He met her eyes with his own.
“This have to do with me fillin’ Max Blackburn’s old job?”
She gave him another nod.
“When we discussed the issue a few weeks back, you told me that you needed to think about it, that you weren’t sure you wanted to tackle the responsibility—”
“Or that Pete Nimec wanted me to,” he said. “My dope was that he had someone else in mind, an’ the two of you were buttin’ heads about it.”
“He did, and we were, but things have changed. Part of it’s what happened here the other night. How well you handled it.”
“Nimec feel the same way?”
“He and I had a talk before I left for Brazil,” she said. “And have reached a tentative agreement.”
“Sounds to me like there’s a catch hid somewhere in this proposition.”
Megan laughed a little.
“I
“As I did say, I’d noticed.” He looked at her. “The catch… you gonna mention what it is?”
“Yes,” she said. “After you tell me whether you’ll accept the promotion.”
Thibodeau looked at her a moment, looked down at the campaign hat. Then he lifted it off his lap and placed it carefully on his head.
“Fit okay?” he asked.
“Perfect.”
“Will you marry me?”
“No.”
He shrugged.
“Might as well accept
Megan put her hand over the back of his and gave it a fond squeeze.
“Congratulations,” she said.
“And?”
She smiled at him.
“And,” she said, “here’s the catch….”
SIXTEEN
“You looked to make sure?” Cobbs said. He was chewing on a thick wad of gum. “I mean, you were
Dex plucked an imaginary lint ball off his mackinaw. It had been maybe ten minutes since he’d tied up the boat and Cobbs had already asked the question half a dozen times in one form or another.
“I told you, it’s done,” he said. “What more you want me to say?”
The look Cobbs gave him felt like a shove. He was wearing his Smokey hat and warden’s uniform, and held a Remington 870 pump gun with 20-gauge chambering and a collapsible stock. His binoculars hung from a strap around his neck.
“I want you to tell me what you saw,” he said bluntly.
Dex licked his lips. He heard something scrabble across the limb of a tree in the nearby woods and glanced distractedly toward the sound. Perched on the budding maple, a squirrel twitched its bushy tail as it nibbled on whatever morsel of food was in its forepaws, the bright black beads of its eyes warily studying the two humans below.
He turned back to Cobbs.
“Important thing’s what me an’ you ain’t seen,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meanin’ I didn’t see no bubbles from my boat, an’ you didn’t see Ricci’s head bobbin’ up out the water through them binocs of yours,” Dex said.
Cobbs stared at him and chewed his gum. They were in the shade behind the prominent slab of rock that marked their meeting spot on the beach.
“Let’s sum this fucking thing up once more, just to help me picture it right in my mind,” he said.
Dex expelled a deep, tired breath and nodded with resignation.
“You waited while the bubbles was still comin’ up,” Cobbs said.
Dex nodded wearily again.
“And when there
Dex nodded a third time.
“So in other words,” Cobbs said, and hefted his Remington, “I won’t need to get in the motorboat and use this shotgun to blow Ricci out of the water.”
“Is the point I been tryin’ to make,” Dex replied, totally wiped out, and more disgusted with his lot than ever before.
Cobbs watched Dex another moment, looking as if he was about to hit him with another round of questions. Then he seemed to change his mind, pushed the chewing gum from the back of his mouth with his tongue, and spat it out onto the pebbly ground.
“Good riddance to one God Almighty asshole,” he said.
Ricci splashed above the water just when he’d felt he couldn’t exhale any longer and would drown within feet of the surface.
Exhausted and gasping, he floated on his back and swooped air into his lungs. Thus far he was feeling no symptoms of decompression sickness, but that didn’t necessarily mean he could dismiss it as a serious concern. The first indications were usually a bone-deep pain in the joints of the arms or legs, and could take minutes or even hours to become apparent. Still, he had fair odds of getting away clean. The nitrogen gas in the bloodstream that caused the bends when you ascended too rapidly after long descents — decompression stops being meant to give it time to dissolve through respiratory processes — tended to accumulate in fatty tissue, and he’d worked hard to stay in peak shape for more reasons than just impressing women at the gym.
He took a few moments to recoup, aware he couldn’t spare too many more. Not safely anyway. The skiff was nowhere in sight, but it was almost certain the water was being scanned for signs of his reappearance — though he did not yet know whether it would be from the island, the skiff, or both. Whichever, he wasn’t going to let himself be spotted.
He glanced around get his visual bearings, then double-checked them on his compass, having no idea how far he’d drifted from the dive site, or which direction the current might have taken him in. He quickly found that he was near the mouth of the cove and within a hundred yards of its southeastern flank. The skiff wasn’t anywhere in sight, not that he’d expected it would be. To the contrary, he thought he could guess where Dex must have brought it.
His breath slow and almost regular now, Ricci allowed himself another twenty seconds to recover his strength, reached into his satchel for the eight-inch J snorkel he’d separated from his spare oxygen canister before ditching it, and put the mouthpiece between his lips. Then he turned facedown and lowered his head underwater, blew into the snorkel to make sure its airway was clear, and began to swim toward shore, his legs loose and straight behind him, his fins stroking smoothly, gliding unseen beneath the surface of the bay.
It was, he thought, a bad run of snake eyes. He’d been set up twice in as many days, and on both instances had felt bound to confront his opposition when it was their two against his one — only this time he couldn’t count on Pete Nimec popping out of nowhere to even the odds.
Crouched low in a clump of juniper bushes perhaps five yards behind the jut of rock he’d noticed from the skiff, Ricci had just heard Cobbs and Dex working out a cover story to account for his “disappearance.” Simple, but
