As the line swung back out over the open sea, Hawkins found his voice and directed it at Peter Blok, the first mate and crane operator. “Get us out of here or I swear to God, I will climb up this cable and throw you in!”
The winch whined as it sped up, pulling the still-swinging trio up out of the shark’s reach. The crane soon deposited them gently upon the presently empty aft deck. Hawkins loosened his grip on the cable and leaned his head around Joliet’s wet hair. “Are you okay?” he whispered.
“I owe you a beer,” she said.
“You owe me a lot more than that,” he replied.
She glanced at him with a cut-the-bullshit expression, and he grinned. “I’d say that was at least worth a twelve-pack. Microbrew. Not the cheap stuff.”
“I can do that,” she said.
“And if you share it with me, I won’t tell anyone about how you screamed like a girl.”
Joliet smiled and visibly relaxed. She stood, turned, and slugged him in the shoulder. “I am a girl.”
Hawkins stood, rubbing his shoulder, and said, “Don’t hit like a girl.”
“That was damn near the craziest thing I’ve ever seen at sea,” came the rough voice of Harold Jones, the ship’s engineer. The man’s wide eyes looked bright white next to his dark skin. He rubbed a hand over his close-cut gray hair. “And I’ve seen some things.”
Jones had two junior engineers on his team, Phil Bennett, who was something of a whiz kid with engines, and Jackie DeWinter, his daughter from a woman he’d never married, who’d been apprenticing with him for nearly three years. Despite being a self-proclaimed grease monkey, DeWinter always looked put together with long, styled hair and longer legs. In short, she was Joliet’s opposite in style, though both women had striking faces.
DeWinter stepped around her father wearing an expression that cycled between happy, terrified, and relief. “Oh my God, are you two okay? What were you thinking? That was awesome!”
“Fine,” Joliet said. “Better than fine. Look what we found.” She stepped aside, allowing the father-daughter team to see the dead, nearly limbless turtle.
DeWinter winced, then saw the pinched shell and gasped. “What is it?”
Hawkins was about to tease her, but the single fin and a severely deformed shell made it look like something alien. “Once upon a time, it was a loggerhead turtle.”
Jones leaned over the specimen, looking at it from all angles. “What happened to it?”
“Aside from becoming a meal for Jaws,” Hawkins said, “that’s what we need to find out.”
“Looks like it got into something,” Jones said, pointing to a band of red where the turtle’s constricted midsection came together.
“Nasty,” DeWinter said. “But this is actually a good thing, right? We’re here to find things like this.”
He felt horrible for it, but Hawkins agreed. Finding this deformed turtle was a very good thing, but as he looked down at the ruined creature, it certainly didn’t feel good. “Yeah, this is why we’re here. But I wish we weren’t.”
That wasn’t entirely true. He looked at Joliet. She met his eyes. They both smiled.
Silence lingered for a moment longer than Jones could bear. He cleared his throat. “I’ll go get a stretcher so we can move her.”
Hawkins turned toward him and saw DeWinter smiling like she knew something he didn’t. Does she? Joliet did spend a good amount of off-time with DeWinter. They were the only two women on board. Before Hawkins could dwell on the idea, a sea of frantic voices that sounded something like a gobble of frightened turkeys drowned out his thoughts. The rest of the crew had arrived, all asking questions and retelling their version of the story at once.
Hawkins heard Phil Bennett, the youngest crewmember on board, ask, “Should we try to kill that shark?”
It was a stupid question. The Magellan had been sent to research the Garbage Patch to help preserve the environment for creatures like the shark. That someone on board, even if he was a mechanic and not a conservationist, would ask that question revealed what an uphill battle cleaning up the Garbage Patch would be. The idea of killing a shark simply because it tried to eat someone made little sense to Hawkins, but he knew it made perfect sense to many people. The problem was, people were still terrified of the unknown, which included most everything in the ocean, and reacted to dangerous animals with violence. Humanity liked to think they were at the top of the food chain, but without modern weapons, people weren’t top dog, and being eaten was, and always had been, part of the gig. Animals ate people. People ate animals. A shark eating a human being was as natural as a twenty-piece serving of chicken nuggets, perhaps more so.
That was his take on the situation. He’d like to believe there was some kind of natural law that said sharks wouldn’t try to eat people, but he knew better. Even people ate other people when tradition, or desperation, required it. And those people weren’t hunted down and shot like crazed beasts. Sometimes they got movie deals.