The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(84)

He tapped his watch, held up ten fingers. Ten minutes. The clock had started running.

We turned horizontal, angled ourselves down, then carefully descended around the periphery of the pecan tree.

It must've been a monstrous specimen when alive, and down here in the murk it seemed even bigger. We tried to keep a safe distance, but the tree kept surprising us.

We kept getting brushed and snagged, clawed at, almost impaled on branches that were worn to silty pikes from the decades underwater.

Then, at last, we were below the lowest boughs, shining our lights on a trunk so large our hands might just have met had we tried to hug its diameter.

Lopez plinked to get my attention again, gestured with his flashlight. He was warning me not to get too close to the bottom. It wasn't really solid below me—just a fuzzy layer of silt, lumpy and pitch black, like the remains at the bottom of a barbecue pit. Our line from the surface went straight down into the stuff, the anchor completely submerged.

Lopez gestured for me to come over and stay by the rope. He produced a second line from his supply bag—the tender line. He made a loose shepherd's knot, and slipped it around my wrist. He checked his computer, apparently calculating our GPS, then pointed off in one direction, pointed to himself.

I nodded.

Lopez measured out two yards of line the way they do in fabric stores—running the line from his nose to extended thumb. He handed me the slack. Six feet seemed a ridiculously small distance to start with, given how little time we had, but then Lopez moved away, and within a few feet he was gone.

There was no logic to it, what you could see and what you couldn't. In one direction, through a clearer patch of water, I could almost make out the trunk of the next tree in the row, but I couldn't see Lopez six feet away. If I shone my flashlight directly on him, I could just barely make out a smudge of black.

He gave me two quick tugs on the rope. I fed him another six feet of line, and then he was gone completely. I was alone.

I shone my light up through the branches of the ancient pecan. It must've been frozen in winter, fiftyplus years ago, but it looked

like it might've been submerged yesterday. There were still hardened knobs of pecans clinging to a few branches, more delicate black claws of open pods—things you would not think could withstand the flooding of an entire valley. The texture of the bark was still discernible. I wondered if the McBrides had picnicked here once, looked up at the sun through the branches, been grateful for the shade back on a Texas summer day before they'd had airconditioning, when Austin had still been a small town a day's wagon ride away.

I reminded myself, a little dreamily, that I'd come down here to do a job. I checked my console—one hundred two feet below. The timer read 12:04 minutes, total dive time.

My breathing had almost slowed to normal. I was relaxed. I started smiling for no particular reason, staring up into the branches of the tree.

Then I was brought back to reality by one sharp tug on the tender line. It meant more than just stop. We hadn't discussed it, but I was afraid that kind of tug must mean, 1

found something.

I waited. The cold enveloped me.

I calculated that Lopez was fifteen feet away now, but I couldn't see anything except the faintest bleached spot in the dark, perhaps his flashlight.

He gave three tugs, the signal that I was to come to him.

Not quite sure what to do with the line, I tied my end to the lead line, then, slowly, kicked my way into the gloom, my hand cupped loosely around the tender as I followed it out. Ahead was a tall streak of darkness—the trunk of the next tree. There was a smaller shape, too, with a tiny shimmer above it—Lopez and his bubble stream.

I got close enough to see him. He was floating right in front of the tree trunk as if examining it, his back to me. I kept my flashlight beam on him.

The beam of my light must've caught his attention, because he turned.

And that is when I realized I was going to die one hundred feet underwater.

Lopez's eyes were wide inside his mask, hardly human. One orangegloved hand held his dive knife, the point level to my nose, the thin blade toward me, serrated edge out.

Just beyond him, in front of the tree's trunk, was the thing.

It wore a wet suit, its limbs floating loosely in the current. A cord was wrapped around its legs, tying it to the same anchor that had sunk it into the muck. There was a severed regulator rope floating like a dead vein, and a metal dive knife impaled to the hilt just under the thing's sternum. The face had lost all definition, and the hair was a billowy, colourless mass until the beam of my flashlight touched it?

then it flared orangered. And the eyes turned to glass. The mouth opened, and I was sure those white hands reached out to me.

I screamed an explosion of bubbles, kicked, flailed away, and suddenly found that I wasn't moving. I couldn't see the dead face anymore, just endless crosses and hooks of black wood, and something was holding me fast from behind. I lost my mouthpiece, clamped my teeth, panicking, ready to inhale lake water, then somehow managed to find the regulator again and breathe.

My flashlight beam crossed with Lopez's. He emerged not three feet away, still holding the knife pointed toward me, a look in his eyes that I could not mistake.

I kicked, swiped at him with my fins, heard a crack that came from everywhere, and then I kicked again and found I was free. The world exploded in an ink cloud. My flashlight slipped out of my hand.