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We had learned the hard way to act on our instincts, and when both of us were on the same page, we absolutely couldn’t ignore that.
Working like a pair of choreographed dancers, we pulled on our scuba gear and tested our air tanks.
“You ready, Dad?” I checked his tank valve was fully open.
“Yep, I can’t wait to get my eyes on all that gear.”
“Me neither.” As I turned my back to him so he could check my tank valve was fully open, I tested my breather.
This was going to be a simple dive to connect our winch hook onto the cage again so we could haul that loot back up. I had offered to do this dive alone, but for some reason, Dad had insisted on diving with me. I sensed an edginess about him that he rarely displayed.
Maybe he was trying to make up for telling Kane Fucking Devlin about Siren’s Lure. Or maybe he was nervous about me diving in the dark waters below with all those sharks drifting around.
I gave Dad the thumbs up, and we both made giant strides off the back of Rhino’s dive deck. The black ocean pressed in on me, and unlike the sunlit waters we’d dived in today, this water was suffocating. It wasn’t like me to feel like that in the ocean, and I brushed my fingers over the dive knife attached to my thigh.
Swimming side by side, Dad and I plunged into the abyss, with our powerful flashlights slicing through the murky depths. We were trespassers in this shark breeding ground, and the silent predators seemed intent on letting us know by gliding just beyond the reach of our beams.
A massive gray nurse shark cruised beneath us, so close that Dad and I slowed our descent, waiting for it to get well out of our way. As I counted the twenty-one companion fish feeding off the shark’s back, Dad tapped my shoulder and gave me a thumbs up.
I gave him the okay signal, and we continued our descent.
My heart pounded in my ears, adding an urgent pulse to the silence around us, and I could almost feel the sharks’ unseen eyes tracking us. I had no idea why anxiety was getting a grip on me. Maybe it was because we had looted Chui’s yacht. I had heard Whisper say to Ryder that everything Chui touched was tainted with someone’s blood.
As long as it wasn’t Dad’s or my blood, I didn’t care.
The cage appeared in our light beams like a large metal carcass, and a twinge of satisfaction raced through me. Dad and I deserved this win. We hadn’t had any luck in a long time, and it was time for the tide to turn our way.
This time, nobody knew about our little cache of goodies. Not the bad guys, not the law. Even Kingsley, who had been on the ocean surface when we raided Chui’s yacht, was oblivious to what we took.
Arriving at the cage, Dad and I knelt on the sand and shone our flashlights onto a trove of Chui’s riches caged in the metal like fish caught in a net. Yes! It’s all here. Nobody had beaten us to the haul. It was a fucking miracle.
Now we just had to get the cage onto Rhino and get the fuck out of there.
Dad and I high-fived each other, and even through his mask, his eyes lit up with elation. It wasn’t very often I saw Dad so happy, and my heart swelled. He deserved this win.
We both did.
Working in unison, we moved methodically, disturbing only the silt that rose in swirling clouds from our fins. We connected the four chains attached to each corner of the cage to the cable that we’d lowered down from Rhino, and our job was completed in minutes.
Dad signaled that it was time to surface, and I gave a thumbs-up.
Following the cable, we ascended at a rate equal to our bubbles. The surface didn’t twinkle above us, and it was like swimming in outer space. If we lost our flashlights, it would be as black as hell down here and easy to get disorientated.
At eighteen feet below the surface, we both clung to the cable to wait out our decompression time and used our flashlights to search the blackness around us.
I ran through the items we’d salvaged, working out which ones we would keep and which we would sell.
An image of Mom drifted into my mind. She’d met Dad in a library, of all places. Mom was studying history, and Dad was trying to investigate the history behind a ship that he’d heard had sunk off Queensland shores in the early eighteen hundreds. Mom had helped Dad find the information, and Dad convinced Mom to come with him in search of the wreck.
According to Mom, their connection had been love at first sight. Dad had been lucky that Mom loved being on Rhino, and loved the crazy industry we were in because salvaging items from the bottom of the ocean was hard work.
Except for the loot we were about to bring up. That was going to be the quickest money Dad and I had ever made.
Mom’s unsolved murder clawed at my mind, and my thoughts drifted to Kingsley. Maybe I could ask him to look into Mom’s cold case.
Jesus. What am I thinking? Cops don’t care about old cases.
I’d learned that lesson over and over. They just cared about the headlining bullshit on their plates right now.
