Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 40

Walter grabbed his slate and wrote something and turned it to show Tolliver and me.

Lanny = hireling

We got it. Lanny was a hireling of Fred Stavis, who couldn't dive due to a burst eardrum, whose company Dive Solutions did the grunt work for Oscar Flynn, who had once saved Lanny from drowning, to whom Lanny owed some kind of twisted life-debt.

Flynn or Stavis or the both of them had sent Lanny down here to do a job and that told me all I needed to know — this job was bad news.

We checked our dive time on our wrist computers and Tolliver gave the okay sign. He unclipped the guideline reel from his BC and tied off the line on a knob of rock and then, without dissent, the three of us nosed into the tunnel.

I took note that Lanny hadn't set a line. He surely knew the basics, diving for Stavis's company. He surely knew how to make a safe entrance in an overhead environment. I guessed he hadn't wanted to leave a breadcrumb trail for us to find.

Too late for that.

We swam into the tunnel with controlled frog-kicks. We hardly needed to kick at all, thanks to a mild inflowing current.

The light zone did not penetrate far and so we relied on our torches, sweeping them back and forth to illuminate the way ahead. There were not likely to be more surprises pressed against the walls because the walls were fairly smooth and offered no crevices in which to hide.

Still.

We proceeded with a large dose of caution.

There was no sign of Lanny, up ahead. Either he'd come to a fork in the road or he'd progressed where our lights did not reach.

It was okay. Plenty of dive time. Plenty of room. The tunnel was wide enough for the three of us to fit side by side with room to spare. But damn it was a burrow into the reef and I felt squeezed.

My mouth went cottony. I tried to recall the taste of fennel on my tongue. All I could taste was stale canned air.

My breathing picked up. My bubbles speeded up.

Time to hum. Slow down that breathing. I searched for a tune, anything but the Jaws theme — a lullaby would be nice and I found myself humming All the Pretty Little Horses. Two bars in I realized where I'd gotten that tune, Oscar Flynn singing to the dying sea lion on the beach. I tried to shut it down but it morphed back into Jaws.

I abandoned humming and began to recite the Gettysburg Address.

Fourscore and seven years ago—a score is twenty so fourscore is eighty plus seven equals eighty-seven and it was the math and Abraham Lincoln that calmed me down.

Up ahead, the tunnel was widening.

Lanny was nowhere in sight.

I had my breathing under control but my mind took off on its own. What was ahead of us? What sort of surprise lay in wait? Something beyond our field of view. Something like that huge ghostly shape I had glimpsed two days ago across the chasm in the dying kelp forest. Only down here, the shape would be close. Identifiable.

My mouth went dry as toast.

Which is preferable, lady? Shadows of the mind or reality in your face?