Authors: Charles Wilson
Smacksmacksmacksmacksmack.
“Time,” Mr. Herald called. “Okay, work’s over; get the tents up, fires started, we’ll cook dinner, and then go fishing—and somebody get rid of those dead bass.”
The boys hurried to do his bidding.
* * *
The young deputy slapped at a mosquito on his neck as he leaned from his craft to hold the bow rope of the half-submerged aluminum boat.
The older deputy leaned from the other end of the craft as he stared at the line of jagged rips angling across the bottom of the aluminum boat’s stern. The line curved slightly as if somebody had hit the craft repeatedly with a sharp ax every few inches for a distance of three feet, changing the angle of the blows only minutely, but evenly, with each stroke.
“Who in hell would do that?” the younger deputy asked. “You can’t sink a boat with flotation seats by knocking holes in its bottom.”
“It’s like a giant old-fashioned bear trap,” the older deputy mumbled to himself.
“What?”
“I said it looks like the tooth marks from an old bear trap my granddaddy kept in front of his fireplace. In one way bigger than that in fact—one bigger than they ever made. And look how the punctures are damn near exactly the same distance apart. It’s as if somebody measured each blow with a ruler. Beats hell out of me, is what it does. And that’s with a big question mark.”
He reached for the cellular phone at his feet.
* * *
The foot, still in the expensive Ferragamo shoe, its laces still tied, sat on the stainless-steel table in the corner of the morgue.
“Mr. Leonard Fraizer the Third,” the medical examiner said. “Positive identification.”
Harrison County Sheriff Bobby Broussard, his thick frame in a pair of brown slacks and a blue sports coat that fit too tightly, stared at the shoe. He had a strange look on his face. “You put the shoe back on after you took the prints?”
“Didn’t take any prints,” the medical examiner said. He was a short, thin man with glasses that magnified his eyes to twice their normal size. “Called the shoe store in New Orleans where the captain of his Bertram said he shopped. It’s the kind he bought, the same size, and the color of the last pair he bought.”
“He ain’t gonna be buying any more,” the little man next to the sheriff said. He was even shorter and thinner than the medical examiner. The morgue’s all-around assistant. Dropped out of middle school in the eighth grade. Been irritated with everyone who didn’t ever since. He had been especially irritated when he had learned Leonard owned a Mercedes. He nodded his head at the justice of it all.
The door to the front office opened and Jackson County Sheriff Jonas “Pop” Stark strode inside the room. He looked at the foot while still walking toward Sheriff Broussard. He shook his head as he stopped in front of the medical examiner.
“There’s something not right about this.”
Broussard held out his hand. “Hi, Jonas,” he said.
Stark shook Broussard’s hand without looking away from the table. “Three bodies in three days. All that’s left is this and a piece of a hand. A pack of bull sharks? A school of piranha would have left more.”
“Was a hell of a lot bigger than a piranha,” the medical examiner said. “Look closely at the cut. It’s clean, one fell swoop at the bottom of the ankle—like a giant scalpel. When I was in med school in California, I saw a seal that a great white had killed—carcass washed up on the beach. There were big jagged chunks out of it. If you checked close you could see where each tooth cut cleanly—the jagged edges resulted from where the points of the teeth went deeper into the carcass than the body of the tooth, leaving a serrated effect. The shark that bit through this ankle had such big teeth that one tooth did this. Couldn’t be anything I know of other than a great white—a big one.”
Before either Stark or Broussard could respond, the doctor added, “I know there’s never been a white shark around here. Wasn’t before I moved down here, and never heard of one being anywhere up and down the coast since I moved here. But I’ll bet my Aunt Laura’s skinny butt we have one now.”
* * *
The Coast Guard forty-one cleaved the water rapidly, its bow throwing spray wide to its sides. Droplets of moisture blew back across Douglas and he turned his face away. Wearing a pair of flowered shorts hanging past his knees, his long legs bent cushioning his bouncing, his hands gripped the rail. Behind him his flippers, face mask, and double air tanks vibrated on the deck. Ahead of the boat the sky continued to darken.
He looked down at the side of the boat at the porpoise thrusting up out of the water and cleaving the next big wave easily. Another of the big animals, preferring a smoother ride under the troubled surface, continued to race in a blurred shape, knot-for-knot with the speeding boat, its throttles pushed all the way forward in an attempt to reach the site where the tooth had been found and, hopefully, back again, Douglas thought, before the torrential rains and lightning began.
His eyes caught the dark shadow out from the side of the boat as they raced past. His head jerked back in the shadow’s direction as it disappeared into the rolling wake behind the craft.
A big sea turtle?
A large ray near the surface?
He shook his head, took a deep breath, and, rubbing the back of his neck, stared up at the clouds racing toward the boat.
* * *
On the Pascagoula there was movement in the trees behind the riverbank. Nothing more could be seen for a few seconds. The deer’s head stuck around a gum trunk. A moment later the animal’s shoulder showed. It was a small doe. She stepped out from behind the trunk into the open. A fawn stepped around her. Born late enough in the spring to still carry pale spots against its brown coat, the baby’s movements were nevertheless agile, springy. A male, he came ahead of his mother to the edge of the river. As she lowered her neck to drink, he stepped past her into the water. His hooves sunk in the soft mud, his head tilted forward splashing the water, and he twisted and lunged backward onto the bank.
He stared at the water, then took a careful step forward, again moving into the water, but now only went a few inches past the edge of the bank. He extended his neck forward and began drinking. The mother’s head suddenly lifted.
Her front legs stiffening, she stared into the water a few feet in front of the fawn.
The mother’s movements were warning enough. The young male backed quickly to her side. The mother whirled. The fawn wheeled and dashed ahead of her, the two quickly disappearing into the thick trees.
In the water, the top few inches of a thick fin slowly surfaced, turned, swirling the water gently, and sank from view.
CHAPTER 16
Alan stood next to the fingerling tank. Ho had a big grin across his face. He patted the surface of the water gently. “Me and little woman do it again,” he said. The red snapper hatchlings were too small to be visible in the churning light-green water blurred with algae, but they were there. “She tired, I’m sure,” Ho added. “But I tell her Chang call this morning and say he has relief on way. She be friends with me again.”
Alan pulled the sleeve of his sports coat back and glanced at his watch. “Rayanne’s not going to be pleased with me unless I get her presents.” He ran them off in his mind: candy, perfume, and pajamas—cotton. And something to surprise her with. “I’m going to go now before I get tied up and forget.”
Ho nodded. “Good to not make her angry. She make good roast beef and carrots. And fried cucumbers—never heard that until I met Rayanne.”
* * *
Sheriff Stark tried to look through the big magnifying glass the medical examiner held over the round stub of the ankle. He finally took it from the doctor’s hand and held it down close to the cut, where the ankle had been severed close above the top of the shoe.
“See the fibers,” the doctor said. “Smooth, slick, like a serial section in a lab; even the talus and the calcaneus, one clean cut did that, one tooth, sharp as a scalpel and as wide as the ankle.”
Stark straightened and held his thumb and forefinger about three inches apart.
The doctor nodded. “At least,” he said.
* * *
Alan slid behind the steering wheel. He slipped his cellular phone from inside his coat as he backed the Jeep toward the street. A couple of minutes later, the phone at his ear, he turned off Bay view Drive toward Highway 90 and the beach area running alongside the twin cities of Biloxi and Gulfport.
* * *
In the morgue, Sheriff Stark listened on the telephone as Mrs. Hsiao gave him Alan’s cellular number.
He quickly punched in the digits, listened to the receiver for a couple of seconds, then replaced the phone on its cradle.
“Busy,” he said, and looked back at Leonard’s foot in the Ferragamo shoe.
“A helluva big shark,” Sheriff Broussard said.
Stark looked in the direction of the doctor standing next to the door on the far end of the morgue as a body was wheeled inside. “If he knows what he’s talking about,” Stark said in a low voice.
“You saw the fibers yourself,” Broussard said.
“And what did that tell me?” Stark came back. “That I thought I was seeing what he told me I was supposed to be seeing.” He reached for the telephone, and punched Alan’s number in again.
“Still busy,” he said a moment later.
“Coffee?” the doctor asked from the side of the room, and held a steaming cup in their direction.
Stark stared at the cup a moment. It certainly wasn’t a Folgers morning in the morgue with the sharp smell of the antiseptic in the air and the stench of something else, pungent and … well, dead. But coffee did
sound
good. He walked across the room, at the same time suddenly deciding he would take his black when he saw the doctor lift an uncovered sugar bowl off a shelf stacked with gallon bottles of preserved organs, some of them with their lids ajar, and the spot where the bowl had sat, stained where liquids had sloshed.
* * *
Alan finished his conversation, slipped his phone back inside his sports coat, and turned the Jeep west down Highway 90 toward the Edgewater Mall. Out in the Sound, a fifty-three-foot Hatteras made its way in the direction of Pascagoula. There was a stiff wind from the north, and a darkly tanned young girl with blond hair rode a sailboard slashing rapidly across the dark water beyond the shallow-water markers. A small Coast Guard boat came toward her so fast it appeared it might run her over. The boat slowed and cut out to her side, stopping as it came up beside her. Alan stopped for a red light. His telephone rang.
It was Rayanne.
“I already told you Happy Birthday,” he said, “so that can only mean you’re checking on me.”
“Would I do that?”
“Or else wanting to know what I’m buying you.”
“No, actually I’m getting ready to step inside the supermarket and I wanted to know what you would like me to fix you for
my
birthday dinner.”
“Bribery.”
“Call it what you will.”
“Just some simple steaks and a baked potato.”
“Simple? At what steaks cost?”
“I’ll grill them for you.”
A pickup made a U-turn at an intersection just ahead of him, cutting across the Jeep’s front, and he had to slow to keep from clipping the truck’s rear. He frowned, then saw who drove it and smiled. It pulled into a service station and he turned off the pavement behind it.
“Happy birthday again,” he said into the phone. “I’ll see you around eight.”
* * *
Stark replaced the receiver on its cradle in the morgue and shook his head. Broussard sipped from his coffee. Another body came in through the door at the far end of the tile.
“Fun place,” Stark said.
* * *
When Ronnie Khulman stepped from his pickup in front of the gas pumps, he saw Alan’s Jeep stopping behind him and smiled. Friends since high school, they had played junior college football together, then gone to separate universities, Alan to USM and Khulman to Ole Miss. They shook hands at the rear of the pickup.
“In town for the weekend to see Mother,” Khulman said, “and then back out to the big D again. She tells me you’re getting ready to break ground on a new plant—an entrepreneur headed to the top. You going to loan me some money when I need it?”
Alan smiled. “What does a plastic surgeon make nowadays?”
“I thought enough, until my accountant told me what I owed Uncle Sam. But they left me barely enough to buy an old roommate a beer—if you still drink beer.”
“Fine, let me park my Jeep out of the way and then you can get the DUI.”
“You know,” Khulman said, squinting his eyes up into the sky, “I believe it is hotter here than in Dallas.”
Alan looked at the blazing sun and began slipping off his coat as he walked toward his Jeep.
* * *
The younger deputy shook Fred’s hand. “Jim Fairley,” he said.
“Fred Herald.”
Edward handed Fairley the rod and reel and bill cap he had found on the dam. “The pole’s back by the creek,” Fred said. “I left everything just the way it was.”
They started around the edge of the slough.
The boys waited by the boats.
* * *
A mile downstream, on the same side of the channel as the boys, the blunt, rounded nose of the creature silently broke the surface of the river. The mouth gaped slightly as it rose quietly out of the water. The shark continued to rise until five feet of its thick body poised above the surface. A few feet in front of the shark, the trees grew thick along the bank, allowing only the barest glimpse of anything behind them.
Movement. The lean, low shape of the small doe could be seen for a brief moment. A prancing movement beside her, near her stomach. The fawn’s pale white-on-brown coating allowed only a blurred glimpse of the animal’s thin body. Continuing behind the trees, they vanished again.
The shark slowly sank back into the water. A slight rippling of the brown surface as it closed over the wide head. Another narrow, longer ripple created a line moving downriver in the same direction as the deer.
* * *
The ringing sound came for the second time. The attendant filling a car with gas realized it wasn’t the telephone inside the station ringing. He looked toward the Jeep parked in the space in front of the rest rooms.