Apex Predator Thriller Series Collection (Including the blockbuster new shark park thriller, Salechii)

by Carolyn McCray

  However Skinny had practiced in his bathtub, not in the ocean.

  Damn, the shark wasn’t even necessarily the biggest danger to his life right now. Getting a concussion as the wave picked up then slammed him against the bottom, scraping him along until it repeated this agitation cycle, was.

  The world was spinning as he saw double. Was that a star fish he just saw or was he hallucinating already?

  His brain screamed for oxygen, trying to get his diaphragm to contract, but Skinny forbade it. He could do this. Just a few more seconds. He could feel the wave giving in.

  Then he felt a tug on his ankle.

  Shit, was that the shark? Did she have him? Was he in such shock he couldn’t feel the pain? He’d heard that from other surfers that you didn’t even realize you were bit until you made it back to shore minus one leg. Then he realized the tugging on his ankle was just the umbilical cord that tied him to the board. Normally that was a good thing. It kept your board close so you could use it to get up and out of the churn. Only this time the cord was tugging him in only one direction.

  Back out to sea. The shark was pulling him back out to sea.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  The shark must have the board and was trying to pull Skinny back to him.

  Clenching his mouth and nose shut, Skinny fished around his ankle for the Velcro anchor. He ripped it off. The Velcro shot out of sight.

  So much for his surfboard.

  Finally the churn let up and Skinny popped to the surface. He gasped, while trying to get the water out of his eyes. His already stringy blond hair was especially stringy, blocking his view.

  The good news was he was nearly to shore.

  The bad news, the people on the beach still looked hysterical.

  Skinny turned to find a dorsal fin heading straight for him. The shark was moving so fast that he was creating a wake of his own.

  This was it.

  Dear God, this was it.

  Sorry, mom. Sorry, dad. At least you won’t have to be disappointed any more.

  He hoped they ordered lilies for the funeral, he’d always thought those looked classy.

  Then the shark’s mouth opened and Skinny’s world filled with teeth.

  He closed his eyes, he didn’t want to see this.

  Then he heard a mechanical clunk and a loud splash, as he was thrown backwards by the rebound. Skinny tossed a bit in the waves, then got himself upright.

  Less than a foot away, the shark tried to attack him, but someone had lowered a huge metal cage over the shark. Skinny looked around the cage to find a large, sleek vessel with Salechii blazed across the side.

  Weird. Skinny kind of recognized the name.

  Then it hit him, Salechhii was the scientific name of the shark. Still kind of weird though, right?

  “Thanks for slowing her down, mate,” a curly blond haired man with a clearly Australian accent laughed, waving from the deck.

  Still stunned, Skinny managed to wave back as the boat came about and started towing the shark out to sea, still encaged.

  “We’ve been tracking her for miles!” another curly blond headed teenager called out. He was the spitting image of the older man.

  “No, problem,” Skinny managed to shout back.

  “You should come visit!” the teen yelled. “Our shark park opens in six months! You can come see her again!”

  Yeah, right. “Thanks, but I think I’ve seen enough!” Skinny shouted waving back.

  “Your loss!” the teen yelled back, laughing with his crewmates. The whole boat was filled with gaiety while Skinny had just peed his board shorts.

  Saved by the skin of his teeth, Skinny turned back to shore.

  Maybe curling up with The Old Man in the Sea wasn’t such a bad idea.

  CHAPTER 1

  “No!” Nami Flack responded, crossing her arms over her chest and stomping her foot in full-on teenage rebellion. She turned away from the ten million dollar Malibu view of the ocean. “I won’t go!”

  “But pumpkin, this is for your own good,” her dad cooed like using his soft indoor voice was going to help. “You need to get over this shark-phobia.”

  Her dad wasn’t used to not getting his way. Being the single largest grossing actor in the history of the industry, Nick Flack, what her dad wanted, was what her dad usually got. Firing an actress because she was taller than him? Fired. Firing a writer that actually tried to script in some vulnerability to his character? Fired. A gaffer that took her dad’s parking spot on the lot? Fired.

  Well, he couldn’t fire her.

  “No,” Nami repeated. “It’s only considered a phobia if the fear is unjustified. Like being afraid of mayonnaise. Beyond the arterial plaque build up, there’s no reason to fear it, so it’s considered a phobia.”

  Her dad cocked his head. It was one of his patented moves he did in a movie when he disagreed with his sidekick. “Yes, sharks should be respected, but try to tell me the rational reason you won’t go into a swimming pool anymore or even take a bath? I’ve got to twist your arm to shower for Christ’s sake, Nami.”

  Okay, even she couldn’t disagree with that, but it didn’t mean she was going to some stupid shark park for “immersion therapy.”

  Hell, no.

  “You’ve been doing an internet search for “waterless shampoo, honey,” her father explained, taking a step closer to her. “There is a line in which eclectic crosses into phobia and you have leapt over it, honey.”

  “Just let me move into town with Marta,” Nami implored. Her maid was cool. She wasn’t all that fond of sharks either. “I’m fine in town. I just can’t stand this…”

  She motioned to the panoramic ocean view. She could feel the sharks just watching her. Waves of pin pricks coursed over her skin if she even looked at the water for a moment. A burning in her stomach, like she hadn’t eaten in a week threatened to consume her belly. She stopped herself from hyperventilating. Like having a panic attack right now was so not going to help her cause.

  “And have TMZ catch wind that my sixteen year old daughter has left home?” he father proposed. “Give them fifteen minutes and they’ll have stories of you hooked on meth and pregnant. No, thank you.”

  Again, everything was about her father and his career. Couldn’t he see past the magazine shows and see how badly she needed this?

  “Then come with me,” Nami begged. “Like back when I was a toddler. Remember that apartment on Wilshire? We loved it there.”

  Her father tossed up his hands and turned to Nami’s mother. “Talia, you talk some sense into her!”

  “What?” her mother said. “You were talking about something?”

  Nami’s dad groaned, sitting down in that stupid plastic “art” chair shaped like a starfish. To her it looked like a bargain buy at a yard sale. To her dad, the chair represented more than her college fund, and she wanted to go to Vassar.

  Her father leaned deeper into the chair, burying his head in his hands.

  But what did he expect? Her mother was packing to leave for Sydney for a fashion show. And she was probably higher than even TMZ speculated. Her mother was more than likely flying high on a combination of cocaine, Tums and sugar-free Fanta.

  “Talia, damn it,” her father cursed, standing up again. “I’ve got to count on you to back me up!”

  Her mother looked in her compact, smoothing her lipstick. “I thought the point of our secret separation was so that I didn’t have to pretend to care anymore?”

  Nami couldn’t look at her father. His face was a work of tragedy right now. Shakespeare could have written a sonnet about it. Her mother’s words should have cut her too, but she’d gotten over her mother’s lack of maternal instinct. Somehow the woman had been born without the mothering instinct. Or perhaps she never learned it. Nami couldn’t imagine growing up in a household with her grandmother. She shivered just thinking about it. Those sharks had some serious competition when it came to her Nanny Eleanor.

  Nami’s therapis
t guessed that her mother had something called attachment disorder. It was common in Russian and third world orphanages. Where the children just didn’t get enough love and cuddling as infants. While her mother hadn’t been raised in an orphanage, she did grow up in Nanny Eleanor’s household, so it was probably about the same thing.

  Her mother didn’t really love anyone. Nami doubted she even loved herself. She went from affair to affair, discarding her lovers like she did her out-of-season shoes. Why her father looked to her for support, Nami didn’t know. The woman just didn’t know how to give it.

  Instead of dwelling on her mother’s short comings, Nami wished her parents would act like adults and bite the bullet and all the bad press and just get a divorce. That way her dad could begin dating again and she could start hunting for a stepmother.

  She didn’t even care if it was a good one. She just wanted someone besides her mother. She’d take the old fairytale stepmothers. Heck, at least they cared enough to give their stepdaughter crap. Her own mother couldn’t even rise to that occasion. Attachment disorder was just that. Her mother couldn’t attach to anything long enough to care, not even her own daughter.

  The only reason her parents were separated, even secretly was that her dad finally couldn’t take the string of lesbian affairs. Once her mother had seduced her father’s last assistant, that had been the straw that broke her father’s back.

  Although Nami didn’t see what difference the secret separation made. They all still lived in the same house, albeit in separate wings. They still pretended to go on vacation together.

  It was stupid, just like this trip.

  Her dad took in a deep breath walked over and rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “Honey, I know how traumatic --”

  “You know how traumatic it was? Really?” Nami challenged. She didn’t think so. He wasn’t there. He didn’t watch his best friend’s leg get bitten off by a Great White Shark. He didn’t see the teeth and the blood and the leg, dangling there off the shark’s teeth, then the thing gulping the leg down whole. How Rusty’s face had gone white as he fell into the water. Or how Nami turned and ran. She ran.

  Leaving her friend in the water, bleeding to death. Luckily they had only been in knee-deep water and tourists had helped Rusty from the water and put a tourniquet on his leg, saving his life.

  And her dad thought he knew how she felt after that?

  “Rusty is doing better than you are,” her father cajoled. “He’s even gone out into the water already.”

  “Well, he’s a moron,” Nami snapped back.

  “No, baby, he’s healing,” her father said with that look of pity he got every time they talked about this. She hated that look almost as much as she hated the prickling of her nerves under her skin.

  Nami jerked out of her father’s hold and strode deeper into the house. Did every room in the place have to have ocean views?

  “Nami!” her father shouted. He never shouted at her. He took great pride in being a new age dad. She stopped if for nothing but the shock. “Get your bags,” he ordered as the limo honked out front.

  Her mother stopped fussing with her lip liner and went to the door and opened it, holding her fingers out at an awkward angle as the blood red nail polish dried. Their chauffeur entered, picking up her mother’s luggage. Nami squirmed. It was one thing to act like this with her parents. She knew exactly how crazy she would seem to outsiders. Nami hadn’t even returned to school to finish out the year to avoid those awful sideways glances. And if she acted up now? She’d never be able to show her face at school after the chauffeur wrote his tell-all autobiography.

  “We are leaving now, Nami,” Her father insisted, pointing to the door.

  She took in a deep breath, setting her teeth. “No.”

  “Fine,” her father said with a shrug. “I’ll re-book your flight to Cleveland and your Nanny Eleanor.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Nami breathed out in horror. Not her mother’s mother. She was old school. Like old country. She served things like goat’s tongue and ox tail soup. How could Nami transition to vegetarian in Cleveland? Okay, so maybe right now she wasn’t so much a vegetarian as an opportunarian. She wouldn’t buy meat, but she wouldn’t turn down a steak at a friend’s BBQ. But ox tail? No, thank you. Plus you had to read the Bible for four hours a day and go to church at least once a day. Ah, yah and in the Mid-West heat you couldn’t wear shorts.

  This was the woman who had given Nami’s mother attachment disorder. That’s where her father was going to send her to heal from her psychic wounds? Really? How did that make any sense? Although Nami didn’t think her father was worried about the sense of it. He just wanted her in that limo.

  “Well?” her father asked, standing next to her mother at the door with their luggage. They almost looked like a normal family.

  Nami sighed. It turned out that going to a Shark Park was actually less painful than visiting her Nanny. Who would have thought? She walked forward and joined her parents as they got into the limo.

  Oh, TMZ was going to be so excited. The Flack family all going on vacation. Of course what they didn’t know was, once touching down in Australia, her mother was going off to join her latest cheerleader conquest at the fashion show and Nami was being dragged against her will to a shark park for some kind of immersion, let’s shock the crazy out of you therapy.

  The perfect Hollywood family. Right.

  * * *

  Kevin Knightly looked out his private jet’s window. There was nothing but the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, rolling out forever. This had been a damn long ass flight. People talked about Australia being all the way on the other side of the world, but now it hit home.

  He stretched out his legs. It had been an uncomfortable flight and he was on a private jet, he could only imagine what it would have been like in coach. That was hard-core dedication there. You really, really wanted to get to Australia if you rode in coach for twenty hours.

  Of course he could have laid down, but he could never really sleep on a flight. Something about being a mile into the sky that couldn’t let him slumber properly.

  There were other things he could have done in the bedroom, but that would have taken two and Susie was still pouting.

  “I still don’t see why we couldn’t go to Fiji or the Bahamas,” she whined.

  Dear god, when your mistress got as demanding as your wife, you knew that you were in trouble.

  “Because this is a business trip. I’ve explained it enough times, Susie, I’m not going to again.”

  Susie huffed and turned her chair away from him. What did she know about checking on investments? Her investment was him. Which might have been a poor strategy. He’d been eyeing a secretary down on the sixth floor that seemed eager to move up the corporate ladder.

  Perhaps it was time to upgrade.

  And he could do so without the fear of Susie going to tell his wife. You see Kevin was an expert negotiator. Before he took Susie on as a mistress she signed a “pre-dissolution of the relationship” contract. It spelled out exactly what she would get and what she wouldn’t get if the relationship ended. It was also a non-disclosure agreement. If she broke her silence, she would lose everything.

  And if Susie loved nothing else it was her things. Her jewelry. Her Fifth Ave wardrobe. Her Bentley.

  In negotiations it was best to get your most favored terms before the start of a relationship. Romantic or otherwise. People would agree to the most onerous dissolution terms while the horizon looked bright and sunny. Kevin realized that most people didn’t believe that those harsh contract terms would ever be put to use.

  “Oh he’ll never leave me.” Or in business, “Oh we’ll never get to the point we want to break up the company.”

  Kevin was here to tell you that, oh yes you will. So he’d spelled everything out when Susie was all hot and bothered by him. When she couldn’t wait to go down on him in her brand new penthouse apartment. Or to go out to Morton’s sporting her new diamond neckla
ce. Their future had seemed so bright and sunny that she hadn’t hesitated to sign the contract.

  And now? Well, come Monday she would see that he had prepared for a rainy day, even if she didn’t.

  As a matter of fact, Kevin opened his laptop and shot off a note to his lawyer to get a contract ready for that perky blond on the sixth floor. Always better to plan ahead.

  He glanced out the window to find something twinkling on the horizon. He squinted. It was an island. Or more accurately an interconnected series of islands. Kevin thought the correct term was archipelago. Whatever its name it was huge. It sprawled out under them as they passed over the northeast corner of the Great Barrier Reef.

  The shark park that he had invested in was just outside the Australian Marine preserve.

  He’d of course seen plans and mock ups of the park, but nothing prepared him for the sight. It was one thing to think about over a hundred miles of coastline, it was another to see it. The park had been based off the success of the underwater manmade archipelago underwater hotels in Dubai. From the surface they looked like any other tropical resort. Palm trees dotted the land along with some above ground buildings, the radio shack, and of course private bungalows.

  However the vast bulk of the hotel, the rooms, spa, and 5-star restaurant and lounge, was under the islands.

  Gorgeous. And to think that nearly every square inch of that long and winding coastline was lined by luxury hotel rooms? That made him wetter than thinking about Susie’s appreciation tonight.

  While the hotel rooms were only a few feet underwater they gave a unique view of the denizens of the reef. You could watch the fish swim and feel right next to them.

  Dubai had made a fortune off of high-end customers coming for the unique stay. What they didn’t have… sharks. Lots and lots of sharks. That was Salechii’s hook into the uber-rich market. This facility added danger to the beauty.

  He’d heard that some A-list douche had paid over a hundred thousand dollars to stay at the park during this soft opening. In theory only investors and mega-donors were supposed to be here this weekend, only a few hundred guests to test work out all the kinks before they allowed the general public in. However when the park’s CEO, Callum McClay had called and asked if they could let the mega-action star, Nick Flack join them for a hundred G’s, Kevin hadn’t hesitated. You didn’t turn down that kind of money on principle.