MACK THE KNIFE

The shark’s dorsal fin sliced through the water as easily as a sharp blade slitting a woman’s tender throat. While the shark headed towards a dinghy through the undulating turquoise sea, a thin white line following in its wake, the old man lifted his arm out of the water, a stream of crimson blood dripping off his elbow. He grinned as the enormous shark slid by the dinghy on its side partially exposing its white belly, one of the creature’s big dead eyes staring up at him just below the sea’s surface. “Not yet my pretty but we’ll dance soon,” he said.

As the old man watched his sailboat slowly sinking into the tranquil sea, the hot sun beating down on his naked tanned all over body, he had often wondered how his life would end. He had lived a charmed yet dangerous life and like the shark, was a predator. However, unlike the shark that had a host of pearly white teeth, he had only one, but oh, could it ever bite! The sun glinted off the blade as he held it high over his head, a rust-colored stain running its length, dried blood from where he had purposely slit his arm. As he lowered the knife and set it gently beside him on the dinghy’s centre seat, he shut his eyes, sighed deeply and listened to his favorite song, which he had looped, so it played over and over again, while his sailboat sank lower and lower into the water.

The old man figured he was much like the shark circling the dinghy, only difference was, he preyed on vulnerable women rather than defenseless fish. As he watched a gull dip down and then skim across the waves, he thought about his first victim. It was 1959 and he was only 12 years old when he slit his mother’s throat, while Bobby Darin sang his hit song, Mack the Knife, on the radio. He could still remember seeing the shocked look on her face as she grabbed her throat to stem the flow of blood, which was spraying all over the kitchen. While her body was spasming on the floor, he went into her bedroom. The stranger that had been screwing his mother, hearing the commotion in the kitchen, pushed him easily aside and ran, skidding across the pool of blood on the kitchen floor and out the door. The murder had been blamed on the stranger and he could remember smiling to himself as the police and other officials made a big fuss over him; little did they know.

He didn’t know why he killed his mother because he didn’t dislike her, could only guess that it had something to do with selling her body to strangers because all the victims after her were ladies of the night, the red-light variety. His aunt and uncle took him in since his father had deserted them several years before. Not until he was 15 years of age and once again heard Bobby Darin singing, Fancy gloves, oh, wears old MacHeath, babe - So there’s never, never a trace of red, did he buy a pair of white cotton gloves, slip out his bedroom window and go hunting in the wee hours of the night. Since he knew that his calling in life was to be the slayer of prostitutes, he took pride in keeping himself in good physical shape because it would not only take stealth but strength as well to perform his dastardly deeds. Also, whenever he listened to the song, which was often, as soon as he heard, And someone’s sneakin’ ‘round the corner - Could that someone be Mack the Knife, it made him smile. He didn’t know if there was a real Mack the Knife or MacHeath but as far as he was concerned, he had become Mack and owned a deadly knife.

Mack’s uncle had been an avid sailor and had taught him to sail, something else that he excelled at besides slaying unsuspecting women. By the time he had grown into a handsome, intelligent and amiable young man, he had saved up enough money to put a down payment on a comfortable sailboat. Since there were many marinas along the California coast, he moved from port to port, leaving rivers of red blood in his wake. He had no idea how many women he slaughtered, nor did he remember their names or took any trophies because that wasn’t important. Notoriety and fame were of no interest to him either, so he left no signatures of any kind, only a body soaked in blood. The authorities believed there was a serial killer at large but sometimes blamed the murders on gang warfare because a pimp would occasionally be found lying in an alley with his throat slashed.

As the years went by and the victims stacked up like cords of wood in his mind, Mack had absolutely no sense of remorse. He neither despised the murdered women nor gave the killings any real meaning. Reading about his murderous exploits in the newspaper or hearing about them on TV gave him no satisfaction, nor did it bother him if some deluded person took responsibility for his actions. He believed the main reason no one had ever associated him with the hundreds of deaths was because he kept all the murders to himself. And why not, he’d never even had a bad dream concerning his activities as a mass killer. Also, he had remained solo all his life, no real friends, wife or other relatives after his aunt and uncle had passed away.

Mack, although in his seventies, because he had lived a healthy and physical lifestyle, looked more like 50 years of age. However, as he sat in the dinghy which would occasionally rock violently, whenever the great white shark passed by, he knew that he was slowly becoming weaker with age. He had decided to leave this world as anonymously as he had lived. Instead of moving to another marina, he had pointed the sailboat’s bow towards the mighty Pacific Ocean and once the land had disappeared beyond the horizon, he had scuttled it and untied the painter connected to the dinghy.

As Mack watched the blood slowly seeping out of his forearm and dripping into the sea, he thought back to his last kill. Like Jack the Ripper in ye old London town ages ago, he had approached his intended victim while she was standing on a corner under a streetlight. She was a woman of colour, not that it mattered because the colour of someone’s skin meant nothing to him. She was wearing a very short, red skirt and long, black-netted stockings that disappeared underneath it. Her stiletto high heels were red as well, which he had found exciting, not in a sexual manner but because of the colour. He remembered salivating a little as her low-cut white blouse billowed with red blood after he had slashed her throat and then gently laid her down next to a dumpster, the streetlight barely illuminating her lifeless body. When he was about to leave, disappear into the darkness, he instead took off his white cotton gloves, dipped his finger into the hooker’s warm red blood and wrote on the wall just above her head, MACK WON’T BE BACK.

Glancing over his shoulder at his sailboat aptly named the Seablade, the sea well above the waterline he could still hear Bobby Darin’s cool mellow voice singing, Could it be our boy’s done something rash? The great white shark, judging from the way its speed had increased and was heading straight for the dinghy, Mack figured the time was nigh. As he stood up, naked as the day he was born, he held the sharp knife just above his shoulder and waited. Just before the shark struck the dinghy he yelled, “Time to dance my pretty!” as he launched himself over the side and grabbing a hold of the dorsal fin with one hand, he plunged the knife up to the hilt into its massive head. The shark dove down while he continued stabbing it and as the red blood streamed around him, he thought that he had never seen anything so beautiful. As the depth of the sea grew darker and he was about to take his final breath, he was certain that he could hear Bobby Darin’s voice fading as he sang the last refrain, Now that Macky’s back in town.