CHAPTER 34

“This island is becoming too small.”

Kerry turns and smiles at me as we walk down the beach toward the Kupulupulu Beach Resort lagoon, snorkel gear on our heads. “Kevin, I never told you we were exclusive.”

I shake my head. “It’s not that. Well, it is that, but only because of who you’re seeing.”

“Oh, so I can see other people, but not Luke?”

“You don’t understand,” I tell her. “The guy’s everywhere. In the papers, on the news. In the ear of once-friendly prosecutors. He’s turned his entire office against me.”

“Aren’t you adversaries?”

“Of course. But it was different here, my relationship with the prosecutor’s office. It wasn’t nearly as contentious as it was in New York. And it was a nice change of pace.”

Our feet touch the water and Kerry wiggles her toes, splashing up a bit of ocean and sand. “Forget about him today. It’s Sunday. Forget about the case.”

“I can’t forget about him. Even on weekends I have to see him.”

“I told you I’m sorry I let him take me to Chip’s. That was wrong; I know Ko Olina is where you live, where you hang out all the time. It’s just that I love it here. But I promise, it won’t happen again.”

“I didn’t just see him with you on Friday night,” I say, stepping deeper into the water. I’m not wearing fins but I lower my snorkel mask. “I saw him yesterday, too, when I was hanging out with my friend Josh.”

“The kid?”

“Yeah, the kid. We went snorkeling at Shark’s Cove, then we stopped by Ke Iki Beach, which was deserted—except for, guess who? Luke Maddox.”

“Ke Iki Beach,” she says, lowering her snorkel mask, too. “Yeah, Luke told me he goes surfing there sometimes. He used to date a woman who lived over there.”

“Well, I guess he sure gets around the island, doesn’t he?”

Before she can respond to my juvenile—not to mention utterly hypocritical—remark, I’m underwater, kicking my legs toward the center of the warm lagoon. Visibility’s good. Fish glide right by me as though we were all simply passengers heading for the Fulton Street subway station. No noise below the surface save for my breaths, amplified by the mask so that I sound like Darth Vader. As my breathing regulates a familiar calm washes over me.

For some reason I never feel freer than when I’m in the Pacific, when my entire body is underwater, weightless and untethered to anything tangible or intangible back on land. It’s almost as though when I’m out in the ocean, Kevin Corvelli ceases to exist. Step into the blue and, like magic, he’s gone. And with him go all of his worries, his appointments and calendar calls, his dissatisfied business partners and pissed-off members of the opposite sex. The whole lot of them. Gone.

In the ocean I’m not Kevin Corvelli. Nor am I anyone else.

Just a thought. A force.

In the deepest part of the lagoon, where the Pacific dumps its excess every few seconds, I remove the mouthpiece from my snorkel gear and set it on a rock. Then I hold my breath and dive back under, my eyes wide behind my prescription mask. Below me are more rocks. I stretch my body toward them, reaching with my arm, fighting the current coming in from the ocean.

Almost there. Just a touch and then up for air.

Jammed between the rocks is something black and small like a hairbrush or a pair of sunglasses. With my right arm I reach for it, touch it, lift it gingerly with my hand, examining it like a child on his first visit to the bottom of a pool. Light hits it just right and its silver side glimmers, nearly blinding me. I shut my eyes tight, then open them again. I open and close the object I have in my hand, study it against the backdrop of the rocks.

Then out of the rocks strikes an arm, reaching for my own. I drop the object but still the arm grabs hold. Not an arm, I see now, as panic floods within me. An eel. An ugly fucking moray eel, and it is sinking its teeth into my flesh, drawing blood, coloring the lagoon a gruesome red.

I straighten my body, place my feet against the rocks, and push up with all my strength, struggling to free my arm from the eel’s grip as I launch myself toward the surface. But the eel simply grips me tighter, sinks its tiny pointed teeth deeper into my punctured flesh.

When my head hits air, I fight for breath, kicking my legs so that I don’t get swept back under. I raise my right arm, eel and all, above the surface. Here, exposed to the air, the eel can’t breathe, so it lets go, falls back into the water like a stone.

I remove my snorkel mask and throw it somewhere, unconcerned right now about whether I’ll ever find it again.

The skin on my forearm is torn, but I’ll live.

The eel dove back to its home in the rocks.

But I now have another dilemma.

Kevin Corvelli is no longer underwater, so again he exists, court cases and all.

There is a murder weapon at the bottom of this lagoon. And, like it or not, whether the weapon surfaces is now exclusively my call.