He swam into the recess, his legs scissoring behind him, taking pains not to scrape his air tanks on the ceiling. Given his imminent plans to kiss his urchin-hunting career good-bye, he found his excitement over the score puzzling, and maybe even a little bit funny. Me in a nutshell, he thought. Never a natural at anything, but bent on giving the job his dogged best to the end. It was the old blue-collar ethic Ricci guessed he'd inherited from his steelworker father, and often wished he could wring from himself once and for all, having learned the hard way that a job well done could just as soon bring on problems as any sort of credit or reward--and worse, that you occasionally wound up getting screwed for your diligence.

Ricci went at his newfound bounty, the tote in his left hand, the knife in his right. The urchins crawling slowly over the backs of those on the rocks were easy pickings, and so plentiful that it took him just a few minutes to fill the mesh bag to a third of its capacity. Pleased with his rapid progress, he got down to collecting the others, sliding the flattened tip of the knife under the suction discs at the tips of their tubular feet, then carefully working them loose from the surfaces to which they were anchored. A slower task than the first, it needed to be performed with some delicacy if he was to avoid cracking their shells--which would be an unfortunate waste, since they were worth zilch to him unless brought up alive.

Ricci had been absorbed in his task for about twenty minutes when his thoughts wandered back to the twinkle of brightness he'd noticed from the skiff. Might have been from something left behind by an ecologically challenged sailor, or a bit of shiny flotsam tossed up onto the island by the surf. Might have. But he couldn't shake the idea that it also could have been the sun glancing off the lens of a pair of binoculars--or a telescopic gun-sight. Maybe his long years of soldiering and police work had lent undue weight to what ought to have seemed an overly imaginative notion, but why discount it offhand?