21

The Institute boat sat low in the water, for it had been filled with fuel and fresh water and loaded to the bulwarks with scientific, photographic and diving gear.  In addition to the two-hundred-pound cage, which Chase and Tall Man had swung aboard into the stern with a block-and-tackle rig hung from a davit on the starboard side, there were four camera cases; a videotape recorder; eight scuba tanks; fifty pounds of mullet for the sea lions; three ten-gallon cans of chum — minced mackerel and tuna — to create a smelly slick that would ride the tide and lure sharks from miles around; two twenty-pound boxes of frozen bait-fish, now thawing in the sun; three dive bags packed with wet suits, masks and flippers; and, finally, a cooler full of sandwiches and sodas prepared by Mrs. Bixler.

Amanda had led the sea lions down the path to the dock, and they had willingly waddled aboard the boat.  Now they huddled together in the stern, their heads bobbing and their whiskers twitching with excitement.  Amanda stroked them and cooed to them.

Max knelt beside her.  "Are they okay?" he asked.

"Oh, sure," Amanda said.  "They know the boat means work, and they can't wait.  They love to work; they get bored very easily."

Max reached out a hand, and one of the sea lions bent its head toward him to have its ears scratched.  "Which one is this?" he said.

"Harpo."

"I think she likes me."

Amanda smiled.  "I know she does."

On the flying bridge, Chase put the boat in reverse.  Tall Man stood on the pulpit and used the boat hook to fend the bow away from the rocks.  When the boat had cleared the cove and Chase had turned toward deep water, Tall Man came aft and went into the cabin.

He returned a moment later and said to Amanda, "Your spotter pilot just radioed, said to tell you he'll be up in the air and looking for whales in an hour or so.  I said we'd monitor channel twenty-seven."  Then he looked up at the flying bridge.  "There's a bulletin on sixteen," he said to Chase.  "We're supposed to keep an eye out for a kid in the water."

"Who?" Chase asked.

"Bobby Tobin, the mate on Tony Madeiras's boat.  They say he fell overboard.  Tony swears he did a bunch of three-sixties, looking for him, but never saw a thing."

Amanda said, "Falling overboard seems to be epidemic around here."

"Why?" said Tall Man.  "Who else?"

"Before I left California, I got a call from my cousin.  A week or ten days ago, her boyfriend disappeared from a research ship just inside Block Island.  He was a photographer for the Geographic.  They never found him."

The boat was still moving slowly, the engine rumbling softly, so even from ten yards away, up on the flying bridge, Chase had heard what Amanda said.  He called down to Tall Man, "See if you can find a life preserver for Max."

"Dad..." said Max.  "C'mon... I'm not gonna fall overboard."

"I know," Chase said.  "And I bet Bobby Tobin never thought he would, either."

*          *          *          *          *

As they passed to the south of Block Island, Amanda gave Max a few mullets to feed to the sea lions; she climbed the ladder to the flying bridge and stood beside Chase.  Rounding a point of land, they could see a couple of dozen people on a sheltered beach.  Children wearing inflatable water wings played in the wavewash; two adults wearing pastel bathing caps swam back and forth twenty yards beyond the surf line, and a teenager lolled on a surfboard.

"Every time I see people swimming offshore," Chase said, "I think how lucky it is that they can't see themselves from a couple of hundred feet in the air."

"Why?"

"‘Cause if they saw what swims within ten or fifteen feet of them every few minutes, they'd never set foot in the water again."

"Are there that many sharks?"

"No, not anymore, not the way there used to be.  But it doesn't take many to start a panic.  It only takes one."

A hundred yards off the beach, a lobsterman was pulling his pots.  He cruised up to a buoy, grabbed it with a boat hook and hauled it aboard, fed its rope through a block and tackle suspended from a steel A-frame, wrapped the rope around a winch and brought the wood-and-wire lobster pot up onto his bulwarks.

Chase waved to him, and the lobsterman looked up, began to wave, then noticed the ‘O.I.’ stenciled on the side of the big white boat.  He aborted his wave, and instead banged one fist into the crook of the other arm and shot Chase the finger.

"How charming," said Amanda.

Chase laughed.  "That's Rusty Puckett," he said.  "He doesn't like me very much."

"So I see."

"Lobstermen are a strange breed.  A lot of them believe the sea is their private reserve, that they've got some God-given right to put traps wherever they want, whenever they want, to catch however much they want, and the rest of the world be damned.  Lord help anyone who messes with their traps; they'll sink one another, shoot one another."

"And you messed with his traps?"

"Sort of.  Before I owned the island, he used to use it as a camp, a storehouse, a trash dump.  He set his pots everywhere, not just in the shallows but in the channel and by the dock.  I couldn’t get in or out, and kept fouling my propeller in his lines.  I asked him to move them, he told me to piss off.  I went to the Coast Guard, but they didn’t want to get mixed up in it.  So one day, Tall Man and I pulled all his pots, emptied them and gave the lobsters to the old folks' home, then reset his pots out here.  It took him about two weeks to find them.

"He knows we did it, but he can't prove it, and when he accused us, Tall just said it was a warning from the Great Spirit.  Rusty's stupid, but he's not suicidal, he wasn’t about to go up against Tall, a giant who feels the same way Rusty does about the law.

"So he left his pots out here, partly ‘cause the fishing's better out here anyway."

"He should be happy, then."

"You'd think.  But Rusty harbors grudges.  And he doesn’t like it out here.  Nothing ever happens, there's no excitement, nobody to get upset with or take a shot at."

They traveled on in silence for a few minutes, then Chase turned and looked aft.  Block Island had receded behind them into a shapeless gray mass.  He throttled back and took the boat out of gear.  "We're here," he said.

"We're where?"  Amanda looked around.  "I don't see a thing, not a bird, not a fish, nothing but empty ocean."

"Yeah," Chase said, "but I can feel ‘em, I can smell ‘em, I can practically taste ‘em."  He grinned.  "Can't you?"

"What?"

"Sharks."