Something’s Down There

Chapter Seven

The tide was a half hour away from being full and Willie Pender maneuvered his boat between the creosoted poles that marked the island’s homemade “floating” dry dock. Boats that needed repairs or their bottoms repainted simply pulled in over the supports framed by the scavenged telephone poles, waited for the tide to go out and dropped the hull on positioned planks so that the workers could get on with the repair work.

Ordinarily, this was such a mundane sight that it was rare to have an audience, but this day everybody was there, crowding for the best space to see what had happened to the launch’s bottom. Hooker tied up to the communal pier, grabbed a beer from the cooler and nodded toward Billy. “Want to see this?”

“Me?” Billy tried to sound surprised. “Why they want me to do the looking? Everybody else sees. They tell me later.”

“Hey, pal, you were all gung ho to get out there.” He waved his thumb toward the crowd. “Look at them, kiddo. They know what you did. Right now you’re their hero.”

Billy frowned. He didn’t like to be pointed out as someone special. He looked pointedly at Mako. “Sar, you were there too. It was your boat. The eater could have bit us. I saw your face. You did not... have the scare.”

“How do you know, Billy?”

“I see your face.”

“Okay, I wasn’t scared, but that’s what makes you the hero. You were scared and did it anyway.”

Billy started to grin at him and silent laughter shook his shoulders.

“What’s so funny?” Hooker asked him.

Rather than answer, Billy’s eyes moved toward the sea. When Hooker followed his glance he spotted the dot of a small outboard runabout heading straight for the Clamdip. Whoever was running it was crouched behind the windshield, running a good fifty or sixty miles an hour. As it got closer he saw a pair of the new black Johnson 130s powering it, but it was a craft he hadn’t seen before.

“That’s Miss Judy,” Billy told him.

“Damn, and I haven’t even had a bath,” Hooker muttered.

Judy cut the power; the boat came off the plane and settled gradually, taking up a position at the dock behind the Clamdip. She tied the fore and aft lines off, then climbed the ladder, where Hooker gave her a hand to the dock.

“You were really flying there,” Mako said.

“Was anybody hurt?”

“Willie’s launch took a lick, but he won’t know for a few hours yet. Nobody got a scratch. Little Jimbo was pretty shook up, but that was all.”

“What did they see?”

“Something was there, all right. It got fouled in Willie’s nets and right after we got there it snatched itself loose.”

“Willie called in and said the nets were sliced through.”

“I don’t know,” Hooker told her. “Could be.”

Judy looked at Hooker very carefully. After a few seconds she stated, “You saw something, didn’t you?”

“Yes, something.”

“What was it?” she demanded softly.

“Keep it to yourself?”

She nodded seriously, her eyes wide.

“It was big,” Hooker said.

“How big?”

“I only saw part of it. It was night, it was a hundred feet or more away and I only saw part of it... and it was big. In three seconds it was gone.”

“How about Willie... did he see it?”

“I doubt it. He was too busy trying to haul in his nets to see anything. I think Billy got a glimpse of something out there, but he’s not about to admit it now. Later he might tell about it around a campfire with his own friends, but he doesn’t want to know if there is a boat eater or not. Right now he’s not a very happy camper. At least you took his mind off the trip. How did you get the word?”

“My crew and I were washing down some pilings with the pressure hose. When one of them went back to get some coffee for us after sunup he heard the chatter on the radio. The way the story was blown up it sounded like the battle of Midway. Then when he said it was you out there helping... Judy paused in midsentence and a look of confusion swept across her face.

Mako’s mouth cracked in a smile. “Damn,” he said, “you were worried about me.”

“Don’t be preposterous! I just thought...”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, hell.” She grinned back. “Now I’m talking like a sailor.”

Mako just kept looking and his grin got bigger.

“Okay, I was worried,” she admitted.

He was close to her now. He could feel the warmth of her body and smell the sweetness she had brought with her. There was a strange brightness in her eyes and the breeze made her hair wave in its caress. Hooker said, “Lick your lips,” and with a slow, sensuous move her tongue flicked out and did as he said; her lips were full and moist and a deep red, and when he kissed her gently and softly she shuddered under his hands. She reached out, her hands barely touching him, her eyes almost closed, then by mutual consent they drew back and this time when they looked at each other they both knew that something very strange had happened.

Billy tried to be quiet, but his audible gasp of pure delight broke into the stillness and Hooker said, “I am going to give you a shark name, Billy.”

And Billy got quiet and moved down toward the end of the dock, where his admirers were waiting. Being named after a shark, any kind of shark, was something Billy certainly didn’t want.

It was fat Charlie Berger who saw them coming and got up and held out his hand to invite them to his table. Lee Colbert pushed himself to his feet and Chana did the feminine thing and just sat there, politely smiling. Alley was on the spot with two extra chairs and they all managed to get seated again, but without any feeling of closeness whatever.

“I understand your reputation has grown to heroic proportions,” Berger addressed Hooker.

“Anything can set that crowd off,” Hooker told him. “Actually, nothing really happened.”

“That’s not what Willie Pender said,” Chana cut in.

“Oh, something got snagged in his nets, all right. Those sports fishermen still come down here from Miami looking for that two-thousand-pound marlin and occasionally basking sharks show up. No boat eaters.”

“What hit Willie’s boat?”

“We’ll know when the tide goes out,” Hooker said.

Lee Colbert came right to the point. “What do you think it was, Hooker?”

After a few seconds’ reflection, Mako said, “I don’t know. All I got was a quick partial look. It was dark, something churned the water and then it was gone. Have you seen Willie’s nets yet?”

“Billy Haines is down there now.”

“Who brought in the robot?” Hooker asked suddenly.

The three of them were too well trained to give away information with a sudden, sly look. “Robot,” Chana said. It was almost a question, but not quite.

Then Mako dropped the ax. “Your instructions were to... coordinate with me.” His tone was cold and the message was clear.

Chana said, “I thought you were out of the business.”

“So did I,” he told her bluntly, “but the option is mine.”

“The robot was the Company’s idea,” Chana said abruptly. “That group will act under our orders.”

“Which are?”

This time Berger, Lee and Chana all looked at Judy Durant and said nothing. Hooker grinned and stood up. “Don’t let Judy here shake you up, kids. She’s in with some pretty heavy hitters too.” He looked down at her and added, “Let’s go, doll.”

Alley gave Mako a strange look when he moved with Judy to a table near the bar and signaled for two coffees instead of the usual beer. Across the rooms he could see Chana and the two men in a serious discussion, but they gave no indication of what it was all about.

Judy noticed his casual glance and said, “What robot?”

Alley set the coffees down, gave Mako a knowing wink of approval and walked away.

“Underwater exploration,” Mako told her.

“Why?”

“Because some agency of the United States wants to know what’s happening around here. That team will lay out a grid pattern and let the robot send up TV pictures of everything on the bottom. They have other electronic equipment on board to scan for anything within range that moves.”

Judy was watching him carefully now, sensing something she hadn’t quite realized. She sipped at her coffee, then put the cup down. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“You know these people pretty well, don’t you?”

“Only Chana, but the others are types I am familiar with.”

She looked puzzled now. “Billy said you were... a city man.”

Hooker shrugged.

“You’re a good fisherman.” When he didn’t answer she went on, “You have odd scars on you.”

“I was in a war.” He felt himself starting to go tight.

She paused, sipping at her coffee again. “Can you tell me what you... were?”

“Why?”

“Because everything seems to be coming apart. No matter where I look things are happening that I’m not used to seeing...”

“Judy... I was a government agent.”

Her eyes went wide. “Oh.” She stared at him hard. “The F.B.I.?”

His grin was almost imperceptible, but she saw it.

“My outfit was very unpublicized. Funding was circumspect, but we had plenty of it. Our jobs were... lethal.” Hooker stopped smiling. He had told her nothing, but he had told her everything.

“Lethal,” she whispered.

He knew she was thinking of the scars Billy had mentioned. “Not for me,” he told her. “Not yet.”

She was trying to assimilate this disturbing information and said, “What are you now, Mako?”

“A fisherman,” he said. “I cut loose from the agency a long time ago. Being here is strictly accidental.”

“You seemed to talk to... your friends... with great authority.”

Mako nodded solemnly. “I said I cut loose from the agency, not that they just let me go. In this job they always keep a string on you, some lead, some damn wire that can reactivate you back into their fold whether you want to or not. It’s nothing you do from eight to five, nothing you take a vacation from, it’s something that’s always with you. They let you out of the harness sometimes to retrofit, to let the wounds heal up, give you time to get your wheels back on the track again. Then when the time comes and they need you, it only takes the slightest little push to get you rolling again.”

“Mako... are you rolling again?”

“No way.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“I’m watching, doll. I’m looking. Nobody seems to realize it, but the players are all out there on the field trying to set the ball up for the big play and nobody even knows the game has been started in earnest. Sooner or later that ball is going to bounce off the field out-of-bounds and I’m going to grab it and run like hell with it.”

Judy frowned. “I don’t understand...”

“Without the ball there’s no game,” he told her.

“But what’s the ball?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, grinning. “But I’ll find out. First, though, let’s go see what hit the bottom of Willie’s launch.” They left the bar and strolled down to the pier.

The crowd had thinned out with the tide. Willie and two carpenters were standing on the support beams studying the barnacleencrusted planks of the boat’s bottom, scraping away the crustaceans on the starboard side. There were no bite marks, no regular scraping indentations of teeth, just a three-foot gouge in the thick wood that did no discernible damage except to show where the boat encountered something fairly sharp underwater, the same kind of scar boats got from being beached, or hitting a partially submerged log in open water.

Hooker saw Billy work his way around the bow of the boat until he reached Willie, then put his own fingers tentatively into the grove mark, feeling it from one end to the other. He seemed satisfied at what he saw, but the expression on his face said he was leaving room for doubt. He spotted Mako, waved, then climbed the supports to where Mako and Judy were.

“What do you think, Billy?”

“Something hit ole Willie.”

“Yeah, I know. You figure it out?”

His nod came reluctantly. “Wood very smooth. Like baby’s skin. No marks like many teeth.”

“Billy... forget teeth marks.”

“Something very big... heavy like iron anchor maybe... it got dragged along bottom.”

“Willie didn’t have an anchor out. He was in two thousand feet of water,” Mako reminded him.

“Yes,” Billy said simply.

“Anchors don’t float, Billy.”

“Yes,” he said again, as though Hooker were a simpleton.

“Just one tooth mark,” Hooker suggested.

Billy’s face brightened. He liked that scenario the best and he’d never seen the movie Jaws. He nodded vigorously. “Yes, just one tooth.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. You see the nets yet?”

“Sure. Now you can see. One big sharp tooth, that,” Billy told him.

Judy nudged Hooker with her elbow. “Aren’t you putting ideas into his head?”

“Not old Billy Bright. He knows what he knows and nobody is going to talk him out of it. There’s an eater out there and until we lay the proof right in his hand, that’s what’s always going to be out there.”

“Will it make a good movie?”

Hooker nudged her back. “You wouldn’t mind that a bit, would you?”

The Lotusland had all the equipment at hand to film it. Why miss the opportunity? “Would you?”

“That all depends.”

“On what?”

Hooker stopped walking and looked out at the area around him. Land development had not taken place yet. There were no signs of exploitation from the moneymen of the States, and the ocean wasn’t dotted with expensive cabin cruisers or exotic marinas with mahogany bars and fake lighting to produce a South Seas setting. It was natural and almost primitive, a place where a hand pump sucking up groundwater was state-of the-art plumbing. There were soft sounds with no blaring horns or jam boxes blaring out rap music. People were polite and helpful, and if anybody was otherwise or did disgraceful things, they were cut off from the island society and had to move on if they wanted to survive.

“On what the islanders would get from it.”

“With all the promotion and publicity...”

“They don’t need that stuff.”

“But... suppose Midnight Cruise ships put in here... would they profit? Wouldn’t they...”

Mako cut her off. “They’d only be exposed to another culture and one that sure wouldn’t be better than the one they have right now. The tourists would ruin this place. You’d be crammed with souvenir shops, T-shirt joints, sleazy motels...”

“What else could they have?”

“If it can’t be better,” Hooker said to her, “there shouldn’t be anything at all.”

Judy gave his hand a little squeeze, trying to understand him. “But what would be better for them?”

Hooker thought on that a moment, then said, “You know what a chandler shop is?”

“A store where they... fit out boats?”

“Pretty close. They’d need their own, supplying them with what they want, not what advertising agencies said they should have. Parts for older engines, for example. Top-quality fishing gear for their commercial needs. Navigation gear they can afford, that sort of thing.”

“How would they get that?”

“Beats me,” he said, “but that’s what they deserve.”

“Sar...”

“Yeah, Billy?”

“Do that Carcharodon megalodon come with only one tooth?”

Judy looked at the Carib in sheer amazement. “Billy... where did you come up with that?”

“Mr. Hooker, he one smart mister. He tell me what that big fish is.”

She looked up at Mako. “That right?”

“Well, he asked me. He saw pictures in a book.” He smiled at the look on her face. “If it come out of the sea, Billy wants to know about it.”

“In that case, I have a library of nautical books he might like. What about that, Billy?”

The Carib’s eyes had that impish look in them again. Hooker knew what he was thinking. Anything he could do that would keep Hooker and Judy together was as great as catching a black marlin on ten-pound test line. “That be very fine, missy,” Billy said.

“What have you got for me?” Mako quizzed.

“A look at Willie’s nets, that’s what.”

Willie had stretched out his nets to dry over a long double row of weathered two-by-fours. The torn ends were draped there and when Hooker ran his forearm under them and scrutinized them carefully, his mouth tightened and little creases appeared along his eyes. The tear wasn’t haphazard, the way the netting would be if it had gotten hung up on an oyster bed or snagged in rotted pilings. It was cleanly cut, as if with a knife, and the slice was long and even, and no matter how Hooker looked at it, Billy’s answer was closer than any. A onetoothed shark from the Miocene-Pliocene Age of many millions of years ago, the way the nutty evolutionists like to put it, seemed to be the culprit.

Hooker draped the nets back on the boards again. When he didn’t say anything, Judy asked, “What do you think?”

“Well, if we haven’t got an eater out there, we have a good taster. I wouldn’t want to be the guy who has to photograph this baby.”

“Oh,” Judy answered pleasantly, “they’ll find a way. Maybe with the robot.”

“Sure,” Hooker said.

Billy wanted to attend to the Clamdip and made a feeble excuse so that he could get back to the dock. Hooker grunted and muttered, “Who does he think he’s fooling?”

“Why?” Judy squeezed his hand again.

“That sucker just wants us to be alone.”

“Anything wrong with that?”

“On this island? Right now the gossip is going fast and hard.”

“Then why don’t we get in my boat and scoot back to my house. I can make you supper and we can pick out books for your friend.”

“And how do I get home?”

“One of my crew can run you back.” She stopped, smiled and looked up at him coyly. “That is, if you want to leave.”

“Little lady,” Hooker said, “something tells me I’m being suckered into a trap, but like any decent oversize fish, I’ll take the bait and see if I can’t throw the hook.”

“And if you can’t?”

“You don’t know this fish, doll.”

Unlike the last time, Judy’s house was totally empty. Two of the boys on the dock had tied up the runabout, then gone back to packing the day’s catch for shipment to Miami, shoveling ice down the chute into the hold of an old shrimper. A pair of local women who kept Judy’s quarters in shape were disappearing over the dunes, and the only sound was the quiet music that seeped out of the screened windows and made Mako feel as if he were in a movie sequence where lovely sound suddenly came up out of nowhere.

Even supper had an unreal quality about it, making him feel as though he were someplace else. A smile made his mouth twitch and he said, “The last time I tasted this sauce was in a little restaurant outside Paris.”

“My cook’s mother was born near Paris. Her recipes are served on all the Midnight Cruise ships.”

“And she taught everything to her daughter.”

“Naturally.”

“Judy...,” he said gently, “a meal like this takes about four hours to prepare.”

She nodded and sipped at her wine. “At least.”

“And it’s not what you make for just one person.”

Judy smiled at him, a sweet little smile that said everything without saying anything at all.

“I think I’m losing my touch,” he said. “I knew I was being suckered, but not this much.”

“You don’t approve?”

“Gal, I love it. Someplace Billy Bright must be grinning all over the place. Just tell me something... who set this up, you or Billy?”

“Actually, neither.”

“Oh?” He was wondering who else she had been expecting and it showed in his expression.

She let him simmer a few moments before she told him, “Nita suggested that since I was making such a mad dash across the island to see if you were all right, that I might as well bring you home for supper.”

“And you agreed to your servant’s suggestion.”

“Naturally,” she said again. “And I was hoping you’d come.”

“I took the bait, all right.”

“Now are you going to throw the hook?”

“Maybe I’ll just play with it a while.”

“That would be nice,” Judy said in a strange tone.

Judy’s father had had a very extensive library. There was a section for classics, an area that would have pleased any lawyer, another grouping on international financing and a dozen shelves of nautical volumes dealing with wooden sailing ships in the last three centuries. Mako pulled a couple out, glanced at the illustrations and put them back in their slots.

“My father loved the sea,” Judy told him. “He said he would have been a pirate back then just for the fun of it.”

“Most of that bunch died violent deaths. If they didn’t get shot up in battle they were hung on the docks.”

“Didn’t any of them get away?” Judy asked him.

“A few,” he said. “Some even became good citizens again.” His eyes met hers and he added, “Not many, though.”

“Wasn’t Sir Francis Drake a pirate?”

“The Spanish called him one.”

“He was a hero in England. The queen loved him.”

“Could you blame her? After he dropped all that Spanish gold in her treasury he was one of her pet boys.”

“Boy,” she mouthed. “Daddy always thought he was a real man.”

“He was.”

“Then why...”

“It just depends on where you sit.”

Judy knelt down and rummaged in the books on the bottom row. She tried two before she found what she was looking for, pulled it out and handed it to Mako. It was a volume on prehistoric sharks filled with illustrations and photos, including one of the men standing inside the jaws of Carcharodon megalodon to show the comparative size of the great fish. She said, “It was something like this that took Jonah. No whale did it. Their throats are generally very small and their food is krill and plankton, but a great white... now that’s a fish, and he could swallow a man whole without any trouble.”

“And keep him alive for three days?”

“Possibly.”

“With no digestion process working on him?”

“Very probably.”

“How?”

While she was searching through the index she said, “Some time ago a fisherman netted a great white and got it to shore alive. That’s one species that’s in great demand by aquarium owners and that fish was sold to one. They kept it in a tank for two weeks, but it wouldn’t eat and gradually started to die, but before it did it regurgitated a human forearm that was as fresh as the day the owner lost it.”

“Really,” Mako said sourly.

“Yes, really. But there’s more to it. They turned the arm over to the police, who took prints from the fingers, found the ID in their files and checked it out. They had belonged to a boxer on the mainland who hadn’t been seen for two weeks and was reported missing by his roommate.” She located what she had been looking for and turned the book over to Mako. “Here it is. When the police called on the guy’s roommate the man almost fainted. He couldn’t figure out how they had caught him. The two had had a fight out on the docks, he had knifed his friend to death, cut his body up into many parts and sailed out to sea and fed the pieces to the sharks. He had watched every bit go down a shark’s gullet. Nobody was ever going to know what had happened.”

“So what did happen?”

“Nothing extraordinary. It’s just that a shark has an odd capacity to be able to retain food without digesting it for some time.”

“And that took care of Jonah, right?”

“Well, let’s say other forces came into play here too.”

Judy waited while he read the entire account, then asked, “Satisfied?”

“They have things like this to read on the Midnight Cruise ships?”

“I wouldn’t think so, although they do serve shark as a meal selection.”

Mako handed the book back to her. “Let’s keep Billy in ignorance of this little story. With his imagination who knows where he’d go next. The eater would turn out to be a real gourmet.”

“For boats?”

“No, for people who were surrounded by a boat hull.”

Judy made a wry face and nudged him with her elbow.

Mako pulled another volume from the shelf. It was dated from 1904 to 1920 and seemed to be a history of the local islands, well studded with black-and-white photos. Peolle and Ara were pretty much the same and the lone picture of Scara Island showed an accumulation of wreckage of small boats and one two-masted sloop that was pretty well smashed up. The naval base where the Sentilla was doing its exploration work was functioning where the German government previously had had a submarine refueling facility.

Mako showed the page to Judy. “You know about this sub base?”

“Oh, yes. Most do, but they weren’t Nazis then,” she stated.

“Those World War One submarines couldn’t have made a trip this far at that time,” Mako said, puzzled.

“Read on. You’ll find they used a refueling sequence in those days too. Earlier, they had attempted to tow subs, but that proved too slow and dangerous. So they had supply ships meet them at designated spots at sea and resupplied their provisions.”

“And they were going to hit U.S. shipping?”

“They never got that far. One of the islanders sailed a canoe up to the States and put them wise. He had landed on a Florida beach where the sailors guarding the area held him prisoner for three days before he got somebody to listen to him.”

Mako frowned and shook his head. “I never heard of any subs being captured here then.”

“They weren’t. Their intelligence system got wind of it, radioed the boat commanders, and they blew the bottoms out of their subs before they were captured. Two more almost were caught, though.”

Mako waited.

“They didn’t get the message until they were fifty miles offshore. That’s when they saw our destroyers in the area and made a run for the base. They were submerging when one took a direct hit from one of the destroyers’ guns and went down with all hands before the destroyer could reach it.”

“What happened to the other one?”

“Oh, he submerged and they laid depth charges all around the area. The bottom is about four hundred feet in that area, so either the depth charges got him or the pressure crumpled the hull. They didn’t have the asdic devices then to pinpoint the wreckage, but they did a search thorough enough to make sure the U903 was gone. As a matter of fact, some graduate college students collecting data on World War One checked it out through the archives in Germany.”

“It’s a good story, doll. They ought to make a movie about it.”

“Should I?” Her tone was serious, but there were laugh lines around her mouth.

“Well, you could afford it, I suppose. You think your dad would have approved?”

“Sure,” Judy nodded. “He was a big risk-taker. Even when he was broke, if it looked good, he’d go for it.”

“Your dad didn’t inherit money?”

Judy busied herself putting the books back and straightening up the shelves. “Nope,” she told him, “not daddy. Every cent he got he earned.”

Mako made a small arc of motion with his head, taking in the room. “He did all right.”

“He was a good businessman, Mako. He took advantage of every opportunity and built up his little empire the hard way.”

“And now you have it all.”

Judy gave a small shrug. “I have good advisors. The big money interests they take care of. I’m sort of the lucky charm for the movie company.”

“How did Anthony Pell get into that?”

“Dad hired him. In fact, he brought him up from another company he owned.”

“Movies?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” she answered.

“What studio?”

“He was an independent. He and dad made four low-budget films that were released in Europe before they came to the U.S. and they made a bundle. Dad brought him into his company as a partner after that and the profits have gone up fifty percent. Luckily, he had a good block of voting stock in the Midnight Cruise line and that venture floated them in the early days, so they made out just fine.”

“Well... as long as it doesn’t disturb the tranquillity of the islands...”

Judy tossed her head and her hair did a little dance in the air. “Oh, Mako, they’re not the usual vacation tours. Those ships cater to casino towns where the rich can play the money games. I know it sounds awfully materialistic... and it is... but this is a wild generation that makes it hand over fist and spends it the same way. One-half the population has hunger pangs and the other half eats their way into a first-class casket. It’s crazy.”

“You can say that again.”

“I suppose you want to know where I stand in all this.”

Mako nodded. “I’m kind of wondering.”

Judy’s eyes met his with startling directness. “I don’t,” she said simply.

“You don’t what?”

“Mess with all that. I live here. I own this place free and clear and run a damn good fishing business with top restaurants on the mainland. I have no partners, so nobody can own me. I still have major hunks of dad’s old businesses, but I don’t control them. I probably could, but I choose not to. Long ago he assigned others to handle his affairs and I have let it stay that way.”

“What do you do with the money you make?”

“I pay taxes, bills, and bank the rest.”

“You a millionaire?”

“I was that when I was twelve. Next question.”

“What would you like to own?”

“A boat like yours,” she said.

“Why don’t you?”

“Because they don’t make those antiques anymore.”

Mako grinned at her. “I had a hard time finding mine, and it’s not for sale.”

“Got a classy name, though.”

He grinned again. “Ah, yes, the Clamdip. Would you like to take a cruise on her?”

“I’d love it.”

“We don’t stop at any exotic ports of call, y’know.”

“So I won’t dress up. When can I go?”

“Tomorrow. We leave the dock at six in the morning. What would you like for breakfast?”

“Billy Bright will know.”

“Good. I’ll tell him to leave the eyes in.”

“Certainly,” she said, and he knew she meant it.