by Rachel Lee
The Alcantara had been within sight of land when it foundered, but only Vasquez and his infant daughter had made it to shore. He had strapped the child to an empty barrel, then clung to it, keeping the baby upright, while the waves carried them to land. There he had watched the wind and rain batter the ship and sweep its remains away “to the southeast,” he said.
Veronica assumed he came up with that direction after the clouds had cleared and he could observe the heavens again.
So, unless he had misremembered, and unless her calculations were completely off base, she thought she had a pretty good idea where the wreckage would be found.
There wouldn’t be much of it, she was sure. The area she was looking at wasn’t isolated. If there was enough of that ship left to see from the surface, someone would have found the remains by now.
Instead she was going to be seeking broken remains, probably deeply buried in silt and sand. And gold. The Alcantara had been heavily laden with plundered gold, an estimated ten million dollars of it, melted into bars.
But she didn’t care about that. It was merely a signpost to the one treasure she really wanted: the mask of the Storm Mother.
Chapter 3
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. The sign hung on the wall facing Dugan’s desk. The quote was attributed to John Lennon, but Dugan had read somewhere that it was really a quote from some female writer in the 1920s or ’30s, except that he couldn’t remember her name. He figured since she wasn’t around to make a stink about the attribution, there was no point in him worrying about it either.
But what that quote did, whoever was responsible for it, was help him keep his cool when everything seemed to be blowing up. Which it regularly did. Which it was doing today.
He’d come to work to find out that one of his divers hadn’t shown up, and one of his boats had major engine trouble. Apart from the loss of income, he’d had to face the irritated clients who’d had reservations for the boat that morning. Some were laid-back about it, of course, taking it philosophically that they might have to wait a day or two for their dives. But others were irate at having their vacation plans ruined, and they were vociferous in telling him so.
By noon he’d managed to rearrange the schedule, cut break times, increase the number of runs each of his boats was to make each day, and was left only with objections that they’d been promised a dive at a certain time of day. There was nothing he could do about that.
Just as he was figuring the worst of the storm had passed, the Coleridges showed up in his office. Veronica, looking a little pink from the sun, at least had her shoulders covered.
Orin took a seat without invitation, apparently deciding to practice manners the way Dugan did. Veronica stood in the corner, her arms folded beneath her breasts. It may have been a protective pose, but from Dugan’s perspective all it did was heighten his awareness of one of her better assets. Maybe her only asset.
Today she had her hair tucked behind her ears, though, and for the first time he saw her hearing aids. He felt a twinge of pity for her, which evaporated the instant he met her blue eyes. They were sparking, defying him to feel sorry for her.
So he looked at her father. Here, at least, he found a human being he could relate to. “What’s up?” he asked, not at all sure he wanted to know. Orin’s next words confirmed that ignorance could indeed be bliss.
“We’ve hired a plane to do a low flyover of the water in the area where we’re planning to search. I can’t go, so I want you to accompany Veronica. It only makes sense, since you’re going to be our captain and chief diver.”
“You want me to go?” Next to getting wet, Dugan hated flying. He most definitely did not like having someone else in control of his survival. Life required him to get on large commercial planes sometimes, and he did it, feeling rather like a cat whose fur was being stroked in the wrong direction. But a small charter? Sweet Mother! “I don’t have time.”
“Certainly you do. We’ve hired you beginning Friday. Tomorrow. Look, Gallagher, you might as well be in on it. If we can see any signs of wreckage from the air, it’ll help our search, and help you know what you’re looking for.”
“It’s a waste of time,” he said, more out of a growing sense of desperation than any real objection.
“Absolutely not,” Orin said. “Many wrecks have been spotted from the air. Flying a hundred or two hundred feet above these waters can be a great help in finding wreckage. This could narrow our search area considerably.”
Flying a hundred or two hundred feet above the water didn’t bother him. Having someone else in the pilot’s seat did. “I’m too busy. I’ve had a diver call in sick, I’ve got a boat that’s disabled, and a hundred tourists really pissed at me. Find someone else.”
He glanced at Veronica again and saw that her eyes were narrowed and irritated-looking. He wished she would say something because then he could tell her where to get off. Then it occurred to him she might not have completely followed his conversation with her father, and that narrowing of her eyes might indicate nothing except that she was trying to piece things together.
Oh, shit, he felt another moral qualm coming on. The woman was deaf. Her father couldn’t go. Was he going to cast her to the wolves? Or more specifically, some wolf who might want the treasure himself?
He looked at Orin. “Are you sure you need me?”
“It would be a great help. We have a GPS, but someone is going to have to write down the interesting coordinates while someone else watches. And it would really help to have a set of eyes looking out both sides of the plane.”
Well, it might shorten his three-month sentence if they found something right off.
Dugan leaned back in his chair and looked out his window at the harbor. “Okay, I’ll do it. Ginny can handle the mess here, now that I’ve set the ball rolling to cope with it.” Which made him remember that he still hadn’t told her he was giving her a raise.
“I’m starving,” he decided abruptly. “Let’s go get some lunch.”
Because all of a sudden he had to get out of that office, breathe a little fresh air and sunshine, and try to find some reason he shouldn’t just bail on this project.
Not that he was going to. He was a man of his word, unfortunately, and he’d already said he’d do it. But he would feel a whole lot better if the ice queen would thaw a degree or two, since they were apparently going to be in close quarters quite a bit.
He stood up and started toward the door when he caught sight of Veronica’s frustrated expression. She didn’t know what was going on, he realized. He hadn’t been looking at her when he spoke, and she probably hadn’t caught a tenth of what he’d said.
Something inside him, something well guarded behind high protective walls, nibbled at him, telling him to take it easy on her. Something very sharp slipped past his barriers and pierced his heart with an unwelcome pang of sympathy.
He stopped, facing her, and said clearly, “Let’s go to lunch. My treat.”
She darted a surprised glance at her father, then nodded. “Okay.”
He picked a restaurant not too far from the dock, a place that always kept its doors wide-open, as did most Key West businesses, and its air-conditioning set at forty below zero. “Great seafood,” he said to the Coleridges, taking care that he was facing Veronica when he spoke.
He noticed she took the seat across from him at the table, apparently determined not to miss any more of what he said. He found himself wondering what life must be like for her, and how handicapped she really was.
And he figured, judging by the expression on her face a few minutes ago, that he would go nuts from frustration if he suddenly lost his hearing. He wondered if she’d been deaf all her life, or if it was something recent.
And he concluded that it was none of his business, so he didn’t ask.
He ordered a beer, and Coleridge ordered a glass of wine. Veronica, he noted, asked for ice water. Uptight in every way. She and he were not going to get al
ong at all.
But somebody had to break the ice, and by the time they ordered their meals, it was pretty apparent that it was going to have to be him.
“So,” he said, “tell me about this wreck we’re looking for.”
Again that look of mild irritation flitted across Veronica’s face, and he figured she hadn’t understood him. Lifting his head, he repeated his question slowly, simplifying it. “What wreck are we looking for?”
She understood this time. He also noted, with interest, that her father didn’t leap into the breach and answer for her. Instead, Coleridge seemed fascinated by the passersby beyond the window.
“La Nuestra Señora de Alcantara,” Veronica replied. Her voice, he noticed, was still too loud, but in the restaurant, which was filling up with a noisy lunch crowd, it wasn’t exceptional.
“Our Lady of Alcantara,” he translated. “Spanish treasure ship?”
She nodded.
“What happened to it?”
“Near miss with a hurricane. The cargo was doubling as ballast, and the captain wouldn’t let them throw any of it overboard when the seas got rough. They foundered.”
He nodded. He almost asked where this had happened, then decided against it. Some details were better not bruited about in public. “Survivors?”
“Two. One of them recorded the events afterward.”
Original source material. That was always useful. “You know, don’t you, that a lot of those ships made navigational errors?”
She cocked her head. “What?”
“A lot of those ships made mistakes in calculating their positions.”
She nodded. “I know. I’m going by other information.”
Maybe she had done her homework. Although he would readily admit he didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about the subject himself. That little fact probably didn’t make him the best judge of whether she knew what she was talking about.
Then she surprised him by actually asking him a question. “You’ve done some wreck diving, haven’t you?”
He nodded. “But only a little. Just for fun. No serious treasure hunting.” Back in his early days in the Keys, he’d wasted some time diving the reefs and the known wrecks. “I’ve used submersible metal detectors, but that’s about it.”
Her eyes were narrowed again, as if she hadn’t quite followed what he’d said. It occurred to him that conversing with her could be exhausting. Then he realized that if it was exhausting for him, it was probably even more so for her. “Metal detectors,” he said.
She nodded inquiringly.
“I’ve used them.”
She gave another nod, a bigger one this time, one that said she comprehended.
There, he told himself. That wasn’t so bad. Although he had a feeling that if he had to spend the next three months repeating everything twice, it was going to be a serious nuisance.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gallagher,” Orin Coleridge said. He turned toward Dugan in a way that cut Veronica out of what he was saying. Veronica noted it instantly, Dugan saw, and she didn’t like it.
“The background noise,” Orin said. “It makes it more difficult for her to make out what you’re saying.”
Dugan didn’t get that. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t understand the hearing aids, either. “Maybe somebody ought to explain this to me, so I know what I’m up against here.”
“My daughter still has some hearing. Her loss mostly lies in the middle ranges where most daily sounds occur. Where speech occurs. With the help of hearing aids, speech can be amplified enough that she can hear some of the sounds you make, but not the consonants. Unfortunately, as she has told me so often, the hearing aids also amplify all the other sounds. So right now I would venture to say that your voice is getting lost in all the other noise around us.”
He nodded, absorbing that. “So what do I sound like to her?”
She answered, apparently having read his lips. “Ooo ow eye iiii.”
It took him a minute to realize that she had said, “You sound like this.” No consonants. Thinking about it, he guessed he could see it. Consonants were kind of quiet. So he sounded like that to her, did he? Then he could damn well understand why she was having trouble. “So you get the consonants from watching my lips?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.” He could scarcely imagine how difficult that must be. So maybe instead of feeling so irritated by her irritation, he ought to just pay more attention to looking at her, and enunciating clearly. It sounded easy enough, but he knew it was going to be a strain, because he wasn’t used to doing that.
And it might be a good time to get back to the subject at hand. “So, okay, how long are we going to be out tomorrow?”
“We’ll be out for a couple of hours and probably make two flights,” she said. “That should cover most of the area I’m interested in.”
“What if you don’t find anything?”
“We’ll still look. There’s an eyewitness report that the ship broke up, so we might not see anything from the air.”
He nodded, but was thinking that this was a fool’s quest. “When did this ship go down?”
“In 1703,” Orin answered.
“Three hundred years.” If it had gotten buried in sand or mud, there might be quite a bit of timber left, but if it hadn’t gotten buried, there wouldn’t be much except cargo and cannons and some of the ship’s iron fittings. And all of that could be scattered over several square miles. Three months? In your dreams, lady.
But he didn’t say what he was thinking. No point in it. It was on her dime, not his, and he figured that if she was going to yield to reason, she would have done it before she showed up in his office. So he acted like this was a perfectly rational thing to be doing. “I’ve got another diver for you, a friend of mine.”
She picked that up well enough, and nodded. “Good.”
“So maybe two is enough to start?”
“Why?”
“No point in hiring anyone else until we’re sure we need the extra hands.”
She thought about that, but something about her eyes told him she wasn’t too happy about it.
“Look,” he said. “You want to keep this under wraps. That means you go at it in a small way. Now if you don’t care what the world knows about this, we’ll hire another boat, string a cable between them and use it as a guideline for a whole team of divers to swim in parallel.”
“I don’t follow,” she said.
So he grabbed a napkin and drew a sketch, using it to show her what he meant as he explained again. She nodded her comprehension, then shook her head.
“I thought you’d feel that way. Look, first we do the flyover, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then we go out on the boat. You said you have a magnetometer?”
“Yes.”
“When we find something worth checking out, Tam and I can do it. You won’t need more than the two of us right away. Later, we might, but right now, two divers will be enough to check out the possibilities.”
She looked at her father. He nodded. “Mr. Gallagher is right. Two will work for a start.”
“Call me Dugan,” he said.
“Okay,” Veronica said. “Two to start. But if I think we need more, we get them.”
“Sure.” If they found anything, they’d need the extra hands. But at least for now he figured two divers were going to be overkill. In fact, he was willing to bet they wouldn’t see anything from the plane, and willing to bet her magnetometer wouldn’t find anything either.
Cripes, he might not know much about treasure hunting, but he’d been in these parts long enough to know how difficult it was going to be to find a sunken, broken-up Spanish treasure ship. Three hundred years could do a lot of weird things to wreckage. Wood would be mostly gone, coral would have grown on the remains, hiding them. Unless they found something that looked distinctly artificial, they were apt to get nowhere fast.
Not his problem. His problem, the way he saw it, was to ge
t these two lambs through the next three months of disappointment and heartbreak without being fleeced. And without drawing the attention of some less-savory elements who might think the Coleridges knew an easy way to get rich.
Which was quite enough of a burden for a man who had decided to avoid moral burdens like the plague after he’d been taught that other people didn’t have moral qualms. The rule was every man for himself, and anybody who didn’t play by those rules was bound to be a loser.
He’d been a loser, once. And he’d finally carved out a niche where he didn’t have to face those conflicts anymore. So what was he doing getting involved in this mess?
The question kept rearing its head, irritating him because he’d already answered it numerous times since yesterday. He didn’t want to think about it anymore. He just wanted to get through these next months.
“What time tomorrow?” he asked.
“What?”
He stifled a sigh and looked at Veronica. “The plane,” he said. “What time tomorrow?”
“Eight. Wilson Air.”
Oh, God! He knew Butch Wilson. Worse, he knew Wilson’s reputation. The guy had started his life as an aviator in Vietnam, where he’d developed some seriously bad habits related to careful flying. Then he’d run drugs up from Jamaica, back in the days when drug running had been a primary industry around the island. He’d long since gone legit with a charter service, but his attitude hadn’t improved any. He still liked treetop flying and quick thrills.
Maybe he needed to pick up some Dramamine for the flight.
On the other hand, Butch was as honest as the day was long. The Coleridges had lucked out, picking him.
“Butch is a good man,” he said finally. “How’d you pick him?”
“You know Drew Hunnecutt?” Veronica asked.
“Hell, yes. We went to Harvard together, and I take him diving a lot.” Not on the regular tours, either. When Drew came to town on vacation, he was looking for something special, and Dugan had long ago developed the habit of scheduling a vacation himself at the same time, and taking Drew out on the Mandolin.
