That left the old redneck man, the one who’d been driving the truck, alone onshore.
Perry looked at King, but King took his time acknowledging Perry—back in charge now, and he wanted the punk to know it.
“Dude,” Perry whispered, “I wouldn’t go in that water. No fucking way, dude. What you think they’re after?” He still hadn’t told King what he had seen yesterday afternoon, the large dark shadow swirling beneath the surface.
King didn’t answer. An executive silence, that was the way to handle punks on speed.
“Maybe fishing, huh?” Perry said. “Or looking for something. How long you think they’ll be down?”
King held his hand out until Perry finally figured out what it was he wanted.
“Long enough,” King said, as Perry handed him the pistol. “You know what’s funny? They’re down there having fun, thinking nothing in the world can go wrong. But here we are.”
King was smiling, picturing the divers’ faces when they surfaced, finding their truck gone, and the old redneck dude shot or cut up—probably dead, knowing Perry.
ONE
ON A WINTER AFTERNOON, DIVING AN INLAND LAKE, south of Orlando, every small thing was going right, far better than I had anticipated, but then it all went suddenly wrong in ways I could not have imagined.
That’s the way it happens, when it happens. People like me, the obsessive planners, the compulsive guardians, always say later—if they survive—“It’s the one thing I didn’t think about.”
On the water, though, it’s seldom just one thing that goes awry. A single miscalculation can catalyze a disastrous momentum that no amount of planning can interrupt. Much of life is random. It’s as simple as that, although my spiritually devout friends wouldn’t agree. Some people find the illusion of order comforting.
I don’t. I prefer unencumbered facts even in an arbitrary universe. When plans unravel and the sky begins to fall, I’m all too aware that the tiniest bit of random luck can mean the difference between life and death.
On this winter afternoon, for example.
I was fifteen feet beneath the water’s surface, in what should have been one of the safest little dive spots in Florida, when I heard a clatter of falling rock and looked up just in time to kick free as a ledge collapsed, burying my two dive partners beneath a ton of archaic limestone.
Fossilized bone atop living bone. Water is a relentless and dispassionate reorganizer.
We had been clustered near the ledge when it fell. One of my partners had found a handhold in a rock vent as we peered through masks, studying a yard-long chunk of ivory that was tannin-stained the color of obsidian. It was the tusk of a prehistoric animal, a mammoth. For one million years, the animal had rested here—its calcified scaffolding, anyway. A couple of rib bones lay nearby; possibly a splinter of femur, too.
Then the three of us came along. We disturbed the delicate balance of limestone, causing a million years of history to come tumbling down with inverse irony: the very, very old burying the new.
My partners included my boat-bum hipster pal, Tomlinson, and a troubled teenage Indian kid from Oklahoma via the juvenile court system, William J. Chaser. Will, for short, to the people he’d met around the marina, except for Tomlinson, who called him Will-Joseph—Joseph being the kid’s middle name.
From the beginning, I’d argued against the boy coming along. I’d finally consented, though, as a favor to a high-powered woman—Will’s temporary guardian—and also because Tomlinson had fronted a convincing argument. The boy was a novice diver, true, but he was also an athlete, a high school rodeo star, tough, and as quick as a cat—when he wasn’t stealing horses, selling pot or running away from one detention center after another.
We had been underwater for half an hour. The kid was doing okay—impressive, in fact. He was as confident wearing fins as he was sitting a rodeo saddle. Tomlinson was having fun, and so was I. Old man Arlis Futch—a commercial fisherman and a friend—was miffed because he wasn’t in the water with us, but that was the way it had to be. Someone had to stay topside and watch the truck, right?
We were doing everything by the book—a book I had personally modified to add additional layers of safety net. Then the sky fell. Literally.
Tomlinson had found the spiral of fossilized ivory, and he had waved us over to look. The tusk was, indeed, an ancient and articulate relic to gaze upon. That’s when Will Chaser made a rookie mistake. I compounded the mistake by allowing him to do it. The kid was having trouble neutralizing his buoyancy. To steady himself, he thrust his hand into a rock crater and pulled. The lake’s basin was honeycombed rock, a delicate latticework of limestone. Will’s not a big kid, but he’s all muscle and sinew, and the pressure he put on the latticework was enough.
I didn’t see it coming, nor did Tomlinson. The man is relaxed and at ease in any situation—with the possible exception of an encounter with police—and he has great instincts. But he was in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. A microsecond before I reacted, my pal’s Buddha eyes narrowed, aware and thoughtful, then widened, alerted by sound and the changing water pressure from above. But too late.
In the slow explosion of silt, I was thinking, This can’t be happening, as I kicked free of the landslide.
It happened.
For a panicked few seconds, I raced away from the murk, staying just ahead in clear water, as if I might suffocate if the silt engulfed me. The reaction was not befitting a marine biologist who has logged hundreds of dive hours.
Me, the so-called expert diver—but that’s exactly what I did. It’s the way our brains work. When darkness triggers the flight mechanism, we bolt for light because light means safety. It means freedom . . . and air.
Air, suddenly, was something that was in limited supply.
We had been exploring the lake’s shallow perimeter for thirty-seven minutes. Because I’m obsessive when it comes to safety, and because I was the most experienced diver, I’d insisted that we not go deeper than thirty-three feet, which is the minimally more dangerous demarcation between two and three atmospheres.
The lake was a geological oddity—a teardrop-shaped pool, central Florida, northwest of a crossroad village named Venus, three miles from the nearest dirt road. We’d had to bushwhack across plains of palmetto scrub and pasture, cutting a track for Arlis Futch’s big-tired truck. It had taken all morning and part of the afternoon.
The lake sat between two ridges, a natural basin with cypress trees on the southern perimeter, then a pocket of cattails to the north where the lake narrowed. Beyond lay a marshy expanse of saw grass and cypress trees, a variety of Florida swamp where reptiles of every variety thrive, and so most people avoid such areas for a reason.
The lake consisted of an acre of water, which is about the size of a football field. It was manageable, I thought.
The water was clear and shallow in all but one dark area. There, the bottom funneled downward, vanishing into depths that were linked to the surface by pillars of silver light.
A “bottomless lake” is the colloquial term but inaccurate. A “cenote” is what similar sinkholes are called in Central America. A thousand years ago, Mayan priests dropped gold offerings into their depths—they gifted the heads of their enemies. Such places were considered holy. Ojos de Dios. The Eyes of God.
This lake was, in fact, the uppermost promontory of a water column that connected with the Floridan Aquifer. “Underground river”—another colloquial term. It was the safest of places to swim and dive, if you didn’t stray too deep . . . and if there weren’t man-sized gators in residence.