The big Italian was standing in the stern, laughing, holding on to a struggling Liz with both hands, evidently to keep her from throwing out a line. And Hook realized that it was not his murder they were trying to effect but only his humiliation, and with that realization the faint light in his head began to burn brighter and he knew that he would be able to go on swimming for hours, even with arms and legs of stone. And he swam, he treaded water, he watched the yacht moving closer and closer until Parnelli, still holding on to Liz, finally picked up the raft and tossed it out to him. Hook managed to pull himself up onto it and then took hold of the line connecting it to the boat and laboriously pulled himself in to the ladder. A happy, laughing Parnelli reached a hand out to help him up but Hook ignored him and somehow made it to the top on his own and rolled over the gunwale and collapsed on the deck. He could not stand. He could not speak.

Parnelli kept asking him what was wrong. “Shark got your tongue?” he piped. “Shark got your tongue? Jesus, Hook, you’ll never make a frogman this way. You just never will.”

From the cockpit Douglas leaned out and said he hoped Hook was not mad. “Bo’s just got this kinky sense of humor. And we’ve got to indulge him every now and then. Keeps him happy.”

Still Hook could not speak. He was gasping for breath; his heart battered at his chest; his arms and legs shook like freshly killed meat.

Shaking his head and laughing still, Parnelli climbed up into the cockpit with Douglas and the boat got underway. Liz came over to him, knelt beside him.

“You all right?” she shouted above the roar.

He nodded weakly and she took him by the arm and helped him across the pitching deck down into the cabin and into a bunk. She got some dry pants and a sweatshirt and socks for him—Douglas’s, he assumed—but she did not say another word, nor would she look directly at him. As she was about to leave, he reached out and took hold of her arm and only then did she meet his eyes. Her own had filled with tears.

“Thank you,” he got out. “Thank you, Liz.”

She started to say something, but gave it up. Pulling away from him, she went on into the bow cabin and closed the hatch behind her. As Hook slowly struggled into the dry clothes, he thought he heard her crying once, but he could not be sure over the sound of the engine.

That evening Hook sat awake in the dark of his room watching television with the sound turned off. On the Formica-topped dresser next to him the fifth of Red Label scotch he had had delivered that afternoon stood only a third full, yet he still felt sober, clear and cold and deadly sober under the surface numbness of his body, the lethargy the alcohol had bought him. But he had felt numb even before he had begun drinking, when he had first come back from the yacht harbor in the early afternoon, and it was the numbness of shock, he knew, the walking sleep of those who had passed through the shadowed valley and for whom the shadow somehow grew colder and darker the further they moved on from it. And then anger had set in, a black bull of rage that had battered at him throughout the afternoon—rage that he had almost been killed as a prank, rage that he was all but helpless to do anything about it, and finally rage that he could not understand what had happened, could not even begin to comprehend the psychology of it all, why they had done what they had done.