State of War

hands to hold the speargun. The water was warm enough that he didn’t need a wet suit. He wore regular bathing trunks, a diver’s knife strapped to his right calf. It had a long, thick, stainless steel serrated blade with a black rubbery handle. He wore a watch with a depth gauge, an extra spear for his gun Velcroed underneath the barrel, and, around his waist, a webbed nylon belt strung with lead weights. As he used up the compressed air in the tank, he would start to get more buoyant, and the weights would help compensate for that.

The water was a clear, gorgeous blue, visibility easily a hundred feet, and all manner of tropical fish schooled back and forth in his panoramic view. The sunlight dappled the bottom, shifting with the currents, and the clean sand was only forty-five, fifty feet from the surface here, but sloping away deeper as he moved seaward. The fish were bright with all the colors of the rainbow, from minnows shorter than his little finger, to angelfish, platys, and groupers as big as his leg.

Jay wasn’t looking for fish, though. He was after a different kind of prey.

Ahead, just barely visible in the distance and under an overhang of coral, was the wreck of the pirate cabin cruiser Elise Matilda, a mid-twentieth-century vessel that had made herself infamous by attacking tourist boats in the islands during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Manned by a gang of cutthroat Australians and a couple of New Zealand Maoris, the Elise Matilda was a seventy-foot diesel craft that had, for two years, managed to avoid the authorities while its crew boarded and robbed more than a dozen vessels in the warm waters, collecting, it was estimated, more than four million dollars in cash and jewels. Late in the summer of 1961, during a storm that blew in unexpectedly, the U.S. Coast Guard had spotted the Elise Matilda, fresh from an attack on a tourist steamer that had been running for shelter to escape the storm. The winds were already above gale force, the rain slashing down and turning the world gray, when the cutter gave chase. As the cutter drew near, she was fired upon by a.30-caliber machine gun mounted on the cabin cruiser’s aft deck.

This was a tactical error on the part of the pirates, because the Coast Guard gunner was a crack shot. From a thousand yards, he hit the pirate vessel with his first round from their five-inch gun, holing the hull. His second round blew away the Elise Matilda’s steering wheel and most of the man holding it. Without any control, the cruiser turned broadside to the wind and was rolled hull-up by a big wave.

The Elise Matilda began to sink quickly. Some of her crew might have made it off, but it was dark, and nobody on the cutter spotted them in the choppy waters if they did.

The pirate ship remained afloat in the heaving seas no more than five minutes after the shelling, then she went down. The cutter stayed for as long as they could before heading for port.

As it turned out, the Coast Guard cutter stayed too long hunting for survivors. They didn’t make it all the way back. Under the storm’s pounding, the vessel lost power, foundered, and began to sink. By some miraculous luck, the sinking happened close enough to land that most of the crew made it back ashore, despite the huge surf. The location of the pirate vessel’s sinking had, however, been lost. None of the survivors seemed to be able to remember, in the dark and foul weather, exactly where they had been, and the ship’s navigator and the commander were two of the six men who had gone down with the cutter.

However, Jay “Sherlock” Gridley had managed to find a survivor of the cutter, and with peerless investigative techniques had gotten enough of the old man’s memory working to determine where the pirate ship had gone down.

Jay grinned at himself. Hunting for sunken treasure might be a bit florid as a metaphor, but it worked for him, and when it came to virtual sleuthing, he was the only person he had to please.

On board the sunken ship, aside from the bones the fish and crabs didn’t get, was a treasure chest of money and jewels. The chest represented the hidden bank account belonging to the Supreme Court justice’s clerk. Once Jay located it for certain and determined its worth, the clerk was going to be cooked.

If it contained as much money as Jay suspected, there was no way the man could have earned that much honestly. His family didn’t have any money to speak of, he’d gone to school on scholarships, and he was going to have some tall explaining to do. And the way they’d do it would be via the IRS. Unpaid taxes had brought more than one criminal low.

Jay grinned into his mouthpiece and moved toward the wreck.

He caught movement from the left.

A shark, bearing right at him. Great white, a good thirty feet long.

Now there was a firewall metaphor. All he needed now was the theme music from Jaws.

He swung the speargun around and pointed it at the shark…

Arlington, Texas

Junior lay naked on the bed next to Joan. She was wearing a long T-shirt with a picture of Albert Einstein on the front. She was asleep, on her back, the shirt reaching only a little way down her thighs.

It had gone pretty much as he had expected it to go. They had gotten back to the house and had a few drinks, talking about old times, and also discussing the fake “plan” a little more. After a little while they had gotten undressed and gone to bed. When they were finished, Joan took a quick shower, came back in the T-shirt, and dozed off.

Once she was asleep, Junior’s next move was clear: Grab the pillow, lean on her face with it, bye-bye, Joanie, au revoir, sorry it had to be this way, kiddo.

But: He couldn’t do it. Not yet, anyway. He had curled up next to her, intending only to let her breathing deepen and even out, letting him know she was sound asleep. He didn’t want her waking up too soon. He knew from experience how strong she could be.

The thing was, he fell asleep himself, lying there all relaxed and cozy and thinking warm thoughts about the woman he was about to kill.

He woke up around six A.M. cursing himself for a fool.

He couldn’t delay any longer. Joan would be waking up soon, and he would have lost his chance to do this the easy way — and for her sake he wanted it to be easy.

Picking up his pillow, he moved to straddle her. He planned to sit on her hips so she couldn’t move, lean into the pillow, and just do it. Couple, three minutes, she’d be choked out, and once she stopped struggling, he’d hold the pillow there another five minutes to be sure.

But as he swung his knee up and over Joan’s hips, she woke up. Her eyes went wide as she saw the pillow, and she must have somehow realized what he was doing. Before he could get set, she screamed like a fire truck siren and kneed him in his exposed crotch.

The pain made him want to puke it was so hot and sudden. He couldn’t even breathe it hurt so bad.

Joan scrambled and slid out from under him before he could catch her. She fell off the bed, hit the floor hard, but was up in a second.

He started after her, slowed by the blinding pain. Before he could do more than scoot toward the edge of the bed, however, she grabbed the bedside table lamp and smashed him over the head with it.

Pieces of the ceramic lamp base shattered all over him.

Junior’s vision flashed red, then filled with sparkling stars.

Stunned, he fell back. He wasn’t out, he didn’t dare lose it that way, she’d probably kill him if he did.

His guns were under the mattress. He lunged for them, but Joan picked up the television set, a little portable on the chest at the foot of the bed, and threw it at him.

The TV came at him in slow motion, and Junior swung one arm to try and block it. He didn’t have any choice, he had to bat it aside or it would bash his head in. He connected with it all right, but his arm was bent, and his elbow hit the glass. The screen popped! and spewed glass everywhere.

He felt a shard slice open his arm above the elbow, and worse, his elbow was caught in the busted TV.

While he was prying his bleeding elbow out of the TV and cutting himself more, Joan vanished. He finally jumped up, blood slinging all over the place, and lurched after her. Before he cleared the bedroom, though, he heard the front door open, and the screen door slam shut behind her. He ran, started outside, then realized he was naked.

It pulled him up short. A naked, bleeding man running after a half-naked woman? That would draw attention in any neighborhood, even this one. He could not have somebody calling the cops before he shut Joan’s mouth for good.