He reached out and caught it, and yes, that was the way it was tugging him . . . to the right . . . perpendicular to the path of his bubbles.
But how . . .?
Oh, God, help! He was down here alone in the impenetrable dark with no idea of where was up or where was down. Somebody please—!
A rush of turbulence spun him half way around and tugged the belt from his grasp. What was that? A wave surge? That meant he was near the surface.
Stover turned and started swimming in the opposite direction, away from his bubble trail, toward where all his senses told him was down. Had to try it. Nothing else made sense. What did he have to lose?
Everything. He sobbed through his regulator. Absolutely everything.
Another swirl of turbulence, stronger this time, and Stover knew no wave or subsurface current had caused that. Something was moving out there in the dark, something big . . . big as the wall itself maybe.
But what could be that big? Something from the floor of the trench? God knew what could sleep in those deeps.
He redoubled his swimming efforts—toward the surface, he prayed. All he knew was that he had to keep going, keep moving, had to reach the surface before his tank ran out. The surface—air, light! It was somewhere ahead.
Had to be . . .
Oh, please! Please!
Please, Silvio thought as he made his first cast into the sparkling water. Please guide the fish to me.
He watched the fine mesh sink beneath the gentle waves, then hauled it back toward him. His heart leaped at he pulled the net from the water and saw the squirming, fluttering mass of silversides flashing in the sun.
They’re back! The fish have come back!
“Granpa!” he cried joyously as he splashed toward the beach.
Granpa had been so quiet since that diver man had disappeared yesterday. Almost sad. Silvio had heard other adults comforting him, saying he had done what must be done.
Silvio didn’t understand. All he knew was that the water was alive again—he had proof right here. And he hoped that would make Granpa smile again.
AFTERSHOCK
“Please, signor,” the corporal says in fairly decent English, shouting over the rising wind. “You are not permitted up there!”
I look down at him. “I’m well aware of that, but I’m all right. Really. Get back inside before you get hurt.”
The patterned stone floor of the Piazza San Marco beckons three hundred feet below as he clings to one of the belfry columns and leans out just far enough to make eye contact with me up here on the top ledge. His hat is off, but his black shirt identifies him as one of the local Carabinieri. Hopefully a couple of his fellows have a good grip on his belt. I can tell he’s used up most of his courage getting this far. He’s not ready to risk joining me up here. Can’t say I blame him. One little slip and he’s a goner. I’ve developed a talent for reading faces, especially eyes, and his wide black pupils tell me how much he wants to go on living.
I envy that.
Less than an hour ago I was just another Venice tourist. I strolled through the crowded plaza, scattering the pigeon horde like ashes until I reached the campanile entrance. I stood on line for the elevator like everyone else and paid my eight thousand lire for a ride to the top.
The Campanile di San Marco—by far the tallest structure in Venice, and one of the newest. The original collapsed shortly after the turn of the century but they replaced it almost immediately with this massive brick phallus the color of vodka sauce. Thoughtful of them to add an elevator to the new one. I would have hated climbing all those hundreds of steps to the top.
The belfry doubles as an observation deck: four column-bordered openings facing each point of the compass, screened with wire mesh to keep too-ardent photographers from tumbling out. The space was packed with tourists when I arrived—French, English, Swiss, Americans, even Italians. Briefly I treated myself to the view—the five scalloped cupolas of San Marco basilica almost directly below, the sienna mosaic of tiled roofs beyond, and the glittering, hungry Adriatic Sea encircling it all—but I didn’t linger. I had work to do.
The north side was the least crowded so I chose that for my exit. I pulled out a set of heavy wire clippers and began making myself a doorway in the mesh. I knew I wouldn’t get too far before somebody noticed and, sure enough, I soon heard cries of alarm behind me. A couple of guys tried to interfere but I bared my teeth and hissed at them in my best impression of a maniac until they backed off: Let the police handle the madman with the wire cutter.
I worked frantically and squeezed through onto the first ledge, then used the mesh to climb to the second. That was hairy—I damn near slipped off. Once there, I edged my way around until I found a sturdy wire running vertically along one of the corners. I used the cutters to remove a three-foot section and left it on the ledge. Then I continued on until I reached a large marble sculpture of a griffinlike creature set into the brick on the south side. I climbed its grooves and ridges to reach the third and highest ledge.
And so here I am, my back pressed against the green-tiled pinnacle as it angles to a point another thirty feet above me. The gold-plated statue of some cross-wielding saint—St. Mark, probably—pirouettes on the apex. A lightning rod juts above him.
And in the piazza below I see the gathering gawkers. They look like pigeons, while the pigeons scurrying around them look like ants. Beyond them, in the Grand Canale, black gondolas rock at their moorings like hearses after a mass murder.
The young national policeman pleads with me. “Come down. We can talk. Please do not jump.”
Almost sounds as if he really cares. “Don’t worry,” I say, tugging at the rope I’ve looped around the pinnacle and tied to my belt. “I’ve no intention of jumping.”
“Look!” He points southwest to the black clouds charging up the coast of the mainland. “A storm is coming!”
“I see it.” It’s a beauty.
“But you will be strike by lightning!”
“That’s why I’m here.”
The look in his eyes tells me he thought from the start I was crazy, but not this crazy. I don’t blame him. He doesn’t know what I’ve learned during the past few months.
The first lesson began thousands of miles away, on a stormy Tuesday evening in Memorial Hospital emergency room in Lakeland, Florida. I’d just arrived for the second shift and was idly listening to the staff chatter around me as I washed up.
“Oh, Christ!” said one of the nurses. “It’s her again. I don’t believe it.”
“Hey, you’re right!” said another. “Who says lightning doesn’t strike twice?”
“Twice, hell!” said a third voice I recognized as Kelly Rand’s, the department’s head nurse. “It’s this gal’s third.”
Curious, I dried off and stepped into the hallway. Lightning strike victims are no big deal around here, especially in the summer—but three times?
I saw Rand, apple-shaped and middle-aged, with hair a shade of red that does not exist in the human genome, and asked if I’d heard her right.
“Yessiree,” she said. She held up a little metal box with a slim aerial wavering from one end. “And look what she had with her.”
I took the box. Strike Zone™ Early Warning Lightning Alert ran in red letters across its face.
“I’d say she deserves a refund,” Rand said.
“How is she?”
“Been through X-ray and nothing’s broken. Small third-degree burn on her left heel. Dr. Ross took care of that. Still a little out of it, though.”
“Where’d they put her?”
“Six.”
Still holding the lightning detector, I stepped into cubicle six and found a slim blonde, her hair still damp and stringy from the rain, semiconscious on the gurney, an IV running into her right arm. A nurse’s aide was recording her vitals. I checked the chart when she was done.
Kim McCormick, age thirty-eight, found “disrobed and unconscious” under a tree bordering the ninth
fairway at a local golf course. The personal info had been gleaned from a New Jersey driver’s license. No known local address.
A goateed EMS tech stuck his head into the cubicle. “She awake yet, Doc?”
I shook my head.
“All right, do me a favor, will you? When she comes to and asks about her golf clubs, tell her they was gone when we got there.”
“What?”
“Her clubs. We never saw them. I mean, she was on a golf course and sure as shit she’s gonna be saying we stole them. People are always accusing us of robbing them or something.”
“It says here she was naked when you found her.”
“Not completely. She had on, like, sneakers, a bra, and you know, pan ties, but that was it.” He winked and gave me a thumbs-up to let me know he’d liked what he’d seen.
“Where were her clothes?”
“Stuffed into some sort of gym bag beside her.” He pointed to a vinyl bag under the gurney. “There it is. Her clothes was in there. Gotta run. Just tell her about the clubs, okay?”
“It’s okay,” said a soft voice behind me. I turned and saw the victim looking our way. “I didn’t have any clubs.”
“Super,” the tech said. “You heard her.” And he was gone.
“How do you feel?” I said, approaching the gurney.
Kim McCormick gazed at me through cerulean irises, dreamy and half obscured by her heavy eyelids. Her smile revealed white, slightly crooked teeth.
“Wonderful.”
Clearly she was still not completely out of her post-strike daze.
“I hear this is the third time you’ve been struck. How in the—?”
She was shaking her head. “It’s the eighth.”
I grinned at the put-on. “Right.”
“S’true.”
My first thought was that she was either lying or crazy, but she didn’t seem to care if I believed her. And in those half-glazed eyes I saw a secret pain, a deep remorse, a hauntingly familiar loss. The same look I saw in my bathroom mirror every morning.
I held up her lightning detector. “If that’s true, you should find one of these that really works.”
“Oh, that works just fine.”
“Then why—?”
“It’s the only way I can be with my little boy.”
I tried to speak but couldn’t find a word to say. Stunned, I watched her roll over and go to sleep.
No way I could let her leave without learning what she’d meant by that, so I kept looking in on her during my shift, waiting for her to wake up. After suturing the twenty-centimeter gash a kid from the local supermarket had opened in his thigh when his box cutter slipped, I checked room six again and found it empty.
The desk told me she’d paid by credit card and taken off in a cab, lightning detector and all.
I spent the next week hunting her, starting with her Jersey address; I left messages on the answering machine there, but they were never returned. Finally, after badgering the various taxi companies in town, I tracked Kim McCormick to a Travelodge out on 98.
I sat in my car in the motel parking lot one afternoon, gathering courage to knock on her door, and wondering at this bizarre urge. I’m not the obsessive type, but I knew her words would haunt me until I’d learned what they meant.
It’s the only way I can be with my little boy.
Taking a deep breath, I made myself move. August heat and humidity gave me a wet slap as I stepped out and headed for her door. Nickel clouds hung low and a wind-driven Wal-Mart flyer wrapped itself around my leg like a horny mutt. I kicked it away.
She answered my knock almost immediately, but I could tell from her expression she didn’t know me. To tell the truth, with her hair dried and combed, and color in her cheeks, I barely recognized her. She wore dark blue shorts and a white LaCoste—sans bra, I noticed. I hadn’t appreciated before how attractive she was.
“Yes?”
“Ms. McCormick, I’m Dr. Glyer. We met at the emergency room after you were—”
“Oh, yes! I remember you now.” She gave me a crooked grin that I found utterly charming. “This a house call?”
“In a way.” I felt awkward standing on the threshold. “I was wondering about your foot.”
She stepped back into the room but didn’t ask me in. “Still hurts,” she said. I noticed the bandage on her left heel as she slipped her feet into a pair of backless shoes. “But I get around okay in clogs.”
I scanned the room. A laptop sat on the nightstand, screen-saver fish gliding across its screen. The bed was unmade, two Chinese food containers in the wastebasket, a Wendy’s bag next to the TV on the dresser. The Weather Channel was on, showing a map of Florida with a bright red rectangle superimposed on its midsection. The words SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING crawled along the bottom of the screen.
“Glad to hear it. Listen, I’d . . . I’d like to talk to you about what you said when you were in the ER.”
“Sorry?” she said, cocking her head toward me. “I didn’t catch that.”
I repeated.
“What did I say?” She said it absently as she hurried about the room, stuffing sundry items into her gym bag, one of which I recognized as her lightning detector.
“Something about being with your little boy.”
That got her. She stopped and looked at me. “I said that?”
I nodded. “ ‘It’s the only way I can be with my little boy,’ to be exact.”
She sighed. “I shouldn’t have said that. I was still off my head from the shock, I guess. Forget it.”
“I can’t. It’s haunted me.”
She stepped closer, staring into my eyes. “Why should that haunt you?”
“Long story. That’s why I was wondering if we might sit down somewhere and—”
“Maybe some other time. I’m just on my way out.”
“Where? Maybe we can go together and talk on the way.”
“You can’t go where I’m going.” She slipped past me and closed the door behind her. She flashed me a bright, excited smile as she turned away. “I’m off to see my little boy.”
I watched her get into a white Mercedes Benz with Jersey plates. As she pulled away, I hurried to my car and followed. Her haste, the approaching storm, the lightning detector . . . I had a bad feeling about this.
I didn’t bother hanging back—I doubted she knew what kind of car I was driving, or would be checking for anyone following her. She turned off 98 onto a two-lane blacktop that ran straight as the proverbial arrow toward the western horizon. A lot of Florida roads are like that. Why? Because they can be. The state is basically a giant sandbar, flat as a flounder’s belly, and barely above sea level. Roads here don’t have to wind around hills and valleys, so they’re laid out as the shortest distance between two points.
Ahead the sky was growing rapidly more threatening, the gray clouds darkening; lightning flashed in their ecchymotic bellies.
The light had dimmed to late-dusk level by the time she turned off the blacktop and bounced northward along a sandy road. She stopped her car about fifty yards from a small rise where a majestic Nelson pine towered over the surrounding scrub. She got out with her gym bag in hand and hurried toward the tree in a limping trot. Wind whipped her shorts around her bare legs, twisted her hair across her face. A bolt of lightning cracked the sky far to my left, and thunder rumbled past a few seconds later. I gaped in disbelief as she pulled off her shirt and shorts, stuffed them into the bag, and seated herself on the far side of the trunk.
“She’s crazy!” I said aloud as I gunned the engine.
I pulled past her car and stopped as close to the tree as the road would allow. Amid more lightning and thunder, I jumped out and dashed up the rise.
“Kim!” I shouted. “This is insane! Get away from there!”
She started at the sound of my voice, looked up, and threw her free arm across her breasts. Her other hand gripped the lightning detector, its red warning light blinking madly.
??
?Leave me alone! I know what I’m doing!”
“You’ll be killed!” I picked up her gym bag and held it out to her. “Please! Get back in your car!”
Her face contorted with fury as she slapped the bag from my hand, then covered her breasts again. “Get out of here! You don’t understand and you’ll ruin everything!” Her voice rose to a scream. “Go away!”
I backed off, unsure of what to do. I debated grabbing her and wrestling her to safety, but did I have the right? As crazy as this seemed, Kim McCormick was a grown woman, and very determined to be here. A daylight-bright flash, followed instantaneously by a deafening crash of thunder and a torrent of cold rain decided it. I ducked back toward my car.
“Keep your windows closed!” I heard Kim shout behind me. “And don’t touch any metal!”
Drenched, I huddled on the front seat and did just that. The storm roared in with maniacal fury, lashing the car with gale-force winds and rain so heavy I felt as if I’d parked under a waterfall. I couldn’t see Kim—couldn’t even see the big Nelson pine. I hated the thought of her getting soaked and risking electrocution out there in the lightning-strobed darkness, but what could I do?
Mostly I resented feeling helpless. I fought the urge to throw the car into gear and leave Kim McCormick to her fate. I had to stay . . . needed to stay. I felt tenuously bound to this peculiar woman, by something unseen, un-spoken.
The lightning and thunder finally abated as the storm chugged off to the east. When the rain had eased to a steady downpour, I lowered the window and squinted at the pine, afraid of what I’d see.
Kim was still huddled against the trunk, looking miserable: hair a rattail tangle, knees drawn up, head down, but seemingly none the worse for the terrible risk she’d taken.
I stepped out and tried not to stare at her glistening, pale skin as I approached. She glanced up at me. The bright excitement of an hour ago had fled her eyes, leaving a hollow look. I reached into her bag and pulled out her shirt. I held it out to her.
“Now can we talk?”
Kim pointed to a pink scar that puckered her right palm. “This is from the first time I was hit.”