themselves scarce between seven an’ three every other day.”
Ricci shrugged. “Can’t figure anything unless you’ve got brains to speak of,” he said, glancing over at him. “And they don’t.”
He turned back toward the front of the boat and stared straight ahead, hands in the pockets of his hooded pullover jacket. Despite the stiff breeze, it was indeed a decent spring morning, with a flood of five or six knots and plenty of sunshine in the mackerel sky. The vapor was thin enough for Ricci to easily read the numbers on the nuns and cans as the channel widened out and Dex goosed the throttle to get them moving faster against the tide.
The light sixteen-footer accelerated with a roar, its props churning up a fine, cold spray. Ricci estimated the water temperature would be about forty degrees, and was wearing a black-and-silver neoprene dry suit and Thinsulate undergarment to retain body heat during his dive.
Soon they were well beyond the channel buoys and red-and-black markers indicating the spot where the shoal at the harbor entrance presented a concealed hazard to low-slung craft, lurking just below the waterline at high tide. All along the surface of the bay Ricci could see patches resembling rippled glass insets on an otherwise smooth mirror, signs that the gusty, variable wind had stirred up circular eddies where salt water and unsettled bottom sediment had mixed with the lighter freshwater flow. He made a mental note to be careful of them later on. As a rule, the current’s westward drift became gentler at the lower fathoms, but the upswellings could exert a strong, sudden pull on a diver, and the phytoplankton that tended to generate in them could severely reduce underwater visibility.
The two men buzzed across the water in their skiff, neither of them speaking above the engine noise for the half hour it took to reach the island where Ricci had found his urchin colony. Not quite an acre in size, it was shaped like a cloven hoof, the split on its northeastern side forming a cove that plunged to a depth of at least a hundred fathoms and was densely forested with eelgrass along its inshore ledges.
Dex simultaneously shifted to port and throttled down as they came in close, then steered them around toward the cove. Ricci sat near the starboard gunwale, scanning the cobbled edge of the shore and the parallel band of trees and brush just yards further inland.
Seconds before Dex maneuvered the skiff into the cove, Ricci thought he noticed a twinkle of reflected sunlight in the shrubbery near a large granite outcropping. He momentarily focused his eyes on that spot, saw the starry glint of light again, and committed the features of the little slice of beach to memory. As an added reference, he glanced at his wrist-mounted diving compass for its coordinates. The reflection could have been from some shards of glass that had washed ashore, or a beer can or bottle discarded by a fisherman who had stopped on the island for a solitary lunch. But just in case it wasn’t, the big hunk of rock made as perfect a landmark as he could have wanted.
After lowering anchor, and paying out rope until it was fast and the skiff was head to wind, Dex yawned, stretched, then reached into the well for his thermos.
“Guess the kids must’ve worn you out,” Ricci said. He was staring out across the bow again.
“Huh?” Dex unscrewed the thermos lid. “What do you mean?”
Ricci turned to face him.
“Way you’ve been trying to catch flies with your mouth all morning,” he said. “I figured it was from filling in for your wife after school the other day. Either that or you haven’t been getting enough sleep.”
Dex looked down, pouring himself some coffee.
“Been sleeping fine,” he said, and sipped. “But it’s true the brats wouldn’t stay off my back for a second.”
Ricci watched him.
“Nancy climbed into bed that night feelin’ randy as a catamount under a full moon, and it’s me was holdin’ out the red flag for a change,” Dex said. “Don’t know if it was the boys got me down, so to speak, or thinkin’ about that awful shit Phipps an’ Cobbs pulled on you while I was playin’ nursemaid.” He scrubbed a hand down over his beard. “Suppose it was mostly the second. I mean, them tryin’ to make off with our catch. Talk about luck, me not bein’ there with you was a bad piece, hey?”
“Don’t sweat it,” Ricci said, still watching him. “They got what they had coming.”
“Should’ve been around to help you give it to ‘em, is all I’m sayin’.” Dex drank a little more coffee from the thermos lid, then held it out to him. “Want some a’ this mud the ol’ lady brewed?”
Ricci shook his head.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said, then shrugged out of his pullover. “I want to get started while the water’s still halfway calm.”
Dex nodded, set down the lid, and went to work. He hoisted the metal dive flag, then reached down into the well for one of the scuba tanks, rose from the cockpit, and put the tank overboard on a rope line.
Meanwhile, Ricci bent over one of his gear bags, unzipped it, and began to extract his scuba apparatus and arrange it on the deck in front of him. He put on his diving hood, then slid his arms into his vestlike buoyancy compensator — the double bladders of which would draw their air from his tank — and fastened the quick-release buckles of its cummerbund around his waist. He had four twelve-pound weights evenly arranged on his nylon- webbing weight belt, and an additional two pounds each on ankle bands to help keep him balanced and relieve tension on his spine. Although the total fifty-two pounds would be excessive under average diving conditions, Ricci had often found that he needed it to remain at the depths inhabited by the urchins in the powerful, spiraling undercurrents.
After donning the belt, Ricci put on his mask, gloves, and fins, then reached into the bag again for his two dive knives and their harnesses. His chisel-tipped urchin knife went into a scabbard secured to his thigh, a pointed titanium backup blade into a similar rig on his left inner arm. Finally he used an elasticized lanyard to hang an underwater halogen light from his wrist.
Once suited up, he opened his second gear bag and extracted three nylon mesh totes, all of which had been packed in long, neat rolls that were held snug with bungee cords. He clipped their float lines to snaplinks on his buoyancy compensator, then raised himself onto the gunwale and sat with his back to the water.
“Don’t forget your spare O2,” Dex said. He took from the well an aluminum canister/snorkel assembly about the size of a bicycle pump, put it into a waterproof satchel, and carried it over to Ricci.
Ricci hung the satchel around his shoulders.
“Okay,” he said. “Ready to go.”
Dex cocked a thumb into the air.
“If you can’t send me up some whore’s pussy, I’ll settle for the eggs she been droppin’,” he said, and grinned as if he’d gotten off a sharp witticism.
Ricci went over the side with a backward roll, swam over to his floating tank, slipped it on, and attached the BC’s narrow low-pressure inflator tube, which would draw air from the tank through a twist valve within reach of his hand. For backup — and lesser, more incremental adjustments in buoyancy than this method easily allowed — his BC also had over its right shoulder strap an oral-inflation assembly consisting of a large-diameter air hose much like that of a vacuum cleaner or automobile carburetor, with a mouthpiece that could be actuated at the touch of a simple button-and-spring mechanism.
The last thing Ricci did before going under was check the submersible instrument console attached to a port atop his scuba tank by yet another rubber hose. On the console were two gauges — a digital readout for measuring depth and temperature, and an analog PSI air gauge below it. The air gauge showed the tank to be at its maxrated 4,000-psi working pressure, with the standard ten-percent safety overfill.
Glancing topside, he saw Dex lean forward over the rail, still grinning and poking his thumb skyward.
Ricci kicked away from the hull of the skiff, dumped air from his BC, and submerged.
Dex’s smile lasted only as long as it took for Ricci’s outline to disappear underwater. Then it, too, vanished. His eyes narrow, his mouth a thin line of tension, he stood at the gunwale watching the bubbles from Ricci’s exhalations reach the surface, the words they’d exchanged earlier that morning suddenly echoing in his mind.
