When I Wake

by Rachel Lee

  When Luis hung up the phone, he realized he was no longer shaking. His fears were imaginary, he told himself. They had been born of too much inaction, that was all. He would get Tam’s information, then would decide what to do with it.

  He left the hotel, hurrying at a quick pace to the bar just off Duval Street, where they could sit in the dim recesses at the back and be observed by no one on the street.

  The late afternoon was hot, the crowds were already building for an evening of revelry. On the one hand, the crowds exacerbated Luis’s paranoia because it would be so easy for a spy to follow him. On the other hand, they made him feel safer, because no one could hurt him with so many people around.

  When he stepped into the frigid interior of the bar, he felt a strong qualm. It was so dark after the brightness of the outdoors, and anyone could be hiding way at the back. Even El Desconocido.

  He told himself he was being foolish, though, and made his way to the small table all the way in the back. It was rarely occupied, because most people seemed to like to be able to watch the street through the open doors. Luis paused at the bar long enough to order his Tecate, then slipped into a chair to wait.

  He felt safer then. There was a wall at his back, and he could see everyone who came into the bar before they could see him. And not even Emilio, he told himself, could possibly see what he was doing there, not even if he walked in that very minute.

  It was right about that time it dawned on him that he wasn’t cut out to play a double agent. He didn’t have the temperament for it any more than he had the temperament to gamble. He worried too much.

  But then he reminded himself how much money might be involved. Emilio would pay him only a bonus for his work on this matter. El Desconocido might pay him millions. It was worth the risk.

  If he didn’t have a heart attack from stress first.

  Tam was a few minutes late, but not so late that Luis started worrying about it. Of course, the Tecate—of which he was drinking a little too much lately—helped relax him. By the time Tam arrived, he was actually bobbing his head in time to the reggae blaring from the overhead speakers.

  Tam ordered a double scotch on ice and carried it back to the table. He turned a chair so that he, too, could sit with his back to the wall.

  “Worried someone will find you?” Luis asked, even though he was concerned about the same thing.

  “I know half the people who live in this damn town,” Tam said. “And I don’t want to be overheard.”

  “It would be hard to hear over the music.” It was one of the reasons he had chosen this place to meet.

  “Maybe.”

  “So you have news for me?”

  “Yep.” Tam tossed back about half his whiskey and let out a satisfied sigh.

  “You found the Alcantara?”

  “Maybe. But maybe not. We found a cannon. There’s no way to be sure where it came from. Anyway, we did a survey and came up with an area to explore, based on magnetometer readings.”

  Luis didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know what a magnetometer was, so he nodded sagely. “So a wreck is there.”

  Tam shrugged. “Damned if I know. Nobody knows for sure. All we know is there’s some iron down there. We’re going back to dive and see what all of it is. It might be a wreck. It might be the Alcantara. It also might be another ship, or just a seagoing junkyard.”

  “That’s all you found?” He had the feeling Tam was withholding something.

  “That’s it.” Tam stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Hey, man, what’s the rush? It takes years to find and salvage these wrecks. A cannon is a cannon. We’re lucky we found it.”

  “But the Coleridge woman, she thinks it is the wreck?”

  “She’s hoping it is. Aren’t we all?”

  Tam took his money, five hundred dollars, drained his glass, and departed, leaving Luis sitting in the dark corner by himself.

  This was entirely too vague for his liking. Entirely. He wanted action soon.

  But he didn’t have any idea how to get it.

  Forty minutes later he called Emilio. His boss was in a jovial mood, enjoying a sail across the Caribbean. “It’s beautiful, Luis,” he said expansively. “I wish you were here.”

  Luis thanked all the gods in the universe that he was not on the Conchita. It was easier to deal with Emilio on the phone, and besides, he would only get sick. “I have news,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry.

  “Yes? What?” Emilio’s excitement was unmistakable.

  “They found a cannon,” Luis said.

  “A cannon?”

  “A cannon. They are not sure if this is from the Alcantara, but my informant says they have mapped an area to begin diving. They used a magneto.”

  “A magnetometer, Luis,” said Emilio, who was far more well versed in the methods of archaeology. “Fascinating. If they’ve mapped out an area to explore, then they have probably found the remains of a ship.”

  “But they don’t know what ship.”

  “No matter. I’ll be there when they discover it, and that’s all that concerns me.”

  That was exactly what concerned Luis, too. Having Emilio breathing down his neck. And having Emilio nearby when the mask was found.

  He debated for more than an hour about whether he should call El Desconocido, and finally decided he had to. He had begun to play with fire, and if he stopped juggling it now he might get burned. But he decided to add another piece of information to this phone call, a piece that might help protect him.

  He left a message, and twenty minutes later the unknown man called him back at his hotel.

  “You say you have information?”

  “I do,” said Luis. “They found a cannon, and have mapped an area for exploration. They think they have found the ship.”

  “Excellent. Anything else?”

  Luis hesitated, unsure whether to say more.

  “When will your employer arrive?”

  The words struck terror in Luis’s heart. How had the man known Emilio was coming? “Uh . . . soon.”

  “Keep me informed.” There was a soft click, then El Desconocido was gone.

  And Luis realized he had made a bargain with the devil.

  Chapter 15

  The deck of the Mandolin was scattered with small treasures: encrusted coins, tools, and even some iron ship’s fittings. The biggest treasure yet found was a Ming Dynasty jar, not even chipped from its journey to the bottom of the sea.

  “It must have been packed in sawdust or something,” Veronica told Dugan as she gently brushed damp mud from it. “The years in the water ate away the crate and the packing material and left the jar untouched.”

  “It’s fabulous.” He’d just found it, and was still smiling with pleasure. “This is it, isn’t it, Veronica? The Alcantara?”

  “I think so. She was carrying treasures from the Orient. I need to check this jar against what’s on the ship’s manifest, but I seem to remember there were some jars like this on it.”

  It amazed him that records of such things had survived all these years, but Veronica had told him about the archives of the Indies, stored now in Seville. Bean counters had been bean counters even back then, and meticulous records had been kept of nearly every jot and tittle aboard these ships. Not the hammers, of course, or even the plates the crew ate off, but of the cargo—yes, of the cargo.

  There was a lot more below them. He and Tam had been scouring the bottom, marking places where treasures existed, only bringing a sampling to the surface.

  “Well, we’ve established it was a cargo ship,” Veronica said, sitting back on her heels. “We’ve now established it was carrying goods that had been shipped out of Manila. I’d say I’m ninety percent certain we’ve found the Alcantara.”

  He crouched beside her. “So what now?”

  “We take this stuff back to shore, hire a few more divers, get a bigger boat, and start salvaging in earnest.”

  He couldn’t stop himself. “What about the m
ask?”

  Her gaze shadowed. “If we find it, we find it.”

  They’d been keeping a careful distance ever since their encounter in her cabin, dancing around one another as if one of them had something contagious. But all of a sudden that distance irritated him all to hell. So he tried to cross it, but safely. “How’s your father doing?”

  “I don’t know. He’s up in Tampa having another scan.”

  “You’re worried about him.” He didn’t mean it as a question.

  But she took it as one anyway. “I guess.”

  Her answer bothered him. “You guess?”

  She shrugged.

  Dugan had his share of faults, but he loved his parents deeply, and even if he only saw them once a year, he’d never say he guessed he was worried because one of them had cancer. Especially if it was as bad as Orin Coleridge’s appeared to be. “What’s with you two?” he asked.

  She acted as if she didn’t hear him. He knew better than that because he was staring right at her hearing aid. But she had turned her face away, so she probably hadn’t understood him. And the only reason she had looked away was because she didn’t want to discuss this with him.

  He was getting damn tired of being tuned out like this. Tired of her rudeness.

  He tapped her shoulder. She looked at him.

  “Being deaf,” he said flatly, “doesn’t give you the right to be rude, or to use your lack of hearing as a weapon.”

  She gasped, anger sparking in her eyes. “Who are you to tell me how to behave?”

  “Another human being. Damn it, Veronica, if you don’t want to talk about something, just say so. But ask yourself how the hell you’d feel if I turned my back on you so I couldn’t hear what you have to say.”

  “Where do you get off talking to me this way, you . . . you dropout!” This time when she turned away, she gave him the full brunt of it, dragging the jar around with her so that she could busy herself with it while showing him nothing but her rigid back.

  Violence was always an option, he found himself thinking. She was making him that mad just then. Unfortunately, it wasn’t his style. The last time he’d resorted to it, he’d been thirteen. Jesse Calisto had been making his life hell for weeks, shoving him around and making sport of him. And one day, much to his own amazement, Dugan had thrown a punch that had given Jesse a bloody lip. The detention had been worth it, especially since nobody ever messed with Dugan again.

  But that wasn’t his usual way of handling problems, and it sure as hell wasn’t the way he wanted to handle Veronica, even if he was savoring an image of shaking her until her teeth rattled.

  He stared at her back for a minute, then moved, grabbing the jar from her and putting it behind his back, forcing her to look at him.

  She glared at him. “Give that back! You might damage it.”

  “You’ll get it back as soon as we’re done talking.”

  “We are done talking.”

  “I don’t see it that way. And I don’t like you turning your back on me. It’s rude. It’s juvenile. And I deserve to be treated with more respect than that.”

  “You don’t have any right to lecture me!”

  Her voice was a hell of a lot louder than usual, and he found himself thinking that he was glad they were at sea, where no one could hear. And Tam was still in the water. “Have I told you lately that you’re a shrew?”

  “So what?”

  “Christ. Look, all I did was ask a question. All you had to do was say, ‘Dugan, I’d really rather not discuss that with you because I don’t think it’s any of your business.’ What you don’t have the right to do is turn your back on me, tune me out, and treat me as if I don’t exist. And quite frankly, lady, I am getting really tired of you turning your back anytime you don’t like something.”

  “And you’re so much better?”

  “I may be a dropout, but I sure as hell don’t treat people rudely.”

  “What do you think you’re doing right now?”

  Helluva good question, he thought. It was hopeless. He started to laugh.

  Her glare didn’t last another thirty seconds. He saw the twitch hit the corners of her mouth, and moments later she was laughing, too.

  “Okay,” he said when he could breathe again. He handed her the jar. “I’ll make you a deal. I won’t lecture you if you won’t turn your back on me.”

  “Why is that so much worse than telling you to get lost?”

  The question caught him sideways. He squatted in front of her and thought about it. “It just is. Maybe because when you turn your back it’s a complete dismissal. Because it removes me from your universe as completely as if you’d dropped me off the edge of the planet. When a hearing person turns her back, you can still argue with her.”

  “Get the last word, you mean.”

  Another laugh escaped him. “I guess. It’s just different. It’s rude when anybody does it, but it bothers me a hell of a lot more when you do it. Because it cuts us off completely.”

  She nodded slowly, thinking about what he was saying. He gave her credit for that. But then, he liked Veronica. She wasn’t a bad person. She just had a few . . . behavior problems. But hell, who didn’t. He knew he drove her up the wall sometimes with his laid-back approach to things. He just couldn’t see getting in a sweat about much. But this woman put him in a lather faster than anybody he’d ever met.

  She studied the jar, absently wiping streaks of mud off it. “This is the Alcantara,” she said. “I know it is.”

  Her voice was unusually quiet, so much so he wasn’t sure she was talking to him, so he didn’t answer.

  She lifted her head and looked at him, her expression strained. “I’ve got to find that mask, Dugan.”

  “I thought you said . . .”

  “I know what I said. But I’ve got to find that mask. My dad says he’s doing okay, but I can tell he’s not. He’s lying to me. I’ve got to find that mask before he dies.”

  “Why?”

  “To prove to him my mother wasn’t on a wild-goose chase. To prove to him that she was right. He didn’t even tell me about this quest of hers until six months ago. He kept the secret from me all through my childhood. So no matter how much he told me about her, I never really knew her. Hell, I didn’t even know what she was doing on a boat when she got killed.”

  “Whew. I’ll bet that made you angry.”

  “It did. It still does, but . . . not as much. The anger’s going away. Now I just feel cheated. But . . . oh I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like I have to vindicate my mother before he dies.”

  “I guess I can see that.” His knees were starting to kill him from squatting, so he stood up, gently drawing her to her feet. “It may be an impossible task.”

  “I know that!” Anguish filled the words.

  “Veronica . . .”

  “Don’t you see?” She held out her hands to him, her eyes swimming with tears. “Can’t you see how much it hurts? I never knew my mother, and now I’m losing my father, and all I can do, the only thing I can do, is try to find that mask before it’s too late! Oh, God, make it go away!”

  He was holding her hands so she couldn’t turn away, and the rawness of her pain lashed at him. In that one plea, God, make it go away, she conveyed to him exactly how much she was suffering. How trapped she was, and how helpless. And all she could do . . . His chest tightened in sympathy.

  “We’ve got to hurry,” she said, yanking her hands from his, and dashing away the tears. “There isn’t much time. . . .”

  “But if we hurry too much . . . well, you’re an archaeologist. You know better than I do what happens to archaeologists who trash excavation sites. You could ruin your entire future.”

  She nodded jerkily, but he could see the sheen of tears in her eyes. “I’ve got to find it, Dugan. Soon.”

  He thought she was being a little irrational, but emotions were rarely rational. She had a feeling biting her on the tail, driving her, and trying to be reasonable ab
out it wasn’t helping. She saw her time growing shorter by the day.

  He wasn’t used to thinking in those terms. Excited as he was about their finds, it wasn’t his nature to get impatient about most things. If it took twenty years, fine. The fun was in the journey anyway.

  But he didn’t have a dying father he needed to prove something to. He suspected that Veronica didn’t begin to realize why this was so important to her emotionally. He had a gut feeling that it had more to do with proving herself than proving something about her mother. More to do with proving she was as good or better than her mother.

  He looked over her head, out at the endless expanse of blue-green water and sky, and thought about that. He’d never been particularly driven to prove anything to anyone, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t understand those who were.

  And Veronica . . . he suspected that the death of her mother had deprived her of something more than a mother’s love. He wondered if, all those years her dad was dragging her around the globe, he hadn’t made her feel inadequate simply because she wasn’t her mother. And maybe, along the way, she had nearly busted herself on the shoals of trying to replace her mother for him. Maybe that’s why she had become an archaeologist.

  Orin probably hadn’t meant to make Veronica feel lacking. He’d naturally been grieving, and Veronica may have interpreted that, in a child’s way, to mean she wasn’t good enough for him. Maybe she constantly felt the lack because she wasn’t able to perform as an adult for him, either as an archaeologist or as a housekeeper, cook, and God-knew-what. He could see that happening.

  But this was awfully deep, and he wasn’t a psychologist. He had no way of knowing if he was on the right track or miles off course. But this made a whole lot more sense to him than that Veronica wanted to vindicate her mother.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  He looked down at her. “I’m trying to figure out how we can hunt for that mask without making such a hash out of this whole thing that you can never again show your face at a professional meeting.”

  The corners of her mouth lifted, and the shine of tears in her eyes stayed dammed behind her lids. “It’s tougher than it sounds.”