“Why’d you get me canned in the first place?”
“I thought I explained that. You just caught onto Rollie’s cuff like a pit bull and wouldn’t let go. Hell, I figured if you were gonna keep calling and writing, sooner or later you’d come around for an impromptu interview instead of a scheduled one. So I just took you off the case. See? I was right. And I’m glad you’re not going to the paper tomorrow morning to write about there being no Rollie Dean Mack at Elite. That’d be bad for everyone. But I didn’t figure you’d keep after him. Christ, Chuck, don’t you ever just give up?”
Frye baited him. “All that to cover a crooked fight?”
“Oh, hell, the fights don’t mean a thing to me. That’s the one tiny legit thing I do at Elite, just to keep the door open. Chuck, I move a lot of money in and out of that place. Oil. Stocks and bonds. Real estate. You name it. Some of it’s even legal. Elite’s got divisions and groups and wings and holdings and subsidiaries you ain’t even heard about and never will. And I’m every one of them. I move and shake. Sometimes I gotta do things that are gonna catch the public eye. That’s when I let Rollie Dean and the rest of the other fellas handle it. I just do it in their names. Like I said, I don’t like the spotlights. I wish to hell you’d never tangled with Rollie, because I didn’t want to lose him, and I didn’t want to mess you up either, Chuck. Funny part is, my fighter plum got knocked out that night. There wasn’t no fix of any kind in. I swear it. I got better things to do than fool around with nickel-and-dime boxing matches, for cryin’ out loud.”
“Why’d you put Cristobel up to watching me?”
“What in God’s holy name are you talking about, Chuck?”
“You and Cris, on her porch last night.”
Parsons blushed. Frye couldn’t believe it.
“Gosh, you weren’t supposed to be in on that one.”
“I was. What were you doing there, Burke?”
Parsons shook his head, stared down at his boots. “I was only tryin’ to get it wet, Chuck. Same as you. I have to admit one thing, and I ain’t ashamed of it, mostly — I love poontang. I took one look at her at the fights that night and I just had to have her. I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m really not. And I’m still working on the bitch, too. Cristobel’s the hardest piece of ass in the world to get. Last night I took her some flowers and sweet-talked her a little. I tried to kiss her up, but she didn’t like that a bit. She had some rape trouble up to Long Beach, is all I can figure. Gun shy.” For a moment Parsons looked at him with the exasperated good humor of a kid caught with a Playboy. “Hell, Chuck, you don’t own that girl, but I’ll lay off Crissy if she means that much to you. I got plenty other fields to plow. So far as her watching you, that just never occurred to me. Maybe it should have. Truth is, I don’t trust anybody enough for that kind of work. Especially some bimbo I don’t even know.”
“Do what you want, Burke.”
“Say no more. I can see I stepped out of line a bit with her. Hey, get over here and check out my critters. You’ll really like these, and I caught most of them myself.”
Frye stood before a huge glass cage. It was almost twenty feet long, six high and deep, with a eucalyptus branch lying in the middle. Half the floor space was a pond. The other half was all reptile, coiled upon itself like a rubber telephone pole, head resting, tongue easing in and out for leisurely whiffs of the atmosphere. The eyes were pale green, big as quarters, with elliptical pupils like a cat’s. The scales along its jaw looked like tile.
“Eunectes murinus,” said Burke. “Anaconda. He’s pushing twenty-six feet long and tips the scales about two-eighty.”
“What do you feed him?”
“You don’t want to know. Could eat a small man, though, if his shoulders weren’t too broad. Or a woman, easy. Probably eat your average Vietnamese real quick like and still have room for dessert.”
Frye looked at Parsons, who was studying the snake with a detached admiration. The animal began to move now, sliding against the glass with no visible means of locomotion. Frye felt the muscles in his back go cold.
“So what’s your next move, Chuck, far as Elite Management goes?”
“I’m not really sure. Any ideas?”
Parsons laughed. “I like you, Chuck. You’re the kinda fella’d drive a car salesman bugshit ‘cause you’d never make an offer ‘til you got one from him first. Now, if I were you, what I do about Elite would depend on what I’d done already.”
“I haven’t told anyone,” he lied. “If that’s what you’re thinking. Not Benny. Not Pop. Nobody.”
Parsons nodded along. “Now we’re getting somewhere, Chuck. It’s good you’ve kept this to yourself. That’s good for starters. See, it’s important in a situation like this that I stay mobile. I hate getting pinned down. What I find in this life is a whole bunch of snake pits that truly aren’t worth sticking your hand into, ‘less you like getting bit. Every now and then you find some sorry fella who does, but that ain’t you, Chuck. If I were you, I’d take a no-harm, no-foul outlook. I’d let things alone. I’d forget any quirks you might have noticed about the way another man does his business.” Burke led him past the anaconda’s cage to a stack of three smaller terrariums. “Top cage is Gaboon viper, longest fangs in the world, up to an inch and a half each. Middle one is black mamba, fastest snake in the world and the meanest. Believe me. Bottom is a good ol’ western diamondback, and that sucker weighs almost twenty-five pounds. Caught him myself, right outside El Paso. I used some snakes in the war when I questioned prisoners. Cong hated them. Couple of times, things got out of hand. Poor Charlie, he hated to see me comin’ with a duffel bag and a putting iron. Putting iron makes a good snake-stick. Anyhow, you can get a feel for those snake dens of life I was talking about.”
Frye bent down for a look at the rattler. It was big around as a softball, with a head like a slice of pie, and dark diamonds on a desert-bleached background.
Burke went to the next cage, smiled, and pointed. “That there is commonly held to be the baddest serpent of the land. King cobra, Chuck, ophiophagus hannah. They get to eighteen, twenty feet, but Charlotte here is only but twelve. Forty-thousand folks a year die of snakebite, and Charlotte’s kind do their share of it. They’re not aggressive, really — kind of lazy in fact. They’re like me. You get ’em riled up, though, and look out! Here, I’ll introduce you proper.”
Burke pulled a pin from the cage top and swung it open. He tapped on the glass with the backs of his fingers and said something to the snake. Then he reached in and took her by the middle, hefting a coil up and dipping in his other hand to get more. The more he pulled and lifted, the longer the snake seemed to get. Then he stepped back, twelve feet of cobra sliding around his body as if it were a tree, its head free, tongue darting. “Charlotte,” he said, “meet Chuck Frye.” Burke grinned from behind a looping, pale green curl.
“Defanged?”
“Nope. She’s loaded, just like my guns. But she’s friendly. Here, like to hold her?”
“No thanks.”
“Don’t be shy, Chuck. Don’t want to hurt her feelings now, do ya?”
Burke gathered the animal, its head still waving free through the air, and arranged her over Frye’s shoulders. Frye felt his legs go heavy and his ears start to ring. The snake was cool, and he could feel the muscles inside it, precise, mechanical, effortlessly bunching and sliding over his own. He supported the last three feet of her with his left arm. Charlotte cranked her blunt, heavy head to him and looked him straight in the face.
“Now, Chuck, if Charlotte here were to zap you right in the snout, where she’s aiming, you’d scream, untangle her, run up the stairs, and croak before you hit the patio.”