Shark Beach

by Chris Jameson

  Corinne shot her a withering glance. “I thought it was a shark.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. If you’d had that reaction to a dolphin, I’d force you to seek therapy.”

  Not the worst idea in the world, Corinne thought. Still embarrassed, she decided she wanted to dry off and get herself a beer. Leaving Jenn in the waves, she waded over to the sand and glanced up to find Rashad swimming about a dozen feet away. When he spotted her, he stood and let the water sluice off the smooth lines of his toned body. Jenn had not been wrong about him. He might only be twenty-one or so, but there was no harm in admiration.

  “Your husband didn’t seem too concerned about you being eaten alive,” Rashad said, smiling mischievously.

  “It was a dolphin.”

  Rashad shrugged. “He didn’t know that. Don’t worry, though. I’d have come to your rescue.”

  As flirtation went, the line was pretty lame, but the delivery felt sincere and that went a long way.

  She raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Yeah. And who’s going to rescue you?”

  Rashad laughed softly, and she saw a bit of shyness in him. She had surprised him, and it gave her a pleasant little tremor. He was a college kid, and Corinne had no intention of cheating on her husband, but she did feel flattered, considering she was nearly twice his age.

  “Careful what you fish for, kid,” she said. “You never know what you’ll reel in.”

  His face went blank, totally startled, and Corinne grinned as she started up the beach toward her husband and Matti. She walked past the little camp of mats and towels and the umbrella that Emma, Kelsey, and Jesse had set up. Kelsey had begun making a sandcastle, adorning it with various seashells. Emma said something quietly to Jesse, but Corinne ignored them.

  As she approached, Rick got up from his chair, his expression turning dark. He gestured toward Rashad with his beer bottle. “What the hell was that about?”

  Corinne shrugged. “Oh, nothing. He wants me, that’s all.”

  “He’s like ten years old,” Rick said, brows knitted.

  She smirked at him. “What about the girls with him? Are they ten years old, too?”

  From his beach towel, Matti hooted. “Better stay on your toes, old man.”

  It should have been nothing but a joke, something to lighten the moment. Instead, Rick shot Matti a hard look and marched back the way Corinne had just come, making a beeline toward Rashad.

  “Rick!” Corinne called. “What are you—”

  “Oh, shit,” Matti muttered, pushing himself up off the towel.

  Together, Corinne and Matti hurried after Rick, but not before Rashad had seen him coming. A couple of the other spring-breakers started calling out warnings and taunts, and Rashad seemed confused by Rick’s angry expression at first.

  “Can I help you with something?” Rashad asked, straightening up, visibly defensive.

  “Yeah. You can keep your fucking dick in your pants and your hands to yourself.”

  “Rick!” Corinne yelled, glancing over her shoulder, hoping desperately that Kelsey hadn’t heard her father’s words.

  Rashad raised his hands as if to ward off the craziness. “My hands are pretty much always kept to myself. Maybe you’d better ease up on the afternoon beer parade.”

  Rick stormed into the surf and shoved Rashad. The guy stumbled and nearly fell, but managed to stay upright. Corinne knew that would only make Rick more frustrated, and she snapped at him again, following him into the water.

  “You don’t want to do this,” Rashad said. “You’re embarrassing your family.”

  Corinne winced. She saw the moment Rashad realized that his calm, reasoning voice had only made things worse. Then Rick reached out to grab him, fist cocked back for a real fight. Rashad slapped his hand away, mostly deflecting the blow, though Rick’s fist struck him in the shoulder. Stepping after him, Rashad gave Rick a shove in return, and Rick went down on his ass in the rippling surf.

  The spring-breakers started to laugh, and Corinne couldn’t deny how foolish Rick looked. Humiliated, he would be angrier than ever. But when Rick climbed to his feet, Matti grabbed Rick around the chest and drove against him, maneuvering him toward the sand.

  “Little prick,” Rick snarled at Rashad. “Nobody talks to my wife like that.”

  Matti hugged Rick close. Corinne heard the rasped words between them.

  “He’s not wrong, brother,” Matti said. “You’re embarrassing everyone.”

  It was me, Corinne wanted to say. I flirted with him. But she knew that in this case the truth would only make things worse. She would tell him later, when they were alone and this had quieted down.

  “Hey, asshole,” Rashad called, as a parting shot. “You ever think maybe if you weren’t a guy who behaved like this, you wouldn’t need to worry so much about her flirting with other people?”

  The other spring-breakers hooted again, applauding this line. Rick turned to stare at him, but by then he had noticed the horrific embarrassment on his daughters’ faces, and he deflated in front of them. He went to the cooler, retrieved a fresh beer, and then stalked back to the path that led to their rental house without bothering to carry his chair or even grab the T-shirt he’d worn to the beach.

  “What the hell?” Jenn asked, walking over to join Corinne and Matti.

  Neither of them had an answer.

  It was going to be a long week.

  * * *

  A few hours later, Rashad had mostly forgotten the incident on the beach. Rick Scully might be a hothead asshole, but he was really his wife’s problem more than anyone else’s, and Rashad had bigger concerns. He knew he and his friends were being stupid about the evacuation, but he didn’t have the freedom to argue with them. His mother had called three times today and sent a dozen texts, very worried about the fact that they weren’t already off the island. He had explained that the evacuation was voluntary, that the hurricane might not even hit here, that historically forecasts had been wrong more than they’d been right about where storms would make landfall once they’d entered the Gulf of Mexico.

  Really, though, if it had been up to him, he would already have left. There had to be places on the mainland where people could take shelter if the hotels were full or if—like Rashad—they couldn’t afford a hotel after having already paid their share of the spring break rental. Simone and Marianna were in the same boat, but Nadia had money, and Tyler and his boyfriend Kevin never seemed concerned about the cost of dinner, or anything else for that matter. The trouble was that Marianna was the only one who seemed to agree with Rashad, and neither of them wanted to rock the boat and piss everyone else off.

  As he stepped off the beach and onto Andy Rosse Lane, he glanced over his shoulder. They had just watched the sun set over the Gulf, along with about a hundred other people who had applauded when the last burning edge slipped into the water, as if it had been a show performed just for them. The horizon still glowed with the last remnant of sunset, but that glow had a strange hue, a dark and angry purple. There were few clouds in the sky, but those few were ominous, and the air hung dense with moisture. Humidity bothered the others more than it did Rashad—he had never sweated much, unlike poor Tyler—but he felt as if it had become harder to draw a breath. The thickness of the air could be suffocating.

  A breeze kicked up, stronger than before, and that made it better. He found himself simultaneously hoping the breeze would grow and that it would vanish, but the latter was wishful thinking. Even if the hurricane didn’t hit Captiva, they were still going to get a hell of a storm.

  Marianna linked her arm with his. “Snap out of it.” She bumped her shoulder against his.

  He grinned, so happy she had come along. Nadia and Simone had gotten into some kind of drama with her just three weeks before the trip and had tried to figure out some way to get her to pull out without telling her they hoped she would pull out. They had ghosted her for about a week until Rashad and Tyler had stepped in. Whatever the issue had been, it ha
d apparently blown over, because the girls were all in synch again, or they seemed to be.

  Whatever it had been, Rashad figured the information was need-to-know, and he neither wanted nor needed to know.

  “I’m good,” he promised her.

  “You’re on island time, remember.” She beamed at him, bright smile framed by springy coils of natural hair.

  Rashad couldn’t help but beam back. “Island time. I need music!”

  They picked up their pace, moving past the others. They had already passed The Mucky Duck, a beachfront restaurant with indoor and outdoor dining, where a white guy in a peach linen shirt played guitar on the patio and sang raspy-voiced songs perfect for white guys in peach linen shirts. Rashad had been born and raised in Philadelphia. His parents were from Pakistan. But down at Keylime Bistro, maybe a hundred yards up the street from The Mucky Duck, a trio of musicians played Caribbean music on steel drums and a fat-bellied guitar, and though Rashad didn’t know shit about Caribbean music, he knew it lifted his heart. It wasn’t the food that drew him to pick up his pace, it was the music.

  “What are we drinking tonight?” Marianna asked.

  “Something cheap,” Rashad replied. “So we can drink a lot of it.”

  “That is an excellent plan.”

  The wind kicked up, a hot gust swathing them in a thick blanket of humidity. Rashad glanced back, but they were too far along the road to see the waves. He had a feeling he knew what he would see, however—had a feeling that the tide would be rising, that the surf would be pummeling the sand. His friends could say whatever they wanted, they could ignore the evacuation order because it was still voluntary, but Rashad could not ignore the tingle of dread in his heart or the chill that ran up the back of his neck.

  A storm approached. The only questions remaining were how long before it arrived, and whether they would be smart enough to get off Captiva before it was too late.

  CHAPTER 2

  Most people on Sanibel had no idea the Institute existed, and those who did—the fishermen who knew better than to enter its tiny inlet harbor, or the lifelong islanders who could remember the days when it had been built—paid very little attention. In order to run across it, you would have to go to the end of Seaspray Lane, where a narrow gravel road was barred by a low metal gate. A small sign read NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE, beneath which was a logo and, in half-inch letters, SANIBEL ISLAND MARITIME RESEARCH INSTITUTE.

  The gravel road beyond the gate was overgrown, the foliage creating a canopy overhead. The curved path meant that none of the Institute’s buildings could be seen from the end of Sea Spray Lane. The neighbors weren’t often interrupted by trucks or even cars, as most of the visitors came by sea. This was no Woods Hole. The public was not welcome. An electrified perimeter fence a hundred yards into the trees made that clear to the unhealthily curious.

  From the Gulf, boats could enter through a small, rocky inlet and disembark on the private pier, but a boom lay across the inlet to prevent unauthorized entry. On the beach, signs warned that this section of the island was private. In amongst the palm trees and underbrush, amidst the lizards and insects, were camouflaged guardhouses.

  Maurice Broaddus had been a security guard at the Institute for sixteen months. He had spent the first seven of those months in one of those guardhouses, getting bitten by bugs and bored out of his mind. In all that time, there had been only six attempts at unauthorized entry, and all of them had been drunk vacationers wandering along the beach and then deciding to investigate the mysterious inlet despite all of its signs warning them to stay away. For certain kinds of people, particularly when drunk, a No Trespassing sign was better than an engraved invitation.

  Broaddus descended the south stairwell, watching the shadowed corners. The lights were on night mode, three quarters of them turned off and those remaining switched to a dimmer setting. Even on an ordinary day the place felt spooky after hours, but this was no ordinary day.

  He used his key card to buzz himself through a security lock hardly anyone on staff could open, then made sure the door shut tightly behind him. He glanced left, into the low-light gloom, and then turned right, walking along a corridor that ended in a junction. To the right was the hallway that led to the Selachii research lab and the vast structure known only as “the pools,” where all of the sharks in residence at the Institute were kept. There were nearly a hundred of them now, and they had all been tampered with in some way or another. Broaddus had no special love for sharks. These were apex predators, always hungry and determined to sate that hunger—nothing like the dolphins or seals found in other buildings on the property. But the more he had seen of their treatment, the more it had begun to get under his skin.

  I need a new job, he thought. But even if he left here, found a security gig somewhere else, he knew what he had seen here would linger in the back of his mind. Broaddus had a pit bull named Sugar—short for Sugar Ray, named after a boxer he’d admired as a kid. He had rescued Sugar from a shelter, saved the dog’s life, and heard an endless stream of worry and ignorance from friends, relatives, and strangers about the risk involved in having such a vicious animal in his house. None of them had seen the sadness in Sugar, or felt the love radiating from the dog. The gratitude and sweetness and relief. Sugar was a good boy who liked squeaky toys and barked happily when Broaddus sang in the shower. He slept at the foot of his master’s bed at night, alert for the sound of any intruder, protecting his own home as much as he protected its human owner.

  Not that Broaddus thought a shark wanted to cuddle. He was an intelligent man and knew better than that. Maybe he didn’t have the scientific background of the Institute’s staff, but he had done his own research, in his own time. Sharks did not attack humans on purpose, despite what popular myth had established. They were wild creatures, smart and cold and incredibly efficient. Broaddus had worked security for animal research labs before, but no matter how much his heart had broken for the monkeys and the mice, he had always been able to tell himself medical breakthroughs would be worth it, that saving human lives was more important than what the researchers did to their animal charges.

  Sanibel felt different.

  He turned left, went down a small flight of stairs, and then used his key card to swipe through an additional security door. Very few people had access to these doors, but Broaddus did. If the place could not trust its own security guards, then what would be the point of having security at all?

  Broaddus smiled to himself as he walked toward the Recovery Tank. An inner door separated him from the interior of that chamber, but the walls were mostly glass, so he could see the large, cylindrical aquarium within. There were all sorts of fish inside the Recovery Tank, but only one Great White shark. It swam listlessly, moving just enough to keep from drifting to the bottom. In the darkened tank, the shark’s body moved back and forth, tail propelling it forward. As it slid by the glass, Broaddus caught sight of the metal glinting on its head, the strange lens over one of its black eyes. The slowness with which it moved, little more than floating in the water as it healed from surgery, reminded Broaddus of a gun still in its holster—not dangerous until it is put to work.

  Cutting into their damn brains, he thought. This is just wrong.

  A plan had begun to formulate in his head. The question would be whether or not he had the courage and the wits to pull it off.

  A rattling of metal came from behind him, and Broaddus turned and began walking back the way he had come just as Arthur Tremblay came marching into the place. His expression was troubled, and when he spotted Broaddus it became more so.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Maurice.”

  “What can I do for you, Dr. Tremblay?”

  The scientist frowned, glancing back and forth between Broaddus and the Recovery Tank. “Hang on. Why are you down here?”

  Broaddus shrugged. “Doing my rounds. At least three times a shift I conduct a walk-through of the building.”

  “This is a secure wing.”<
br />
  “Isn’t that the point? The places in need of the best security are the places you don’t want anyone else to see. I was told that when I hired on for my first security job, and I’ve always believed it. But if you want me to—”

  “No, no, it’s fine.” He seemed distracted now. “I came to let you know the board has instructed us to send all non-vital staff home. You’re encouraged to evacuate.”

  Broaddus hesitated, thoughts awhirl.

  “Maurice?” Dr. Tremblay said. “You feeling all right?”

  “Just thinking. Non-vital staff implies there are members of the staff who are vital. Someone to look after the tanks and pools, make sure nothing goes wrong. But if there are going to be people here—and even if there aren’t—there ought to be security.”

  Tremblay nodded. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking. Are you saying you don’t mind? I could ask one of the younger guards…”

  Broaddus put on a fake smile and placed his hands on his hips. “Hell, doc, now you’re just being insulting. I’m fifty-six, not eighty.”

  Dr. Tremblay exhaled in apparent relief. “I know. But if you’re anything like me, some days you feel a thousand years old. This is great, Maurice, truly. It’s a weight off my mind to know the staff who are staying behind will have you as a resource if there’s any issue with trespass or a power disruption.”

  Broaddus gestured for the Institute’s director to walk beside him, and they went out through the door, leaving the secure area.

  “Happy to do it. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Are you not sticking around, doc?”

  Tremblay grimaced. “I wanted to, but my wife decided we were evacuating whether I liked it or not.”

  Broaddus tapped a finger at his temple. “Smart man. The wife always knows best.”

  The two men shared a knowing look, a kind of easy camaraderie, but then Dr. Tremblay headed through a metal door and up a narrow staircase, leaving Broaddus to continue his patrol of the building.

  He glanced back the way they’d come, thinking about rescuing Sugar. Thinking about the sharks, and the oncoming storm, and how few people were going to be staffing the Institute in the next couple of days. An idea formed, and Broaddus couldn’t deny that even in his own head, it seemed crazy.