Deeper (22 page)

"You get
the impression she's seen her fair share of ghosts?"

"Oh yeah."
 
She nodded vigorously and then cut another piece of well-done steak for
herself.
 
Me, I've always preferred my
steaks rare, but Belle can't stand the idea.
 
"She's definitely seen a few things.
 
She told me about an asylum in
New Jersey
she checked
out once.
 
Said the place was about the
worst she's ever been in."

"Well,
it's an asylum.
 
Not just ghosts, but
crazy ghosts."

"Exactly what she said."

"What
else did you talk about?"

"Girl stuff."

"Yeah?
 
You comparing notes on me and Jacob?
 
‘
Cause
I gotta say,
he's winning in the financial stability department."
 
What can I say?
 
It always bothered me that I could never give
Belle all the fine things I thought she deserved.
 
I tried not to let it show, but now and then
I brought it up just to see if it bothered her as much as it did me.
 
If it did, she never even gave a hint.

"She
didn't say how much he's worth, but yeah, I think so."
 
Belle chuckled.
 
I loved her laugh almost as much as her smile.

"She
tell
you about the ghost ship we saw?"

"Yes, and
I'm staying a few more days ‘cause I want to see it."

"I only
saw it the once, but you never can tell."
 
We sat in silence for a few minutes and ate our dinner.
 
It was a damned fine meal and I didn't want
to see it go to waste.
 
We had crème
brûlée for dessert — pure poison for the system, but worth the health risks.

"Anyone
hear anything about Tom yet?
 
Did he show
up?"

Belle looked
at me and shook her head.
 
"No, and
I'm starting to get really worried."

"Me, too.
 
So in
the morning, we'll drop by
the
 
police
station and make sure they get
their sorry asses in gear."

"It's
just not like him, Joe.
 
Tom is
responsible."

"Belle,
there isn't much we can do about it.
 
He's a big boy and I agree he should be back by now, but there's just so
much we can do.
 
I'd call him but his
phone is still on the boat.
 
I'd look for
him but where do I look in a town like this?"

"I'm not
blaming you, honey.
 
I'm just
worried."
 
She put her hands over
mine and made sure I knew she wasn't just saying the words.

"I gotta say, this day has sucked."

"Well,
the dinner was good."

"The
company was better."
 
I stood up
from the table and put the remains on the tray to slide outside the door.
 
Belle followed me and put up the DO NOT
DISTURB sign.

Sometimes she
makes my world just about perfect.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The next day
started nice and early, just the way I knew it would.
 
My head was only
throbbing
a little as we went down to the police station and made sure they'd follow up
on Tom's disappearance.
 
The cop I dealt
with looked at me a little funny, and I couldn't blame him.
 
The lump on the side of my face wasn't
looking all that pretty.

He didn't ask
who hit me and I didn't volunteer anything.
 
We got along just fine that way.

The morning
sun came up and lit the entire area with high wattage warmth.
 
For about ten minutes.
 
After that the clouds moved in and brought
back the cold with a vengeance.
 
By the
time we were on the
Isabella
, I was
ready to settle in for a nice cup of coffee and to put on my winter coat.
 
I got to the coat before Ward found me.

He walked up
looking sheepish, and I ignored him completely.
 
It's a gift I learned from my grandfather, who always advised against
starting the day with a shit-kicking.

"Captain?"

"You
don't exist for me, Professor Ward.
 
Keep
it that way."

"I'm
sorry?"
 
He sounded as confused as
he looked, so I decided to clarify it.

"If you
existed right now, Professor Ward, I would have to lose my temper.
 
So for right now, you don't exist.
 
Don't make me remember you."

"I'm not
sure if I follow."

I put down my
coffee as carefully as I could and looked at him.
 
He hadn't listened.
 
I really wished he had.
 
So did Charlie, who was watching the whole
exchange.

Being a smart
first mate, he didn't interfere.

The stitches
in the side of my head were pulsing with my heartbeat, which was racing a bit
as the adrenaline worked its way into my system.
 
I reached out and grabbed Professor Martin
Ward by his jacket collar and hauled him up into my face.
 
He let out a little squeak that did me a
world of good and then grunted when I slammed him against the wall.
 
Both of his hands reached for mine, to break
my grip, I'm sure, and I shook him as hard as I could to make sure he knew not
to do anything else that was stupid.

"You hit
me when I wasn't looking and you kicked me in the face you puissant little
fuck."
 
I saw the spittle coming
from my mouth land on his face and even that made me angrier.
 
I also saw Charlie thinking about doing
something, but he stopped himself.
 
"The only reason you aren't in jail right now is because I like
Jacob Parsons and he thinks you're an okay guy.
 
The only reason I'm not feeding you your own goddamned spleen is because
Charlie asked me to play nicely with you."

He let out
another groan and started stammering something in my face.
 
I shook him again until he shut up.

"I don't
like people who take cheap shots and I really don't like it when they take them
at me.
 
So listen very carefully and
we'll get along just fine.
 
You don't talk
to me until I speak to you.
 
You don't
look at me and you don't dare touch me, or I swear to you, I'll break every
finger on both of your hands.
 
And if you
decide to get bitchy about that, I'll pry your teeth out of your mouth and make
you swallow them.
 
I don't like you and I
don't want to deal with you anymore.
 
You're on my Shit List, Ward.
 
It's not a good place to be and it's worse if you're using my boat.
 
Stay away from me."

I let him go
and went back to my coffee.
 
He stayed
against the wall making faces like his pet fish man, big eyes, gaping mouth and
all.
 
When he'd calmed down, he moved
away from me as carefully as he could.

That made me feel
much better about him being on the
Isabella
.
 
It made me feel like I could trust him to
behave for a few hours.
 
Charlie poured
himself a cup of coffee and leaned against the edge of the seat across from me
and never said a word.
 
Ten minutes later
we were on our way back out to the reef and another day of fishing.
 
I'd feel a lot better when Ward and his cronies
were in the water.

And because
I'm a nice guy, I decided I wouldn't leave them out there.

In hindsight,
maybe I should have.
 
It would have saved
a lot of problems later.

14

The weather
got worse, with winds coming from the northeast and threatening clouds turning
the early morning the color of evening darkness.
 
By the time we'd reached the Devil's Reef,
the clouds seemed to have lowered themselves right over the water and then they
let loose with a constant drizzle, the sort that creeps past all of your
clothes and soaks you to the bone.

There were
fewer divers than usual, and Jacob — who had taken my shaking his friend in
stride and was just happy to have things back to normal, apparently — explained
that three of the students were staying in the warehouse that had been rented
for the next two months.
 
They and two
people I'd never met were going to be studying the Deep One in greater detail,
starting with getting the damned thing sedated and then taking measurements of
every part of its body.
 
Diana was on the
yacht and diving, but she sent her brother along to watch the fish-faced
bastard get measured, weighed and tested.
 
He was supposed to film the entire procedure.
 
Apparently Ward wanted to be there, but he
couldn't pull himself away from his aquatic caves long enough to do it.

Yippee.

The team went
down, and I got busy making lunch for when they came back up.
 
Tommy being gone was not only a personal sour
point, but also a guarantee that I was going to stay busy.
 
With Charlie on the dive team and Davey
taking care of the engine and generator on the
Isabella
, I had my hands full.

Luckily, I had
two perfectly willing sidekicks to help me.
 
I guess it's a testament to my cooking that both Belle and Mary decided
to come to my rescue long before I'd managed to get properly started.
 
I'd planned on making the steaks I never got
to the night before, but Mary volunteered her tuna to the cause and I wound up
cutting the steaks off the cleansed, monster-sized fish before they took over
and kicked me out of the galley.

Jacob was
waiting for me.
 
I found him in the main
cabin, with notes scattered all over the place again.
 
This time he waved me over and showed me the
papers.

Mostly what he
had was the sort of stuff that means nothing at all to me.
 
Charts and long lists of
statistics that had been written out over the last few days.
 
I didn't bother with trying to read
measurements from sonar printouts or studying the alterations in the
temperature underwater.
 
I knew it was a
big cave and I knew the waters were damned cold.
 
That was enough for me.

Not for
him.
 
He'd been busy drawing detailed
schematics of the cave's layout.
 
For the
first time I got to see just how big a deal the caves were.
 
The first part of the place, the antechamber
is what he called it, was about thirty feet across and twenty feet deep.
 
He'd made a mark that clearly showed where
the tunnel leading to the rest of the cave was, and explained that it went
sideways into the reef for almost a hundred yards before it dropped down into deeper
waters.
 
That was really all that the
divers had managed to discover so far.
 
He also showed me some of the pictures Ward and his students had taken
of the walls in the cave.
 
There were
some fairly simplistic carvings in the rock, most of them thick and crude and a
little disturbing to look at.
 
They
seemed like pictograms of creatures that lived underwater, but they didn't hold
to shapes that quite made sense.

And it wasn't
the shapes so much as the effort to carve them that surprised me.
 
It looked like someone had scraped them at
least a quarter inch into the stone, and unlike most of the walls in the cave
that were covered with algae and slime, the carvings were clean.
 
That might have been the divers themselves,
but really, how would they have noticed the damned things in the first place if
they hadn't been cleared away?

"How old
would you say those were?"

"What?
 
The carvings?"
 
Jacob looked at me and frowned in
thought.
 
"Hard to say, but they
don't look very old, do they?"
 
He
had mercy on me and gave me a smoke.
 
I
nodded my thanks and lit up.

"They
look like they could have been done a few weeks ago."

"For all
we know, they were."

I shook my
head.
 
"If that was done in the last
couple of weeks, Ward's fish man is an industrious little shit."

Jacob looked
at me and nodded.
 
"Or he wasn't
alone."

"Yeah,
that's a comforting thought."

"You're
the one who brought it up first, you know."
 
His voice was half teasing but his expression
was completely serious.

"Well, if
we get overrun by toad men, I did my part."

We sat in
silence for a while and just smoked, looking at the pictures they'd managed to
bring back so far.
 
Aside from the
carvings, they were nothing all that spectacular.