Rae said, “Oh. Okay.”
Virgil thought about that, looked at Rae, who nodded, and he said, “If we’re going shopping, I gotta get my certifications.”
“We can wait.”
Virgil went back to the bedroom and returned with a cloth satchel, pawed through it, and came out with a drop-down plastic card file meant for the credit card–addicted, and dangled it up for Regio and Lange. “There you go. Twelve certs.”
“Let’s rock,” Regio said.
Out the door,the three of them; Rae stayed behind. Regio was driving a Lexus SUV, Virgil got in the back and Regio said, “Safety belt.”
On the way west to Scuba City, Lange asked, “How was Fort Dodge?”
“Oh, you know. Not bad,” Virgil said. “A little primitive, therewere like three guys in a cell. Nobody hassled you too much; mostly just chickenshit. Food was okay. Didn’t have to blow anyone, it wasn’t that kind of place. I mean, it was Iowa.”
“I can deal with chickenshit,” Regio said. “I’ll tell you what, though. You want to stay away from New York. I got a friend...”
They talked prisons for a while, and both Lange and Regio seemed conversant with prison conditions in the Northeast, including one called the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Delaware, which Virgil thought was a funny name. He goofed on it for a while, in a mildly stoned way, until Regio told him to shut up. “There ain’t nothing funny about Jimmy Vaughn.”
Virgil, in the backseat, leaned forward and said to Regio, who was driving, “I couldn’t help noticing that your fine ride here has inferior wheels. I got four Porsche wheels and the tires are right next to new. N-Specs. They’d really cheer up this, uh, you know, Toyota...”
Made Lange laugh. “Toyota.”
Regio: “Fuck you. Lexus. Best car I ever owned.”
Virgil, stoner: “You own this car?”
“Of course I own it. What’d you think?”
“I thought maybe it was your wife’s.”
Made Lange laugh again.
Scuba City hadeverything they needed except the diver propulsion vehicle—DPV—and there was a decent tech shop in back. Virgil produced his certification cards and chatted with the salesclerk about their requirements. Regio listened in, while Lange strolledaround the place looking at the gear. In the car, Virgil had asked what the budget was, and Lange had said, “There isn’t one. Get what you need.”
“That DPV gonna cost six or seven grand...”
“Get what you need.”
“Like Christmas...”
“Don’t need to buy the lift bags. We got those, big ones, custom, cost a goddamn fortune,” Lange said. “And we’ve got a top-of-the-line GPS watch. Don’t need to buy one of those, either.”
Since price wasnot a problem, Virgil bought a Halcyon backplate and wing, on which the store’s shop would mount twin steel scuba tanks nominally holding a hundred cubic feet of air each, depending on pressure.
When the salesclerk had gone to look something up, Lange said, “Our first diver had something different. Like a life vest, sorta...”
“She was diving single tanks, right?”
“Yeah. We could get her right on top of the drop.”
“So she had a standard BC—buoyancy compensator. I need more air because we’re a lot further out. Easier to mount twin tanks on a backplate. The wing is the equivalent of her BC.”
“Okay.”
Virgil asked theclerk about tank pressure, and she said, “We do standard fills at three thousand psi.”
Virgil said, “I’m going deep and cold. These are new tanks and perfect. You think your guy could bump that to thirty-three hundred?”
