He would have to think of that! And this was worse than Dracula’s castle. There you only had to worry about the count. Here he was surrounded by hundreds of creepy fang-bearers. The image of the cobra biting into the rubber-topped bottle flashed vividly to mind. How could the snake doctor get himself to even touch the damned cobra? How many cobras were in here with him? What was in the other three wells? Did the snakes out there crawl out of their pits at night and—
Jesus, what was that!
Somewhere over to his left, he’d heard a grating noise, loud and long, like somebody pulling a fire hose around a comer. That sure hadn’t been a snake in a cage. It was right out here in the—
Forked lightning flared overhead, strobed the courtyard white. Seconds after darkness fell back in, he could still see it burned in his eyeballs. Empty, thank God, the walkways making a giant cross.
That’d keep old Dracula away, he thought inanely. Then thunder exploded like a ton of TNT going off.
His ears sizzled from the blast. No, that wasn’t his ears. It was a hiss. He had definitely heard a hiss. And damned close. Just to his left.
He was out of here!
As Sammy leaped into the empty courtyard, he felt something hit his right knee. Then his left shoulder. Soft impacts, but terrifying. Then his face was struck, and he almost laughed through his fright. Raindrops, that’s what was hitting him. Nothing but big, fat raindrops.
He stumbled to the center of the courtyard as the scattered drops became a downpour. Then a deluge. The cascading sheets were shot through with jagged spears of lightning that threw the walkways and the concrete-ringed serpent wells into brilliance that blinded him for seconds afterward.
Hunched against the storm’s beating downpour, squinting into its lightning flares, soaked and shivering, Sammy shoved his right hand under his sopping jacket and jerked out the Sterling automatic. He was sure now that something was loose here, something more terrifying than anything he’d seen in the cages. He didn’t know what it was, didn’t even want to imagine, but he knew it was here because he could feel it, just like he would have felt a hidden shooter from the rival Giovanchi Family.
But there was something worse than a Giovanchi shooter in here, something that made the hairs on his neck stand straight out. With the pistol held in both hands, Sammy crouched, swung around wildly in the inky blackness. What could—
Lightning strobed twice, only a fraction of a second each time, but it etched into Sammy’s retinas a sight so incredible, so terrifying, that Sammy froze tight.
The thing stood taller than Sammy in his shooting crouch. It swayed there, ghostly white with gleaming eyes that stared down at Sammy as hard and merciless as bronze chips.
Dracula! Sammy thought wildly. The crossed sidewalks didn’t mean a thing. For a frozen moment, he crouched motionless, praying that what he’d seen had been an illusion, a figment of panic.
Then his stunned brain jerked back on track and he pulled the trigger. He got off just one wild shot as the hellish apparition crashed in over his extended arms and sank daggers deep into his neck.
“Found him just like that,” Doctor of Herpetology Herman Grosvenor told Charlotte County Sheriff Duncan Bosworth. They stood in the center of the courtyard, flanking the body of the little man in the sodden poplin jacket and seersucker trousers; the little man with two widely spaced, bloody punctures in his neck. Nearby, two more men in county sheriff’s uniforms were supposed to be checking for “clues,” but mostly they stared into the snake wells with obvious distaste.
“And the hama-whatever, you say you found him out of his cage?” Sheriff Bosworth was a big man with a florid face, but Grosvenor could see that under the lacework of beer-bloated capillaries, the sheriff was pale as paste.
“Hamadryad,” Dr. Grosvenor amended. “When I got here, I found him footloose and fancy free.” He looked down at the body. “I don’t know who this unfortunate fellow is, or how he got locked in here. Found him just like this when I opened up this morning.”
“Who was the last one to leave last night?” the sheriff asked as he crouched and kind of aimlessly fingered the deceased’s neck.
“My assistant, Lou Burke. Oh, you mean, could he have left the cage open? Not him, he’s a detail man. It’s more likely this fellow came in a misguided effort to steal the hamadryad and it got out of hand.”
“The thing’s worth money?”
“Well up in five figures, Sheriff.” Dr. Grosvenor frowned. “Funny thing about Lou, though. He called in just after I called you, said an emergency had come up, and he had to quit.”
The sheriff looked up from his crouch. “Quit?”
“As of today. Said he’d be back in touch to tell me where to send his severance check.”
“I’ll check on him, but I can’t say I blame anybody for giving up this kind of showbiz.” Bosworth stood and gazed uneasily around the courtyard. “You’re sure you corralled that hama-whatever?”
“Hamadryad, Sheriff. Our king cobra. I can’t imagine how he got loose, but he’s safely back in his cage. All eighteen feet of him.”
“That’s some hell of a snake!”
Dr. Grosvenor smiled like a proud parent. “The only snake, I like to say, that can rear up and look you straight in the eye.”
Detectiverse
Mother Goose Mayhem
Jack Be Nimble
by B. E. C.
© 1994 by Betty E. Covey
Wine Is a Mocker
by Jeffry Scott
© 1994 by Jeffry Scott
The female cop has become such a familiar figure on the street, we may be inclined to forget that her lot within the force can still be difficult — especially when she’s paired with the likes of Jeffry Scott’s PC Kit LePage...
Drunks are funny. Ask generations of clowns, cabaret artistes, or writers scrabbling around for light relief. Cue the rumpled Man-about-town, screwing a cigarette into his ear, fumbling with a lighter, and then solemnly igniting the tip of his necktie.
In real life, your average benighted boozer, slurred of speech and double of vision, tends to be an embarrassment. Or due to irrational rages over imagined slights, an outright menace. Sadly, city coppers find it hard to laugh, but then they know of too many maimed innocents, and the occasional grieving widow whose life has been altered for the worse by a gush, of alcohol.