Death in Deep Water

by Paul Kemprecos

  “It was only a supposition,” I said.

  “Yes, but it could have happened. Don’t you see, Soc, if we can prove Eddy was torturing Rocky, it might make a difference. Then at least people would understand that Rocky’s not a ferocious killer.”

  “In other words, Rocky could have killed Byron, but he had a good reason. How do you prove that?”

  “By locating the electrical prod. It wasn’t anywhere near the pool when they found his body. But it could have fallen into the water. No one else knew Eddy had the prod, so they wouldn’t have looked for it. I’ve wanted to search for it, but it’s been difficult because everybody’s been banned from the water. And even if I got into the pool, it would take me forever to search the bottom. You’ve seen how big and deep it is, like a small lake.”

  I could see where this was heading and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Soc, you’re a diver. Could you go down in the tank and look? It would mean so much to me.”

  Sally and I had been on the same track. We both felt the electric prod might tell us something. In time, I might have made the dive myself, but I hadn’t summoned up the courage to go swimming with Rocky. I would have procrastinated forever, hoping something else would develop.

  “When do you want to do this?”

  She was ready for the question. “How about tonight?” she said.

  A breeze came in off the bay, and the candle flames flickered, casting moving shadows across her face. There was no mistaking the determination in those lovely eyes. Sally had me with my back to the wall.

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”

  I couldn’t slip out of this one without looking like a coward. I wouldn’t do that, even if it killed me. But if I had known a dive with a possibly homicidal killer whale was on Sally’s dinner menu, I might have taken a chance with my own cooking.

  Chapter 24

  We cleaned up from dinner, then Sally and I got in the pickup and drove to Oceanus. I parked in the shadows of the administration building and we went through the employees’ entrance. There was no sign of Ben. I guessed he had made his one swing around the complex and was back in his office taking a snooze. He seemed unable to maintain consciousness past the “Johnny Carson Show,” but then I can’t get through it either.

  Sally stopped at the locker room to pick up her wet suit. At her suggestion, I grabbed a bucket of herring from the fish house. We met at the fountain and proceeded to the orca stadium. As one of the mammal trainers, Sally had her own key to the gate. We locked it behind us and carried the gear into the darkened bleacher section.

  From a central switch box, Sally turned the underwater lights on in the whale pool. The water glowed like a great puddle of distilled moonbeams. We set the gear down next to the plastic wall. Before leaving her apartment, Sally had changed into a teal exercise outfit. She slithered out of it, revealing a two-piece bathing suit in matching color. Sally got into a form-fitting red-and-black Oceanus regulation wet suit that looked as if it had been brushed onto her supple body.

  Her long chestnut hair was untied and fell free over her tanned shoulders. She looked like a Nereid, one of the lovely water nymphs whose parents were Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea, and Doris, the daughter of the god called Ocean.

  Sally and I stood on the platform at the side of the orca pool watching Rocky’s wobbly dorsal fin knife through the water.

  “It’s normal predator behavior for Rocky to be curious about something new introduced into his environment,” Sally was saying. “So don’t worry if he approaches you.”

  I looked out over the orca pool. “Do you mind if we don’t call Rocky a predator until I come out of the water?”

  “Of course, but it won’t change a thing. Rocky is a predator, the biggest. He doesn’t have any natural enemies, so he isn’t scared of anything. He’ll be very bold about inspecting you, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to eat you.”

  “Thanks, I’m glad to hear that.”

  “It’s the same as walking through a cow pasture. The cows will clomp after you. You know they won’t hurt you, but it’s still unnerving, because they’re so big.”

  The glistening black back roiling the surface only hinted at the powerful body that lay beneath. I tallied Rocky’s vital statistics like the master of ceremonies at a boxing match.

  In this cor-nah, at twenty-fi-yuv feet and sixteen thousand pounds, Rocky the killer whale!

  I shook my head. “Sorry to disagree with you,” I said, “but Rocky is no guernsey.”

  Sally put her arm around me as if she were comforting a bashful kid on his first day of school. It was a natural gesture and didn’t embarrass me.

  “He’s as gentle as one,” she said. “Whales and cows share the same bovine ancestors, and both are very curious. Orcas are as fascinated by human beings as we are of them. Just expect Rocky to pay a great deal of attention to you. You’re the most interesting thing he’s seen in weeks. And don’t forget, I’ll be in the water with you.”

  She did have a point. If Rocky devoured anyone, it would be a tasty morsel like Sally and not a chewy old shamus.

  Her after dinner suggestion to look for the electrical prod caught me by surprise, but I wasn’t totally unhappy. I had been toying with the same idea. The prod might be the only tangible piece of evidence in this whole weird case. Ben said Eddy was brandishing a “stick” the night he died. It wasn’t around in the morning when Byron’s body was found. Ben may have been seeing things, but if the prod were in the pool, I would conclude that Eddy had unwisely zapped Rocky, and the killer whale zapped back.

  Case closed, Mr. Otis. Rocky did it.

  Being nudged into action by a beautiful young woman who cooked like a dream wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. I was pleased she trusted me and guilty for parading under false flags. As far as I knew, she didn’t suspect I was a private cop.

  I stripped down to my boxer shorts and got into my wetsuit. I strapped on my buoyancy compensator, wondering if the air in my tank was clean, but quickly dismissed the worrisome thought; I had picked the tank at random from the shed at Larry’s dive shop.

  Sally hung a whistle around her neck, walked to the edge of pool, knelt down, and slapped the water several times. Sound travels four and a half times faster in water than it does in air. The noise would have sounded like gunshots to Rocky, who was about fifty feet away. His head popped out of the water and he moved it back and forth, showing us his white chin.

  “That wig-wag motion is typical orca behavior,” Sally said. “He’s seeing who’s here.”

  She blew lightly on the whistle and gestured hands-up in a come-along signal. Rocky disappeared in a circle of bubbles. Sally quickly stepped aside and suggested I do the same. Seconds later, I saw why. Rocky exploded from the water and slid his immense body onto the stage between us. I was ready to scramble for the highest row of bleachers, but Sally went over to Rocky, knelt down, and rubbed the whale’s blunt nose.

  “Hello, Rocky.” She crooned like a mother talking to a baby, not to an eight-ton hunk of blubber with a mouthful of sharp teeth and a tail that could crush a man. This close, where I could measure Rocky’s bulk against my own body, he was enormous.

  She gave him a herring. He chomped it down like a bon-bon.

  “Rocky, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. His name is Soc and he’s an okay guy.” Sally gestured at me.

  I went over and knelt beside her. She took my hand and put it on the top of Rocky’s nose. His skin was smooth and surprisingly soft. My presence was not unnoticed. Rocky was watching me with his great liquid eye.

  Sally patted his head and made a signal with her hands again. Huffing through his blowhole, Rocky wriggled backward and slid into the water, so all but his head was submerged.

  “Okay,” Sall
y said. “Let’s go in. Me first.” She dove off the platform, disappeared for a few seconds, then emerged several yards from Rocky. She pushed her hair away from her face and waved. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

  I checked on Rocky, who seemed to be doing the same to me, shrugged my shoulders, and jumped in. Buoyed by my inflatable vest, I breast-stroked over to Sally. She waited until I was by her side, then we struck out together. We swam around twenty feet and stopped. I turned onto my back and looked for Rocky. He was gone. Where the hell was he?

  Wooo-oof!

  It sounded like an exploding steam valve. I spun around in the water. Barely fifteen feet away was Rocky’s head. It was only visible for a second before Rocky rolled partially onto his side, fixed me with his big black eye, and slid under the water. I thought about my dangling legs and hoped they didn’t look like pork chops to Rocky.

  He began to circle. The four-foot-high dorsal fin sliced through the water, keeping a respectful distance away, which was fine with me. ’Round and ’round. I pivoted to keep pace with him, but soon got dizzy. Sally swam over and hung on to me to gain a moment’s rest from treading water. I put my arm around her waist to help. The warmth of her body penetrated the double thickness of our wet suits.

  “You can start your search anytime,” she said. “I’ll try to keep Rocky busy up here so he won’t get in your way, but don’t be surprised if he checks you out again. One more thing. You may feel a slight tingling at the base of your spine when Rocky uses his sonar on you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll swim around the inside rim of the pool and kind of spiral into the center. Then I’ll retrace my path back to the sides again. If I don’t find anything, I’ll slip into the smaller pool and do the same thing. It’s an inexact way to cover ground, but the water is pretty clear, and I’m sure I’ll see anything on the bottom.”

  She nodded and let go. I paddled back to the pool’s edge near the stage and let air out of my BC. I swam straight down to the blue-painted concrete bottom of the pool, inflated the vest to a slight positive buoyancy so I could hover, and set off around the perimeter, swimming with the transparent wall off to my right.

  Moving my fins in unhurried but steady scissors kicks, I swam about a yard above the bottom, covering ground rapidly. But less than a minute into the search, I stopped.

  A huge shadow was passing over my head.

  I looked up and saw Rocky’s white underside. He was just below the surface, rounded flippers angled down. Swimming with a lazy side-to-side motion of his tail, he moved across my line of vision like a miniature dirigible.

  I gritted my teeth and pushed ahead. The pool was his turf, after all, and he could do anything he wanted.

  Tap-taptappity-taptap.

  It sounded like somebody hitting the distant keys of an old Underwood typewriter. I rolled over and looked above and behind me. Rocky had dived almost to the bottom, and was following me. He must be echolocating, because my spine prickled as Sally said it would. This continued until I was halfway around the pool, then Rocky broke off and disappeared.

  I kept on, moving my head to take in as wide a radius as possible with my search, and completed the entire circuit of the pool without finding a thing.

  Back where I started, I angled in and started a smaller circuit, moving toward the center of the pool in ever-decreasing concentric circles. Rocky returned to keep me company. He passed overhead, but stayed a respectful distance away. I caught a reassuring glimpse of Sally’s red wet suit from time to time.

  At the pool’s center, I paused a few seconds to get my bearings, then started on a reverse spiral that ended at the island. I surfaced and yanked the regulator out of my mouth. Sally was standing on the elongated island that divided the larger section of the pool from the smaller one.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I’ll try the smaller pool.”

  She nodded. “Is Rocky behaving?”

  “He’s following me around like a lost puppy, but he’s being a good boy. See you in a couple of minutes. This shouldn’t take long.”

  I swam around the island to the smaller pool, dived to the bottom, and did a repeat of my search pattern. I surfaced again. Sally was still on the island, sitting with her long legs in the water. I shook my head. “If there was a prod in there, Rocky must have eaten it.”

  Sally tried to hide her disappointment, but it showed in her eyes. “Well,” she said, “at least we know. Let’s go back.”

  She slid into the water beside me and struck out across the pool. She swam in slow easy strokes so I could keep up with her. Scuba gear isn’t made for surface movement, and even with the added push from my fins, I fell several paces behind her.

  I was getting used to Rocky’s antics and thought nothing of it when he disappeared at the far side of the pool in a frothy bull’s-eye of ripples. Then he exploded from the water in a great graceful arc that took him completely out and splashed down in a huge geyser. Sally and I bobbed in the seas he created. It was a beautiful maneuver and I marveled at his agility.

  It just didn’t seem possible for all that bulk to move as if gravity didn’t exist. I watched to see if he was going to jump out of the water again. He swam around the edge of the pool, as if he were going to repeat his circling pattern, then cut in suddenly toward the center. He began to pick up speed, moving on a straight-line trajectory, his black dorsal fin cutting the water like the conning tower on a nuclear submarine.

  Sally swam in a slow, measured Australian crawl, oblivious of Rocky, who was rapidly moving in on her blind side.

  I watched Rocky, expecting him to turn or submerge as he had before. Instead, his head came out of the water and he opened his beartrap mouth wide. The significance of the movement penetrated my thick skull. Fingers of fear clutched my heart.

  He was going for Sally!

  I shouted, “Sally, get out of the pool!” My mouth was half-full of water and the words were garbled. Sally caught their urgency even if she didn’t understand them. She stopped swimming and turned to face me.

  “Behind you!” I screamed again.

  She swiveled around to face Rocky, her back to me, but she didn’t move. Poor kid must have been petrified with fear.

  Adrenaline surged through my body. I put all the strength of my legs into frantic kicks. My arms windmilled, although I didn’t have the faintest idea what I could do against an animal the size of a locomotive.

  The whale had cut the distance to Sally in half, trailing a white wake behind him.

  I flailed away in panic, got closer by a few yards. Too late. Rocky was less than two dozen feet away.

  His pink mouth looked big enough to swallow a car. I had never seen so many teeth in one place in my whole life. It was the same awful sight that must have filled Eddy Byron’s vision in the last few seconds of his life.

  I swam even harder. Sally was turning to face me now. I expected her features to be twisted in fear.

  But she was laughing.

  Rocky had come to a stop. Grabbing the whale by the nose, Sally pulled herself up and stood on his flippers. She wrapped her arms around his huge head, rubbed him on the side of the snout, then kissed it. I swam closer, gulping for air.

  “Are you all right?” I yelled.

  “Of course. Watch.”

  Rocky began to pivot as if he rested on underwater ball bearings. Faster and faster in a leviathan ballet. Sally held on to his nose with one hand for balance, leaned back, and waved at me with the other. After a few dizzying seconds of playing ring-around-the-rosy, they stopped.

  Rocky turned kittenishly onto his back and swam around the pool with Sally riding on the whale’s belly. After a few seconds Sally slid off. Rocky turned right side up. I swam over to them.

  “Rocky just wanted to play,” Sally said. She giggled like a teenager, hanging on to his pectoral fins and s
troking his back. “Rub his skin. He likes it.”

  I moved in and gently touched the whale’s back near the dorsal fin. That’s when I noticed the fin had two V-shaped nicks in the trailing edge. Rocky didn’t exactly purr, but he must have liked the body massage because he floated there while we hung on.

  Sally said, “That’s enough. We don’t want to spoil him.” She gave him a couple of affectionate pats, pushed off, and swam to the side of the pool with me following.

  Rocky angled off fighter plane style. I brought my knees up to my chest instinctively and stuck my head underwater to see what he was up to. Rocky was below me near the bottom of the pool, swimming belly up like a big dog looking for a tummy scratch.

  Sally had climbed onto the stage. She took my air tank and weight belt, then helped me out of the pool. Rocky had followed me. His head was out of the water near the stage.

  “See if he’ll take a fish from you, Soc.”

  I reached into the bucket and held the fish over the pool. Rocky moved in closer until he was under the herring. He eyed me for a second, then opened his mouth. I dropped the fish and it disappeared down his gullet.

  “I guess you passed the test,” Sally said. She gave him another fish and patted him on the nose. He moved out into the water and turned on his side to wave a flipper at us. The he dove deep and disappeared.

  Sally shook her head sadly. “He’s pretty happy to have company. People have been avoiding him because they think he’s dangerous. Next time I’ll show you his grand finale trick. He’ll jump out of the water with me standing on his nose.”

  “Is there anything he won’t do for you?”

  “Yes, he won’t let me ride on his back. Some whales are like that. It must be sensitive there. He’ll knock off any trainer who tries it, even me. Almost all the incidents you heard about with trainers happened when they tried to ride him.”