But, like I said, first thing through my head was that someone had set it all up just to fuck with us. Because right there in front of me, hanging from the ceiling, was this goddamn fourteen-foot great white shark. The tip of its nose was just barely touching the concrete floor. I knew what kind of shark it was, because when I was a kid, my dad and me, we used to deep-sea fish down in Destin, and once one of his buddies landed a great white. Only, the one in the warehouse was bigger, a lot bigger. Probably, right then, it looked like just about the biggest goddamn fish ever was. Later, I heard it weighed in at something like fifteen hundred pounds. Anyway, the shark had been suspended from a hook, from a block and tackle rig that had been set into the ceiling of that place, a rope looped about the shark’s tail. Its jaws were bulging out of its mouth, just because of gravity, I guess, because of its own weight. There were rows and rows of glistening triangular teeth big as my damn thumb, serrated like a steak knife. And its eyes were bugging out, too, those horrible black fucking eyes. Even when a shark’s alive, its eyes look dead.
Of course, you know that’s not the worst of it. Not even close. That fish was just the opening act, right?
So, there we are, and the initial shock’s beginning to fade. Audrey, I remember she started in laughing. At the time, it pissed me off, but now I get it. I mean, it really is like the setup for a bad joke, right? Three cops walk into an empty warehouse in downtown Atlanta. There’s a fucking dead shark hanging from the ceiling. One cop says to the other cop, “Who brought the hush puppies?” and etcetera. Real funny. Anyway, I remember Babineaux looking over at me like, “Hey man, you know what this is, right? You’ve seen this shit before, right?” Me, I’m just trying to let it all sink in, okay. Because it’s not just the shark. There’s this enormous design drawn on the concrete floor, sorta painted on the floor in red sand. You know, like those Tibetan monks do. Later, one of the specialists that the department called in—an anthropologist from Georgia Tech—he said the design was a mandala, like in Hindu religion. To me, what it put me in mind of was a maze. And right at the center of all those parallel lines, all those circles inside circles, was the shark.
“Call it in,” I say to Babineaux, and Audrey, she says to me, “What the fuck is he supposed to call it in as?”
I was the one who found the body. But you know that, too. Those lines of sand on the floor, they were spaced just far enough apart from each other that you could get to the shark without stepping on them. Straight off, I felt this instinctual sorta revulsion at the thought of doing that, putting a foot down on one of those lines. Step on a crack, break your momma’s back, right? So, while Babineaux is making the call, I go and ignore that little nagging voice in the back of my head that’s telling me just to get the fuck out and let someone else deal with this crazy shit. Audrey, she tells me we should wait for the ME, and when she says that, I swear she sounds scared. And that also pisses me off. “Christ,” I tell her, “it’s just a goddamn fish. What the fuck.” All the same, crossing that space between the doorway and the shark—and it couldn’t have been more than ten feet—I am perfectly cognizant how I’m being so careful not to step on even one of those lines, acting like some superstitious seven-year-old, and, hey, that’s something else pissing me off. That’s the thing pissing me off the worst.
I get up close and I see how the shark’s belly is split open, right down the middle. Well, not just its belly. The fish has been sliced open from the underside of its head most of the way back to the tail. And here and there, it’s been sewn shut again with nylon fishing line. We couldn’t see that when we first came in, because of the angle it was hanging at. Anyway, this doesn’t come as a surprise. No reason it should. You catch a fish, you gut it. And who the hell ever had gone to the trouble to drag a fifteen-foot great white shark up three flights of stairs, surely they’d have done themselves the favor of not hauling along the extra weight of its innards. That’s just plain common sense.
“They’re on their way,” says Babineaux.
I reach into a pocket and pull out a pair of latex gloves, and that’s when I see three fingers poking through between a gap in those nylon stitches. A thumb, an index finger, the middle fucking finger—a woman’s fingers with this deep red nail polish, some shade of red so dark it is almost black. And the fingers, they’re fucking moving, okay. I yell, “We need an ambulance, we need a fucking ambulance right fucking now,” or some shit like that, and I’m digging around in my coat, trying to find my pocket knife. Next thing I know, Audrey’s standing there beside me, and Jesus God, the look on her face. I could talk all day and I wouldn’t ever come up with words to convey that expression. She starts in tugging at the fishing line with her hands, but it’s slippery with blood and oil and shit, and the line’s like, you know, hundred-pound monofilament test. Finally, I get my knife out and start cutting, and—whenever I come to this part of the story, it’s always like, looking back, like right here a flashbulb goes off in my head or something. Suddenly, everything is so clear, so stark, more real than real—and I know that doesn’t make sense. I get that, see, but I don’t know what would. If you’ve ever been in a car crash, it’s kinda like that. That exact instant when two cars collide, a moment that seems so perfectly defined, but that also seems sorta smeared.
Anyway . . .
It doesn’t take me all that long to get the fish’s belly open again. I nick myself once or twice in the process, but I don’t even realize that until later, when the EMTs arrive. I have a scar on my left palm from that day. Souvenirs, right?
Yeah, she was still alive, the woman they’d stitched up inside the dead fish. Only barely, but, well, you’ve read the files. You probably read the book that cocksucker from New York City wrote about the whole thing. So you know how it was. We’re standing there, and Audrey, she’s saying, “Oh God, oh dear God, oh God,” over and over, and back behind us, Babineaux is praying the fucking rosary or some other sorta Catholic mumbo jumbo. The woman in the shark, she’s completely naked and she looks maybe twenty-five, probably younger, but it’s hard to tell much because she’s covered head to toe in rotting shark. “We have to get her out of there,” says Audrey, and I’m holding the sides of the fish’s belly open, and Audrey, she’s leaning in and putting her arms around the woman. Thank fuck she wasn’t conscious. I think that’s the one small piece of mercy we got that day, that she wasn’t conscious. Audrey’s in up to her shoulders, and I’m starting to gag from the stink. I just know I have maybe ten seconds before I spew coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts, and that’s when Audrey says, “Oh Jesus, Mike, they’ve been sewn together.”
“What?” I ask. “What’s been sewn together?”
“She’s sewn in here,” Audrey replies, “sewn to the fucking fish,” and there’s this terrible, brittle tone in her voice, like eggshells. I’m never gonna forget the way she sounded. And that’s when I see what the woman inside the shark is holding. The sons of bitches who’d done it to her, they arranged her hands—sewed them together, too—so that she’s cradling the thing in her palms. She seems to be holding it out to us, like an offering. Only, I know it isn’t three cops that offering is meant for. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking—hell, I’m not thinking. I’m running on shock and instinct, shit like that. I take it from her hands, that jade idol, what the fuck ever it is, and I just stand there, holding it, staring at it. You spend fifteen years on the force, and you think maybe you’ve seen evil, maybe you’ve stared it in the face enough times that you and evil are chummy old acquaintances. But I know right then how wrong I was to ever believe I’ve seen evil. That chunk of rock, not much bigger than a plum, it’s evil, true and absolute, indescribable, and I want to put it down. More than anything, I just want to set it down on the floor with the lines of red sand. But I can’t. Sounds hokey as hell, but it’s like that Nietzsche quote, the one about staring into the abyss and it staring back into you. I’m still standing there holding that thing when backup arrives. They have to pry it out of my hands.