The Devil went down to Austin

CHAPTER 41

"You son of a bitch," Pena said.

"You don't know how appropriate your comment is, Matthew." Dwight's wrist rested on Maia's shoulder. The neoprene of the wet suit was soaking the top of her shirt. He moved his free hand around her waist, spreading his fingers caressingly across her abdomen.

"You smell good," Dwight told her. "I've never been close enough-except for your apartment, looking through your things. I'm glad you decided to pursue us, Maia."

She swallowed. Her throat muscles pushed against Dwight's gun and made it look like she was nodding.

I watched her fingers, waited for our old sign-a threefinger countdown, which would mean she was about to risk a move.

"All right, Victor," Dwight said.

Lopez had raised his gun. He was pointing it at Dwight Hayes, but his arm was bent, the gun turned sideways, as if some invisible armwrestling opponent was forcing his hand back at the wrong angle.

"You won't need that," Dwight assured Lopez. His voice was calm, deep. "Don't you remember?"

"You're drugged, Lopez," I said. "Fight it. Shoot the bastard."

Lopez's arm trembled. His chest had begun to cave in like an old man's under the weight and heat of the scuba gear.

"Don't remember," he mumbled.

"The little boy," Dwight told him. "The little Asian child. He was right under the deck, wasn't he?"

"The boy."

"Right about where you're sitting."

Pena said, "Jesus Christ, Dwight."

Pena started to move forward, but Dwight pressed the gun into Maia's throat, made her gag. "Tsk, tsk, old friend. First things first."

Lopez mumbled, "Right here."

"Good," Dwight said, nodding pleasantly. "What should you do?"

"Search."

"That's an excellent idea. You can leave the gun, I think. Your prints are on it now. That should be sufficient."

Lopez's hand lowered. The Raven clunked on the floor. "I can'tNo."

"You need your mask on," Dwight suggested. "And you'll have to keep looking. Even if it gets cold, even if you can't get out, you can't leave a little boy alone down there.

Can't let that happen again."

Dwight's voice had taken on a cadence that wasn't quite humanmore like a drum, hit by a small, angry windup machine. "You'll just need to keep searching, Vic. That little boy is down there somewhere. Drowning in the dark."

Lopez fumbled with his mask.

"No, Vic," I said.

But I was just part of the nightmare. His heart must have been slowing, his mind turning to thick sap, flowing over Dwight's words, hardening wherever they stuck.

He bit the regulator's mouthpiece, groping for a pressure gauge.

"Oh, there isn't one, Victor," Dwight reassured him. "Time is the diver's enemy. This dive, you won't have any limits. No charts. Just your task. Now over you go-it'll feel so good to get into the cold water, won't it?"

Lopez had trouble getting his leg over the railing. He slid off awkwardly, his tank hitting the rail as he fell, and then he was gone.

The sound in my ears compressed into a roar. I looked at Dwight. "How much time, you sick fuck?"

He cocked his head. "Air consumption is unpredictable when their metabolism slows down. It's a race, really, whether his heart fails from the drugs before the air gives out."

Next to me, Pena made his hands into fists. "You killed her. You drugged Adrienne. You followed us-waited for me to leave. You goddamn-"

Dwight made shhshhshh sounds, the way you would for a restless infant. "Adrienne was getting too close to you, Matthew. She was softening you. I couldn't allow that.

You made too good of a shadow to stand in, allowed me to get away with so much. I couldn't give up all the years I'd cultivated you."

"You pointed Pena toward Techsan," I said. "You made the pact with Ruby, killed her when she started having regrets. It was all"' your idea-you intended to destroy Jimmy."

He rubbed his hand across Maia's belly. "Lopez needs help. I'll tell you what, Maia-there's my equipment. I'll let you go in. Only you."

If it was possible for Maia to look any more tense than she already did, with a gun at her throat, Dwight's comment did the trick.

"It's only about twenty feet there," Dwight told her. "Pitch black. And of course, you'd have to feel around-not knowing when you'll touch human flesh, and if he'll still be alive when you do. What do you say, honey? It would be worth it, letting you save Lopez's life, just to see you face that."

Pena said, "I'll destroy you."

Dwight raised his eyebrows. "Don't lose your only admirable quality now, Matthew.

You've got to be strong. You've got to cut those ties, stand alone. That's what you always wanted. That was why I visited your parents that Christmas. I granted your wish."

Pena was deadly still for half a second, and then, foolishly, he charged. It might have been an opportunity, but before I could even think of using it, Dwight fired.

The bullet caught Pena in the gut. He contracted like he was catching a football, slammed down on his knees.

After the shot, the silence was intense.

"I've learned a lot of lessons from you, Matthew," Dwight told him. "I was hoping to spare you. But it's only right you're here to help me end this."

Matthew hugged his middle, made small sounds of pain.

A sheen of sweat had formed on Dwight's blackened face, but I got the feeling it had nothing to do with the insulation of the wet suit. Dwight Hayes was overheating from the inside.

"You remember, Matthew? How many times we lay awake at night in the dorm room talking, that first semester? Don't you remember when you gave me the idea? You told me about changing your name, how you wished your parents were dead for ignoring you all those years? You were my inspiration."

"No," Pena managed.

There was a wet stain on the wood, blood spreading around his knees.

"Oh, yes, you were," Dwight insisted. "You gave me the courage to live. You gave me a purpose."

I met Maia's eyes, saw what she was thinking. Distract him.

"You're Jimmy's brother," I told him. "Clara and Ewin's son."

Dwight's smile became disdainful. "You don't see the resemblance, Tres? Don't worry-the disk there on the table, I take the blame for it all. When they find your bodies, they'll understand. All the roots will be pulled-all the pieces of my family, Jimmy's family, will be gone. I'm sorry Garrett couldn't be here, but he'll have enough charges against him to destroy him. After tonight, Clara's younger son can rest in peace."

The way he spoke of himself in the third person chilled me even more than his threat.

"Kill him, Tres," Pena moaned. "You have to kill him."

Maia's first finger went down.

I'd have to tackle him. But the way Dwight shot, the speed with which he moved-I was pretty sure Maia and I were both going to die.

Maia's second finger went down.

A floorboard creaked in the main dining room, and a voice grumbled, "Eh! What the fucking gunshot about?"

Armand the biker. I had never been happier to hear a Cajun accent in my life.

Dwight's eyes turned heavylidded. He readjusted the muzzle of his gun against Maia's neck, then turned her, walked her backward toward the railing where he would have a clear view of the doorway. I stepped back, too, slowly, moving around Pena, now crumpled on his side, his breath a faint rattle. The gun Lopez had dropped-the . 380 Raven-was three feet from my boot.

"Eh!" Armand called again, irritably.

"On the deck," Dwight called, his voice completely altered, like a teenager's, feigning fright and surprise. "It's okay, man. We were just screwing around."

Armand appeared in the doorway, the lug nuts in his beard glinting, a sawedoff shotgun in his hands. But the shotgun was down, not ready to fire.

I met Maia's eyes one last time. Her third finger went down. Then things happened quickly.

Dwight said, "Hey, man," and shot over Maia's shoulder, hitting Armand in the chest.

Maia fell sideways out of Dwight's grasp and went into a prone sidekick, slamming her foot into Hayes' rib cage.

She knocked Dwight off balance but he spun as he fell, firing wildly behind him.

I lost a precious second trying to find the Raven, which had disappeared in the dark.

Then I gave up and charged toward Dwight.

He fired again, and Maia rolled.

I slammed him into the railing with my best varsity tackle. The railing creaked. Dwight clubbed me in the face with his pistol, but I grabbed his waist, slammed him backward again, and this time the rail cracked under our combined weight. One moment air, then we were consumed by water.

I clamped my teeth against the instant cold and black. There was no light, just the sound of churning bubbles and the fists and knees of Dwight Hayes. There was no weight to my punches, no air to breathe. Nothing but clawing and kicking in liquid.

My foot slammed into something hard-one of the aluminium pontoons under the building, maybe. The pain was enough to make me slacken my grip on Dwight's wrist.

I clawed at him once more and got wet suit, grabbed again, got nothing.

The need for air overrode everything else. I let myself float up, felt cool on my face and gasped in a breath that tasted like gasoline. My eyes burned in the darkness.

There was tromping above me. Maia's voice. A man screamingArmand. I was under the deck.

I took a breath, submerged, felt my way beneath the aluminium pontoon, kicked up in open water, the railing of the deck above me.

I yelled for Maia, then grabbed the deck floor. It took a supreme effort to haul myself up out of the lake.

Maia was tying a strip of white table linen around Armand's shoulder. Something was wrong with her foot-it was wrapped in cloth, too, and blood had already soaked it.

She finished with Armand, then limped toward Pena, who was not moving.

"Hayes?" I yelled.

"I don't know." She examined Pena's gut wound. "Christ. I used Pena's cell phone, called 911. We've got to get Lopez out of the water. It could still be a tenminute response time."

I wheeled around, scanning the horizon-saw nothing but darkness, glittering water.

Then a faint reflection-moonlight on wet neoprene-and I saw Hayes. He was on the shoreline, running uphill.

"There," I said. "He's heading for the dam."

Maia had blood on the side of her face, and I wasn't sure if it was hers.

"Hayes will get away," she said. "And Lopez doesn't have ten minutes."

I looked at her foot, then at the scuba equipment. We both knew Maia would not be running up any hills.

"Go!" she said.

"Lopez will have to hold out," I said. "Don't try it, Maia."

Her face was utterly white, but she staggered over to the air tank, stared at it like it was a bomb. She picked up the. 380 Raven, tossed it to me. "Just go, Tres. Now."

I ran-out of the restaurant, stumbling over the gravel in the parking lot, following Dwight Hayes uphill. My shirt felt like fifty extra pounds of water so I stripped it off. It was a hard trail through agarita and whitebrush and cactus, over limestone rubble at a thirtyfivedegree angle. Dwight didn't seem to have any problem with it, even in a wet suit. He was far ahead, and he kept gaining.

When he got to the top, I shot at him. Instead of turning toward the parking lot, as I'd thought he would, he turned toward the dam, started running across. By the time I was at the top, on the dam access road, Dwight was fifty yards out and I could hear the first police sirens in the distance.

A Travis County patrol car was racing up the road on the far end of the dam, a mile away. His lights were flashing. He would be there, inadvertently cutting off Hayes' escape, before Hayes could ever reach the far side.

The wind that always buffeted the dam seemed to be blowing Dwight back in my direction, ripping at his short brown hair, making it dance in spikes.

He stopped at the halfway mark. I slowed. On the other side, the police car braked, its headlamps pointed straight at us. A deputy's flashlight cut a wavering beam in the night as he ran in our direction.

Dwight looked at me, then looked over the railing on the north side of the dam-at the lake two hundred feet below, visible only because of the nickel streaks on the surface.

I kept walking toward Dwight, slowly, my hand tracing the rivets on the metal railing.

When I was about twenty feet away, Dwight took hold of one of the metal cables and stepped up onto the railing. He looked down, seemed gratified by what he saw, then looked back at me.

"One favour," he said.

"Don't do this, Dwight."

The cop on the other side of the dam kept coming.

Dwight's eyes were ferocious and clear, but there was nothing insane in them. I realized that the Dwight Hayes I'd befriended had not been a facade-not simply a mask covering a monster. Dwight Hayes was right there, standing on the ledge, imploring me.

"One thing left undone," he confided. The wind tore at him. "The most important. Don't let her do it again. You understand?"

"Come down," I said. "You can explain it to me."

Dwight smiled. "You have to improvise. Remember that, Tres. Improvise."

Then Dwight turned and faced the water.

The silence of his fall was terrible, the smallness of the impact on the water.

I stood with the wind ripping at my wet clothes, my hands on the metal railing, still gritty from the soles of Dwight's dive boots.

The deputy ran up next to me, cursed, then called on his field unit for a helicopter, LCRA boats. He shone his light down into the darkness, but there was nothing except the glitter of the black water, a small, shimmering template of lake, that had swallowed Dwight Hayes whole.

MAIA LEE

Maia wasn't sure her napkin bandage would stay on in the water, but she didn't have time to redress the wound. She didn't want to think about the diagonal groove Dwight Hayes' bullet had carved across the sole of her foot, straight through her shoe, making it look as if she'd stepped awkwardly onto a redhot metal bar.

She fumbled with the air tank-dragged it onto a table, backed up to it, tried to wrestle on the BC vest. The damn thing was not meant to go over a silk blouse. It was a man's extra large, kept slipping around her shoulders.

Calm down, she thought. You've done worse. Remember Hawaii. You've done twenty feet.

The small voice responded-the voice that always scolded her, always spoke Mandarin, the language in which she could not lie to herself. Never in the dark. Never alone.

She tugged at straps, Velcro that wouldn't go through the rings. It was an eternity before she had her equipment in place, and still she heard no sirens-only the wounded cursing of Armand in the corner. Matthew Pena had stopped making noise a long time ago.

She stood, feeling as if she'd just offered a piggyback ride to a tengallon jug of Evian.

Lake water from the BC trickled out the purge valve, leaking into her clothes. She limped toward the railing, trying to keep the weight off the wad of napkins that passed for her left foot.

She heard a gunshot far up the hill toward the dam, and she thought, Tres. Was Dwight armed? Shit.

Momentarily she thought about trying to get to the truck, maybe finding a road up there, but she knew that was just her cowardice talking.

You never get away once you back down. The fear is always there, waiting for a rematch.

She managed to get her bad foot over the railing, then the other.

Only then did she remember to check the air gauge.

The tank registered just above the red-perhaps six minutes of air, perhaps less.

Thank you, Dwight Hayes.

She found the regulator, slipped it in her mouth. The mask was too tight, but she didn't take time to loosen it. She breathed in that cold oxygen mixture, like dry ice vapour, scooted as close as she could to the exact location Vic Lopez had jumped, and she went over the side.

The cold stopped her breath. She'd never thought she would miss wearing a wet suit.

Her wounded foot was the only part of her that felt warm, and that hurt like hell.

She kicked uselessly. Her head was still above water, and she realized she had no weights to compensate for the BC. She'd have to let all the air out of her vest, hope the steel of the tank was enough to sink her.

She groped for the inflator hose, pushed the button, let the air hiss out. The BC got looser, impossibly big on her. As she tugged at the straps, trying to correct the problem, she started to sink.

Underwater, there was a brief layer of dark brown light, like beef bouillon, and then complete black.

She felt herself starting to hyperventilate, her breathing turning to gasps. She tried to remember what to do. Exhale fully-get the air out, let the carbon dioxide kick in, make her body realize she needed a deeper inhale.

She counted, tried to do chi kung breathing. She told herself this was no different than abovewater meditation, an idea that had almost worked for her in Hawaii. Almost. It was like standing up on a galloping horse-telling yourself it was no different than on steady ground.

She couldn't tell if she was still sinking.

She used her arms, swept them up. Finally, her right leg crumpled against something hard, pain flared, and her knee stopped her descent on what must've been a shelf of rock. She felt it with her hands-a mossy surface, furry and cold.

All right, she thought. I'm at the bottom. Now what?

She felt along the rock, completely blind. Nothing.

She moved down, toward a lower place-mud. She put her hands into the stuff and felt a soda can, a slimy branch, rocks.

What the hell was she doing? Which way was the shore?

She half crawled, half swam along the bottom.

Something brushed against her face? she flinched. Something nipped the top of her ear.

Fish, she told herself. Just fish.

She swept one hand in front of her in an arc, used the other to pull herself along.

And then she brushed neoprene-a gloved human hand. She lurched backward, almost lost the regulator out of her mouth. She clamped down hard with her teeth, forced herself back toward Lopez.

She felt his fingers again, his wrist, and pulled herself toward him.

She felt along his face for the regulator manifold, panicked for a moment until she felt the weak trickle of bubbles that marked his exhale. How could anyone breathe that slowly?

Now what? The weights. She'd never get him to the surface unless those came off.

She started groping around his chest-feeling the cold squares of lead, looking for a catch. There seemed to be a million damn weights, and none of them seemed connected. Just when she'd found the first buckle, Lopez began to put his hands on her, feeling her as if she were a rock or a sculpture for the blind.

Men, Maia thought. You'd better be drugged out of your mind, Detective.

She loosened the first belt, got it off his chest, heard the underwater plink plink as it hit rock at the bottom. She started looking for the second catch when Lopez's hands groped up her shoulders and found her neck. He started to squeeze.

Maia pushed herself away, fought to control her panic.

She breathed several times very slowly, listening to the exhales explode around her.

All right. So now he's trying to kill me. He's weak. Ignore it.

She got next to him again, and again he started working his hands up her body toward her neck.

She founded the second catch, lost it, found it again. It was stuck on something-the strap of the air tank maybe. She tugged.

Lopez's fingers found her throat, started to choke her. His grip was light, palsied, but his thumbs still found her trachea, made her want to gag. She pushed his hands away, went back to work.

The second belt was off his chest. Now just the ones around his waist. These are supposed to be easy latches, she remembered, for quick removal. Yeah, right.

Lopez kept strangling her. She wrestled the third belt off, groped for the final one, tried not to gag.

She imagined her grandmother in China, learning the news of Maia's death-strangled underwater by a drugged man who was feeling her body. Drowned in the beercanpolluted muck under an American restaurant. Maia tried to think how she could translate that into Mandarin and make it sound dignified-something that would save face for the family. She couldn't think of a way.

The last belt came loose.

She tugged at Lopez, trying to get him to move.

Then she realized it was no use. She would have to let the BC do the work.

Could she ascend straight up? She didn't know. Had no clue how deep she was. But then she felt her own air starting to thin- the first sign that she had a few breaths left at most. She had no choice. She wrapped one arm around Lopez's waist, used her other hand to hit the BC inflator and let it inflate all the way.

Suddenly she felt as if her whole chest was in one big blood pressure tester. The vest tightened, expanded with a rush of sound, and she and Lopez were rising, too slowly.

Lopez's hand touched her regulator, yanked it out of her mouth.

She clenched her teeth-tried to find the backup onehanded. No luck.

She inhaled a mouthful of water just as she broke the surface, coughing up half the lake.

Her entire body was shaking. She kicked and paddled with her one free hand, cursing at Lopez.

Sirens everywhere. She was at the corner of the restaurant. There were smeary lights on the shore-blinking red and blue.

She yelled for help.

Then two men in uniforms were coming for her-paramedics, splashing into the water, wading out to meet her.

And when she collapsed on the shore, staring up at the stars, more men moved around her, pulling at her straps, trying to loosen her equipment, and she tried not to tremble.

She pushed back the sensations of the water-the cold brown light, the mossy shelves of rock, the hiss of her own breath through the regulator.

As the lump formed in her throat, she spoke to herself silently, thinking the words in Mandarin so that she might believe them: They will not see me cry. They will not see me cry.