Megalodon In Paradise

by Hunter Shea

  Ollie held back from saying, no shit, Sherlock.

  There was no such thing as coincidences. Just a long series of interrelated clusterfucks.

  There was a knock at the door. Ollie let Lae inside. She looked worried.

  What did Tara say to her?

  “Mr. Ollie, your friend said you and Marco wanted to talk to me,” she said, adding, “Did you see the storm?”

  He grabbed Marco’s phone from his computer desk. “All the more reason for you to call Lucky and tell him to stay put. We’re going to have to batten down the hatches.”

  The quizzical look on her face told him she had no idea what the phrase meant.

  “We’ll have to stay together and ride out the storm,” he clarified.

  Lae nodded. “Yes, that would be best. I hope you don’t mind my being here.”

  He gingerly touched her shoulder. “Lae, we’re more than happy to have you. Yours and Lucky’s safety is the most important thing. Give him a call.”

  The storm was something even pragmatic Lucky could see and respect. Lae could be clued into the whole shark business later.

  Lae walked off to a corner of the living room by the big bay windows overlooking the beach to make the call. The skies were still blue from that vantage point.

  To Ollie’s surprise, Heidi came back. She had changed into cargo shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers.

  “Where’s Steven?” Lenny asked.

  “At the house freaking out,” she said. “He’s calling everyone he can find to tell them about the shark and the skulls. He’s desperate to find a way off the island right away.”

  Ollie bit the inside of his mouth so hard, it hurt. “That’s crazy. No one will come out in this storm.”

  “I told him that. He’s beyond listening to me.”

  “He talk to any cops? Is the Coast Guard out around here?” Lenny asked.

  “Who knows? Reception is a disaster. He’s just doing a lot of cursing and staring at his phone. I’m hoping he’ll calm down on his own. I got the feeling if I stayed there, I’d just make things worse. He needs to find out for himself that we’re going to have to stay put.”

  Ollie offered her a cup of coffee, which she eagerly accepted. “I don’t get it. I never saw Cooter . . . I mean Steven, panic, not even the day before finals and he hadn’t studied. I always thought the reason he pulled through was because he could stay calm no matter what.”

  “A lot has changed since you last met.” A glimmer of sadness shimmered in her misty eyes before she looked away.

  Ollie didn’t know what to do. Heidi’s hands trembled, drops of coffee splashing over the side of the cup. Should he put his arm around her? Was that off limits because she was married to his friend?

  Tara burst in, breathless.

  “It’s still out there,” she said.

  “Where?” Lenny asked.

  “Not that far out. It’s just circling, like it’s waiting.”

  Heidi nearly dropped her coffee. “Waiting for what?”

  Tara shrugged. “Since the dolphins are gone, I assume more people like Titus in slow-moving boats.”

  “Fuck!” Heidi shouted. She sat in a chair at the kitchen table staring at the note Lenny had spread out.

  Lae stared at them while she talked to her husband in hushed tones. Ollie could tell she was very, very confused, as well as a bit frightened. He prayed Lucky was being reasonable and wouldn’t attempt to put his toe in the water. If the storm didn’t get him, the circling shark surely would.

  Tara showed them the ledger. “Maybe this will help.”

  Lenny eagerly took it from her. Ollie cleared a space on the table so he could crack it open. Old papers scattered all over the floor.

  “Crap,” Lenny blurted. “Now this really makes sense.” He flipped to the front of the ledger, a name listed on each line along with the date, time of entry and departure. “Look at those names.”

  Ollie swallowed hard. Lenny was right, most of the names were doctors. They were right there in black and white.

  Dr. Knoop

  Dr. Schmidt.

  Dr. Mueller.

  The list of German names went on and on.

  “Fucking Nazis,” Lenny whispered. “We have to get back to the lab. There has to be more stuff like this hidden around.

  “Where’s Marco?” Heidi asked.

  “He took off with a rifle,” Lenny said, nonchalantly. “He’ll be back.”

  “A rifle?” Tara said.

  “He thinks he’s going to pull some great white hunter, Hemingway shit,” Lenny said, flipping through the pages.

  Ollie stood close to Tara, feeling her body heat. “With the storm coming, we should think about getting everyone in one place until it passes.”

  Tara nodded. She took her pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, eyed it, then threw it in the garbage.

  “Oh man!” Lenny exclaimed, slamming the book closed. “We’ve got all the culprits right here.”

  Tara swiped the book away from him. “Maybe we can track down the names and find out who they were.”

  “You could start by Googling Nazi war criminals,” Lenny said.

  Tara ran to Marco’s laptop and quickly became dejected. “Internet’s down.”

  “Of course it is,” Ollie said.

  Heidi stood up and said, “So maybe now we concentrate on this storm. We can deal with killer mutant sharks and crazy skulls later.”

  “She has a point,” Tara said. The sky had darkened considerably.

  “I’ll get Marco,” Ollie said. “Heidi, you take Lenny and talk Steven off the ledge. We’ll meet in my house. Grab anything you think is essential from your places.”

  Heidi nodded.

  Lae was still on the phone.

  Ollie leaned close to Tara.

  “You mind making sure Lae gets to my house?”

  Tara squeezed his arm. His overreaching alligator arms.

  “No problem. Did you tell her about the shark?”

  “Not yet. I figured the storm would be enough to ground her husband. But it doesn’t look like it’s going so easy. Nothing is easy today,” Ollie said, chewing at a nail.

  Rodney Dangerfield in Easy Money popped into his head, as inappropriate a flick as he could conjure at the moment.

  If only life were as uncomplicated and silly as a comedy.

  Stepping outside, Ollie was struck by a nasty gust of wind. The storm was, at best, less than an hour away.

  Less than an hour until he found out if all this work could withstand a tempest.

  He shuddered, thinking that the lab that had withstood the elements for six decades might end up being their only hope.

  ***

  Steven threw his phone on the bed. It bounced once, twice, and landed on the floor.

  What was the point?

  They were screwed.

  Even the few calls that had gone through were so garbled, neither side could understand the other. It was like living in the fucking Stone Age.

  “Now what?”

  He stood in the middle of his bedroom, hands on his hips.

  And where the hell was Heidi?

  Sure, he’d been a bit of a dick, but that was no reason for her to desert him.

  She’s with everyone else, he thought.

  Most importantly, she was with Marco.

  They’d been role players right at the start of their relationship. It was the one thing that turned Heidi on. Literally, the instant he mentioned getting into some role play, she was wetter than Niagara Falls.

  Last night, when he was going down on her, she’d told him she wanted to pretend he was Marco. In the heat of the moment, he didn’t give it a second thought. He was harder than a Redwood, she was grinding against his mouth, the tang of her juices on his tongue. He didn’t care if she wanted to call him his father’s name as long as he made her come and got to slip inside her, filling her with his seed, shaking from head to toe as she groaned with unmitigated ecstasy.

  He’d bee
n so worn out afterwards, he hadn’t even thought about it until now.

  They’d indulged each other in their fantasies, pretending they were fucking friends, strangers, celebrities, and porn stars. It had become second nature. Part of their love-making ritual.

  Steven always assumed it was the best way to keep their relationship fresh and exciting. Like daydreaming about killing someone when you were pissed at them, it was a way of exercising the id so you didn’t have to act out on it in real life.

  But out here on an island where Marco was one of only three other men, it didn’t seem so cool.

  “I bet she’s hanging on his every word right now,” he said. “She’ll expect me to bang her brains out later, calling out his name. Maybe I should call her Tara while I do it.”

  He shook his head. He’d had his go-around with Tara back in the day and had no desire for a repeat. She was a nice girl, but just not his type. He’d wiped her out of his spank bank a long time ago.

  What the hell is the matter with you?

  How had his mind wandered so far off topic?

  They weren’t having sex tonight. Between the storm, the shark, and God knows what with the skulls, sex was a pipe dream. And there was nothing he could do right now. As much as he hated to admit it, he had to suck it up and sit tight. Once the storm passed, he’d get a helicopter out here to get them back to Majuro where they could hop a plane to the states. Ollie would be footing that bill, whether he liked it or not.

  Steven was glad he and Heidi hadn’t sold their house just yet. He’d acted responsibly, not throwing everything away to live out here. You always needed a safety net. He knew Ollie and the rest of them expected him to be the same hard partying, reckless goofball he’d been in college.

  That version of Steven Combs was long gone. He’d buried Cooter the day after graduation.

  Now he hoped he wouldn’t be buried out here in the middle of nowhere.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Sir, I think you should see this.”

  Captain Robert Powell was in the sonar room. His back was killing him. Chewing on several Tylenol had done little to ameliorate the pain. That put him in a less than hospitable mood. His crew sensed it, and they were giving him a wide berth.

  “What is it?” he snapped, grabbing the tablet from the officer. The kid was steely-eyed, but Powell could tell he’d rather be anywhere but here at this particular moment.

  “Intercepted cell phone communications,” he said, his posture more erect than the Empire State Building.

  Powell wasn’t in the mood for chatter gathered by the tentacles of the NSA. That department was the head of this goose chase. Sure, there was valuable intel they stumbled upon, but it was usually enmeshed in a goulash of babble. Most of it came in handy only after the fact, hindsight making it very easy to put all the pieces together.

  When Powell saw the origin of the calls, his back pain suddenly disappeared.

  “Are they sure about this?” he asked, not expecting an answer. None was mercifully supplied.

  Grand Isla Tiburon.

  What the hell was going on there?

  It couldn’t be that thing. It had been in cold storage so long he wondered if it was even still alive.

  The Pacific Ocean was prime breeding ground for numerous black-ops projects. It was far from prying eyes and the shores of America. The theory was, if something were to go wrong, knowledge of the event, and more importantly, any serious repercussions, weren’t going to be felt in the US.

  That was why they had sent the Maximus—a super-secret, black-budget submarine—down to this quadrant of the Pacific. After the explosion of prehistoric chimaera fish off the coast of Miami two years ago, several live specimens had been captured by the US Navy for further examination and testing. They were held in a special containment unit off the coast of western Australia.

  Powell was here to check on things and make sure there was no chance for the giant ghost sharks to escape. The scientists in charge of the lab said the creatures were growing, which seemed impossible, considering they were already over fifty feet long. It might be time to put them down like rabid dogs. The captain didn’t like the thought of any of those demonic fish swimming in the land of the living. They needed to be eradicated with extreme prejudice, not studied.

  Just thinking about the sea battle that was waged against the horde of ravenous beasts made his gorge rise. They’d lost a lot of good men and women that day.

  And now there was this.

  They would have to head north to the Marshall Islands. That was all he’d been told so far.

  But he knew it couldn’t be good.

  What the hell had gone wrong on that dead, deserted island?

  ***

  The storm seemed to be picking up speed, gobbling up the blue skies like a starving man.

  So was the boat skipping across the water like a flat rock.

  Marco settled behind a stack of driftwood, the rifle resting steadily atop it, keeping the boat in the crosshairs as he watched it approach.

  Am I really going to shoot them? I’ve sunk low, but this is a new bottom.

  He banged his head against the wood, the pain centering him.

  Yes, he’d fucked up royally, but this was a chance to start making things right.

  He should have never taken that gig cooking the books for Donovan Bailey. But he wasn’t thinking straight, his fentanyl addiction in total control. The soul-deadening narcotic was the only thing that got him through life after Mazie. With so many people overdosing on the stuff and it making headlines—especially after a celebrity like Prince died from it—the stuff got harder and harder to score.

  His bank account tapped out and brain itching, he told his dealer he’d do anything they asked of him to get a steady supply of his precious fentanyl. His dealer, a low-level piece of street grease who went by the name Scoots, knew Marco had once been a Wall Street hotshot. He took great delight in mocking him for his fall from grace.

  Scoots passed the word up the line, and somehow it reached Donovan Bailey, the head of the Jamaican Mob for the entire northeast. Marco had never met the man, but he’d heard plenty of stories, like how Bailey gouged the eyes from his wife’s head when he found her looking at another man. Or the time he had an entire village in Ecuador executed just to show the local drug lords that there was a new man in charge, his trade in America no longer enough to satisfy his desire for money and power.

  He was never mentioned in the papers. He kept it that way on purpose. He saw how well being a celebrity worked for the Italians. The Mafia was a shell of its former self, its days of glory gone, never to return.

  Donovan Bailey had no intention of letting his empire collapse. Not while he was still alive.

  Aside from drugs, guns, human trafficking, and other unsavory revenue pipelines, Bailey had his brutal hands in dozens of legitimate business. Naturally, most of them were in place to launder his ill-gotten gains. Word had it that once he heard he could have a legitimate Wall Street player in his pocket, his previous money manager disappeared . . . for good.

  He’d supply Marco the fentanyl he desperately needed at the start, but he needed him clean. So, Bailey paid for Marco’s rehab in one of the finest centers in New York. It was all part of Bailey making Marco indebted to him. And Marco truly was, at least at the start.

  Marco knew what he was getting into. If the drugs could no longer kill him, he’d be just as happy to let Bailey do the job for him.

  And then Ollie came along. Ollie with his friendship and money and generosity. It was the promise of a new life.

  Marco’s plan was to take his parents, his only relatives, and move them down here, well out of Donovan Bailey’s sight. They’d simply disappear.

  But somehow, Bailey had gotten wind of the change in Marco’s circumstance. He probably had Marco’s damn apartment bugged.

  Once he knew that Marco would be living on a remote island, Bailey quickly came up with a way to taint the whole thing. Grand I
sla Tiburon would be a kind of way station for various associates – a place to drop things off and pick them up.

  In return for use of the island, Bailey wouldn’t behead Marco’s mother and father.

  “Where the hell is that shark?” Marco hissed, hoping the beast would take his burden from him. But of course, it was nowhere to be found. The boat was almost ashore now.

  Marco’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  Being in charge of Ollie’s money, he’d found a way to hide a few million dollars from his friend who’d trusted him. It wasn’t much, just enough for Marco to grab his parents and disappear if the moment ever presented itself. Ollie would understand, not that Marco ever planned to face the music. He wasn’t man enough for that.

  With everything going to hell at the same time, this was that moment.

  The rifle was just supposed to be a backup. He’d counted on the shark.

  It would eat Bailey’s men, the storm would blow through, and Marco would rush back to New York and smuggle himself and his parents away in a small town in Canada he’d picked very carefully.

  The boat stopped, dropping anchor. Six men loaded into a dinghy, headed for the lab.

  Sweating so much the salt burned his eyes as it ran down his head in steady rivulets, Marco tensed.

  You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.

  He couldn’t tell if any of the men had guns. Why hadn’t he bought a scope?

  The dinghy hit the beach and the men scrambled out.

  Marco looked past them to the waiting boat.

  No massive dorsal fin.

  The storm loomed in the shrinking distance. The wind picked up, pelting his face with grains of sand.

  The men were carrying full gunnysacks, running up the beach. They wanted to dump their shit and get back on the boat, peeling away from the storm.

  But Marco knew that wouldn’t happen. He felt it like a fever, burning his brain to cinders. They would never get back in that boat. No, they would be stuck here, a band of very bad men who would do terrible things to Marco and his friends.

  The signs were there.