Finally, I kicked up and broke the surface in the late afternoon light. I almost sunk below the surface again, then inflated my BC. I ripped the mask off my face, spit out the regulator. The air burned from the summer heat. It was charged with the smell of approaching storm and cedars. I promised myself I would never complain about cedars again, no matter how bad the pollen fever season got.

The Flagship of Fun was floating not thirty yards away-so impossibly close it made me angry, given the odyssey I'd just completed.

There was no place I wanted to go less, just then, than the Flagship of Fun. But I could hear the voices clearly over the water- Clyde, Lopez, and most frantic of all, Maia.

I yelled, "Hey!" with more anger than I knew I had, letting out twentytwo minutes of terror in a single word.

Lopez and Maia rushed to my side of the boat.

Maia spotted me and her whole body seemed to sag under the weight of an extra G force. "Oh God. Oh thank God."

Lopez yelled, "You son of a bitch!"

He'd stripped off his gear except for his mask, which was still stuck to his forehead-the sign of a diver in distress. I don't think, at that moment, Lopez cared what signals he sent.

His face was livid, but the look in his eyes was not what it had been at one hundred feet. It was not wild. He yelled: "You could've killed us both!"

I bit back comment, kicked over to the ladder on the boat.

Clyde was there, too, talking on a cell phone, giving the Lower Colorado River Authority our position. His expression could've been carved out of slate.

Lopez helped me aboard, Maia taking my other arm. I let them help me get my gear off.

Then I turned to Lopez just as he was starting to cuss me out and I slammed a right uppercut into his jaw.

His teeth clacked shut and his head did a little snap. He staggered back, looking momentarily stunned. That was all. I must've been even weaker than I felt.

Lopez's face hardened, got very calm. Then he charged me. He knocked me to the deck, began throwing sloppy punches into my ribs and face, kicking, kneeing. Clyde was above Lopez, trying to pull him off, either because he wanted to break it up or because he wanted his own shot at one or both of us.

A gun roared.

Lopez rolled off me instantly, stood. Clyde backed away. I rose to my elbows, wiped a trail of blood off my upper lip, and looked up at Maia, who was holding Clyde's revolver, the barrel pointed out over the lake.

"That's it, gentlemen," she told us. "You are now above water. Above water, I am the queen almighty. And the queen says no fighting. Any questions?"

I shook my head.

Lopez rubbed his jaw, stepped carefully to the bar and grabbed a bottle of vodka.

"What the hell do you mean hitting me, Navarre? Me, who just tried to save your sorryass life."

"Fucking fascist cop," Clyde growled.

Maia said, "Drink something, Clyde. Gin?"

"I hate gin."

She tossed him the bottle anyway. He caught it, uncapped it and drank.

She didn't even ask what I wanted. She tossed me a fifth of Cuervo Gold.

We all drank, except for Maia. The gun was enough for her.

I glowered at Lopez. "You were saving me, huh?"

"Yeah. Not that it was worth it."

"That what you were doing with the knife, Vic? Saving me?"

Maia watched for signs of new trouble, but Lopez just shook his head in disgust.

He stormed over to where my gear lay and yanked a broken branch as thick as a golf club out of my BC strap.

"Actually yes, Navarre. You stupid son of a bitch. I was trying to cut you free. And three tugs-that's your signal to call me in, not the other way around. You never leave the main line. Never. I was asking you for more slack so I could cut the corpse free, put a loop around it. Now Search and Recovery's going to have to do it, and you and I just royally fucked up an underwater crime scene."

Maia watched both of us, unsure what to do. Clyde looked like his only uncertainty was deciding which of us to kill first.

I said, "Lopez, I'm-"

I couldn't make myself say it.

Clyde spat a mouthful of gin over the side. "Somebody's going to pay, Lopez.

Somebody's going to pay for Ruby, and his name ain't going to be Navarre."

"Shut up," Maia decided. "Let's just shut up."

And we did.

We paced around the deck in hostile silence, Maia holding the gun, the rest of us drinking liquor from the Flagship of Fun's premiumstocked bar while the sirens of the LCRA and Sheriff's Department boats got closer and closer over the water.

CHAPTER 35.

The Flagship of Fun was tame compared to the party the media was throwing.

We made shore at Windy Point around four o'clock, hoping to evade the bulk of spectators and reporters. No such luck. The Point's foottrafficonly road was lined with news vans from Austin, Waco, San Antonio-all the network affiliates and several cable stations.

The usual contingent of scubacampers looked bewildered by the invasion.

Cameramen clambered around, knocking over air tanks and pup tents, setting up portable generators and satellite dishes and tripod lights. Reporters fussed with their makeup, lamented their winddestroyed hairdos, and forcefed microphones to anyone and everyone coming up the ladder from the water.

Maia and I got through the gauntlet only because Vic Lopez was right behind us.

"Detective!"

And the feeding frenzy began. The reporters' questions told me that every important fact had already leaked out. A woman's body had been recovered from one hundred feet of water. She had been stabbed, weighted down. Had she been dumped overboard? Had the body been positively identified as Ruby McBride, exwife of the recently murdered Jimmy Doebler? Was it true her former business partner Garrett Navarre, already a suspect in Doebler's murder, was still at large?

As Maia and I were leaving, the PR director for the Sheriff's Department was trying to organize the chaos into a formal news conference. He got a lieutenant and a couple of sergeants to line up on one side of him, Lopez on the other side.

From the expressions of the brass, I got the feeling Lopez would've gotten chewed into catfish bait had the press not been present. But the press was present, so Lopez was the star of the moment.

I gave Maia the keys to my truck. The rain started to fall.

While Maia drove, we listened to the news conference live on an AM station. The police refused to release the identity of the victim. They refused to speculate on suspects, though they promised they were "actively pursuing leads." I tried to focus on the hills, the trees, the arc of rain outside the sweep of the windshield wipers-anything but what had happened at the bottom of the lake.

The anger had left me. Nitrogen was venting from my system, sapping every bit of energy my body had left. I drifted in and out of sleep.

When Maia and I got back to Jimmy's dome, my need for a scuba nap overrode all other concerns. I crawled up the ladder to the sleeping loft and passed out.

I'm not sure how long I was unconscious. When I opened my eyes the daylight was gone. Rain pounded steadily on the roof of the dome.

Maia's voice said, "I was about to put a spoon under your nose, check if you were still breathing."

I looked toward my feet. She was sitting on the corner of the bed, Robert Johnson pacing back and forth on her knees, purring smugly.

I grabbed an extra pillow, stuffed it behind my head. "News?"

"Not much. Lopez called, said he was taking a lot of heat. Said he should have the ME's report by morning."

"Garrett?"

"I'm sorry. Nothing."

I studied the Beatles poster on the ceiling. The Fab Four looked mad at me.

"It isn't your fault," Maia said. "If nothing else, it got Lopez on your side."

"Yeah, the minute I punched him."

"He knows Garrett couldn't do . . . what you saw down there. There's no way. Lopez got a revised statement from Dwight about Adrienne Selak's drowning. He's talking to SFPD. Momentum is starting to shift."

The rain kept drumming on the roof. The only one comfortable in the loft seemed to be Robert Johnson, now snugly nestled in Maia's lap, getting his ears scratched.

"Ruby wanted to fix things," I said. "She met with Pena, tried to reverse her deal with him. But she wasn't any use to him anymore. So he killed her. Just like Adrienne."

Maia picked at a fold in the bedspread. "We don't even know it's her yet, Tres. The condition of the body-"

"Yes, we do."

"We'll bring Pena down."

"You were right. It would have been better if I'd stayed out of this, let you handle it."

"No," she said. "That was my bitterness talking."

She slid Robert Johnson out of her lap, scooted onto the bed, lay down next to me.

She put her arm across my chest, her chin resting on my shoulder.

We lay like that, the fan at the top of the dome pin wheeling shadows across the ceiling, for a long time. I thought about dark green water through the branches of frozen pecan trees.

She kissed my neck. "Stop, okay?"

"Stop what?"

"Thinking."

She slid the sheet down, away from my chest.

"You're running up a bill at the Driskill," I said. "For a room you aren't using."

"Mmhmm."

She put a finger on my chest, ran it up to my collarbone, traced the starburst of pink scar tissue just below my right clavicle. "What's that?"

"Gunshot."

"I can see that." Three fingers now, tracing the skin. "But it's new. How?"

"An old friend. He gave it to me last spring."

She exhaled a laugh against my shoulder. "Figures."

I kissed her and she didn't object. Then another kiss-longer, more earnest.

I looked in her eyes-amber, bright, defying me to stop.

"I'm pretty sure this is a reaction to trauma, here," I warned her.

"So react," she said.

She shifted her weight onto me.

I crossed my arms around her neck, pulled her face down to mine.

Robert Johnson murred, protesting an obvious error in the direction of our affections. I nudged him with my foot, as gently as I could, to the edge of the bed, and then thump.

After that I didn't care much what the cat did all night. And he extended us the same courtesy.