biggest damned maw of teeth I never even saw in a nightmare. I thought I'd seen everything on the high seas. There wasn't nothin' I hadn't seen. And then this. If my son had been standin' where he was only a minute before, that damned thing would 'a knocked him into the drink sure as hell. The shark musta been twenty feet long and a body eight feet thick. Thrashed the boat around, I can tell you, ripped open the net, got a gulp of fish and was gone."

"Well, I'll be damned," whistles Mad Jack imagining it all with a grin. "A Great White. Never did latch onto one of them. Where'd this happen?"

"North of Santa Cruz," answers Squatbender.

"Yeah, we got our share of 'em here in Monterey Bay and north," pipes up a skinny young man in the usual worked over blue levis and flannel shirt that probably hadn't been washed by anything but sea spray and fish guts in its lifetime. "Specially north of Santa Cruz, up around Ano Nuevo. Everybody says they go after the

 

 

Elephant Seals now that there's so many of them every year." Mad Jack nods, taking it all in.

"Yeah," adds a dark tanned Latin fisherman in a blue-black ball cap motioning with a mug of golden beer

"Hey, remember a couple years ago that big Aquarium in San Francisco bought a live Great White from some guy that caught it in his net by accident. He sold it for $20,000 or so."

"What?!" Mad Jack booms.

"Yeah, 20,000 big ones. For one fish!"

"You don't say," Mad Jack scratches at his red brambly beard with a distant look in his washed blue eyes.

"Yeah," rejoins the skinny fisherman, "but that was for a live one. It's no good to them dead. People don't ooh and ahh and spin the turnstyles to come and see it if ain't swimmin' around looking back at them."

"Do they still have that shark?" Mad Jack asks distantly. "No. I think they let it go finally out around the Farallon Islands." "Is that right?" Mad Jack grins.