Extinct (21 page)

“Alan,” Stark said, “will you answer my damn question—what precedent?”

Alan looked toward Stark as they walked toward the house. “I don’t remember the exact date, Jonas. It was around 1916 or ’17. A white took two victims off the coast of New Jersey, but it also traveled twenty miles up a creek. Around South Amboy. It killed a ten-year-old and a young man and mangled a third boy before it went back into the ocean. Everyone then was wondering about a white coming up into freshwater, too. But it was July, the same as now. It had been especially dry. The creek would have been low. From rainfall records back then, scientists now think it’s likely the ocean had run inland, leaving the creek highly brackish, maybe even containing more saltwater than fresh.”

Stark looked toward the river as he stopped on the patio. “Okay,” he said. “It’s brackish up into the marshes, as far as the Interstate bridge at least. But not more saltwater than fresh. And not brackish past here to the dam, anyway. But I believe it got those two fishermen. It damn sure got their boat. After it ran out of brackish water, could it have just kept going upriver? I mean it’s not like freshwater’s poisonous or something to it—it just doesn’t prefer it, does it? Right?”

“That’s all I can tell you, Jonas. Other than for that one incident I don’t know of any other time a white has come up a river, brackish or otherwise.” Alan opened the door and stepped into the kitchen, and Stark came in behind him.

“Could there be two of them, Alan? Because if there isn’t, you not only have a white coming up the river, but leaving the river to attack Mr. Fraizer in the Sound and then coming back here again.”

Before Alan could respond, Stark said, “But it couldn’t be two, because if it was it would not only be
just
two, but two
big
ones. But, hell, there can’t be two that size. Both of them here at the same time. It has to be just the one. Right?”

“You want another guess?” Alan asked.

“There couldn’t be,” Stark repeated. “Not two here at the same time when there hasn’t even been one in years. Damn sure not two of them twenty-five feet long. It’s just that the son of a bitch is roaming.”

Stark looked back toward the kitchen door, as if he could see through it to the river. “And now we have the problem of finding it in this crap you can’t see through. If it was outside the Barrier Islands.… Hell, about anywhere else anywhere along the Gulf Coast its size would play against it. We could spot it with a plane. Hell, from a boat that got within a hundred feet of it as big a shadow as it would leave. But even if it goes back out of the river again, the Sound is so damn silted, too, that you can’t see a couple of feet through it.… Hell, it could be four or five feet under the surface and we wouldn’t be able to see it.”

As Stark quit talking he looked up at the kitchen cabinets. “You think she’d mind?” he asked in a calmer voice than he had been using.

Alan shook his head and Stark opened a cabinet and then a second one, finding the glasses he was looking for and lifting one from the shelf.

“Twenty-five feet,” he mused as he stepped to the sink. He filled the glass with water, drank half of it at one time, then looked back at Alan.

“Twenty-five feet?” he said again.

Though the size
was
unusual when compared to the normal size of whites seen off the coasts of North America, one that size wasn’t out of the question, Alan knew. The biggest white ever caught off North America was thirty feet long, caught off California in the late 1800’s. And, more recently, in Cuba, not that far away from the Gulf in particular, a twenty-one-foot specimen had not only been caught but photographed and weighed as well, topping out at over three and a half tons.

What did make Alan wonder, though, was the white’s rolling in the shallow channel, obviously trying to push away the small section of grass to get to Fred and the kids. The only similarity he could think of were the killer whales that had been seen using the weight of their great bodies to come up up on the edges of sections of floating ice and tip them to slide their helpless prey into the water. But a shark?

“I need to call the Coast Guard,” Stark said, and walked toward the living room. “All they’ll do, though, is warn boaters. If it’s going to be caught, it’ll be up to us. And when you stop and think about it, we’re going to have to do it the same way they did in the Middle Ages, with a long line, a big hook, and a chunk of meat. That’s modern technology for you, isn’t it? And what if the son of a bitch decides he doesn’t want to bite?”

Alan walked to the front of the living room and looked out a window as the ambulance drove out of the driveway. A deputy’s cruiser, the children filling its seats, pulled out onto the street behind the ambulance. Fairley walked toward the house and Alan opened the door for him.

“Mr. Herald said to tell his daughter he was going in the ambulance with the boy who was burned,” Fairley said.

Alan nodded. Fairley looked toward the Sheriff, speaking on the telephone to the Coast Guard. Stark looked back at him then turned his face back into the receiver.

Fairley turned back toward the last cruiser parked in the drive. Alan shut the door as Carolyn came out of the hallway. “Paul went to sleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow,” she said.

Stark replaced the telephone receiver and walked toward them. “If we’re going to have a chance to catch it, we’re going to need all the boats we can get,” he said.

Carolyn nodded. “I’ll have the
Intuitive
here in the morning.”

“I’ll get something for bait tonight,” Stark said. “Somewhere.” He glanced at his watch and walked toward the door. When he opened it, he looked back at Carolyn. “The earlier the better.”

She nodded.

“I’ll get ahold of the other captains tonight, too,” he said. He stood there a moment longer, seemed to be thinking about something. He looked back at them. “Hell, I hated
Jaws
anyway,” he said, and stepped outside.

Alan walked to the window and watched Stark walk toward the cruiser with Fairley standing by the driver’s door. As they backed out of the driveway, the cruiser’s lights shined on the Jeep, illuminating the gaily wrapped presents sitting on the rear seat.

“I’m going to get her a present, too,” Carolyn said as she stepped up beside him. “If she hadn’t started calling around about you and let Stark know we hadn’t come back from the dam yet, I would have been out there for another hour before you could have found a boat and gotten back to us. I don’t think I could have taken five more minutes.”

She glanced at her watch. “I’m going to call Mother and have her come stay with Paul. I might as well go after the
Intuitive
now. By the time I would get to sleep it would be time to get up and go after it, anyway. Alan…” She looked a little sheepish. “I know this is silly, but would you mind going with me? Bringing it back by myself is going to make me…” She shrugged.

He smiled and nodded.

She looked directly into his eyes now. “I couldn’t move when Paul fell out of the boat,” she said. “Thank you for what you did.” A tear welled in the corner of her eye. As it started down her cheek, he kissed her softly on the forehead.

She leaned her face against his chest. He moved his arms around her back and cupped the back of her head with his hand. Her tears started coming freely now, and she shook her head. “It’s crazy to cry now that it’s all over,” she said, “with it all over.”

CHAPTER 25

Dawn broke over a thin layer of mist suspended above the marshes and a half-dozen charter fishing boats moving slowly along the river. Each of them pulled lines running to a chain leader and big hooks baited with large pieces of meat. Floats the size of small buoys, hooked to the lines near their ends, kept the bait at the proper depth. Two smaller boats moved along the shallow passageways winding through the tall grasses, using their depth sounders to see if there might be a channel deep enough for a twenty-five-foot white shark to use. One of the boats coasted to a stop and started backing out of a channel too shallow to navigate any farther. Carolyn steered the
Intuitive
from its canopy-covered flying bridge. Fred stood in the fishing cockpit as he stared out past the line trailing the boat. Alan and the Sheriff rested their hands on the bow rail, just past the small, black, hard-rubber Zodiac inflatable boat secured to the forward deck.

“Look at those crazy bastards,” Stark said, staring at a small ski boat coming slowly up the river. One of the two men in the craft’s front seats waved at a captain of one of the charter boats passing it in the opposite direction. The captain stared back without returning the greeting.

“Carolyn,” Stark called toward the flying bridge. “Can you cut them off?”

She turned the wheel in their direction.

The stocky man in T-shirt and swim trunks pulled the throttle of the ski boat back when he couldn’t determine on which side the charter boat was going to pass him. The
Intuitive
coasted to a stop across the small boat’s bow.

The skinny man in a windbreaker and trunks in the passenger seat smiled when he saw who guided the
Intuitive.
“Morning,” he called, still looking at Carolyn.

“You all planning on skiing?” Stark asked.

The men laughed at the joke. They both had a beer in their hands. The skinny one reached behind him over the seat and lifted a stick of dynamite into the air.

“Planning on making shark soup,” he said and laughed.

“Where did you get that?” Stark asked. He wasn’t in his uniform, wearing only khakis and T-shirt and a pair of deck shoes.

“There’s places,” the man said. “You want a few sticks? Do a helluva lot better job than that line you’re towing.”

“No, I think I’ll just confiscate it all.”

The man still grinned, but it was artificial now. “Come again?” he said.

“I said I’ll just take it all.”

The grin was completely gone now. “That’s what I thought you said.” The man looked at his heavily built partner.

He was dark-skinned with wide shoulders, thick arms, and an old-fashioned flattop. He slid up from under the wheel to sit on top of his seat. Carolyn put the
Intuitive
’s gears into reverse and touched the throttles lightly, stopping the craft’s drift toward the bank. The heavily built man watched her until she cut the throttles again, and then he looked back at Stark.

Stark’s badge glinted from his billfold, held open out over the rail. “You’re in violation of Mississippi Code Section Ninety-seven dash Thirty-seven dash Twenty-three—unlawful possession of explosives meant to be used in the commission of a crime.”

“Crime? We’re going to blow up a damn shark.”

“Exactly—using explosives to kill fish. In addition to the Mississippi code, a violation of numerous federal statutes, not to mention pissing off the Wildlife and Fisheries Department.”

“Aw, Deputy, come—”

“Sheriff,” Stark said.

“Okay, Sheriff, we’re just trying to help out. You know that thing ate a couple of kids.”

“I appreciate your thoughts, and that’s why I’m not going to arrest you right now. Unless I see you out on the water again.”

The men looked at each other. The skinny one grinned. “You mean you think he might come up and snatch us outta here? I heard he smashed one of those little ole aluminum jon boats. That for real?”

“That’s just exactly what happened. But I’m not thinking about it coming up in a boat the size of yours. I’m thinking I have a couple of boys getting drunk and whipping in and out of the charter boats. You’ll end up fouling one of their lines. Or be throwing those sticks around at something you think you see.”

“We wouldn’t be throwing them around at nothing but the shark,” the stocky man said. “And I wasn’t whipping in and out of nothing, Sheriff. Didn’t I come up the side of the river careful-like?”

“You’re not all the way drunk yet,” Stark said, looking at the two cases of beer sitting in the rear of the boat.

“No, and we ain’t gonna be either with that little bit. What do you say that—”

“Hey,” Stark said in a suddenly sharp tone, cutting the stocky man off. “Enough talking. Bring the dynamite around to the stern and then get on back to where you came from. Watch you don’t foul the line.”

A couple of minutes later, Fred looked at the cardboard box of dynamite lying near his feet. The box had a waxy-looking film impregnated into its surface. Written across its top in big, black letters were the words
RED DIAMOND BRAND, DITCHING DYNAMITE,
50%
STRENGTH.

“It’s not dangerous,” Stark said.

Fred looked at him with an uncertain expression.

“It’s not,” Stark repeated, “as long as you keep these away from it.” He handed Fred the small box of percussion caps and the length of orange-colored coiled fuse he had taken from the men. Then he looked at their ski boat speeding back down the river in the direction it had come. “You have some dumb asses in the world—but most of them mean well.”

“Your men are back,” Carolyn called from the flying bridge.

Deputy Fairley and an older, gray-haired deputy in a wide-beamed steel-hulled workboat of the kind that serviced the offshore oilrigs motored past the skiboat and came toward them. The rear of the boat was stacked with a half-dozen forty-gallon drums. In a few moments the craft slowed and pulled alongside the
Intuitive.

“You know how much a slaughterhouse stinks, Sheriff?” the older deputy said.

Stark smiled. “Get it dumped out down the center of the channel.”

The deputy nodded. Fairley looked up over the rail at Stark. “Sheriff, about last night. It wasn’t really my wife doing the worrying. I was thinking about my children and something happening to me where—”

Stark held up his hand, stopping the deputy’s words. “If it were me, Jim, and I was the deputy and you were the Sheriff, I’d probably would have figured the same way you did.”

“No, you wouldn’t have, Sheriff, but I appreciate your saying so anyway. You won’t have a problem again.”