Rae said, “Youarethose guys. The originals.”
Neither Regio nor Lange looked at her: they were focused on Virgil, who seemed to be thinking. Then Virgil asked, “When?”
“We were told you need some gear.”
“Yeah. Like all of it. I got nothing left. There’s a big scuba place out west of here. They’d have most of it,” Virgil said.
“You know about GPS?” Regio asked.
“Sure. Used it all the time on the boats.”
“Then, how about we go shopping? Now,” Lange said.
Virgil looked at Rae, who said, “He might be a little stoned.”
“We noticed.”
“Shit, I’m fine,” Virgil said. He looked at Regio and Lange. “I got to dig out my certification cards. That’ll take one minute. You need to tell me what I’ll be doing. How deep I’m going, and how far I’m going to have to motor.”
“We can do that right now,” Lange said. He held up the notebook he was carrying. “I made some sketches based on what we know.”
They sat at the apartment’s shaky kitchen table and Lange opened the notebook and said, “This is all based on our first diver. She’s not with us any longer—she went back home.”
“What was her problem?” Rae asked.
“Not relevant to you,” Regio said.
“Let us decide that,” Rae said.
Regio and Lange looked at her, then Lange tipped his head and said, “She was... worried about, mmm, the police. The Coast Guard. We thought we were good with her, but she took off and we can’t reach her now.”
“That’s it?” Rae asked. “She split?”
“That’s it, really,” Lange said. “She was good at what she was doing, and I guess she sorta freaked out.”
They sat and looked at each other for a moment, then Virgilasked, “Are you guys really good at this? What you’re doing? Or are you a bunch of fuck-ups?”
“We’re good,” Regio said. “We’re about the best. Our problem with Jaquell—she’s the diver—was a one-time thing. She opted out, and we’re good with that. But we need a diver. We’re hoping you’re it.”
Lange held up the notebook. “You want to see this, or not?”
Rae looked at Virgil and asked, “What do you think?”
Virgil bobbed his head. “Okay. Let’s take a look.”
Lange had drawna series of simple sketches on notebook paper. The containers holding the dope were a hundred and fifty feet down on a reef that paralleled the coastline north of Fort Lauderdale. He said they had GPS coordinates for each end of the drop string. Each container weighed about twenty-eight pounds and was a hair less than twenty inches long—fifty centimeters. They had custom lift and cargo bags, designed to take five or six containers at a time. Each lift bag could lift a maximum of two hundred pounds.
“You talked to Jack about using one of the DPV things from a mile out,” Lange said, tapping his sketch. “We won’t have to do a whole mile. A half mile would be good enough, because the containers, the cans, are right on the east edge of where the Coast Guard is searching. A half mile further out, they wouldn’t pay us any attention. Jack’s run up there a half dozen times in his sailboat, never got a look.”
Virgil said, “Let me getmynotebook.”
He went into the bedroom and came back with a spiralnotebook jammed with loose pages. He got out dive tables and sat at the table peering at them, yanking on an earlobe as he did it, twisting one of the fake diamonds. He borrowed Lange’s pencil and made a couple of calculations, then said, “We’d need a twin set—double tanks. Gonna need a good scooter. Gonna be expensive.”
“You can do it?”
“I can do it, if you can do your part. My part isn’t that hard; yours is the part that scares me.”
“We can do our part. We’ve been in the business for a long time,” Regio said. He looked between Rae and Virgil with a tight smile, and added, “Since our folks left the old country... like a hundred years ago.”
