Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,123
and the bags tried to drag him up.
He hovered a stop at thirty feet, where he rested. He was sucking too much air, he thought, struggling with the lift bags, although his computer said that he had plenty left. His leg itched from the cut, and from the saltwater inside the suit. A boat seemed to be coming toward him, high-speed screws, so probably shallow draft, still some distance off. A sport-fishing boat? He got the Genesis going and headed east, into the ocean, praying that the boat wasn’t trolling. A big hook in the face—or in the bags, for that matter—really wasn’t something he needed to deal with.
He continued pushing east until the boat was well past, then surfaced and checked the GPS. Worried about the boat, he’d overrun the pickup point, so he turned back west and steered over to it, adjusted the lift bags until they sat at the surface, then added air to his wing until his head and shoulders were above water. With nothing but low rollers, he could see red and green boat lights out across the ocean; none seemed to be coming his way. He had twenty minutes to wait. He removed the regulator mouthpiece, and settled in to do that.
* * *
Rae sat on the deck and watched the condo lights go by on shore. A tranquil night, and beautiful, the salt air heavy and soothing in her face. The three men sat back by the cockpit talking; she couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. Then Cattaneo called out to her, “Ally, we’re coming up to the turn.”
“All right.”
Cattaneo was watching the radar for anything that might be Coast Guard. The only thing near them, as they came around, was a radar blob that was closing from the north on a line parallel to theirs, and not far away; they could clearly see the lights getting larger by the moment. When they came around in the turn and headed south, their radio burped, and a woman’s voice said, “Sailboat off Deerfield turning south, this is the powercat Uncaged coming up on your starboard side. If you hold your course we’ll stay well off to starboard.”
Cattaneo got on the radio and acknowledged the other boat’s call, then said, “Goddamnit, I hope Willy’s keeping a good watch. They’re running down the same line we are.”
The boat that went by looked like a fat white wedding cake, a catamaran at least three tiers high. A man on the cat’s flybridge raised a hand to them as it went by.
“Gonna get me one of those,” Regio said, as he watched it go. “Fuck a condo down here. You could live on a boat like that and wouldn’t cost you anything like a condo.”
“That boat cost anywhere between a buck and a half and two when it was new,” Cattaneo said. “You can get a damn nice condo for that price.”
They were talking condo prices when Rae’s phone rang: she took it out of her pocket, looked at it, frowned, and answered. A man’s voice, artificially cheery: “We’re calling to alert you to an opportunity to insure your car against . . .”
Rae said, “Fuck you,” and punched off.
Cattaneo laughed and asked, “What was that?”
“He wanted to alert me to an opportunity,” she said. She felt a chill crawl down her spine, but forced a skeptical grin. “Like Willy and his Salvation Army pot.”
“Got a cousin up in Jersey doing that, phone work,” Lange said, faking a shudder. “You know what they say when somebody listens to the pitch and then declines the offer? They say, ‘Fuck you very much.’ The guy who’s listening never picks it up. They think you’re saying, ‘Thank you very much.’”
“Another bit of garbage information from the brain of Matthew Lange,” Cattaneo said.
Rae: “I’m getting a little chilly, I think I’ll get my wrap.”
She went below and got a zip-up cotton sweatsuit top, carried it back up to the cockpit, handed it to Regio, and said, “Hold this, help me get it on.”
He held it so she could get her arms in it, and helped tug it up over her shoulders. “Thanks.” She zipped it. “How much longer?”
“Thirty minutes,” Cattaneo said.
Ten minutes later, Cattaneo’s phone rang. He looked at the screen and said, “Uh-oh. Trouble. It’s the boss. Ally, if you want to go up on the bow or down below, this might be kinda private.”