Lovely, Dark, and Deep (The Collectors)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Hell, maybe she would hire him despite the way they’d started, assuming it was a job worth doing. “You said you had work for me. Tell me about it.”

  “I need to hire a diver.”

  Shane’s hopes crashed to the deck. “I occasionally take people on dive tours,” he said. “I can give you pointers on good spots to dive, but I don’t give lessons and I won’t dive with you. Before we went out you’d have to sign a waiver of responsibility.” He paused, thinking about how he might keep the job-prospect door open. “I can do special charter tours, though.” For a hundred grand, he could make it really special.

  Gillian seemed unsure what to do with her hands, clutching them together on the table in front of her, moving them to her lap, leaving one in her lap and putting the other back on the table. Fidgeting, in other words.

  “You don’t understand,” she finally said. “I need to hire a diver for a special job, not to give me lessons.”

  Shane leaned back in his chair and studied her. Gillian Campbell looked tired. And nervous. And hadn’t made eye contact since they sat down. “You can’t walk down G Street without tripping over a scuba diver,” he said. “Where’d you get my name, and why would you think I’m the diver you need?”

  From her comments about the hurricane rebuilding, she’d been to Cedar Key before, maybe even lived nearby. But she didn’t hang in his circles—with the regulars at Harley’s, in other words. He’d never seen her. And most of the folks at the bar, including old Harley himself, wouldn’t recommend Shane Burke for a dive job. Not without talking to him first.

  “You’re not telling me everything. If you want me to work for you, I need to hear it all.”

  She finally looked up at him, and nodded. “I’m a scuba diver myself, but a recreational diver’s not what I need. I want to hire a technical diver, someone who can locate a shipwreck that might be sunk in deep water. Once the wreckage is found, I need something from it.”

  “Oh, well, if that’s all, why didn’t you say so?” Shane regretted the sarcasm when she winced at his words. “Sorry, but wreck salvage is highly regulated.” The fine state of Florida didn’t take kindly to people looting things off the floor of the Gulf, nor did any other coastal state, for that matter. “When did this ship go down? I haven’t heard of anything around here in the last few years.”

  She opened the front compartment of the satchel she carried and spread out a map. “It’s an old wreck from sometime in the early 1600s that set sail from Spain or Portugal. The ship was called the Marcus Aurelius.”

  She shoved the map toward Shane but he ignored it. The woman was nuts. “You think anything from a wreck that old is still salvageable?”

  At her stricken look, he took a deep breath. “Look, people get big dreams about finding sunken treasure left from pirate ships or old warships, but the vessels back then were built of wood. An iron or fiberglass ship might survive, but a wooden ship would have broken into matchsticks under the force of the waves unless it’s in deep water. Even if you knew exactly where this Marcus Aurelius sank—which I’m assuming you don’t since you mentioned locating it—chances of finding anything from it are…” He shook his head. “I think you’re on a fool’s mission.”

  Gillian blinked several times and looked down at her leather purse. Aw shit, she was going to cry. On a good day, one without a hangover, Shane didn’t know what to do with a crying woman.

  Her voice came out strong, though, not tearful. “I have to try. Please—you’re the only technical diver in this area. I can pay you.” She reached inside her bag and pulled out a stack of bills, setting it gently on the table between them. It was a tall stack, and the top bill had a picture of Benjamin Franklin on it.

  Holy shit. Shane slowly pushed the money back toward Gillian with his left hand, not trusting himself to be that close to it, and pulled the map toward him with his right. He looked down, expecting to see one of those dive maps of the Gulf of Mexico sold in the tourist shops, but he didn’t recognize the coastal area it showed. At least not until he pulled it closer and leaned over.

  Okay, now he knew she was crazy. “You’re looking for someone to dive the North Atlantic? Why the hell are you looking in Cedar Key, Florida?” He shoved the map back at her and took a last, longing look at Ben Franklin and his friends. “You need to go to New England or, hell, Halifax or Newfoundland. Not Florida.”

  “I have to find someone who can go quickly, and I live here—well, over in Sumner, near the reserve.”

  Shane scrubbed his hands over his stubbly face. The pounding of little jackhammers in his temples had grown in intensity. He needed a drink. “I’m not set up for cold-water diving; it takes special equipment.” Expensive equipment, and a little retrofitting.

  Hell, he wasn’t retrofitted for that climate; he’d done dives in the North Atlantic before, but not in a long time and not when he was looking for a needle in a sand-filled haystack. He needed that money, but he had to be a realist.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not your guy.” At her look of horror, he added, “I’ll ask around, though. I’ll see if anyone can recommend a diver who’s equipped to tackle something like that. It’s the best I can do.”

  Shane pushed his chair back and stood, frowning as Gillian made no move to leave. She’d picked up the stack of bills and had been flipping through them. Damn, but Ben had a lot of other friends who looked just like him. She reached in the satchel and put two more stacks on the table.

  Shane swallowed hard. How the hell much money was that?

  “This is to get your equipment and provisions, and to retrofit your boat,” she said, looking him in the eye with a hard blue stare. “It’s more than you’ll need, and you keep the rest. When you find the Marcus Aurelius and retrieve my family heirloom, there’s another million for you. All cash. All under the table.”

  Son of a bitch. Shane looked at her, at the money, at the map of the Canadian east coast.

  How hard a dive could it be?

  CHAPTER 3

  Gillian walked with a deceptively calm gait until she felt confident that she was out of Shane’s field of vision. Then she found an unoccupied bench near the end of the dock, sat down, and wrenched off the blasted heels.

  She’d done what Tex had told her to do. She had pretended, without actually saying so, that she was rich. That she had unlimited money to burn on a whim. But she’d never even seen that much money—almost a quarter of a million in three neat stacks. She knew, because she’d counted it.

  Acting was not her forte, though, and she wasn’t sure how much Shane Burke has bought. She could barely walk on the freaking heels. One didn’t trap nuisance gators or patrol wildlife reserves in heels.

  The only thing that saved her was recognizing the truth in what Tex had told her about Shane Burke. He was desperate for money and on the verge of losing his boat. Obviously, the man drank, and judging by how well he was functioning on what appeared to be a serious hangover, he drank frequently.

  Not the kind of man on whom she wanted to risk Holly’s life, but also not a man she wanted to drag into this mess. It would be easier, maybe, if she hadn’t liked him. Truth was, she admired Shane on some levels. She hated to think his looks had anything to do with it, although he did remind her of the guys who’d been on her college swimming and diving teams—tall, long-limbed, with powerful shoulders and thighs, and that cocky attitude that seemed to be the domain of men who spent a lot of time in the water.

  Mostly, though, it was the fact that he was a tec diver, which meant he could do things she’d never had the nerve to try. She was scuba-certified to thirty meters, but he’d be able to go much deeper. Stay longer. To stay certified, he’d have to prove himself able to think under pressure, stay calm, and handle decompression issues, which scared the hell out of her.

  Why he was tucked away in Cedar Key, known more for its shoals and clams than for deep-water diving, she didn’t know. Tex probably did, but the less she talked to Tex, the better. The less she came to
sympathize with Shane Burke, the better, too. Otherwise, Tex and his evil twin employer might find a way to coerce him to cooperate the way they’d forced her.

  Gillian stuffed the heels in her bag and wiggled her toes, trying to restart the circulation. She’d ferreted the shoes out of a back closet early this morning after her phone call from Tex. “Look on your stoop,” he’d told her, and she’d found the bag full of cash. “Dress like a rich girl. Wave money in front of Shane Burke’s face. He needs it. Don’t tell him more than you have to. Go off script and you know what will happen.”

  Just in case she’d forgotten, at the bottom of the bag of bills was a grainy photo of Holly in her pink dress with the kittens on the front. A dress Gillian had bought her, but surely Tex didn’t know that. Then again, he seemed to know an awful lot.

  He and his lunatic employer—if he was telling the truth and wasn’t behind this whole crazy scheme himself—even seemed to know she wouldn’t cross many lines to save herself. The lines she’d cross for a child, however, especially this child, were unlimited.

  After massaging her feet, Gillian walked back to her truck parked behind the marina, the hot concrete baking her heels and the undersides of her toes. She dodged families with strollers, kids playing chase, even a couple of canine escapees racing along the dock trailing leashes. The population of sleepy little Cedar Key was already swelling with Labor Day crowds of hippie college kids from Gainesville a couple of hours inland and families from neighboring counties who wanted to enjoy a pristine waterfront without all the commercial trappings of the Panhandle beaches.

  And in the middle of all this crowded wholesomeness here she walked, a woman who loved alligators and her solitary lifestyle. A woman whose nightmares had come to life, whose fear threatened to paralyze her. She’d lived this fear before, five years ago. But she couldn’t think about Ethan, or about Sam. It would be too much and she had to keep her thoughts clear and her mind sharp.

  She’d think about Shane Burke instead. She kept his smile, boyish despite the hangover and the stubble, and his sun-lightened blond hair in her mind while she drove to the county seat of Bronson. She parked in front of Coastal Bank, wedged protesting feet back into the heels, and marched inside ready to do battle.

  Now that she was cooperating, everything was back to normal. There must have been a computer glitch, the teller said. Gillian withdrew as much as she thought she could spare, glad her monthly bills were set up on bill pay so she didn’t have to worry about those. She still had the stacks of hundreds from Tex, but that would be for Shane Burke to get his boat ready if he decided to help her. As for herself, she wouldn’t spend dirty money if she could avoid it.

  She next stopped at the tiny office that her wireless company’s only local employee shared with a State Farm agent. The phone guy, whose nametag identified him as Tim, was more interested in singing the praises of the newest iPhone than listening to her tale of woe, but when she mentioned the police, he settled down and tried to look older and wiser than he probably was. If she had to guess, she’d say he was a nineteen- or twenty-year-old, working his way through Florida or the community college in Ocala.

  He listened, nodded his head vigorously enough to flop a strand of lank black hair in his eyes, and thrummed nervous fingers on his Formica desktop. “Far as I know, we don’t have any way of tracing a private caller,” he said, then snapped his fingers and jerked out a desk drawer. After rifling through what looked like an even mixture of forms and gum wrappers, he pulled out a manual and slapped it on the desk. “What we can do, though, is set up your phone to block any calls from a private number. I have the instructions right here and can do it for you. That should solve the problem.”

  Right. That would be the absolute worst thing Gillian could do. She wanted to track Tex down, not block him out, piss him off, and send him straight to her sister’s house.

  “What about the police?” She snatched her phone off the desk before Tim could reprogram it. “Do you know if they can trace it?”

  Tim gave her a blank, gator-in-headlights look. “I don’t know. You don’t want me to block the calls?”

  Gillian made her escape, and drove across town to the county sheriff’s department, where she was absurdly happy to see Terry Miles, the young deputy who’d tracked her down in person to tell her about Viv’s accident. Make that Viv’s nonaccident.

  “How’s your friend?” He motioned her to a desk in a room off a short hallway, his dark blue uniform blending with the dark blue institutional carpet and the light blue walls. Even the table in the windowless meeting room had been painted blue.

  “She’s stable this morning. If she does okay today, they’re going to move her out of ICU.” That news, at least, had gotten the day off to a good start.

  All along the drive back from Cedar Key, following the narrow state highway through the densely forested county, Gillian had thought about how to start this conversation. She’d finally decided a bit of honesty—but not too much—might convince the deputy to help her. “I started getting some threatening phone calls last night,” she said, explaining about the private caller. “He claimed that he caused Vivian’s accident to get my attention. Do you think someone could’ve tampered with her car?”

  This might be a small-town deputy in a very small town, but he didn’t laugh, or blow her off, or pretend knowledge he didn’t have. “I guess it’s possible. Since the rain was coming down so hard we didn’t really look for a sign of tampering.” He frowned and scribbled a few lines on a clipboard. Gillian tried to read it but beyond her own name, it all looked like gibberish.

  “Is there any way to trace the call?” She hated the desperation in her voice.

  “Can I see your phone?” Gillian handed it to him reluctantly, wondering how far the reach of Tex’s employer really went. Did it extend to knowing what she said or did inside a cinderblock building in Bronson, Florida?

  Deputy Miles looked at the list of recent calls and tried to redial one of the private listings.

  “I tried that,” Gillian said, and he gave her a sheepish smile.

  “You’d be surprised how many people don’t think of it.” He handed the phone back to her. “I assume you don’t want to block the calls, right? Want to keep track of what the crazy dude’s up to?”

  Deputy Miles was no dumb bunny. “Right.” Gillian set the phone on the table and stared at it as if it might suddenly spit out some answers. “I’d just like to find out who the guy is. You know, see how seriously to take him.”

  “You’ve always gotta take crackpots seriously these days. Exactly what is it he wants from you?” The deputy leaned back in his chair, reached in his pocket for a stick of gum, and proceeded to unwrap it slowly enough that the sweet smell of Juicy Fruit filled the room before he finally got it in his mouth. “Is he asking you to give him money, or to meet him somewhere? If you wanted to set up a meeting with him, we might be able to trap him.”

  Here’s where it got tricky; if she set Tex up that blatantly, whoever was watching Holly—whoever had taken her picture—could hurt her in an instant.

  “He found out about a family heirloom and thinks I have it,” Gillian said. “He says he wants it. It’s just an old piece of jewelry. I told him that I don’t have it; I’ve never even seen it. But if he caused Viv’s accident…I mean, what else will he do? I’ve gotta admit; he’s creeped me out.”

  “I can imagine.” Deputy Miles leaned forward and propped his elbows on the table, training his hazel eyes on Gillian’s. “Here’s the problem. We don’t have any way of tracing his call without working with your phone service and monitoring all of your calls—we might even need to set something up at your house so we have a fixed position to work from.”

  And if that happened, no telling what Tex would do. He or someone working with him had delivered that bag of money to her trailer during a night when she’d barely slept, and she hadn’t heard a thing. Her dog, Tank, who practically had heart failure at the sight of a squirrel in th
e yard, hadn’t let out a single suspicious bark.

  “I don’t think that will work, but I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “At this point, he hasn’t broken a law that we know of, so there’s nothing we can do.” The deputy tapped his finger on the clipboard. “Except I will ask the impound guys to tow your friend’s car over to Joe-Tom’s garage and have him check it out. If a line was cut or something was tampered with, JT can find it.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.” Gillian stood up, although her legs felt as if they’d been dipped in concrete, stiff and almost immovable. Without realizing it, she’d let herself hope that someone here could help her. But deep down, she’d known better. Even if they could prove Viv’s wreck wasn’t an accident, she doubted Tex and his associates had been careless enough to leave a calling card.

  Back at the Jeep, she pulled a blue flyer advertising a free car wash from beneath her windshield wiper before unlocking the door and climbing in. She backed out of her parking place and sat at the lot’s exit, waiting for traffic to clear enough for her to turn left onto the main road. Only that wasn’t really what she was waiting for.

  Her real wait was for the phone call, and it came less than thirty seconds later. She didn’t bother with a greeting. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

  “Go home, Ms. Campbell. No more running by the phone company. No more trips to the bank. And you sure as hell better not talk to any more law enforcement. Do you understand me, or do I need to send you a reminder?”

  Gillian felt hot tears trailing down her cheeks. She wanted to rage and scream. To explode. To kill something. Not to sit here and beg. “Please, no reminders. I’m sorry. I understand.”

  “Fine. Now tell me about your meeting with Shane Burke. My employer would like an update.”