Pit had given me years before. I pushed the drawer over with my foot, spilling the contents across the cabin sole, and I pulled the knife closer to me, sliding it across the aluminum deck. It took several tries before I was able to grasp the thick knife with my toes and pick it up. Leaning my butt back, I lifted my foot toward the hands tied to the locked wheel. My toes reached to within about four inches of my hands with the muscles in my back and legs stretching and straining. When I was almost there, the toes let go, and the knife clattered to the floor.
“Damn!”
Finally, on the third try, I got the knife lodged between my toes in a very firm grip. My fingers plucked it right out of my toes, and though I was losing all feeling in my hands and my fingers felt like fat sausages, I eventually pulled the knife out of the handle. The blade cut through the rope in seconds.
I saw that James had taken the Larsens’ tank but used his own mask and fins. His mesh dive bag, shirt, wallet, gun, and keys were neatly stacked in the stern. I could have sat in the dinghy and waited, but even though Neal was a former Seal, James had the element of surprise on his side, and I figured it was about even odds who would be most likely to surface alive. I wasn’t willing to wait and give either of them that element of surprise over me.
The shorts and big T-shirt I’d borrowed back at the house billowed up around me in the water even as I tried to squeeze the air out of the fabric. I wished I could take them off, but I had nothing on underneath.
The water was exceptionally clear. Gorda’s anchor was in the sand off the port side of the wreck, so the tug was floating just over the stern of the freighter. I could make out the superstructure of the Bahama Belle and see the bubbles rising out of her bow. The top of her mast was only about thirty feet down, but her deck level was a good fifty feet below the surface. I swam slowly toward the bow.
In only a few short months, the sea had already started reclaiming the lump of iron that had once been a working interisland freighter. Dark spots that would become the bases for soft corals were starting to grow around and on top of the pilothouse. Parrot fish, grunts, and trigger fish cruised in and out of the holes that had been blown in the aft cabin areas and around the bridge area. A lone barracuda hovered halfway to the surface, up over the bow.
I heard Neal before I saw him. It was a noise that sounded like a monstrous underwater woodpecker. He was down below the main deck level, visible through a hole that the dynamite had blown in her decks when they sank the ship. The air hose fed into the hole where a yellow dive light illuminated the whole compartment. Debris from his work floated in the water around the light, giving everything a fuzzy appearance. Using some kind of an air hammer, Neal was chipping away at the ballast cement in the anchor chain hold. As he worked, bursts of bubbles emerged from the compartment, and he tossed aside large chunks of cement.
I smiled so wide, water leaked in around the edges of my snorkel. Of course—very clever Neal. It wasn’t unusual for ships to add some cement ballast to make the ship float properly on her lines. Neal had probably chipped out the old cement while in the shipyard, stowed the money, and then cemented over it. Add the anchor chain resting on top of the cement, and who would ever know? Obviously not Customs, the cops, or Crystal and his men.
The noise of the air hammer stopped. The yellow light was momentarily covered by Neal’s body as he maneuvered himself around in the cramped space. He seemed
to be straining, trying to pull something out of the hole he was creating.
The barracuda cruised down for a closer look, attracted by the sudden movement in the water.
Down in the murky water, Neal was slowly surrounded by floating shapes. For a moment, I thought it was a school of fish swimming out the forward hold, like the blue tangs that travel in schools so thick they can cast a single dark shadow on the bottom. But these shadows moved too slowly for fish. And there were hundreds, thousands of them, waving in the current like gentle sea fans. Neal swam out and grabbed one, then another, and another. He stuffed them into his trunks. They were bills.
At that moment, I noticed a string of bubbles rising off the port side of the ship, headed toward the bow. James. His dark head appeared over the bulwark, and he paused to watch for a moment as Neal worked both hands down in the forward hold. Neal was so intent on his work, plucking the bills like fruit from the sea, that he didn’t spot James rising over the ship’s gunwale behind him.
I’d already thought Neal was dead once. I’d loved him, mourned him, and almost been killed by him, but I couldn’t sit back and watch him be murdered.
I started hyperventilating, puffing, blowing, in, out, super-oxygenating my system for a long free dive. Neither man had seen me yet. Divers often don’t look up. I sucked in air until my lungs ached, and I was so dizzy I nearly passed out. Then I dove.
They were below me, moving in slow motion, one man gliding up behind the other with a fluid, graceful movement, wrapping his arms around the other like a ballet dancer hoisting his partner into the air. James held Neal from behind, sliding his arm around Neal’s neck.
Neal’s legs splayed, his fists beating on James’s arm and head and body, but the bicep crushing his air supply held firm. James’s head was cocked to one side, and even though I could not see his face, I knew the smile that danced around his eyes.
Ely. God knew how many others. Not Neal.
The borrowed fins flapped loosely on my feet as I kicked and stroked and pulled deeper, faster. As I approached the two struggling men, I swam through the school of money, surprised at the coolness of the paper as I pushed aside the bills with each stroke. Swimming up behind James, I grabbed his air hose, braced my shoulder against his tank, and yanked with all my strength. The regulator pulled free, waving through the water like a dancing serpent, spewing silvery bubbles. His head jerked around as I kicked to distance myself from him. Neal swam off as James grabbed my leg with one hand and with the other reached around for the life-giving hose. I kicked and struggled, but his grip only tightened around my ankle. I had to get to the surface. James pulled me toward him by the leg, grabbing my knee, then my thigh, reeling me in. He clamped his arm around my waist like a metal bar the strength of his embrace so unyielding that my body went limp with fear. His fingers clamped around my throat.
Neither of us had a regulator; neither would last much longer without one.
This was where I would die, drowning, like my mother, I thought. After all these years of being so angry, angry at her, angry at myself, I now saw it differently. I felt sleepy. It would be nice to sleep for a long time. I even thought for a moment that I saw my mother, a shadowy presence swimming out of the darkness to welcome me. My body relaxed, and James let go of my throat to reach back for the regulator. Let him have it, I thought, let me sleep.
Suddenly James jerked and arched his back, squeezing my abdomen. I tried to hold on to what air I had, but bubbles trickled out of my mouth. The faceplate on my mask seemed to be shrinking, the blackness closing in. The water was growing even more murky, with inky trails of darkness, and his arm still encircled me, squeezing away my life like a giant squid. My own arm reached back, more from reflex than thought, to fight, to deliver one last blow, and my elbow hit cold steel projecting out from James’s left side.
It wasn’t ink. It was blood, and James Long was pulling me down, wouldn’t let go, and I knew for certain then I was going to die there with him in that sea of blood and money.
Out of the darkness a hand grabbed my face, pried open my mouth, and inserted a regulator. From years of dive training, I blew out the salt water before I inhaled the cold, sweet air. Neal’s eyes behind the glass of his faceplate peered into mine, checking to see if I was conscious. I stared back and blinked several times, trying to say thank you with my eyes.