Extinct (23 page)

“Anybody dumb enough to be in the water right now needs to be eaten up. Save us having to mess with them later when they do something else crazy—like those nuts with the dynamite.”

“No,” Fairley said. “Nuts that crazy don’t get eat up or blowed up.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Fairley, be better if—” The deputy suddenly ducked his head. There had been the sound of a shot. He looked over his shoulder toward the bank. “What are those crazy bastards doing?”

Standing in the trees near the edge of the water, a tall man in a jumpsuit raised his rifle back to his shoulder, sighted down its barrel for a moment, then lowered the weapon. The shorter man next to him laughed wildly, slapped the thighs of his overalls and raised his hands high in the air, laughing again.

Carolyn turned the
Intuitive
’s wheel in the men’s direction as Stark and Alan walked to the bow rail.

“Hey!”
Stark shouted.

The shorter man looked toward the
Intuitive,
but the one with the rifle kept looking out toward the water. He raised his rifle again and stared down its sights.

“Damn it, you hear me!”
Stark yelled.

The rifle slowly lowered. The
Intuitive
neared the bank.

“What in hell are you doing?” Stark asked.

“Thought I saw the shark,” the man with the rifle said.

Alan looked toward the center of the river.

“Saw an alligator gar is what he saw,” the short man said, and laughed.

The taller man stared at his companion.

Stark shook his head in irritation. “It occur to you we have people out here—and you’re shooting a damn rifle off around them?”

“I know which way I’m shooting,” the taller man said.

Stark’s billfold came out again. He flashed the badge. “Get your ass somewhere else, okay?”

“Deputy, I was born and raised around guns.”

“Yeah, buddy, and an experienced idiot is still an idiot.”

“That so?” the man said, staring his displeasure at Stark’s remark. “What’s your name?”

“Jonas Stark.”

“And that’s a Sheriff’s Department badge you’re flashing around?”

“That’s right, sure is.”

“Maybe the Sheriff would be interested in how you’re talking to voters in this county. What’s the Sheriff’s name?”

“Jonas Stark.”

The shorter man turned silently and started toward the street beyond the trees. The taller man still stared. “Okay,” he finally said, “I can remember that.”

As the man turned and walked after his companion, Alan smiled. “That’s two sets of voters in a couple of hours.”

Stark said, “Son of a bitch didn’t even know my name; he didn’t vote for me.”

At the sound of the motors, they looked toward the two small helicopters sweeping toward them above the river. The one with the brunette from WLOX swept overhead. The other craft stopped, tilted slightly to its side, and a man leaned out the passenger-side opening and pointed a television camera down toward them.

Carolyn turned the
Intuitive
’s wheel, guiding the boat back into the middle of the channel. Fred glanced at the dynamite setting just inside the cabin, then looked at the line trailing taut down into the water behind the boat. Deputy Fairley threw the last bucketful of chum out into the water, and the older deputy spun the wheel, turning the workboat around and starting it back down the river.

The sun was beginning to set.

*   *   *

Empty wrappers from a pair of Big Macs sat on Douglas’s desk along with a large plastic cup containing nothing but ice. He slipped the last french fry into his mouth as he cradled the telephone receiver on his shoulder.

“Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department.”

“I’m calling about any unexplained drownings or boat accidents you have had in the county since January.”

“Do what?”

And Douglas started his spiel once more. “This is Ensign Douglas Williams, I’m calling from Washington, D.C., the Office of Naval Intelligence. We are seeking information on any unexplained drowning or disappearance of…”

*   *   *

Vandiver looked at the red light on his telephone, indicating that his nephew was making another call. Douglas was going through them at a rate of about one every five or six minutes. Vandiver hoped he wasn’t passing over them too quickly. He looked back at the terminal screen. All that had been on it for the last ten minutes was the artist’s rendition of a megalodon, the thick-bodied creature facing outward and looking as if it were about to swim off the screen. The depiction was meant to jar his mind, help him to think what else could be done to locate the creature. But nothing new had passed through his thoughts. He continued to stare. An artist’s rendition, he thought. If technology had progressed only a little bit more, he knew he might be staring at a picture of the real thing. But it hadn’t, at least not enough for even computer enhancement to show what didn’t register on the videotape—you had to have at least something fuzzy and registering before it could be enhanced.

It had been the lack of light. And maybe, somehow, possibly the megalodon’s intelligence.

It had happened only four years before—the image caught on the now famous videotape had initiated endless speculation among marine scientists the world over. The robot camera equipped with several-hundred-thousand-candlewatt flood lamps had been lowered thirteen thousand feet to a distant bottom in the South Pacific.

The experiment was conducted in the hopes that the lights would draw some of the strange bottom dwellers at that depth into view, allowing the camera to photograph them for future study. But even with the great candlewatt of the flood lamps, they illuminated only a few feet, before the water at that depth, blacker than the darkest night, absorbed all their power. A creature would have to come very close.

A few had. A three-foot-long yellow-brown gulper, with its mouth extending back nearly the full length of its body, which is how the fish derived its name, had come slowly into view. Tiny, flashing yellow-greenish lights in the sand off to the right of the field of view indicated small deep-water shrimp, directing their mating signals toward the light.

Suddenly the gulper had spurted to the side and disappeared. Out in front of the camera, at the very periphery of the light, a huge shadow against a blacker background moved slowly through the field of view. A full fifteen seconds passed before it seemed that the camera was again photographing only the black water. Then another almost imperceptible movement began and lasted for thirty more seconds.

Scientists had been able to calculate the speed the creatures swam by comparing their barely visible movement against the movement of the sediment drifting slowly across the sand floor. One of the creatures had been approximately twenty feet long. There had been a gap of about thirty to thirty-five feet between that creature and the one trailing it. And then the trailing one had been calculated to be nearer forty feet in length. The scientists, aware of the recently discovered giant deep-water megamouth shark, had decided that the camera must have picked up a pair of those large creatures moving in the dark.

Vandiver wasn’t so certain. There was no way anyone could be certain that there had in fact been two different creatures. As far as he was concerned, a single creature passing near the camera’s periphery, then drifting slightly farther away as it proceeded, then nearer again, could have easily been viewed as two separate creatures.

The twenty-foot length of the so-called first creature, plus the thirty-to thirty-five-foot gap while the creature drifted farther from the camera, and the forty-foot length of the so-called second creature, added up to ninety to ninety-five feet—if it had been one creature.

And one thing that made that even more possible in his mind had been that when each creature passed, its top-to-bottom thickness had completely filled the field of view. A megamouth even forty feet long couldn’t have been as thick from top to bottom as the twenty-foot minimum that would have been needed to completely obliterate the field of view.

He had seen two scientific explanations regarding that.

Both of them basically had to do with a play of shadows.

“More than likely,” one of the scientists had stated.

The other one had said, “Or something similar.”

Learned opinions.

“Have a shark-attack fatality off Tampa, sir,” Douglas shouted from the outer office. “Male, age twenty, windsurfing, hemorrhaged to death after they got him to shore.”

Vandiver ignored him. There wouldn’t be anything to bring back to shore after a megalodon attack.

*   *   *

“Everybody is getting tired,” Stark said as he stepped next to Alan and Carolyn illuminated in the
Intuitive
’s running lights as they stood at the flying bridge. “We don’t know how long this is going to last. I’m going to ask half of the boats to go in and some of them to come back in eight hours, the rest eight hours after that.” He looked at the Bertram passing them going in the opposite direction. “I called the county supervisors. I told them these captains all lost charters, that we needed to at least reimburse the boats’ running expenses. But I’m not counting on that happening. I know you two have to be worn out. You want to go in first?”

Carolyn nodded. “I would like to take a shower and see Paul before he goes to bed. Then I’ll come back. There’s a bunk below. Daddy and Alan and I can take turns getting some rest.”

Stark looked ahead of them upriver and then down the channel. “I haven’t seen Fairley in an hour or two. If you will, call him on the radio and tell him to bring the boat by to pick me up.”

*   *   *

Fairley arrived as they reached Carolyn’s dock. The half-dozen drums in the workboat were filled again, the thick mixture of blood sloshing out of one with its top ajar as Fairley slowed the craft and came alongside the
Intuitive.
The stench was terrible. Fairley’s and the older deputy’s clothes were soaked red.

Stark shook his head as he climbed from the
Intuitive
down into the workboat. “Your wife wouldn’t have wanted you home last night if you smelled like this,” he said.

Fairley frowned. “Now, Sheriff, I told you I was sorry about that.”

Stark smiled as he slipped behind the boat’s steering wheel. A moment later its engine coughed, began to putter, and the boat pulled away from the
Intuitive.

Fred finished pulling in the long line with its big stainless-steel hook baited with a several-pound section of meat cut from a beef quarter. He coiled the line and chain leader in the cockpit, set the buoy on top of the coil, and left the meat balanced on a rear corner of the cockpit.

A strip of skin hung down nearly to the water. The meat, softened by being in the warm river for hours, oozed red juices that seeped down the strip and fell drop by drop into the brown water.

CHAPTER 27

Carolyn’s mother looked from the kitchen toward the back door as it opened. “I was just getting ready to call you,” she said. On the counter behind her there were four plates covered in aluminum foil. A two-liter bottle of Coke and a thermos sat next to the plates. She looked at the door when Fred closed it behind him.

“The Sheriff’s not with you?” she asked.

“We’re going back out in a while,” Carolyn said. “I’ll take his plate then.”

“Your Aunt Rayanne came by and got her presents, Alan. She left you a change of clothes and a shaving kit.”

Paul stepped into the kitchen.

“Hey, baby,” Carolyn said.

“Did you get him?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“You will,” he said and nodded.

“Darn sure right,” Fred said. He looked at the plates.

“Be about fifteen more minutes,” Martha said. “I put the cornbread in late.”

“I can eat it without cornbread,” Fred said.

“You can wait like everybody else,” his wife said.

He frowned and walked toward the living room.

“News about the shark is on all the channels,” she said.

*   *   *

Douglas shut his apartment door behind him, stripped off his uniform tunic, pitched it to the couch, and began to loosen his tie. He yawned as he walked into the kitchen. The tie went onto the counter next to the sink, piled with unwashed dishes and glasses. He opened the refrigerator, lifted out a Budweiser, and popped its top. He reached back into the refrigerator, got a second beer, and walked toward the living room.

He unbuttoned his collar, fluffed one of the couch pillows with one hand, and lay down, stretching his long frame out comfortably to try to relax. Leaning his head up to sip the Budweiser, he reached for the TV’s remote control on the coffee table at the same time.

The Weather Channel came on. That was the last channel he had viewed before he boarded the helicopter on the first leg of the flight to south Florida. He frowned at remembering how nervous he had been when he had seen the display of the storm front moving across the map toward the waters off the Everglades.

He pushed the channel change button.

On NBC an attractive brunette reported from the Pascagoula River in Mississippi.

*   *   *

Carolyn stood in her brassière and bikini-cut panties in front of the mirror over the bathroom lavatory. She turned to the side and held her shoulders back. “Not too bad,” she mumbled, and turned her other side to the mirror.

Seconds later she slipped into a pair of loose khakis and a short-sleeve orange blouse. Before she left the bathroom she dabbed perfume behind each ear and smiled into the mirror.

*   *   *

Martha slipped a thick glove on over her hand and reached into the oven to pull the pan of cornbread out. Her bare hand touched the pan as she laid it on the counter and she mumbled something under her breath.

Carolyn came up the hall.

Martha held her finger up to her lips and nodded toward Alan, lying asleep on the couch. “I told him to lay down and rest his eyes for a minute,” she said in a low voice. “That’s the last movement he made.”

Carolyn smiled as she came into the kitchen. “Where are Paul and Daddy?”