Death in Deep Water (Aristotle Soc Socarides) Read online

  Death in Deep Water

  By Paul Kemprecos

  SUSPENSE PUBLISHING

  Death in Deep Water

  by

  Paul Kemprecos

  DIGITAL EDITION

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Suspense Publishing

  Death in Deep Water

  Copyright © 1992 by Paul Kemprecos

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  For Christi

  “He harms himself who does harm to another, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner.”

  —Hesiod (c. 700 B.C.)

  Death in Deep Water

  Chapter 1

  In the liquid emerald coolness, the predator waited.

  Terrible in its deadly beauty, the twenty-five-foot-long body glided through the water, propelled by lazy sweeps of its spade-shaped flukes. Slowly, almost lethargically, it cruised in wide leisurely circles, steering into turns with its paddle-shaped pectoral fins, slicing the water with its tall dorsal.

  The easy movements were deceiving, for no sea creature was faster, none could be more ferocious. Shaped by a harsh and demanding environment, it was a marvel of natural engineering, and except for humans, the most efficient killer on the planet. It feared nothing. Not even the savage sharks or the great leviathans that lumbered through the world’s oceans were safe from its slashing teeth. The enormous energy locked in the creature’s streamlined torso could send eight tons of murderous flesh hurtling toward its prey.

  But for now it was tranquil.

  Moving its massive round head from side to side, the predator forced air through its nasal sacs in a series of repetitive clicks that were above the human range of hearing, focusing the sound waves in a narrow directional beam that bounced off solid objects like the sonar used by submarines. The returning echoes were sonic brushstrokes that painted a sound picture of the creature’s surroundings in its large and complex brain.

  It was a skill developed through millions of years of evolution in the dark, deep reaches of the sea, where light never penetrates and eyes are useless.

  The echoes struck a hard, unbroken expanse, rebounded, ricocheted in a confusing tattoo, coming at the animal from all directions.

  Then faded. The creature was silent, and in the silence, memories came to it, ghostly dreamlike recollections of endless vistas that teemed with life. But even more wonderful was the eerie music made by others of its kind, calling across the cold distances with warbled trills and trumpet blasts.

  The predator felt its isolation keenly, for it was a sentient creature with a capacity for feeling and perceiving. It knew anger and frustration, happiness and sorrow, even if it couldn’t put words to these emotions. Now it was hungry, not for food, but for companionship. It let out a plaintive scream, long and strident. There was no answering call.

  Lonely.

  The predator surfaced to breathe, sending misty exhalations from the blowhole in its head, then resumed its mindless circling. With each circuit, the animal paused at a hard transparent surface where it could see beyond its confines, then went on.

  It passed again, and stopped. Something was moving on the other side of the hardness.

  Curious, the animal hovered on its vertical axis, watching, first with one black eyeball, then the other. The tail flicked, the creature shot straight up, and its huge head emerged from the water.

  Yes.

  The man came nearer. He looked at the animal for a very long time. Then he blew a sharp note on a whistle and signaled with his arms. The animal knew what was expected. It plummeted to the bottom, zoomed to the surface and leaped from the water, spinning high in the air, dancing on its tail in defiance of gravity.

  Good.

  It exulted in the chance to use its muscles, to respond, to act, to move, to be with another living being. The man slipped into the water. He swam over and stroked the shiny black-and-white skin.

  Good.

  The man clutched the creature’s dorsal fin and pulled himself onto the animal’s long back. He dug his knees into the blubbery flesh like a rodeo cowboy on a Brahma bull. Lulled by its pleasure at having company, the animal responded slowly at first. Then the great brain absorbed the significance of the pressure on its back and sides.

  No.

  A lightening message flashed along the spine to hundreds of nerve endings in the tail. Powerful muscles tightened under the rubbery black skin. The tail lifted, flexed, then whipped down and slapped the water like a giant flail.

  Cuh-rack!

  The ear-splitting impact echoed and reechoed. Water exploded into foamy shards.

  No.

  The creature hated the weight against it sensitive skin. Its mood change was electrical. The almost child-like eagerness to please vanished. Primitive reflexes took over.

  The creature snapped its tail again, submerged in a shallow dive, then angled up and jumped clear of the water. The man leaned forward and gripped the slippery dorsal fin. They splashed down again as one. Tidal waves sloshed in every direction. The animal plunged deep. The man held on, desperately. The creature came up fast. It leaped from the water, higher this time, soared, then landed in a wet explosion of foam and spray.

  No.

  The animal rolled violently, coming down on one side, and it shook the man from its back the way a cow might dislodge a tick. The man sputtered and gasped for air.

  They were only a few yards apart, so close the man could see his pale, terrified face reflected in the creature’s dark eye. He yelled in terror. The predator closed the space between them. It opened its mouth wide to show the long pink tongue and dagger-sharp teeth, then swiftly moved in on its struggling target.

  Chapter 2

  The dusty Ford van with the avocado paint job and Rhode Island plates pulled up next to a silver BMW polished like a gravy bowl. A scruffy long-haired kid in a blue workman’s uniform slithered out the passenger side and eyeballed the crowded parking lot in a quick three-hundred-sixty-degree pirouette, as graceful as Baryshnikov in his prime. Then he curled his fingers in an okay sign and two more young guys in uniforms spilled from the van. They must have figured nobody was watching them, but they were wrong. From the crest of a sand dune around a hundred feet away, where I lay belly down, the seven-by-fifty Bushnell binoculars could pick out the acne on their wise-guy faces.

  It was a perfect July day. Mercury in the eighties. Not a hint of humidity or whisker of a cloud in the sky. The low thunder of breaking rollers rumbled in the distance. Black-capped laughing gulls wheeled in lazy circles overhead, their manic cackles mingling with the happy screams of kids daring the surf. People dressed for the beach threaded their way between parked cars. They lugged coolers, oversized towels, and folding chairs, and did funny little barefoot dances on the hot sunbaked blacktop.

  It was hard to believe a felony was in progress.

  While his buddies kept their eyes peeled, one g
uy slid a metal strip down into the Beemer’s window. I turned to swat a greenhead fly that was sinking its fangs into my bare thigh. Missed. Looked again. The car door was open. The whole thing took about thirty seconds.

  Jimmy Buffet was singing about good times and riches and son of a bitches in my head. I slipped the earphones off, stuffed my Walkman in a canvas daypack, and flicked on a Radio Shack portable CB.

  “Sandman to Chowderhead. Come in, please.”

  A breathless voice crackled on the radio.

  “This is Chowderhead.”

  “Stand by for instructions.”

  “Will do.”

  I swiveled the navy blue Boston Rex Sox cap so the visor pointed backward, rapper-style, and brought the Nikon 35mm camera with a zoom lens to my eye. The letters printed on the van filled the viewfinder. ACE LOCKSMITHS. Cute cover. One of the guys was in the car. His disembodied arm handed out two tennis rackets, a duffel bag, and a camera. I banged off a half-dozen shots of the stuff moving into the van and grabbed the radio again.

  “Write this down, Dougie. Man o’war with three Klingons aboard. Green Astro Ford van. Rhode Island plates. Number 896-687. Get a Federation starship in here. Pronto.”

  “Roger that, Sandman. Chowderhead out.”

  Yeow! The greenhead nailed my calf. I smashed the little bastard to a green pulp, then turned back to the parking lot. A car stereo, wires dangling, was on its way from the BMW to the van. I caught the smooth transfer on film and shook my head in admiration. These dudes were real pros.

  Five minutes later they were done. They got back in the van, cruised slowly around the parking lot, and headed for the exit. Surprise! Blue and red roof lights flashed on the access road. First one police cruiser, then another swung into the lot and blocked the way. The cops hustled the guys out of the van, frisked them, and stuffed the trio into the patrol cars.

  All I had to do was drop the roll of film off at the police station, tell them I’d be available to make a statement, and my job was over.

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead, gulped down a swallow of lime Gatorade to replenish the moisture baked away by the summer sun, and put the camera and radio into the daypack with my Walkman and sunscreen Then I followed the fragrant aroma of fried onion rings to a white clapboard building with a sign on it that read DOUGIE’S CLAM SHACK AND CHOWDER HOUSE.

  Dougie burst out the screen door leading to the kitchen and pulled me inside. His bald head glistened with sweat and his black anarchist mustache was caked with flour.

  He put his pudgy arm around me and grinned like the Big Bad Wolf. “Caught those bastards with the goods. The little pricks have been hitting my customers all summer. Friggin’ cops in this town couldn’t catch a cold going bare-ass in a blizzard.”

  “Don’t be too tough on the local cops, Dougie. They haven’t got the manpower to stake out every parking lot in town, especially when people don’t lock up or forget to set their car alarms.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he fumed. “The tourists leave their brains at home when they go on vacation. But Jeez, Soc, you’d think the town could spring one of those summer rent-a-cops you see standing on street corners hustling the babes. Sometimes I think we’re supporting the LAPD from the taxes I pay. Which reminds me, pal, whadda I owe yah?”

  I leaned against a pile of potato sacks and watched the teenage kids working the fryolators at the front counter. “I dunno, Dougie. I put around ten hours into this case, not counting travel. Most of it was lying out on the dunes, so I got a great tan, but I lost fishing time on Sam’s boat, and I’d like to make that up.”

  Dougie scratched his double chin with a batter-caked fingernail and did some mental calculations.

  “How about a couple of hundred clams?”

  The figure he mentioned was close to the balance on my unpaid ComElectric bill. “Sure, Dougie, that should do it,” I said.

  Fifteen minutes later I sat at a sticky picnic table trying to make a dent in an Everest of golden nuggets that was as high as my nose. Doug came over and patted me on the back.

  “Everything okay, Soc?”

  I aimed some ketchup from a plastic envelop onto my french fries and glurped most of the red stuff onto my fingers.

  “Terrific, Dougie.” I said, forking down a mouthful. “Tender, fresh, done to perfection. Unfortunately, these weren’t the kind of clams I had in mind.”

  He sat next to me, frowning like a melancholy walrus. “Yeah, I know pal, you want greenbacks. Look, business has been a little off and the price of shellfish has been up near platinum, but I’ll pay you in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, come by when you get hungry for the best fried seafood on Cape Cod. Bring a friend. It’s on me. Okay?”

  “Okay, Dougie.” I munched on an onion ring. “But you might be sorry.”

  *

  My name is Aristotle P. Socarides. The middle initial stands for Plato, something I don’t advertise because it makes me sound like the first three chapters in a book of Greek philosophers. I live in a weatherworn boathouse on the easterly shore of Cape Cod, a seventy-mile-long arm-shaped peninsula that hooks into the Atlantic off the coast of Massachusetts. I share my lodgings, as Dr. Watson would say, with a mostly black and constantly hungry Maine coon cat named Kojak. Generations of mice who know they have nothing to fear from Kojak have transformed the walls into cooperative housing. Two noisy raccoons live under the boathouse, and from the decibel level of their frequent arguments, their marriage is on the rocks.

  The boathouse overlooks an even-tempered saltwater inlet that Samuel de Champlain mapped when he passed this way in 1606. He called it Pleasant Bay and the name stuck. Low-lying islands that were carved by glaciers in the ice age rise from the bay, and its waters are enclosed by the mainland on one side and a barrier beach a few hundred yards wide on the other. Beyond the beach is the moody Atlantic, and on clear days I swear I can see Portugal from my deck.

  Elegant blue herons with necks longer than Audrey Hepburn’s wade through the quiet marshes nearby, and in the warm season an intoxicating fragrance of beach plum and salt-spray rose mixes with the scents of the ocean. It’s light-years away from my old life, and I prefer it that way. I quit my job as a Boston cop because I couldn’t deal with the city’s banana-republic politics. But you never stop being a flatfoot. A visceral need to set the world in order always claws at your innards. You’re like a person who can’t walk by a hanging picture without straightening it. So I have my private-investigator’s license and take a case now and then, depending on my mood and the balance in my bank account.

  Mostly I fish for cod or haddock on a line trawler owned by a fine old Yankee gentleman named Sam. He took me under his wing with no questions asked, patiently taught me the craft of fishing, and gave me work on his boat, where the clear fresh air fumigated the musty corridors of my mind.

  The fishing boat is called the Millie D. Sam named it after his wife Mildred. He swears the trawler and the woman he adores are one and the same. Both are sturdy, broad in the beam, demand constant attention, and can handle the roughest of seas. And both are temperamental.

  “Sweet as sea-clam fritters one minute, sour as rhubarb pie the next,” he says. Sam’s culinary appraisal aside, the Millie D has a definite unpredictable streak. She showed it two days after I wrapped up the Clam Shack Caper.

  Sam and I had cast off from the fish pier around 4:00 A.M. and steamed east then south. Just before dawn we hove to out of sight of land off the elbow of the Cape. It was a soft day with no hard edges. The sun was bright but not blistering hot. Rolling seas nuzzled the underside of the Millie D’s wooden hull as gently as suckling kittens. The breeze held steady at fifteen miles per hour without the ocean-puckering gusts that often come out of the southwest in summer and kick the seas up.

  I brewed a second batch of Maxwell House in the dented old pot that gives an aluminum aftertaste to our coffee and listened for a moment to the chuckling seas, convinced I was hearing what Aeschylus called “the myriad laughter of
the ocean waves.” Then I bent my back to the task at hand, catching fish.

  Everything was going well. The long nylon trawl lines snaked from their plastic tubs and off the stern chute in a silvery blur of hooks, splashing into the chartreuse surface of the dappled sea without a single tangle or snag. No schools of hungry dogfish ate our bait. Every hook that came aboard had a wriggling silver-scaled cod on it. The cash register in Sam’s head would be going ca-ching with every fish we caught.

  By late afternoon the fish hold was filled to bursting. Smiling at our good fortune, we pulled in the last set and pointed our bow back to port. Sam was at the helm and I was coiling trawl line. Five miles from home the engine coughed like a dog with a chicken bone caught in its throat, gargled wetly, and gave up the ghost. Sam tried to get the engine going, then took his tan duck-billed cap off and crawled below to take a look.

  He poked around, muttering to himself. Before long, he emerged from the engine compartment wearing war-paint streaks of grease on his long-jawed face and wagged his craggy chin sadly in a sorry-the-patient-died headshake.

  “Guess we’ve best give the Coast Guard a call. We’re not going anywhere under our own power ’less we row home.”

  The Coast Guard got a commercial salvage boat out to us. Five hours later we entered the darkened harbor and the Millie D tied up to the fish pier. I had radioed the fish dealer we’d be late. A couple of bored fish packers were on hand to unload our catch and ice it, but the trailer truck had left for the Fulton Fish Market in New York. We refrigerated our catch and crossed our fingers, hoping the high price would hold when the fish were sent out the next day.

  Sam said he’d try to line up a mechanic, and I told him I would call later. Looking at water all day long had made me thirsty. I drove straight from the pier to a dark pub with a Batcave ambience. The bar used to be called the Porthole, but the hard-core drinkers who had trouble pronouncing two-syllable words slurred the name down to the ’Hole.

  I sat at the bar next to a bearish charterboat skipper. “Tell me, Cap,” I said, “do you think the Sophoclean definition of tragedy could be applied to a dead engine, a boatload of fish you couldn’t get to market, and a hefty tow fee?”