Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

The flashlight beam darted around the circular walls. Here a black mamba (which was actually kind of gray), there a spitting viper, a hooded cobra, an eight-foot python, a Florida cottonmouth, a Texas diamondback rattler. He hadn’t come for any of these, though. The mambas were too fast and agile, the rattlers too noisy, the cobras, cottonmouths, and vipers too venomous, and the constrictors not venomous at all.

No, what Simon had come for was the humble eastern coral snake, Micrurus fulvius fulvius, a red-, yellow-, and black-banded member of the Elapidae family, which, with its small mouth, short fangs, and delayed-action, borderline-lethal neurotoxic venom, was perfect for his purposes. Even better, for educational reasons, the three coral snakes were housed with members of various mimic species-nonvenomous, look-alike milk snakes, scarlet snakes, and scarlet king snakes. Surely the reptilarium staff wouldn’t miss just one coral and one scarlet king out of that whole tangle.

Simon grabbed a leather gauntlet and a snake hook, which was basically a golf club with a hook on the business end instead of a club head, and dragged a plastic garbage can over to the cage. Carefully he opened the trapdoor in the back, and holding the flashlight in his mouth, the garbage can lid in his bare hand, and the snake hook in the gloved hand, he gingerly extended the hook into the pen and positioned it under the neck of one of the corals, which accommodatingly wrapped itself around the shaft.

This was the most dangerous part of the transfer-for a few seconds, as he lifted the snake-on-a-stick out of the cage, there were only two feet of haft between his gloved hand and the deadly reptile curled around the base of the hook, with nothing at all to prevent it from slithering up the shaft and past the gauntlet, and sinking its stubby fangs into his upper arm. But the coral knew the drill-lazily it unwound itself and dropped into the garbage can. Simon quickly clapped the lid on- fait accompli.

Half accompli, anyway. The nearest scarlet king snake to the hatch proved equally cooperative; the only danger in this second transfer would have come if the coral had made a break for it when Simon raised the lid to drop the king in. But luckily the coral, having recently been fed, was already fast asleep again, curled peacefully in the bottom of the can, dreaming, no doubt, of fat rats and juicy, slow-moving mice.

“We should have called first,” Dorie had said repeatedly, from behind the wheel of Pender’s rented Toyota-the winding, cliff-hugging, two-lane stretch of Highway 1 between Carmel and Big Sur was definitely not a drive for a one-armed man.

“You should have called first,” announced the young neohippie who greeted them at the door of the Lethe Institute Retreat Center of Hot Springs. Behind her, a great empty cathedral of a room-vaulted ceiling, redwood beams, and through a picture-window western wall of rose-tinted glass, nothing but ocean and sky. The smell of incense hung in the air; New Age space Muzak filled the room, where half a dozen figures in white meditation pajamas were either performing yoga exercises or training for jobs as circus contortionists.

“So I’ve been told.” But Pender, who was wearing one of his new hula shirts and his glorious new wide-brimmed white Panama, had learned over the years that it was more difficult for somebody to turn him away from their door than it was for them to refuse him an interview over the phone. And having parked the Toyota at the top of what seemed like a sheer cliff and descended a flagstone path so steep it would have given a Grand Canyon donkey second thoughts, he was not going to be dismissed by some flunky quite so easily. “Why is that, exactly?”

“Because Dr. Luka won’t see anybody without an appointment,” said the young woman.

“I see. And what’s your name?”

“I’m Lakshmi.”

“Lakshmi, I need you to do something for me.” Linda Abruzzi wasn’t the only one who knew psycholinguistics. “I need you to tell Dr. Luka that Special Agent E. L. Pender of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to speak with him briefly about a former patient of his, by the name of Simon Childs. We’ll wait here,” he added-it was all about seizing the initiative.

“Hell of a view,” Pender whispered to Dorie, as Lakshmi left the room via a side door.

“Dramatic, anyway,” she replied. “But you could paint it with a roller.”

Lakshmi reappeared, beckoned from the side door, and led Pender and Dorie down another fearfully steep path to the famous Lethe baths, a series of recessed natural hot tubs carved into the side of the cliff over eons by a mineral spring, and canopied by a great granitic overhang that gave the baths the feel and echo of a shallow cavern or grotto. Alone in the hottest and deepest tub, the one nearest the mouth of the spring, sat the hairiest old man Dorie had ever seen naked, or wanted to-white hair to his shoulders, bushy Santa beard, and the matted white pelt covering his chest and arms would have made a yeti reach for the Nair.

“Come on in, the water’s fine.” His accent was a strange hybrid of hip and cultured, of Berkeley and Budapest.

Pender shrugged, pointed to his cast, and sat down on a backless marble bench, facing the tub, with his back to the ocean. He could hear the surf crashing below; silvery reflections from the light playing off the steaming surface of the baths danced on the shiny granite walls of the cliff like hundreds of manic Tinkerbells.

“And you, dear?”

Dorie shuddered as she sat down beside Pender. “I may never take another bath again.”

“Ablutophobia?”

“Simon Childs-ophobia.”

“Oh?”

Dorie looked over at Pender, who nodded. He suspected her story would make a more eloquent argument for Luka’s cooperation than anything he could say. As she spoke, the damp walls of the shallow cavern gradually took on a pinkish glow from the western sky. When she’d finished, Luka asked Pender to give them a moment alone. Pender walked a few dozen paces up the flagstone path and watched the sun hovering twice its width above the curved horizon-he’d never seen anything as vast as that horizon.

Dorie appeared around a bend in the path. “He wants to talk to you now.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He just wanted to make sure I had a good therapist. Said he could give me a couple of names if I needed.”

She told Pender she’d wait for him up at the house. Pender retraced his steps. The light back at the baths was now a refulgent primrose pink-it was like being inside a Tiffany lamp.

“Tell me, Agent Pender,” said Dr. Luka, “is it FBI policy now to schlep victims around on interviews?”

“No, I-”

“Your relationship with Miss Bell is more of a personal nature then, I take it.”

“Yes, we-”

“In that case, let me give you a little professional advice, free of charge: Either Miss Bell has one of the best-integrated psyches in the western world-which her history of severe phobias would tend to argue against-or she’s heading for a psychological blowup of Hindenburgian proportions.”

“But isn’t it possible that it could be kind of, what’s the word, empowering for her-helping put Childs behind bars?”

“I suppose so-but if she were my patient, and I were thirty years younger, I’d kick your ass down that cliff there. Now, what is it you think I can do for you, Agent Pender?”

“Tell me everything you can about Simon Childs-the more we know, the more likely we’ll be able to catch him before anybody else has to go through what Dorie went through. And worse.”

“Oh, my, I have been out of touch, haven’t I? And when was it, precisely, that the privilege of doctor-patient confidentiality was revoked?”