“The mouth on that chippie,” Gert grumbled from down the bar.
“Why would I have to get out of the Arms?”
“There’s a cobra loose.”
“A cobra? Like…from India?”
“Right.”
“So what’s a cobra doing in upstate New York?”
“Evidently one of your fellow residents sells exotic reptiles.”
“Who?”
“Don’t have the gentleman’s name just yet, Chief.”
“But selling poisonous snakes is—”
“Illegal, yes.”
Actually, insane was what he was going to say.
“It seems that one of the cages got knocked over in the dark, and the snake escaped. It chased him down the corridor and out into the street.”
“Good,” Raymer said.
“I need to use the gents’,” Jerome said, sliding off his stool.
Puzzled by his abrupt exit, Raymer watched him go. “Okay,” he told Charice, “here’s what you do. Get on the horn with animal control—”
“Already did. They’re on the way.”
“So am I.”
“How about I put Miller on the desk and join you.”
“No,” Raymer told her. “I need you there.”
“Chief?” she said. “I ever tell you about the tattoo on my ass?”
“No, Charice. That I would’ve remembered.”
“Butterfly. Tiny little thing. If you don’t let me out from behind this switchboard, it’s gonna be a pterodactyl by the time I’m forty.”
Then she was gone, the radio silent. I am not, Raymer thought, heading for the door, going to think about the butterfly on Charice’s ass. I will not.
“Funny gal,” said Gert, lowering his paper at last. “I just remembered why I voted for you.”
“And?”
“You seemed sort of…” He was clearly groping for the right word. “Normal.”
Raymer nodded. “Normal?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Gert repeated, shrugging. “Rare in law enforcement. In my experience.”
Stepping outside was like being bludgeoned, by the heat and stench and blinding sunlight. Raymer paused to let his eyes adjust. He wobbled, then righted himself. Across the street a crowd was milling around in front of the Morrison Arms, many of them residents Raymer recognized. These were his neighbors, he reflected, and while he didn’t like to be unkind, they were not attractive people on the whole. He’d known several of them since grade school, and they hadn’t looked too good back then either. Amazing, when you thought about it, how much of human destiny was mapped out by the third grade. A man wearing a neck brace, with his right arm crooked in a sling, caught his attention because he, too, looked familiar. When their eyes met, the man quickly turned away, and in this furtive gesture Raymer recognized Roy Purdy, who only hours ago had been pulled from his flattened car by a Jaws of Life machine. Was it possible he’d already gotten treated and been released from the hospital?
Raymer was about to cross the street when he heard the door open behind him. “I think I’m just going to head on back to Schuyler,” Jerome said. Tone-wise, he seemed to be trying for nonchalance, but it didn’t ring quite true. And though he’d had just the one beer, he didn’t look right, either.
“Jerome?” Raymer said, visited by a sudden intuition. “Are you scared of snakes?”
“Me?” he said, then waited a beat. “Nah.”
“Because you look kind of—”
“Some snakes, sure,” he grudgingly admitted. “I mean…”
“What?”
“Look,” he said, clearly annoyed he had to explain himself. “There are three things a snake shouldn’t be able to do. It shouldn’t swim. It shouldn’t climb trees. And it sure as hell shouldn’t stand up like a vertebrate.” He actually looked relieved, having gotten all this off his chest.
“I think cobras can do only one of those things,” Raymer noted.
“One’s enough,” Jerome said, refusing to look him in the face. “Go ahead and laugh,” he finally said. “I don’t care.”
“I’m not laughing,” Raymer said. “I’m just…I don’t know…surprised, I guess. I always figured you were—”
“Brave? I would follow you into a hail of gunfire, brother, but I don’t do serpents. Sorry.”
“Chief?” his sister chirped from Raymer’s hip.
“What now, Charice? I’m kind of busy here.”
“Jerome still with you?”
Jerome shook his head.
“No, he’s headed back to Schuyler. Why?”
“Just wanted you to know you can’t count on him for backup. That boy’s petrified of garter snakes.”
Not true, he mouthed. Unconvincingly, given the speed at which he was backpedaling.
“I’ve got this, Charice.”
Though in truth, he was no great fan of reptiles himself. He was glad he had a snootful of Twelve Horse ale, which, combined with the rush of seeing Jerome unexpectedly fearstruck, gave him the necessary courage to turn back to the Morrison Arms and step into the street, though the immediate result was a blaring horn and screeching tires as the Schuyler County Animal Control van came to a rocking halt only inches away, sending him up onto his tiptoes.
The driver appeared to be in his midtwenties, and when he poked his head out the window, he looked vaguely familiar. “That was close,” he said. “I’m Justin. We met last year?”
Though the danger had passed, Raymer stepped back onto the curb, his heart pounding.
“I hear this right?” Justin said, sounding skeptical. “A cobra?”
“That’s my understanding.”
The young man nodded thoughtfully. “And me without my mongoose.”
Raymer followed the van across the street as Justin parked as far away from the crowd as possible, then hopped out and pulled from the back a long pole with a wire noose at the end. For some reason its length deepened Raymer’s already serious misgivings. He wished there’d been time for one more beer. “Just how lethal are these things?”
Justin seemed disinterested. “Do me a favor,” he said, stepping into thick canvas pants that looked like waders. “Go ask those people where the snake was last seen.”
Before Raymer could do so, though, there came a shriek he’d never heard outside a movie theater, so high pitched that he couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. But what really made no sense was that it wasn’t from inside the Morrison Arms, where the snake supposedly was, but rather from the direction of Gert’s. He froze for a moment as the scream morphed into a terrible keening, then found himself chugging back across the street, once again setting horns blaring and tires screeching. In his peripheral vision he saw Mr. Hynes, flag in hand, struggling to his feet and tipping his beach chair over in the process. And what was that expression he fleetingly glimpsed on Roy Purdy’s bruised, swollen face? A smirk? But there was no time to dwell on such irrelevancies. Because it suddenly came to Raymer who the screamer had to be.
Raymer found Jerome on his knees in the parking lot, staring straight ahead, slack jawed, unresponsive, and he squatted down next to him. “Where did it bite you?” he said.
Because as he hurried back across the street a narrative had formed. The cobra, frightened by the noisy crowd, had somehow slithered across the busy two-lane blacktop, probably in search of a hiding place. Had Jerome left one of the ’Stang’s vent windows cracked, or could the serpent have crawled up under the chassis and—
“Bite me?” he said, still staring off into the middle distance before turning his focus on Raymer. “You bite me.”
Raymer wrote this bizarre response off to the snake’s venom and told him, “Don’t worry. It’s gone.” Which was true: no snake was in evidence. Nor was there any sign of snakebite on Jerome’s face or neck or hands. Dear God, had it slithered up Jerome’s pant leg? No way. Jerome wouldn’t be calmly kneeling there with a cobra sliding around in his trousers. Unless the venom had induced more or less instant paralysis. “Jerome,” he said. “Look at me. Where did it bite you?”