That’s how long you had between clinical death and biological death. CPR. Defibrillation. You could restart the heart, if you got there in time.

Four minutes. About the length of an average pop song.

That’s how long Archie had to save her.

Chapter 59

CHAPTER

59

He’d heard her voice.

No one else in the boat had. But Archie was certain that he’d heard Susan calling his name.

“Quiet,” he said.

The soldier piloting the Zodiac shut off the outboard motor, and Archie called back to her. But there was nothing. Only the choppers. The endless staccato of the rain. The crescendo of the current.

Archie searched the blackness and tried to pinpoint the location.

“That way,” he yelled, and the outboard kicked once again to life and headed twenty feet up and west until Archie said, “Here.”

One of the soldiers was on his radio calling in a dive team and directing a helicopter to their position. Someone threw a life preserver into the water. It made a dead splash. Someone else swung the boat’s spotlight around, scanning the surface of the water. But they didn’t have time for all that.

Archie jumped off the boat and went under.

It wasn’t the first time he’d plunged into this kind of darkness.

In Gretchen’s basement, when she’d cut into him, the blackness had been an enveloping comfort; and later, after she’d let him go, all those nights when he’d fallen asleep with seven Vicodin in his system, he had longed to let his mind go again to the abyss.

The floodwater was that place, given physical form and weight.

He reached clumsily, feeling around underwater, fingers splayed. His ears pounded and ached from the cold. He dove deeper.

A martyr with a white knight complex, Anne had said.

Except that the people he tried to save died.

Even underwater he could hear the roar of the river. The current twisted around him, nearly turning him over. His inner ears ached from the cold water. He opened his eyes under there and saw only blackness. He propelled himself deeper, struggling against the current. He could feel it moving him. His lungs pulsed with pain.

He dug through the water, stretching his arms and legs, hoping to make contact with her.

But he needed air.

He swam up, breaking the water with a sputtering cough.

He looked around. The boat was a hundred feet away. The current had washed him downriver fifty yards in just a few minutes.

And then, all at once—light.

He was bathed in it. He had to squint against it for a moment before he could see. The light was filled with a trillion tiny glittering raindrops. The beam encircled him and went straight up into the sky.

He was in the spotlight of a Coast Guard helicopter.