Last Call (Last Call 1)

Crane's eyes were open, but his mask was gone. He could see nothing in the murky water, and had to exhale through his nose like a novice. Over his panic he was peripherally aware of the music again, "Begin the Beguine," and of laughter and loud talking.

Then, even without a mask, Crane saw the blurry bulk of the diver above him, and at the same moment the tether went slack in his hands; the man had let go of the spear gun and would now probably come in close with a knife to finish Crane off.

The man was close—only a couple of yards away.

Without thinking, Crane dragged his hand back down through the water and grabbed again at his belt—and Siegel's .45 was there. He pulled it free, thumbing back the hammer as he thrust it up through the water and pointed it at the looming figure whose agitation of the water he could now feel, and he pulled the trigger.

The gun actually fired, though Crane saw no flash, and the underwater shot sounded like a loud, hoarse shout.

Blurrily he saw the body above him convulse in the water.

Christ, I've hurt him, maybe killed him, Crane thought dizzily. How could I have known a .45 would shoot underwater?

He heard a muted crack then, and the mask strap tugged at his throat—the other diver had fired his spear again, and had again hit Crane's mask, which was now broken and swinging loosely below his right ear.

With his free hand Crane reached up and gripped the shaft of the spear. With his other hand he raised the automatically recocked .45.

His eyes were straining through the cloudy water as the fast bubbles from his nose churned in front of his face—and all at once he was again seeing through his false right eye.

From against a black background that might have been the night sky, a whitely luminous figure was moving toward him. Like a double-exposure photograph, it was a scuba diver with mask and fins but was also a robed, bearded King, and the object it held out before itself was at once a spear gun and a scepter.

Crane raised his right arm, seeing it draped in a baggy sleeve as well as cased in black neoprene, and though he felt the grip of a .45 automatic, he seemed to be holding out a golden chalice.

His tank was ringing with each breath—broong, broong—and it was taking effort now to pull air into his lungs through the regulator.

You have to shoot, he told himself over the shrill, despairing wail in his head. You have to squeeze the trigger and kill another man—and maybe the gun won't shoot a second time underwater anyway.

The double-exposure figure was almost upon him. If the gun did fire, Crane could not possibly miss.

He pulled the trigger, and again the water shook to the short, hard shout of the report—and abruptly he could see only the blur of cloudy water in front of his left eye.

He kicked away, pulling the spear along with him; the only drag on the spear was the inertia of an unencumbered spear gun, and he felt safe in tucking the .45 back into his torn weight belt.

His air was just about entirely gone, and the rented tank had a simple K-valve, with no reserve-air mechanism. He needed to get up right now.

He looked up and extended the spear over his head and began to kick upward. Without the mask he couldn't see how fast his bubbles were rising, and he had no idea how deep he might be, so against the urgency of his laboring lungs he made himself kick slowly.

If there was any air at all left in the tank now, his lungs didn't have the strength to suck it out—but he kept the regulator clamped in his teeth to help resist the increasing spasmodic urge to inhale lake water.

He was exhaling steadily through his nose, but there wasn't much air left in his lungs. Surely I can hold my breath now, he thought desperately. If the goddamn tank's empty, there's no pressure to pop a lung!

But he remembered seeing a diver surface once with a ruptured lung, the face mask opaque with bloody froth, and he kept on exhaling.

I'm going downward, he thought in sudden, pure panic. I've been kicking myself straight down. It's the bottom I'm going to hit, not the surface.

He paused, his heart pounding, and he stared down past his fins to see if the water was brighter in that direction—and suddenly his ears were out of the water.

He yanked his head back, spat out the regulator mouthpiece, and for half a minute just hung at the surface and stared into the blue sky and gasped huge lungfuls of hot dry air. If there's bad guys on a boat nearby, he thought, let 'em shoot me. At least I'll die with oxygen in my blood.

Nobody shot at him. After a while he fished up the BCD mouthpiece and inflated the thing enough so that he could float without using his hands or feet to tread water.