“How do you account for the teeth in the stern?”

“The fish attacked the boat.”

“What the hell for?”

“Sharks aren’t very bright, Chief. They exist on instinct and impulse. The impulse to feed is powerful.”

“But a thirty-foot boat …”

“A shark doesn’t think. To him it wasn’t a boat. It was just something large.”

“And inedible.”

“Not till he’d tried it. You have to understand. There’s nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That’s their instinct. But this fish doesn’t run from anything. He doesn’t know fear. He might be cautious—say around an even bigger white. But fear—no way.”

“What else do they attack?”

“Anything.”

“Just like that. Anything.”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“Do you have any idea why he’s hung around here so long?” said Brody. “I don’t know how much you know about the water here, but …”

“I grew up here.”

“You did? In Amity?”

“No, Southampton. I spent every summer there, from grade school through grad school.”

“Every summer. So you didn’t really grow up there.” Brody was groping for something with which to re-establish his parity with, if not superiority to, the younger man, and what he settled for was reverse snobbism, an attitude not uncommon to year-round residents of resort communities. It gave them armor against the contempt they sensed radiating from the rich summer folk. It was an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude, a social machismo that equated wealth with effeteness, simplicity with goodness, and poverty (up to a point) with honesty. And it was an attitude that, in general, Brody found both repugnant and silly. But he had felt threatened by the younger man—he wasn’t really sure why—and the sensation was so alien that he had reached for the most convenient carapace, the one Hooper had handed him.

“You’re picking nits,” Hooper said testily. “Okay, so I wasn’t born here. But I’ve spent a lot of time in these waters, and I wrote a paper on this coastline. Anyway, I know what you’re getting at, and you’re right. This shoreline isn’t an environment that would normally support a long stay by a shark.”

“So why is this one staying?”

“It’s impossible to say. It’s definitely uncharacteristic, but sharks do so many uncharacteristic things that the erratic becomes the normal. Anyone who’d risk money—not to mention his life—on a prediction about what one big shark will do in a given situation is a fool. This shark could be sick. The patterns of his life are so beyond his control that damage to one small mechanism could cause him to disorient and behave strangely.”

“If this is how he acts when he’s sick,” said Brody, “I’d hate to see what he does when he’s feeling fine.”

“No. Personally, I don’t think he’s sick. There are other things that could cause him to stay here—many of them things we’ll never understand, natural factors, caprices.”

“Like what?”