The Red Reef Read online

The morning lasted an eternity. They bandaged Larkin’s wounded leg, gave him whiskey to help with the pain, and then stuffed him into a diving suit. He felt a moment of panic as the helmet was lowered over his head and screwed into place, but he was able to control it.

  Then had come the descent through the blue-green waters. This was the first time he had ever been under, and he thought that with other circumstances it might have been beautiful . . . a fairy tale world of coral castles and brightly colored fish fluttering past like pennants waving in the breeze.

  But there were other shapes sliding sleekly through the depths. Dark shapes that regarded the divers from a distance with cold, prehistoric eyes and rows of razor-sharp teeth.

  Larkin felt a pang of loss and regret as the sunken ship came into view on the bottom. For good reasons, there had been no salvage operations.

  Over the next few hours Larkin and the other diver, a man named Gresham, clumped through the ship in their heavy boots, being careful not to foul their air lines. Even a novice like Larkin knew that the thick rubberized hose meant life to him. Many times since the sinking of The Red Reef he had thought about dying, longed for death, even, but those feelings vanished at the bottom of thirty fathoms of water. Each breath became precious.

  Giselle had told him what to look for: a small metal chest, with a wooden box inside it. Larkin found it in the sixth and final cabin. He showed it to Gresham, who motioned for him to open it. The chest was locked, but Larkin managed to smash it open on the corner of a bulkhead.

  The wooden box inside was latched but not locked. Larkin unfastened it and raised the lid. Even at these depths, the blue-green light made the diamonds sparkle so that they took a man’s breath away.

  As he closed the lid and fastened it, from the corner of his eye through the helmet’s glass, he saw Gresham swiping a knife at his air line.

  Larkin moved without thinking and interposed the box between the blade and the line. The knife hit the wood and slid off, missing the hose. Larkin rammed the box at the face plate of Gresham’s helmet as hard as he could; a corner hit the glass and cracks radiated out from it. On the other side of the glass Gresham’s eyes had time to widen with horror before it shattered and the pressure of a hundred and eighty feet of water rushed in, pulping flesh and bone and filling the helmet with a grisly pink mixture.

  Larkin pushed Gresham’s body aside. These diving suits had no radios, so there was no way the man could have communicated with the people on the Gallister. They would have no idea what had just happened.

  He was sure, though, that Giselle Beauchene had given Gresham his orders. She hadn’t wanted Larkin left alive to tell anyone about the diamonds. She and MacGreevey probably planned to murder the other members of the crew as well . . . and then it would be time for them to turn on each other.

  But it wasn’t going to come to that. Not if Larkin had his way.

  Half an hour later he climbed out onto the deck of The Red Reef and gave three tugs on the life line, the signal for him to be hoisted. He had switched his line with Gresham’s, so they wouldn’t know the difference. He knew what Giselle would think: Gresham had carried out his orders and was on his way up with the diamonds.

  He rose slowly from the depths, watching the predatory shapes wheel around him. When he reached the surface he was hoisted aboard, all but helpless in the heavy, cumbersome diving suit. One of the crewmen unscrewed the helmet and lifted it from his shoulders.

  “Mon dieu!” exclaimed Giselle.

  Larkin smiled at her. “You didn’t expect to see me, did you?”

  She came at him, brandishing the gun. “Where are the diamonds?”

  “Get me out of this damned suit, and I’ll tell you,” said Larkin.

  “Tell me now,” she ordered as she pointed the gun at his head.

  “If you kill me, you’ll never find them. You see, I moved them after Gresham tried to kill me. I’m the only one who knows where they are.”

  She looked at him for a long, tense moment, then evidently decided he was telling the truth. “Get the suit off him,” she snapped.

  That operation took several minutes, but when it was over Larkin stood there in trousers and singlet with the bloodstained bandage wrapped around his leg. Giselle came close to him, close enough that he could see the greed and hatred glittering in her eyes.

  “The diamonds?”

  “They’re in the main cargo hold, on top of some crates we were taking to Walualonga.”

  “Why would you put them there?”

  “Because of what’s in those crates. You can still try to recover the diamonds if you want to, but I’d advise against it." Larkin raised his voice. “In fact, if I were the captain, I’d raise anchor and get out of here as fast as I could. The way I stacked those crates, they’re going to topple over any minute now.”

  Giselle licked her lips and swallowed. “What’s in them?”

  “Nitroglycerin,” said Larkin. “Bound for a construction company in Walualonga. Lord knows why the ship didn’t explode when it hit the bottom, but once it was down there no one wanted to mess with it again. You’d have known that . . . if you’d read the records from the inquiry.”

  “Nitro!” MacGreevey yelped from the bridge. “Good Lord! Get those anchors up! Move!”

  Giselle came at Larkin, a snarl making her beautiful face ugly. “You bastard!” she cried. “How could you?”

  She swung the automatic at his head in a frenzy.

  Larkin caught her wrist and looped his other arm around her waist. “Never offer hope to a man who has none,” he grated.

  Then he toppled over backward into the water, taking a screaming Giselle with him. The automatic exploded once, twice, as they went under, but the bullets did no harm. She struggled frantically; his grip was like iron.

  But she wouldn’t drown, if that was what she was afraid of. Oh, no. Because those ominous shapes were cutting through the water like knives, drawn by the blood from the bandage on Larkin’s leg. Neither of them would drown, nor would they know what happened to the diamonds, or if the Gallister made it safely away before the nitroglycerin detonated, or if Captain MacGreevey lived only to be murdered later in Singapore . . .

  Larkin felt the first hit, felt Giselle torn away from him by a force that could not be denied, and then all he saw was red, red like that reef at low tide, as the sun went down and the day was done.

  About the Author

  A lifelong Texan, James Reasoner has been a professional writer for more than thirty years. In that time, he has authored several hundred novels and short stories in numerous genres. Best known for his Westerns, historical novels, and war novels, he is also the author of three mystery/crime novels that have achieved cult classic status, TEXAS WIND, DUST DEVILS, and TRACTOR GIRL. Writing under his own name and various pseudonyms, his novels have garnered praise from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as appearing on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. He lives in a small town in Texas with his wife, award-winning fellow author Livia J. Washburn.

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  Sample

  TRACTOR GIRL:

  A TEXAS CRIME NOVEL

  BY

  JAMES REASONER

  Copyright © 2011 by James Reasoner

  1

  The car stopped in the middle of nowhere, and the guy with a gun in my side said, “Get out, you son of a bitch.”

  The day was hot, but I felt cold as I stepped out onto the side of the road. On the other side of the muddy bar ditch was a broad field, tall with corn, stretching off to a line of post oaks. The two-lane blacktop ran straight as a string as far as the eye could see in both directions, bordering the field I was facing and another one just like it on the other side of the road.

  The two men in the front seat got out, leaving their doors open. They didn’t expect to be here very long. The driver went and stood at the front of the car, the passenger at the rear. The driver said, “We’ll watch the road, Mr. Hawley. Better get it over with before some farmer comes along.”

  Hawley, the man who’d been in the back seat with me, moved closer to me. Even without seeing it, I knew the gun was pointed at the back of my head.

  “I won’t say I’m sorry about this,” Hawley said. “I always had a funny feeling about you, and it turned out I was right, didn’t it?”

  If you’re going to be dead in another two seconds anyway, what the hell, right?

  I twisted, ducked, threw myself backward and to the side. Hawley’s gun went off next to my ear as my shoulder rammed into his soft middle. I yelled because the shot was so loud and felt like a fist against my ear.

  Hawley fell back against the car. I brought a fist up into his groin. That doubled him over. His hat fell off. I got hold of his wrist to keep the gun away from me and used my shoulder to drive him into the car again.

  The man at the back of the car said, “Shit!” and fired his gun. The bullet hit the roof of the car and whined off into the hot afternoon. I slid my hand from Hawley’s wrist up over his hand and got my fingers wrapped around his gun. I was able to make him jerk the trigger while the barrel was pointing in the general direction of the driver. The gun blasted and the bullet came close enough that the guy yelped and took cover in front of the car.

  I figured the man at the back would shoot again, so I kept my left arm around Hawley’s body and hauled him around just in time. Another shot sounded, and I felt him jerk against me as the bullet went into him. It didn’t go all the way through his body.

  He dropped his gun and I made a grab for it, but before I could get my hand on it, the driver opened fire on me, too. I shied away from the bullets and tried to jump over the bar ditch. I thought if I could get into the corn, I might be able to get away from them.

  My foot hit the mud and slipped, and that slowed me down just long enough. Something slammed into my side and twisted me around. I made it out of the bar ditch anyway, but then a huge impact against the side of my head knocked me into the edge of the corn.

  I rolled over and came up on hands and knees as another bullet ripped through the plants close beside me. I drove forward with my feet and came up in a stumbling run.

  “Go after him!” I heard Hawley yell behind me.

  At least one man did. I heard him thrashing through the plants. That was probably a mistake on his part, because he was making so much noise he couldn’t hear the racket I was making. They would have been better off climbing on the trunk of the car, tracking my progress through the field by the way the plants were moving, and emptying the guns at me. Chances are, they would have gotten me that way.

  As it was, I made it to the trees, went through them with branches whipping at my face and briars in the undergrowth clawing at my pants legs, and came to another ditch.

  By that time I had lost enough blood that my strength was just about gone. I could feel its wet heat on my side, and something was running down past my ear, too. My head rang like all the church bells in creation and was spinning madly. I didn’t see the other ditch in time to keep from falling into it.

  My face went into the mud. I hauled it up so I wouldn’t suffocate and looked along the ditch. A short distance away was a concrete culvert where a road of some sort went over it. It offered a hiding place, so I started pulling myself toward it. I was too weak to get up, so I used elbows and toes to inch myself along.

  Somewhere back on the other side of the trees, a man yelled, “Do you see him?”

  “No, but he’s got to be here somewhere. We hit him at least twice. He’s not going very far.”

  Farther than you think, you son of a bitch, I told myself as I gritted my teeth and crawled toward the dark hole of that culvert.

  As I came closer, I realized that was just the sort of cool, shady spot where a snake might curl up on a hot day like this, but as far as I could see I didn’t have any other options.

  Those guys in the field were worse than any snake, anyway.

  I made it to the culvert and crawled inside, not finding anything except some little puddles of water left from the last rain. My shoulders are pretty broad and the pipe was almost too small, but I forced my way in. Cool, blessed darkness surrounded me. I kept crawling until I was sure my feet wouldn’t show. The men who were after me would have to come down into the ditch and bend over to look into the pipe in order to see me.

  Of course, if they did that I was dead. No two ways about it.

  My breath seemed so loud in the culvert’s narrow confines that I worried they would hear it. I struggled to bring it under control as I lay there.

  I heard them still calling to each other. That would have been a stupid thing for them to do if I’d had a gun – I could have targeted them that way – but they knew I was unarmed.

  I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but after a while the voices came closer and I understood the words.

  “ – the hell did he go?”

  “He must have cut across this other field. There’s a farm house over yonder. Maybe he went there.”

  “That’s half a mile away. He hasn’t had time to get that far. Anyway, he was shot at least twice. He may be dead by now.”

  No. I was in bad shape, but I wasn’t dead.

  “I guess we’d better search this field, too.”

  “And leave the boss back there bleeding on the side of the road? Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Hawley wanted him dead. The guy saw him shoot that cracker.”

  “Yeah, well, Hawley’s gonna be dead if we don’t get him some help. You want that?”

  “I guess not. And we did hit that bastard at least twice.”

  “That’s what I said. He’s dead, or he soon will be. And if he’s not, he’ll get as far away from here as he can and never set foot in Brown County again.”

  “You’re right about that,” the other one said, his voice fading.

  A few minutes later car doors slammed, sounding like they were a million miles away. I heard the car start up, but the engine's steady purr lasted only a few seconds before it faded away, too.

  The easiest thing to do then would have been just to stay where I was. It was cool and I didn’t have to do anything.

  Nothing but bleed to death, that is.

  One of the guys who’d tried to kill me had mentioned a farm house. If I could get out of this culvert and make it to the house, whoever lived there might help me. At the very least they might have a phone.

  Since I was about halfway through the culvert it was easier to go forward than trying to back out. I pushed and pulled myself along until I was able to reach out and grasp the far end of the culvert. Once I had hold of it, crawling out wasn’t much trouble. It only seemed to take me about a year.

  When my head poked out, the bright sun blinded me. I squeezed my eyes closed and kept moving. Eventually I was all the way out of the pipe.

  But I was still in the bottom of that ditch. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around.

  The trees were to my left. That meant the farm house was som
ewhere off to the right. The side of the ditch in that direction looked as steep and tall as Mount Everest. I started trying to claw my way up it anyway.

  I didn’t make it very far before my strength played out entirely. I tried to hang on so as not to lose the little bit of progress I’d made, but the ground was too slippery. I started sliding, and then I found myself rolling. I wound up in the bottom of the ditch again, lying in an inch or so of muddy water.

  A hell of a place to die, I thought as oblivion claimed me.

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