Captain Futch?,” as I stopped to place the fin at the base of a cypress tree, then removed my BC and empty bottle.

From the truck, I heard Arlis call, “Is that you, Doc? Did you find ’em?”

I answered, “How are you feeling, Arlis?”

He hollered back, “The Yankee scum’s got me tied up again. Damn cowards didn’t want to risk two against one!” Once again, he asked, “Where’s Tomlinson and the kid? Are they with you?”

I looked from the truck to King, then toward the edge of the clearing where Perry was preoccupied pissing in the bushes. The rifle, I noted, was leaning against a nearby palmetto. It meant that King was carrying the pistol. He had dried off and dressed, leaving his sodden underwear to dry on a wax myrtle tree. The pistol was probably hidden in the back of his pants.

No . . . the fool had put it in his pocket. I watched him wrestle it from his pants as I walked toward the truck. I was hoping the thing would go off accidentally and maybe sever his femoral artery, but no such luck.

“So what’s the word, Jock-a-mo? Are we rich yet? You’d better by God have those truck keys!”

I ignored him as I went to the driver’s-side window and looked in, seeing Arlis lying on his back, hands tie- wrapped behind him, his face now so swollen that I wouldn’t have recognized him under other circumstances. The skin between his left ear and jaw was stretched bright in demarcations of purple, green and jaundiced yellow. On the towel next to him, blood was starting to cake.

King was calling to me, “Stay the hell away from that old man! You still don’t seem to understand who’s in charge here.”

I said to Arlis, my voice low, “They’re both dead. It’s just you and me now.”

I watched the man wince, his eyes closed tight. “Are you sure? Did you find them?”

I said, “They’ve been down there for more than an hour and fifteen minutes. There’s no way they could still be alive. And there was another landslide—a whole wing of the lake fell. King caused it.”

Arlis raised his head to look at me through his one good eye. “Fix it so I’ve got ten minutes alone with those bastards, Doc. I don’t care if they kill me, I’ll find a way to get a few shots in of my own first.”

I said, “We will. We both will, trust me. But now it’s time to move on to other things.” I gave it a second, waiting until I was sure Arlis was still looking at me, before I mouthed a question, Where are the keys?

The man took a deep breath, shaking his head, as if trying to erase this nightmare from memory. Then with his chin he motioned toward what might have been the ashtray or the center console as he said something that sounded like “Cut me loose and let’s get going.”

“You’ve got them?”

He replied, “Yeah.”

“Where?”

Arlis was trying to sit up. “Cut me loose and you’ll see. I’m going to kill those two for doing this to us. Run them over with the truck. You just watch me.”

I shook my head as I whispered, “No. You’re getting out of here the first chance you get—and without me. Understand?”

I leaned in to get a closer look at the man’s eyes, saying, “Do you know what they did with our cell phones and the VHF?”