There was no excuse to quit. He took a deep breath and looked out at the harbor waters.

The fog was holding just outside the entrance. No excuse there, either.

He hated the sea, and slimy pilings, and the salt that ate at tools and ships and men.

He cast off his lines and eased away from the dock, switching on the spotlight. Over the rumble of the old Perkins diesel he heard the high school band pounding "The Little Drummer Boy" into the dirt.

He set a course for the green light on the starboard channel buoy.

***

The great white had heard the high-pitched squawking of the starter, and now he heard the growl of the diesel. He began to track it, closing in on it as it moved away from the wharf, which he saw with his receptors as if it had been bathed in light.

He was a scavenger as well as a predator, and the survival of his kind had depended for three hundred million years on curiosity.

His energy needs were enormous. If he was not where the action was, he starved.

***

Sean stared at the floating piling. The dark, water-soaked wood glistened in the spotlight. He could hear it thumping and rubbing the buoy, following the regular rhythm of the swell.

It was more than a simple log. Torn from some ocean wharf by a winter storm, it trailed its own debris: a rusted cable, a slimy hawser, the remnants of a painted sign. Faintly he made out the sun-bleached letters: DANGER.

Danger, all right, and a pain in the ass. Carefully he eased the boat alongside the creaking mess. The current was sweeping into the channel from Amity Bay. Boards nailed to the piling embraced the buoy. Sean could see the whiskered wire trailing toward the shore like the tail of a kite.

He knelt by the gunwale and leaned over the side with the line, plunging his arms up to his biceps to retrieve the line from below the thick log. He couldn't make it around its girth. All right, if he simply freed it, it would drift up the channel. Then, if it didn't stave a hole in a boat en route, he could handle it near the wharf.

He heard faint childish voices from the pavilion: "Silent night, holy night..."

Stretched over the side of the boat, with his ear near the water, he heard the thumping of the piling against the buoy. The sound—a soggy, lifeless rasp of wet wood on metal—made him nervous.

The freezing water filled his gloves. His fingers ached. He tugged on the two-by-fours that clasped the buoy. They let go with a shriek of rusty nails. Only the sign kept the piling snagged.

"All is calm, all is bright..."