“I’d do anything I could to help you, you know that,” King replied. “Just name it.”
“If I go in that goddamn water, I get sixty percent, which we already agreed on, plus you’re going stand right there by the generator ready to haul me back to shore if I say the word. You promise?” He was talking about using the power cord as a towline.
King said, “Afraid something’s gonna swim up and bite you on the ass, Perry?”
“I mean it! Unless you promise, I ain’t going in that goddamn lake. If I say the word, you’d better by God haul me in quick.”
King had been limping unconvincingly—it was his way of teasing Perry with the truth—but now that he’d won the argument he stood on two straight legs and said, “You know you can trust me, old buddy. When have I ever let you down?”
I crumpled the aluminum pack and tossed it next to my gear. “Let’s go,” I said. “You two have wasted enough time.”
All I cared about was getting back to the tunnel and finding Will Chaser and Tomlinson. I no longer had Arlis to worry about, which was freeing. When I was out of bottom time, whether I had found Tomlinson and the kid or not, I would surface quietly and then drown the man on the inner tube—Perry, apparently. If King tried to shoot me, I would submerge and crawl out on the other side of the lake. After that, I would play it by instinct.
I buckled on my BC, checked my regulator, then picked up the night vision mask. I noticed that Perry was unbuckling his trousers. He wasn’t in a hurry, but he was going through with it, which surprised me.
“Leave your clothes on,” I told him. “The water will seem cold at first, but your clothes will add some insulation. You’ll warm up faster. Hey—there’s a jacket in the truck. You should wear it.”
“A jacket?” Perry asked.
I said, “It’s mine. You’re welcome to use it.”
“You’re serious.”
I was tempted to say, Dead serious, but instead I told him, “You’ll need the insulation.”
“Like dressing for cold weather, huh?” Perry said. “I never heard of that working in water.” As I looked at him, I was struck by his expression. Illuminated by the fire, the man’s face was pale, his eyes wide. He resembled a frightened child. Maybe the children he had murdered had exhibited similar reactions.
I said, “We’re in this together, right?,” as I carried my fins and the extra gear into the water.
Nearby, King was starting the generator.
King had the rifle now, I noticed. The man had been right about Perry.
Perry wasn’t very smart.
Fifteen feet was only three strong strokes with my fins, but the world beneath the surface was so different that I might have traveled the distance between the earth and the moon. My vision narrowed, and isolation stripped away the filters from my senses. Hearing became a survival tool.
Because of that, I froze momentarily when I heard what by now was a familiar sound: the distant thump and slap of something big breaching the water’s surface. I had been arranging my gear next to the lake bottom’s most recognizable feature—the prehistoric tusk, near where the buoy was tied. My head swiveled as I searched for the source.
It was King again, I decided. He had probably found something else to push into the lake. Another one of his adolescent jokes, and I thought, It will be his last.
But what had he used? There weren’t any more handy truck wheels, so maybe he’d rolled a chunk of limestone into the lake. If the rock was big enough and if it hit me, it could mean the end of my search—possibly the end of me.
I spun toward shore. Through the green lens of the monocular, I focused on the jagged incline where the wheel had appeared but saw nothing. Next, I checked the surface fifteen feet above. I could see the silhouette of the inner tube, Perry’s legs dangling over the side, the contour of his fins gray against the emerald, star-speckled sky. I could picture the man shivering with fear and cold as he waited to play out the hose when I signaled him by giving a tug.
Perry wasn’t much of a swimmer, so he had seated himself in the big rubber doughnut like a kid at a water park and paddled out using the spare fins. For the last several minutes, he had been floating above me motionless, too scared to move.
Perry hadn’t caused the noise I’d heard, that was for sure. It was something else.
I considered using the underwater spotlight to check the area. The monocular was effective for a radius of about fifteen feet, but it would take the light’s thousand lumens of white LED to pierce the darkness of the lake basin.
Using the spotlight, though, was a bad idea, I decided. I could see nothing tumbling down the incline toward me, and a flashlight would only screw up my night vision—yet I still felt uneasy.
I told myself to ignore the lingering paranoia I’d experienced earlier. Even so, my nagging inner voice repeated the same ancient questions: Was something out there, watching? Maybe a predator had sensed my vibrations, my body heat. Was something swimming my way?
I remembered the fear in King’s voice when he’d said, I just saw something go in the water. It was fucking huge, man!
His fear was real. He had seen something—but it was also true that King and Perry were easily frightened by the sounds of a Florida swamp at night. To King, a five-foot alligator would appear huge—or a monitor lizard.
I clipped the light to my BC and turned my attention to the jury-rigged jet dredge. The brass nozzle was gone, as well as the trigger, so I could no longer control the flow of water.
That was Perry’s job.
After taking a last look around, I signaled the man by tugging three times on the hose. Above me, I watched the inner tube rock as Perry stirred—and then I saw something that convinced me that King was still taunting us with his absurd tricks. I saw a spinning bright light appear in the sky—a meteorite, I thought at first. But the light tumbled downward, then slapped the water next to the inner tube, creating a shower of sparks.
King had pulled a chunk of burning wood from the fire, I realized, and thrown it at Perry.
Idiot.
The man reminded me of a spoiled child who got nastier and nastier if he wasn’t the center of attention. I imagined the two cons shouting at each other, exchanging threats—wasting time again—so I repeated my signal to Perry by jerking on the hose.
A moment later, Perry recovered enough to provide me a descending coil of slack. Soon, he opened the flow valve, and the hose jolted in my hand, writhing like a snake. I waited until I had the thing under control, then swam to the mound of sand that now covered the mouth of the karst vent.
King. I had never met anyone I had disliked so intensely, so quickly. For now, the best way to deal with the man was to ignore him.
I focused on my work.
The dredge had lost a lot of its pressure, but the jet was still powerful enough to peel away layers of soft bottom as I searched for the tunnel. Around me, as I probed with the hose, sand and silt exploded, forming a cloud as dense as smoke. Visibility dropped from excellent to zero. Soon, I had to work by feel.
With my left hand, I found what I hoped was the upper lip of the tunnel. I used my weight to burrow downward, the hiss of water meshing with the bell-sound exhaust of my own regulator as I excavated.