Last Call (Last Call 1)

He had tugged and coaxed the wet suit on and had pulled the Buoyancy Control Device, looking like a deflated life preserver vest, over his head.

"Should have got a dry suit," said Mavranos helpfully. "Or a diving bell."

"Or scheduled this meeting somewhere else," Crane said. He adjusted the straps of the backpack harness and then had Mavranos hold up the tank while he snaked his arms through the straps. He bent forward with the weight on his back to adjust them, and he made sure that the waistband release was clear and that it opened to the left. In spite of his reluctance to enter the cold, murky water, he was pleased to see that he still remembered how to suit up.

He hoped he still remembered how to breathe through a regulator. His old diving instructor had always insisted that the most dangerous thing about diving was the way gases behaved under pressure.

Dressed at last, with his weight belt on over everything and its quick-release buckle situated well clear of the BCD, he stood up and stretched. The wet suit was tight enough that it took effort to straighten both arms, but he thought it could be snugger across the front.

Oh well, he thought. A long, hot shower at whatever motel we wind up at.

His mask was up on his forehead, and the regulator mouthpiece swung by his elbow, and he turned to Mavranos before fitting it all on.

"If … say, forty-five minutes goes by," he said, "and I'm not back here, go ahead and split. The money's in a sock in my pants there."

Mavranos nodded stolidly. " 'Kay."

Crane pulled the mask away from his forehead and settled it down over his face, and then he tucked the regulator mouthpiece between his teeth, breathed through it a few times and pushed the purge button to check the lever spring, and finally put one foot up on the gunwale.

Dimly under the mask strap and the foam neoprene of the hood, he heard Mavranos say, "Hey, Pogo."

Crane turned. Mavranos was holding out his right hand, and Crane clasped it with his own.

"Don't fuck up," said Mavranos.

Crane made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, then stepped up over the gunwale and jumped into the water with his feet together, his right hand behind his head holding the tank down.

He splashed in, hearing the crackle of the bubbles muffled through his wet suit hood.

The water was cold, about sixty degrees, and as always, it invaded his crotch first. He hooted through the regulator, blowing a cloud of bubbles up past the face plate.

He swallowed and wiggled his jaw, feeling his ears pop as the pressure was equalized, and then he began breathing. Slow and deep, he told himself as he stretched his feet out through the bottomless water. Careful the cold doesn't get you breathing fast and shallow.

He was sinking slowly, and he relaxed and let himself go down. Visibility was terrible—a dust of brown-green algae hung in suspension in the darkening water, and shreds like puffy cornflakes swirled up around him.

About six feet down he passed through one of the planes of temperature difference called thermoclines, and again he hooted at the suddenly colder water. He spread his hands and kicked, halting his descent.

Dimly he could see the slope of the island through the fog of algae. The cobblestone-size rocks were all fuzzed with the yellow-brown muck, and he wondered how he could identify any of the shaggy lumps as a severed head.

But the fisherman had been a little further out anyway. Crane began swimming away through the murk, kicking with long strokes and feeling the pull in the tendons of his insteps.

Very soon his left leg began to ache where he had stabbed it eight days ago.

The repetitive routines of breathing and kicking began almost to hypnotize him. He was remembering dives off Catalina after spring rains, when the visibility was a hundred feet of crystal blue and the boundary plane between the fresher top layer and the saltier one below was a rippling refraction, like heat waves over a highway; and he remembered climbing deep down in tide pools off La Jolla, picking up tiny octopuses and touching twitchy rainbow-colored anemones, and having to patiently untangle himself from long rubbery strands of kelp, and one time accidentally elbowing the release buckle of his weight belt and watching it plummet away into oblivion through the glassy clear water.

All he could hear was the metallic echo of his breathing in the steel air tank, and the air that he sucked in long pulses through the regulator valve was cold and tasted of metal, and as always somehow had a gritty feel in his mouth.

Several times he had glanced at his watch and the pressure gauge, but he had not looked at either one for a while when he began to hear, faintly, something more than his own breathing.