Scorpion Reef Read Online Free

deckhouse structure, and two doors led off into other rooms at each end. The air was dead and still, and smelled faintly of dust.
    She nodded to one of the doors at the right end of the living-room. “You can change in there. I’ll see if I can find my swim-suit.”
    I went in. It was a bedroom. There was a double bed in it, and a dresser, and the floor was carpeted from wall to wall. So this was roughing it in a duck camp in the wilds. I took off my clothes and got into the swimming trunks. It was hot, and I was shiny with sweat. I wondered if she had found her suit, and then wished irritably I could quit thinking of her.
    I took a cigarette out of the shirt and lit it before I went out in the living-room again. The doors at the other end were closed, but I could hear her moving around in one of the rooms. It sounded as if she was changing clothes. I located a pair of oars and went down to the end of the pier.
    Hauling one of the skiffs up alongside, I began bailing with an old can. There was no shade here, and the sun beat down on my head. In a moment I heard the whispered padding of bare feet behind me and turned around.
    She could make your breath catch in your throat. The bathing suit was black, and she didn’t have a vestige of a tan; the clear, smooth blondness of her hit you almost physically. A few inches shorter with the same build and the same legs and she would have been downright voluptuous; as it was there was something regal about her. I looked down and went on bailing.
    I fitted the oarlocks and held the boat while she got in and sat down amidships. Setting the aqualung and mask in the stern, I shoved off.
    “Pull out about twenty yards,” I directed. The water was only about five feet deep around the pier and I could see the bottom from the surface. The gun was nowhere around there.
    “All right,” I said in a moment. “Hold it right there while I go over. Row very slowly toward the point, just as if you were going to the blind, but don’t get too far ahead of me. You’ll be able to tell where I am by the bubbles coming up. I’ll have to cover fifty or seventy-five feet on each side, because it was dark and he could have wandered that much off the course.”
    She nodded, and watched with intense interest while I slipped the straps of the outfit over my shoulders and put on the mask. I bit on the mouthpiece and slid over the stern. The water was only about ten feet deep and the visibility was good. I went down and brushed bottom. It was soft, and my hand raised a cloud of silt.
    That was the only thing I was afraid of. In all that time the gun might have sunk completely out of sight in the mud. But still it should leave a track, an outline, where it disappeared, as there were no currents to disturb the bottom and erase it. I looked up and could see the boat directly above me on the ground-glass screen of the surface. The oars dipped once, scattering bubbles. I swam to the right, just above the mud and not disturbing it, made a wide swing, and came back to cover the other side. Here and there an old log lay on the bottom. I searched carefully around them.
    She moved the boat slowly ahead. Time went by. I saw an empty bottle, two or three beer cans, and an underwater snag festooned with bass lures. Now and then bass and perch would stare at me goggle-eyed and slide away.
    We couldn’t have been over seventy-five yards off the pier when I found the gun. If I’d been looking ahead instead of staring so intently at the bottom I’d have seen it even sooner. It was slanting into the mud, barrel down, at about a 60-degree angle with the stock up in plain sight. I pulled it out and kicked to the surface. I was some twenty feet from the boat. She saw me and rowed over.
    I caught the gunwale and lifted the shotgun out of the water so she could see it. Her eyes went wide, and then she smiled. “That was fast, wasn’t it?” she said.
    I set it in the bottom of the boat, stripped off the diving gear, and