his leg, her red nails like a spray of blood. Virgil picked up the beer, finished it, and said, “Look. You guys . . . you fuckers are the guys who dropped the dope off the coast. You’re looking for somebody to get it for you.”
“That against your principles?” Regio asked.
“I’ll tell you what’s against my principles,” Virgil said. “Getting caught or doing it for free. Or getting shot when the job’s done, to clean up loose ends.”
Regio stared at him for a moment, then looked quickly around the room and came back to Virgil and said, “What we’re thinking is, that shit is out there, and we think we know where and how to get it.”
“Aw, man, if that’s all it is, I told Jack it’s long gone,” Virgil said. “If you’re not the original guys . . . then the original guys, the guys who dumped it, have been all over it by now.”
“Let us worry about that,” Regio said. “You worry about this. If you think you can get to it, using one of these DPV things you told Jack about, we’ll give you . . . seven thousand, five hundred dollars for every can you bring back with you. Give it to you in cash. Every night. There are almost a hundred cans still out there; that’s almost three-quarters of a million to you. In cash. If you recover at least ninety of them, we’ll top off your take for an ice-cold million dollars.”
Rae said, “You are those guys. The originals.”
Neither Regio nor Lange looked at her: they were focused on Virgil, who seemed to be thinking. Then Virgil asked, “When?”
“We were told you need some gear.”
“Yeah. Like all of it. I got nothing left. There’s a big scuba place out west of here. They’d have most of it,” Virgil said.
“You know about GPS?” Regio asked.
“Sure. Used it all the time on the boats.”
“Then, how about we go shopping? Now,” Lange said.
Virgil looked at Rae, who said, “He might be a little stoned.”
“We noticed.”
“Shit, I’m fine,” Virgil said. He looked at Regio and Lange. “I got to dig out my certification cards. That’ll take one minute. You need to tell me what I’ll be doing. How deep I’m going, and how far I’m going to have to motor.”
“We can do that right now,” Lange said. He held up the notebook he was carrying. “I made some sketches based on what we know.”
They sat at the apartment’s shaky kitchen table and Lange opened the notebook and said, “This is all based on our first diver. She’s not with us any longer—she went back home.”
“What was her problem?” Rae asked.
“Not relevant to you,” Regio said.
“Let us decide that,” Rae said.
Regio and Lange looked at her, then Lange tipped his head and said, “She was . . . worried about, mmm, the police. The Coast Guard. We thought we were good with her, but she took off and we can’t reach her now.”
“That’s it?” Rae asked. “She split?”
“That’s it, really,” Lange said. “She was good at what she was doing, and I guess she sorta freaked out.”
They sat and looked at each other for a moment, then Virgil asked, “Are you guys really good at this? What you’re doing? Or are you a bunch of fuck-ups?”
“We’re good,” Regio said. “We’re about the best. Our problem with Jaquell—she’s the diver—was a one-time thing. She opted out, and we’re good with that. But we need a diver. We’re hoping you’re it.”
Lange held up the notebook. “You want to see this, or not?”
Rae looked at Virgil and asked, “What do you think?”
Virgil bobbed his head. “Okay. Let’s take a look.”
* * *
Lange had drawn a series of simple sketches on notebook paper. The containers holding the dope were a hundred and fifty feet down on a reef that paralleled the coastline north of Fort Lauderdale. He said they had GPS coordinates for each end of the drop string. Each container weighed about twenty-eight pounds and was a hair less than twenty inches long—fifty centimeters. They had custom lift and cargo bags, designed to take five or six containers at a time. Each lift bag could lift a maximum of two hundred pounds.
“You talked to Jack about using one of the DPV things from a mile out,” Lange said, tapping his sketch. “We won’t have to do a whole mile. A half mile would be good enough, because the containers, the cans, are right on the east edge of where the Coast Guard