Feeding Frenzy (Aristotle Soc Socarides) Read online

  The wave knocked him back and he popped into view. He tried again, and busted through the white wall of foam on the second try. Within seconds he was cutting through the water in a blur of powerful arm strokes, rising and falling in the life of the oncoming rollers.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mo scrambled down the ladder. He grabbed a float attached by a nylon line to a red wooden spool. Slinging his arm through the loop the way Gary had done, he raced toward the surf.

  Two other guards dashed in from stands at the north and south ends of the beach. They scooped up the spool, and with each guard holding a spindle, pounded after Mo. He hit the water running. He was either stronger or luckier than Gary; he made it through the roiling breakers on his first try.

  I ran to the water’s edge and raised the binoculars. Targeting Gary, I moved the glasses slightly to the right, past a swirling flock of birds, and squinted through the curtain of foggy haze hanging over the breaking waves. A white face bobbed against the dark sea. Arms flailed. It was a man. I focused in on his face. The man’s mouth opened and shut.

  Gary was coming up on the swimmer, slicing the water with expert chops of his arms. Only yards away now. Then a few feet. The two men merged. Gary slipped the float belt off his shoulder and put it around the swimmer, then held onto him.

  Mo was seconds behind. He reached Gary and the swimmer and all three floated as one for a few moments. An arm shot up and waved like a school kid trying to get a bathroom pass. I couldn’t tell if it was Gary or Mo. The two guards handling the spool on shore caught the signal and began to haul in on the line.

  Less than halfway to the beach, Gary or Mo signaled again. Two hands went up in a clapping movement.

  One of the guards saw the motion. “Guy’s unconscious! I’ll call the rescue squad. You keep hauling.” He sprinted to the headstand and grabbed a telephone connected to the administration building. Another guard took his place.

  The rescue had electrified the beach. People abandoned their blankets and crowded the water’s edge to watch the unfolding drama.

  Gary and Mo neared shore with their burden. They timed the waves, using the ocean’s energy to help carry them closer. Almost to the beach now, they disappeared in a tumble of breakers, then broke free and emerged, fighting the undertow, scrambling for footing in waist-high water that tried to suck them back in.

  A guard was on each side of the rescued man, holding him by his arms. The lifeline was attached to one of the floats which Mo wore as a belt around his waist. The other belt was attached to the swimmer’s waist.

  The man was middle-aged, with minimal hair and a paunch. He had thick arms and shoulders. I waded into the surf to help pull him onto shore. As we came free of the water, a woman shrieked. I looked up. Her mouth was open in horror.

  What the hell was her problem? A second later I found out. There was blood on my hands. Blood on my legs. Blood on Gary and Mo. Blood on the sand. There was blood everywhere, except where it should have been, in the swimmer. It poured off the lower portion of the man’s body as if a dozen spigots had been turned on.

  We pulled him up a short slope to the crest of the beach and stretched him on a blanket. His mouth gaped, his eyes were glazed and staring, and his face was deathly white. But that wasn’t the worst part. His stomach and legs looked as if they had been rubbed against a cheese shredder. The skin was slashed in dozens of places. Handfuls of flesh were missing. His blue bathing trunks were soaked with crimson and sections of cloth were torn away.

  A slender woman pushed her way through the crowd and sank to her knees beside the stricken swimmer. She cradled his head in her arms, kissing his pale face and sobbing hysterically. She was talking rapidly in French.

  Gary ran up with the first aid kit and applied gauze bandage patches that were soaked in red as soon as he put them on. Face grim, he took a blanket and covered the man up to his chin. Then he put his arm around the sobbing woman and tried to tell her the ambulance was on its way. I don’t know if she understood, but it probably wouldn’t have made any difference.

  The panic was triggered by a fat man with white zinc oxide smeared on his nose. He had elbowed his way through the crowd for a good look, and saw the wounds before they were covered. His eyes connected with his tongue without stopping first at his brain.

  “Shark!” he shouted.

  The word rippled outward. The crowd became a mob, then a mindless stampeding herd. People grabbed their kids and coolers and bolted for the parking lot as if sharp white teeth snapped at their heels.

  The beach instantly became a confused mass of pushing and shoving humanity. I watched the wild disorderly rout in amazement. Within minutes the beach was almost empty of people. Blankets and umbrellas were tossed about as if a big wind had roared through.

  Gary was still trying to calm the woman. She moaned and rocked back and forth on her knees. A pair of lifeguards knelt next to the swimmer. One tested for a pulse. My mind did a flashback. Medic bending over a guy who’d been hit by one of the claymore mines the VC turned on us. For a second I thought that’s what had happened. This guy must have hit an old mine floating at sea. But that was dumb. There had been no explosion.

  A siren wailed. The rescue squad arrived within minutes. Two emergency medical techs piled out of the ambulance and ran onto the beach with a stretcher and their kit. They did a quick pulse check and tried zapping the man’s heart with electrodes placed on his chest. Then they lifted him onto the stretcher and carried him up to the rescue truck.

  The French lady went with them. The cops had arrived and Gary and Mo were trying to tell them what happened. I walked to the water’s edge and squatted in the surf to wash the blood off my hands and legs. When I had rinsed the last of it away, I peered out at the ocean. There was only the endless ranks of waves and a few darting seabirds.

  Like Charlie Nevers said. Just another quiet day at Quanset Beach.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Offshore wind’s moderated,” Sam was saying on the phone. “Looks like we might get a day’s work in tomorrow. Got to earn some money. Millie broke the bank at the mall.”

  I smiled at Sam’s grumbling. He is the epitome of Cape Cod thrift. His wife Millie is even more frugal. They probably split a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke at Friendly’s and considered it a big splurge. I checked the tide chart over the kitchen sink.

  “High tide’s at five A.M.,” I said. “Meet you at the pier around four.”

  “Finestkind. See you down on the shore. I’ll be sniffing the breeze.”

  Sam and I fish from a pretty, steel-hulled tub-trawler named Millie D. We used bait hooks strung on nylon lines hundreds of feet long. Hooking doesn’t bring in big catches like gill nets, but the fish are fresher and less damaged, and it’s a lot less like factory work. Sometimes we cover expenses; sometimes we don’t. We fish mostly because we like the independence and the chance to be out on the water. We gripe a lot, but we wouldn’t be fishermen if we didn’t.

  Like most Cape Cod people, I have more than one job. I dive when someone hires me to find a lost mooring or to check out the underside of a boat. And I have my private investigator’s license. I don’t do divorces because I don’t like listening at motel room doors for heavy breathing. Without wandering husbands or wives to tail, my caseload is lightened considerably. I’ve located missing lobster pots and runaway kids who haven’t run too far. Once I found a lost miniature Schnauzer for a rich summer resident. The Schnauzer bit my hand and the rich lady stiffed me on the payment and flew off to Europe with the dog. Sometimes I even hunt for tuna harpoons.

  I don’t advertise. People hear I’m an ex-flatfoot who doesn’t know when to quit and they seek me out. I’d like to think it’s because I’m good, but I know some people hire me because I come cheap. My overhead is low. No office, no high-tech keyhole lenses or electronic listening devices
. Just my annual P.I. license renewal fee and a handful of dog-eared business cards that say: A. P. Socarides. Investigations. The A is for Aristotle, the P stands for Plato. Most people call me Soc, and I don’t discourage them.

  Herodotus said circumstances rule men; men don’t rule circumstances. That about sums it up for me. I grew up in a tightly knit, hardworking Greek family in the old mill city of Lowell, north of Boston. I studied the classics at Boston University and didn’t do badly; I still translate road signs into Latin or ancient Greek just for the hell of it. I quit college to join the Marines. I survived Vietnam, physically, anyhow, then joined the Boston PD. I made detective and might have stuck with it. But the woman I was going to marry was killed in a car crash that wasn’t her fault and my whole life turned upside down.

  I heard about the boathouse on a weekend fishing trip with some of the guys from Vice and Homicide. It was part of an old estate that had been subdivided. The boathouse wasn’t much then and still isn’t, but the location overlooking the bay and distant barrier beach was special. I walked along the edge of the peaceful marsh, smelled the salt spray rose and sedge, saw a pair of snowy egrets tiptoeing in the cord grass in search of minnows, and knew I had found home. I used the money saved to get married as a down payment, scrimped the mortgage out of my cop salary, and volunteered for special detail overtime. I spent every weekend I could at the boathouse patching the leaks in the walls and putting in insulation. I got an old wood stove at a yard sale and hooked it up.

  The closeness to the sea has a healing effect. I witnessed the first spring squawkings of the red-winged blackbirds and the return of the striped bass, watched the marsh grass turn to copper in the fall, and saw the scallops being harvested and the bluish plates of ice forming around the edges of the bay. My internal timekeeper became more tied to the seasons’ passage than to hands on a clock.

  One night I arrested the son of a city politician for hit-and-run. His father was a friend of the mayor’s, who appointed the police commissioner. The kid got off. That did it for me. I quit the Department and moved into the boathouse year-round. I met Sam in a local coffee shop named Elsie’s. His crewman had left to run his own boat and Sam was having trouble getting a new hand because some of the younger guys thought he was too old. I signed on. Sam took me under his wing and patiently tried to teach me the craft of fishing. In about thirty years, I might know a fraction of what he does.

  I still carry a lot of baggage no amount of beautiful scenery can lighten, and I drink more than I should. Which may be why I’m always broke. The IRS doesn’t consider self-abuse a deductible expense. Despite my dissipations, I’m in pretty good shape. Fishing ruins your body in the long run, but in between it hardens our muscles better than a Nautilus machine. The toughest part is getting up in the morning. I crawled into bed, set the alarm for three A.M., and turned out the lights.

  Sam sucked in a deep lungful of air, let it out, and pronounced his verdict. “Gonna be a good day. On the hot side. Rain coming soon.”

  It was four in the morning. We stood under the floodlights on the puddled loading platform. The darkened harbor looked like a big hole in the world.

  “Sam, you amaze me.” I shook my head. “One of those days you’re going to have to show me how you do that.”

  Sam shot me a sly glance and scratched his chin. “If I told you, then you’d know, wouldn’t you?” He stumped off toward the end of the pier where the Millie D. was moored. “What say we go catch some fish.”

  “Sounds fine to me, Cap.” I hurried to catch up.

  The minutes before a fishing trip are a delicious time. Your muscles protest and your joints cry out that it’s too damn early to be moving, but anticipation crackles in the salty air like an electric current. The morning hush is broken by the scrape of rubber boots on the tarmac, grumpy murmurings, the coughs and curses of sleepy fishermen, boat engines rumbling into life. Expectations are never higher.

  Every fishing trip is a treasure hunt, every fisherman a searcher for a big pot of gold. Today you might be the fleet’s high-liner, catching more fish than anyone and getting top dollar.

  The Millie D. was moored alongside the little dock to the north of the fish pier. We climbed aboard, started the engine, cast off the mooring lines, and glided over the limpid waters of the still harbor. Soon we bumped across the washboard breakers that guard the opening in the barrier beach, broke out into the Atlantic Ocean, and set a course so’east.

  The eastern sky shifted from black to blue to rose petal pink. Two hours later we were off the elbow of the Cape, rocking in the rolling wells. The air was thick and warm even before the sun lifted off the metallic blue sea into the peach-skin sky. Cobwebby clouds scudded off to the east, the remnants of the rainsqualls that had brushed the Cape that night. It was typical of the crazy weather we’d had that summer.

  We set our trawls. While the lines fished, I made coffee and Sam threw a couple of tender cube steaks in a black cast-iron frying pan. He fried them rare and scorched four eggs over easy in steak juice and brown butter. Pure cholesterol, pure heaven. We pulled up a couple of fish boxes for stools and attacked breakfast. In between bits, we talked about the death at Quanset Beach. Sam knew about it. News travels fast in a small town. I filled him in on the details.

  “You know more about the sea than anyone, Sam. What could have happened to that guy?”

  His brow furrowed. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting bit by a shark in these waters, but that’s the only thing I can figure could kill a man.”

  “I don’t know. He was chewed up like he’d gone through a meat grinder. There were a lot of cuts and slashes on his body, and some of his flesh was missing, but nothing bigger than this.” I curled my fingers to form a circle about the size of a half-dollar. “That’s not my idea of a shark bite, but if it isn’t a shark, what is it?”

  “Sounds like he ran into an outboard motor.”

  I shook my head. “There wasn’t a boat within miles.”

  “Humph,” he said. He set his empty dish on the deck and pulled his pipe from his pocket. He dug the pipe into an Edgehill tobacco pouch, and touched a match to the bowl. He savored a puff, then pointed the pipe stem toward the ocean.

  “Well, there’s lotsa things out there that bite. Once saw a man who’d got stung real bad by one of those Portugee man-of-war jellyfish. Left a heck of a rash on his arm, like somebody whipped him. Your fella would have to get in a school of the darn things to get hurt real dead like you said. You’ve seen the teeth on a bluefish, but they’ve never killed anybody so far as I know. Once read a book about a giant squid, the kind that fights with sperm whales. Stingray? Nope. It was some kind of shark, that’s my guess, but . . .”

  He puffed on his pipe again. He had a far-off look in his frosty blue eyes.

  “But what, Sam?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking about the ocean, how little we know of it. Heck, I’ve been hooking fish almost fifty years now. This is my third boat. Sank the first one before I knew what I was doing. I think I’ve seen everything there is to see. Whales, dogfish, mola-mola, those big flat things with the little mouth and a body that looks like a steamroller run over it. I see the herring come back every year to the stream they were born in, as if they had a map. I’ve speared eels through the ice. They say eels are born in the Sargasso sea, but nobody can explain to me how they came to the salt ponds. Once I had the dickens scared out of me.”

  I stayed silent, knowing he would continue.

  “Years ago, I fished by myself to save money. I was about five miles east of the old break in the beach, south of the current one. It was night, low fog hanging over the ocean. Well, I looked down and saw something glowing green under the water, moving along like a big Ferris wheel. I tell you, Soc, that one made every hair stand up, like Millie was holding the vacuum cleaner over my head.”

  “Did you ever fin
d out what it was?”

  “Not really. Talked to a few guys. Scientist fellow from Woods Hole said it was probably bio . . . biolumi . . .”

  “Bioluminescence?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s the sparkle you see in the water sometimes. It’s caused by millions of tiny little creatures.”

  “Don’t know about that. Guess what I’m trying to say is that we don’t know squat about the ocean. Not by a darned sight, we don’t.”

  We rinsed off our breakfast dishes and went to haul in the trawls. Sam’s words ran through my mind. It was hard to look at the green water with its white foam marbling and not wonder what lurked below. I’ve dived long enough to know what he meant about the mystery of the sea. On more than one dive I’ve convinced myself something was watching me. I still don’t feel comfortable with my feet dangling below the surface. It’s probably a genetic residue left over from our ancestors who had to worry big-time about being eaten by something, but it’s a real fear, nevertheless.

  The breeze that cooled our faces while the boat was underway had died the second we stopped to set trawl. A killer sun beat down on the deck. Its hard rays slow-cooked my head under the Red Sox cap like a burger on a grill. Sweat poured from our noses and chins like rain running off a roof with no gutter.

  Sam is tougher than a barnacle on a rock, but he is no youngster. And neither am I. We were gaffing on board fish weighing ten, twenty, or thirty pounds. Fishing is tough work even when the heat isn’t pushing ninety. I glanced over frequently to see how he was doing. Sam panted with exertion. I would have liked to quit, but I knew he’d dig in his heels if I suggested calling it an early day.