Then she and the last five feet of the rubber boat were crushed into a jumble of flesh and neoprene rubber as the swords of glittering ivory met and pressed.

***

The banana boat lay limp in the wake of the cruiser. No one ahead noticed. The children, screaming, flailed and thrashed in their life jackets.

Mike and Carla Brody hit the water like racing divers. So did Jake, two black lifeguards, and a retired American insurance salesman who hadn't swum in years. But before they reached the spot, the harbormaster's workboat had picked up the survivors.

The children, most of whom could swim almost before they had walked, hardly realized what had happened, but two of them were in shock. One was the heroine's daughter and the other was Thea.

Ellen was knee-deep in the water when she was intercepted by the first clarinet of the Royal Bahamas Police Force Band, in full uniform. She had fought the musician all the way back to the shore.

In Dr. Stanford's little clinic, as Mike and Carla sat by Thea's bedside, Mike noticed that his mother seemed detached, quite calm, and absolutely mute.

He was near shock himself, at what had happened to Margaret de Lacey and had almost happened to Thea. He blamed himself and Jake. When Ellen left the clinic without telling him, she had been gone an hour before he noticed it.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Hoagie Newcombe could not find a taxi in the crowds on Kingston Street, so he jogged along the deserted residential ways to his digs on Devon Square to get his jeep.

He raced up the stairs and opened his bedside table drawer. He left the Drug Enforcement Agency's .25-.20 automatic there and took out the old .455 Wembley he had carried on his carrier strikes.

He was a poor shot with a handgun and disliked them, but he had an old, old score to settle. If he found Lomas, he would need the most powerful and familiar weapon he could get.

His jeep was parked under a satinwood tree. As he had for the past year, he checked quickly under its hood and body for a bomb before he started it.

Then he headed for the airstrip and Salt Hole.

***

Ellen Brody moved in a daze down the dock. In her hand was the police revolver that had been her husband's—and her son's. She had loaded it carefully. Brody had taught her to handle it during the time of the first Trouble, when feelings against them had run so high in Amity that someone had strangled their cat.

Neptune's Folly groaned at her lines, as if she knew what she was going to be asked to do. Too bad. Ellen, in her strange, dead-eyed anger, felt older than the vessel and as tired, but the shark had challenged her to the death, and one of them would go.