The Steel Shark

Chapter 8

Joe moved his head and decided he never wanted to do that again. Each heartbeat slammed painfully inside his head. He started to count each throbbing beat, but that caused the corresponding colors to flash across his mind, which made everything so much worse. He worried he would vomit.

Nails clicked on the floor as Edison approached the bed. He brought with him the smell of a fish market at the end of the day. Joe stumbled into the bathroom, relieved to be home safe and sound with Edison. Vivian had been with him before he lost track of what was going on. So, they were all three (red) safe and sound. Unlike the driver of Prince Timgad’s sub.

A damp nose nudged Joe’s hand before a cool tongue lapped his cheek.

“Hey. Good boy.”

Edison stopped licking him.

He wobbled, but managed to stay upright, so he was counting that as a win. He opened the old-fashioned medicine cabinet and took out a bottle of aspirin. He knocked back a few and cup after cup of cold water. Edison’s brown eyes followed every movement.

“I’m fine. But you’re not going to like what comes next.”

Edison cocked his head.

“Bath.”

Probably thinking of escaping, Edison looked toward the door.

“Nope. Sorry.”

Joe turned on the shower and filled up the antique claw-foot tub, adding a dollop of oatmeal dog shampoo. “You first.”

Edison gave him a long-suffering look before he jumped in, and Joe grinned. Life was back to normal. By the time he’d washed the dog, washed himself, brushed his teeth, and gotten dressed, he felt almost human.

He grabbed the laptop from his nightstand and booted it up. He wanted to identify the sub that had hit him while the memory was fresh in his mind. First, he sketched it out, trying to remember the dimensions, the outline, and the shape and location of the crow’s nest thing perched on top. He had a good visual memory, and the sketch came easily.

Then he brought up a list of current submarines. At around two hundred feet (blue, black, black), the sub he’d seen was too small to be nuclear, but it had looked fairly modern. Pattern recognition was his superpower, and he quickly identified the vessel that had run him down: a Swedish Gotland-class submarine.

A little more time online and he learned a submarine of that type had been lent to the US government for practice war games, but was currently supposed to be back in Sweden. He even found a photo of it patrolling the Baltics dated a few days earlier. So, the ship he’d seen couldn’t have been that one.

According to the Internet, the Saab Group had built three (red) subs of that class at the Kockums shipyard in Malmö. If the sub hadn’t been the Gotland, it could have been the Uppland or the Halland. They sounded like IKEA furniture names. He’d nearly been killed by an IKEA submarine. That didn’t seem likely. Why would the Swedes be hanging around off the coast of New York running over civilians?

He dug deeper and discovered a news story about a hacking at a Swedish military installation. Details were sparse, but it looked as if a foreign entity might have stolen the design for the Gotland-class submarines. Searching told him the culprit hadn’t been identified, but suspicion had fallen on China. China was notorious for hacking classified military documents, so it wasn’t farfetched. If China had obtained the plans, maybe they had built the sub that had run him and the prince down. They could have sold it to anyone. Made more sense than angry Swedes.

Eventually, Edison whined and looked at the door, and Joe realized he was starving. The dog must be hungry, too. Shame on him for ignoring Edison. Edison was a hero and ought to be treated like one.

“Let’s see about food.” He ruffled Edison’s damp ears. “We’ve got steaks in the fridge.”

Edison’s tail wagged at the word steak. He’d earned that treat and more.

“Steak?” Joe said, heading down stairs carpeted with a red Persian runner older than he was. “Who wants a steak?”

Edison ran ahead. His toenails were muffled by the rug as he bounded down the stairs and through the hall. Joe followed a lot more slowly, a hand on the wall. His head ached, he was dizzy, and he felt weak. Overall, though, better than he’d expected. While the knockout drug had a lot of unpleasant aftereffects, none was as bad as being dead.

“Are you feeling better, Mr. Tesla?” Mr. Rossi, his lawyer, stood at the foot of the stairs. As usual, his salt-and-pepper hair was immaculate, his Italian suit perfectly pressed, and he looked like George Clooney. His tie was embroidered with tiny anchors. Joe had seen enough anchors for a while, but he smiled.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “Is Vivian OK?”

“She suffered a cracked ulna, but is otherwise fine. She wished to be here until you awoke, but I sent her home to rest and took her place.”

“Thank you for both.” Vivian never accepted you-saved-your-boss’s-life bonuses, but he knew her mother needed a new refrigerator, so he’d have a fridge delivered to her house. It might bother her, but once it was installed, she couldn’t send it back.

“Some gentlemen from the New York Police Department’s Harbor Patrol Unit are here to speak to you about the accident.”

As if on cue, two (blue) cops came out of his parlor. The older cop looked to be in her early forties, with the leathery skin that comes from being outside in all kinds of weather. The younger was maybe late twenties, his potato nose peeling from a recent sunburn.

“Thank you for pulling us out of the water. I’m Joe Tesla.”

“Detective Bellum.” The woman stuck out her hand, and he took it. She had a strong grip, as if she were proving a point.

“Detective Hap.” The younger guy had a strong handshake, too.

Both were asserting their dominance already.

He wouldn’t be dominated in his own home, so he turned away and headed for the kitchen. He’d promised Edison a steak, and he needed food himself.

“Mr. Tesla.” Bellum’s voice sounded like she’d smoked a pack a day for twenty (blue, black) years. “We need to talk to you.”

He didn’t slow his pace. “In the kitchen.”

Mr. Rossi didn’t voice an opinion.

Joe took steaks out of the converted icebox, cut one up, and dropped it in Edison’s bowl. Edison finished eating before Joe finished washing his hands. “Hungry, boy?”

Edison wagged his tail.

“Mr. Tesla,” said Bellum. “Tell us what happened out in the water.”

“Our sub got sunk.” He dropped the remaining steak on a cookie sheet, drizzled olive oil on it, rubbed in coarse salt and pepper, and dropped a handful of frozen green beans next to it. He walked over to his stove. An elegant piece from the 1920s with gently curving legs like a table, a trio of burners, and an oven that opened at waist height all painted with a glossy white enamel. He’d rewired it himself. He slid the tray into the oven and set it to broil. “Anyone want a drink? I have—”

“Sunk? By whom?” Bellum moved to stand in front of him.

“I’m sure Vivian Torres gave you the details.” He stepped around her and went over to the pantry, where he got out dry food for Edison. He didn’t remember exactly how he got to the surface. Based on his headache, she’d knocked him out somewhere, but he wasn’t going to talk about that part.

“And now we’d like to confirm her details.” Bellum again. Apparently, the other guy was just there for decoration.

He gestured to his kitchen table. Once everyone was sitting, he gave them a rundown of events, including his recent research, ending with, “Who does the giant submarine belong to?”

“There’s no record of a submarine of that type being in that location,” Bellum said.

He looked over at Mr. Rossi, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. That’s why they were here. They hadn’t believed Vivian’s story. Or they hadn’t wanted it to be true.

“I saw it. Miss Torres saw it. There has to be physical evidence. The ocean floor is pretty muddy there. It must have scraped a trench along the bottom when it took out our two subs.”

“Did it leave a trench?” Bellum asked. “Exactly where?”

“I have the GPS coordinates… ” On his sub’s computer, at the bottom of the ocean. “Near where we were picked up by the Harbor Patrol. Right by the contest flags. Blue Dreams had the GPS coordinates for the flags. I’d say start there.”

“We found a body there.”

“I’m sorry to say I’m sure you did.” He’d seen it, after all.

“The body recovered was of the bodyguard of Prince Timgad. The prince himself was not aboard.”

Lucky for the prince, not so much for the bodyguard. “And the sub?”

“We found the remains of Prince Timgad’s sub in that location, as well as yours. But no larger submarine.”

“It seemed very mobile,” he said. “It probably didn’t wait around.”

“The US Navy assures me they would know if a submarine of that description were anywhere near New York, and if there was one, such a thing would be a matter of national security, and we’d appreciate you not disclosing it to anyone outside of law enforcement.”

Someone was clearly covering his ass. He got up and fetched his steak from the broiler. His stomach growled.

“The Harbor Patrol officer says you were impaired when he brought you on board,” Bellum pressed.

He swallowed a bite of steak. “I hit my head.”

“Are you certain your condition wasn’t alcohol- or drug-related?”

“Yes.” Not exactly. His head ached. Definitely drug-related. He forced down another bite of steak.

“Maybe you saw the shadow of a boat passing overhead and mistook it for a submarine.” Bellum wanted him to agree with her scenario.

“A shadow couldn’t smash up my sub. Or the prince’s.”

“Maybe your subs collided, and you’re misremembering.” She didn’t sound like she believed the maybe part of that sentence.

“Nope,” he said.

“Maybe you were driving while impaired.”

He looked over at Mr. Rossi. “My head hurts. I need to have a doctor look at it.”

“I’ll call Dr. Stauss,” Mr. Rossi said. “You should go lie down.”

Joe dumped the remains of his steak into Edison’s bowl. A couple of gulps later, it was gone. Double steaks. Edison’s lucky day.

“I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful,” Joe said to Bellum and Hap.

Bellum rose, too, and handed him her card. “Call me if your memory of the incident returns.”

Face unreadable, Hap stood next to her.

He set the card on the table. “And I’m certain my account tallies with that of Miss Torres.”

“How can you be so certain?” Officer Bellum asked. “Did you collaborate?”

“It’ll tally because it’s the truth.” He looked into Bellum’s gray eyes. “I hit my head underwater and was taken aboard the helicopter in a semiconscious state. As you can see, I just woke up. So, when would we have had an opportunity to collaborate?”

“Maybe before you left home in the first place,” Bellum said.

“I think you need to go,” Joe said. “I’m done talking.”

She walked down his old-fashioned hallway, tanned hand nearly brushing the ashes-of-roses wallpaper. Hap trailed behind like a puppy.

Joe opened the wood and glass door and showed them out onto the porch of his Victorian house. They were buried over a hundred (cyan, black, black) feet below the surface. Built long ago for the designer of Grand Central Terminal, the house had everything he needed. His refuge, and he wanted the police out of it.

“Thank you for stopping by. And for the rescue,” he said.

“I’ll see them out,” Mr. Rossi said.

Joe stepped into his underground garden and watched the group head to his elevator. It’d take them straight up into the middle of Grand Central Terminal and out of his life, at least for a while.

Then he looked at his front yard. He’d had an opera-set designer named Maeve Wadsworth turn the cave in which his house sat into a simulacrum of a summer garden — a blue sky that changed colors throughout the day to end in an orange sunset on the western edge, a seagull flying endlessly toward the sun, and a soft blanket of real plants on the floor. She’d set up LED lights to keep the plants alive. It had worked perfectly, and his garden grew year-round.

He took a deep breath, drawing the fresh green smell into his lungs. It made him feel better. His head still felt like it had been smashed against the wall a couple times, and he winced. Again, having a headache was better than being dead.

Vivian must have injected him when they got close to the surface. It had been the right thing to do, as he hadn’t been able to make himself go up any more. The thought of bobbing around on the face of the ocean in the sun still made his heart race.

He sat and leaned against the schist wall of a cavern bored out a century before. Edison rested his head on his lap, and he ruffled his ears. “You smell much better, boy. You were pretty ripe when I first woke up.”

Edison gave him an injured look, and he laughed. “You like the odor of rotten fish better than lavender?”

Edison wagged his tail in agreement.

Mr. Rossi emerged from the elevator, walked across the old wooden walkway, and stood nearby. “How’s your head?”

“Been better.” But it had been worse, too.

“You were combative with them.”

“They were combative with me.” He petted the dog. “Are they going to investigate the sub, figure out why it rammed us?”

“Seems unlikely.”

“If they find something, it means a sub turned up right off the shore of New York and they didn’t even notice until it ran into someone.” It was in the government’s best interest to pretend Joe was lying and investigate quietly. He understood, but he didn’t want to let it go.

“It could mean that, yes,” Mr. Rossi said.

“What’s your advice?”

“Lie low. Don’t cause any trouble and see where this goes. It might get swept under the rug and not present a problem.” Mr. Rossi fiddled with his gold cuff links.

“Someone killed the pilot of that sub, either accidentally or on purpose.”

“There’s talk that someone was you,” Mr. Rossi said. “I suggest you don’t aggravate the situation.”

Joe sighed. Edison bumped his shoulder. “Let someone get away with murder?”

“It’s not your place to investigate these kinds of things.”

Answer enough, he supposed. “If I do it anyway?”

“I shouldn’t meddle if I were you,” Mr. Rossi said. “They’re thinking of filing charges.”

“What kind of charges?”

“Boating while intoxicated.” Mr. Rossi flicked an invisible speck off his suit. “Manslaughter.”

“If they’re willing to go that far, there must be a good reason.” Joe stood up. His head throbbed with pain and anger.

“Maybe.”

“I can’t undo what happened to the prince’s bodyguard, to Vivian, to me, to my sub.” He reminded himself not to shout at Mr. Rossi. “But I can make damn sure it doesn’t get swept under some political rug.”

Edison nudged Joe’s palm with his nose.

“It’s OK, boy,” Joe said. “I’m not upset. I’m angry, and I intend to do something about it.”

“I advise against it.”

“Noted,” Joe said. “Now help me figure out the next steps.”