All three of his visitors looked around at the shelves, the two strangers with the curiosity of people who’d never been in a dive shop in their lives before—which Doug could well believe—and Mikey with a kind of professional interest. “Gee, Dougie,” he said, “you haven’t moved much product, have you, kid?” He was probably the same age as Doug, within a year or two, but he called him Dougie and “kid.”

“It’s just the beginning of the season,” Doug explained. “Things’ll pick up.”

“You know, kid,” Mikey said, “it could be, what you could use is a nice burglary. You gotta be insured, huh?”

Oh, no. Doug was living on the edge of disaster as it was, and he knew it. False burglaries for the insurance were exactly the way to integrate a state prison, a goal Doug had never held for himself. “Not just yet, Mikey,” he said, trying to produce a cool and untroubled grin. “If I ever need anything like that, you’ll be the guy I call. You know that.”

“Sure, kid,” Mikey said and grinned, spreading his hands as though to say naturally you’ll come to me. With that round tough face and lumpy nose and curly black hair and those penetrating dark eyes, Mikey could be just as easily Italian or Irish, Irish or Italian. Doug had no idea why it mattered to him to know what Mikey was, but it did. Maybe because the question was essentially unanswerable.

Now Mikey turned to his companions, saying, “I wanna introduce you a couple guys. This is John and this is Andy. That’s Dougie. He runs this place.”

“How are you,” said Doug, nodding at them, not liking the flat emotionless way they both studied him.

“Fine,” said the one called John. “You got the certification, huh?”

That was a surprising question. “Sure,” Doug said. “I couldn’t run the dive shop unless I did.” And he gestured to the sticker in the bottom right of the front window: DIPS.

“Dips,” said the one called Andy in a thoughtful tone of voice. “I don’t think I know that one.”

Surprised that somebody like Andy would know any of diving’s professional associations, Doug said defensively, “It’s a new group, very lively, very forward-looking. The best, I think. That’s why I went with them.”

With a raucous laugh, Mikey said, “Also, Dougie, they’d take you, don’t forget.”

Doug was offended, and for the moment forgot his fear. Looking hard at Mikey, he said, “It wasn’t exactly that way, Mikey. What have you been telling these friends of yours, anyway?”

“Hey, take it easy, Dougie,” Mikey said, laughing again, but putting his hands up mock defensively. He’s afraid! Doug thought with astonishment, as Mikey went on, saying, “All I said to Andy and John, maybe you were the guy could help with a little problem they got. I’m not in it at all, okay? It’s strictly between you and them.”

Doug, pushing his unexpected advantage, said, “What’s between me and them?”

“Why don’t you guys talk it over?” Mikey said, backing toward the door, grinning at everybody. “I’m just John Alden here, right? Dougie, I can guarantee these guys, Andy and John’ll treat you straight. Guys, Dougie here is a hundred percent.” Waving generally, he said, “I gotta couple calls to make in the neighborhood. Be back in fifteen, twenty minutes, okay?”

“Sure, that’s good,” the one called John said. He nodded at Mikey, but his brooding eyes were on Doug.

“See you, guys,” Mikey said, and reached for the doorknob. But then he pointed playfully at Andy and said, “Remember, if it works out…”

Andy nodded as though this reminder was unnecessary. “Don’t worry, Mikey,” he said. “You’ve got your finder’s fee.”

“Great,” Mikey said. His grin was bigger and bigger. “I love to get friends together,” he said, and pulled open the door at last and left.

They all watched out through the window as Mikey slogged through the rain to his diseased-lime Impala and climbed in. After a few seconds, the windshield wipers started, and then the Impala backed away in a semicircle and drove out toward Merrick Road. And they were alone.

Doug looked at his unexpected visitors, wondering what this was all about. More stolen goods? He had to be very careful here, dealing with strangers; there was such a thing as entrapment.

My God, yes! Suppose the cops had the goods on Mikey for something or other—Doug had no idea what Mikey’s activities were beyond the finding of goods that had fallen off trucks, but he was sure those activities must be wide-ranging and far from legal—suppose Mikey had got himself caught, and the cops had offered him a deal if he’d turn somebody else in. Didn’t they do that all the time? They did.

Okay, in that case, who would Mikey choose to betray? Some other tough guy like himself, who’d grown up with him and knew all about him and knew where he lived? Or would he choose Doug Berry, a guy he barely knew, who wasn’t connected to anything that Mikey thought important?

These guys didn’t look like cops, But they wouldn’t, would they? Giving the pair a very critical and cautious look, Doug said, “You need some help with a diving problem?”

If he’d expected a no to that question—and he had—he was both disappointed and surprised, because the one called John turned and said, “That’s it, okay. A diving problem.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” John said. “Andy and me, we got to go underwater, and we never did that before, and it turns out it’s not so simple like we thought.”

Doug just couldn’t get this straight. “You really do want to dive?”

“Walk,” Andy said. “We wanna walk in from the shore to where it’s fifty feet deep.”

Doug looked out the side window at the rain-pocked gray waters of the Great South Bay. “Around here?”

“Somewhere else,” John said.

“Where?”

But John spread his hands and said, “We got to talk first, you know? We got to know we’re all on the same team, then we’ll talk about where.”

Andy said, “You see, Dougie, John and—”

“Doug,” Doug said.

They both frowned at him. Andy said, “I thought Mikey said you were Dougie.”

“That’s what he calls me,” Doug agreed. “Everybody else calls me Doug.”

They looked at each other and came to some sort of decision. Nodding briskly, Andy said, “Got it. Okay, Doug, here’s the story. John and me, we got to go into a body of water, like a lake—”

“Freshwater, you mean,” Doug suggested.

“Yeah,” Andy said. “Down at the bottom of this lake, there’s a box we want. A big box. So we got to get to it, tie a rope on, pull it out.”

John said, “We thought it should be kind of simple. But then we went to a store to buy the stuff, and it turns out there’s this secret society or something, nobody gets to go underwater unless they know the password.”

“We have no fatalities in the sport in the United States,” Doug told him, “and that’s why. Safety first.”

“I believe in safety first,” John said. “I don’t want to go anywhere that it isn’t safety first. So maybe this is okay after all. We can’t pull the job without a pro.”

“Not if it’s underwater,” Doug agreed.

“But,” John said, “we need a very particular special pro. Not just any pro.”

“Not the pro in just any dive shop you see around,” Andy said, expanding on the idea.

Here comes the illegality, Doug thought. Entrapment. Temptation. They’re probably both wired. Be very careful about everything you say. “Mm,” he said.

“So we asked around,” John went on, “among people we know, particular people we know…”

“And I happened to know Mikey,” Andy said. “We’ve been in trade together a couple times. And he said you were exactly the guy we were looking for.”

“So here we are,” John said.

“Mm,” Doug said.

They all looked at one another for a minute. Finally, Andy said, “Don’t you wanna know what we want?”

“I thought you were going to tell me,” Doug said, trying not to sound too eager to commit anything illegal.