White Shark (24 page)

As they passed to the south of
Block Island
, Amanda gave Max a few mullets to feed to
the sea lions; she climbed the ladder to the flying bridge and stood beside
Chase.
 
Rounding a point of land, they
could see a couple of dozen people on a sheltered beach.
 
Children wearing inflatable water wings
played in the wavewash; two adults wearing pastel bathing caps swam back and
forth twenty yards beyond the surf line, and a teenager lolled on a surfboard.

"Every time I see people swimming
offshore," Chase said, "I think how lucky it is that they can't see
themselves from a couple of hundred feet in the air."

"Why?"

"‘Cause if they saw what swims within
ten or fifteen feet of them every few minutes, they'd never set foot in the
water again."

"Are there that many sharks?"

"No, not anymore, not the way there
used to be.
 
But it doesn't take many to
start a panic.
 
It only takes one."

A hundred yards off the beach, a
lobsterman was pulling his pots.
 
He
cruised up to a buoy, grabbed it with a boat hook and hauled it aboard, fed its
rope through a block and tackle suspended from a steel A-frame, wrapped the
rope around a winch and brought the wood-and-wire lobster pot up onto his
bulwarks.

Chase waved to him, and the lobsterman
looked up, began to wave,
then
noticed the ‘O.I.’
stenciled on the side of the big white boat.
 
He aborted his wave, and instead banged one fist into the crook of the
other arm and shot Chase the finger.

"How charming," said
Amanda.

Chase laughed.
 
"That's Rusty Puckett," he
said.
 
"He doesn't like me very
much."

"So I see."

"Lobstermen are a strange breed.
 
A lot of them believe the sea is their
private reserve, that they've got some God-given right to put traps wherever
they want, whenever they want, to catch however much they want, and the rest of
the world
be
damned.
 
Lord
help
anyone who messes with their traps;
they'll sink one another, shoot one another."

"And you messed with his traps?"

"Sort of.
 
Before I owned
the island, he used to use it as a camp, a storehouse, a trash dump.
 
He set his pots everywhere, not just in the
shallows but in the channel and by the dock.
 
I couldn’t get in or out, and kept fouling my propeller in his
lines.
 
I asked him to move them, he told
me to piss off.
 
I went to the Coast
Guard, but they didn’t want to get mixed up in it.
 
So one day, Tall Man and I pulled all his
pots, emptied them and gave the lobsters to the old folks' home, then reset his
pots out here.
 
It took him about two
weeks to find them.

"He knows we did it, but he can't
prove it, and when he accused us,
Tall
just said it
was a warning from the Great Spirit.
 
Rusty's stupid, but he's not suicidal, he wasn’t about to go up against
Tall, a giant who feels the same way Rusty does about the law.

"So he left his pots out here, partly
‘cause the fishing's better out here anyway."

"He should be happy, then."

"You'd think.
 
But Rusty harbors grudges.
 
And he doesn’t like it out here.
 
Nothing ever happens, there's no excitement,
nobody to get upset with or take a shot at."

They traveled on in silence for a few
minutes,
then
Chase turned and looked aft.
 
Block Island
had receded behind them into a shapeless gray mass.
 
He throttled back and took the boat out of
gear.
 
"We're here," he said.

"We're where?"
 
Amanda looked around.
 
"I don't see a thing, not a bird, not a
fish, nothing but
empty ocean
."

"Yeah," Chase said, "but I
can feel ‘em, I can smell ‘em, I can practically taste ‘em."
 
He grinned.
 
"Can't you?"

"What?"

"Sharks."

22

Rusty Puckett watched the boat speed away
to the east, its white hull seeming to be absorbed by the ocean swells
until,
at last, all he could see were occasional flashes as
the steel superstructure on the flying bridge caught the sun.

Son of a bitch, he thought, I hope you
sink, I hope you hit something and go down like a stone.
 
Or maybe catch fire first,
then
sink.
 
Yeah, fire's good, something nice
and nasty about a fire.

Maybe he should go over to the island some
night and set fire to something.
 
Teach
them a lesson about messing with him.
 
‘Course, they'd likely know he did it, then that fuckin’ King Kong of an
Indian would be all over him like drool on a baby.
 
He should probably think about it for a
while.

He opened the door in the trap balanced on
the bulwarks and looked inside.
 
Two
lobsters were in the far corner, their antennae waving back and forth.
 
One was a good size, a couple of pounds at
least, and Puckett reached in and grabbed it behind the head, avoiding the
claws, and pulled it out and dropped it into the box on the deck.

The other was much smaller, probably a
‘short,’ a youngster that should be thrown back and allowed to grow for another
year or two.

Puckett considered measuring the carapace
to confirm that the lobster was a short, but then he thought:
 
Hell, if I don't take it, someone else
will.
 
So he pulled the lobster from the
trap and, with a single swift twisting motion, tore its tail off and dropped
the head, legs and claws — still writhing — overboard, and watched them sink
out of sight.

He set the tail on his cutting board.
 
He'd shell it later and sell it for lobster
salad.
 
Nobody'd ever be the wiser.

He rebaited the trap, tied the door
closed, shoved the trap off the bulwarks and let the rope slide through his
hands till it went slack, which told him that the trap was on the bottom.
 
Then he chucked the buoy overboard, put the
boat in gear and motored slowly along the line to the next one.

Ten down, ten to go.
 
He already had eighteen ‘bugs’ in the box,
he'd likely have thirty or more by the time he was through... not bad for a
morning's work.

Puckett reached his next buoy, put the boat
in neutral, leaned over the side, snagged the buoy and brought it aboard.
 
He fed the rope through the block, wrapped it
around the winch and turned the winch on, keeping a hand on the rope to guide
it around the drum.

He heard a scream from the shore, and he
looked and saw a tall blond girl being chased along the hard-packed sand by her
boyfriend.
 
She was wearing one of those
bikini bathing suits that weren't so much a bathing suit as a come-on — what
did they call them?
 
Butt floss — and her
hooters bounced up and down like two melons.

Nice, he thought.
 
He wouldn't mind having some of that.

The girl suddenly stopped running and
turned and kicked sand and water at the boy, and he shouted something and
charged at her, but she veered away from him and dove into the water and
started swimming.

Come on out here, honeybun, Puckett
thought, I'll show you how it's done.

The girl treaded water beyond the wave
line, taunting the boy until he dove in and swam to her.
 
Together
 
they
breaststroked down the beach,
moving swiftly with the tide.

The trap bumped against the bottom of the
boat.
 
Puckett shut off the winch and
pushed the rope as far out over the side as he could, guiding the trap out from
under the boat and up to the surface.

Something was wrong:
 
the trap was hanging at a weird angle, as if
one end were much heavier than the other.
 
He leaned on the bulwark and grabbed the trap with both hands and heaved
it aboard.

One end of the trap was gone.
 
Splinters of wooden slats hung from pieces of
shredded wire.

He looked inside.
 
At first, the trap looked empty —
no
bait, no lobsters, nothing.
 
Then, as he
looked closer, he saw bits of shell and two lobster legs caught in the wire
mesh.

What the hell
? he
thought.
 
A poacher wouldn't do
this,
he'd do it the easy way:
 
pull the trap,
open the door, take the lobsters and toss the trap back.
 
A shark?
 
No, a shark would've
beat
the trap to pieces, maybe crushed parts of it as he ran away with it.

Puckett unshackled the rope from the shattered trap, pushed the trap
overboard and walked aft to fetch a spare.
 
He always carried four spares, because you never knew:
 
traps got stolen, had their ropes cut by
propellers, drifted away in storms.
 
He
rigged the spare, baited it and shoved it over.

The next trap he hauled was the same, only worse.
 
Two sides were bashed in, and the door was
ripped off, gone.
 
Half a dozen lobster
antennae were scattered around the bottom of the trap, which meant that there
had been at least three lobsters in there.
 
Something had torn them to pieces.

But what?

No octopus would do that to a trap.
 
There were no giant eels around here, no squid big and mean enough.

How about a gigantic lobster?
 
They
were cannibals, and a huge enough one might crush a trap.

Gimme a break, he told himself, that lobster'd have to be the size of a
goddamn Buick.

Whatever did this was big and strong and either angry or crazy, and it
had some kind of tools to work with.

A man.
 
It
had to be a man, but what man would want to...

Chase.
 
Simon Chase.

Sure, it made sense.
 
Why else
would Chase have waved when he went by?
 
They weren't exactly bosom buddies.
 
He was stickin' it to old Rusty, not content with running him off the
island where he'd been lobstering the better part of twenty years, not content
with pushing him all the way to hell-and-gone out here, now he wanted to drive
Puckett out of business altogether.

Yeah, that wave was the key, the giveaway.

Okay, Mr. Simon
fucking
Chase
from your Osprey
fucking
Island
Institute... you want a war, you
got
a war.

Conjuring up a suitable revenge, Puckett replaced the trap and gunned the
engine, racing down the line to the next buoy.
 
Chances were, Chase had wrecked all the rest of the traps, but he'd have
to pull them all to find out.

Anger returned like an incoming tide as Puckett realized that he had only
two more spares, which meant that he'd have to go all the way back to town,
collect some more and come all the way out here again.

Anger distracted him as he reached for the next buoy.
 
It should have been floating with the tide,
its rope angling downward, but it wasn't; it was bobbing, as if something was
tugging on it.

Puckett didn't notice.
 
He hooked
the buoy and brought it aboard and wrapped the rope and started the winch.

Immediately, the winch whined, the boat heeled over and the rope began to
skid against the drum.

Now
what? Puckett thought.
 
The damn thing must've got itself hitched in
the rocks.

No, that wasn't it, couldn’t be, because now the rope was grabbing, the
winch was bringing it in
... slowly
, as if it had a
huge weight on it; but it was coming.

Weed.
 
It probably had a hundred
pounds of kelp wrapped around it.

He grabbed a six-foot gaff hook and leaned overboard, prepared to tear
the kelp away before bringing the trap aboard.

Suddenly the boat popped upright and the rope came faster.

Maybe the kelp fell off.
 
Maybe...

The trap came into view, a dark shape against the green mist.

There was something beside it, caught in it... no, pushing it... it was
whitish, and...

Jesus Christ, Puckett thought, it's a body.

But, no, it wasn't a body, and it was swimming, and fast.
 
Its mouth was open, as were its eyes.
 
It had hands — or claws — and they were
reaching up at him.