Lester Biorkin, the target’s name was. Or had been. Now the Federal Witness Program called him Louis Burke, according to Sammy’s briefing phone call yesterday. As far as the Family was concerned, the FWP was a great help. The Family had a mole there, and the mole could turn up just about anything they wanted. At the moment, they wanted Biorkin, who had done three hateful things that upset them. First, a year ago he had witnessed from his taxi up in Harlem the disposal by gunshot of Don Dominic Giovanchi. That wouldn’t have been bad if Giovanchi’s recycling had been handled by one of the Family’s routine disposers. But the hit had been made personally by Don Edmundo Carli himself. “I owe him that honor,” Don Carli himself had explained it to his worried security pros. Anyway, who’d of thought a dumb taxi driver would be wandering along Lenox Avenue just as Don Carli’s .45 brightened the night? Who’d of thought the driver would recognize the distinguished shooter? But worst of all, who’d of thought the hack driver would do the second hateful thing: be dumb enough to testify and put Don Carli himself up the Hudson in Ossining for twenty-five to thirty-five?
Worse. When word from Don Carli himself came down out of Sing Sing, a worker shooter named Skagg had been sent to Miami to take care of Biorkin. Dancing through Biscayne Boulevard traffic a couple of feet behind Biorkin, Skagg went under a gravel truck, or so the story went. That was the third hateful thing. Biorkin made it across the highway, but Skagg was roadkill. At that point, the Family decided a worker shooter had been a bad choice, and they contacted a specialist shooter, namely Sammy Little Shot.
Now here Sammy was, sliding one slender, polished black Thom McAn out of the Honda to the dusty parking surface, then the other. Wrong shoes, he knew, but he hadn’t had much time to put his wardrobe together for this little swing south. It had been “Five Gs and leave now, or be picky, wait for the next one, and hope you don’t starve in between.” Nice way the Family had of putting things. So here he was. The blue and white seersucker pants would be okay, the button-down white shirt would pass. The blue poplin jacket was already too hot, but he couldn’t take it off because that would expose the handgrip of the Sterling stuck in his waistband.
He left the car unlocked in case he’d need to make a speedy exit, shaded his eyes, and looked up at the facade of the Spanish hacienda. And that was when he felt icy slivers prickle his spine. All through the plane trip down to Fort Myers then back up here by Japanese scooter, he had pushed to the back of his brain just where he had to go to find Biorkin-Burke. The Garden of Serpents was a tourist attraction, a goddamned snakearium, and if there was anything he hated enough to send cold slivers up his arms just by thinking about it, it was a snake. Hated them even worse than bats, and he hated bats enough to try to stay inside after dark — even in Midtown in winter. The bat hate had come from his mother, when he’d been a kid back in Jersey City. One had gotten into her bedroom and she’d gone bonkers, rolling on the floor, screaming it was going to get in her hair and strangle her. When he was older, he knew that probably wouldn’t have happened, but it never stopped giving him the shakes. Even now, he couldn’t make it all the way through a Dracula movie.
The snake business had started when he was ten. He and a buddy had chased a grass snake under a fence. The buddy ran around the other side, screamed, “I got it!” and stepped on it just as Sammy leaned down with his mouth open. Something green and sour and vile squirted out of the snake’s mouth straight into his. He spit and gagged and spit and thought he was going to die.
As Sammy stared up at the big green and pink lettering across the whole front of the Garden of Serpents, he felt that old gagging urge begin to throb in his throat. The letters were decorated with vines — until a second look showed him the vines were snakes, holding each other’s tails in their mouths. The sun, low on the horizon behind him, made the entwined lettering seem to writhe in its brassy glare. He swallowed his revulsion and walked into the building.
A few tourists fingered the gaudy souvenir display racks that flanked a sales counter on the left side of the tiled lobby. On the right were a pair of restroom doors labeled “Hiss” and “Herss.” The entrance to the exhibits was center rear, a heavy solid wood door with a ticket cage just to its left.
He realized he was stalling, hoping that somehow Biorkin would magically appear, walk out to the parking lot, and make things easy. Sammy didn’t want to go in there. But Biorkin worked here. He had to be out there doing something or other in the exhibit area. To avoid the guy’s leaving through a back door while he stood here wondering about it, Sammy had to make himself go in there. He yanked out his wallet, careful not to expose the gun butt, and handed the five-buck tariff to the bored-looking babe behind the screened ticket window. Then he faced the big, curved-top entrance, took a long, deep breath, and pulled it open.
Years ago he’d read that snakes smell like cucumbers. That might have been a lot of horse hocky, but he could swear that as he stepped through the door, all of a sudden he smelled cucumbers. And there wasn’t a snake in sight. He’d expected a big room with cages along the wall. It wasn’t like that at all. He walked across a sort of hallway, then he was outdoors again, in a big courtyard open to the darkening sky. The central area was crisscrossed by two brick walks at right angles. The walks intersected in the middle, cutting the yard into four sections. In each section was a — what? Some kind of cinderblock ring. Sammy walked over to the nearest one, his shoes scuffing the tanbark mulch. He peered into the big fifteen-foot-diameter well. His blood turned to instant ice. Down there in the bottom of the six-foot-deep pit was a writhing tangle of fat black snakes. Christ, there must be a hundred of them, Sammy realized.
He stumbled backwards until his feet found brick again. A wave of black dots threatened to black out his vision. He fought it off. Okay. He was okay now. But he sure didn’t want to see what was in the other three wells.
The roofed hallway that ran around all four sides of the courtyard was formed by a wall without windows all around the outside, and a low parapet sort of wall around the inside. Widely spaced concrete columns jutted up from the parapet to support the roof’s inside edge. All along the outside wall of this open hallway Sammy made out rows of glass cages. He was glad the light was getting so bad he couldn’t see what was in them.
In a distant comer, a knot of people had gathered around some guy in a white coat. Sammy couldn’t spot anybody anywhere else in here, so he walked across the courtyard toward the gathering. He was careful not to throw any careless looks into the two wells he passed on the way.
Standing at the edge of the little crowd down here in the comer, he could see that the short guy in the white coat was working with something on the edge of the parapet. A citizen with ape shoulders moved aside and Sammy saw what was going on. The white-coat guy had a damned snake right out here with everybody. Only his little pole with a hook at the end was between him and the snake.
Sammy was surprised that he knew what kind of snake it was. The flaring hood was a dead giveaway. This skinny little snake man with brushcut gray hair was diddling around with a cobra. A couple of feet of cobra, and the lousy cobra was getting tired of it. It made a lunge for the guy’s hand. Just as it did, the guy whipped in with the other hand, and Sammy was goggle-eyed. The bony little snake charmer had the thing by the back of its neck.
“You going to show us the hamadryad this afternoon, Dr. Grosvenor?” The speaker was a brainy-looking teenager crowding right in on the cobra act.
“Afraid not, son.” The snake doctor had a voice as dry as scales on leaves. “We bring him out only on Sundays.”