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.”