Free Jaws by Peter Benchley Page A

wore a bathing suit, the other a blazer and slacks. Meadows’ reporter—Brody knew him as Nat something or other—was leaning against the desk, chatting with Bixby. They stopped talking as soon as they saw Brody enter.
    “What can I do for you?” Brody said.
    The young man next to Meadows took a step forward and said, “I’m Bill Whitman, from the
New York Times
.”
    “And?” What am I supposed to do? Brody thought. Fall on my ass?
    “I was on the beach.”
    “What did you see?”
    One of the
Newsday
reporters interrupted: “Nothing. I was there, too. Nobody saw anything. Except maybe the guy in your office. He says he saw something.”
    “I know,” said Brody, “but he’s not sure just what it was he saw.”
    The
Times
man said, “Are you prepared to list this as a shark attack?”
    “I’m not prepared to list this as anything, and I’d suggest you don’t go listing it as anything, either, until you know a hell of a lot more about it than you do now.”
    The
Times
man smiled. “Come on, Chief, what do youwant us to do? Call it a mysterious disappearance? Boy lost at sea?”
    It was difficult for Brody to resist the temptation to trade angry ironies with the
Times
reporter. He said, “Listen, Mr.—Whitman, is it?—Whitman. We have no witnesses who saw anything but a splash. The man inside thinks he saw a big silver-colored thing that he thinks may have been a shark. He says he has never seen a live shark in his life, so that’s not what you’d call expert testimony. We have no body, no real evidence that anything violent happened to the boy … I mean, except that he’s missing. It is conceivable that he drowned. It is conceivable that he had a fit or a seizure of some kind and then drowned. And it is conceivable that he was attacked by some kind of fish or animal—or even person, for that matter. All of those things are possible, and until we get …”
    The sound of tires grinding over gravel in the public parking lot out front stopped Brody. A car door slammed, and Len Hendricks charged into the station house, wearing nothing but a bathing suit. His body had the mottled gray-whiteness of a Styrofoam coffee cup. He stopped in the middle of the floor. “Chief …”
    Brody was startled by the unlikely sight of Hendricks in a bathing suit—thighs flecked with pimples, genitals bulging in the tight fabric. “You’ve been
swimming
, Leonard?”
    “There’s been another attack!” said Hendricks.
    The
Times
man quickly asked, “When was the first one?”
    Before Hendricks could answer, Brody said, “We were just discussing it, Leonard. I don’t want you or anyone else jumping to conclusions until you know what you’re talking about. For God’s sake, the boy could have drowned.”
    “Boy?” said Hendricks. “What boy? This was a man, an old man. Five minutes ago. He was just beyond the surf, and suddenly he screamed bloody murder and his head went under water and it came up again and he screamed something else and then he went down again. There was all this splashingaround, and blood was flying all over the place. The fish kept coming back and hitting him again and again and again. That’s the biggest fuckin’ fish I ever saw in my whole life, big as a fuckin’ station wagon. I went in up to my waist and tried to get to the guy, but the fish kept hitting him.” Hendricks paused, staring at the floor. His breath squeezed out of his chest in short bursts. “Then the fish quit. Maybe he went away, I don’t know. I waded out to where the guy was floating. His face was in the water. I took hold of one of his arms and pulled.”
    Brody said, “And?”
    “It came off in my hand. The fish must have chewed right through it, all but a little bit of skin.” Hendricks looked up, his eyes red and filling with tears of exhaustion and fright.
    “Are you going to be sick?” said Brody.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Did you call the ambulance?”
    Hendricks shook his head