Extinct (28 page)

“Okay, now?” he called to his wife, a stocky woman dressed in a one-piece bathing suit and standing at the bow.

She didn’t bother to answer him.

He looked at his watch. “Six, seven hours and we’ll have to start back to Jackson or I won’t get enough sleep to go to work tomorrow. I get off an extra day past the weekend and the whole thing’s wasted sitting in this damn slip.”

A little, blond-haired girl in a two-piece red bathing suit ran up the deck to her mother and looked at the water in front of the boat. The woman slipped her arm around the child’s shoulders and looked up at her husband.

“Would you rather have taken the children out and fed them to the shark, Alvin?”

The little girl looked toward the bridge and frowned.

Her twin brother, a curly-haired boy walking toward the bow, looked back over his shoulder and twisted his face too.

They were his stepchildren by his wife’s first marriage.

And not only were they the reason that he had been forced to sit in the slip for two days—even though the Gulfstar was way too big to be bothered by a shark of any size—he had also had to sit here since dawn because his wife feared the starting of the boat’s big diesel engines would disturb her babies’ sleep. He thought about what she had just said about feeding the children to the shark and considered the remark very seriously, then nodded in the affirmative.

Next he looked at the shiny, metallic blue speedboat moving across the water in front of him on its way toward the exit from the marina. Two windsurfing boards with their sails detached and lying beside them projected over the rear of the boat.

A dark-haired boy who appeared to be in his early twenties stood behind the wheel. Dressed in khaki cutoffs with his chest bare, he was the type of lean, tightly muscled youth that would catch any girl’s eye. But not as much as the girl standing next to him would catch a man’s eye—of any age. Her rounded hips were tightly enclosed in a pair of short shorts, while a narrow pink bikini top strained to contain her heavy breasts. Her long blond hair blowing out behind her tanned figure and whipping back and forth from side to side almost created the optical illusion of her body swaying sexily back and forth. Alvin continued to watch her until the Gulfstar had gone nearly two-thirds of the way across the marina and was about to enter a slip on the other side when his wife said something and he remembered to turn.

*   *   *

Alan pressed his mouth down against Carolyn’s neck, feeling the warmth of her skin with his lips. She rubbed the side of his face with hers, and moved her lips across his cheek to his lips. Her hands came around the back of his neck. She spread her fingers and ran them into his hair and up the back of his head, and pulled his lips down harder onto hers.

He stretched out closer to her and she moved forward against him and they kissed again, moving their lips even harder against each other’s and holding the kiss for several seconds. Alan slipped his fingers between the top buttons of her blouse, undoing them and pushing the material back to kiss her skin where it began to swell into the top of her breast.

“Alan…”

She never finished because of the knock sounding sharply on the side of the cabin.

“Carolyn,” Sheriff Stark called.

With his speaking just outside the fiberglass bulkhead, it sounded like he was already in the cabin with them. Alan pulled his face back from hers and looked across his shoulder at the door at the rear of the cabin.

“Anybody home?” Stark called.

Carolyn smiled up at Alan as she buttoned her blouse.

He came to his feet and walked toward the door.

As he stepped outside into the cockpit, Stark hopped down inside the craft from the walkway. “Carolyn,” he said, nodding his greeting at her as she stepped from the cabin behind Alan, “I hate to bother you again, but I have a real big favor to ask. The mayor over here wants the shark’s body removed. He doesn’t like it reminding people what happened here—specifically tourists. Problem is, Sheriff Broussard’s daughter is getting married today—to Broussard’s chief deputy. Almost the whole damn department is in the wedding party. He called me and asked if I could coordinate the removal for him. With the hours the Coast Guard put—”

The telephone ringing inside the cabin cut Stark off.

Carolyn said, “Just a moment,” and stepped back through the door.

When she answered the phone, her father said, “Carolyn, Paul’s a little … Carolyn, I wasn’t going to call you and bother you with it, but Martha insisted. Duchess started barking at the river again and it frightened Paul. He asked when you’re going to get here.”

“Tell him I’ll be there in just a few minutes,” she said, and replaced the receiver and walked back out into the cockpit.

“Carolyn,” Stark said, “I really do hate to bother you, but with the hours the Coast Guard put in the last couple of days they released everybody from duty but a skeleton crew at the station. They said they would remove the body in a couple of days, but I guess I need to go ahead and do it now—told Broussard I would, I know how much you have already done, but I need a boat with some power and you’re the only captain I personally know who I can—”

“Jonas, I’m sorry, but I can’t. Paul’s worried about the river again, that the shark—”

Carolyn suddenly stopped her words. “Yes, I will help you remove it,” she said. “And I’m going to go pick up Paul first. I want him to see that the shark’s dead and see us when we take it out and dispose of it. I want him to go with us.”

“Thank you, Carolyn. I’ll make it up to you some way.”

“It’s all right. Maybe this is just what Paul needs.”

The telephone rang again and she turned back into the cabin.

“I hate this,” Stark said to Alan.

“She might be right,” Alan said. “It won’t hurt anything and it might help him get it out of his mind once and for all.”

Stark nodded. “Pretty rough thing for a child his age to have gone through—it’d be hanging on my mind, too.” He looked down the line of fishing boats bobbing quietly in their berths without a single captain or mate in sight if a group desiring a charter came by the marina. “Everybody’s tired,” he said.

Carolyn stepped back into the fishing cockpit. “It was Mrs. Hsiao,” she said to Alan. “She said the redfish had to be moved to the spawning tanks before they injured each other, and that she’s down there now and can’t get the valves or something to work. She said you’d know what she meant. She said Ho had been so keyed up during the night he couldn’t sleep and she gave him some sleeping pills. She said to tell you she was sorry to bother you.”

“Everybody is sorry,” Stark said.

“Go ahead, Alan,” Carolyn said. “Jonas and Paul and I can handle it fine. It won’t be any trouble.”

*   *   *

Vandiver stared at the clamshell-shaped door as it came up to close at the rear of the Hercules.

All that remained in the cavernous sixty-five-foot length of the giant plane’s cargo belly was a single small crate sitting conspicuously by itself halfway toward the bulkhead behind the pilot and copilot.

“What’s in it?” Vandiver asked.

“I don’t know, sir. I got it at the loading dock at Andrews when they were getting ready to put it on a truck.”

“You did good, Douglas,” Vandiver said.

CHAPTER 34

Carolyn guided the
Intuitive
out of the marked channel toward the body of the big shark lying half submerged on its side in the water. A mixture of small boats surrounded the carcass. Seagulls circled overhead. Two teenagers pushed a rubber raft off the nearby shore and paddled toward the long shape. A skinny man in his late forties stood bare-chested, well over his waist in water as he raised his long arms and worked inside the gaping mouth with a long knife and a pair of big pliers. A tooth, a bloody section of the gum attached to it, came loose, and the man pulled it from the mouth and grinned.

But what Carolyn stared at was the long, gaping slit cut along the center of the shark’s belly just above the water line. Parts of the shark’s visceral lining, some of it a pale white and some a bloody red, draped down into the water.

She looked at Stark’s khaki pants and shirt. At first she thought they were so wrinkled because he hadn’t had time to change them from the night before. But now she realized it was because they had been wet in the last few hours. He saw her look, and nodded.

“There was one complete skull, and fragments of the others,” he said. “Bones, some of them with the meat still … It made me sick to my stomach. The medical examiner says he’ll have it all put together enough to positively identify all the victims by tomorrow.”

Carolyn looked at the creature she had felt sorry for the night before, even a moment before, as the man wrenched the tooth from its mouth, but didn’t feel sorry for it any longer.

Stark looked back toward the marked channel a couple hundred feet away as the workboat, Deputy Fairley at its wheel and the older deputy at his side, turned toward them.

A thick pile of heavily woven net filled the boat’s rear.

Carolyn glanced over her shoulder toward the fishing cockpit “Jonas, do you mind if they take the dynamite with them?”

Stark smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Does make a mess when it goes off, doesn’t it?” He raised his hand and signaled for Fairley to bring the workboat to the
Intuitive
’s stern.

“And something else I can do for you,” Stark said. “I just thought about it—your ski boat’s still sitting in the marshes. I’ll have Fairley tow it in and get the prop fixed—compliments of the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department.”

*   *   *

The number of people present around the carcass proved beneficial in the ensuing task, several of them joining the two deputies and Stark, in water up to their shoulders sometimes, in slipping the net under the carcass’s tail and pulling it partially up under the body. The workboat dragged the net the rest of the way under the body from one side while the
Intuitive
used its big engines to supply the power to the ropes trailing back to the other side of the net.

It took nearly an hour. The last work done was the securing of the net around the top of the carcass as tight as it could be done by human strength and the attaching of the several-foot-tall cone-shaped nuns’ buoy Fairley had obtained from the Coast Guard to help keep the dead weight buoyant as it was hauled toward the Gulf.

Still, as they pulled the shark toward the marked channel, it sank low enough that it had to be dragged along the mud with the buoy floating partially submerged above the surface.

As the
Intuitive
came out of the marked safety fairway leading from Biloxi Bay to the Sound, the carcass lifted off the mud for the first time.

With only the buoy’s top third showing, Carolyn guided the
Intuitive
in the direction of the barrier islands in the distance. Stark had asked if she minded if he rested in the cabin for a moment, and now was sound asleep on the bunk. Paul stood beside her. When she looked down at him, he smiled up at her and she patted his head.

Behind them, seagulls squawked and dipped low over the buoy. Occasionally one of them dove to the water behind the net to grab a piece of flesh that came loose from the unseen carcass.

*   *   *

The Gulfstar yacht bobbed at anchor a hundred feet behind the small white dinghy making its way toward shore at the northern tip of the Chandeleur Islands. The stocky woman sitting at the bow of the dinghy looked at the water to her sides and said, “That wasn’t the only shark in the world, you know, Alvin.”

Her husband, holding the arm of the dinghy’s small steering motor, shook his head. “The water’s only two feet deep here. What do you think a shark is going to do—wade across the shoal and grab us?”

His wife looked across the island to where large waves rolled in to crash against the white sand on the Gulf side of the long structure. “The children aren’t going in the water over there,” she said.

“Nobody’s making them.”

The curly-haired boy moved off the single center seat toward his mother. Her broad hips taking up nearly the full width of the seat, the boy had to step to its very outside to sit down. The dinghy tipped slightly to that side and Alvin had to counterbalance it by leaning in the opposite direction. The little blond girl held her hand in front of her face and stared over her shoulder at him.

“The water’s blowing on me.”

“That happens in boats,” he said.

She frowned at the reply and rose from her seat to walk toward her mother’s other side.

The boat tipped that way now and the girl tilted in that direction. Alvin thought seriously about suddenly leaning to the same side. But he didn’t.

As soon as the bow of the dinghy touched the shore, the children sprinted toward the slight rise at the center of the island. Alvin stepped into the water, caught his wife’s arm, and helped her out.

She frowned at the stiff breeze whipping her hair and reached into her purse for her scarf. “I just really would prefer you sold the yacht and bought us a condominium,” she said.

He didn’t pay any more attention to her saying that than he had any of the other hundreds of times she had said the same thing.

“Momma,” the little girl called, “there’s somebody here already.”

Alvin walked to the rise.

Pulled onto the sand at the far side of the island, with its bow line tied to an anchor planted in the grasses in front of it, the blue speedboat that had exited the marina as they did rocked gently at the waves crashing against its stern.

“I thought this was our island,” the little girl complained.

“Just visitors,” Alvin said.

“I told you he didn’t buy the island,” the little boy said.

“You shouldn’t be lying to the children,” his wife said.

Alvin shrugged.

The little girl dashed toward the boat.

In a moment, she was climbing over into it.

“Honey,” Alvin said as he walked toward the boat, “it’s not nice to be on someone else’s property without their permission.”

The child frowned back at him and slipped on a ski jacket she found in the boat. Her brother climbed over the back of the seats toward the motor. He held up a pair of short shorts, and then a pink bikini top and bottoms.