Woods fell 185 feet. How far from him? He didn’t know. Woods got caught in a cross-blast of wind halfway down, hit the water on his shoulders and back with his legs spread.
He had been left paralyzed from the waist down for life.
Was the same thing going to happen to him? Or was he just going to thunk into hard granite and...
He speared the water at sixty miles an hour. Water, not rock! Shot down so fast his hands were jammed into the sand bottom, his elbows smashed agonizing on the sloping shelf.
Pain in his ears; he’d gone very deep with no chance to clear his eustachian tubes. Thank God for the quick shelving of the bottom into deep water here.
In the utter blackness he started pulling himself upward. But now the sea felt he belonged to it; ghastly clinging fingers of dead seamen wrapped around his limbs, tried to hold him in the shifting depths. He twisted and fought, panicked, lost half his air in a single silent scream.
Training took over. Just kelp.
Fighting with every fiber to stay calm, he made himself gently drift upward, so the clinging fronds of seaweed opened easily for his passage, slipped off him as he went by.
His lungs were screaming for air but he kept exhaling the spent air as it kept expanding under the lessening pressure. Autrement you could rupture your lungs. He did the last five yards to the surface in a clawing upward scramble, burst out with a huge whoosh! of carbon dioxide, turned in the water, seeking orientation.
Yes! The cliffs were that way. Find a way to snake in between the rocks and...
And a massive wave smashed down on him, energy that probably had come all the way from Japan to commit seppuku on these black rocks. Then the next wave picked up his stunned form to hurl it like driftwood against the cliff face.
Terrible pain in a wrist, an ankle, a crashing blow across his rib cage. Another stunning blow, this one against the side of his head.
Nothing else.
Chapter Nine
If nothing else, Ken thought, when it finally came, the grub was good. Great, in fact. But they hadn’t even sat down at the table until nine o’clock, and everyone else had acted as though that was a perfectly normal time to eat.
He could tell it was food for gourmets: anchovy fritters (little salty fish belonged on a pizza), partridge in casserole, and cucumber mousse. The only drawback had been the old dowager’s occasional bony hand on his knee under the table; embarrassing, but he could handle it.
Before tonight he’d had one gourmet meal in his life, during the great Gypsy hunt when he’d been ferrying a linked pair of Gyppo Caddies from L.A. to San Francisco on Route 1, and had stopped at the Highland Inn’s Pacific Edge Restaurant. Took every dime in his pocket, he’d even had to siphon gas from one Caddy to the other just to get home, but it’d been worth it.
Over coffee and dessert — something incredible called Creole curds and cream — Bernardine and Giselle had still been going at it.
“I agree with Paul,” said Giselle, “internal security here at the estate makes bodyguarding redundant. We can have a man with any of you outside the estate, but our time would be better spent—”
“I’m paying the bills and I want around-the-clock personal protection.” Bernardine’s secret hand left Ken’s knee to gesture above the tabletop. “That means right here at the estate.” She simpered at Ken. “All-night protection by Mr. Warren.”
Before Ken could speak, Sam Spade’s alter ego said, from across the table, “You’ll play hell with her, you will.”
Ken got in quickly, “Hnaound flnoor.” That way they’d at least be away from the family asleep upstairs.
Giselle knew less about guard duty than he did: he’d been a doorknob rattler for a while with a uniformed guard outfit on the Oakland docks. But she knew how to deal with these people. Give them what they wanted.
“Ken’s right,” she said. “If we’re going to be inside, our most effective place will be on the ground floor patrolling the interior perimeter of the house.”
She thought Paul might persist in defending all of his electronic security, but instead he gave a wolfish Sam Spade grin and said, “You’ve got brains, yes you have.”
Inga said, “I don’t get it.”
That had been two hours ago; everyone else was asleep, or at least abed, and Ken and Giselle were moving through the ground floor of the silent house, checking perimeter security on windows, doors, locks, alarms. Because they would be moving around inside, the body-heat and movement sensors were turned off.
Giselle shined her high-density halogen light around the edges of a window to make sure the filament contacts of the alarm were intact, said crossly, “Playing miniature golf all afternoon and pursing Trivia all evening!”
“Nghood ngrhub!”
“That food was beyond grub, it was unreal. But did you take a peek into Paul’s laboratory? Coke Classic and Chee-Tos.”
“Hnenius.”
A genius. Yeah, she supposed so, with all of his holograms guarding the estate. But a real pain in the keister. When they got back to the living room where they had set up their little guard center, they found a CD player and a stack of discs, a thermos full of coffee and a plate of sandwiches covered with plastic wrap. Proper sandwiches that looked like little checkerboards, watercress, cucumber, with the crust cut off. Giselle dug an elbow into Ken’s ribs.
“Pays to have an in with the management,” she said.
Ken grunted in embarrassment and poured them each a cup of coffee. Then they sat down in the spindly-legged antique cherrywood chairs that were hardier than they looked. It was going to be a long night.
Two beers, that was all it was going to be. So how the hell had this happened again?
O’B lurched across the muddy, nearly empty parking lot to his car, keyed the door. Missed, left a long scar down the paint beside the lock. Leaned and squinted, jabbed with the key again.
Screeeech.
Another one. Like the lumber mill worker showing how he’d lost a finger in the saw, Lordy, Lordy, there goes another one. Only the Great White Father wouldn’t just take O’B’s digit over those scratches: he’d take O’B’s whole damned head.
He finally got the door open, fell across the seat facedown, muttering imprecations, dragged himself in, grunted and turned and mashed his knee on the steering wheel and his red gray-shot rain-sodden head on the on-off radio knob, finally got straightened around behind the wheel. Panting piteously.
Somebody must have put something in his drinks.
Like maybe booze.
After three tries, O’B found the ignition lock, got the key in, turned it. From the radio blared shitkicker music about moaning trains, dead mamas, unfaithful loves, lost dogs, tears on the pillow... All while he scrabbled wild-eyed at the key: the sounds were cutting through his head like laser surgery.
Blessed quiet. He settled lower in the seat, steaming up the windows with his wet clothes. Rain spattered lullingly on the roof of the car. He’d drive to Tony’s empty house, fall into Tony’s empty bed, hell, it was just a couple of miles south. Just rest here for a second before he went...
At least he had seen Blow Me Baby at this barnlike roadhouse, the Rainbow, north of Freshwater Corners on Myrtle Ave, which, taken far enough, got you to Arcata. Had seen their instruments, had heard their awful music. Had seen drug deals going down in the parking lot, if you still called grass a drug. Had seen band members taking a few heavy hits between sets...