anything?”
“Like I said, just curiosity.”
“You keep your curiosity for your job, Martin. Let me worry about my business.”
“Sure, Larry. No offense.”
“So what are you going to do? We can’t just sit around and hope it will go away. We could starve to death while we waited.”
“I know. Meadows and I were just talking about our options. A fish-expert friend of Harry’s says we could try to catch the fish. What would you think about getting up a couple of hundred dollars to charter Ben Gardner’s boat for a day or two? I don’t know that he’s ever caught any sharks, but it might be worth a try.”
“Anything’s worth a try, just so we get rid of that thing and go back to making a living. Go ahead. Tell him I’ll get the money from somewhere.”
Brody hung up the phone and said to Meadows, “I don’t know why I care, but I’d give my ass to know more about Mr. Vaughan’s business affairs.”
“Why?”
“He’s a very rich man. No matter how long this shark thing goes on, he won’t be badly hurt. Sure, he’ll lose a little dough, but he’s taking all this as if it was life and death — and I don’t mean just the town’s. His.”
“Maybe he’s just a conscientious fellow.”
“That wasn’t conscience talking on the phone just then. Believe me, Harry. I know what conscience is.”
Ten miles south of the eastern tip of Long Island, a chartered fishing boat drifted slowly in the tide. Two wire lines trailed limply aft in an oily slick. The captain of the boat, a tall, spare man, sat on a bench on the flying bridge, staring at the water. Below, in the cockpit, the two men who had chartered the boat sat reading. One was reading a novel, the other the New York
“Hey, Quint,” said the man with the newspaper, “did you see this about the shark that killed those people?”
“I seen it,” said the captain.
“You think we’ll run into that shark?”
“Nope.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Suppose we went looking for him.”
“We won’t.”
“Why not?”
“We got a slick goin’. We’ll stay put.”
The man shook his head and smiled. “Boy, wouldn’t that be some sport.”
“Fish like that ain’t sport,” said the captain.
“How far is Amity from here?”
“Down the coast a ways.”
“Well, if he’s around here somewhere, you might run into him one of these days.”
“We’ll find one another, all right. But not today.”
FIVE
Thursday morning was foggy — a wet ground fog so thick that it had a taste: sharp and salty. People drove under the speed limit, with their lights on. Around midday, the fog lifted, and puffy cumulus clouds maundered across the sky beneath a high blanket of cirrus. By five in the afternoon, the cloud cover had begun to disintegrate, like pieces fallen from a jigsaw puzzle. Sunlight streaked through the gaps, stabbing shining patches of blue onto the gray-green surface of the sea.
Brody sat on the public beach, his elbows resting on his knees to steady the binoculars in his hands. When he lowered the glasses, he could barely see the boat — a white speck that disappeared and reappeared in the ocean swells. The strong lenses drew it into plain, though jiggly, view. Brody had been sitting there for nearly an hour. He tried to push his eyes, to extend his vision from within to delineate more clearly the outline of what he saw. He cursed and let the glasses drop and hang by the strap around his neck.
“Hey, Chief,” Hendricks said, walking up to Brody.
“Hey, Leonard. What are you doing here?”
“I was just passing by and I saw your car. What are you doing?”
“Trying to figure out what the hell Ben Gardner’s doing.”
“Fishing, don’t you think?”
“That’s what he’s being paid to do, but it’s the damnedest fishing I ever saw. I’ve been here an hour, and I haven’t seen anything move on that boat.”
“Can I take a look?” Brody handed him the glasses. Hendricks raised them and looked out at sea. “Nope, you’re right. How long has he been out there?”
“All day, I think. I talked to him last night, and he said he’d be taking off at six this morning.”
“Did he go alone?”
“I don’t know. He said he was going to try to get hold of his mate — Danny what’s-his-name — but there was something about a dentist appointment. I
“You want to go see? We’ve got at least two more hours of daylight.”
“How do you plan to get out there?”
“I’ll borrow Chickering’s boat. He’s got an AquaSport with an eighty-horse Evinrude on it. That’ll get us out there.”
Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of — let alone in — water above his head gave him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and an ache in his stomach — essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody’s dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned. “Okay,” he said. “I don’t guess we’ve got much choice. Maybe by the time we get to the dock he’ll already have started in. You go get the boat ready. I’ll stop off at headquarters and give his wife a call… see if he’s called in on the radio.”
Amity’s town dock was small, with only twenty slips, a fuel dock, and a wooden shack where hot dogs and fried clams were sold in cardboard sleeves. The slips were in a little inlet protected from the open sea by a stone jetty that ran across half the width of the inlet’s mouth. Hendricks was standing in the AquaSport, the engine running, and he was chatting with a man in a twenty-five-foot cabin cruiser tied up in the neighboring slip. Brody walked along the wooden pier and climbed down the short ladder into the boat.
“What did she say?” asked Hendricks.
“Not a word. She’s been trying to raise him for half an hour, but she figures he must have turned off the radio.”
“Is he alone?”
“As far as she knows. His mate had an impacted wisdom tooth that had to be taken out today.”
The man in the cabin cruiser said, “If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s pretty strange.”
“What is?” said Brody.
“To turn off your radio when you’re out alone. People don’t do that.”
“I don’t know. Ben always bitches about all the chatter that goes on between boats when he’s out fishing. Maybe he got bored and turned it off.”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s go, Leonard,” said Brody. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”
Hendricks cast off the bow line, walked to the stern, uncleated the stern line, and tossed it onto the deck. He moved to the control console and pushed a knobbed handle forward. The boat lurched ahead, chugging. Hendricks pushed the handle farther forward, and the engine fired more regularly. The stern settled back, the bow rose. As they made the turn around the jetty, Hendricks pushed the lever all the way forward, and the bow dropped
