Free Jaws by Peter Benchley Page B

no.
    “Ambulance?” said the
Times
reporter. “Isn’t that rather like shutting the barn door after the horse has left?”
    “Shut your mouth, smart ass,” said Brody. “Bixby, call the hospital. Leonard, are you up to doing some work?” Hendricks nodded. “Then go put on some clothes and find some notices that close the beaches.”
    “Do we have any?”
    “I don’t know. We must. Maybe back in the stock room with those signs that say ‘This Property Protected by Police.’ If we don’t, we’ll have to make some that’ll do until we can have some made up. I don’t care. One way or another, let’s get the goddam beaches closed.”
    Monday morning, Brody arrived at the office a little after seven. “Did you get it?” he said to Hendricks.
    “It’s on your desk.”
    “Good or bad? Never mind. I’ll go see for myself.”
    “You won’t have to look too hard.”
    The city edition of the
New York Times
lay in the center of Brody’s desk. About three quarters of the way down the right-hand column on page one, he saw the headline:
    SHARK KILLS TWO
ON LONG ISLAND
    Brody said, “Shit,” and began to read.
    By William F. Whitman
Special to The New York Times
    AMITY, L.I. June 20—A six-year-old boy and a 65-year-old man were killed today in separate shark attacks that occurred within an hour of each other near the beaches of this resort community.
    Although the body of the boy, Alexander Kintner, was not found, officials said there was no question that he was killed by a shark. A witness, Thomas Daguerre, of New York, said he saw a large silver-colored object rise out of the water and seize the boy and his rubber raft and disappear into the water with a splash.
    Amity coroner Carl Santos reported that traces of blood found on shreds of rubber recovered later left no doubt that the boy had died a violent death.
    At least fifteen persons witnessed the attack on Morris Cater, 65, which took place at approximately 2 P.M. a quarter of a mile down the beach from where young Kintner was attacked.
    Apparently, Mr. Cater was swimming just beyond the surf line when he was suddenly struck from behind. He called out for help, but all attempts to rescue him were in vain.
    “I went in up to my waist and tried to get to him,” said Amity police officer Leonard Hendricks, who was on the beach at the time, “but the fish kept hitting him.”
    Mr. Cater, a jewelry wholesaler with offices at 1224 Avenue of the Americas, was pronounced dead on arrival at Southampton Hospital.
    These incidents are the first documented cases of shark attacks on bathers on the Eastern Seaboard in more than two decades.
    According to Dr. David Dieter, an icthyologist at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island, it is logical to assume—but by no means a certainty—that both attacks were the work of one shark.
    “At this time of year in these waters,” said Dr. Dieter, “there are very few sharks. It’s rare at any time of year for sharks to come so close to the beach. So the chances that two sharks would be off the same beach at virtually the same time—and would each attack someone—are infinitesimal.”
    When informed that one witness described the shark that attacked Mr. Cater as being “as large as a station wagon,” Dr. Dieter said the shark was probably a “great white” (
Carcharodon carcharias
), a species known throughout the world for its voraciousness and aggressiveness.
    In 1916, he said, a great white killed four bathers in New Jersey on one day—the only other recorded instance of multiple shark-attack fatalities in the United States in this century. Dr. Dieter attributed the attacks to “bad luck, like a flash of lightning that hits a house. The shark was probably just passing by. It happened to be a nice day, and there happened to be people swimming, and he happened to come along. It was pure chance.”
    Amity is a summer community on the south shore of Long Island, approximately midway between Bridgehampton and East