Black Coral Page 2

  “Sloan? You okay?” asks Finick over the radio.

  I’d respond, but I’m holding my breath. Hopefully Kaur will explain that to him.

  Given my inability to breathe underwater, now is not the time for a conversation. I get that he’s nervous. I’m nervous. Everyone is nervous except for maybe Big Bill.

  I kick once more and see the light from the overhead spotlights. The car is nose-first in the muck with the trunk a few feet from the surface. The taillights are still on.

  I swim over the car and catch as much as I can with the video camera strapped to the top of the mask. The back window is completely blown out and the reason the car sank. No way there’ll be any survivors in this wreck.

  I swim to the driver’s side and see the open window. The lucky bastard was able to climb out of the car, probably while it was still sinking.

  I poke my head inside and check the interior. The airbags are flopping around like flat jellyfish. I push the steering wheel bag aside and feel a moment of relief when I don’t see a passenger. Then I get a look from a lower angle.

  A young man—late teens, early twenties—floats above the passenger airbag, his back pressed against the roof.

  He’s dead, and his face looks like it smashed into the windshield—which he’s sticking halfway out of.

  “Sloan . . . ,” comes a garbled voice over the radio. No time or air to respond.

  I get a look from the front. The victim’s sticking out in a precarious position, his head placed perfectly for chomping.

  I linger a few moments longer, getting as many views with the camera as I can, then unfurl the pouch to bag him. This all appears pretty cut-and-dried.

  I keep a couple of dive weights in the pouch to make it easy to maneuver as I lay it on the hood of the car and slide the body from the car into the bag’s opening.

  If you ever want to call attention to yourself, go practice this at a public pool with a diving dummy like I have a hundred times. My daughter calls it “Mommy doing her underwater hit-man thing.”

  While trying to put the victim into the bag, I’m distracted by a distant metallic sound.

  “S—” goes my radio.

  Why are they still trying to have a conversation with me?

  Suddenly the spotlight jerks.

  Damn it. Don’t they know I’m working down here?

  Dumb girl. They’re not trying to get a status update. They’re trying to warn you.

  A shadow passes overhead, and I realize they’re not moving the light. Something is swimming through it.

  Something . . . big.

  I don’t look for him. Instead I go on defense and pull the victim’s body in front of me as I back into the car, using it like a hermit crab’s shell.

  The dark shape glides directly over the top of the car, and I feel it bump the body bag.

  Damn. I don’t want him getting ahold of that. Although, all things considered, I’d rather he take the dead body than my live one.

  Okay. Think fast. Bill is curious. He smells blood. Bill is attracted to motion. I can move; the corpse can’t.

  Let’s change things.

  I take the rope attached to my waist and tie it to the body bag. Now let’s give it three big tugs . . .

  Okay. Nothing.

  Let’s do it again . . .

  Ouch! The body is ripped from my fingers. At first I think Bill grabbed it, but then the rope is pulled taut. My colleagues are pulling it ashore—probably thinking it’s me.

  As the body flies out of my line of sight, I get ready to leave the car, but my gut says wait a beat.

  A couple of heartbeats go by, and my lungs gently remind me that I haven’t breathed in a few minutes. I fight my own impatience.

  Wait, Sloan. Wait . . .

  HOLY CRAP! Bill’s toothy snout passes less than a foot in front of me as he chases the body bag.

  His form is still passing me. It’s like waiting for a train to go by—if that train could eat you.

  His massive tail slashes at the water, sending a current so powerful it pushes me back.

  Wait a moment.

  Now!

  I kick off from the seat and circle to the opposite side of the car from where Bill is heading, intending to take the shortest path back to shore.

  I move my legs hard and send my body like a torpedo. No time to . . .

  BAM!

  I see stars.

  I almost open my mouth to scream. Almost. I’m dazed.

  Where the . . . ?

  You’re underwater, Sloan. You ran into something.

  Remember how you marveled at how the car made it so far into the water? Remember how you decided it must have skidded across something that was at the end of the stone embankment?

  This is that something. It’s a big something.

  Much bigger than a car. It’s a van.

  You just ran into a van . . . underwater.

  From the look of it, this van has been here awhile. It can wait. You can’t.

  SWIM!

  I push away from the van and swim for shore as fast as possible. The radio crackles again, but I ignore it. I can hear metal banging as my colleagues hit their poles together—either trying to warn me or annoy the heck out of Bill.

  I near the shoreline and poke my head out of the water. The sound of the raft’s outboard motor roars behind me, and I see a cop on the shore with a shotgun aimed at me . . . correction, aimed over me.

  It’s a horrible weapon to use in this situation, but I don’t point that out between gulps of air. I simply keep kicking for land.

  When I get a few feet away, men rush over and grab me. They don’t even bother helping me to my feet; they just take me by the arms and drag me onto the shore like a large fish . . . and keep dragging me across the slick grass.

  We’re ten feet in before we finally come to a stop. When I roll over, I see the deputy with his shotgun trained on the water. There’s a crack that sounds like a gunshot. But it’s not. It’s Bill’s gigantic tail slapping against the water as he comes toward shore, then veers away at the last moment.

  He makes a bigger wake than the raft.

  And then everything falls quiet. The lake is calm, and everyone’s silent. Bill has gone down to sulk. We all catch our breath.

  I take a deep breath, then notice the black shape to my left. It’s the body from the wreck. I barely give it another thought as I get to my feet and take off my fins.

  I’m still thinking about the sunken van.

  My gut saved me several times in the last few minutes. Now it’s telling me something else.

  This body wasn’t the only one in the lake.

  CHAPTER THREE

  UIU

  My boss, George Solar, is sitting next to me in a Florida Department of Law Enforcement conference room in Miami across from Janet Marquez, chief of investigations for the FDLE. While Solar, in his late fifties, is as energetic as anyone I’ve met aside from my own father, Marquez, ten years his junior, seems tired of her job and doesn’t hide her frustration well.

  At the moment she’s frustrated by us. Not George and me personally, but the existence of our little agency, the Underwater Investigation Unit.

  The UIU was formed six months ago, when the governor of Florida needed a quick response to a massive corruption crisis and George stepped in with a solution—deputizing me and pulling himself out of retirement.

  Our debut case was a doozy, tying together a massive drug-running operation, public corruption, and renegade intelligence operatives. It’s sent several judges to jail, and the repercussions are still being felt around the state.

  It would have been a career-making case except that it happened before my new job began and when George’s was effectively over.

  While the case proved the necessity of the UIU, since then people in other state agencies have begun to ask whether our unit should be a onetime thing. For George, that prospect means being put out to pasture. For me, it effectively equals unemployment. I got fired fro
m my last police job when the powerful people we were chasing put pressure on my superiors.

  Even if I were offered my old job, I don’t think I could take it, given what happened. I thought members of my police department would take a bullet for me; instead they pushed me under the bus. Or at least that’s how it felt.

  “I’ll be blunt with you,” says Janet Marquez, directing her attention at George. “Some people are asking if your unit’s even necessary.”

  “Would these be the same people who had their thumbs up their posteriors while Bonaventure and his pals were bribing judges left and right? If so, I’d love to talk to them.” George turns his head dramatically toward the door. “Will they be attending this meeting?”

  If Marquez favors a blunt, bureaucratic approach, George is a precision sniper. He doesn’t dance around, skirt, or soft-pedal the point.

  “My point is that we’re considering making a recommendation to the governor that you formally fall under the FDLE.” Marquez turns to me. “We could use you here. We need to expand our diving program and could use your help with training.”

  “McPherson isn’t a police diver,” says George. “She’s an investigator who happens to be really good at scuba diving.”

  “I see,” says Marquez. “And what are you currently investigating?”

  “Right now, the UIU is working on a series of burglaries along the Intracoastal Waterway,” says George.

  “Would this be the New River Bandits? The kids stealing boat motors and fishing tackle?”

  “This would be the gang breaking into yachts and stealing millions of dollars’ worth of navigation equipment,” replies George.

  “Jurisdictionally, isn’t that coast guard or local police?”

  “If they want to put anybody else on the case, they’re welcome to it. We also have several other active investigations. Four days ago, we provided an assist to the Highway Patrol with a murder investigation.”

  “You mean McPherson’s body retrieval?” asks Marquez.

  “It was more complicated than that,” says George.

  Actually, his exact words to me when he found out were harebrained, imbecilic, and outright stupid. We have that kind of working relationship.

  “That’s actually our case now,” says Marquez.

  George ignores her. “The fact of the matter is that the UIU has expertise that other agencies don’t have and, equally important, a mandate to investigate cases other agencies like yours don’t have the manpower to look into.”

  “Like the New River Bandits? If the governor hadn’t handed that to you, it would be with us,” she says.

  Actually, George dropped a whole stack of cases in my lap when I signed up—unsolved ones that could potentially fall within our jurisdiction. So far, we’ve only looked into a few and haven’t turned up any new leads. When the New River Bandits popped up, the governor asked us to take it on, derailing everything else we’d been working on.

  “You haven’t made it clear to me why you couldn’t do that from within the FDLE,” she adds.

  “If we’re inside the FDLE, then what we investigate is left to your discretion,” he replies.

  “So what you’re saying is that you want the UIU to be your own one-man operation?”

  While George didn’t tell me to keep my mouth shut at this meeting, I’ve tried to do so as a general policy, but Marquez’s jab at him is too much.

  “I think what my boss is saying is that, just like in the past, the FDLE doesn’t have the resources to pay attention to everything that needs paying attention to.”

  “You haven’t given me any examples,” she says evenly.

  I flash a sidelong glare at George. What’s going on here? Does Marquez have more power than I realize? Is she on some kind of commission that has authority over us? Maybe that’s it.

  “What about Pond 65?” I ask.

  She thinks for a moment. “I already pointed out that’s our case. We retrieved the car four days ago.”

  “I’m talking about the van.”

  “Van? There was nothing about a van in the accident report.”

  “No. I mean the van that was already in the pond. What are the FDLE’s plans for looking into that?”

  She looks to George. “What do I need to know about this van?”

  “Exactly,” he replies. “What do you need to know about the van, other than that McPherson referred it on to you and nothing has been done about it? The van is exactly why the UIU exists. While you’re too busy taking over other investigations, you’re ignoring evidence being handed directly to you. Like the goddamned van.” He shakes his head in frustration.

  “Can you excuse me for a moment?” She rises without waiting for an answer.

  As soon as the door closes, George turns to me. “What the hell is this van you’re talking about?”

  Nobody can bluff like George Solar. He even had me thinking he knew about the van while he made a show of getting irate with Marquez.

  “In the lake, I ran into a submerged van while retrieving the body. I told Highway Patrol.”

  “And?”

  “They said there are hundreds of abandoned cars in canals.”

  “But you already know this. What makes the van special?”

  “I don’t know. A feeling. I didn’t want to bring it up until . . .”

  “Until they had a chance to do nothing about it?” He shakes his head like I just failed a test. “Sloan. You’re not just a diver anymore. You’re a detective now. You need to act like one. If your nose is telling you there’s something there, then you should have told me.”

  “I . . .” I didn’t want to be wrong. “You’re right.”

  Marquez walks back in with a folder and reclaims her seat. “I spoke to Finick at Highway Patrol. He has high praise for you, McPherson. But he said that the van was likely abandoned and not worth the effort to pull from the water. It would be too far down in the muck.”

  I take my own folder out from my briefcase and lay a photo from Google Earth on the table. I’ve drawn a grid on the lake showing where the car was pulled from and where I ran into the van.

  George inspects the map and lets out a laugh. “Finick is a good cop, but I don’t think he paid much attention to this one.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Marquez as she stares at the map.

  “You don’t push a van into a lake and have it get out that far. You have to drive it. Fast,” says George. “If there’s nobody in the van, then someone has one hell of a story to tell. My bet is that we probably have a missing-persons case that could be solved and some family’s minds put to rest if we put in the effort. And since you’re too busy to look into it, I think you’ve made the case for the UIU.”

  “We’ll see,” she says.

  As we walk back to George’s truck, he mutters under his breath, “There’d better be a body inside that van, or it’s gonna be mine.”

  “I didn’t mean to . . .”

  He waves off my apology. “You mentioned the van. Now we’re stuck with the van. Speaking of stuck, how the hell are you going to get it out of the canal?”

  “So now the van’s my problem?”

  “Well, you and your pirate father. He certainly knows a thing or two about pulling worthless debris out of the water.”

  Harsh, but true.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WRECK

  Big Bill is watching me, and he’s pissed. My herpetologist friends would insist that an American alligator doesn’t make the same kind of mental connections an ape like me makes, but as he sits there on the bank, his snout muzzled and body wrapped in the rope the Fish and Wildlife trappers used to snare him, he seems to know that I’m the reason for all this.

  My hat is off to George for being able to pull the resources together to carry out this salvage operation. The only downside is, since word spread that Fish and Wildlife was going to trap Big Bill ahead of the van recovery, the media has shown up in force. There are news trucks and photographers lined up alo
ng the highway, taking photos and doing live broadcasts next to the giant crane we rented. But all their attention is on the massive reptile.

  Poor Bill looks like a dinosaur in a museum display. The worst part is that, for Big Bill’s safety, they’ll probably have to relocate him so that opportunistic poachers can’t hunt him as a trophy kill.

  While Bill, George, and I are stressed out, my dad’s having a field day. Having engineered this salvage operation, he’s bouncing around and pep-talking the crew like an overly excited director getting ready to shoot his next feature film.

  I guess it is a bit of a show for him. However, if we pull the van from the pond and find it’s empty like the Highway Patrol claimed it will be, it’ll be a terrible show for George and me in front of the media. The UIU got its start with a flashy case, but we could go out with a fizzle just as quickly.

  My daughter, Jackie, asked if she could come. I regret telling her no, but I didn’t want her to deal with the pressure of watching her mom swim in alligator-infested waters and god knows what else I might find. I also try to keep her dad—my boyfriend, Run—as far away from all this as possible. Which I’ve failed at spectacularly so far.

  “You about ready, ma’am?” asks Scott Hughes. He’s a former navy diver who did a stint with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. He’s also UIU’s hire number three, as of yesterday.

  A shade taller than me, he’s squat and muscular and still sports the clean-shaven scalp from his navy days. He’s also retained his southern manners.

  “It’s Sloan or McPherson,” I tell him. “Pick one. Call me ma’am again and I’ll stab you. Got it?”

  “Yes, m—McPherson.”

  I turn around so he can check my tank, after which he spins so I can inspect the valves on his. Not surprisingly, everything is in perfect order.

  I couldn’t ask for a more ideal dive partner, which has me worried. Hughes is precise like a robot—a robot bound to notice that I tend to wing it more than I should.

  I started breathing compressed air before I could read. Coming from a family of treasure hunters and salvagers, diving is second nature. It also means that my bad habits are deeply ingrained. I’m not sure how my new partner’s military precision will work alongside my leap-first/think-never mentality.