The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(101)

I lost a precious second trying to find the Raven, which had disappeared in the dark.

Then I gave up and charged toward Dwight.

He fired again, and Maia rolled.

I slammed him into the railing with my best varsity tackle. The railing creaked. Dwight clubbed me in the face with his pistol, but I grabbed his waist, slammed him backward again, and this time the rail cracked under our combined weight. One moment air, then we were consumed by water.

I clamped my teeth against the instant cold and black. There was no light, just the sound of churning bubbles and the fists and knees of Dwight Hayes. There was no weight to my punches, no air to breathe. Nothing but clawing and kicking in liquid.

My foot slammed into something hard—one of the aluminium pontoons under the building, maybe. The pain was enough to make me slacken my grip on Dwight's wrist.

I clawed at him once more and got wet suit, grabbed again, got nothing.

The need for air overrode everything else. I let myself float up, felt cool on my face and gasped in a breath that tasted like gasoline. My eyes burned in the darkness.

There was tromping above me. Maia's voice. A man screaming— Armand. I was under the deck.

I took a breath, submerged, felt my way beneath the aluminium pontoon, kicked up in open water, the railing of the deck above me.

I yelled for Maia, then grabbed the deck floor. It took a supreme effort to haul myself up out of the lake.

Maia was tying a strip of white table linen around Armand's shoulder. Something was wrong with her foot—it was wrapped in cloth, too, and blood had already soaked it.

She finished with Armand, then limped toward Pena, who was not moving.

"Hayes?" I yelled.

"I don't know." She examined Pena's gut wound. "Christ. I used Pena's cell phone, called 911. We've got to get Lopez out of the water. It could still be a tenminute response time."

I wheeled around, scanning the horizon—saw nothing but darkness, glittering water.

Then a faint reflection—moonlight on wet neoprene—and I saw Hayes. He was on the shoreline, running uphill.

"There," I said. "He's heading for the dam."

Maia had blood on the side of her face, and I wasn't sure if it was hers.

"Hayes will get away," she said. "And Lopez doesn't have ten minutes."

I looked at her foot, then at the scuba equipment. We both knew Maia would not be running up any hills.

"Go!" she said.

"Lopez will have to hold out," I said. "Don't try it, Maia."

Her face was utterly white, but she staggered over to the air tank, stared at it like it was a bomb. She picked up the .380 Raven, tossed it to me. "Just go, Tres. Now."

I ran—out of the restaurant, stumbling over the gravel in the parking lot, following Dwight Hayes uphill. My shirt felt like fifty extra pounds of water so I stripped it off. It was a hard trail through agarita and whitebrush and cactus, over limestone rubble at a thirtyfivedegree angle. Dwight didn't seem to have any problem with it, even in a wet suit. He was far ahead, and he kept gaining.

When he got to the top, I shot at him. Instead of turning toward the parking lot, as I'd thought he would, he turned toward the dam, started running across. By the time I was at the top, on the dam access road, Dwight was fifty yards out and I could hear the first police sirens in the distance.

A Travis County patrol car was racing up the road on the far end of the dam, a mile away. His lights were flashing. He would be there, inadvertently cutting off Hayes'

escape, before Hayes could ever reach the far side.

The wind that always buffeted the dam seemed to be blowing Dwight back in my direction, ripping at his short brown hair, making it dance in spikes.

He stopped at the halfway mark. I slowed. On the other side, the police car braked, its headlamps pointed straight at us. A deputy's flashlight cut a wavering beam in the night as he ran in our direction.

Dwight looked at me, then looked over the railing on the north side of the dam—at the lake two hundred feet below, visible only because of the nickel streaks on the surface.

I kept walking toward Dwight, slowly, my hand tracing the rivets on the metal railing.

When I was about twenty feet away, Dwight took hold of one of the metal cables and stepped up onto the railing. He looked down, seemed gratified by what he saw, then looked back at me.

"One favour," he said.

"Don't do this, Dwight."

The cop on the other side of the dam kept coming.

Dwight's eyes were ferocious and clear, but there was nothing insane in them. I realized that the Dwight Hayes I'd befriended had not been a facade—not simply a mask covering a monster. Dwight Hayes was right there, standing on the ledge, imploring me.

"One thing left undone," he confided. The wind tore at him. "The most important. Don't let her do it again. You understand?"

"Come down," I said. "You can explain it to me."

Dwight smiled. "You have to improvise. Remember that, Tres. Improvise."

Then Dwight turned and faced the water.

The silence of his fall was terrible, the smallness of the impact on the water.

I stood with the wind ripping at my wet clothes, my hands on the metal railing, still gritty from the soles of Dwight's dive boots.

The deputy ran up next to me, cursed, then called on his field unit for a helicopter, LCRA boats. He shone his light down into the darkness, but there was nothing except the glitter of the black water, a small, shimmering template of lake, that had swallowed Dwight Hayes whole.