Extinct (25 page)

“Uh-huh,” Nettie said.

The next step he was back up to his knees again. He looked behind him at the water, but it was too murky to see what he had stepped off into.

“I’m watching,” Nettie said.

“Will you be quiet, Nettie?”

“You can’t hear me anyway.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Nathan…” There was a change in her tone. She stared past him toward the near side of the markers.

The moon was brilliantly bright and Nathan had no trouble seeing the dark shape. But even in the bright illumination when he first saw what Nettie stared at he thought it had to be a boat without running lights. Then it moved its front to the side and lunged forward a few feet. The dorsal fin stood out against the clear background of the sky. The shark began to back into the water behind it. Slowly it began to sink. In a moment, all that could be seen was the tip of the thick fin.

And then it disappeared beneath the water.

A few hundred feet beyond the spot, the running lights of the
Intuitive,
moving west in the direction of Gulfport, combined with the moonlight to brightly illuminate Alan steering from the canopy-covered flying bridge. Carolyn rested her hands against the back of his shoulder. She kissed his neck softly. He turned his face toward hers and she nuzzled his cheek. The roar of the hundred-fifty-horsepower Mercury on the ski boat coming toward them was loud even over the sound of the
Intuitive
’s twin engines. “I believe Mr. Shark Soup and his friends are on a new case of beer,” Carolyn said.

A woman with her long red hair whipping in the wind and her legs bare under her light jacket, leaned over the stocky, dark-haired man at the wheel. Another skinny woman with short blond hair and attired in a similar jacket sat across the lap of the thinner, taller man in trunks and a windbreaker in the craft’s rear seats.

The stocky man pointed at the
Intuitive
and the redhead waved. He said something to her and she dropped her hand. The man in the rear of the boat came to his feet. The stocky man spun the steering wheel and the craft cut toward the
Intuitive
’s bow. He raced across it barely twenty feet in front of them.

Carolyn frowned. Alan looked across his shoulder as the boat sped around the
Intuitive
’s side, bounced across its wake, and came up their other side.

The thinner man came to his feet, facing them. He opened his fingers and cupped his hands toward each other, fashioning a ball.

“Boom!”
he yelled loud enough for them to hear and jerked his hands open and out to his sides.

The boat cut across their bow again.
“Boom!”
The hands flew apart. The women were laughing wildly.

“Boom! Boom!”

“Boom!” came back lower to the
Intuitive
now as the ski boat cut toward shore.

“Bo-om,” came back, barely perceptible, broken up by the wind now. Alan could see the man still jerking his hands apart as the boat angled toward the marked channel leading behind Deer Island. The blond yanked the man down into the rear seat of the craft. His skinny legs kicked up into the air.

*   *   *

In the ski boat, the skinny legs kicked up once more as the woman chewed on the man’s neck. He laughed and pushed her back and reached for the open case of beer in the bottom of the boat. “Howard?” he asked, holding one of the cans toward the front seats.

Howard reached his thick arm back and snatched the beer, let go of the steering wheel to pop it open, and lifted the can to his mouth.

The boat swerved. The redhead grabbed the wheel with one hand and held her other hand back over the seat.

“Peter,” she said.

The man slapped a beer into her hand, then came to his feet. “Speaking of peter,” he said, “I need some place to take a leak. You all want to shut your eyes?”

The redhead thought that was funny. The blond didn’t.

“You better not,”
she said, grabbing him by his wind-breaker and pulling him back into the seat.

Howard suddenly moved his face forward closer to the windshield. “Hey, Peter,” he said. His tone was different. “You see what I see?”

Peter looked in the direction his friend stared, but didn’t see anything. “What?”

“In the channel.”

Peter still didn’t see anything. And then he did. Nearly two hundred yards ahead, clearly visible in the mixture of moonlight and the glimmer of flashing lights from the line of tall, brightly illuminated casinos on shore, the thick tip of a dark fin sped between the channel markers leading toward Biloxi Bay.

“Son of a bitch,” Peter said. He looked back across his shoulder at the
Intuitive.
“They got our damn dynamite.”

“They ain’t got this,” Howard said, fumbling under his seat. He pulled out a heavy revolver with an eight-inch barrel and held it up in the air. “My madman stopper.” He pressed the throttle of the hundred-fifty-horsepower Mercury all the way forward.

The boat jumped in the water and raced for the pass.

CHAPTER 29

Nathan stood at the pay telephone. Nettie stood beside him, looking back toward the Sound.

“Coast Guard,” he repeated to the information operator, and then spelled it out, trying to sound as Southern as he could. “C-o-a-s-t g-u-a-r-d. Two words. Starts with a C.”

*   *   *

The hundred-fifty-horsepower Mercury roared. Howard waved his “madman stopper” over his head. Peter stood with his hands on the back of the front seats. The ski boat bounced across the water into Biloxi Bay and past the wide, rounded concrete pier fronting the Marine Education Center to their left.

“Where in hell did it go?” Howard asked.

“I’d just as soon we didn’t know,” the redhead said and looked back at the blond. She nodded.

“There!”
Peter yelled. He pointed ahead of them to the Highway 90 bridge running across the bay to Ocean Springs. Near the center of the bridge, the thick fin, barely perceptible in the bright moonlight, moved slowly along the base of the pilings coming down from the high, arched section over the boat channel.

Howard jammed the throttle forward and Peter had to grab the back of the seats to keep from falling.

They quickly closed the distance. The fin kept moving slowly, angling in and out of the pilings. Part of the nose surfaced. Howard raised the long barrel of the revolver over the windshield as the nose moved back under the water.

“Wait’ll we get closer,” Peter said. “You want to hit him good.”

“Wherever a slug from this hits him, it’ll be good,” Howard said.

The fin sank beneath the water.

“Son of a bitch!” Howard said. They were only a hundred feet away now and he eased back on the ski boat’s throttle. The boat slowed. Car lights flashed over their heads from vehicles turning onto the bridge in the direction of Ocean Springs. Small waves slapped gently against the boat’s hull.

“There,” Peter said.
“There!”

A hundred feet ahead of them the tip of the fin broke the surface of the water and moved slowly into the marked channel under the bridge. Howard eased the throttle forward. Peter smiled and nodded. The nose broke the surface.

Howard fired, the weapon recoiling in his hand and the sound of the shot deafening. The shark abruptly submerged, leaving the water swirling.

“Hit him right in the head!” Howard yelled.

The boat sped toward the channel.

The wide head exploded up through the surface. The mouth gaped toward them. The body rose ten feet into the air. Howard’s eyes widened. “Holy Christ!” Peter said. The body fell forward, splashing big waves out to its sides. And the fin sped out from under the bridge toward them.

Howard dropped the revolver and spun the wheel around, hitting the throttle. The boat jumped forward. The blond and the redhead stared back over their shoulders in shock. “You didn’t hit him in the head,” Peter said in a voice barely audible over the roar of the motor. “You didn’t even see his head.”

Spray began to rise to each side of the fin.

Howard glanced back over his shoulder, then ahead of him, and then back across his shoulder again. The spray was rising ten feet into the air now. The fin had already cut the distance in half. Howard jerked the wheel to the right and guided the boat directly toward the pier sticking out from the Scott Marine Education Center. The gap between the boat and the pier quickly narrowed. The gap between the boat and the fin narrowed even quicker. The redhead started climbing over the windshield toward the bow. Peter leaned forward over the seat and caught her around the waist, pulling her backward. She screamed. The blond fought past him toward the front seats.

“Look out!”
Howard yelled.

He jerked the throttle back at the last moment. Too late. The boat coasted rapidly in on its bow wave into the side of the pier. There was a loud crashing sound. The front of the boat caved backward. The blond shot forward as though fired out of a cannon. Peter and the redhead, his arms still holding her waist, tumbled through the air toward the pier. Howard slid face first through the windshield into the concrete and rebounded off of it back toward the wheel. Stunned, he came awkwardly to his feet, took two long steps on the boat, and hurdled up onto the pier, wobbled backward at its edge, and dove between Peter and the red-head. The blond scurried past them on all fours.

Behind them, the shark rose out of the water and came down hard on the boat, smashing it beneath the water.

*   *   *

Up and down the Sound, the radios of the charter boats and pleasure craft alike received the Coast Guard broadcast of the shark having been spotted moving in the direction of Biloxi Bay by an older couple out floundering. Carolyn swung the
Intuitive
around to the right and opened the throttles as much as she could without coming to a speed that might pull the section of meat from the big hook trailing the boat. Small waves beginning to build out to the sides of the craft’s bow, they moved in the direction of the channel passing behind Deer Island toward the bay.

CHAPTER 30

Alan and Carolyn stared at the flotsam drifting out from the Education Center’s pier. The crushed bow of the submerged ski boat bobbed next to the seawall. At the rear of the pier, four figures hobbled slowly in the direction of the brightly lit casinos rising high into the air a few hundred feet in front of them.

“Looks like Mr. Boom-boom is in for the night,” Alan said.

Carolyn lifted the mike from in front of her. “Coast Guard, this is the charter fishing boat
Intuitive.
”

“This is Coast Guard Station Gulfport. Go ahead, Captain.”

“There’s a small boat wrecked on the Scott Education Center pier at Point Cadet. Its four passengers are moving on foot in the direction of the casinos. I don’t know if there are any injuries.”

The Coast Guard responded by saying they would contact the Biloxi Police and signed off.

As Carolyn replaced the mike she glanced at the four figures again, then turned the
Intuitive
’s wheel toward the Highway 90 bridge and looked over her shoulder at the long line stretching taut in the water behind them.

*   *   *

Vandiver cradled the telephone receiver against his shoulder as he buttoned his shirt. “The artist’s interpretation is what I started thinking about, Douglas—drawing the megalodon’s head blunter than a white’s is only an artist’s interpretation. And what was that interpretation based on? A megalodon is cartilaginous. Cartilage doesn’t fossilize, it wastes away—nothing is left from which to interpret. There maybe were a few places where silt formed around a megalodon’s body and hardened and left a rough imprint of what it looked like. But that’s nothing. Think of the dinosaurs. They did at least leave fossilized skeletons—and there’s been many a dinosaur interpretation changed after subsequent finds of new bones. But there’s no bones to find of a megalodon.

“And the brown coloring.… An artist’s conception is all that is too. Hell, nobody really knows what color the megalodon was—it could have been pink. An artist’s conception, that’s all any of it is. All a guess. The megalodon could look
exactly
like the white of today, at least enough where that marine biologist in Mississippi couldn’t tell the difference; perhaps enough alike that nobody can tell the difference. Why not, it’s the direct great-grandfather of the white?

“We’re going to go look for ourselves. You get out to Andrews and find a flight where we can hitch a ride. You know how we have been catching hell about spending taxpayers’ money by using service flights rather than traveling commercial. But we haven’t got time to waste with a commercial flight, so find somebody already going that way. If you can’t find somebody already going that way, then give them a reason why they should—and I want to take off within the hour.”

“Sir?”

“Yes.”

“Sir, remember the length of the trench I saw? You said yourself that based on the size of the tooth the megalodon had to be at least forty feet in length. The white in Mississippi is only twenty-five. They said they saw it up close. I don’t see how they could have been that far off in their estimate.”

“I’ve thought about that, too. Why did I say it had to be at least forty feet? Because I used shark teeth of today for a comparison. Who’s to say that the megalodon doesn’t have teeth twice the size of a similar-length shark of today?”

“Then a megalodon wouldn’t look like a white, sir.”

“Teeth wouldn’t.”

“The depression I found in the Keys, sir. Its length—over fifty feet?”

“Did you see him lying there, Douglas, or where he had been lying? Hell, how do you know he didn’t scoot up the trench so that it looks like he is longer than he really is? He had to settle there, slide into it, come out of it, that would have stretched it some.”

There was no response, and Vandiver waited a moment. Then he frowned. “Douglas, son, I don’t know. Okay? You sound just like your mother in an argument; she has to have every damn thing hammered out in concrete before she’ll believe it. But bear with me, please. And have that flight ready for takeoff within the hour.”