Read White Shark for Free Online Page A

Max
said, reading digital numbers on the screen.
    Chase bent to the screen again, shading
it.   "Yeah, she's been cooling off
at two hundred feet, but she's already at less than a hundred."
    "Where'd she find two hundred feet
between here and Block?" asked Tall Man.
    "Must be a ditch
out there.   I tell you, Tall ,
she knows her territory.   Anyway, she's
coming up the slope."   From a hook
on the bulkhead Chase took a still camera with an 85-mm—200-mm zoom lens and
hung it around his neck.   He said to Max,
"Let's go see if she'll pose for us."   Then, to Tall Man, "Check the monitor now and then just to make
sure she doesn’t buzz off somewhere."
    He went to the doorway and looked at the
shore again.   "I hope she doesn't
come up between us and the beach.   Mass
hysteria, we do not need."
    "You mean like Matawan Creek,"
Max said, "In 1916."
    "Yeah, but they had reason to be
hysterical.   That shark killed three
people."
    "Four," Max said.
    "Four.   Sorry."   Chase smiled and looked down — he could still look down, but barely; the
boy was already five-ten — at the gangly replica of himself, but skinnier and
better-looking, for he had his mother's sharp nose and narrow mouth.
    Chase took a pair of binoculars from a
shelf and handed them to Max.   "Here, go see if you can find her."
    Tall Man called to Chase.   "Never argue with a kid about
sharks.   Kids know sharks.   Sharks and dinosaurs."
    It was true, Chase thought:   kids were dinosaur freaks, and most kids were
shark freaks.   But he had never met a
child who knew half as much about sharks as Max did, which pleased him and also
saddened and pained him, for sharks had always been the main, if not the sole,
bond between father and son.   They hadn't
lived together for the past eight years, had seen each other only occasionally,
and (phone-company TV commercials to the contrary) weekly long-distance calls
were no way to reach out and touch someone.
    Chase and Max's mother had married too
young and too hastily.   She was an
heiress to a timber fortune, he an impecunious Greenpeacer.   Their naïve premise was that her money and
his idealism would interact synergistically, benefitting the planet and
allowing them to live in
Eden
.   They soon discovered, however, that while
they shared common ideals, their means of attaining ends were less than
compatible.   Corinne's notion of being on
the front lines of the environmental movement included giving tennis parties,
swimming parties, cocktail parties and black-tie dinner-dances to benefit the
movement; Simon's involved being away from home for weeks at a time, living in
the stinking fo’c’sles of ratty ships and confronting ruthless foreigners on
the high seas.
    They tried to compromise:   Simon learned to play tennis and to give
speeches; she learned to scuba dive and to differentiate between the Odontoceti
and the Mysticeti.   But after four years
of drifting apart, they agreed to disagree... permanently.
    The only synergy that
come from the relationship was Max — handsomer than either of them,
smarter, more sensitive.
    Corinne got custody of Max:   she had money, a large and caring family, a
home (several, in fact) and, by the time the divorce was final, a stable
relationship with a neurosurgeon who had been the number one singles tennis
player in
Northern California
.
    Simon was the only son of deceased
parents, and he had no steady income, no fixed residence and fleeting
relationships with several women whose prime assets were their looks and their
sexual fervor.
    Through her lawyer, Corinne had offered
Chase a generous financial settlement — she was neither cruel nor vengeful, and
she wanted her son's father to be able to afford a decent home for Max to visit
— but in a fit of self-righteous nobility, Chase had refused.
    Several times since, Chase had regretted
what he now regarded as a misplaced sexist lunacy.   He could have put the money to good use.   Especially now that the