Sharkman by Steve Alten Read Free Book Online Page B

top of the pecking order. Here in Delray Beach, I was the Asian freak in the wheelchair—a cripple’s version of The Scarlet Letter .
    I hated that book.
    Ley struck right before first period biology, assaulting me outside the classroom with a shaken can of soda, taking photos of my stained pants with his iPhone to create a new album of embarrassing photos. Anya stepped in to defend me—only making it worse.
    “Why do you have to pick on Kwan, Stephen? What did he ever do to you?”
    “For your information, Anya , his gook relatives killed my uncle’s wife’s brother in Vietnam. What’s it to you anyway? Unless you like him. You do! Hey guys, Anya has a new boyfriend—Kwan the Cripple.”
    “Stop it!”
    “Go on, Anya, give your boyfriend a lap dance.” He pushed Anya onto my Coke-drenched lap, her sudden weight displacement nearly tossing me sideways.
    “He’s not my boyfriend, now stop it. Ugh, you stained my skirt, you asshole!”
    Mr. Hock stepped out into the hallway. “Anya? What’s going on out here?”
    Ley grinned. “It’s Kwan, Mr. Hock. He got excited over Anya sitting in his lap and had an accident.”
    The rest of the class laughed. Anya stormed off to clean her skirt in the bathroom—and suddenly I didn’t give a damn about the internship or school . . . or life.
    Bill Raby was waiting for me curbside when the seventh period bell mercifully ended my day. A small crowd of Ley disciples recorded my chair being loaded aboard the van. I didn’t even bother to turn away from their cell phones, having already disappeared.
    “Miami, eh?”
    “Just take me home, Bill.”
    “Can’t do that. Work order says I have to take you to Miami and pick you up at eight.”
    “Take me home, I don’t feel well.”
    “If you don’t feel well then I’m supposed to take you to the doctor.”
    “Listen, asshole, I don’t want to see the doctor, I just want to go home and lie down.”
    “I could lay you down on the gurney.”
    “Are you hard of hearing or just stupid? I just want to go home.”
    Forty-five minutes later we arrived in Miami.
    * * *
    The Aquatic Neurological & Genetics Engineering Lab—ANGEL for short—was located on Virginia Key, which is a small island situated in Biscayne Bay that harbors the Miami Sea Aquarium. I would learn that the sea aquarium leased their unused land to the genetics lab and shared its water purification plant, which fed both facilities’ salt water tanks.
    Bill had to cross over the Rickenbacker Causeway twice before he found the lab’s unmarked dirt road entrance. He cursed the entire bumpy half mile before we reached a steel gate securing a twenty-foot-high perimeter fence capped with barbed wire. A security camera was mounted atop a light pole, a two-way speaker attached to a post.
    “Hey kid, where they got you working—Folsom prison?”
    “Dude, just roll down your window and press the intercom.”
    Bill shrugged and complied. “Afternoon, eh . I’m delivering Kwan Wilson, your new intern.”
    After an annoying minute the gate buzzed, then swung slowly inward on its hinges.
    Bill drove onto a recently tarred two-lane road which curved to the right around a privacy shrub that concealed the facility from the causeway. “Nice view, eh . . . for a dump.”
    He was right. Spoiling the sparkling turquoise-blue horizon that was Biscayne Bay was a two-story rectangular brown brick building that looked like it had been built back in the 1950s. To the left of the structure were four double-wide trailers, their rusted steel bottoms resting on cinder blocks. The back end of the trailers lined up along a weed-infested stretch of fencing that separated the lab from the aquarium’s water treatment plant before cutting west across a barren stretch of beach, enclosing the six-acre facility.
    Making his way down a cement sidewalk that separated the building from the trailers was a stocky man in his early thirties. He had short brown curls for hair, a high forehead, and