When I Wake

by Rachel Lee

  Luis slapped his forehead in anger as he entered the bar, then gave thanks for the cool waves of air-conditioning that washed over him. Maybe he should simply stay in his hotel room for the next four days. Order room service—Emilio could afford it—and just hole up until he sorted his way through the awful tangle his life was becoming.

  Instead he ordered a Tecate and considered drowning his sorrows.

  What was he to do? He supposed he could drop all contact with El Desconocido, get rid of the pager, and hide his tracks. At least then Emilio would never find out. But the problem was—and he wasn’t stupid enough to underestimate the possibility—El Desconocido might have figured out who Luis was.

  Careful as he’d been to leave no trail, he’d been working for Emilio long enough to know how difficult it was not to leave a trail. There was always something, like a loose thread on a shirt, that could be found if someone looked carefully enough.

  He had canceled his credit card two months ago, claiming it had been stolen, but only after he had paid for six months use of the pager in cash. That little attempt to hide his connection to the pager had seemed wise at the time. It had even seemed brilliant. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  Maybe, and this was a distinct possibility, there was no way to hide his duplicity from Emilio indefinitely. Maybe he just needed to resign himself to the fact that sooner or later Emilio was going to find out. What he needed to be doing, instead of covering his tracks, was preparing his escape plan, to be ready to disappear on a moment’s notice.

  The trouble was, he couldn’t think of a way to do that. Not if Emilio was going to be aboard the Conchita. Because if Emilio was aboard the boat, he was going to insist that Luis be there as well, no matter how seasick Luis became. After all, if Emilio didn’t care that the humidity and humus smell of the hothouse made Luis sick, he was unlikely to be more sympathetic about seasickness. And how was Luis supposed to escape a boat on a moment’s notice?

  His life was cursed. There was no doubt about it.

  They were dragging the magnetometer again, extending their search to the southwest, moving into the area which Drew Hunnecutt had designated as the next likeliest location of the wreck. Dugan was unable to believe that any man, even an oceanographer, could have realistically figured out the conditions during a hurricane three hundred years ago, at least not well enough to know where a galleon had sunk. But he supposed Drew’s suggestions at least gave them an excuse to narrow the search to a reasonable area.

  They were motoring along at a lazy pace, bobbing gently on soft swells. Tam had finished his book, pulled yet another out of his duffel, and retreated to the stern bench to read through his mirrored sunglasses. His skin was nut brown now, and his hair and moustache were bleached almost white. Dugan, who stayed mostly in the shadier cockpit, had darkened, too, from the light reflecting off the water. Even Veronica, who slathered sunscreen all over herself and stayed below most of the time, using her computer, had picked up a healthy glow.

  And Dugan was bored out of his gourd. He liked sailing, but not this much. Maybe it was time to put the boat on autopilot and do some fishing. Maybe then he’d at least feel as if he was accomplishing something.

  Less than a month left, he reminded himself. Just a little over three weeks. Then she could find someone else to drive a boat for her.

  Just then the motor kicked out. It died. A sputter, and it was gone. Dugan tried restarting it, but the starter ground uselessly.

  “Oh fucking great,” he muttered under his breath. The fuel gauge said they still had plenty of gas.

  “What happened?” Tam called from the stern.

  “Engine died.”

  “I’ll take a look.” He jumped off the bench and opened the stern hatch, then slid down into the hold.

  Dugan considered running up some sail and continuing that way, but then decided not to. He was more concerned about the engine problem. It was probably some minor thing, but he could think of a few major things that he wouldn’t want to wait to discover.

  They were drifting east, slowly but surely. He shrugged it off—what were they going to run into?—and locked the wheel. The boat was rolling more since they were without power, but it wasn’t anything to worry about.

  He turned to go help Tam just as Veronica’s head popped up through the hatch.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He paused to look down at her. “Engine died.”

  “What?”

  “The engine died.”

  “Oh. Can you fix it?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “We’re not stuck, are we? I mean, we have the sails.”

  “No, we’re not stuck.”

  “Then put up the sails and let’s keep searching.”

  He stifled a sigh and squatted down so he was closer to her face. “I need to make sure there’s nothing serious wrong with the engine first.”

  “Serious?”

  “Something that could endanger us.”

  “Oh.”

  Tam called from behind him. “Dugan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We got a broken gas line.”

  He straightened and turned to look back at Tam. “Did much spill?”

  “Nah, the shutoff worked. I’m going to try to jury-rig it.”

  “Okay.” He looked back at Veronica. “Broken gas line. Tam’s going to try to fix it.”

  “How long will that take?”

  All of a sudden, Dugan was angry. For weeks now this woman had been pushing him on this search as if he were nothing but a mule to be goaded, and he was getting mightily tired of it. Christ, she hardly even talked to anyone anymore.

  He squatted and faced her. “Do you give a damn about anything except finding that damn mask?”

  She blinked, and her head pulled back a little. “Of course I do.”

  “Then act like it for the next five minutes. Or maybe the next hour or two, because I’m getting tired of criss-crossing the same piece of empty ocean all day every day looking for something that probably doesn’t even exist.”

  “It does exist!”

  “You have only one conquistador’s word for that. How do you know he didn’t make up the tale to cover the fact that he kept the damn mask and melted it down so he could live a life of luxury?”

  She gave a little gasp, then disappeared swiftly down the ladder. Good riddance, he thought, and went to help Tam. Only he really didn’t mean it. That woman just got under his skin faster than chiggers on a hot summer afternoon. And he didn’t want to think about why that was.

  It took them only ten minutes to repair the gas-line leak. Tam returned to his reading, and Dugan went below to tell Veronica they were ready to get started again. He found her glued to her computer screen, a frown knitting her brow.

  “Veronica?”

  Several seconds passed before she looked up at him, her gaze almost vague.

  “We fixed the problem. We’re ready to start again. I’ll take us back to where we left off.”

  “No!”

  “No?”

  “No.” She shook her head, her face tight. “There’s something . . . I’m getting an anomaly. Can you take us a little further in the direction we’ve been drifting?”

  In spite of himself, he felt his pulse leap. “Yeah. Sure. What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “But something’s disturbing the magnetic field not too far from here.”

  He climbed back up into the cockpit and turned the engine over. It responded immediately, telling him all was well. Then, slowly, he began to take them in the easterly direction they’d been drifting.

  After about five minutes, she called up to him. “Stop. It’s starting to taper off.”

  He obeyed, calling to Tam to get ready to put out the anchor. Tam jumped up quickly, glad of the change of pace apparently. Then Dugan took them back to a point about midway between where Veronica had first noticed the anomaly and where she said it had started to taper off.
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  “Lower the anchor, Tam.”

  Veronica came surging up the ladder, her face as excited and happy as Dugan had ever seen it. “It might be a cannon,” she said. “It’s a big enough anomaly.”

  Then she threw her arms around Dugan and hugged him. The gesture surprised him, but it felt good, too, so he hugged her back, finally lifting her right off her feet. She laughed, and he found himself thinking that she ought to laugh more often.

  Such a serious little puss. The thought, coming out of nowhere, disturbed him, and he quickly set her down again.

  “We’ll go down now,” he said, when he had her attention.

  “Yes. Yes, please!”

  Tam came up behind him. “About damn time,” he muttered. “Action at last.”

  “What did he say?” Veronica asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  A shadow passed over her face, then she laughed. “Okay, I don’t want to know.”

  He and Tam climbed into their wet suits and gathered up their gear.

  “It’s probably a spittoon from the late nineteenth century,” Tam grumbled as he pulled his flippers on, then reached for his air tank. “How much you wanna bet? Or some old iron bathtub somebody dumped out here.”

  “Can you be any more positive?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  At least Veronica couldn’t understand him. She was standing at the side of the boat, looking down into the water as if she hoped her gaze could penetrate the thirty feet below them and see what the magnetometer had detected. He didn’t think it would, because they’d have seen it from the plane, if that was possible.

  He checked his regulator and waited until Tam checked his. Then he lowered the dive platform at the stern and picked up his metal detector.

  “Okay,” he said to Tam. “You take starboard, I’ll take port. Let’s do a longitudinal sweep, starting right under the boat, for about a hundred yards fore and aft, then move out another ten yards and repeat. If we don’t find anything, we’ll put out some buoys and guide ropes and do it the intelligent way.”

  Tam laughed. Veronica looked perplexed, as if she hadn’t understood most of what he said. But that was okay. He’d explain later if she wanted to know. For right now, his pulse was hammering, adrenaline was filling him, and he couldn’t wait to get down there and see if they could find something.

  And to think he’d been wishing he’d never agreed to do this.

  He wet his mask, pulled it on, stuck the regulator in his mouth, and stepped into the water. He heard Tam jump in right behind him.

  God, he hated to get wet. But he loved to dive. He headed straight for the bottom, where he could see mud and some seaweed beds. No coral, at least not there, which was a good thing. Searching in coral could be an unpleasant experience.

  The metal detector was a small instrument, not much bigger than an Uzi, with a pistol grip, a dial on top for him to watch, and a six-inch detector plate on a short rod sticking out of it. He didn’t bother sweeping it around because he needed to read the dial, and anyway, it would detect metal within a few feet in all directions.

  Visibility was excellent, and he found himself almost wishing there was a reef nearby. It would have been great to enjoy the fish and all the color. Instead, he had crystalline water and a muddy bottom with occasional patches of growth. Oh well.

  Ten minutes passed, then fifteen as he swam slowly, keeping his attention on the meter. Nothing, and more nothing. Then he turned around and headed back, feeling a growing sense of impatience. The magnetometer hadn’t imagined it. But of course, they didn’t know exactly where it was. They were probably going to have to survey the whole area to pinpoint whatever it was she’d found, then he and Tam were going to have to get serious about criss-crossing the area using guidelines so they wouldn’t miss anything. Painstaking, but instead of dreading it, he was actually anticipating it.

  Because all of a sudden, he thought it might well be the highlight of his life if he discovered a three-hundred-year-old cannon.

  That’s when the dial on his meter jumped. Digging his fingers into the mud to hold himself still, he swept the meter around, looking for the point at which it peaked. When it did, he set it down and reached for his diving knife.

  Pulling it out of the sheath, he began to dig into the mud. Unfortunately, digging kicked up enough debris that the clarity of the water was lost, and his vision began to be obscured.

  But not so obscured that he failed to see the glint of metal. Digging around, he found a coin, partially encrusted, then another, and another. His heart was beating rapidly by then, so rapidly that he was concerned about his air consumption. His pulse was pounding in his ears.

  They’d found something.

  Veronica remembered other times in her life when seconds and minutes seemed to drag, but she couldn’t recall anytime when they had dragged this badly. She counted them off, pacing the deck of the Mandolin, while the minutes stretched into a half hour.

  Her mind was springboarding between painful hope and the absolute conviction that they couldn’t have found the Alcantara. Even when she had so bullheadedly set out on this three-month exercise, she hadn’t really believed that they would find the ship. The possibility seemed as remote to her as winning the lottery—and she never bought lottery tickets.

  But she had bought this lottery ticket despite the huge odds, and had pressed forward as if she were convinced that she was bound to win. Even in her own mind she had realized there was something not entirely rational about her behavior but she had refused to back off. She knew she was acting out of emotion rather than scientific objectivity, but vindicating her mother had become paramount in her life.

  Now, as she paced the deck, waiting to discover whether they’d found a cannon or some piece of junk dropped off a boat of much later date, she found herself wondering why she had assumed such an immense burden. What she was doing bordered on the insane. People didn’t just get into a boat and look around for several months and discover a specific three-hundred-year-old wreck. It didn’t happen. Oh, they might easily find a wreck. The waters were littered with them. But a specific wreck? With as little information as she had? Not likely.

  But still she hoped. Even if she couldn’t find the mask, finding something that would substantiate that she had located the Alcantara would be a major achievement. Even if it didn’t prove to her father that he had been wrong.

  Peering over the side, looking through the polarized lenses of her sunglasses, she tried to see the shapes of the divers below. But she could see nothing except murky hints of the bottom below the boat.

  Then there was the question of why she felt she had to prove her father wrong. Why she felt this almost childish need to look at him, and say, “So there.” The truth of it was, she was doing exactly what he had feared she might do if she learned about her mother’s quest. Not that what she was doing really deserved that level of fear. It wasn’t so very different from the things Orin had done in his life.

  Unless you believed, as he did, that her mother had been killed because of it.

  Veronica couldn’t believe it. Her mother had taken a terrible risk that day, setting out alone in a boat to dive the reefs. She should never have done such a thing. And alone on a boat at sea, or diving alone, there were dozens of things that could prove fatal. Veronica had no difficulty believing the coroner’s determination that Renata must have been leaning over the side when a wave caught the boat, throwing her out and causing her to hit her head as she fell. The scenario was well within the realm of possibility. And the sorry fact was, people died from such senseless accidents all the time.

  Orin’s refusal to believe it probably had more to do with his refusal to believe his wife could have been so foolhardy. He probably believed some sinister force was at work.

  She looked over the side again, then reminded herself she was probably doing exactly what her mother had been doing. A chill passed down her spine, and impulsively she went to get a life jacket
and strap it on. Her mother might still be alive today if she had followed this one simple precaution.

  Some puffy popcorn clouds were appearing in the sky, and she tried to amuse herself for a few minutes by imagining what animals the shapes looked like. But that didn’t distract her for long. Soon her eyes were glued to the swells again, trying to pick out the shapes of Tam and Dugan from the splintered light.

  When she saw the first head, she almost doubted her eyes. Then she was sure it was Dugan, his brown hair darkened by the water. He was only twenty feet from the boat, to the stern. He lifted an arm and waved to her, then disappeared again beneath the waves.

  What had that meant? Was he in trouble of some kind? Her heart slammed into high gear, and she made her way to the stern, standing near the diving platform, wondering what she should do. Take out her hearing aids and dive in? But her eardrums were perforated, and she wasn’t supposed to get in the water without earplugs. Fool that she was, she hadn’t brought any with her because she hadn’t expected to need to get into the water.

  Just when she thought she was going to fly apart from the tension, Dugan’s head popped out of the water again, just a couple of feet from the platform. He pulled out his regulator, then grabbed the ladder and climbed aboard.

  “Thank God!” The words burst out of Veronica before she could stop them.

  Dugan pushed back his diving mask and looked at her. “Thank God?”

  “I didn’t know what it meant when you waved. I was afraid you might be in trouble.”

  “Sorry. I just wanted to see exactly how far from the boat I was. It looked like about twenty feet to me. You?”

  She nodded and stepped back, making room for him to climb off the platform onto the deck. “That’s about what I thought.”

  “Get a GPS right now, will you?”

  Wondering why, she went to the cockpit and checked the reading on the Global Positioning System. Pulling a small memo pad out of her shorts pocket, she scribbled it down.

  Turning, she saw that Dugan was pulling off his fins. He’d already set his air, harness, weight belt, and regulator aside, and his mask was on the bench. The wet suit fit him like a second skin, and she found herself thinking that he had a damn good body for a man who appeared to spend his whole life lazing around at a desk or on the deck of a boat.