Lili pressed her lips together, stifling a smile. Deborah laughed out loud.
“Five?” Joe echoed, fuming.
“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” Sam turned and looked at the surf line. A dark shape materialized out of the foam. Seal? No, it was an otter, with a wriggling fish in its mouth. Moving silently, the lithe mammal loped up the beach and vanished into a pile of driftwood.
“Sweet,” she and Lili said simultaneously.
Turn the page for a preview of Pamela Beason’s next Summer Westin Mystery…
UNDERCURRENTS
Coming soon from Berkley Prime Crime!
BY the time Sam finally stepped into the brilliant sunshine of the Galápagos Islands, she felt like she’d toured the entire Western Hemisphere in one day. She’d driven to Seattle in the wee hours of the morning, boarded a plane for Houston, then another for Guayaquil, and then another for Puerto Ayora. She’d barely had time to introduce herself over dinner to Dr. Daniel Kazaki before she’d fallen asleep. Now, only sixteen hours after touching down, she was preparing to jump into the Pacific Ocean with him.
She had looked forward to sun, but she wasn’t quite prepared for the contrast between the Pacific Northwest and the equator. Daylight in the Galápagos was blinding, even from behind the polarized screen of her sunglasses. She blinked at the surroundings, feeling like a mole that had been suddenly unearthed. She hoped she wouldn’t feel similarly exposed in the water. She’d passed her diving certification course with flying colors and had done well in the underwater photography class, too. But today was the real test.
Her first posts at Out There were due tomorrow. She had one day to pass herself off as an underwater pro, or at least not reveal herself as an inept pretender. Last night at dinner, when she told Dan that all her dives had been in the Pacific Northwest, he said ominously, “Good, then you’ll have no problem with the currents here.”
She studied the water around their boat. Unlike the Pacific Northwest, there were no fields of bull kelp fronds here to indicate the water’s flow. “Have you explored this location before?” she asked Dan.
“Several times,” he responded, without looking at her. Clad in a wet suit unzipped to the navel, neoprene sleeves tied around his waist, he leaned against the side of the cabin cruiser. Dan nibbled the end of a pen, his brow wrinkled in concentration as he studied the clipboard he held. “It’s easy, great for gear checkout.”
Easy. Hallelujah! She picked up her digital camera and zoomed in on him. While he did have a kind smile and a few shallow wrinkles around his hazel, almond-shaped eyes, Dr. Daniel Kazaki was in no way the gray-bearded academic she’d imagined. In fact, he was a few years younger than she was, and his muscles would have been the envy of many a high school gym class. Sam prayed that she’d be able to keep up with him.
She pressed the shutter button. Dan looked up. He pulled the pen from his mouth and frowned at the tooth marks that dented the plastic. “Bad habit. You’re not putting that on the front page?”
“It’s a blog. It’s up to the editors where the photos go. I’m just a peon.”
“Impossible. I refuse to have a peon for a partner.” He grinned. “Ready to go in?”
“Almost.” She checked her regulator and buoyancy control device vest—BCD for short—for the tenth time, twisted the valves on her main cylinder and emergency pony bottle to be sure they were fully open, studied the readout on her dive computer, and breathed from her safe-second mouthpiece again to assure herself that she could use it in the event her primary mouthpiece failed. It was like preparing for a space walk.
She straightened and gazed at the surroundings, trying to postpone the dive a few minutes longer. A short distance to the east, a spear of rock broke the mirror glare of the Pacific. To the north and west lay the Santa Cruz Islands and the town of Puerto Ayora, where they had slept last night.
“Zip up,” Dan told her, shrugging into the sleeves of his wet suit.
Key Corporation had supplied her with a sleek black wet suit that featured neon green and yellow insets and “Get Out There” in fluorescent yellow script across her breasts. It made her look quite the dive diva, if she did say so herself. They had it fabricated just for her, so it perfectly fit her muscular five-foot-one inch frame. For a woman resigned to spending her life rolling up cuffs, the perfect fit was a rare luxury.
The air temperature had to be over ninety degrees Fahrenheit and she was not eager to enclose herself in thick neoprene. “Do we really need these wet suits?” she asked.
“You’ll see.” Reaching behind his back, Dan pulled up the cord attached to his zipper, stretching his wet suit tight across his upper torso. Centered in the middle of his chest was a rectangle of gray duct tape, peeling at the edges. Curious. The rest of Dan’s gear looked to be in excellent shape.
Dan tugged up his hood, buckled on his fins and then reached for his tank. As he hefted the strap of his BCD over his right shoulder, Sam snapped another photo. “Marine Biologist at Work,” she named it aloud.
“Save the film for the sharks.”
“There’s no film.” She snapped the camera into its waterproof housing and mounted the lights she would need below the surface. Then she caught up with the end of his sentence. “Sharks?”
“If we’re lucky, we’ll see a nice big hammerhead.”
Nice big hammerhead? Perched on the starboard side next to Dan, Sam reluctantly harnessed herself into her equipment and tugged on her fins. She pushed her regulator into her mouth and took a quick suck of metallic-tasting air.
Dan tethered a small handheld computer to his left wrist with a black cord, and then patted himself down, checking equipment. “Time to blast off.” He looked toward the boat cabin. “Ricardo?”
A dark-skinned man in khaki shorts and a green shirt emerged. A red can of cola sweated between his callused fingers, and a pair of sunglasses perched on top of his head.
“We’re going in now.”
Ricardo’s gaze focused on the duct tape on Dan’s wet suit. “You have a rip?” He stepped forward and pulled at a loose flap of tape. “I have glue. I can fix.”
“It’s no big deal.” Dan quickly smoothed the tape back down over the circular NPF logo Ricardo had exposed.
“N-P-F?” Ricardo pronounced it with Spanish letters, ennay-pay-effay.
Dan shrugged. “They gave me the wet suit. I’m a university professor.”
Ricardo frowned. “Pero…but NPF—”
“Could you hand Sam her camera?” Dan interrupted. “We should be down less than an hour. No need to move the boat—we’ll circle and come back here.”
Ricardo nodded. Then he pulled his sunglasses over his eyes, cloaking his gaze. Sam recognized the mirrored lenses as a brand that gang members were killing each other for in the United States—PCBs. PCB was a hip designer, not the toxic compound found in Environmental Protection Agency cleanup sites, but the idea of poisons apparently also appealed to the gangster crowd. The glasses seemed out of place here.
It was too risky to leap into the water holding the expensive camera, and on this small boat, there was no platform to gently step off from. Sam folded the attached lights against the camera and handed it to Ricardo.
“Let’s do it.” Dan shoved his mouthpiece into place, pulled down his mask, and backflipped headfirst into the water.
You can do this, Westin. After a last longing look at the sunny surroundings, Sam stretched her mask strap over her French braid, then held her face mask and regulator with one hand and followed Dan’s lead. The jade-green water closed above her. One step down. She rolled to the surface again to take the camera from Ricardo’s outstretched hands, then exhaled and sank into the foreign world.
A school of silver fingerlings, scattered by her splashdown, regrouped in a swirl around her. Sunlight stabbed the water in bright beams that reflected from the pearlescent scales of the tiny fish. Beautiful.
She took a breath. The canned air didn’t taste bad, although
it was as dry as the desert. It was the sound of her breath that rattled her nerves, amplifying the intake and outflow of her own lungs like a ventilator. A vision from her childhood welled up in her imagination. Tubes and wires and pump, breathing for a woman who was more machine than mother. Sam willed the dreaded hospital memory away. She was not her mother, nor the nine-year-old girl watching her die. She was thirty-seven now, a strong woman on an adventure.
First rule of scuba: breathe slowly and continuously. She tried to relax and do exactly that. The glittering surface receded as she descended, pinching her nose and puffing air into her sinuses to equalize pressure in her ears. Her computer readout marked fifty feet below the surface. So far, so good. She’d been down to seventy on her training dives. Rolling to a horizontal position, she spotted Dan twenty feet below her, gliding over the coral-encrusted seafloor. She sank down to join him, remembering at the last second to add air to her BCD to prevent a crash landing.
Dan plucked a tube-shaped creature from the rock and held it out. She nodded to show she recognized the sea cucumber, one of the overfished creatures NPF was especially interested in counting.
Dan gently repositioned the animal on the rock. Another of the orange-and-white species crawled a short distance away, side by side with a pale yellow one. She watched Dan tap the count into his handheld computer.
A school of bullet-shaped silverfish, each at least a foot long, surged just ahead of them. Bigeye jacks? She’d have to look them up later in her Galápagos wildlife encyclopedia CD. Dan held up ten fingers three times, then two fingers on his left hand.
Crap. She forgot she was supposed to be helping. Taking a quick glance at the gray blurs disappearing into the blue, she nodded, agreeing with the count. The look in Dan’s eyes told her that he knew she was faking.
He pointed into the murk. Sighting along his finger, Sam spotted a dark shadow headed in their direction. No. She wasn’t ready for a shark. As the creature approached, she concentrated on breathing slowly.
The shadow transformed into a spherical beast with wings. A turtle, flying underwater. Whoa. The sight was amazing. Dan returned to his examination of the ocean floor—he’d probably seen hundreds of sea turtles. Sam swam closer to the marine reptile. Its dark eyes were huge and soft, almost spaniel-like. Black spots freckled its pale green beak and neck. The turtle ignored her, gliding past with powerful thrusts of its long flippers. She took a photo with the turtle in the foreground and Dan hovering over a cluster of starfish in the background.
She finned back to Dan, who obligingly plucked a mottled red-and-white lobster from among the starfish and held it out toward the camera. As she centered his figure in the frame, his head jerked and a cloud of bubbles burst from his regulator. Alarmed, she curled the fingers of her right hand into an “okay” sign. Another burst of air bubbled from his regulator, then he quickly jabbed a finger at his throat, and returned the “okay” sign. Just coughing.
It was understandable. The compressed air was dry; her own throat felt tight and scratchy. As she reframed man and lobster in the viewfinder, she noticed a torpedo shape in the blue gloom beyond him. Uh-oh. She took a breath and pressed the shutter button, exhaled, and then pointed.
After a quick glance, Dan thrust his fingers into a vertical fin on top of his neoprene hood. Scuba sign language for shark. Crap. There was no mistaking the dorsal fin on its back, the flattened profile. It was indeed a shark. Sam hovered uncertainly in place. What was a diver supposed to do to avoid looking like food?
Dan held his hands out, two feet apart. A little shark? As it swam closer, she saw that he was correct. It was bigger than two feet, but probably no longer than three. Its sleek hide was an intricate mosaic of shaded patches. A leopard shark. Harmless, gorgeous, and best of all, alone. As the shark swam upward, she followed with the camera, capturing a shot of the shark suspended beneath the triangular shape of their boat. Even as she snapped the photo, Sam knew she shouldn’t have glanced up. She had a perfect view of all the bubbles streaming upward from both regulators. There was fifty feet of water between her and normal air.
Her breathing sounded mechanical and forced now. Calm down, she told herself. In—hiss. Out—bubble, bubble, bubble. You signed up for this.
She looked down. Below, Dan stared at her and coughed again. The display on her computer was flashing, the technological equivalent of a stern teacher shaking a warning finger. She’d been down with Dan, up after the turtle, down with Dan again, and then up after the shark. Yo-yoing. A definite no-no. Letting air out of her buoyancy vest, she slowly sank again, holding out her arms in an underwater shrug, then pointing to her camera, hoping he’d read that as being an overly enthusiastic photographer. If her fingers trembled, maybe he’d attribute it to the water’s chill. He had definitely been right about the wet suit. Her computer registered seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, which was surprisingly cold when suspended in liquid for thirty minutes.
With another burst of bubbles, Dan turned away, circling over the algae-mottled seabed, searching for more marine life. She followed, gliding a yard above the rough black lava, delighting in the marvels of a red-and-white cushion star and a psychedelic display of orange cup coral.
Suddenly the rock floor beneath her fell away, and she found herself suspended above a deep chasm. Dan was below her, his form made hazy by a shoal of tiny blue fish between them. His bubbles streamed up between the darting shapes. One air globule hit her mask squarely in front of her right eye, and clung there like a droplet of mercury until she turned her head and it rolled away, continuing its journey to the surface.
She was suspended in blue-green space. It felt marvelous and frightening and astounding, all at the same time. Her air gauge showed almost a thousand PSI left. She was breathing well, not too fast. She was gliding through the liquid womb of Mother Earth with fish and reptiles and—what was the proper classification for sea cucumbers, anyway? Echinoderms? Her wildlife biology studies had focused on mammals, so she needed to brush up on the cold-blooded classifications.
She came face-to-face with an exquisite purple lace fan. On land, she would have said it was part of the fern family. Down here, coral? She wasn’t sure. According to her books, corals came in many shapes, sizes, and colors. So did sponges. To make identification even more confusing, other creatures mimicked plants. Bryozoans? She didn’t yet know which name applied to which creature. Or even if it was one creature she was staring at. Some marine organisms were actually groups of animals. Mind-blowing.
They’d been down for nearly forty minutes now. Hadn’t Dan told the boat pilot they would circle? They hadn’t. Unless her underwater navigation skills were seriously flawed, they hadn’t traveled very far at all. Shouldn’t they be swimming more, counting more? Beneath her, Dan listed slightly to starboard. His computer dangled on its wrist cord in the slight current. He floated facedown, barely moving. Sam joined him to see what was so mesmerizing. Unable to detect much of interest within his range of vision, she tapped him on the shoulder. When he didn’t react, she tugged at his arm.
His body rolled toward her like a mannequin. Behind the face mask, his eyes were dull, his eyelids at half-mast. She flashed the “okay?” question at him.
Dan floated listlessly, unresponsive.
Bear Bait (9781101611548) Page 31
