White Shark (18 page)

"Sure."
 
Max smiled
wanly.
 
"That's why the
pads."
 
He gestured at his knees,
and Chase saw that the fabric covering the pads was tattered.

"What about the girl?"

"She's fine... just shaken up."

"She said that?"

"Not... not exactly."
 
Max frowned, as if unsure what the girl had said.

"So how do you know she's fine?"

"I don't know
...
I just know."

"Max..."
 
Chase felt
himself growing angry, and he fought to keep his mouth from surrendering to his
temper.
 
"Look, you
creamed
that kid.
 
Maybe she's hurt and doesn't know it.
 
Maybe she's looking for a doctor right
now."

"She's not," Max said flatly.

"Why'd she run off?"

"I don't know."

"What did she say?"

"Nothing."

"What d'you
mean
, nothing?
 
She has to have said something... like, ‘It's
okay’ or ‘
How
are you?’ or "Why don't you look
where you're going?’"

"No," Max said, "
she
never said a
word.
 
She came over, and I said, ‘I'm
really sorry, are you okay>’ and all she did was touch my face and
smile.
 
But it was like she
was
talking, like inside my head I could
hear the words."

"What words?"

"I'm not sure, maybe they weren't even real words but more a kind of
feeling... sort of a ‘Don't worry’ and ‘I'm glad you're not hurt’ kind of
thing."
 
Max paused.
 
"Then she saw you and took off."

"Christ, we don't even know who she is.
 
I didn't notice what house she came out
of."
 
Chase glanced down the alley
as if expecting to see the girl, but the alley was empty.
 
Then he turned back to Max.
 
"Well," he said, pointing at Max's
blades, "you want to take those things off and we'll walk back to the
club?"

"No, I'm fine, let's keep going.
 
It's this helmet, that's the problem.
 
I never heard her."

"Stick close to me, then, I'll be your eyes and ears."

"Right," Max said.
 
"I'll circle you like you're a defenseman."

Chase smiled.
 
"Great, maybe
we can share a room in the intensive-care unit."
 
He started off at a jog.

When they reached the end of the street, Chase had to make a choice:
 
they could proceed ahead and return to the
club and get in the boat and go back to the island, or they could take more
time, get more exercise, by winding through the small back streets on the east
side of the borough.

Jogging in place, he looked at Max, who
was happily skating backward and pretending to cradle a puck with an imaginary
hockey stick, and decided that the boy was indeed unhurt and could use the
workout.
 
So he turned right off

The street dead-ended in a chest-high
stone wall
beside
the building.
 
Normally, Chase would have turned several
yards before the end of the cul-de-sac, but in the bay beyond he saw a flock of
terns feeding, and the sunlight on their white bodies and on the water that
splashed as they dove looked like a spray of diamonds.
 
He kept going toward the wall, pointing out
the terns to Max, who sped by him and circled to a stop.

They watched the terns for a moment, turned
to go, and as Chase's eyes left the water, he saw something in the rocks at the
water's edge.
 
He paused.

"What?
"
Max
said.

"I'm not sure."
 
Chase looked again, scanning the narrow
expanse of pebbles and boulders.
 
Max
leaned on the wall beside him.
 
"Where
are you looking?"

"By that mess of weed," Chase
said, pointing.

A wave lifted the clump of weed and moved
it a couple of feet closer to shore.

"Dad!
"
Max
shouted.
 
"It's a hand!"

17

Its fingers were locked in a claw, as if
whoever it was had been trying to climb something or grab something or fight
off something at the moment he or she had died.

"Stay here," Chase said, and he
hauled himself up onto the wall, swung his legs over and dropped down onto the
pebbly strand.

"But Dad..."
 
Max was already unlacing his Rollerblades.

"Stay
here!
"
Walking toward the clump of
weed, Chase tried to recall if he'd heard of anyone reported missing.
 
Then he wondered how long it took a drowned
body to rise to the surface again.
 
It
happened, he knew that:
 
after a while
the gases in a body built up, and as they expanded, the corpse would float.

The clump of weed was huge, extending far
out into the water.
 
Chase didn't want to
touch the hand — what if that was all there was to it, or what if there was
more but it was so rotten that it fell apart
?
—
so
he used his running shoe to nudge aside the rubbery
strands of weed.

He saw a head then, and what was left of a
face, and bile rushed up the back of his throat and poured into his mouth.
 
He dropped to his knees, coughing and
spitting.

The skin was whitish gray; the eyes were
gone, and the earlobes and the lips.
 
There was more of the body snarled in the weed — no blood left in it,
just shredded white flesh interlaced with strands of neoprene wet suit.

"Call the police," he said to
Max.
 
"Go down to

"Who... who is it?"

"I don't know."

"What happened?"

"Just
go!
"
Chase said, and almost
immediately he heard the rattle of Max's wheels on the pavement.

When he thought he could look again
without retching, Chase crawled closer.
 
The face was unrecognizable, but there was something familiar about the
hand.

The watch.
 
The watch on
the wrist of the hand with the rigored claws was one of those diver's watches
that did everything but rinse your socks — told the time in every zone on the
planet, had windows for bottom time, lap time and phases of the moon.
 
It was the watch of a gimmick freak, and he'd
seen it before.
 
But
where?

It came to him:
 
Waterboro Lumber, holding out a can of
WD-40.
 
He had remarked on the watch, and
the owner had insisted on explaining every function and had told him how to
order one.

Buck Bellamy, that's who it
was
.
 
Could this be
what was left of Buck Bellamy?
 
But why?
 
Buck was an expert
boatman, a certified scuba diver, and in high school he'd been a competitive
swimmer.

He had been
diving,
the wet suit was evidence of that.
 
What
could have killed him?
 
Maybe he'd gotten
bad air — people sometimes were careless about where they filled their tanks,
and died of carbon monoxide poisoning
.
  
Maybe he'd had a heart attack or a
stroke, or been chopped up by a boat propeller, or
...
Christ
knew what.

Chase peeled more of the weed away, and he
saw the other arm.
 
All the flesh between
the elbow and shoulder was gone, and there were deep gashes in the bone of the
upper arm, as if a big fish or a small shark had grabbed the arm and shaken it
back and forth and gnawed on it like a dog with a bone too big to crush.

Around the wrist was a thong, and attached
to the thong was a steel housing containing a video camera.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

"You tell me, Simon," said
Police Chief Roland Gibson.
 
"You're
the shark expert.
 
What kind of shark'd
do a job like that?"

"None," Chase said.
 
"None I know of.
 
Not around here."

They were sitting in Gibson's office in
the station house on Route 1.
 
Polaroid
pictures of Buck Bellamy's remains were spread out on Gibson's desk, and Buck's
video camera was plugged into a television set in a bookcase.

A police car had arrived within five
minutes, an ambulance a few minutes later, and by the time the body had been
photographed and bagged and taken away to the medical examiner in
New London
, a small crowd
had gathered by the stone wall.

At Gibson's request, Chase and Max had
been brought to the station house, and their statements had been taken.
 
Now Max sat in the lobby while Chase and
Gibson talked.

"Nice, Simon," Gibson said.
 
"First you tell me it looks like a shark
attack,
then
you tell me there are no sharks around
here that attack people."

"I didn't say a shark
attacked
him, Rollie, I said it looks
like a shark might've bitten him... after Buck was already dead."

"What makes you think so?"

"Shark attacks are rare anywhere, and
unheard-of around here.
 
A man's got a
better chance of being killed by a feral cat or a farmer's pig than by a
shark.
 
For one thing, there are damn few
dangerous sharks in these waters.
 
Sand
sharks are bottom feeders; they'd never go after a swimmer, let alone a diver,
but they might nibble on a dead body on the bottom.
 
Makos are scarce, they're loners, and they
live in deep water and follow schools of pelagics — tuna and jacks.
 
The odds are a million to one against a mako
wandering into shallow water, especially murky shallow water like around
here.
 
A blue shark's a possibility; a
blue might make a run at a person if he was bleeding, and if a bunch of them
went after someone, they'd rip him to pieces.
 
But we'd see the evidence — the bite marks are obvious."

"What about white sharks?
 
They're around, you've told me so
yourself."

"Sometimes," Chase said,
unwilling to tell Gibson about the big white he and Tall Man had tagged only
last week.
 
The last thing he wanted was
a mass vendetta against white sharks by an armada of blood-thirsty macho
loons.
 
"But rarely... almost
never.
 
And, hell, if a great white shark
had wanted to eat Buck, it would've eaten him.
 
Period.
 
If it had made a run at him by mistake, maybe thinking he was a seal —
divers in wet suits on the surface look like seals to a shark — Buck would've
probably been sheared in half.
 
We might
find the other half, we might not, but if we did, the bite marks would be
definitive:
 
big, nasty half-moons.
 
We sure wouldn't find him with his throat
torn out and meat bitten off him here and there like he'd been served up at a
banquet."

Gibson paused.
 
"I guess we have to wait for what the
M.E. says.
 
Maybe like you say, Buck just
died.
 
People do."

There was a rap on the door, and a
patrolman stepped into the room.
 
"They found Buck's brother, Chief," he said.
 
He hesitated, then added, "Over on
Seagull Point."

"What's the matter?
 
You look awful."

"He's dead, too.
 
Half
et
.
 
Just like the other one.
 
Like Buck.
 
Only difference, this one, Brian, had a knife scabbard strapped to his
leg."

"Just the scabbard?
"
Gibson said.
 
"No
knife?"

"Nope, the knife was gone.
 
The scabbard had one of them rubber safety
rings, too, so the knife didn't just fall out."

"
Which means Brian
had
it out, in his hand.
"
 
Gibson looked at Chase.
 
"So much for natural causes, wouldn't you
say?"
 
He nodded to the
patrolman.
 
"Okay, Tommy."