It never meant anything, though. Not to Joseph, either. Diane could tell.
Lex was the one for her, always had been.
“There you are. How was your beer?” Dr. Hammerstein called out to her from the beach. It was a little inlet with a rocky beach, and sea lions were everywhere. “Be careful. Come around to the sea line and make sure those camera poles are secure, will ya? Triple check.” He bent back over a hole he was digging. She wondered what that was for, and then started watching the sea lions getting restless from people being around them, too close.
“We have to hurry, Dr. Hammerstein,” she said. “I’ll check all the perimeter cameras on this side. You get the others and we’ll pack it up for the night.” She smiled at him.
“You’re right. What the hell is this irrigation hole going to do? I’m not going to get consistent anything in the storm to come.” He wiped his forehead and flipped the shovel over his shoulder. “Keeping busy to keep busy, I suppose.”
“It’s okay. You’re nervous.”
“I’m not nervous. You’re nervous.”
“Okay. Yeah. I’m nervous.”
He put his hand on her shoulder and squinted at her. “It’s all going to go great. You picked a good team. You didn’t have the second beer, and you came and got the captain from the storm and his madness.”
“Yeah, what’s the madness about?” she asked, pulling the beer out of her pocket and popping the lid. She took a swig, and then grinned at the sea.
He shrugged and shook his head, looking down woefully. “I’ve never won at blackjack. It haunts you after a while.”
“Unlucky in cards, lucky in love.” She watched a baby sea lion wiggle in the shifting sand at water’s edge.
“You get that beer out of Lex’s secret, locked cooler?”
“He says it’s champagne for the end of the trip. I saw the receipt. It’s the nice stuff… I wish I’d gotten this out of it. He won’t let anyone touch it.” She looked up at him. “You should tell him sharks like it.”
“Then he’ll dump it all in.” Dr. Hammerstein smiled.
“Hey, we just need a way in the locked cooler. I’ll take it from there.”
He chuckled. “All right, let’s go.”
“Mind if I power nap for fifteen when we get back?” She tilted her head over at him.
“I allotted you five power naps a day and that’s it.”
“I’ll both tell Lex the sharks like champagne and steal the contents when he opens it if you give me six.”
“Done.”
*
“One time, about 40 years ago,” Lex said, stoking the fire in the deck’s fire pit, “Great White Death was said to have disrupted a small music festival the locals put on here.” He turned, walked back to his deck chair.
Much to his annoyance, before he even got to sit down and really tell this one, Oliver interrupted. “Back to scaring people. Maybe if we were 12.”
Joseph laughed. “Let him tell the story.”
Lex looked around at all their faces, eyes lingering a little longer on Oliver’s pitch-black ones. Did Oliver see what Lex could do to him? No, he couldn’t, but some part of him was afraid of Lex. Lex knew it.
Everybody had some sense to stay away at least a little bit unless Lex was careful. Lex knew how to be careful.
He told the story in creatively graphic detail, watching the reactions of the others. Bunny, nothing, as usual. Lost in her booze haze. Aaron was rapt with attention. Dr. Hammerstein ate his hot dog and listened with interest. He knew most of these stories, or had and forgot them. He had known most everything to Lex and had seemed to enjoy telling him shark legends he knew of. Lex loved it.
Melody grinned and laughed at Lex’s more descriptive gore-gore, while Chas played on his phone. Oliver all but glared at Lex the whole time, just waiting to speak. Did he ever listen, Lex wondered?
He couldn’t wait until they all went to sleep. He had plans.
He was going to bring Great White Death.
Diane held his knee the whole time he told the story. Her delicate, thin hand, so pale and pure. He wanted to know her perfectly so very badly.
*
Lex stood farther down the island from the yacht, at a point, and had climbed over some rocks and swam through water to get there. It was the dead of night. This was where he planned to summon Great White Death. He had to test to make absolutely sure he could bring the great white shark. Lex knew his lore. He knew the local witchcraft, and a couple years before the trip, made some visits to less scrupulous “psychic readers” to learn just the right things.
What nobody alive knew about Lex was that he was a killer. He had no problem with this: that he was a killer, not that nobody alive knew. He didn’t want them to, though. He’d go to jail, and then he wouldn’t get to kill anymore.
He’d hit a snag. An ongoing, brutal reality about his killings that he could hardly live with anymore.
This expedition gave him an answer.
Lex meant it when he told Great White Death’s earliest legend. He said that no two make the same sound when utterly tortured. It was true. That’s when Lex knew them, truly knew them. Lex only felt he completely understood another human being when they’d reached that point, the point where they were making their own sounds of terror, torture, and insanity…but it was always right before they died.
That was the part that got Lex.
With every single person he murdered, he immediately regretted it if he did it this way. He knew them. Knew them. Understood them completely. He loved them unconditionally forever in that moment and didn’t want them to die, but they always did. Lex lived with great regrets from his strange, unexamined urge to kill, but much examined urge to feel an awesome understanding of another person.
He wanted to know Diane. He would never kill her, though. He loved her more than life itself. Still, it ate at him. He could know her, he just needed to set it up.
Great White Death was the solution.
Lex pulled a plastic bag and a butterfly knife out of his jacket pockets. He unwrapped a limp bat body, pocketed the wrapper, flipped the knife open, and held the knife out over the water, bat body to the blade’s side.
He stabbed the bat body in the heart, squeezed the thing just right. Lex knew how to keep blood off himself. The bat’s blood fell into the sea.
He tossed the bat body in, took several steps back, and waited.
The wind was fierce now, and rain stung like ice pellets. Little, sharp stabs. The water was rough.
Lex waited.
Time passed. Lex didn’t get cold. He stayed alert.
He was a shark lookout.
He saw a large, dark fin, but it had to be literally only a second or two before an enormous great white shark plunged from the sea, gaping mouth wide and ready, teeth glistening in the lightning. Lex couldn’t even see anything but its mouth.
That second was enough for Lex to jump back and into the water behind the rock he stood on.
The giant shark mouth closed on empty air and the beast landed on the rock with a thud. His garish mouth opened and clamped shut violently over nothing.
Lex treaded water, heart pounding, knees shaking, and waited with all his calculated patience.
The shark stopped his chomping, realizing there was no meal here anymore, and slid back into the sea.
Lex swam to the next rock, hopped up, then to the next rock, and finally got to land.
He bent over his knees, head up and still staring at the darkness where he had made it happen, fear eating him up. Fear wasn’t something he felt very often, and he didn’t like it.
But it would be worth it. He had found Great White Death, and his trick was in an old story out of a witch woman’s mouth.
He’d done it. This was going to happen. He would know Diane, and she wouldn’t have to die if Lex did it just right.
The shark was terrifying. That much was for sure. Great White Death should suit Lex’s plans well, as long as he didn’t mess
it up.
Lex hardly ever made those kinds of mistakes.
Great White Death is available from Amazon here!
Operation Norway (S-Squad Book 7) Page 12