“I saw five gators tonight. Their eyes glowed kind of a dull red when I hit them with the light. On the way back, though, I saw one that had eyes more orange than red. It went under before I got a good look. Do some gators have orange eyes?”
I said, “Orange? You’re sure?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Then you saw a saltwater crocodile.”
The boy was impressed. “No kidding? I’ve seen them on television—shows on Australia and Africa. I didn’t know crocs lived around here.”
“They’re a different species,” I said, “but similar animals. There’s at least one big female that hangs out in the sanctuary. It could have been her. How big?”
“Not that big, but definitely orange eyes.”
The kid closed the locker and began walking toward the parking lot, where I could see a bike leaning against the ficus tree next to the Red Pelican Gift Shop. I fell in beside him, inexplicably pleased that he considered me worthy of conversation.
Will asked me, “Are they exotics?”
In my mind, the kid’s stock was rising. “Nope, crocs are native. Florida’s home to about every form of exotic animal you can imagine. But saltwater crocs were here long before people arrived.”
“Like the electric eels in your lab.” He offered it as an example of a feral species.
“That’s right. Plus a hundred thousand boa constrictors and pythons, between Orlando and Key West, all gone wild. Monitor lizards, iguanas, Amazon parrots and monkeys, too—you name it.”
“That’s kind of cool,” Will said, but his tone was cooling. “Is that why you’re diving a lake instead of the Gulf? To check it out and see if there are any exotics?”
I shrugged, a perverse streak in me wanting the boy to know what it was like to be answered with silence.
“You’re not going to tell me why you’re diving the lake, either, huh?”
I said, “It’s not my trip. A friend of ours planned it. Any questions, he’d have to answer.”
“Do I know the guy?”
“His name’s Arlis Futch. Captain Futch. He’ll be here in the morning.”
“Tomlinson said there was a chance you might let me go.”
“That’s up to Captain Futch, too.”
The windows of the Red Pelican produced enough light for me to read the boy’s reaction. He didn’t believe me.
“What’re you going to tell the guy when he asks about me?”
I said, “Knowing Arlis, he won’t. But he might ask you about your first open-water dive. How’d you like Key Largo?”
Will ignored the question and skipped to my reason for asking. “It doesn’t bother me a bit, being in closed spaces. Being kidnapped—that’s what you’re wondering about, isn’t it? Underwater, same thing—I liked it. You sound just like the shrinks now. If you’ve got something to say, why not just come out and say it?”
I smiled. Smart kid. “Okay, I will. Even in a lake, a diver has to be able to count on his partners. There’s nothing simple about recreational diving. I don’t know why they use that term.”
I expected the adolescent shields to drop a notch. Instead, he replied, “I count on myself all the time. Always have, so I guess you can, too. If I do something wrong, all you have to do is tell me. I’ll fix it. That sound fair?”
Yes, I had to admit it. It was reasonable and fair.
Before I could respond, he added, “Or maybe there’s something else you’re worried about. The shrinks don’t come right out and ask me about that one, either.”
I started to pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about but decided that lying was the worst way to deal with William Joseph Chaser. He was talking about the man he’d killed, one of his abductors. I said, “It doesn’t worry me. You had a choice and you made it. It was the right thing to do. If anything, it tells me you can handle yourself in a tight spot.”
Will said, “What’s the problem, then? I’d like to go. I’ve never been underwater in a lake before. Maybe you can tell the guy in charge—Captain Futch, you said? Maybe you could convince him that I’d do okay.”
There was something in the boy’s tone that bothered me. It was the airy way he had asked, What’s the problem, then? Tomlinson had been pushing me to discuss the subject, so I decided I would never have a better opportunity. I said, “How do you feel about it? You killed a man. Does it bother you?”
“I thought we were talking about diving a lake.”
“You said if there was something I wanted to say, say it. So there it is. I’ve heard that you won’t discuss it with your doctors. That you don’t talk with anyone about what happened.”
We were beneath the ficus tree now. Will took his bike by the handlebars and swung his leg over the seat as if mounting a horse. “Sometimes I know things about people,” he said. “It’s always been that way. So I know enough to keep my mouth shut because there are things I don’t want people to know about me.”
“Intuition?” I said.
“Maybe. Or instincts—the kind animals have. I’m not sure how I know things, but I do.”
I listened carefully, inspecting his tone and his words for arrogance, but there was none. He had said it matter-of-factly, more like a confession than boasting.
“Tomlinson asked me to bring up the subject. Do your instincts tell you why?”
I expected the question to unsettle the kid, but instead he looked at me until my eyes had found his. In the winter light, his eyes were as black as his Apache hair. “I feel just like you must feel after getting rid of something that needs to be killed. Does that answer your question?”
I said, “You mean how I would probably feel—if I’d ever done something like that.”
Maybe the teen smiled, I couldn’t be certain, but he allowed his intensity to dissipate, then looked away. He shrugged. “Yeah. That’s what I meant. I wish it hadn’t happened. It comes into my mind every day. I don’t feel bad about it, but I don’t feel good about it, either. No, wait—” He was reviewing what he’d just said. “Can I tell you something? Confidentially, I mean.”
I said, “Maybe. But maybe not. If you tell me something Barbara should know—for your own good, I’m saying—then don’t risk it. Otherwise, you can trust me.”
“Most people would’ve said sure right off the bat.”
I said, “I’ll keep that in mind the next time you think about sharing a secret. What did you want to tell me?”
“The truth, I guess,” he said slowly. “The truth is, I feel good about what happened. I was lying about that. The man tried to kill me, so I killed him. I’d do it again. My guess is, you know what I mean.”
I straightened my glasses, then put my hands in my pockets, giving it some time, before saying, “Tomorrow morning, have your gear checked and ready to go. Be here at eight sharp—just in case Captain Futch says yes.”
FIVE
IF I DO SOMETHING WRONG, JUST TELL ME, I’LL fix it . . .
Will had meant what he’d said, yet I was the one who had screwed up. I had allowed him to jam his hand into the rocks and topple the delicate scaffolding of underwater limestone.
Will had told me, I count on myself all the time, so I guess you can, too . . .
What did it matter, if I couldn’t count on myself?
When the ledge collapsed, burying Will and Tomlinson, I compounded the mistake by panicking. I bolted from the scene, swimming ahead of the murk, until my intellect finally subdued my instincts. It took only seconds, yet I was already berating myself, as I drew my knees up and thrust out my hands to stop my momentum.
I did an about-face and swam into the cloud of silt, kicking hard toward where I’d last seen Tomlinson and the boy. Because visibility had gone from bad to impossible, I extended my left hand as a bumper.
First, though, I paused long enough to check my watch. I had to mark the precise time of the landslide. If Will and Tomlinson had not already wormed themselves free, they had a finite amount of air remaining in
their tanks. If they were trapped, I needed to know how long I had to get them out.
We had been underwater thirty-eight minutes, according to the chronograph on my new dive watch. That wasn’t a large or forgiving window.
Will, the novice, would have consumed more air than we had. That was predictable. He might have as much as twenty-five minutes remaining or as little as ten, depending on how he now handled the shock of being caught under the rocks.
Tomlinson would deal with it more calmly. The man is benignly neurotic, as high-strung as a poodle during the normal course of his abnormal life, but when events turn sour, and the sky begins to fall, the man changes.
I’ve seen it often enough to know.
When the pressure’s on, Tomlinson withdraws into some ancient retreat inside his head. His voice softens, his mannerisms slow. He exudes an unaffected calm—a serene acceptance that is sometimes comforting but occasionally maddening.
What I hoped was that the guys had already dug their way out of the pile. I hoped they were now kicking their way toward the surface with nothing more than a few bruises and cuts to deal with. If true, the landslide was something we could laugh about later.
After a full minute of kicking through the murk, though, I began to have my doubts. With each stroke, I expected to collide with remnants of the fallen ledge.
I did not.
I changed direction, certain I would hit bottom. Wrong about that, too. So I recalculated, and made another attempt to find the ledge, both hands extended, feeling my way.
Nothing.
I was disoriented. The sediment was so thick there was the illusion that I was descending, not traveling on a level course. The silt, as it boiled around me, appeared to be siphoning downward, too.
Or was it illusion?
I swam blindly for another few seconds before I stopped, and told myself to calm down, to think. I checked the depth gauge attached to my buoyancy compensator vest—a BC. The gauge was a simple recreational-dive computer, with a needle and precise green numerals. Even so, visibility was so poor I had to hold the thing against my mask to read it.
48 ft.
Damn it!
It wasn’t an illusion. I had been descending. Without landmarks to guide me, I’d been following the lake’s rim downward toward the mouth of the underground river.
My brain analyzed the inference. If silt was being drawn downward, there was a reason. It meant there was a subtle, siphoning current. I had been swimming with the same current, following the path of least resistance.
I took two slow, measured breaths. Because I no longer knew up from down, I cupped my regulator and watched the bubbles. Next I jetted a burst of air into my BC, then followed the bubbles slowly toward the surface, exhaling as I ascended, left hand extended above my head, right hand holding the pressure gauge near my mask.
When I got to twenty feet, visibility had not improved. I purged my BC until buoyancy was neutral, then hung suspended for a few seconds. Where the hell had the lake’s bottom gone?
I spun around, searching . . . and was instantly disoriented again.
Granules of sand swirling before my eyes assumed the pattern of distant stars . . . then zoomed closer, thick as a soup of protoplasm. I knew I had to surface to get my bearings. When I burped more air into my BC, it reacted with a thrusting space-shuttle jolt and began to transport me upward.
At ten feet, I stopped again, surprised by another thunderous rumble. Water conducts sound more efficiently than air. The rumble came from beneath me, vibrating through flesh, resonating in bone.
Another landslide?
No. The sound was different, an abrupt thud of weight, then a mushrooming silence. If a massive slab of limestone had collapsed, it might make a similar sound.
I waited, dreading confirmation. The confirmation arrived via an upward surge of displaced water and a blooming cloud of darker sediment.
The landslide had caused a section of the lake’s bottom to collapse. I knew there was a chance that Will and Tomlinson had been swept deeper by the implosion.
I surfaced in a rush. When I’d broken free of the murk and pushed the mask back on my head, I used fins to do a fast pirouette, examining the lake’s surface. I hoped to see Tomlinson and Will floating nearby, laughing in the winter sunlight, already recounting their brush with death.
Instead, the lake was a solitary disk, wind-rippled, empty.
I checked the time. Forty minutes, I’d been down. At the max, Will had twenty minutes of air left, Tomlinson thirty . . . if they were still alive.
I faced the lake’s southern shore, searching for our vehicle. It was a four-wheel-drive Dodge Ram truck, parked on a cypress ridge, fifty yards away across the water. I began calling for Arlis Futch and expected to see him exit the vehicle, hands on hips, still in a foul mood because I’d made him stay ashore.
The truck’s door was open, but there was no sign of the old man. There was no sign of life, period, save for a pair of loons V-ing toward the lake’s far rim and the ascending whistle of an osprey that wheeled overhead.
I cupped my hands and yelled, “Arlis? Arlis! Call nine-one-one!”
I waited before adding, “Tell them we need an emergency response team. Arlis! Rig the jet pump and start the generator!”
Silence.
Above, the osprey tucked its wings and dropped like a boulder. The hawk crashed the water’s surface, splashed wildly for a moment, then struggled to get airborne, gaining speed, its claws dripping . . . but empty.
“Arlis! Do you hear me? Goddamn it . . . Arlis Futch!”
Near the vehicle, a rabble of crows scattered above the cypress canopy, black scars animated on a blue sky. Something beneath the trees had spooked the birds. If Arlis was somewhere back there in the cypress grove, he wasn’t answering.
Tomlinson and Will had to be beneath me. Somewhere. There is no such thing as a bottomless lake, so I would find them. Somehow.
I cleared my mask, purged my BC, then piked downward. I let the weight of my legs push me toward the bottom.
Years ago, diving a sinkhole in the Bahamas, I swam down through a pea-soup murk only to suddenly bust through into a globe of glacier-clear water. It was like entering a crystal vault from above. The light was muted because of the gloom, but visibility was flawless.
On that occasion, I had pierced the aqueous lens of an underground spring. Fed by ocean currents, the outflow of water created a bubble of clarity. It was like discovering a secret world.
Something similar happened now, as I descended, although the change in clarity wasn’t as abrupt. Sediment was dissipating, visibility improving. It was surprising because there hadn’t been enough time for the murk to settle. It suggested that clear water was now flowing into the area from below. Perhaps the landslide had uncovered a spring.
At ten feet, I observed a vague, stationary darkness take form. It was the lake’s shallow perimeter. The ledge that held the prehistoric tusk had stood fifteen yards from the rim of a drop-off. The sandy rim remained—a relief to see a familiar landmark—but the bottom had changed. The rim soon assumed color in patterns of gray and white. I was peripherally aware of varieties of fish—bream and immature bass—that had been drawn to the disturbance.
As I drew closer, I could also see that the bottom hadn’t just changed, some of it had vanished. A section of ridge the size of a car had imploded, taking the ledge with it. From the appearance of the crater, the area beneath it had dropped about ten feet. The elevated wall had collapsed atop it and was now a mound of oolite and sand. The area was littered with fossilized oysters. The oyster shells were the size of footballs.
Then I saw something else I recognized: the prehistoric tusk. It lay bare on the sand. The thing was twice as long as I’d supposed. It was six feet of black ivory, spiraled like a corkscrew.
I swam downward, spooking fish as I approached, and lifted the tusk—it was heavy. I waited a moment, ears adjusting to the pressure, then let the artifact drop. It made a sat
isfyingly hollow thud. The vague percussive sound told me that the bottom was porous, not solid.
Good.
It gave me hope.
First things first, I had to mark the spot. I pulled a dive marker from my vest and secured the nylon cord to a rock near the tusk. I inflated the marker, then watched it rocket to the surface.
From a calf scabbard, I removed my dive knife. Normally, I would have been carrying something cheap—more than one diver has died because he dropped an expensive knife and chased it into the depths. But this was to have been a shallow-water dive, so I was carrying a treasured possession. It was one of the last survival knives made personally by the late Bo Randall of Orlando. The handle was capped with a machined brass knob. I used the handle now to tap on the tusk, then straightened myself to listen, hoping to hear a response.
Nothing.
I tapped again, a measured series, then gave it a few silent seconds before leaving the tusk and swimming down into the crater.
A vein work of fissures thatched the crater’s limestone floor. Tendrils of gray silt vented upward from the cracks, as symmetrical as smoke on a windless day.
A volcanic effect.
It told me yes, water was flowing out through the latticework of stone. It also told me that the area beneath me was porous, not solid—possibly not heavy enough to crush two men.
Using the knife, I began tapping on the limestone, traveling along the bottom in an orderly way. Tap-tap-tap. I waited. Tap-tap-tap. I listened.
After several attempts, I abandoned the crater and followed its outer wall downward. At the edge of the wall, the bottom angled deeper. It dropped toward a funneling darkness: the mouth of an underground river.
Again, I went through the ceremony with the knife. Tap-tap-tap. Wait. Tap-tap-tap. Listen.
Twice, I worked my way around the wall, tapping, then waiting. When I finally heard a dull Tap-a-tappa-tap in reply, I thought I might be imagining it. I wasn’t convinced until Tomlinson added a vaudeville rhythm: Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits.
The sound was muffled but the source familiar. Rap an air tank with a knife—it was the same bell-like sound. It told me at least one man was alive. No . . . they were both alive, I realized. I was now hearing a duo of bell sounds: Tomlinson and Will both banging on their tanks.
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