Salt & Sinners (The Iron Compass MC #5)

Prologue

Torren

Two years ago. Off Cozumel.

The water that morning was the color of a bottle held up to a light. Flat. Warm at the top, cold underneath, the way it always is when the current's about to change its mind.

I was on the Ladrona, a forty-two-foot boat with a bad transom and a good compressor, working a job that wasn't a club job. Private contract. Four of us and a mapped wreck that had already been picked twice.

Silas Pham was on the platform, checking his own gear for the third time.

"Third time," I said.

"Second."

"Third."

"Then I'll do a fourth and you can eat it."

Silas was thirty-one. He had a laugh like a dropped toolbox and he read paperbacks with the covers torn off because he said covers were advertising and he'd already bought the thing.

He was the best diver I ever worked with. I want that on the record before anything else.

Nikko was in the house with the sonar up, arguing with it.

"It's a plate," he called down.

"It's a plate," Silas agreed.

"It's a loose plate."

"Everything down there is a loose plate, Nikko. It's a shipwreck. That's the defining feature."

"I'm saying it in front of witnesses."

"You've said everything in front of witnesses for four years," Silas said. "You should run for something."

I looked at the screen anyway. I want that on the record too — that I walked up the two steps into the house and stood behind Nikko and looked at the return, and saw a section of hull plate lying at an angle over what had been a companionway, and said the two words I've said to myself approximately nine thousand times since.

"That's fine."

"That's fine," Silas said, behind me.

Neither of us was being lazy. That's the thing. Neither of us was tired or careless or in a hurry. Two competent men looked at a grainy return on a nine-year-old unit and made the same reasonable call, and the ocean didn't care that it was reasonable.

"Ninety feet," he said. "In and out. I'm not sightseeing."

"You sightsee every time."

"I appreciate my surroundings. That's different."

I checked his first stage. He let me, because he always let me, because that was the deal between us and neither of us had ever said it out loud.

"Line's yours," he said.

"Line's mine."

He went over. I watched the bubbles go from a boil to a rhythm to a trail, and then I sat down on the gunwale with the line running through my hand and I did what I had done a thousand times.

I felt him.

That's the part people don't understand about tending. You're not holding a rope. You're holding a person through a rope. You feel him kick. You feel him stop to look at something. You feel him turn.

At eleven minutes I felt him turn.

At twelve minutes I felt nothing.

Not a tug. Not a signal. The line just — went soft in my hand, the way a sail goes soft, all the shape gone out of it at once.

"Silas."

The line answered nothing.

I pulled twice. Standard. Two pulls means you okay.

Nothing.

I want to say I thought about it. I didn't. I had my mask on and my tank up and I was over the side in under forty seconds, and forty seconds is fast, and forty seconds is also the rest of my life.

The water went from bottle-green to gray to that particular blue that isn't a color, it's a temperature.

Sixty feet. The line ran down and away, off the vertical, dragging southwest with the current.

Seventy.

Eighty.

The wreck came up out of the murk like a building you've walked past your whole life and never noticed until somebody knocked half of it down. Ribs. A boiler. Silt hanging in the water where something had recently moved through it.

Ninety.

His light was on. That's what I saw first. His light was on and it was pointing straight up, which is not a thing a diver does on purpose.

He was under a section of collapsed plate that had not been collapsed forty minutes earlier, when we'd looked at it on the sonar and I'd said that's fine and he'd said that's fine.

I got the plate up. I don't know how. There's a version of me that lives at ninety feet who is stronger than the version of me standing on a dock, and I've never once been able to find him again on land.

His regulator was out of his mouth.

I put it back. I put my hand behind his head like you'd hold a kid who'd fallen asleep in a truck, and I put it back, and I started up.

Slow. You have to go slow. That's the obscenity of it. The one time in your life when every part of you is screaming up, the water says no, at this pace, and if you argue, I'll take you too.

I went up at thirty feet a minute with a dead man in my arms and I counted every foot of it out loud into my regulator like a crazy person.

Eighty-nine. Eighty-eight. Eighty-seven.

At sixty feet I did the arithmetic on skipping the stop.

I want to be honest about that. I hung there in the blue with him and I calculated, coldly, whether I could take a hit and get him on the deck four minutes sooner, and whether four minutes might be the four minutes.

And then I did the other calculation, which is that a man bent on the deck is a second casualty and Nikko would have two bodies and a boat.

So I stopped at fifteen feet.

For three minutes. Holding him. In the light, close enough to the surface that you can see the underside of the waves moving like a ceiling somebody's shaking out.

That's the worst three minutes of my life and it isn't close, and I don't think about the plate, and I don't think about the sonar, and I don't think about the forty seconds nearly as often as people assume.

I think about the fifteen-foot stop.

Twelve. Ten. Six.

Later, the report said four minutes.

Four minutes past. That's what they told me. If I'd been in the water four minutes sooner, maybe. Maybe not. Water doesn't do maybes, but people do, and people will hand them to you at a funeral like a casserole.

I broke the surface into that same flat bottle-green morning. Same sky. Same everything.

Nobody had told the day.

Nikko was on the platform and he was screaming something and I couldn't hear it because there was a sound in my head like a compressor running dry, and I got Silas onto the deck and I did everything you do, all of it, all the way, for twenty-six minutes, until Nikko put both hands on my shoulders and said my name four times.

His paperback was on the bench seat. Cover torn off. Page one-eleven folded down.

I sat with that book in my hand for two hours while we ran back in, and I never found out what it was.

I could have read it. That's the stupid part. I had it in my hand for two hours and all I had to do was open it, and I couldn't, because opening it would have been reading his mail, and because as long as I didn't know what it was there was still a thing about him left to find out.

At the dock there were people. There are always people. Somebody's uncle with a truck, a port official with a clipboard, a woman selling ceviche out of a cooler who stopped selling ceviche when she saw the deck.

A man from the company came down with a folder.

He was decent about it. I want to say that. He said the right words in the right order and he asked me three times if I needed anything, and on the third time I said no thank you, and he wrote something down, and that was the last human contact I had for eleven days.

Silas's mother flew in from Sacramento on the Thursday.

She was five foot nothing. She held both my hands in the parking lot of a funeral home in a country neither of us lived in and she said, "You brought him up."

"Ma'am — "

"You brought him up," she said again, harder, the way you'd correct a child on a fact. "He's not down there. That was you."

Everybody at that service handed me some version of maybe. Maybe four minutes sooner. Maybe if the plate had gone the other way. Maybe if the sonar had been newer.

She was the only person who handed me a did.

I have never once been able to make it fit, and I have never once been able to put it down.

That was the last time I went in the water.

I told the club I was done diving. Cade didn't ask. Cade never asks; he just moves the furniture around you until the room's a different shape and you're standing in it anyway.

For two years I did land work. I fixed bikes. I stood behind people in rooms where standing behind people is the whole job. I got very good at not being asked.

I sold my gear in the first month. All of it. Regs, computer, the drysuit I'd had since I was twenty-four.

Then I bought it all back over the following nine months, one piece at a time, off the internet, at a loss, and put it in a footlocker in the corner of my room, and never opened the footlocker.

Amos found it once, looking for a socket set.

He shut it again without a word and never mentioned it to anybody, and I found out four months later that he'd told two people to stop asking me to help load the truck at the lake run, and that is what a brother is, and it still made me want to put my fist through a wall.

The Iron Compass has a word for a man who won't do the one thing he's best at.

The Iron Compass has a word for a man who won't do the one thing he's best at.

The word is brother, and they say it the same as always, and that's worse.

Here's what nobody tells you about ninety feet.

It's not a depth. Not after. It's a floor in a building you have to walk past every day.

You can be doing anything — hauling a chain, arguing about a carburetor, eating a sandwich Mama Odette made you eat — and you will get to ninety feet in your head and the floor will be there, and his light will be pointing up.

Two years.

Then a woman in Key West found a galleon that wasn't supposed to exist, and somebody stole her survey data, and Cade Merrick called my name across a garage in Arizona in a tone I'd only heard him use twice.

I said no.

I want that on the record too.

I said no, and then I packed a bag.