“Try harder. I don’t want to be selling retail. And I won’t be waitin’ two years if you get hooked again.”
“Why not sell? Get a job at the Gap, or whatever. You’re good at it. They like your looks. Get a few bucks, get me back on my feet.”
“You could get on your feet if you’d get off your fuckin’ back. How many dive shops you hit today? One? None?”
“Two. They didn’t need anybody.”
They continued toargue, but now Cattaneo checked them out. The dude was wearing a faded yellow T-shirt that showed a grinning skull wearing a dive mask and a snorkel. He swallowed some sandwich, leaned out of the booth and said, “I couldn’t help hearing what you said. You’re a diver?”
The blond dude looked him over, then said, “Maybe,” which Cattaneo could have predicted he’d say. “What’s it to you?”
Cattaneo shrugged. “I heard a bunch of divers were down here trying to find that Coast Guard treasure. Thought maybe you were one of them.”
The blond seemed to focus. “Coast Guard treasure? What Coast Guard treasure?”
“The Coast Guard has a fifty-thousand-dollar reward...”
“Oh,” the woman said to the blond, “that dope thing.”
“Yeah, we know all about that,” the blond said to Cattaneo. “You’d have to be a major dumbass to think that shit’s still out there. That’s long gone.”
Cattaneo’s eyebrows went up. “Yeah? How’d that happen? The Coast Guard’s all over it.”
The blond tapped the tabletop with his knuckles. “I read about it. The Mexicans dumped that shit off a freighter into a hundred and fifty feet of water. They knew exactly where it was.”
“But the Coast Guard...”
“The Coasties got no idea, except maybe a general area. That’s what the newspaper said. So what’d the dopers do? Easy. They drove by in some boat maybe a mile farther out from where the Coast Guard is watching, in the middle of the night. They put a diver over the side with a good DPV, maybe... a Yamaha or something like it, and a lift bag. He rode the DPV over to where the dope is, towed it back to the pickup spot, hung out twenty feet down until the boat came back, surfaced, and there you are. I don’t know how much was down there, but the paper said millions. It’s gone now, man. Long gone.”
“What’s a DPV?”
“Diver propulsion vehicle? Like a torpedo that you hold on to and steer?”
The chick said to the dude, “Whyn’t you get a ride on a boat, go look for it? If there are boats out looking for it, they’d take an extra diver if it don’t cost them anything. What’d they have to do, give you free air? We could use fifty K.”
“’Cause it’s not there,” the dude said. “That’s why. Because if you cut up fifty K ten ways, it’s five K for risking your neck, because that shit’ll be down deep. Then the IRS wants its taxes. And maybe the Mexicans would make an example out of you; I don’t need that kinda trouble.”
“I think it was Colombians,” Cattaneo said.
The dude shrugged. “Same thing.”
“If you say so,” Cattaneo said. “I don’t know anything about diving. You a pro?”
The dude shrugged again. “Yeah. I worked out in California for a few years. Cold water out there. Hot women, though. Thought I might find a spot down here.”
“He had to leave because he was screwing his Hollywood clients,” the woman said. “And I don’t mean out of money. He finally screwed the wrong housewife.”
Another shrug. Shrugging was apparently his lifestyle, Cattaneo decided, a guy who tended not to be concerned. The dude said, “It was sorta worth it.”
“Unless you need to go back to LA someday and you can’t,” the woman said.
Cattaneo smiled, showing yellowed fang teeth. “You piss off somebody?”
“A cop,” the blond said, head bobbing as he remembered. “He had like this primo old lady. Like a starlet.”
“A starlet whose time had expired. And not just a cop,” the woman said. “The head of LA vice.”
Cattaneo: “Whoops.”
