Extinct
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Charles Wilson
Praise for the Novels of Charles Wilson
Copyright
To Linda, as always
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My special thanks to those many people whose knowledge, research, and advice made this novel possible.
In particular: Dean A. Dunn, PhD in oceanography and paleontology, former shipboard scientist for Glomar Challenger expeditions in both the Pacific and western North Atlantic, and current Professor of Geology at the University of Southern Mississippi (Dr. Dunn is also the webmaster for GeoClio, World Wide Web site for the history of Geosciences—Oceanography, Geology, Meteorology, Geophysics, at http://geoclio.st.usm.edu). Dr. David M. Patrick and Dr. William Odom, the University of Southern Mississippi. Major Gen. Dave Robinson, U.S. Army, Ret., of Ridgeland, Mississippi. E. B. Vandiver of Fairfax, Virginia. Wesley and Craig Harris of American Aquaculture, Inc., of Jackson, Mississippi. Rayanne Weiss, Jimmy McIntyre, and Mike Filippi, of Gulfport and WLOX-TV. Julian and Rowella Brunt and Ralph Hyer (former charter boat captain) of Biloxi, Mississippi. Alice Jackson Baughn of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. ATF Special Agent Ron Baughn of the Gulfport, Mississippi, office. Rankin-Madison County District Attorney John Kitchens, Ridgeland, Mississippi. Lisha Edwards of Florence, Mississippi. Derrick Groves, charter boat captain at the Broadwater Marina in Biloxi. Dr. Steve Hayne, M.D. FCAP DCMEI, pathologist at Rankin Medical Center, and medical director for Renal Care Group Laboratory and the Rankin County Morgue. Al Jernigan, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Jackson, Mississippi. Bos’n Mate Third Class Todd Anderson, Bos’n Mate Third Class Beck Shane, and Fireman Michael A. Schmitt of the Gulfport, Mississippi, U.S. Coast Guard Station, who helped me with Coast Guard boats, regulations, and equipment. My oldest son, Charles P. Wilson, Jr., J.D., who helped me with the legal aspects, and my son-in-law, Cas E. Heath, III, M.D., who helped me with the medical facts, both of Brandon, Mississippi.
Finally, my thanks to two special friends of mine from Brandon who made criticism contributions to this novel from the time it began to take shape to its finale: first, to Tommy Furby, whose help on all my previous manuscripts has been above and beyond, but who helped more with this work than any before—especially with his intricate knowledge of the Mississippi coast and its “creatures”; and, to Alison Orr, who refused to let my opinion overpower hers—though I tried hard.
After all the highly knowledgeable help given me on this work, it goes without saying that any factual errors there might be contained in the text are solely attributable to me.
CHAPTER 1
COASTAL MISSISSIPPI—THURSDAY, JULY 18, 1:00 P.M.
Dustin pointed his finger in the six-year-old’s face. “This is as far as you go, Paul—I mean it.”
Paul stared at the finger, and then past Dustin to the river spreading out across a wide channel behind the teenager’s back. Nearer the water a second teenager smiled at the confrontation as he unbuttoned his shirt. Dustin looked at him. “You going to help me, Skip?”
“You’re the one who let him come with us,” Skip said. “Tie him to a tree.”
Paul narrowed his eyes. Dustin tried again. “I know you can swim fine, bud, but I told your mother you wouldn’t go near the water.”
“What about you?” Paul asked.
“I told her you wouldn’t go in the water, not us,” Dustin said.
Paul stared past him again. Across the river a heron suddenly flapped up into the bright sunlight. Curving its long neck back into an S above its body, the bird turned across the vast expanse of marshland extending out from the far side of the channel toward the long Interstate 10 bridge in the distance—and Paul’s gaze followed the bird’s flight.
“I’ve got some gum,” Dustin said.
Paul’s eyes went to the pockets of the teenager’s jeans.
Dustin pulled out a flattened pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint. “I’ll give you this now and buy you a sucker the next time I’m at the store.”
Paul weighed the offer with one eye nearly closed. He held out his hand.
Dustin said, “You promise?”
Paul nodded.
“He’s lying,” Skip said. He had his shirt off now and was stepping out of his jeans.
Paul reached for the pack.
Dustin pulled it back.
“Promise,” Paul said in a low voice.
“I heard a big bull alligator got after some people here yesterday,” Dustin said.
Paul smiled mischievously.
“He knows you’re lying now,” Skip said. In his undershorts now, he stepped to a frayed rope hanging down from a limb of a tall oak leaning out toward the river. Catching a grip high up the rope, he took a step backward, then jumped off the ground and sailed slowly past the bank, dropping into the warm brown water with a splash, sending ripples fanning out in wide circles toward the center of the channel and back against the bank.
Paul took the gum. “I’m warning you,” Dustin said. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head. Paul, pulling a stick of gum from the pack, theatrically stuck his foot out closer to the bank.
“Paul.”
The boy smiled.
Dustin slipped off his jeans. “You stay here and I’ll let you take a drag off a cigarette when we finish.”
Paul pulled his foot back and began to unwrap the gum. Dustin caught the rope and, stepping back a couple of feet, jumped and grabbed it higher and swung out past the bank. Reaching the peak of his swing, he kicked his feet over his head and somersaulted backward into the water.
A large black Labrador trotted out of the trees behind Paul and stopped by the boy. It wagged its thick tail as Paul patted its head.
Skip splashed water in Dustin’s face.
The Labrador edged closer to the bank and barked loudly.
But the dog wasn’t looking toward the boys. Instead, its muzzle was pointed downstream in the direction the river dumped into the Sound and, beyond that, the Gulf of Mexico. A hundred feet in that direction, the water sloshed gently against the bank.
The Labrador barked again.
Dustin got his hands on Skip’s head and pushed down. Laughing, barely able to get a breath be
fore he was dunked, Skip disappeared under the surface. Dustin splashed away from the spot so Skip couldn’t grab his legs. Near the bank, he turned and waited for his friend to reappear. The Labrador barked again. Now it was looking directly at Dustin.
Skip did not reappear.
A few seconds more.
Dustin’s brow wrinkled. Slowly, he began to breaststroke toward the spot. He began to stroke faster. The Labrador barked repeatedly.
Close to the spot Skip disappeared, Dustin took a quick breath and dove under the surface.
Paul walked past the Labrador to the place where the bank started sloping steeply down to the water.
The dog came up beside him.
Paul looked at the foil wrapper from the stick of gum. He used his finger to shape it into a trough and sent it sailing toward the water. It curved in the air and landed at the bottom of the bank, where it sparkled in the sunlight.
Paul stared at the shiny scrap for a moment, then turned and, moving his leg backward down the slope, caught a grip on the edge of the bank and began sliding toward the water.
* * *
Carolyn Haines leaned back from the ledger sheets she worked on at the desk in her study. She slipped her glasses off and fluffed her hair off her neck. She looked toward the thermostat next to the glass doors leading out onto the sun deck, then stood and walked to the control.
She adjusted the temperature and started to turn back toward her desk but hesitated and looked toward the doors. She listened for a moment, then walked to the doors and slid the glass back.
Duchess’s loud barking reverberated through the trees between the rear corner of the house and the river.
Carolyn stepped out onto the sun deck and looked through the thick growth.
“Paul,” she called.
She waited a moment. The Labrador’s barking grew more agitated.
“Paul! Dustin!”
Duchess barked at a feverish pitch now.
* * *
Duchess, her forepaws in the mud at the edge of the bottom of the bank, her head and neck stretched out over the water, barked rapidly, one sharp sound after another. Paul stood next to her. “Stop it, Duchess,” he said.
She didn’t.
He pulled at her collar. “Duchess.”
She suddenly moved sideways, bumping into him. He barely kept his balance. “Duchess,” he said, frowning down at her. She barked toward her left now. Paul looked toward the center of the river. Then he looked down the channel to his left. His eyes narrowing, he pulled a wad of gum from his mouth and looked up the bank to his right. Twenty feet out in the water in front of him, a gentle swirl twisted the surface and a faint ripple moved in a line toward the bank.
“Paul!” Carolyn yelled as she came out of the trees. “You’ll fall in!”
He looked up at her as she slid awkwardly down the bank and grabbed his arm. Tugging him back up the slope, she saw his questioning expression. Somehow she knew it wasn’t because of her pulling. At the top of the bank, he looked back at the river again.
Her gaze followed his.
“Dustin?” he said in a low voice.
Carolyn looked at the clothes scattered under the oak. Her eyes went back to the water. She looked down the river with the current and upriver to her left.
“Dustin?” Paul said again.
He kept staring toward the center of the channel.
Carolyn brought her hand up to cover her mouth.
CHAPTER 2
BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI—AN HOUR LATER
Alan Freeman came up the side of the street at a fast jog, running effortlessly, his thick, dark hair whipping gently in the breeze, his loose T-shirt damp with perspiration clinging to his wide shoulders. Slowing for a Lincoln Town Car entering Boom Town Casino rising back to his left above the shoreline of Back Bay, he shortened his stride, then came around the automobile’s rear, resuming his pace. A couple of hundred feet farther he passed dozens of shrimping trawlers berthed close together off to his left, their long booms pointed up at an angle out to their sides.
Running past a rambling, broken line of aging boat repair shops, old ice houses and the shuttered front of an abandoned fish-processing plant, he kept his pace. Moments later, he began to slow and came to a walk. He raised the tail of the T-shirt to his face and wiped the perspiration away.
A hundred yards farther, he turned off the pavement onto the graveled area at the front of a wide, one-story concrete-block building. A van sat next to his Jeep parked close to the big, block letters AMERICAN AQUACULTURE, INC., painted in red across the building’s front.
To the side of the entrance a wooden sign proclaimed in bright orange letters:
Dr. Ho Hsiao
Dr. Alan Freeman
Proprietors
As Alan passed the sign he knocked on the wood. He felt stickiness and looked at his knuckles, now brightly illuminated with round spots of orange.
Mrs. Hsiao, a small woman of fifty with coal-black hair hanging down the back of her print dress to her waist, sat behind her desk in the reception area.
“Ho touched up the sign again,” he said, reaching to the desk to pull a tissue from a box of Kleenex.
She smiled as she looked at his knuckles. “He thinks he was an artist in his former life. Your aunt called. She wanted you to call her as soon as you came back.”
He wiped as much of the paint from his skin as he could, dropped the Kleenex in the wastebasket at the side of the desk, and reached for the telephone. “Whose van is that outside?”
“A Mr. Herald. He called Ho yesterday and asked if he could bring some boys from a local boxing team over to view an aquaculture operation. Ho is back there practicing the speech on them he’s giving to the Chamber tonight.”
His aunt’s line was busy. He replaced the receiver. “I’m going to take a quick shower.”
As he walked across the hall toward the rest room and showers, he looked down the hallway past the open, double doors at its far end. Ho stood just inside the wide rear area of the building with his back to the doorway. His thin body clad in a white, knee-length lab coat, his long hair hanging against his shoulders, he leaned forward on the side of the fingerling tank, a container closely resembling a child’s wading pool with sides three feet high. Beyond the far side of the tank a dozen boys of widely varying heights seemed to be paying close attention to his words. Alan walked toward the door.
“Water cover seventy percent of world,” Ho was saying. “People in past always think it inexhaustible supply of food.” He raised his long finger. “But, as I tell you while ago, most sought-after food species in oceans decline two, three percent a year. Population grow more than that each year. Soon not only most sought-after species but all food species begin to decline. If this so, then nature’s balance in seas as we know it not stay the same. To not let that happen, big aquaculture must be world’s future. Grow fish in controlled environment for eating, leave fish in oceans to people for fun catching—if not catch too many.”
As Ho stopped his words he smiled broadly. “So that it. How you like speech?”
The boys, most of them wearing dark windbreakers with BILOXI BOXING CLUB arched in white block letters across their backs and appearing to range in age from around ten or eleven to their early teens, remained silent.
“Questions?”
The deep voice came from Mr. Herald. A large man, he stood off to the boys’ side. His gray hair unruly, and dressed only casually in a short-sleeved pullover hanging out over a pair of faded khakis, he nevertheless presented an impressive appearance with his erect posture and taut arms that belied his age.
Two of the younger white boys on the team wiggled to the front of the mostly black youths to get a better look inside the tank’s light-green waters, bubbling with oxygen and swarming with the inch-long baby fish.
“What about you, San-hi?” Mr. Herald asked, looking at one of the oldest boys in the group, a thin Vietnamese with shoulder-length coal-black hair.
“He
explained it fine,” the boy answered.
“Armon?” Mr. Herald said.
A stocky black youth about the same age as San-hi said, “Got it all here in my mind.”
“Any you others?” Mr. Herald asked.
A boy at the rear of the group looked behind him at the half-dozen larger tanks spread out across the concrete floor, each of them six feet high and twice as big around as the fingerling tank. Conveyor belts rumbled as they angled over the rims of the tanks, lifting a shiny-looking coating from the water and carrying it to a garbage-dumpster-sized container against a far wall. “What’s that stuff?” the boy asked.
“Algae and fish droppings,” Ho said. “We recycle for fertilizer—nothing go to waste. When we build new facility, we send droppings and old water to pond where plants grow. Plants make food and same time filter droppings from water where water come back clean to tanks. Called hydroponics—and save money for not having to buy more water.” Ho smiled broadly again.
“Anybody else?” Mr. Herald asked.
When none of the boys responded, he turned and reached toward a tall stack of slim, white Styrofoam cartons on a metal folding chair behind him. Lifting the cartons and balancing them against his wide chest, he nodded across his shoulder toward the open, double doorway at the rear of the building.
The boys stepped toward him and started stripping him of his load. “Easy, men,” he said. “Out in back to eat. Don’t let any of the trash end up in the bay.”
In a moment the boys, each with a carton, were hurrying toward the doors. Mr. Herald looked at Ho. “Thank you for your presentation, doctor. They don’t often say much, but they’re listening.” Then he followed the team from the building. Ho walked toward Alan.
“I do good horse and dog show, Alan?”
Alan smiled at his friend’s misquoting of the saying. “It’s dog and pony show, Ho.”
“What different?”
The wall telephone at the side of the door leading toward the front offices rang. A few seconds later, it buzzed. Alan stepped to it and lifted the receiver to his ear. “Uh-huh?”
“It’s your aunt,” Mrs. Hsiao said. “Line one.”
He pushed the button. “You’re feeling guilty because you haven’t invited me to dinner this week,” he said, and smiled.