Crouched low in a clump of juniper bushes perhaps five yards behind the jut of rock he'd noticed from the skiff, Ricci had just heard Cobbs and Dex working out a cover story to account for his "disappearance." Simple, but it didn't have to be anything more: Bumptious, know-it-all city boy Ricci had been diving for weeks without letting modest, conscientious local boy Dex properly check and maintain his scuba equipment, and since a tender couldn't do his job if the diver insisted on being foolhardy, Dex had given up trying to argue the point with him. Divers had gotten into bad fixes before through their own carelessness, and it would surely happen again in the future.

If Ricci's body didn't turn up, that would be that. And in the unlikely event it happened to float ashore before scavenging crabs, lobsters, and groundfish picked it apart, even an honest investigator would conclude Ricci had died from an out-of-air accident due to instrument failure, based upon a post mortem exam and the faulty reading on his psi gauge. Why suspect the gauge had been jiggered with by his partner when there was no evidence of a prior falling out between them; indeed, when any of the dealers with whom they regularly did business would attest they'd seemed to get along fine as a team? And besides, considering that Dex would be handing his pile of homespun horseshit to the sheriff or one of his deputies, and would have Cobbs signing off on it, he could probably chalk Ricci's fate up to a Big-foot attack, alien abduction, or head-on collision with the Flying Dutchman and get away with it, no sweat.

Ricci looked and listened from the concealment of the brush. In their own way they were good, he thought, the only monkey wrench in their scheme being that he was better and savvier. His mistake--and he acknowledged it was significant--had been underestimating how far Dex could be pushed. Ricci had known Dex had his weaknesses, and they'd never quite been friends, but had always gotten on all right as partners. Much as he disliked admitting it to himself, he'd started out being a cop with a deep-rooted core of positivism, and some rudiments of that attitude remained stubbornly lodged inside him despite having spent years exploring the darkest alleys of human nature. He'd been hesitant to think the worst of his partner, and had almost paid for it big-time.