White Shark (20 page)

Chase turned, following Max's gesture,
took the boat out of gear and let it coast.
 
He saw something white on the surface; it slipped along the side of the
Whaler unit Chase reached over the side and stopped it.

It was a dead seagull, floating
belly-up.
 
At first Chase thought it was
whole, but then he picked it up by one leg and saw that the bird's head was
gone.

"Jeez!
"
Max
said, startled.

Chase examined the stump of the bird's
neck.
 
He looked for tooth marks, slash
marks, anything that might tell him what had decapitated the gull, but there
was nothing.
 
As far as he could see, the
bird's head had simply been torn from its body.

"There's another one!
"
Max said.

Chase dropped the dead gull into the
bottom of the boat and put the motor in gear.

The second gull was floating upright, its
head lolling forward.
 
It almost looked
asleep, but it lay too low in the water, and it bobbed unsteadily.
 
Chase picked it up by its neck, turned it
over.
 
Its legs had been ripped off, and
there was a ragged wound in its belly.

"What the hell...
"
Chase said.

"Bluefish?" asked Max.

"No, I think bluefish would've
finished the job, eaten the whole bird."

"What, then?
 
What did it?"

Chase shook his head.
 
"I don't get it.
 
I don't get
any
of this."

Max stood on tiptoe in
the bow, bracing himself with the rope, and looked toward the beach.
 
"There's
our wire," he said.
 
"And more
birds.
 
Lots more.
 
In the waves."

Chase aimed the boat at the shore and
gunned the motor.
 
When he reached
shallow water, he turned off the outboard, raised it and locked it in place so
the propeller wouldn't catch in the sand.
 
The
boat had enough momentum to coast through the
wavewash and nudge
its bow onto dry sand.

It was like traveling through a
slaughterhouse.
 
Dead birds were
scattered everywhere in the wavewash — some decapitated, some eviscerated, some
with their throats cut.
 
Chase picked up
one or two, glanced at their wounds and dropped them back into the water.

"It almost looks like something kids
would do," Chase said.

"What do you mean, kids?" said
Max.

"Sickos... you know... vandals.
 
Practically nothing in the ocean kills for
the sake of killing.
 
Animals kill for
two reasons:
 
to eat and to defend
themselves."

Max hopped off the bow; Chase followed and
pulled the Whaler farther up onto the sand.
 
They walked up the beach to the black wire, which the policeman had
coiled and tied.

They dragged the wire back to the boat,
loaded it aboard and pushed off from shore.
 
When Chase judged that the water was deep enough, he lowered the motor
and started it.
 
As the propeller roiled
the water, another dead bird surfaced and bumped against the side of the
boat.
 
Chase lifted it from the
water.
 
It was a young tern; its wings
had been torn from its body.

"Whatever did this," Chase said,
setting the bird gently back into the water, "did it just to do it.
 
Almost for the thrill of
it."

He aimed the boat eastward, toward the
island.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

When they were halfway home, slicing
through the long, easy swells, they saw a big, slow, broad-beamed boat heading
toward them.
 
The boat had a tiny
deckhouse forward and a huge open stern with a davit on each side.
 
As they passed the port-to-port, the captain
of the big boat tooted his horn, leaned out of the deckhouse door and
waved.
 
Chase waved back.

"Who's that?" asked Max.

"Lou Sims.
 
He hauls freight.
 
I guess he just dropped off Dr. Macy and her
sea lions... must've picked them up at the
New London
docks."

In the wake of the freight boat was
another boat, still a quarter of a mile away but coming fast.
 
It was a sleek white sportfisherman, with a
flying bridge and outriggers.
 
As it drew
near, it slowed, and a man on the flying bridge signaled to Chase that he
wanted to talk.

Chase took the motor out of gear and let
the Whaler drift.
 
"Hold on
tight," he said to Max.
 
"That
thing pushes a mountain of water around it."

As the fishing boat stopped, its deep hull
wallowed, and waves surged out from its sides.
 
Chase braced himself as the waves tossed the Whaler from side to side;
he saw Max stagger, then half fall, half sit onto the forward thwart.

"Been lookin' for you, Simon,"
said the man on the bridge.
 
"We
were trolling off Watch Hill; I seen a dead dolphin, for chrissakes, hitched up
in the rocks."

"A dolphin," Chase said.
 
"You're sure it wasn't a shark?
 
It was a dolphin... a porpoise?"

"You think I don't know a dolphin
from a shark?
 
It was a porpoise.
 
Just like Flipper, only younger, a baby.
 
I couldn’t get too close, but the thing
looked all cut to ribbons, like something had had at it.
 
I thought you might want to have a
look."

"I appreciate it, Tony," said
Chase.
 
"I will, right now.
 
Where was it exactly?"

"Just this side of
the lighthouse.
 
What the hell lives around here that can
catch and kill a porpoise?"

"Beats me."
 
Chase picked
up one of the dead birds.
 
"Maybe
the same thing that's cutting the heads off seagulls."
 
And maybe, Chase thought to himself, the same
thing that killed those two divers.

"Well, anyway... give me a call when
you figure it out."

"I will."

"Is that your boy?"

"Yep," Chase said.
 
"Max
...
Captain
Madeiras."

Max waved, and
Madeiras
said, "Come work for me some summer.
 
You can earn your lunch-pail degree."

"Thank you," Max said, "But
I don't have much exper—"

"Don't
worry,
you couldn't do any worse than that worthless Bobby down three."
 
Madeiras
laughed and gestured at the stern of his boat.
 
Then he shoved his throttles forward, and as the boat leaped ahead, its
two propellers scooped a deep cavity in the water.

A teenaged boy stood in the stern, looking
unwell and unhappy.

19

Bobby Tobin decided that the chances were
excellent that sometime in the next five minutes he would throw up.
 
With every breath the stink of blood and guts
and diesel exhaust got to him, and he had to swallow constantly to keep bile
from oozing into his mouth.
 
Every time
the boat yawed in the following sea he felt his stomach drop into his feet and
then rush up as if it would burst from the top of his head.

Though he knew it would make him feel
better, he didn't want to throw up — wouldn't throw up, refused absolutely to
throw up — for Captain Madeiras would never let him forget it.
 
Every customer that came aboard would be
regaled with the story of Bobby sprawled on the bulwark heaving his breakfast
overboard; lessons would be drawn about landlubbers, teenagers, summer people,
Protestants and kids who had life too easy.

Bobby rose to his knees and, careful not
to touch his shirt or any part of the gleaming white fiberglass with his bloody
hands, leaned over the side and drew several deep breaths of clean air, air
that didn't smell of diesel oil and dead fish.
 
He could see
Osprey
Island
behind them, and
beyond it Napatree Point, and, far in the distance, the water tower in
Waterboro.

"Hey, asshole,"
Madeiras
called from the flying bridge, "nobody told
you to take a break.
 
Swab
that shit off the deck before it dries."

"Yes, sir," Bobby said, and he
sucked in a last breath and turned to face the carnage on the afterdeck.
 
He had already cleaned ten bluefish — scaled
and gutted them and wrapped each carcass in newspaper — and another twenty
waited in the fish box on the starboard side.

What did two fishermen want with thirty
fish?
 
They wouldn't eat more than one or
two, there was no market for the rest — bluefish were so plentiful this summer
that the fish stores could make money only if they were given the fish for free
— and chances were they wouldn't even be able to dole them out to friends.

Trophies, that's all they were, badges of
manhood.

A dozen gulls hovered over the boat's
wake, cawing impatiently as if hurrying Bobby along.

He picked up the dip bucket by the
six-foot length of rope tied to its handle, walked to the open transom in the
stern, got a firm grip with his free hand, leaned over the transom and tossed
the bucket into the water.
 
It hit,
bounced, tipped, and suddenly filled, and the weight jerked at Bobby, almost
pulling him overboard.
 
He sloshed water
on the deck and scrubbed with a brush at the patches of drying blood and
scales, shoving them overboard through the transom and the scuppers.

The gulls wheeled over the new blood in
the water and squawked when they spied no bits of meat.

Bobby put the bucket aside, dropped to his
knees, took the filleting knife from the scabbard on his belt and reached into
the box for another bluefish.
 
He slashed
its gills to start the blood draining,
then
slit its
belly from throat to tail, reached inside the body cavity and pulled the guts
out and tossed them overboard through the transom.

The gulls dove frantically, two of them
snatching at the same piece of viscera, and they rose from the water, flapping
their wings and screaming as they tugged at the rubbery guts.

Bobby flipped the fish onto its side and
began to scale it with the blade of his knife, cursing himself and his father
and
Madeiras
and fate.

God, how he wished he'd gone to summer
school instead of taking this job.
 
His
father had given him the option, go to summer school or get a paying job.
 
In this economy, jobs were as scarce as teeth
in a goose; college graduates were bagging groceries, business school students
were tending bar.
 
He'd bee turned down
everywhere from the Mystic Seaport Museum to the Waterboro marina, and he'd
been about to start calling around to summer schools when all of a sudden his
father had called in an IOU from the Madeirases.

Manuel, the family's gardener, who had no
medical insurance, and whose hip-replacement surgery had been paid for by Mr.
Tobin, let slip one day that his brother Tony's mate had just come down with
hepatitis.
 
Without asking Bobby, Mr.
Tobin had called Tony and gotten him the job.

True enough, Bobby had gone along with
it.
 
The job had sounded great:
 
mate on a sportfishing boat.
 
Five bucks an hour, plus tips, maybe as much
as a hundred bucks a day on good days.
 
Outdoor work.
 
Learn
how a professional fishes.
 
The work was
long — seven days a week, weather permitting — but he had every night off, and
there were bound to be at least ten days of rain and wind that would keep the
boat ashore.

But there were a few things that nobody
had told Bobby.
 
First of all,
motorboats, especially thirty-eight-footers like the
Sea Hunter
, weren't like sailboats.
 
They didn't ride the wind and cut the waves and stay relatively stable;
they bounced and pitched and rolled, soaking you and bruising you and making
you sick all day long.

Second, the word
mate
really meant waiter, busboy, garbageman, slopsman,
fish-gutter, ass-kisser and drudge.
 
If a
customer lost a fish, it was the mate's fault:
 
he hadn't set the hook properly or hadn't grabbed the leader at the
right time.
 
If a customer puked, the
mate cleaned it up.
 
Worst of all and
most common, if a customer clogged the head, ignoring the prominent sign over
the flushing mechanism and tossing into the bowl a tampon, a cigarette filter
or a condom (it had happened), it was the mate's job to unclog and clean it
out.