The Don Saved Me From the Ice, Then Buried Me in the Sea novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Dive

The video had no sound until the end.

Ettore hung in the cage with both hands on the bars, and a thin silver line of bubbles rose from his regulator.

It was the same slow leak that had been in my tank.

Then Dario's voice came in over the picture, bright and easy.

"Good morning, Viola. The vote is at noon."

"Come to the Christ by ten, alone, with the recording and the chair's seal. Or watch your Don use the last of his air."

The picture went black.

I stood on the beach with the phone in my fist and water running out of my hair.

I counted.

A diver's tank leaking like that lasts forty minutes, and he had been down for most of one.

I ran.

The phone in the plastic bag had a number saved in it, and I called the only one I trusted to answer.

"Agnese."

"Where are you?"

"Dario has Ettore in the cage at the Christ. His tank is rigged. I am going down for him."

"It is a trap."

"I know it is a trap."

"Bring the twelve to the bay," I said. "All of them, and the priest. Tell them the Don is dying under the water, and Dario is on the surface watching."

She was silent for one breath.

"We will come," she said.

An old fisherman waited at the end of the village quay with a boat that smelled of tar.

He had a white beard and a face the sun had cooked, and he did not ask my name.

"I took the Don out of the water two years ago, on the other side of that bay," he said. "Get in."

"I am nine weeks," I told him. "Ten, now. I am going to seventeen meters."

"Then do it quickly."

He had two tanks stacked in the bow, and I checked them myself.

I checked the first-stage valve three times, with my thumb and my eyes and my ear, and I took the air from the better one.

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