Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,64

couple of days before, new customers, he thought, though they’d been sitting on the other side of the room the first time he’d seen them. He’d noticed them because they’d seemed to be arguing, the dudette all over the dude’s act. And they were hard to miss, a biracial couple in an old people’s deli on Miami Beach.

The dude had not overly clean blond hair falling down to his shoulders. A lazy look seemed permanently fixed to his face, behind multicolored dime-store sunglasses; he had earrings in both ears, fake diamonds that would make an NBA player go over and slap his face. He was wearing a T-shirt, gym shorts that looked like they’d been stolen from a high school locker, and flip-flops, though the predicted high temperature that day was only in the low seventies. He had an earphone plugged into an ear, the other end plugged into what must have been an iPhone Zero. He was listening to music, and tapped his thumb with the beat as he argued with the woman.

The dudette was exactly his opposite: a tall, lithe black woman with close-cropped hair, high cheekbones, and a sexy scar running slantwise across her forehead; maybe, Cattaneo thought, from a knife, or possibly a church key. She had bloody-red nails that looked like the claws on a cheetah, and wore a blue Nike running suit that fit her like a glove. The front zipper was down to a point about two inches above her navel. No bra, and the jacket’s contents were worth looking at. The front of the suit said yale, and Cattaneo thought, “Yeah, right.”

He smiled to himself: what it actually said was ya—cleavage—le. Most guys wouldn’t make the jump.

Cattaneo got his usual, a corned beef sandwich with red onions and Russian hot mustard, fries, and a bottle of Peroni, and carried them back to his booth, where he poured ketchup into the fries cup and went to work on the sandwich and beer and half-listened to the dude and dudette quarrel.

The woman was saying, “Yeah, that worked, didn’t it? We’re lucky we made it out of the state.”

The dude half-whined, “Shut up. I was trying.”

“Try harder. I don’t want to be selling retail. And I won’t be waitin’ two years if you get hooked again.”

“Why not sell? Get a job at the Gap, or whatever. You’re good at it. They like your looks. Get a few bucks, get me back on my feet.”

“You could get on your feet if you’d get off your fuckin’ back. How many dive shops you hit today? One? None?”

“Two. They didn’t need anybody.”

* * *

They continued to argue, but now Cattaneo checked them out. The dude was wearing a faded yellow T-shirt that showed a grinning skull wearing a dive mask and a snorkel. He swallowed some sandwich, leaned out of the booth and said, “I couldn’t help hearing what you said. You’re a diver?”

The blond dude looked him over, then said, “Maybe,” which Cattaneo could have predicted he’d say. “What’s it to you?”

Cattaneo shrugged. “I heard a bunch of divers were down here trying to find that Coast Guard treasure. Thought maybe you were one of them.”

The blond seemed to focus. “Coast Guard treasure? What Coast Guard treasure?”

“The Coast Guard has a fifty-thousand-dollar reward . . .”

“Oh,” the woman said to the blond, “that dope thing.”

“Yeah, we know all about that,” the blond said to Cattaneo. “You’d have to be a major dumbass to think that shit’s still out there. That’s long gone.”

Cattaneo’s eyebrows went up. “Yeah? How’d that happen? The Coast Guard’s all over it.”

The blond tapped the tabletop with his knuckles. “I read about it. The Mexicans dumped that shit off a freighter into a hundred and fifty feet of water. They knew exactly where it was.”

“But the Coast Guard . . .”

“The Coasties got no idea, except maybe a general area. That’s what the newspaper said. So what’d the dopers do? Easy. They drove by in some boat maybe a mile farther out from where the Coast Guard is watching, in the middle of the night. They put a diver over the side with a good DPV, maybe . . . a Yamaha or something like it, and a lift bag. He rode the DPV over to where the dope is, towed it back to the pickup spot, hung out twenty feet down until the boat came back, surfaced, and there you are. I don’t know how much was down there, but the paper said