Free Dark Water (Cooper M. Reid Book 1) by Barry Napier

back. If there was something to be found here, he wasn’t going to find it at night, anyway.
    He turned back, already anxious for the relief of the sandbar. But as he made his first sluggish stride away from the side of the rock, he heard something that caught his attention. It was slight, buried beneath the sloshing noise of the water that churned between the rocks. At first, he thought it was nothing and nearly ignored it. But once he heard it, it was hard to not hear it.
    It sounded like someone pouring water into a bowl, only denser. It was hard to tell where it was coming from, but he thought that it was directly beside him. He lunged back to the side of the rock, catching himself along the side. He scaled the side of the larger rock and went to the back of it. He felt the water between the rocks sucking at him, trying to pull him away, but he clung steadfast to the side. He looked down to where the water was splashing against the side of the rock and thought he saw the source of the sound he had heard. In the dark, it was impossible to tell for sure, but he thought there was an anomaly there.
    Curious, Cooper splashed back out into the water and with two labored strokes, made it back to the sandbar. He stood there for a moment and caught his breath. He then looked to Stephanie and held up a hand.
    “I need the flashlight. Can you throw it this far?”
    She looked at the flashlight, considering. He knew that she wasn’t wondering whether or not she could get it to him (she was stronger than he was when it came to arm strength), but whether or not she wanted to part with it. After a few seconds, she cocked her arm back and threw it in a perfect underhanded arc to him. Her aim was dead on and he caught it with no problem.
    He turned to the rocks and saw that they looked almost slimy with the flashlight’s beam directly upon them.. Holding the flashlight up over his head, Cooper walked back off of the sandbar. He was ready for the drop this time and managed to keep his head above the water.
    As he directed the light around the rocks, he got a very brief sense of familiarity—of venturing into uncertain places where any form of danger might be around the corner. Although his relationship with the FBI and the shadow organizations that had later sought him out had spoiled him and left him disenchanted over his career, he couldn’t deny that he had loved it. He felt a slight pang of regret over his past as he stood neck deep in the water, sketching the flashlight along the base of the two large rocks ahead of him.
    Having only one free hand this time, it was harder to grab onto the first rock. He stretched his arm out and managed to dig into a sizeable crevice with his fingers. He pulled himself forward and shuffled his feet blindly under the water for some sort of foot hold. He found one and managed to pull himself up a bit as he climbed around to the rear side of the rock again.
    He shone the flashlight into the V-shaped region of water between the rocks, looking for the source of the pouring sound he had heard. Now that he couldn’t un hear it, he thought that it sounded like rain water channeling down through a city drain. Only this drain would be very deep and the water was much stronger than simple rain spillage.
    With the flashlight, it was easy to find the source. Roughly three inches above where the water was currently splashing against the rock, there was a large crack that was taking in water. The crack was roughly the size of a soccer ball and was located along a curve in the rock that made it hard to spot. If the tide had have been just a bit higher, Cooper would not have been able to hear it, much less known it was there.
    Pressing the flashlight against the side of the rock, Cooper managed to angle himself over to his right in order to get closer to it. His footing slipped a few times in the muck along the submerged base of the rock but he somehow kept his head from going under.
    He was now facing the hole