When the Killing's Done Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t stomach having her skin spoiled, not at her age. But she was bleeding in the here and now, each wave washing the gash anew and extracting from it a pale tincture of pinkish liquid that dissolved instantly and was gone. That liquid was blood. And blood attracted sharks.
    Again the flap of panic. Her legs trailed behind her like lures, like a provocation, like bait, and she couldn’t see them, could barely feel them. If the sharks came—when they came—she’d have no defense. She was trapped in a childhood nightmare, a vestigial dream of the time before there was land, when all the creatures there were floated free amidst the flotilla of shining jaws that would swallow them. She tried to hold her hand up out of the water. Tried not to think about what was beneath her, behind her, rising even now from the lazy depths like a balloon trailing across the sky at dusk. But she had to think. Had to terrify herself just to stay alive.
    For as long as the ice chest had been there she’d maneuvered around it, straddling it like an equestrian as it rode beneath the clamp of her thighs, pushing it all the way down to tamp it with her feet and perch tentatively atop the tenuous wavering shelf of it, lying flat with its lid tucked between her abdomen and breasts so that her back was arched and her legs could spread wide for balance. Now she tried to huddle atop it, to kneel beneath the full weight of her limbs and torso as if she were praying—and she was praying, she was—struggling to hold her gashed hand clear of the water and balance there like an acrobat stalled on the high wire, but the waves wouldn’t allow it. She kept slipping down while the cooler bobbed up and away from her so that she had to swim free and snatch it back in a single searing beat of white-hot terror, thinking only of a mute streaking shape lunging out of the depths to snatch her up in its basket of teeth.
    She’d seen a shark only once in her life. It was on the Santa Monica pier, just after Till had come home from overseas. They’d walked on the beach for hours and then promenaded all the way to the end of the pier, her arm in his, the stripped pale boards rocking gently beneath their feet and the sea air deliciously cool against their skin. She was so alive in that moment, so attuned to Till and his transformation from the recollected to the actual, to the flesh, to the arm round her waist and the voice murmuring in her ear, that the smallest things thrilled her with their novelty, as if no one had ever conceived of them before. A paper cone of cotton candy, so intensely pink it was otherworldly, seemed as strange to her as if it had been delivered there by Martians from outer space. Ditto the tattooed man exhibiting himself in his bathing trunks in the hope of spare change and the eighty-year-old beauty queen in the two-piece—even the taste of the burger with chopped raw onions and plenty of ketchup they ate standing under the sunstruck awning of the stand at the foot of the pier was like that of no other burger she’d ever had. Her feet weren’t even on the ground. They were there in the flesh, both of them, she and Till, strolling along like any normal couple who could go home to bed anytime the urge took them, day or night, or go get a highball and listen to the jukebox in the corner of some dark roadhouse or drive slow and sweet along Ocean Boulevard with the windows down and the breeze fanning their hair. It was her dream made concrete. But then, right there in the middle of that dream, was the shark.
    There was a crowd gathered at the far end of the pier and they’d gone toward it casually, out of idle curiosity, people looping this way and that, little kids squirming through to the front for a closer view, and there it was, more novelty, the first shark she’d ever seen outside of a picture book. It was suspended by its tail on a thick braid of cable that held it, dripping, just above the bleached boards of the dock. The