Dead of Night

Dead of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Dead of Night Read Online Free PDF
Author: Randy Wayne White
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
make an awful woman, ’cause you just don’t know how to say no. Either that, or a very, very popular one.”
     
     
    When I finished talking with Frieda, I let my eyes move around the lab, taking refuge in its orderliness. My lab’s one of two houses built over water on pilings, beneath a communal tin roof. I’d chosen the largest of the two as a workplace. A lucky call. The lab’s where I spend most of my time, and where visitors prefer to gather if it’s too hot or rainy on the deck outside.
    I prefer functional to fancy. Not everyone does. A disapproving lady visitor once told me the place was a cross between Tom Sawyer’s raft and a castaway’s tree house. She pretended not to be offended when I thanked her.
    Some people are lucky enough to find their life’s love. I’ve found my life’s home in this drafty, salt-glazed wooden vessel—which is another rare kind of luck. It’s a good place for a biologist who makes his living collecting and selling marine specimens, but who also enjoys socializing with fellow islanders with a beer or two at sunset.
    I like approaching the building by boat, seeing the horizontal banding of clapboard exterior balanced on stork-legged pilings, the tin roof pitched like the bow of an Indonesian junk, all framed by deck railings.
    The place also possesses a distinctive olfactory mix—which is something else not everyone appreciates. It’s a fusion of ozone from aquarium aerators, graphite from precision instruments, chemical reagents, and formalin all mixed with odors that sift through the wooden floor: the smell of barnacles, creosote, and salt water.
    On the walls are shelves of books, lab instruments, paintings and pictures tacked at eye level so I can look at them if I want, chemicals in jars, and rows of tanks that hold fish, crabs, shrimp, bivalves, and mollusks—including one goat-eyed octopus that now watched me, its focus as intense as my own.
    Octopi are the geniuses of their phylum. I was the entity that delivered a crab into its tank daily. To this animal, I was food. If it were larger, or if I were smaller, it would have stalked, dispatched, and eaten me with equal relish.
    I stood alone for a few moments in the middle of the room, and let my attention settle on a 250-gallon aquarium into which I’d released five newly born bull sharks; genus: Carcharhinus, species: leucas. My son, Laken, visiting from Central America, had helped me build the thing, rig the filters and aerators, so the water inside was Gulf Stream clear. The finger-sized sharks were active, always moving. They seemed to be acclimating just fine.
    I’ve had a long-standing interest in bull sharks; spent a lifetime traveling the same jungle rivers and remote sea places they inhabit. I find their ability to prevail in dissimilar environments fascinating. They roam tropic waters worldwide, commonly forage hundreds of miles up rivers, and can thrive in freshwater lakes.
    Because the species is identified by various names—Zambezi River shark, the Lake Nicaragua shark—it’s not widely known that it’s responsible for more serious attacks on humans than great whites.
    In popular literature, bull sharks are often described as “ferocious,” which is misleading because the word implies emotion. Efficient— that’s more accurate, and the way I prefer to think of them.
    I’d discovered these five pups while doing a necropsy on a two-hundred-pound female one of the guides brought in. Finding living young inside a shark isn’t uncommon. But three of these fish were uncommon, which is why I’d rigged this big tank. Like the mother, three of the five had visible spinal deformities. It was probably a genetic defect, though it might have been caused by waterborne contaminants. Whatever the source, the deformity was unusual in the cartilaginous fishes. A first, in my experience.
    The big female had found a way to survive. Would her young?
    On a table near the aquarium was a leather-bound day-book in
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