“Call it in,” I say to Babineaux, and Audrey, she says to me, “What the fuck is he supposed to call it in as?”
I was the one who found the body. But you know that, too. Those lines of sand on the floor, they were spaced just far enough apart from each other that you could get to the shark without stepping on them. Straight off, I felt this instinctual sorta revulsion at the thought of doing that, putting a foot down on one of those lines. Step on a crack, break your momma’s back, right? So, while Babineaux is making the call, I go and ignore that little nagging voice in the back of my head that’s telling me just to get the fuck out and let someone else deal with this crazy shit. Audrey, she tells me we should wait for the ME, and when she says that, I swear she sounds scared. And that also pisses me off. “Christ,” I tell her, “it’s just a goddamn fish. What the fuck.” All the same, crossing that space between the doorway and the shark—and it couldn’t have been more than ten feet—I am perfectly cognizant how I’m being so careful not to step on even one of those lines, acting like some superstitious seven-year-old, and, hey, that’s something else pissing me off. That’s the thing pissing me off the worst.
I get up close and I see how the shark’s belly is split open, right down the middle. Well, not just its belly. The fish has been sliced open from the underside of its head most of the way back to the tail. And here and there, it’s been sewn shut again with nylon fishing line. We couldn’t see that when we first came in, because of the angle it was hanging at. Anyway, this doesn’t come as a surprise. No reason it should. You catch a fish, you gut it. And who the hell ever had gone to the trouble to drag a fifteen-foot great white shark up three flights of stairs, surely they’d have done themselves the favor of not hauling along the extra weight of its innards. That’s just plain common sense.
“They’re on their way,” says Babineaux.
I reach into a pocket and pull out a pair of latex gloves, and that’s when I see three fingers poking through between a gap in those nylon stitches. A thumb, an index finger, the middle fucking finger—a woman’s fingers with this deep red nail polish, some shade of red so dark it is almost black. And the fingers, they’re fucking moving, okay. I yell, “We need an ambulance, we need a fucking ambulance right fucking now,” or some shit like that, and I’m digging around in my coat, trying to find my pocket knife. Next thing I know, Audrey’s standing there beside me, and Jesus God, the look on her face. I could talk all day and I wouldn’t ever come up with words to convey that expression. She starts in tugging at the fishing line with her hands, but it’s slippery with blood and oil and shit, and the line’s like, you know, hundred-pound monofilament test. Finally, I get my knife out and start cutting, and—whenever I come to this part of the story, it’s always like, looking back, like right here a flashbulb goes off in my head or something. Suddenly, everything is so clear, so stark, more real than real—and I know that doesn’t make sense. I get that, see, but I don’t know what would. If you’ve ever been in a car crash, it’s kinda like that. That exact instant when two cars collide, a moment that seems so perfectly defined, but that also seems sorta smeared.
Anyway . . .
It doesn’t take me all that long to get the fish’s belly open again. I nick myself once or twice in the process, but I don’t even realize that until later, when the EMTs arrive. I have a scar on my left palm from that day. Souvenirs, right?
Yeah, she was still alive, the woman they’d stitched up inside the dead fish. Only barely, but, well, you’ve read the files. You probably read the book that cocksucker from New York City wrote about the whole thing. So you know how it was. We’re standing there, and Audrey, she’s saying, “Oh God, oh dear God, oh God,” over and over, and back behind us, Babineaux is praying the fucking rosary or some other sorta Catholic mumbo jumbo. The woman in the shark, she’s completely naked and she looks maybe twenty-five, probably younger, but it’s hard to tell much because she’s covered head to toe in rotting shark. “We have to get her out of there,” says Audrey, and I’m holding the sides of the fish’s belly open, and Audrey, she’s leaning in and putting her arms around the woman. Thank fuck she wasn’t conscious. I think that’s the one small piece of mercy we got that day, that she wasn’t conscious. Audrey’s in up to her shoulders, and I’m starting to gag from the stink. I just know I have
