it didn’t have to be anything more: Bumptious, know-it-all city boy Ricci had been diving for weeks without letting modest, conscientious local boy Dex properly check and maintain his scuba equipment, and since a tender couldn’t do his job if the diver insisted on being foolhardy, Dex had given up trying to argue the point with him. Divers had gotten into bad fixes before through their own carelessness, and it would surely happen again in the future.
If Ricci’s body didn’t turn up, that would be that. And in the unlikely event it happened to float ashore before scavenging crabs, lobsters, and groundfish picked it apart, even an honest investigator would conclude Ricci had died from an out-of-air accident due to instrument failure, based upon a post mortem exam and the faulty reading on his psi gauge. Why suspect the gauge had been jiggered with by his partner when there was no evidence of a prior falling out between them; indeed, when any of the dealers with whom they regularly did business would attest they’d seemed to get along fine as a team? And besides, considering that Dex would be handing his pile of homespun horseshit to the sheriff or one of his deputies, and would have Cobbs signing off on it, he could probably chalk Ricci’s fate up to a Big-foot attack, alien abduction, or head-on collision with the Flying Dutchman and get away with it, no sweat.
Ricci looked and listened from the concealment of the brush. In their own way they were good, he thought, the only monkey wrench in their scheme being that he was better and savvier. His mistake — and he acknowledged it was significant — had been underestimating how far Dex could be pushed. Ricci had known Dex had his weaknesses, and they’d never quite been friends, but had always gotten on all right as partners. Much as he disliked admitting it to himself, he’d started out being a cop with a deep-rooted core of positivism, and some rudiments of that attitude remained stubbornly lodged inside him despite having spent years exploring the darkest alleys of human nature. He’d been hesitant to think the worst of his partner, and had almost paid for it big- time.
Ricci breathed quietly, motionless, watching the two men stand and talk in the small, pebble-sprinkled clearing around the big rock. He had approached them through the woods at a diagonal, and was more or less behind Cobbs, who was turned toward the beach, with Dex facing inland in Ricci’s general direction. While they had been ironing out the main points of their little deception, he’d put the finishing touches on a plan of his own, and it too was pretty bare. Cobbs had a weapon — not the sharpshooter’s rifle Ricci had speculated about earlier, but a Remington pump, which at close range could pack an even deadlier wallop — and so would have to be taken down first. This time there was no truck door to pin his sorry ass in, but the shotgun would only be a problem if he had the chance to use it. As for Dex… he was unarmed, and would be easy.
Surprise and the ability to hit fast and hard were then Ricci’s best assets. He’d abandoned his scuba tank, fins, and mask in the woods, and left himself wearing only the dry suit and knife rigs. The urchin knife would be of marginal use offensively and was in its scabbard. The pointed, double-edged blade was in his right hand. That baby had the meanness in it.
A breeze fluttered through the woods, and Ricci eased partially out of his crouch using the rustle of leaves, branches, and weeds to cover the sound of his movement. When the wind died down he stopped, then waited for another gust to stir the foliage and stole forward, falling back on his SEALs training again, obeying tried and proven fundamentals of stalking one’s quarry. Registering one leg in front of the other. Touching the ground with the ball of his foot and slowly lowering his heel while scanning for rocks, fallen leaves, anything that might trip him up or be disturbed by his weight. Shifting direction every few steps so that the brush wouldn’t sway unnaturally and attract attention.
The wind quieted. He paused. The two men were still talking. Cobbs’s back was now less than three feet in front of him through the brush that constituted Ricci’s self-designated skirmish line. Another draft of wind and he would launch from his concealed position, tackle Cobbs from behind, and hopefully disarm him before he could get off a single shot.
It was the squirrel that screwed things up.
“… want to make it look good, you ought to wait another couple hours, then phone in a diver emergency to me
He stopped talking and gave Dex a questioning glance.
Dex had suddenly cast his eyes toward the maple tree on which he’d noticed the munching squirrel a short while before. Already on heightened guard because of his and Cobbs’s near proximity, it had been startled from its perch and abruptly gone bounding up the tree amid a loud rattle of branches, dropping the seed pod it had been clutching in its obvious fright. This instigated a sort of chain reaction, the commotion sending a jolt through Dex’s tightly wound nerves, prompting him to jerk his head up toward the squirrel, then drop his gaze to the creeping junipers below it — and just a few feet behind Cobbs — to find out what could have sent the little animal fleeing
That was when he saw a dead man about to spring from between two of the bushes in a semi-crouch, his fist clenched around the haft of a long knife.
His face all at once draining of color, his mouth yawping open, too shocked to utter more than a wordless cry of alarm and incomprehension, he thrust out his arm to frantically gesture in Ricci’s direction.
Without knowing what was going on except that something had scared the living daylights out of Dex, Cobbs spun on his heels, raised his shotgun, and brought its barrel around to where he was pointing.
Ricci was about to make his move when he heard the spooked squirrel in the treetop, then saw Dex turn to investigate its racket, his eyes sweeping up the tree, then down to land directly upon him and widen with stunned confusion.
There was no time to hesitate. Even as Dex began gesturing wildly — and a split second before Cobbs swiveled his upraised shotgun around toward him — Ricci broke from cover and came at the warden in a scrambling, straight-ahead run, ducking below the shotgun’s muzzle.
The gun roared above his head, its load gouging into the tree trunk behind Ricci and flurrying the area with shaves and splinters of bark. Cobbs rocked backward from the weapon’s kick, but was surprisingly quick to recover, and managed to chamber another round before Ricci could reach him. Ricci heard the
Without releasing the weapon’s barrel, Ricci smashed his right forearm against Cobbs’s neck, then hit him twice on the jaw with his elbow while jerking the shotgun around hard to the left.
Cobbs’s chin snapped to the side and blood instantly began streaming from his mouth. His lips stretched into a grimace of fury and pain, he managed to hang onto the gun, but Ricci pushed close against him, using both his hand and body to keep the barrel angled upward and sideways. Cobbs hung on. Ricci had not thought he would have as much fight in him, but anger and adrenaline could give people the strength to stay committed. Still, he had to finish him before Dex got involved.
Ricci shoved against him with his chest, forcing him to stumble backward. The moment he had him off balance, Ricci jammed his right elbow into Cobbs’s stomach and, as he doubled over with a groan, finally got the shotgun out of his hands.
A moment later Ricci dropped down into a squat and shoved his dive knife into the top of Cobbs’s boot, putting his arm and shoulder into the blow, driving in the blade until all six inches of it had penetrated his foot and sunk into the dirt beneath him.
Cobbs released a howling, animalistic scream that grew in volume and shrillness as he tried to lift his impaled foot off the ground and realized that he couldn’t. His face bright crimson, the whites of his eyes enormous, he looked down at himself and saw blood swell up around the knife handle projecting from the upper part of his boot, simultaneously draining from where the blade had cut through its treaded rubber sole. His screams reached a ragged peak of hysteria and cracked apart, dissolving into moist snuffles.
“Look what you done to me!” he whimpered, and sank to his knees, looking up at Ricci, water gushing from his eyes. Blood smudged his lips and chin like grotesque stage makeup, and there was a slurry thickness to his speech that told Ricci his jaw had either been dislocated or broken.
Ricci ignored him. He had straightened up and could see the bushes thrashing to his left where Dex had
