“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?”