Dead of Night Read Online Free PDF

which I’d been keeping lab notes, a things-to-do list, a few personal observations on people and events. It was novel-sized, with SHIP’S LOG embossed on the cover. A salty touch, but a tad theatrical. It was a present from my son, so I used it.
    That morning, as had become habit, I opened the log and noted date, tides, and moon phase, before writing:
    5 immature specimens, C. leucas, 18 cm long +/-. 3 exhibit obvious spinal deformities rarely reported in sharks or rays, but common in bony fishes. I’ve found only two cases of deformed elasmobranchs, both bull sharks, both collected in Florida waters (Eugenie Clark, 1964; Mote Marine Laboratory). Deformities include: scoliosis (lateral spinal curvature), lordosis (axial spinal curvature), and kyphosis (humpback curves)....
    I also made some personal notes. Wrote more than usual, referencing Lake, my girlfriend Dewey Nye, and Tomlinson. No one is entirely the person he or she appears to be. We all inhabit a more solitary dimension in which we deal with our secret aspirations and fears; frailties seldom suspected even by those closest.
    It’s true for me. I didn’t realize to what extent until I began keeping daily notes. Writing allowed me to fret or inspect on a private level, so I now carried the journal even when I traveled.
    It wasn’t long before I transitioned back from personal matters to the more interesting subject of sharks:
    No field observations on immature sharks with skeletal abnormalities have been published. Does deformity = handicap? Am I wrong to suspect lineage between these fish, and the abnormal bull sharks collected by Dr. Clark several decades ago?
    I was excited about the project. Which is why I was proportionately pissed off at myself for saying yes to Frieda. Did I really want to go off and leave the sharks, leave my work, to look for some oddball biologist who lived on an island in the middle of the state?
    No, I didn’t. Hell no. Didn’t want to leave Sanibel. The longer I live where I live, the more I dislike being away. Hate missing a good sunset. Hate missing the 5:00 A.M. silence of a fresh tropical morning.
    But the woman had me.
    Before I’d received her first Internet message, I’d even already formulated a plausible excuse for not making the surfing trip. But now I was committed.
    Tomlinson and I are close enough that it would have been okay to bail. He’d have understood. But I didn’t know Frieda well enough to disappoint her.

3
    LOG
    10 Dec. Friday Low tide: 10:21 a.m.; Tortuga’s wind 15 knots. Night jasmine, and owls during talk with Laken about paternal genetics.
    He’s interested for a reason....
    Checklist: 1. Cat food @ Bailey’s. 2. Reserve hotel, Vero Bch. 3. Learn to say no, dumbass.
    —MDF
    LOG
    11 Dec. Saturday (Driftwood Motel, Sebastian Inlet)
    ... too clumsy for surfing, shins all bruised. Tomlinson’s weird pals driving me nuts & worried about my sharks. Home tomorrow. Prefer windsurfing.
    —MDF
    So it was on a blue bright Atlantic Coast Sunday, just before sunset, the twelfth of December, and only slightly more than twelve days before Christmas, when I detoured to check on Frieda’s brother. I’d left Tomlinson with his gaggle of new surfer pals, old doper buddies and adoring Zen students, dropped off the crappy rental at Ron Jon’s Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach, and drove my truck inland.
    I could have stopped at Applebee’s home two days earlier, on my way to Sebastian Inlet, but procrastination is a powerful copilot when it comes to unpleasant duties. I wanted to put this one off as long as I could.
    Later, my conscience would play the inevitable game of “What if . . .”
    What if I had stopped by the man’s home on Friday instead of Sunday night? What if I hadn’t interrupted the two people who were interrogating and beating him? Would he have lived? Or would he have died? And what would have happened then?
    I had Frieda’s directions on a square of paper stuck to the truck’s dashboard, so I