Surface Tension - Kling Christine - Страница 64

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“What’s that noise?”

I couldn’t see any reason not to tell him. “It’s a compressor. I use it for filling scuba tanks, hookah diving sometimes.”

He nodded. “I guess we’ll just watch from here. He’ll have to come up sooner or later.”

It was only a few minutes after sunrise, and the heat was already building. I let him sweat for a while before I spoke.

“How far do you think it is to shore from here?” I asked.

“Who cares?”

“I guess that’s the way Neal got off the Top Ten before—you know, after he killed Patty. I guess he used his scuba gear and just swam under the water and came out on the beach.”

James squinted toward the shore.

“He could do the same thing right now, you know. He doesn’t care about the Gorda. Maybe he’s already got the money and he’s swimming for shore as we speak. You may not believe it, but I don’t want to see that son of a bitch get away with that money.”

He raised one eyebrow and swung his head back and forth a couple of times, trying to gauge the distance, to decide if what I was describing was really possible.

“Okay, let’s go over there. Tie up to your boat.”

We tied the dinghy off to the midships cleat and climbed over the bulwark. The compressor was chugging on the afterdeck, making too much noise to permit speaking. The air hose led over the side toward the bow. James stayed behind me, the gun still pointed at the small of my back. I leaned over the bulwark and pointed off the starboard bow to a spot where lots of bubbles were breaking the surface.

“He’s still down there,” I shouted over the roar of the compressor. “Right there.”

James nodded, then searched the horizon to the south, probably hoping to see the Hard Bottom coming out of the harbor entrance.

“One of us could go down, check it out, see what he’s doing,” I said.

He rubbed his chin, staring at the small patch of bubbles off Gorda’s bow.

He motioned with his head. “Rope—where do you keep it?”

“This way,” I said, and passed through the companionway into the wheelhouse. In the passageway heading to the engine room door, I saw that the toolbox was still open on the floor. James was right behind me with the gun, but I reached down and grabbed a big piece of angle iron out of the tin box. I brought the iron up under the gun and tried to carry it through right under his chin.

He was caught by surprise, and as the gun flew up, the noise exploded in the wheelhouse compartment. The starboard wheelhouse window shattered, the safety glass flying in pebble-sized bits and clattering onto the aluminum decks. The gun tumbled to the deck in the wheel- house, and when I tried to duck under his arms and push past him to get at the weapon, his hands twisted me onto my belly, pressing my face to the deck. I was unable to breathe, and he had my left arm behind me, my wrist in his hands. He stepped over me, reaching for the gun. My right hand was free and my fingers could barely touch it, so I pushed it as hard as I could. It skittered across the aluminum deck and slid out the scupper and over the side of the boat. I heard the clunk as it fell into the Whaler tied alongside.

The pressure on my wrist increased, and I waited for the bone to pop.

“I think not.” He pulled me to my feet. “I have something much more interesting in mind for you later. And I want to see your eyes when I do it.”

He used a length of half-inch nylon dock line to tie my hands to the top of Gorda’s wheel. When he was sure the rope was tight enough to cut off my circulation, he said, “The Hard Bottom will be here soon. The more you struggle,” he told me, pointing to my hands, “the more damage those ropes will do.”

As soon as he left to go back to the dinghy, I reached my foot out toward the bottom drawer under the navigation station. After several tries, I got my big toe through the latch ring that locked the drawers, and pulled. It made a loud clatter when the drawer hit the deck, but the compressor noise covered everything. Each movement seemed to draw the ropes tighter about my wrists. Pain wasn’t about to stop me, though.

I pulled the drawer closer and riffled through the junk with my toes: bolts, shackles, old teak plugs, bits of line, and down in the bottom, the stainless-steel rigging knife

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

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