Fifty feet.
More activity in the cages now. Snakes expecting dinner and now the lights had gone off? With no chow? Small sounds. Leaves moving. Scales against sand. Prolonged dragging sounds. One long exhalation.
Thirty feet to the door, which we could barely see now that we were closer. I focused on the door, trying hard to ignore the angry reptiles on either side, as I recited the mantra: Steel screens. Two locks. No way.
Fifteen feet. No way-and then something black rose up in the visual frame of the utility room door.
Tony collided with me when I stopped short, and we both switched on our lights. Directly in front of us was a dark green snake about ten, maybe twelve miles long. Okay, feet. The front five feet of him were vertical, weaving slowly back and forth as if he were range-finding. I thought it might be a cobra, but there was no hood. I moved my flashlight out away from my side, and Tony did likewise, going in the opposite direction. The snake’s head stopped when the lights moved, and the base of the vertical part began to bow out toward us. It gave a low hiss and opened its mouth, which was jet black. Then I saw the end of that black pipe, which was no longer capped.
You can get in, but you won’t get out. And here’s why.
The snake continued its hypnotically slow approach, its head just barely weaving now, its hiss more like a prolonged exhalation. Its top half didn’t seem to move at all, but that bottom half was definitely advancing. The snake wasn’t afraid, just getting ready to take care of business. It opened its mouth again in a menacing gape.
I married the flashlight with the barrel of my SIG in a two-handed grip.
“On three,” I said.
“Yup,” Tony said, and we pointed our guns. I aimed for the juncture between the head and the body, and gave Tony a second to do likewise. The snake kept coming, rising higher on its back half now.
“Three,” I said, and we both fired. A pane of glass shattered somewhere along the line of fire, but the snake’s head disappeared in a red bloom. Its body collapsed on the path into a writhing knot of reflexive coils.
We both shone our lights all around us just to make sure he hadn’t brought a brother into the weeds. Fucking Trask. He’d kept a sentinel in that pipe with some kind of automatic opening device. The whole greenhouse had only the one door in, one door out, and a black mamba for a doorkeeper.
We stepped around the still-moving mess on the path and reached the utility room. We did another sweep of the floor and the tables with the flashlights, just to make sure. The stink of gunpowder was strong in here, and the rat cages had all gone still. I looked at the breaker box. The breakers were still on, but that circular device wasn’t making noises any more. Then I realized what it was: a light timer.
You can get in, but you won’t get out. I wondered how many teenagers had not come home in these parts after accepting a beer-driven dare.
The shepherds were waiting anxiously outside the door after hearing the gunfire. I was glad I hadn’t taken them inside. The air outside was much colder, headed for the low forties. It felt really good to be outside. I told Tony what my solution to the snake house was. He agreed. We propped the back door open, and Tony went around front to break a bunch of glass panes to improve air circulation in the hothouse. Then we went looking for the main breaker.
It took us ten minutes to trace the underground riser from the last telephone pole, but finally we found it, a big metal box with a lead-seal wire in the middle of the base section. A glass meter looked back at us from above the box. I ripped off the seal and opened the box. A spider jumped out into the darkness when I lifted the lid. I reached in and threw the D-handle. The dials on the meter stopped moving. The humming noise inside the utility room ran down to silence.
“There,” I said. “See how they like North Carolina in November with no heat.”
“If Trask comes back, all he’d have to do is turn that back on,” Tony pointed out. “Let’s go get that master key and cut the propane service line.”
I called in the dogs, and together we made a sweep of the grounds around the greenhouse just to make sure no one was lurking. A fragment of moon was rising, throwing a thin wedge of white light across the river. If there were any boats out there, they weren’t showing lights.
The shepherds seemed to be glad to move around. So was I. Tony retrieved the bolt cutters and went back to disable the propane tank. The fuel was a liquid in the tank, but would evaporate into the night air once he opened that line. He was back in five minutes, giving me a thumbs-up sign and displaying a two-inch-long piece of copper tubing. We walked back out to our vehicles, alert but increasingly grateful to get away from that place.
“Let’s go find a bar and make some calls,” I said, loading up the dogs. “In that order.”
“Amen to that,” Tony said.
We went back to Southport and stopped at Harry’s because he and I had already reached an understanding about the shepherds. Having two of them with us at our corner table only seemed to reinforce said understanding. The first Scotch made me feel better; the second made it down to my throbbing arm. The pills had nothing to do with it. I reached Alicia by phone at the hospital; she reported that Pardee’s vital signs were slowly but surely rising from whatever depths he’d been exploring for the past eight hours. The docs were now contemplating stabilizing him into a medically induced coma to allow his lungs more time to recover.
I asked if they were treating her all right, although that bordered on being a frivolous question. Alicia Barter-Bell was a litigator who specialized in suing hospitals and doctors when they mistreated black people in Triboro. I’m no admirer of the tort bar, but after hearing some of her stories, I had to admit that the occasional shark attack was probably good for the hospitals’ QA program. Apparently, they were being treated very well indeed. She wanted to know if we’d caught up with Trask. I told her we were working on it, glad she couldn’t see the Scotch. She asked that, if we did catch him, we save a part of him for her. I was afraid to ask which part she wanted saved.
I rubbed my tired eyes, which made my arm hurt again. I probably should not have been mixing single malt with antibiotics and the residue of a really spiffy tetanus shot, but I didn’t care. Tony kept quiet, waiting for me to decide what we were going to do next, if anything. The bar wasn’t very full, and the few regulars present were all watching the TV along with the bartender.
My cell phone went off. It was Ari.
“Where are you?” he asked, almost too quickly. I told him.
“Aw, shit,” he said. “Someone’s here.”
“Where’s here?”
“I’m at home. The Bureau people are still at the plant. Everybody’s waiting for Trask. But I think someone’s-”
Sudden silence.
“Ari?”
Then the connection was broken. I hit the received call log, dialed back. Four rings, then voice mail.
Not good. I told Tony, who suggested we call Sergeant McMichaels, ask him to go see. Great idea.
McMichaels had gone home, but they promised to call him. He called me back three minutes later, and I told him what had happened. He said he’d send a car over there, but wanted to know what was going on. I suggested we meet face-to-face. He gave us directions to Ari’s house on the river. We threw money on the table and went over there in our two vehicles.
By the time we arrived, there were two cruisers there, both at the front gates, which they hadn’t managed to open. Sergeant McMichaels was standing outside one of them and came over when we showed up. It was cold enough that his breath was showing in the early night air. Snakes hopefully were expiring upriver by the dozens.
“I’ve got people inside,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to be asking me how.”