Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef - By Charles Williams Page 0,3

“you wouldn’t have to take a diving suit and air pump and all that stuff. I thought perhaps you had one of those aqualung outfits.”

“We do,” I said. “In fact, I’ve got one of my own. But it would still be cheaper to buy a new shotgun.”

“No,” ‘she said. “Perhaps I’d better explain. It’s quite an expensive one. A single-barreled trap gun with a lot of engraving and a custom stock. I think it cost around seven hundred dollars.”

I whistled. “How’d a gun like that ever fall in a lake?”

“My husband was going out to the duckblind one morning and accidentally knocked it out of the skiff.”

I looked at her for a moment, not saying anything. There was something odd about it. What kind of fool would be silly enough to take a $700 trap gun into a duckblind? And even if he had money enough to buy them by the dozen, a single-barreled gun was a poor thing to hunt ducks with.

“How deep is the water?” I asked.

“Ten or twelve feet, I think.”

“Well, look. I’ll tell you how to get your gun back. Any neighborhood kid can do it, for five dollars. Get a pair of goggles, or a diving mask. You can buy them at any dime store. Go out and anchor your skiff where the gun went overboard and send the kid down to look for it. Take a piece of fishline to haul it up with when he locates it.”

“Don’t you want the job?” she asked. “Why?”

I wondered myself. I wasn’t doing anything, and I hated sitting around. It would be easy, and she didn’t mind paying for it, so why the reluctance?

I shrugged. “Well, it just seems silly to pay a professional diver all that travel time for something a kid could do in half an hour.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” she said. “You see, it’s about three hundred yards from the houseboat to where the duckblind is, and we’re not sure where it fell out.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It was early in the morning, and still dark.”

“Didn’t he hear it?”

“No. I think he said there was quite a wind blowing.”

It made a little more sense that way, but not much. I still hesitated. Maybe I only imagined it, but I could feel a tension inside her that she was trying to hide and it had to be caused by something more than a lost shotgun. And I was too damned aware of her. I could feel her, even when I wasn’t looking at her. I realized this was stupid, but it didn’t change the fact. Maybe I’d been living too long alone.

She turned her head a little then and I got those eyes full in the face. She said only one word. She said, “Please.”

If the shotgun had been under the Arctic ice pack it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. “When do you want to start?” I asked.

“Right now,” she said. “Unless you have another job.”

“No. I’m not doing anything.”

“That’s fine. We’ll go in my car, if it’s all right with you. Will your equipment fit in back?”

“Sure,” I said.

I went down the ladder to the barge and stowed away the gear I’d been working on, and got the aqualung and diving mask out of the storeroom. I set them on the dock and returned for some swimming trunks. While I was in my quarters I put on some lighter shoes and changed into white linen slacks and a sport shirt. I checked all the doors to be sure they were locked and went back up on the pier. She handed me the car keys and I put everything in the trunk.

“I think this is fun,” she said, smiling for the first time. “It’ll be fun watching you work.”

I shrugged, and said nothing. I wondered a little irritably if she really wanted that gun back, or if this was just her idea of a lark. After all, if it was lost during duck season it had been lying there for six months now. Maybe she had so much money and was so bored that hiring a diver came under the heading of entertainment, like ordering a clown for a children’s party.

Then I asked myself morosely why I was so intent on picking her to pieces. She hadn’t done anything, and so far as I knew there was no law against looking like a Norse goddess, even a slightly sexy one.

Norse? With a name like Shannon? It was odd, though, because she did look like