To judge by her expression, the woman standing over him in her off-duty attire — tight jeans and a halter top, in all rather provocative — agreed. It was as if by studying him she could envision all the improvements Becka had tried to make and was calculating how much work remained to be done, what it would cost to finish a job so poorly begun or whether it would make better sense to start over and just gut him again. How was it possible that two women with so little in common had come to share such an unflattering assessment?
“I mean,” he told Charice, his embarrassment giving way to annoyance, “no…fucking…snake.”
He and Justin had gone through every apartment in the Morrison Arms, including Raymer’s, plus the common areas. No snake, no trace. Tomorrow, when electricity was restored, it would have to be done again, this time, blessedly, without Raymer’s assistance. Justin had called in additional animal-control personnel from Albany, but even so he wasn’t very hopeful. It was possible the cobra had slithered into a vent or behind a wall, though it wasn’t likely. Thanks to the heat wave, all the windows that didn’t have air conditioners in them had been flung open in hopes of capturing a stray breeze, and the two rear doors on opposite ends of the central corridor had been propped open as well. The snake was long gone, probably into the weedy lot out back. Once it was daylight it, too, would have to be searched. Until then there wasn’t much to be done. The Squeers brothers and the town’s two or three other private trash collectors had already been warned to be careful when upending garbage cans into their trucks. Meanwhile, until the authorities were certain there was no danger, the Arms was off-limits to residents, all of whom had been given vouchers for a night’s stay at one of the inexpensive motels out by the interstate, a significant upgrade as far as they were concerned.
Raymer himself had a voucher but for the time being had opted for his office sofa. Not wanting anyone to know he was there, he’d snuck into the station through the back door. Dead on his feet, he’d had just enough energy left to shed his sweat-soaked uniform before collapsing onto the couch, too exhausted to go over and make sure the door was locked. So Charice had found him there, enjoying a sleep so profound and dreamless that it bordered on oblivion, the kind of slumber only a very cruel person would interrupt. In fact, the kind of person who, if she was to be believed, had a butterfly tattooed on her rear end.
“What are you even doing here?” he asked.
“I work here, same as you. What’re you saying, exactly? It got away, or there was no snake to begin with?”
The former, he assured her, though the question was understandable. Mass hysteria had been Raymer’s own first thought. Somebody yells Snake! and everybody sees scores of them all over. But that was before he and Justin entered apartment 107. It hadn’t taken Justin long to suss out what was going on in there. No pots, pans, plates, bowls or silverware in the kitchen. Just a ratty couch facing the small television in the living room. A minifridge stocked with cheap beer under the window. The larger kitchen fridge, with most of its shelving removed, had been completely repurposed. Justin had noted the temperature setting and removed the one flat box, holding it out to Raymer and saying, “Snake?” When the shape of the box altered subtly before Raymer’s eyes and he took a quick, involuntary step backward, Justin grinned and returned it to the fridge. “No doubt about it, this guy’s in business.”
The guy being “William Smith,” according to Boogie Waggengneckt, who’d never met him and claimed to have learned only the day before what was in the UPS packages he’d been signing for. Nobody else at the Arms seemed to have met the guy, either.
The bedroom in 107 was heavily curtained, so dark inside that Raymer instinctively flipped the switch, which of course did nothing at all. There was just enough light from the front room for them to make out the cages stacked on the bed and along one wall. When Justin turned on his flashlight, there was a chorus of rattles and hisses, but it was the dark, relentless, ropy movement that caused Raymer to back into the front room, his stomach roiling with rancid Twelve Horse ale. When Justin emerged a few minutes later, carefully shutting the door behind him, he was carrying a blue plastic pail of the sort you’d take to the beach for a small child. This one was full of handguns. “Not just the snake business, either,” Justin said, handing them to Raymer, who examined several of them. The serial numbers, no surprise, had all been filed off. “You’ll find drugs as well, I can almost guarantee it.”
It had taken them and two additional officers, together with the apartment house’s manager, three nerve-racking hours to complete the search for the missing snake, after which Raymer had ordered the Arms locked down and the entire complex to be surrounded with crime-scene tape.
“Did I hear you right?” Justin asked him when they were back outside in the parking lot. Justin was still in his waders, leaning against his van and smoking a cigarette. “You live here?”
Raymer, deeply embarrassed, winced. “I had no idea.” What one of his neighbors was up to, he meant, though it was possible Justin had merely been commenting on the fact that the place was a sty and not the sort of place a police chief would call home.
“Well, you wouldn’t, necessarily. These guys don’t linger. They set up shop, do their business and get the fuck out of Dodge. Three, four weeks, max.”
“You’ve run into this before?”
“Heard about it. Mostly down south.”
“Why an apartment house instead of someplace out in the sticks?”
“You’d have to ask them, but cost is a factor, I imagine. Plus rural folks tend to be nosy. Observant. Welfare types mind their own damn business. They got too many problems of their own to worry about the neighbors. If it hadn’t been for the power outage, you probably never would’ve known this guy was even here.”
“Explain the fridge, then? And the air-conditioning?”
“Below sixty degrees, snakes basically hibernate. With the AC running, they’d wake up every couple of days, drink some water, go back to sleep. You wouldn’t even need to feed them.”
“Whereas in ninety-five-degree heat?”
“Wide awake. Hungry. Pissed off.”
None of it made any sense to Raymer. “Okay, but why?”
“There’s a growing market for exotic reptiles. Boas don’t make bad pets, actually. Gotta remember to feed ’em, though. One lady down in Florida drove to the market for milk. Gone, like, ten minutes. Came home to this very fat snake in the baby’s crib.”