The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(82)

Lopez and Clyde exchanged looks.

"Oh good," Lopez said. "A blackwater expert. Lake Travis is the clearest lake in Texas, Navarre, which means your visibility here will be three to ten feet rather than zero.

Unless you stir up the bottom, in which case you're blind."

"Stop the scare tactics," Maia snapped. "Tres can handle it."

Lopez turned, the muscles in his neck tensing. "That's good to know, counsellor.

'Cause he and I, we're dive buddies now. If he freaks out down there and gets me killed, he's going to need a damn good defence attorney."

The boat bobbed. Lopez grabbed a Body Glove shortie, threw it to me, then another wet suit—a Farmer John style. "You'll need both," he said. "Layer them. We'll probably hit three thermocline layers on the way down. Even in June, the bottom is going to feel like an icebox."

"What's underneath us?" I asked.

Clyde and Lopez exchanged another look, but neither responded. Clyde started unlatching a med kit.

I said to Lopez, "You've been down there before, haven't you? This spot in particular."

Lopez picked up a mask. "There's about a hundred and ten feet of water under us, Navarre. We're floating on top of a pecan grove."

"The McBride farm."

Lopez spit in his mask, rubbed the glass. "It's an eerie place, Navarre. It's a f**king forest at the bottom of the lake. It's so deep, we'd bust the charts if we went down with the regular pressure gauges, the SPGs. We'll go on computer—more accurate nitrogen allowance. Even then, we've only got about ten minutes at the bottom.

Probably less."

He put the mask down, took the dumbbell anchor to the side of the boat, and dropped it over with a sploosh. The line fed out.

"What we'll do," Lopez said, "is a modified circular search. You're going to be anchorman, Navarre. All you got to do, you follow the line down, float just above the bottom. Not on the bottom. Don't touch that. It's about three feet of silt and muck, and you put so much as a fin in it—poof. We'll be in a blackout."

The line went slack.

"Snag." Lopez tugged at it, moved down the boat a few feet, then kept lowering it. "There. That should be the bottom. Looks like a hundred five feet.

We'll let the silt settle for a few minutes."

Lopez cut the top end of the rope, tied it to a yellow inflatable buoy the size of a bike tire. It had a diverdown flag fastened to the top. Lopez made the line taut and set the buoy over the side.

"I go down with you," he said. "I take a second line out from the anchor—a tender line.

I do a quick sweep of the area, as much as the trees will let me. The signals are like this. One tug from you or me means stop. Two tugs, take up the slack. Three tugs from you means come here. From me, it means let out some slack. Four tugs, pull me in slowly. Five tugs, I'm in trouble and can't get back. You get five tugs, pass that signal along to the surface by pulling hard on the main line, and Clyde comes in. He'll be fifty percent ready to dive the whole time we're down. Counsellor, you know enough to help Simms suit up?"

Maia nodded.

Lopez stared at me intently. "You got all that?"

"I think so."

"Give it back to me," he ordered. "All the signals." I did.

"Now the basic dive signals," Lopez said. "Let's make sure we're using the same ones."

I ran through the ones I remembered. I needed a little prompting, but in the end, Lopez seemed satisfied.

"We wear a minimum of gear," he told me. "It's easy to get snagged down there. You get caught, don't panic. You might get in a zerovisibility situation. You might not even be able to see the rope. In that case, you find east on your computer compass. The console is illuminated—stick it against your mask if you need to. Then you swim east.

You'll hit the shore that way no matter what, and you just follow it up. How fast do you ascend?"

"No more than thirty feet a minute," I said. "Safety stop twenty feet from the surface for at least fifteen minutes."

"All right," he said. "You know what nitrogen narcosis feels like?"

"One margarita for every thirty feet. Sort of like walking through the Texas Folklife Festival."

Lopez did not look amused. "You start feeling like you want to offer your regulator to the fish, the mud starts looking beautiful— you ascend to a higher level. Got it?"

"Got it."

He exhaled. "Now let's hope we don't need any of that. Suit up.”

Lopez walked over to Clyde, who was getting the tanks ready.

I sat next to Maia, started pulling on the legs of the shortie suit. "You okay?"

"Just get down there and get back up," she said. "Quickly."

She wouldn't meet my eyes. Her hair was tied back loosely, wisps of it trailing down in front of her ears like brown silk thread. She wore white shorts, an oversized blue Tshirt, flipflops. I could see the crescent scar on her calf that I'd traced with my finger many times, the single tiny mole on her forearm, the perfect diamond shaped corners of her eyes that had always reminded me of comet tails.

Maia caught me looking, gently pushed my face away. "I think you've got somewhere to go."