Free Shark River by Randy Wayne White Page A

projects. Like what that’s so damn important?”
    “I’m working on sturgeon, too. Not just bull sharks. I’ve got current projects, old projects—but sturgeon are what I’m doing right now. I’m working with some biologists from a lab not far from here, Mote Marine.” All true. When Waldman didn’t respond, I proceeded to tell more than he wanted to know about our sturgeon project, aware that a good way to deal with interrogation is to bore your interrogator. I informed him there’d once been a booming sturgeon fishery on Florida’s Gulf Coast, all because of the profitable caviar market. I described the fish to him, with its scale cover of primitive bony plates and rows of bony scutes on its body. Told him that the sturgeon is a freshwater species that migrates into saltwater, and is very easily netted—which is why the sturgeon was so quickly decimated north and south of Tampa. I added, “Now you mention sturgeon to a coastal fisherman and he’ll look at you like you’re nuts. No one even remembers that they were here. So we’re working on raising them in captivity, then releasing them into the wild. Problem is, they grow so damn slow.”
    Waldman stared at me, bored, not letting the details register. “You’re not going to tell me a damn thing, are you?”
    I said, “Nope, Doug, I’m not. I don’t want any trouble. I really don’t. I live a quiet, private life, and that’s the way I want it to keep it.”
    He stood, hunted around in his jacket pocket for a moment and pulled out a tin of Copenhagen snuff. He flapped the can with his thumb, opened it, and pushed a big pinch of tobacco between cheek and gum. “I kinda figured you’d be a tough one to budge. That call I just took—when my cell phone rang a few minutes ago?”
    “What about it?”
    Waldman walked to the kitchen sink, spit, and flushed it with water. “Our people in D.C. and Virginia have now had”—he checked his watch—“they’ve now had slightly more than four hours to come up with a dossier on you. Know what they found? And I’m talking about the best-equipped, most computer-savvy security agency in the world. Nothing,” he said. “They found nothing interesting at all about you. Zip, zilch. Know what, Ford? From the information we got back, it’s almost like you really don’t exist.”
     
     
    I began to feel uneasy, but made it a point to take a deep breath, relaxing in my chair. “You’re saying there’s something wrong with not being in some crime computer somewhere?”
    “You’re in no computers anywhere. Nothing but the barest stuff, anyway. Harrington was tough to get information on. You’re even worse. Any idea why that is?”
    I told him no, hoping he’d drop it, but he didn’t.
    He leafed through a couple of sheets of paper and said, “Here’s what we’ve got on you. You’ve got a six-cylinder Chevy more than twenty years old. I’ve got the block number and the registration number right here. Another thing? When you were still in high school, you took the battery of Armed Services Vocational Aptitude tests. Damn near aced them all. Not the highest scores ever recorded, but way, way up there. Then you vanished for seven years. Not a trace. No military record, no nothing. Next thing that shows up is that you’re in California, graduating with a B.S. from San Diego State and then you get a master’s a year later from Stanford. No record of where you lived, no record of credit cards, no student loans or a checking account. Nothing at all that indicates you were actually at those places and attended classes. But the degrees are legitimate. I made our people check. Your doctorate from the University of Florida? Same thing.”
    “That’s weird,” I said. “They don’t give degrees unless you attend classes. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been kind of a loner. That, and I’ve always tried to pay with cash. Saves on bookkeeping.”
    His smile told me that he knew that I was lying. “I’ve