Mark of the Devil Read Online Free

ninety-three. They called it amniotic embolism. To make a long story short, her heart stopped. They tried, but they couldn’t bring her back.”
    “And the baby?”
    “From what the doctor told me, once they realized Peyton was gone, they did an emergency C-section, but too late.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    Pulling the last of the beer from the bottle, Matt said, “Don’t be. It’s one of those things you learn to live with. Time does a hell of a healing job, or so they say.” Tossing a ten and a couple of ones on the bar, Matt pushed himself off the stool, adding, “C’mon, Steve. Let me call Ashley. Then let’s go find that barge of yours before somebody stubs their toe on it.”

CHAPTER 2
    Friday, 12 October 2001
Offshore, Jacksonville Beach, Florida
    When he’d first stepped off the dive platform at the stern of the 36-foot
Native Diver,
the sky had been a clear, autumnal blue, the seas running no more than one to two feet, and the water unusually clear for so short a distance off the northeast Florida coast. Within what seemed only minutes, however, clouds had rolled in and the scarred white bottom of the
Native Diver
was now a barely visible outline which Matt had to strain to see.
    As he moved over the sand and limestone bottom in an ever-widening circle, he allowed the quarter-inch, yellow nylon search line to play out from a handheld reel until he reached the red tag signifying 50 feet. With bottom visibility rapidly decreasing, he pushed the
transmit
button and spoke into the tiny microphone nestled at the side of his full facemask. “Steve, I’m at fifty feet on the line and already completed a half circle in my search pattern. Nothing. Current’s hitting a good two to three knots and whipping up a sandstorm down here.”
    “Yeah,” came the reply from the surface. “Wind’s picked up to maybe fifteen to twenty knots up here. I’m bobbing up and down like a cork. Hear the wind?”
    Matt automatically nodded as the rushing sound of wind reached his ears. “Visibility’s dropped to less than half of what it was when I first came down,” he said. “Next time, get your goddamn sonar fixed so I don’t have to crawl around the bottom looking for a needle in a haystack. Sure you got the coordinates right?” His knees in the sand, his body bent into the current, Matt checked his depth gauge. Just over 50 feet.
    Suddenly, sensing the presence of potential danger, Matt swept the now murky horizon, doing a double take as his peripheral vision picked up a dozen or so dark scaled barracuda hanging not more than ten feet away. Their long, slender bodies hovered only feet above the yellow search line, their eyes fixed in a curious stare that made him shiver. “Steve, you there? Got some barra-scooters down here, looking at me like I’m next on the menu. Appreciate if you’d hurry it up. What’ve you got?”
    “I’m here,” came the response through the receiver mounted over Matt’s left ear. “Close as we can make it. Tugboat captain was pretty vague on the location. Just inside three miles and between the fishing pier and the Jax Beach water tower. Using his coordinates, I’ve got the end of the pier at two-niner-two degrees and the tower at two-four zero. Where the bearings cross, X marks the spot, and that’s where we are.”
    Without warning, the line tugged at Matt’s hand and jerked him forward across the sand. It stopped, then another jerk. “Not any more, you’re not,” he growled. At the same time, he realized he was on a collision course with the formation of barracuda. “Shit!” The barracuda stared at his approach, impassive except for the hungry gleam in their eyes and the anticipatory grin on their teeth-filled snouts as dinner approached.
    Unable to dig the heels of his swim fins into the bottom to stop the drag, Matt yelled into the microphone, “My search line’s tied to the ring at the top of the anchor, and the damn thing’s dragging me with it.” Releasing