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In a pale roiling of bubbles, Pilcher and Vega were gone. There was nothing more to do but wait. A
As the abandoned Blackduck, Jo’s boat, bobbed gently to the starboard, Jim tried to raise Mrs. Castle on the radio. Sandra Fox answered, reminding him Jo had not yet been issued a handheld Motorola radio.
“Try Scotty,” A
“Scotty’s off today,” Jim said. His voice was nasal and fiat, so much in keeping with his traditional nerd exterior that A
“He got yesterday and today off and he took another day of a
“What’s wrong with his ear?” A
“Scotty’s part deaf in his left ear. He wears one of those little bitty hearing aids in it. Did you know that?” Jim asked so sharply A
“Nope.” She’d guessed Scotty was hard of hearing on one side by the way he cocked his head and the number of times he asked people to repeat things, but she’d never given it any thought.
“That damn De
“How did De
“He didn’t happen to hit him,” Jim snapped. A
And Scotty was drunk, A
“More like a shoving match. De
“Gonads.” Not “balls.” A
For a while they sat without talking. A
“I feel sorry for Jo,” Jim said, staring out the window to where the Blackduck had nudged up beside the Lorelei. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was no accident, if she got upset and came out here and killed herself. It’d be one way of getting away from that damned De
A
She decided to prod a little. “I don’t know why anybody would feel sorry for Jo,” she said. “There’s not many women who’d throw De
Jim snorted, a sound like old pug dogs make. “Oh, women fall for that crap De
The insult to De
A number of retorts came to mind but A
No, she decided, he wasn’t trying intentionally to provoke her. He was just naturally irritating. At his age-somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-he probably knew he rubbed people the wrong way. A
“I used to work on St. John in the Caribbean,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t mind diving so much there. It’s warm.”
“Why did you leave the Virgin Islands National Park?” A
“The District Ranger was a prick,” he said succinctly.
“Ah.” He didn’t elaborate and A
“They made me do it in the Navy,” he said. “It’s a job.”
A secure government job with health and retirement benefits. Easy to get for an ex-Navy man with veteran’s preference in hiring. Dig a comfortable little air-conditioned niche and wait out the years until retirement while hundreds of overqualified people worked as seasonals, scraping by winters doing odd jobs, because they wanted to save the world- or at least one little corner of it.
It wasn’t hard to understand how De
A
The respite was short-lived. Ralph and Lucas surfaced. She and Jim helped them crawl aboard. For half a minute the divers lay in a puddle on the boat deck like a couple of unpleasant monsters dragged in with the day’s catch.
With a popping, sucking noise, Vega pulled off his rubber hood and dropped it on the deck. A
“Not a joke?” A
Lucas shook his head. “Not a joke. It’s De
A
She hadn’t known she cared.