Like Fish in the Water

andrew adams

022706

They found the first body bright and early on a Monday morning, only I shouldn’t say bright because it was four in the morning, the sun hadn’t even begun to rise, and the only lights around were the streetlights and the stores. They were all open. Of course they were open. It was four in the morning. How could they not be open?

It was a rush and they were going through the fish faster than they could manage, passing off fish after fish to customer after customer. Men in overalls and rubber boots were running around, screaming and selling and organizing. Nobody had smelled the body. Nobody could smell anything over the fish.

The lady was Ms. Norton, an elderly tourist from Utah who had dreamed of seeing the Big Apple her entire life. When they lifted the fish, she began to scream. The vendors were about to put up a fight over the quality of their fish when they looked down and saw the mouth frozen into a scream, blood running down the chin and covered with ice crystals.

Detective Burroughs came in and they took the body down to the labs. The autopsy revealed lungs full of salt water. It had a salinity of 330. That day, how somebody drowned in the Dead Sea and then appeared in the Fulton Fish Market was the question on everyone’s mind. Naturally, everyone but Burroughs had forgotten about it by nightfall. His team set about trying to identify the man.

The second body was found before the first name. Screams in the middle of the morning rush, two days after the initial discovery, alerted workers to a body tied to the top of a lamppost. When they pulled him down, they found a corpse with two big, black holes where his eyes should have been. Somebody had stuffed crab intestines into them. His throat was serrated, completely and totally destroyed by crab bones. There were crab eggs beneath his tongue. And when they examined his trench-coat, the only article of clothing he’d been wearing, they found 37 crab claws in his pockets. There were 16 in his right pocket, 20 in his left, and one forced into the lining itself. Police were baffled.

The third body came in the next day, that of a Mr. Robert Addonizio. A young man who had recently realized that his part-time job as a fisherman had, over the past eight years, blossomed into a career he would never escape opened up a fresh shipment of eels only to find that they were all very, very much alive and Mr. Addonizio was very, very much dead. He was found naked, his skin riddled with holes where the eels had sunk their teeth into his skin. A live eel spilled out of his esophagus during the preliminary autopsy reports.

Curiously, the name of the man who opened the box was a Mr. Albert Addonizio. He was Robert Addonizio’s son.

Positive ID’s came in on the first two bodies. The first was Doron Friedman, a prominent Israeli player in the international fish market. The second was Eric Berenguer, a petty thug who, reports showed, had been trying to break into the market before opening to steal a meal.

Three bodies in four days. The Fulton Fish Market was closed the next morning.

Albert Addonizio was brought in for questioning, but police reported that their findings were inconclusive. Addonizio knew nothing, and is now seeing a therapist thrice a week.

Detective Burroughs was livid. He wanted to know what was happening in his city. And so he spent all morning, sundown to sunrise, lurking the shadows of the Fulton Fish Market, unable to escape that slimy smell of fish so thick that it hovered over the entire market.

He was found soon after sunrise, dangling from the ceiling, fish hooks poking into his back and out of his chest. Beneath him, on the floor, in a puddle of blood, was his gun. He had expended every bullet in his clip. Nobody had reported the shots fired.

The other police on a homicide beat noted, curiously, that there were footprints extending from the puddle of Burrough’s blood to the New York Harbor. But they weren’t normal footprints; they were distinctly amphibian. They had small claws and webs between the toes. The tabloids had a field day.

And then the murders stopped. In New York.

The problem is, I live in Baltimore. Right near the Inner Harbor. And I can tell you now that I sense something big coming my way. Something monstrous.