Randy White - Dead of Night

“Graves? Ms… Graves? What are you doing on Sanibel?”

“The name’s Rona. If I split two bottles of wine with a man, I expect him to call me by my first name. Do you have a few minutes to talk? We could get some coffee.”

She was making her way along the boardwalk in the careful way of someone unsure of her footing, or unsure of the circumstances. Her facial muscles were strained-flexing, then relaxing-as if struggling to maintain a look of informal cheer.

Either that or she was dawdling. Which annoyed me. I’d just been told by a Florida Fish and Wildlife dispatcher that someone had reported seeing a big shark tangled in a net not far from Dinkin’s Bay. The shark was drowning.

I started toward the boat again. “I’d like to sit and talk but I’m right in the middle of something. An emergency. I’ve got to take off in the boat.”

“There are emergencies in the world of marine biology?”

“Nope, not usually. But this hasn’t been a normal week.”

From a wooden locker beneath the house, I took a nylon backpack already packed with medical kit, shark tags, and miscellaneous gear. I opened it and began to add gloves, prescription goggles, snorkel, my old and dependable Rocket fins, my equally old and dependable Randall survival knife.

“I know I should’ve called first. But I decided, what the hell, I’ve got the weekend off. I’ve never seen Sanibel, and you seemed like the friendly, informal type. So I… well, you’ll understand.”

I paused. There was something peculiar about her manner. “Understand what? You didn’t drive three hours just to tell me the results of Jobe Applebee’s autopsy, did you? If you did, that’s thoughtful. But it’s not like we were close-”

“No… no, that’s not the reason. We can talk later. How long do you think you’ll be gone?”

Her insistence was an additional annoyance. I looked at my watch. It was 4:13 P.M. The dispatcher told me the report had come in around four. A shark tangled in a net is likely to die. It has no swim bladder, nothing to keep it from sinking and stalling on the bottom. Minutes count. If I found the shark quickly, and if it hadn’t been too badly stressed, I might be gone an hour. If things didn’t go smoothly, I wouldn’t be back until long after dark.

She surprised me by saying, “Hey, how about I tag along? I’d like to see what a biologist does. I’m good around boats, I really am. I grew up waterskiing.”

I wasn’t wild about the idea, but I didn’t want to waste additional time debating it. I told her, “Okay. But we’re leaving now. And no guarantees about when we get back.”

She seemed weirdly relieved. People used to making decisions sometimes like it when they’re told what to do. “What’s the problem? Dealing with emergencies is one of the things I do best.”

I was already in the Aquasport, lowering the engine as she stepped aboard. “There’s a shark in trouble. It was spotted near a place called Lighthouse Point. It’s only a couple of miles from here, but we’ve gotta fly.”

“Sharks,” she said, settling herself onto the bench seat beside me. “They’ve always scared me. They’re sending you out to catch it and kill it-right?”

Locating something on water is never as easy as you hope, so I expected to have trouble finding the shark.

We didn’t.

I steered the boat beneath the causeway bridge, headed for a point of land that is the island’s last partition between bay and the open Gulf of Mexico. There’s a lighthouse there-a maritime antique-which is why the paw of beach is named Lighthouse Point.

I’d been told the shark had been spotted nearby. Luckily, though, I noticed a cluster of four or five boats off to my right, near the channel to Sanibel Marina. They were behaving oddly. The boats jockeyed for position, leapfrogging as if fishing for moving tarpon. But this wasn’t tarpon season.

To Rona I said, “Grab that stainless rail. Hang on tight,” and turned sharply, not slowing until I’d closed on the pod of boats.

It was the shark. The boats were following it, each skipper vying for a better view. Understandable. It was a very big shark that couldn’t submerge because it was tangled in a mess of ropes, plastic floats, and netting.

Beside me, Rona said, “That thing’s… alive? I thought it was a small plane at first. Like maybe it’d just crashed, and these people were trying to help. But a shark-now I see why it’s an emergency.” She turned her head, searching the empty deck. “How are you gonna do this? Do you have a gun? Or maybe a harpoon, or something?”

I’d slipped in between the boats and the fish. Looking at it, I thought about my little deformed leucas back at the lab. This was what they were coded to become: a bull shark, fully mature. It was ten or eleven feet long, and three times the girth of my chest. Probably five or six hundred pounds.

I told Rona what she was looking at, adding, “I’m going to cut it free, not kill it. What I’ve got to figure out is, how?”

The shark’s side fins, or pectorals, were each more than a yard long. They extended from its sides like wings. The top lobe of its tail, or caudal fin, was even longer, curved like a scythe. Tangled between the left pectoral fin and the tail was a section of gray monofilament netting.

The shark had probably gone after fish caught in the mesh. Not uncommon.

So the creature was now towing a thirty-foot shroud of rubbish-a clutter of buoyant floats and nylon that restricted its movement, and also kept it riding on the surface. The rope had cut so deeply into the caudal fin that I could see exposed cartilage. It made the tail stroke uneven, causing the creature to swim in wide, counterclockwise circles as it drifted with the incoming tide.

I was taking off my shirt, my glasses, stepping out of my rubber boots, in a hurry to get to work. “Consider yourself a lucky woman. In all the years I’ve dealt with bull sharks, I’ve only seen one other specimen this size. In fact…”-I considered the shark’s bulk and length; the blunt head, the density of its dark eyes, before continuing-“… in fact, this could be the same fish. It was a year or so ago; I was windsurfing. At night. I could see its outline because the water was glowing with phosphorus. It sparkled as it swam.”

It startled me, the realization. As I continued to prepare gear, I thought about it, replaying the events of that night. It was near the marina, Dinkin’s Bay. I’d never seen a specimen as large before or since. Until now.

The same animal?

Possibly. No… probably.

The unexpected connection injected a new urgency, as well as irony-ironic because this shark had attacked me. Pursued and attacked my surfboard, anyway. The only person I’d told about it was Tomlinson, who, of course, assigned the incident an exaggerated importance.

He’d used a Buddhist term that I’ve now forgotten.

Rona watched me as I picked up goggles, gloves, and bag. Her eyes went wide. “Oh no… you’ve got to be joking. Please tell me you are not going in the water.”

I said, “I’ll be fine. That shark’s the least of my worries. All these boats charging around, though, are dangerous. Were you serious when you said you knew boats? I need you to take the wheel.”

“Yes… sure. I guess so. I grew up driving ski boats.” She was studying the gauges, the throttle arm. “This is the same kind of setup?”

I was holding my fins. Should I wear them? Decided no, and dropped them on the deck.

Stepping around the console, I said, “Try to stay between me and the other boats. Mostly, keep the engine in neutral, make them avoid you.”

I slipped into the water.

The tide had put thirty yards between the shark and me. I wanted distance because I didn’t want to spook the thing.