She laughed. “Remember who you’re talking to,” she told him in a teasing voice. “I should be telling you that.”

  “I may not have been born in the water,” he stated, “but I can tell you that I’ve spent more than my fair share in dive hours. I still love it, but I’ve never become complacent about the danger.”

  “Good,” she agreed. “You never should be complacent. There’s way too much to live for, and a stupid accident is no reason to lose it.”

  “All accidents are stupid,” he noted, preparing to slip overboard.

  Just before he did, she declared, “All accidents are stupid, but some are stupider than others.”

  On that note, he laughed and fell backward into the water. Once under the boat, he saw her swimming toward him. He waited for her to catch up to him. Then the two of them headed down to the same spot where he and Gavin had found her brother.

  It seemed odd to come back again today, but he’d meant it when he said that he’d always come back here to dive because it was a beautiful location. Plus, if one had to die somewhere, this was not a bad part of the world to be in. There was joy in seeing the underwater world.

  Something was so fun and fascinating about all the various fish that swam by, completely oblivious to all the problems of humanity. The fish were just doing their thing, trying to find their next meal, while remaining safely in a group in order to best stay out of the mouths of nearby predators.

  At the same time, an awful lot could be said for a beautiful clear day topside. Down here, things got murky very quickly, but knowing the sun was up above, waiting for them when they finally broke through after the dive, made him smile. They had brought a big lunch with them, so they could stay out and could do multiple dives, if need be. He really appreciated somebody like Robin, who was fully versed in taking precautions and planning for all potential events.

  The only thing that would have made him a little happier was if they could have had somebody they knew and trusted to stay in the boat above. That had always been his one fear in the diving world—that he would break through the surface looking for his boat, only to find it long gone. No need to suspect that would happen here, and, even if it did, he knew they could quite possibly make their way back to shore, even though it was a distance away. But that was the shore they had come from. Other land was much closer.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, and he looked over to see her pointing at the ship up ahead. He smiled, then nodded, giving her a thumbs-up, as she started off ahead of him into the bowels of the ship. He followed right behind. Her long form gracefully cut through the water ahead of him. It was obvious that she’d spent a lot of time in the water. She was totally comfortable with it and with the gear. Never hesitating, she did her safety checks before each dive and then ran through them again, almost like rote. It made him smile to think of somebody else who loved the sport as much as he did.

  There was a lot to be said about somebody with the same kind of hobbies. He toyed with the idea of seeing her because she was a beautiful woman and somebody he was already connecting with on a level that he hadn’t anticipated. His own family history was something he hadn’t expected ever to share with anybody, and yet it had seemed completely appropriate and timely to tell her about his brother. It wasn’t something he really ever expected to want to share.

  As they headed deeper and deeper into the ship, moving toward where he had found Jason’s body, Bronson realized just how much he and Robin had in common.

  Now, whether that was good or bad, he didn’t know, but he was fully prepared to explore the idea as much as he could, as long as she was on board.

  Chapter 8

  Robin led the way back down to the shipwreck site, where Jason had been murdered. As she passed through the first part of the broken and aged old hull, she turned to look behind her to ensure that Bronson was still with her. He was right there beside her. He gave her a thumbs-up, using the universal signal that everything was fine, and, with that, she headed down deeper into the bowels of the ship.

  She would never again look at this ship or any other the same way, not after losing her brother here. Regardless of his self-sabotaging tendencies, he had still been a good man and had a lot of life left to live. She had to believe that he hadn’t done anything stupid enough to get himself killed, but—if the truth came out, and he had—she would just deal with it.

  It was looking pretty slim that they would find any answers to this whole mess. A large part of her just wanted to walk away and to grieve over her loss and to commiserate with her uncle about how she could have done nothing to help Jason. He’d lived his life on the edge; he’d made a lot of enemies, and very few people would mourn his passing.

  That hurt, but it was also a fact of life that she just had to deal with. It was also a sign of where he had lived and how he had lived that the cops here didn’t seem to give a crap—proven by her recent visit to the police station.

  She had a little bit of time left here in Mexico to search through the wreckage of Jason’s life to see if she and Bronson could turn up further details for the cops. If she could find any information, she’d pass it over to them. However, even if any evidence were found, she wasn’t sure that Jason’s killer would be brought to justice. … And that was something she knew she would have a hard time reconciling.

  Her uncle and the others had made it very clear that Robin could have done nothing more to help her brother. And so, if the local law enforcement decided to shelve Jason’s murder case, then she would just have to accept that sometimes justice sucked and that sometimes there just wasn’t any to be had. She got that; she really did, but she had to do everything she could first. Which is why she was here once again, taking a look at the area where Jason had died.

  She didn’t know what could possibly even be here. However, if Jason had made some sort of find here, maybe it had contributed to his death. Yet, even if he had seen something down here, what possible difference could it make to anybody?

  Besides, thousands of tourists did dives in this area. And nobody would listen to anything her brother had to say. But then she thought about the two tourists who had been diving in the same area at the same time and how she had felt something was off about them, when they spoke to the one man at his hotel room. If nothing else she had to follow through with this much and see if there was anything to go on.

  The fact that Bronson was here with her helped a lot because it confirmed that she wasn’t crazy in thinking that this other motive idea was even a possibility. That he was just humoring her was also possible, but she wouldn’t look at that right now. He had stood by her side right from the beginning, and she appreciated it. She hadn’t expected such kindness from a stranger and, in fact, hadn’t even thought that anybody would do something like that.

  Her world had always been very independent, and, although she had her uncle, she’d never had very many others she could depend on. Yet even her uncle, always incredibly busy, wasn’t someone she could call on for help and expect it every time. Sure, he was always going to be there if she needed a job or financial support in the short run, but emotional support wasn’t really his thing.

  Even when her parents had died, Uncle Jerry had found it very hard to fill her needs, but then who could? She’d lost both parents in one fell swoop, and that wasn’t something that anybody else could handle for her either. She’d had to grieve solo. It had taken time, but she’d gotten there eventually. However, she’d also become a little distant with her brother afterward and found it very difficult to just let him go and be himself. And look what happened when she did, even though she’d tried so hard to reel him back in these last few months?

  She gave herself a mental shake, knowing full well that this wasn’t the time or the place to get sidetracked. It was important that she and Bronson stayed safe on a dive, so she needed to focus on the matter at hand.

  She was in her element, but, at the same time, the murkiness closed in around her, giving her more of a stifling feeling than she was used to. Ten out of ten times she’d have said that she absolutely loved diving, but something was unnerving about it today. Then the purpose of the dive was likely behind that. Nobody would ever trust her brother with their secrets because, when he had the booze in him, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  She turned once again to check that Bronson was there, and when he gave her a thumbs-up again, she kept on going. When she felt the brush of his hand on her ankle, she turned back toward him, Bronson pointing off to one side. She frowned and backtracked slightly, wondering what he wanted to show her. But then he pointed to another area, and she realized she’d gone down the wrong passageway. Damn. That wasn’t good.

  With a hard hand motion she let him take the lead. When he approached the room where he’d found her brother, she sank back ever-so-slightly and studied the area. They both had headlights on, which should have allowed them to see at least something, but it was pretty dark and dim here. They had to go close to all the wooden sides to see anything. That’s when she noted Bronson methodically going from one bit of wall panel to another. By the time he’d covered all the walls in this area, he didn’t seem happy, as he came back to her and shrugged.

  She got the message. Nothing was here. She couldn’t let go of the disappointment that she’d hoped that there had to be something to find, and yet she had no reason for it except instincts. Maybe it wasn’t even instincts but her fervent and slightly desperate wish to find an answer. They needed to cross the Ts and dot the Is. Even if there were no Ts and Is in this equation, she still wanted it done right. She needed it to be done right.

  She nodded to him, but he went by her, and, instead of going back the way they came, he headed down the pathway where she had earlier wandered into by mistake.

  She followed him, wondering what he was up to. And there he did exactly the same thing, checking every wall. Of course that made sense because, if her brother had been here, it wouldn’t have taken much for him to have been either forcibly shifted from one room to another or to have floated from one to the other. The tides were constant here, keeping the water gently shifting around them. Even as she looked now, the sandy bottom lifted and shifted with their flippers.

  With that, she went down closer and kicked around, trying to lift up the dirt from the floor. It only made the visibility worse.

  She moved over to another area and did the same thing but at a different angle. When her leg was grabbed, she glanced around at Bronson, motioning to something. She stopped immediately and slowly drifted toward the area he pointed at. He then brushed away some of the sand. She floated closer to him, and her headlight caught a glint of something shiny.

  As in shiny gold. Like a bar of it, which didn’t make any sense. Yet she was looking at what appeared to be a bar of gold. How the hell would that have gotten here? She stared at Bronson, wide-eyed, and he quickly used his own flippers and brushed away more and more of the sand. There was only the one bar of gold, as far as she could tell. There shouldn’t have been even one.

  He picked it up, hefted it, and nodded. She took that to mean it was real, not that she would know the difference, but she understood it to be very heavy. With the bar still in his hand, he quickly stuffed it into his backpack. They searched the rest of the area. Then he motioned at her to go up to the surface.

  With one final glance around to confirm nothing else was here that she was supposed to see, she followed him back up. As they broke through the crest, she twisted, looking for the boat, and then turned to him at a decent clip. She removed the snorkel from her mouth. “Oh my God. Where’s the boat?

  He stared at her grimly and then pointed in the distance.

  There was the boat all right, but it was heading away from them. “Shit.” Robin stared at it, shaking her head. “Well, that’s not exactly the way I wanted my day to start.”

  “Yeah, and you’re not carrying a brick of gold in your pack either,” Bronson noted.

  She looked at him in horror. “Put it down then,” she said immediately. “We’ll come back for it.”

  “Nope. I’m pretty sure that’s what your brother did.”

  She stared at him, as the truth sank in. “Dear God. … Where would he have found it?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe it was planted, or this site was used as a drop zone, or some other boat went down here. Whatever happened, that’s where somebody found it, hid it here, and used the location of this shipwreck as a way to find it later.”

  “That makes sense,” she replied, slowly treading water, as she searched for options to help with their two predicaments now. “A drug-running boat went down over here. As the story goes, they got into a fight with another one, and everybody ended up dying—at least we thought everybody ended up dying,” she corrected herself. “I only really heard about it from my brother.”

  “Is that the reason he always came over here to dive?”

  “I don’t know.” Robin frowned and turned toward Bronson. “Yet it wouldn’t surprise me if it was.” Nodding, she continued. “Jason’s definitely the kind of guy who would have been looking for that score. Always said he’d score big.”

  “Maybe he found it,” Bronson suggested. “And, if that bar is here, chances are there are more from wherever this one came from.”

  “Maybe, but why didn’t he take it with him?” She eyed the shoreline and sighed; it would be a long swim.

  “Probably for the same reason you talked about earlier. He usually dived with somebody, and, unless you trust someone, you don’t want to be packing that kind of booty around. Once Jason found it, he would likely make arrangements to come back with someone he trusted. Probably you.”

  She winced at that. “He did say that he needed to tell me something and that I needed to get ready for the dive of my life. Then he immediately backtracked, adding something about not wanting to get me involved in his sordid life and dropped it.”

  “That would make sense,” Bronson noted.

  She stared off into the horizon. “You got any brilliant ideas right now to get us back to shore?” she asked bitterly. “This is not how I wanted my dive to end.”

  He looked around, searching for the closest spot. “The nearest land is still about two miles away. I’ve certainly done that ocean swim before. How about you?”

  “I’m game,” she said; then she gave a broken laugh. “It’s not as if we have much choice anyway.”

  He grinned at her. “That is a great way to look at it. Let’s get to shore, and then we’ll deal with the next problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t know yet, but there’ll probably be one.” And, with that note of humor, he started swimming toward shore. She watched as he put back on his mask and snorkel, kept his head down, using his flippers as much as he could, and kept up a slow and steady pace.

  “There’s a lot to be said about a guy who can handle real life-and-death emergencies like this,” she muttered to herself. Although she knew she would be tired long before they reached land, if they did keep to a nice steady pace, then they’d be okay. She was pleasantly surprised when he pointed to some rock outcroppings closer than the actual land mass itself.

  He pulled up alongside one and asked, “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay,” she replied. “Good thing we’re both in good shape.”

  He nodded. “You realize that others will come back looking for you?”

  “Are they though?” she asked bitterly. “I mean, aren’t they expecting not to find us?

  “They’re expecting to find you underwater.”

  That thought was unpleasant, so she refused to consider it.

  The distance that had looked doable when they started out now looked not so doable by the time she made it just over the halfway mark. She stopped and just floated in the water for a few minutes.

  He stopped at her side. “You okay?” he murmured, his voice concerned.

  She nodded. “I am. It’s just … the shore looks farther away than ever.”

  “We’re gaining on it,” he stated, with assurance. “It would be nice if the waves would change direction though.”

  She winced at that. “Does wishing like that ever really help you?”

  “Often, yes,” he declared, with a bright smile. “In this case, it’ll make a difference between an easy finish and a hard finish,” he murmured. He nudged her toward shore. “Come on. Just keep floating, and use your flippers as much as you can. You just need to keep going.”

  “I know.” She sighed. “I’m doing okay.”

  “You are. You’re doing just fine,” he stated. “Let’s keep it moving. We don’t want the current to drag us back out, or we’ll lose any gains that we’ve made.”

  She winced at that and struck out again. He slowed his pace, which she appreciated, but, at the same time, if one person were to break out and go get help, it would likely be him, and Bronson could help her more than she could help him. She stopped even looking toward the shore. It seemed to be something well past the point of even doable at this stage. The hours stretched out longer and longer, her arms straining at the shoulders. Her thighs burned, and her lungs? … God, they were screaming at her to stop.

  She refused to even think about it though because that would mean that her brother’s killer would win, and that was something she wasn’t at all happy about. Then she remembered the gold in Bronson’s backpack.

  She swore at that. If Bronson could do the swim with that damn bar still in his backpack, she could do it without that extra weight. She was a hell of a lot lighter than he was too. And, whether he had the strength that she suspected he had, she didn’t know, and she didn’t care because this wasn’t a contest. This was about endurance. They kept on at the same pace for another twenty-odd minutes, and then he stopped suddenly and turned to look around.

  “We got company.” Bronson pointed behind her. She turned and saw another boat, racing in the general direction of them. However, it was doubtful that they even knew they were here. She looked at it in excitement and started waving her hands.