Prologue

 

 

It was a small boat and an old one. Matthew “Bear” Barrett sat on the middle seat, his six-foot-four frame, 270-pound bulk pressing the hull of the rowboat deep into the cool, blue-green water. It creaked when he shifted his weight, as if the little vessel had grown weary of supporting the big man on its wood back. But it continued to hold him, just as it had for the last twenty years. Bear had every confidence that it would once again return him to the shore as it always had and as it had for his father who built it. His father was dead and long gone now, yet his memory hovered around Bear in the house he called home. A hundred mementos were there, with stories at the ready anytime Bear found himself longing for the man who had brought him up in a stern but loving fashion.

It had been Bear’s father who had taught him to fish for bass and trout at the lakes and man-made reservoirs around Nevada and California. Honest to a fault, Bear was now involved in a bit of criminal activity. This, too, he had learned from his carpenter father. Bear had adopted his father’s sense of justice, and it was unjust for the “gov’ment” to snatch from the hands of its citizens what was rightfully theirs. Fishing was a right protected by the Constitution. Bear had once tried to convince his father that the Constitution nowhere mentioned fishing. The logic was faulty as far as his father was concerned.

“You expect me to believe that Jefferson didn’t dip a line and pull in his share o’ bluegill? Ol’ Georgie Washington wouldn’t have been much of a president if he didn’t bring home a mess o’ catfish from time to time.” Bear’s father had never lost his Arkansas way of talking or thinking.

An uneducated man, he drew his degrees from the school of life; from sweating in the Las Vegas sun, building one casino after another; driving one more of the million sixteen-penny nails of his life; erecting one more wall, laying one more header. Like Bear, his father’s shoulders had been wide, his back strong, and his heart good. But such qualities were useless in the face of skin cancer left undiagnosed for too long.

Bear shook his head and drove from his mind the last painful days of his father’s life. Death had quieted his father’s agony but had done nothing for Bear. He lived with the memory of it every day.

Unlike his father, Bear didn’t swing a hammer or wield a saw. Instead, he sold houses to the hundreds of people who moved to the Las Vegas area, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. It struck Bear as odd that people would choose the desolate terrain of the Mojave Desert to be home. He was ready to move any place that had more green on the ground and more cool in the air. But he was stuck in the desert with a wife who refused to move from her roots. So he lived in a two-thousand-square-foot house in Henderson, Nevada, with a wife who loved him and two teenage children who tolerated him.

All of Las Vegas and Henderson were well over three hundred miles south. Tonopah, the town where he would sleep tonight before returning home, was miles to the west. The roar of an F/A-2 Raptor sounded overhead, a reminder that Nellis Air Force Base was not far south of the lake in which Bear and his boat sat. Hearing and seeing jets was nothing new. He had been sneaking up to this lake for as long as he could remember. Nellis had over three million square miles of airspace they called their own. Seeing jets was just part of the entertainment.

Working his reel, Bear pulled his lure into the boat for what must have been the one hundredth time. No fish trailed from its treble hook. Bear didn’t much care. A day skunked while fishing was better than any day selling real estate to demanding young couples who wanted champagne on a beer budget.

He raised the tip of his rod, took aim at a promising patch of reeds, and let the lure fly. It plopped softly in the water. Bear began the ritual reeling, hoping to tempt some widemouth bass out of its hiding place. He laughed to himself. He was floating in the deep water and casting to the shallow. His father had always laughed at men who stood on shore and cast deep while men in a boat sat over the deep and cast back to shore. Now Bear was doing the same. Perhaps he would change tactics soon, leaving the bass alone and turning his sights on trout. He had Velveeta cheese to tempt the little buggers.

A soft string of popping caught his attention. The noise was familiar, yet impossible to place. He reeled the lure in and once again sent it flying. A second after it dropped in the water, Bear heard another plop. Then another.

He stopped reeling. It sounded close.

Plop, plop.

With a practiced eye he scanned the surface of the water. The rising sun bejeweled the surface, forcing Bear to squint. Were the fish feeding off the surface? That wasn’t unusual, but it was an odd time of day for it.

Plop, plop, plop, plop, plop.

“What the . . .” It was close all right. Bear looked over the edge of the rowboat and gazed at the bubbles that were surrounding its hull. At first it was just a few bubbles, but they were large, some the size of a grapefruit. No lake creature made bubbles that large. One bubble followed another, and soon they broke the surface in a frothy mass.

It took a moment for Bear to realize that something else was different about these bubbles. The froth they formed on the surface was brown, not white. Then he noticed the smell. The air began to reek of spoiled oranges. He pulled back, trying to gain a little distance between the foul air and his nose.

He grimaced, then sneezed. It was time to move and time to do it fast. Bear began to reel as fast as his big hands would allow. The air might stink to high heaven, but the lure on the end of his line had been his father’s favorite. He wasn’t going to risk losing it on the bottom of Lake Lloyd.

The lure rose from the depths and hit the surface, skipping along the water as Bear reeled for all he was worth. His eyes began to sting, and unbidden tears flowed. The lining of his nostrils seemed ready to combust, and his lungs were beginning to ache.

The instant the lure touched the rod’s tip, Bear set the gear down on the bottom of the boat, letting it rest against the craft’s front seat. He reached for the oars.

The bubbling was increasing, and spurts of foul water were becoming an airborne mist. Brown lake water was dropping inside the boat in tiny splatters. Bear had no idea what was going on, but he didn’t intend to stay around to figure it out.

He dipped the oars in the water and pulled. He repeated the action several times before he realized something else was wrong. He had used these oars on this boat more times than he could count, and they didn’t feel right. They weren’t sitting in the water the way they always did. His weight pushed the boat lower than most people found comfortable, but he had become accustomed to it. Now, however, the boat was riding deeper than he had ever seen and much more than when he had rowed out on the lake two hours earlier.

Again he dug the oars into water that boiled like a witch’s brew in an iron cauldron. They slipped through the surface as if it weren’t there, as if Bear were rowing in the air. He peered over the edge and saw that the brown froth was now a mottled mix of brown and black.

The smell was putrid. Bear gagged and fought down the rising gorge in his belly. A dead rainbow trout rose to the surface, its eyes curtained in cataract white. Another fish followed, this time a large catfish. He looked to the other side, and more fish percolated to the top. A couple twitched in death throes.

This time Bear rowed with an urgency fired by fear. His first desire was to move from the rancid air. Now he knew something was very, very wrong. What killed the fish might just kill him. He had no desire to spend his last moments alive floating in a private lake where his body might never be found.

He pulled hard. The boat moved a foot but no more. He pulled the rough handles of the oars again and again but made little headway. The sight over the stern of the boat sent ice water coursing through his veins. What had begun as a few bubbles, then a stream, had extended out from his location in a wide disk of putrid, boiling, churning froth.

Bear had never been a spiritual man and couldn’t recall ever having prayed. Until now. He yanked at the oars in a panic, replacing the rhythmic stroking he’d learned as a boy with terror-filled jerks. He coughed and tasted copper. His mouth was bleeding. Something trickled from his nose, but he was too busy rowing to wipe it away. He knew what it was. He’d had enough bloody noses in his youth to be certain.

Stroke. Pull. Yank.

He looked to the side and saw his worst fear—the water was just an inch below the gunwales. To dip the distal end of the oar in the water, Bear had to level them until they were almost horizontal. He was sinking. His heart was pounding without regularity. It skipped. It paused. It fluttered. The exertion demanded more air, but every breath made Bear more sick and weak.

He was sinking. The cascade of bubbles eroded the surface tension and water density. A boat could float in water but not on something as thin as soapsuds.

Bear pulled at the oars as the first trickle of water crawled over the edge of the boat and poured into its bottom, settling at his tennis-shoe-clad feet.

Reason floated away from Bear’s mind like the bubbles floated to the surface. He pulled on the oars a few more times but knew he was making no progress. When the water that was invading the boat grew from trickle to cascade, carrying several dead fish with it, Bear did a desperate thing. He jumped into the water and tried to swim through the stew.

The water that could not hold his boat could not hold him. Dead fish might cling to such a nebulous surface; a man of Bear’s bulk stood no chance. He flailed at the water, grasping for a shore that was still a hundred yards away—a shore that might as well have been a hundred miles distant.

He slipped beneath the surface but kicked his way back up for another breath. Something was wrong with his eyes; the shore he had seen clearly seconds before now seemed draped in milky white. He thought of the first dead fish with its white eyes.

Against his will, contrary to his desperate fear, water entered his nose and poured into his mouth. He retched and doubled over.

A roar filled his ears, and he squinted through hazy eyes to see another fighter jet shoot overhead. He waved at it. He reached for it. He knew that the pilot was too high and moving too fast to see him.

Matthew “Bear” Barrett slipped beneath the surface of the private lake he had loved.