Some People Die Quick Read online

  "The boys from Maine, George and Vickey took them over to the mainland. They'll be back in a couple of hours."

  Suddenly conscious of rubbing the scar, she clasped both hands and placed them in her lap. Cocking her head to one side, eyes returning to life, she asked, "How much did Susan tell you about our relationship?" She looked back into the fireplace.

  "Everything?"

  She jerked her head around, eyes searching mine for meaning. "I loved Susan, Jay, but I was not in love with her. Can you understand?"

  "I think so."

  "Did Vickey or George say anything about the way I've been acting? I'm sure they did. It's been a strange few weeks. After you came, I felt better. Hoped some of what's been happening would be resolved. But Susan getting killed…" Big tears ran down the scarred, disfigured face. "You know what I'd like to do more than anything?"

  "What?"

  "I would like to borrow Guy's sailboat, take her outside the islands, we can run all night. Can we do that?"

  "What for, Anna? Why be aboard Picaroon now?"

  "Please don't ask me to explain."

  Maybe a night's sail would give me enough time alone with her to work some things out. She had some explaining to do about several statements.

  "I have a boat, we'll run over now, before it gets dark."

  We met Vickey and George in the Gulfport Ship channel as they were returning to Cat Island. There was a look of surprise and bewilderment on their faces. I would call them later and explain.

  Easing into the Broadwater Marina, we tied Chris Moran's cigarette in the empty slip next to Picaroon. Asking Anna to wait until I could see if the boat had been cleaned, I climbed aboard. Entering the cabin, I found not a trace left showing that a beautiful woman had her throat slit, from ear to ear, had bled her life blood out on the birth and sole. The smell of death was gone, but the memory was fresh.

  Using the boat's phone, I called Guy and told him about our plans. He volunteered to come along. Thank goodness he did not argue when I declined.

  Anna handled Picaroon's lines expertly. We eased out of the marina into the channel. Once clear of the markers, I gave her the helm, went forward, and raised the sails. Falling off on a broad reach, we set course for Little Dog Keys pass. There was a light southeast breeze wafting in the late evening. Inside the Sound, the water was glassy smooth and visibility was excellent. The outline of Ship Island was already in view.

  Puffy cumulus clouds lazed along above our heads. High up, a few mare's-tails fanned out in lacy patterns. Man-of-War birds soared effortlessly under them. This could turn out to be an interesting, if not enigmatic voyage.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As we cleared the barrier islands and turned east, the sun was touching the sea, turning it to gold, the sky to blood. The sun soon grew huge and angry red. Horizontal now, half-eclipsed by the sea and almost perceptibly sinking, it began to spread a red glow over the islands like a silent and ever-moving fire. The scrub pines would burn, the sand dunes melt, the sea dry up. There would be nothing left but the smoldering ashes of the sea floor.

  Anna was at the helm. Going below, I got a bottle of Freixenet and two glasses. Returning to cockpit, I found Anna with a smile, the first one all day.

  The sun was now gone, the stars beginning to brighten, and continued doing so as if someone was slowly turning up a rheostat. Jupiter glistened almost as bright as the evening star; Mars blazed red and seemed as big as a baseball. The constellations began to form. Scorpius appeared low on the horizon. Overhead were the bright navigation stars: Arcturus, Antares, Altair, Vega, Deneb, Navi, and Polaris, ever in its fixed position. These were like old friends that gave me a sense of permanence and place.

  Picaroon was working the sea, now, in her element, doing what she was designed to do. We passed south of Dog Keys Pass, and came abeam of Horn Island, a place where Walter Anderson, a local artist, spent many years doing some of his best work. He was a man who so few people understood.

  Anna startled me from my thoughts, asking, "Do you know what Tiburon means?"

  "Spanish for shark."

  "Yes," she said mysteriously. "Do you know who is the God of Tiburon?"

  "No idea, but if you confess to being a shark god, we're going back to the marina."

  She frowned, "No, I am not the God of Tiburon, though I am a direct descendent of those who tend her. My family for many generations has had the responsibility of carrying on the tradition. My mother taught me from infancy the duties entrusted to our family. We had been spared our lives by the God as payment for doing what she wished."

  "She?"

  "On the island where we came from, it was the duty of the oldest female to select a young maiden for the leap from the cliff into the waters below to appease the God of Tiburon. The Christians came and changed the human sacrifice to that of a pig. When my family migrated to the Americas the sacrifice stopped altogether. My mother could not accept that, so she kept trying to make the offering with her mind. It did not work. When my father was lost at sea, she knew she had failed and the God of Tiburon was angry with her. It wanted to know why she had not passed the tradition on to her daughter. It was a great sin of omission, and it was the daughter who must pay. My mother tried to tell me this, but I would not listen. My mind was trained in western ideology and it seemed foolish."

  George mentioned that Anna had some strange ideas concerning her background. I thought of making a joke about it, but held my tongue. If this was the reason for tonight's sail, to get some failed traditional lore off her chest far out to sea where no one but I could hear, then let her do it.

  Holding her hands before her in the shape of a steeple, she said, "My mother's death rested on my shoulders. In a letter written before she died all the blame was placed squarely on me for not continuing with the tradition. That's a heavy burden for a young girl all alone in the world to carry."

  "But surely you can't blame yourself…"

  Her eyes flashed, her chest rose and fell rapidly, the breathing came in gasps. Her face was suddenly alive, set and controlled, but full of dangerous energy. "When the shark took me into its mouth, I knew the God of Tiburon was appeasing itself. I never saw it, but knew instantly what it was, and resigned myself to my fate. One minute I was swimming alongside the sub, the next I'm in the sharks mouth, feeling the muscles rippling as it bit and bit, the gills pulsating as it breathed. It was very strange and dark, and there was no pain. When it spit me out the last time, there came a reality. This was only a shark, a big one, but still only a shark, not some God of Tiburon. As Bill raced with me to the surface, I knew I would live. I may not be pretty, but I would live."

  She stood in the cockpit, raised both arms above her head, and screamed some primal song. The hair rose on the back of my neck. It was a sound I never want to hear again.

  Anna slumped on to the deck. I released the helm, letting Picaroon round up into the wind, and went to her, putting my arms around the scarred shoulders. She cried, the body jerking in unison with the sobs."

  "This is what I needed. Can you understand?"

  "I don't have to understand, Anna."

  "I've been carrying this guilt around for so long. It's been so confusing. Why does someone what to kill me? Why would they kill Susan?" She looked hard at me. "Are you the one sent to kill me? Are you the one who killed Susan?"

  "Nobody's going to harm you, Anna. You are safe. You are the one who came to me, remember?"

  "I thought for awhile, the God…"

  "No, it's not a shark god that put us together. It was Guy Robbins. We will find out who is responsible for this and why."

  She took a sip of the wine, looked up at the stars. "It feels so good to get this all out of my system. Thanks for being so patient. I'm okay. Let's get Picaroon sailing again. We can talk some more."

  We brought the boat back on the wind and headed east. She was a confused young woman. It is said that memory eliminates the bad, magnifies the good. I suppose it's how we endure the
past. In Anna's case, it seemed to work in the opposite. Maybe she should be in some form of therapy. At any rate, there was murder and attempted murder to deal with.

  "You ready to start back?"

  "No, no, no, no! I want to sail all night, to feel the sea, live among the stars. I want to see the sunrise. I want to be pretty again."

  Tears welled up in her eyes and she turned her angry gaze out across the dark sea. Her appearance was working on her mind. She tried hard to show that the scars, the pain, had been conquered. But not enough time had passed. The first day in my office she was so comfortable about her looks. Now I knew that no matter how strong she wanted to be, how much she wanted to be normal, it would be a long time before the horror would ease.

  Anna looked back at me. "You have something else to tell me."

  "Yes. How did you know?"

  "What is it?"

  "The other scientist who worked with you and Susan on the shark repellent, Betsy Jones. We know now she can be eliminated as a suspect. She died two months after leaving Cat Island of a brain aneurysm. That's why you didn't hear from her. Betsy's brother had her cremated two days after she died, then left the next day on a two-year sabbatical in Russia. Since he was her only family…"

  "My God, she's been dead for two years and no one knew. How terrible. All this time I've been suspicious of her. Jay, what's happening?"

  "Do you remember a man named, Ashton Garino?" This was a name Guy had on his list that did not appear on the one Anna gave to me.

  "Yes, one of a group from Oklahoma. There were four of them. Ashton was a jerk, not serious about his work. Why, what about him?"

  "You left him off the list as having been on the island."

  "I don't know why, a mistake, I guess."

  "What was his field of study?"

  "His group was on the island to do research on abdominal pores of sharks. There are two small pores opening directly into the peritoneal cavity. No one has ever explained the function of these pores, and I was interested in their findings."

  "Did they discover a purpose?"

  "No, but Ashton, yes I remember him. Young, good-looking, and about as interested in studying comparative anatomy as I am in cooking. He chased Vickey around like a dog in heat. His interest in life seemed to be in sex and airplanes. I never did understand why he was allowed to be a member of the group. How did you find out about him?"

  "From Guy's list. He kept one for the insurance liability, remember?"

  "Yes."

  * * *

  The waves were beginning to increase in size, the sea becoming restless. We came about and headed back to the Broadwater Marina. When Picaroon stuck her bow into a swell, showers of sparkling diamonds would erupt upward and outward and not a drop of water would reach the cockpit. She was a dry boat.

  Anna grew quiet, sitting blankly, without moving, watching the lights twinkling on shore. She had no clue, no reason, nothing to give her a foothold with which to weigh what was happening to her, or how to fix it, or understand it. Right now, neither did I.

  Someone made the radio call to the lab and told them the location of the sub. Was it coincidence? Why was that tiger shark so zeroed in on Anna and not the other people in the water? Who called Guy's office with the threat? Who sent the letter? Did someone murder Susan Weems who had no connection to Anna Yillah or the lab? What was the motive for all this? There was much work to be done and it had to be done fast.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The boat was working well. Water flowing along the hull with a hissing sound lulled us into ourselves.

  "Memories."

  "What?"

  "Memories," Anna said, again, looking at me without blinking. "It's memories that mold a person. From the time you're born until you die, it's memories that guide us, tear us apart inside, make us do things we regret, or drives us to excel in ways we could never imagine. People we love should take all their things with them when they die. Especially the memories."

  My only response was with a question that needed asking. "Anna, why do you think the shark attack on you was deliberate?"

  She turned her head toward the stern of the boat where our wake disappeared in frothy foam. Turning back to me with an eerie stare caused by the damage to both eyes which rendered her unable to blink, she used eye drops to keep them from drying out, she said, "When I was well enough to return to the lab, I sent for the remains of my wet suit and ran an analysis on it. Though it was in shreds both from the attack and the emergency personnel cutting it from my body, there was plenty for testing. The wet suit was soaked in a chemical Susan and I had developed to attract sharks. There was enough attractant on the suit to stimulate all the sharks in the ocean."

  "An attractant? I thought you were working on a repellent?"

  "In order to develop a repellent, we needed to learn what caused sharks to feed, what mechanisms were involved in attracting them to the food source, and what powerful brain stimulant effectuated the feeding frenzy observed in all shark species. This was the way we proceeded. Our attractant was both effective and powerful."

  "Why have you not told me this?"

  "I did. You simply did not comprehend it at the time. That's why you asked Susan for help with the science. Had she lived, you would have understood. I wanted you to check out everyone involved." She ran a scarred hand through scraggly hair.

  "That doesn't explain why you wouldn't tell me…"

  "I knew you were going to contact Susan and that she would explain it to you. It was the only way you could determine for yourself that she had nothing to do with the attack."

  "How could you know that?"

  "I can't explain it." She tilted her head back, looked up into the star-studded void of space. "The same way I can't explain how I know I'm not some deity responsible to the shark God…I just know."

  "Do you have any idea how your wet suit became contaminated with this attractant?"

  "Susan and I named it 'ay-sa-x,' our initials and an x for experimental. No, however the other wet suits used on the dive did not show significant concentrations of the attractant."

  "Are you sure this chemical, this …ay-sa-x, really works?"

  "Susan and I ran test after test on every species of shark we had available. The data is incontrovertible."

  "Then it narrows our field of suspects down to a select few."

  "No it does not. It widens the field to every marine biologist who read the paper on Protein ay-sa-x. We published it four months prior to the attack."

  Slamming my fist on the combing, I looked far out into the black ocean. We were no closer to an answer than the day Anna walked into my office.

  * * *

  The earth had rotated to a whole new set of stars. All my favorite constellations were visible. Scorpius was below the horizon. Pleiades was overhead, along with Perseus, Auriga, Taurus, Gemini, Orion. Low in the southeastern sky, Canis Major barked with its bright eye. Sirius blinked, shinning like a silver dollar. Cassiopeia hung in the northwest, reminding me of Gus Grissom, the astronaut who perished in a launch pad fire along with White and Chaffee. The middle and brightest star of Cassiopeia, Navi, is named after Gus.

  "Anna, can you think of any way the wet suit could have been contaminated with the chemical, other than intentional?"

  "Not possible."

  "Then who? How?" I mumbled more to myself than to her.

  Anna did not answer.

  The darkened shapes of the barrier islands off to our starboard passed slowly as we sailed westward. They looked like huge whales following along with Picaroon. We passed Dauphin, Petit Bois, and Horn. Ship Island was ahead, now two small islands, due to being cut in half by hurricane Camille in sixty-nine. Cat Island was further west. Chandeleur was off the portside. Deer Island ahead, up close by Biloxi Bay. A whole pod of whales keeping us company as we sailed into the dawn.

  As we approached the mid-point of Horn Island, the first change of color appeared on the horizon behind us; false dawn. Light would come
fast. Low clouds hung in the east and began to take on a golden glow, then burnt orange, appearing as if someone was setting fire to them. The sun peeked above the horizon and started to melt the earth, turning everything to a boiling, fiery red. There was nothing one could do to stop it. The earth would simply melt into nothing.

  Suddenly I was very tired. It had been a long day and night, but a lot of things had been cleared up, and some that had not. Why had Anna kept the attractant thing from me? I could not remember her ever mentioning this in our early conversations. If she did, it sailed over my head. But then, that would not be the first time something like that had happened.

  We retraced our route back to the Broadwater Marina. Once inside the Sound, I started the engine and lowered the sails, impatient now to get Picaroon tied up in her slip. I wanted to get Anna back to Cat Island and then get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, sleep devoid of sharks, killers, and the horrible images of Susan Weems.

  * * *

  Radioing the marina when we were still a half-hour out, I found that Hebrone Opshinsky was finishing up his shift. Telling him I needed a favor, he agreed to meet us at Picaroon's slip. I would ask him to run Anna out to Cat Island, allowing me to get some rest.

  Turning to Anna, I said, "You'll be safe enough on the island. Don't take any walks on the beach, though. It would be better if you stayed either in the lab, or at the house. Be sure George or Vickey are with you. There are a couple of things I want to check here on the mainland. I'll come out to the island late this afternoon. You get some sleep."

  She ran both hands through her thin hair and nodded.

  "What about money?" I asked as we motored through the calm inshore waters of the Mississippi Sound. "Is there any to be made from the protein attractant, ay-sa-x, that you and Susan developed?"

  "There could be some. Certainly not enough to make anyone want to kill me. I've had offers to buy the rights for the method of extraction of the protein. It won't take a chemist long to figure out how to isolate it. We've filed all the papers necessary for protection. Both the state and federal governments are working on this with us. They get a percentage of everything we do at the lab that earns a profit. It's part of the agreement. The big money would come with the repellent. If it is perfected and proved effective on every species of shark, then there would be billions to be made. I would think anyone in, on, over, or around the ocean would buy the repellent."