Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology Read online

  “It was a sign to others not to murder Cain.”

  “Very good.” Walters nodded. “You’d be surprised how few people know that. But have you thought about it? You’re right. God marked Cain so that nobody would murder him even though Cain had murdered his brother, Abel. It was a mark of protection. God said he would take sevenfold vengeance on anyone who killed Cain. Sevenfold. Think on it.” He nodded at Anderson.

  “Maybe it means God didn’t want any more murders, not even of Cain,” said Anderson.

  “Or maybe it don’t,” said Walters. “Moses was one of God’s favorites. He killed an Egyptian in cold blood. He saw an Egyptian waling on an Israelite, looked around to see was anybody watching him, killed the Egyptian and then hid the body. They don’t talk about that much in Sunday school, do they? God still chose Moses to lead the Israelites out of bondage. God chose David over Saul. Saul was no slouch as a killer but David fairly swum in blood. They sang, ‘Saul has killed his thousands and David his tens of thousands.’ You see, God protects a few special killers and makes use of them for His purposes. I see you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”

  Walters patted his dog on its head. “It’s like in Ecclesiastes: There’s a time and a season for everything—‘A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build up.’ When it’s time to kill and time to break down, then it’s my time. Other times belong to somebody else.”

  “I’m listening,” said Anderson, leaning toward Walters.

  “Maybe it started with my daddy. Nothing my daddy did ever bothered him none. He was one mean son of a bitch. I’m the same. Used to be in this country that we settled things with guns. Gunmen got respect. Hell, if my daddy and I had lived a hundred and fifty years ago, they would have written songs about us like they did about the James boys and the Younger brothers. There have always been desperadoes. There always will be. A poor man has to do what he can in a rich man’s world. My daddy never took no shit from nobody. He was a legend hereabouts. You cops were after me before I was even born. My daddy would have killed me if I kissed up to John Law. I had to become an outlaw. What other choice did I have?”

  Walters spat. Then he continued.

  “Whatever else he was, my father was true believer. After he died I stopped believing for a while. ’Til God put me in prison so I could find the light for myself. My daddy taught me that the Bible is the word of God. When you have a question, you just open the Bible wherever the spirit moves you and point. If what you read don’t make sense you keep going down the page until it does.”

  “Is that how you choose who to kill?” asked Anderson.

  “I don’t anymore,” said Walters. “Back in the bad old days, before I reformed, should somebody come to me and ask me to kill somebody else, I would find out about who was asking and who they was asking about. Often enough it was one jackass talking about another one. If it made sense, I’d open the good book and check it out with God. If He said, ‘No,’ I wouldn’t do it no matter how much money I was offered. Killing people pays right well, by the way. Not many men have the balls to sit down and figure out how to kill somebody they’re not even mad at.”

  “You’d check it out with a Bible verse?

  “Yes, I always keep a Bible handy. I have one right inside. Let me show you why I don’t worry about you lawmen.”

  Walters entered his shack and returned with a well-thumbed Bible. Anderson stood and moved next to him.

  “Last time I needed direction, I ended up in Ezekiel,” said Walters. “It said… let me find it. Here it is, ‘Their blood I will require at your hand.’ It says that twice. Later on it says, ‘You have feared the sword and I will bring the sword upon you.’ That’s clear enough for this mother’s son. The whole Bible is the word of God. Whenever I read it, what I read is meant for me.”

  “Can I try that?” asked Anderson taking the book and, flipping pages. “What you find is meant for you. So what I find must be meant for me.”

  “Can’t argue against that,” said Walters.

  “Deputy Johnson and I already talked to a couple of people who said they could identify the man they saw messing around under the hood of Mr. Mason’s car,” said Anderson.

  Walters looked away. He stopped chewing and spat.

  “How about these verses of mine, Mr. Walters?” asked Anderson pointing to a passage in the Bible.

  “Ezekiel 8: 12 through 14?” asked Walters looking at the Bible in Anderson’s hands. “I can read it for myself. Here it is. ‘I will spread my net over him and he shall be caught in my snare; I will bring him to Babylon, land of the Chaldeans yet he will not see it; and he shall die there.’”

  Anderson closed the Bible and spoke. “By the time he returns, Johnson will have a valid search warrant from Judge Matthews for your house, truck and property, Mr. Walters. Your ‘greeting’ makes it certain that nobody was able to sneak into your place and plant evidence against you. I wonder what we’ll find in there. The sheriff asked the state bureau of investigation to send bomb experts. It’s incredible what experts can do these days. You know they found the Oklahoma City bombers. They considered themselves Christians too.”

  Walters stared at the Bible. His hands began to shake. “Well I’ll be damned.”

  REEF TOWN, by Kara Cerise

  It was a dark and slimy night. Overgrown hairy green algae covered the inside tank walls and blocked out ambient light; the darkness was only intermittently punctuated by flashing, broken moonlight LEDs. A malfunctioning electronic wave maker caused currents to surge and cease, creating dangerous eddies around stinging corals.

  The inhabitants of Reef Town schooled together in fear. The hardy blue damsel and delicate orange anthias fish rode the angry, rollicking waves side by side. A rockmover wrasse fish swam up to join his surfing reef mates.

  “Nice night for a murder, huh, Rocky?” a damsel quipped although his voice shook.

  Rocky shuddered. It had been a scary week with a fish gone missing every few days then intensifying to one missing every day. It always happened at night and none of the reef people saw anything out of the ordinary. One day a tank mate was sucking algae off the glass and the next day he was gone—never to be seen again.

  Suddenly a series of “snap, bang, snap” shots rang out. The damsel and anthias fish scattered and took cover behind rocks while Rocky dove head first into the sand.

  After a few seconds he poked his head up cautiously and looked around.

  A red pistol shrimp moved haltingly sideways on the sandy bottom with his antenna swaying. “Excuse me. I thought I felt something come after me and my hand gun went off.” He clicked his large claw together to make loud snapping sounds.

  A convict tang grumbled and wiggled his white and black striped body. “I’ll say it again, S.H. Rimp, gun control should be mandatory, especially for you since you are semi-blind.”

  A clown fish chimed in, “I’m keeping my family safe any way I can until these disappearances are solved. How do I know that one of you isn’t responsible?” Using a fin, she swept two of her fry into their anemone-home and swam in after them for the evening. The anemone’s waving tentacles enveloped the clown family to keep them safe from any evil doer.

  As the danger seemed to have passed, Rocky fully emerged from the sand and shook himself off. He looked up—directly into the eyes of a pretty female rockmover wrasse named Maria.

  She stretched. “I guess you got a little scared by the bang of the pistol shrimp. I saw your bubble trail.”

  Embarrassed, Rocky spit out a piece of finely granulated coral that he had mouthed on his frantic dive. “Yeah, well, I went under just to be cautious. How about you?”

  “I was safe with Flasher and stayed above sand,” she said, tilting her head to the right toward a red and blue fish with his chest puffed up and top fins splayed.

  Flasher alternately flexed his dorsal fins then his pectoral fins. “I’ll escort you home, Maria. You’ll be safer with me than with this dragon
-finned small fry.”

  Rocky tried to flex a fin but it drooped and looked like he was waving.

  “Bye, Rocky.” The cute female waved back at him as she and Flasher swam off.

  He shook his head and bared his two small protruding teeth. Flasher was nothing but a show-off and a bully.

  Rocky looked around at the remaining inhabitants. The crabs and S.H. Rimp were in the process of tucking themselves in narrow crevices in the rocks while the schooling fish made for a dark corner in the back. Yes, there was something funky going down in Reef Town and Rocky hoped they would all be alive in the morning. He dove under the sand to wait out the night.

  * * * *

  The next morning Rocky surfaced, yawned and stretched his fins and tail. It had been a quiet night and he hadn’t heard a thing. He was hungry and began to probe under nearby shells and rubble, looking for a tasty morsel.

  A female damsel shot by. “Have you seen my mate? I’ve looked everywhere.” Her blue color glistened in the daylight as she wrung her fins together. “You’re so good at spotting things, could you look around…even in the Dark Zone?”

  Rocky gulped, his fins getting sweaty. “I’ll search Reef Town first then decide if I need to go into the Dark Zone.” The Dark Zone was the isolated and untamed part of the tank where the overflow filter box slurped and burbled. It was a place where fish never dared to go or, despite parental warnings, juveniles would go on a dare and never return. He had sworn to never dangle a fin in there.

  Rocky made a circuit of his home, flipping over small rocks with his nose and peering into crevices of live rocks encrusted with algae, orange sponges, small clams and worms. But he didn’t find any part of the missing damsel.

  He didn’t expect to find anything since he had been over these rocks many times. Also, if a fish had died of natural causes he would have seen two large eyes peering in followed by a five fingered appendage holding a net. The net would descend into their world and scoop up the body and take it to the white whirlpool leading to the Big Reef in the sea. He suddenly realized that he hadn’t seen the eyes, the net or even any new food since just before his tank mates started disappearing.

  Mulling that thought, Rocky decided that he would swim to the top for an aerial view and to check on the water level. He hadn’t said anything to his tank mates but over the last week he noticed that the water level was decreasing. Rocky pressed his body to the glass and measured the distance between the power head and the top of the water. It had gone down another fin length last night. At this rate they would run out of water in less than a month.

  From his elevated vantage point Rocky could see all of Reef Town. He noticed a path of destruction through the field of stone-like antler corals, their white, pink and green fingers hanging at right angles off their stems. Something large had made a sweeping motion from the top of the tank through the coral forest and dragged itself along the sandy bottom. He dove to the bottom and swam low, following the trail to a valley surrounded by rocks. He saw two halves of a large open clam shell and a couple of crabs eating scraps left in the shell.

  “Hey!” Rocky shouted at them, bubbles spewing from his mouth. He pointed a fin in their direction. “So you two are the reason our friends keep disappearing.”

  The two crabs looked at each other while one crab quickly moved a piece of clam behind his back with his large claw. The other snapped, “We didn’t do it. The shell was upside down on the sand and open like this. We’re just cleaning up the place.” It came out muffled since he was chewing.

  Maria, Flasher and the female damsel swam over.

  “We heard the commotion. Did you find my mate?” the damsel asked.

  “No,” Rocky said, wiggling, feeling proud and excited that he could solve the mystery in front of pretty Maria. “But I found these two feeding on the remnants of a clam. They must be the perpetrators who have been eating the reef people.”

  The damsel flared, “Murderers!” She repeatedly and forcefully nosed into one crab then the other.

  “Hey, lady, cut it out,” the crab without food in his mouth shouted. “We’re innocent. We only eat dead things, remember?”

  The damsel rounded on Rocky who, sensing things could get ugly, was about to go underground. “You said they were the culprits!”

  “Sorry,” Rocky mumbled and looked down. “I forgot that scavenger crabs only eat the remains.”

  The damsel nosed into Rocky. “We’ve looked everywhere. What if my mate is still alive? You need to go to the Dark Zone. You can always dart underground if you need to hide.”

  Flasher chuckled, “Yes, Rocky always hides when he’s scared. He’s nothing but a useless fin nipper.”

  “Rocky, you can do it,” Maria said. She gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  Rocky hesitated. He was frightened but his resolve was strengthened since Maria believed in him.

  He sucked in a deep gulp of water and blew it out. “Okay, I need someone to go with me. There’s safety in numbers.”

  “I’ll stay here and protect the females,” Flasher quickly said.

  After a good deal of convincing on Rocky’s part and agreement to share his food for the next month, Rocky and S.H. Rimp slowly made their way to the Dark Zone over rocks and through tunnels. When they entered, Rocky saw that it lived up to its name as he could barely see a fin in front of his face.

  They lingered while Rocky’s eyes became accustomed to the light and turned into night goggles. S. H. stretched his legs, getting his sensory feelers ready to taste his way through the darkness.

  “I don’t know, m-man,” S.H. stuttered. “There’s being brave and then there’s being stupid. Are you doing this to show off for Maria?”

  “Maybe. She is so pretty. Maria, star of the sea.” Bubbles rose out of Rocky.

  S.H. smacked him on the head with two of his legs. “Focus.”

  Rocky sobered. “In any case I think we need to know if there is a killer lurking back here. Anyone of us could be next. Follow me.”

  Rocky slowly swam toward a large rock. Suddenly, something moved underneath him and kicked up a small flurry of sand. He twisted to one side to get out of the way and pushed S.H. back. After a few seconds, when the sand had settled, he saw a puffed up, well fed red serpent star.

  “You look stuffed to the gills,” Rocky said. “We’re looking for our friend. Eat anything suspicious lately?”

  “No way. There’s so much uneaten food in here that I don’t need any more. But if I get hungry, hungry, hungry I know where to go.” The serpent star leered, two of his arms creeping toward them.

  They darted out of the way and continued onward through an abyss with high rock walls on either side illuminated by fluorescent tipped hydroids. They were translucent and looked ghostly waving in the darkness. Rocky thought it was hauntingly beautiful.

  Since he couldn’t see well, S.H. Rimp followed closely behind Rocky. His antenna tickled Rocky’s tail, causing him to twitch and accidentally slap S.H.’s face.

  “Watch the tail, man.”

  “Then don’t get so close.” Rocky flipped a fin at him and swam forward through a narrow crevice.

  Suddenly, tentacles from a nearby hydroid waved in the current close to Rocky. He catapulted forward to avoid its poisonous tips.

  S.H. felt the water move, ducked and narrowly missed being stung. He scuttled ahead and yelled, “Maybe this is why all our friends have vanished!”

  “I don’t think so,” Rocky yelled back. “The hydroids need to touch a fish in order to sting them. They don’t move around and our friends would be stupid to be swimming here.”

  “You mean stupid like us,” S.H. said, dodging more stinging tentacles while following his friend to a safer area.

  Rocky stopped abruptly when he reached the deepest, darkest part of the tank that was no longer lit by sporadic beams of light from the surface. S.H. slid to a stop behind him.

  “We should investigate inside that small rock cave,” Rocky said.

  �
��A cave? Not me. When did you get so brave and become a mighty adventurer? You can explore that death trap by yourself.” S.H. folded four of his arms around his body.

  “By myself? Well…I’ll just take a quick look.”

  Very slowly, feeling like he was going to his doom, Rocky went to the entrance of the cave and peeked inside. He didn’t see or feel anything unusual so he went further in the cave until only his tail stuck out. The interior was quiet and still. He continued to the middle of the cave and looked around. No sign of the damsel or any other creature. Relieved, he turned to leave.

  A whirring noise came from ahead. A shiny green body jumped down from a hidden burrow in the roof. A lethal mantis shrimp blocked off the cave entrance and Rocky’s escape.

  “I was feeling the need for a bite of something tasty,” the mantis shrimp said, his large bug eyes focused on Rocky. “Pre-packaged food gets so tiresome.” He unsheathed an oversized clubbed claw. Rocky knew that the mantis first hit the water with his claw, making a wave to stun its prey. Then the mantis bashed its victim to death. Rocky wanted to dive under the sand and hide but knew that Maria and the others were counting on him.

  The mantis moved his claw and smacked his fist of death in the water. A loud explosion sounded and echoed off the rock walls, the vibration creating an underwater wave that somersaulted Rocky backward. He frantically paddled to keep from being thrown into a cave wall.

  His life on the reef flashed in front of him and he realized he wanted a future with Maria and small fry of his own. Taking strength from that thought, he dove and kicked up sand with his nose to obscure the mantis shrimp’s vision. He bobbed left then right and swam under the mantis, flipping him up with his tail.

  He rocketed out of the cave to S.H. who used his claw to shoot off his pistol. Together they darted off, loud stunning snap waves shrieking from the mantis shrimp interspersed with S.H.’s pistol fire. Rocky blasted through the water while S.H. trotted behind. They dashed by the hydroids, creating a wake that made the poisonous tipped tentacles sway in unison. Then they careened over top of the red serpent star.