Down and darker, and I remember the cooling of the water the deeper we went. I could feel the chill through my three-millimeter wet suit. I could feel the pressure of the heavy water weighing on us, and I watch myself on the video as I continuously lift my left hand to my nose, clearing my ears, the sound of my breathing artificial and loud. The shape is vague when it first comes into frame, and then it becomes the wrecked barge, a twisted, broken, rusting carcass.

My attention is fixed on it in the surrounding darkness, getting closer and closer, and the images bring back sensations, the flutter of unsettledness when I didn’t see any sign of the two police divers who had gone down minutes before us. I’m looking for them. I’m scanning the surroundings for them as I puzzle over where they are. Now Benton and I are almost a hundred feet deep where the sunken German freighter called the Mercedes is nestled in the silt. We move away from the mooring line and turn on our small flashlights attached by lanyards to our wrists.

Fish swim by, magnified by the water, and Benton hovers inches above the ocean floor, horizontal, his buoyancy perfectly controlled. He shines his light over a fishing lure, the antenna of a spiny lobster hiding in the rocks, the old tires that are supposed to help build an artificial reef. A small shark leisurely snuffles past, skimming the silt and stirring it up, and I use gentle movements of my fins to propel myself to the barge. I sweep my light into gaping holes in the corroded metal.

Disturbed fish dart off, a barracuda big and silvery, and then I’m suspended above the deck, dropping lower into an opening, what used to be a hatch, and as I watch the recording I vividly remember not understanding what I was seeing at first. A man’s neoprene-covered back. The hoses hanging down. The absence of bubbles, and when I moved him I could see the spear embedded in his chest. Then below him my light finds the second body, two dead police divers inside the freighter’s hull. I bolt out of there with powerful kicks.

I dart to Benton and tap my knife against his tank. Clink, clink! I’m pointing my light up at the barge, and suddenly I’m looking around. I remember hearing a faint vibration, like a distant power tool, and I see my fins kicking up into the camera as I try to back up and twist away. She’s there. Pointing a spear gun at me. Pandemonium. The blast of my bubbles and the clank of something hitting my tank as the camera jerks crazily. A second spear, and the line attached to it leads tautly to the surface where it’s tethered to a float that moves with the strong current, tugging my impaled leg. Thrashing crazily. Thundering bubbles.