A Criminally Fishy Date

“I want to take you to my favorite restaurant,” said Toby.

I practically whooped for joy. Finally, some initiative! We’d been to my four favorite restaurants in an invariable cycle for two months. They were my favorites—a vegetarian, a southern comfort kitchen, the all-potato place, and a pork barbecue joint—so it wasn’t like I was having a bad time. But it seemed like Toby should share a little bit of his life with me sometime. If he wanted a relationship, that is. Why is it so hard to tell?

“I’m game. Let’s do it!”

I probably should’ve asked what his favorite restaurant was. I can be particular. But I don’t think anything could’ve prepared me for where we went.

We walked into an alley. I hesitated, and Toby took my hand to pull me along.

“I like to go in the back way for a preview of what’s for dinner,” he said.

He pulled on the handle of a dinged metal door as if he’d been doing it all his life, and a suffocating odor of the sea overwhelmed us. I tugged on his hand, trying to let him know without opening my mouth that I didn’t want to go in, but he didn’t seem to understand the problem.

“Oh, I know what day it is!” he said greedily.

My eyes adjusted quickly to the low light. Some kind of storage area boasted shelves full of labeled spice jars and enormous cardboard boxes. But of course, my gaze was drawn to the source of the smell.

On a pallet with ice packs rested a four-foot-long shark, its eyes white and unseeing.

I couldn’t stop staring at it. Its conical, pointed nose and crescent-shaped tailfin signaled that it was a shortfin mako. I could perceive a pattern on the skin: denticles, a hard, toothy material that the water glides over. They have exceptional muscle control and swim elegantly, silently in shallow and mid-depths.

All of those characteristics combine to make the shortfin mako the fastest shark in the world. I’d seen videos of makos torpedoing through the oceans with their economical swim and leaping out of the water in flying backflips to the oohs and aahs of everyone on the surface.

The specimen before me must have been a juvenile, because adults average six to eight feet long. It looked horrifyingly out of place on that pallet. And what was worse, it lay there immobilized, scalped bald without its dorsal, pectoral, or caudal fins.

It should’ve been in the sea, alive, snatching up fish faster than they could see what was coming, contributing its special charm to the ecosystem.

“Now are you going to tell me they’ve got rhinos and pangolins out back?” I asked Toby.

“What?”

“Shortfin makos are endangered, and legitimate commercial fishing has mostly been curbed.” I wasn’t sure how to explain without veering into what men like to call “drama.” “We’re probably staring at a crime scene.”

“Nah,” Toby said, swatting the idea down, then rubbing his hands together with glee. “It’s just shark fin soup day. I love that stuff.”

I wished I were a shortfin mako then, because they’re endothermic and, unlike most sharks, can keep their inner organs several degrees warmer than the water they swim in. I felt like a regular, ectothermic fish suddenly plunged into the icy waters of the Arctic. I struggled to breathe.

“Come on, let’s place our order before all the fins are taken,” said Toby. “We may have to come back in another couple of weeks for our soup, depending on their drying process.”

I thought I’d been getting to know him in my favorite restaurants. He seemed to feel some responsibility to the planet, always throwing his soda bottles in the recycling bins. But in the back room of his favorite restaurant, I didn’t recognize Toby.

He took my arm, but I wrenched out of the hook of his grasp. I headed back out the door, shaking. A juvenile with perhaps two more decades ruling the seas ahead of him, cut short for the sake of how many bowls of gelatinous soup?

Toby didn’t follow me. In the street, I fished my phone out of my purse and dialed.

I’ve had bad dates before, truly dismal, but this was the only one that ended with me tipping off the police about a wildlife crime syndicate.