Retribution

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 13

  I located the device in the side door panel, a blue plastic disk the size of a doughnut. There was a convertible Sebring parked at the near court. I strolled over, tossed the thing behind the front seat and returned to the van. Johnson headed back to the freeway and in an hour’s time we were past a security kiosk and deep within a heavily landscaped network of narrow roads, motoring under a bridge and down a winding driveway before shutting down in the brick courtyard of what could best be described as a fantasy two-story Malibu beach pad, a construction of gray slate, redwood beams and expansive smoky glass, complete with private beach.

  In L.A. you had to be somebody to have private beach access. Apparently, Johnson’s sister in law was that somebody. They had money, and not the kind that was just on paper, but the kind where if need be, somebody could open a large safe deposit vault and come out with more than a few gold coins.

  Johnson looked at me. “I can’t believe you put the tracking device in some dweeb’s convertible,” he said. “What do you think’s going to happen when Poon’s man catches up with the dweeb?”

  “The dweeb will discover new and untapped depths of fear,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  I nodded, and Johnson and the dog headed for the front door, but I followed some redwood planking down the side of the place to some stairs which led me down to the beach. The five-foot surf was choppy, courtesy of a stiff offshore breeze, the whitecaps glimmering in the reflected beams from a half moon. It wasn’t much, but it was at least enough to see by. I stripped naked save for the knife. You may ask yourself what kind of man goes swimming with a knife. And the answer is that there are many such men in the world, men who regard the sea, the air and the land as all components of the same battle zone.

  Okay, let’s get real. Mother Earth hates your guts and has been trying to get rid of you for thousands of years. She’s poisoned you with thorns, eaten you alive with her monstrous animals, bitten you with her snakes, driven you off with her droughts and drowned you in her floods. So, with this basic truth firmly in mind, I, in defiance of all this, kept the knife strapped to my body and in no time at all I found myself doing a slow backstroke through the swells parallel to the coastline, about an eighth of a mile offshore. Malibu is a cove where the swells break a good couple of hundred yards out, and I was happy to avoid the pounding a typical shore break could have caused.

  Yeh, it was winter and the water was ice cold. Handling cold water is a state of mind. There is a room in your head where all the circuits connect. You have to go in there and reroute the pain circuits and tell yourself that what you’re feeling is just a meaningless vibration and nothing more. Once done, you keep moving and after a few minutes your thermostat kicks in and the warmth floods your body.

  I didn’t know how far I’d have to swim to get the stink off me. To Japan, perhaps, judging by the acrid, lingering presence of Gregor’s death. Which was when it hit me exactly how right the idea was. There was a purity to the notion of swimming to Japan. A penitence to the act itself. And the Land of the Rising Sun was a land of violence and redemption.

  Or had I gone too far with the killing of young Gregor? Maybe there was no place I could go. Perhaps the stink would never come off. Or maybe Johnson was right. Maybe at this point, I would need to find myself a new religion. One which had a dry cleaning service of the soul for such as I Yes. It was clear to me. I would swim to Japan. Of course, it was impossible, and that was the reason I knew I had to try. The very impossibility of it meant that I would either die trying or experience a miracle so incomprehensible that it would never be talked about to any other human being.

  Is the world really a place of time and distance? Or is it a dream which allows constantly for the impossible to occur with any frequency necessary for the salvation of the wounded? I would have to believe the latter. I would swim to Japan. I would arrive in a state of complete putrefaction, my body reduced to nothing more than a shell inside which something stank to High Heaven. The smell would attract the monks like bees to a flowering vine. There would be a saffron robe to hide the sores and the pus, and a ringing of many bells to summon the requisite spirits able to quench the hellfire raging in my spirit. My interior landscape would be meticulously raked and rearranged into the exact flowing pattern needed to align my energies with that of the Almighty. Thus assured that perhaps salvation was still possible, I put everything out of my mind and continued on to Japan, a lazy backstroke moving me infinitesimally closer and closer to the sublimity of it all.

  A sublimity which lasted about thirty seconds. And was then rudely interrupted. I sensed it before I felt it. A presence in the water of something large. I was not alone. A shark fin only slightly smaller than the tail fin of Air Force One broke the surface at twenty five yards and closing, the surreal phosphorescence of the surrounding wake mesmerizing me, the push of the predator’s forward motion rudely registered by my every fiber as the many tons of water displaced by its enormous bulk shoved me sideways.

  I had no time. The damn thing didn’t circle, or sniff or test anything first. It simply rushed me with jaws wide open. In the split second before we collided, I was invaded by a surge of truth, and understood everything perfectly. I knew why the cosmos had come into existence and how everything was going to wind up. I understood my role in all of it, and why I’d had to play it the way I had. I knew this without the hindrance of words to describe it. It was the gift the shark was giving to me prior to its removing me from my formerly lofty position at the top of the food chain.

  In a matter of days, or hours, depending on the speed of the beast’s digestive tract, I was going to become shark shit. This certain knowledge enlightened me. Yes, I was infused with the truth, and finally knew for certain the exact state of my affairs and what it was I had done to bring myself to this juncture.

  When I’d killed Gregor, he’d gone straight to Heaven, where even now he was looking down on me. Gregor was no longer wan, and crippled. He was in possession of some hefty new powers as befits a citizen of the celestial realms.

  Which was why Gregor had sent a bad-assed fish to bite me in half.

  We all have our gifts. The shark’s gift is violently dismembering live creatures and gulping down the constituent parts. My gift was more spiritual in nature. It was the gift of the warrior’s pride. I was a warrior, first and foremost. A warrior fights back, no matter the odds. It wasn’t important that I was going to die. It was only important that I die proudly, fighting back. Important that I do everything I could to at least make the price of killing me as high as possible. So that when the review board looked things over, they would record that when the nasty-ass shark took out John McDougal, at least John made the critter suffer for it, in some small way.

  Of course, I was a warrior who had traditionally fought against men. And not having been trained to fight off a very large shark, I had no game plan, save for letting it come naturally. I simply allowed instinct to take over, pulling my killing knife from its scabbard, and retracting my extremities into as tight and small a target as possible. Which wasn’t saying much, as it wasn’t likely the beast could miss a three-hundred pound wad of flesh under any circumstances. And yet, inasmuch as my retraction was at the last possible second before impact, the shark, perhaps following his regular routine of going for the part that was elongated and fluttering and perhaps resembling a seal or something, did miss chomping off my legs by a fraction. He did not, however, miss me entirely, and slammed into me with his enormous, sandpapery side, the feeling not unlike being slapped by the waterlogged trunk of a giant sequoia.

  Phase Two. The shark stopped and turned his enormous snout for the inevitable expert followup snap. Which, was, I figured, my last chance. And thanks to the splendid refulgence of the moon, I could see the beast
clearly, we were practically eye-to-eye. So what the hell. I simply jammed my blade straight into his unwinking orb and buried it to the hilt. At which point, all hell broke loose and I took a hit from a tail fin which knocked me out of the water and straight up a good ten feet before landing me, breathless, in a resounding belly flop on the surface, where I gasped and sucked just like any organism suddenly finding itself on the wrong end of a deadly predation. This was how it would end. The sounds of wheezing mingled with the crunch of teeth on bone.

  Except all was eerily quiet on the Malibu front. It took me awhile to realize I was alone with my fears. The beast was gone. To wherever sharks go when somebody sticks an eighteen-inch blade in their eye.