Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

When the cab pulled away I pushed a buzzer next to the metal door frame and Sims' voice crackled through an intercom. I answered and he buzzed me through.

Inside was a two-room lab: white tile floors, fluorescent lighting, sterile-looking walls. In one room two desks were knocked together and stacked with papers and folders and computers that were a few generations behind the ones Billy used in his office. The other room was lined with glass-fronted cabinets stacked with books and vials, plastic models and labeled containers. In the middle was a long, stainless steel table. Sims was standing there, next to a large blue and white ice chest.

I tried to look imposing, but my threatening manner on the phone was impossible to keep up in person. So I kept my mouth shut and let my silence build up on him.

"I, uh, could use your help here," he said, tapping the top of the cooler.

His request caught me off guard. He was either too nervous to talk or was effectively spinning our roles. Me help him?

He was wearing a long-sleeved denim shirt rolled up at the cuffs, jeans, and thick-soled hiking boots. My guess was about a size nine.

"Sure," I said, stepping up to the table.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Freeman. I didn't know how long it would take you to get here and my inopportune visit to the sheriff's office this morning has thrown me off schedule. I've already started this procedure and I'm afraid it really can't wait," Sims said, moving to one of the counters and pulling open a drawer. From inside he brought out a tray of instruments and a box of latex gloves and put them on the table next to the cooler.

"We're tracking as many of our resident rattlesnakes as we can and this one is due to be released back where we found him," he said, tapping the top of the cooler. "So I've got to get this chip in him while he's still cold and slow."

Sims snapped on the gloves and then unwrapped a small package that contained a tiny microchip and a large-bore hypodermic needle. He explained how his study of the snake's movements was done by inserting the chip into its layer of scales. I nodded at the logic. It didn't take a detective to know what my role in all this was going to be. Sims loaded the chip into the needle and laid the syringe on the corner of the table.

When he was ready, he carefully opened the cooler a few inches and peered inside and then reached one hand into the space. His movements seemed too slow for what I knew was inside, but his arm came out with the spade-shaped head of an adult rattlesnake gripped in his hand. When three feet of the animal was out of the chest, he grabbed the middle with his other hand and gestured at me to hold on to the last three feet.

"Tight. But not too tight," he said. "Just keep him from wriggling while we stretch him out on the table."

I don't know why I followed his instructions. But now I had half of a six-foot poisonous snake in my hands. The skin of the animal was smooth and the body felt as hard as a giant hose under full pressure. As I worked to pin it against the stainless table it flexed, and when I tried to keep it from curving, my hand slid up against the grain of its scales and the edges scraped roughly across my palm. When I repositioned my hand, I laid it higher and then slid it smoothly down the cool body.

"He's been on ice for about fifteen minutes so he's feeling pretty sluggish," Sims said. "Just hold him here while I get this chip in."

I couldn't see the snake's head. Sims kept his left hand locked just behind the flanged jaws which, I assumed, kept the animal from twisting around and biting him.

"I honestly did not intend to raise more scrutiny from the police by revealing our meeting, Mr. Freeman," Sims suddenly said. He obviously wasn't as focused on the snake as I was.

"I guess it just sort of spilled out as they were questioning me. They are very persuasive. In an unsettling way."

"They do have that effect on people," I said, trying to concentrate on both the environmentalist's words and the shift in the lump of muscle under my hands. "But why do you think they called you in to begin with?"

"That's a bit of a mystery in itself," he answered. "They'd already talked to Professor Murtz, who is the head of the lab. They wanted to know about the milking of snake venom, which we do some of right here. The process is really quite easy. You see, the fangs are really like big needles themselves," he said, twisting up the head of the snake in his hand and somehow squeezing the jaws to make them open to expose the half- inch gleam of needle-sharp bone.

"You get them over a funnel with some rubber-like membrane stretched over it and let them sink their fangs in. They think it's something's skin and pump away.

"Most of the time they're more than anxious to bite. A snake is a survivalist, the venom is its protection and its means to a meal, so they're instinctive with it. You anger them, they're going to hit you. So the hard part is handling them over and over because, eventually, you're not going to be quick enough."

I watched Sims pick up the hypodermic and then hold the syringe in his own mouth while he probed the snake's skin, running his hand over the cream-colored diamonds, looking for a spot to stick it. He motioned for me to bend up the tail and decided on a place near the base. As he held the animal's head away, he slid the needle under a scale and pumped the chip in. When he finished, he swabbed the spot and then motioned to the cooler and we lifted the snake back into the ice chest and closed the lid.

"Professor Murtz already gave the police all of that information the first time, and how dozens of people from scientists to snake hobbyists to any good Southern snake hunter could do it," Sims continued as he stripped off the gloves. "We could never figure why they were so interested and I thought that was why they called me in this time. But somehow they kept turning me toward the meeting at Loop Road and when your name came up I got the impression that I wasn't telling them anything that they didn't already know."

"Yeah. My name just happens to come up a lot in places where I'd just as soon it didn't," I said, rubbing my palms together, still feeling the slick smoothness of the snake and the cool tingle of my own nerves.

Sims wrapped up the hypodermic and put the package back in the drawer and then washed his hands in a stainless steel sink built into the counter. I wondered if I should do the same.

"They knew you were there," he said, turning as he dried his hands with a paper towel and reading the flash of confusion that must have shown in my eyes. "At the hotel bar. I don't know how, but I'm positive they already knew it. They just wanted to know why."

It took me a second to gather myself. Of course they knew. Why the hell wouldn't Hammonds know? He'd been trailing me ever since I pulled up to the ranger's dock with news of a killing.

"I don't doubt it," I said to Sims. "I'd still like to know myself why it was that I was there."

The environmentalist seemed to consider the question for a few seconds as he oddly and carefully folded the damp brown paper towel in his fingers. Then he tossed the square into a wastebasket, walked over to grip both handles of the ice chest and lifted it off the table. He nodded his head to the door.

"Let's go drop this off," he said and I followed, holding open the door and wondering why I was letting him lead again.

We loaded the cooler into the back of the van and as Sims drove out to an empty asphalt road leading east he explained, as best he could according to him, what he knew of my invitation to Loop Road.

"You've got to understand, Mr. Freeman, there are generations of folks out there in the Glades that have lived lives far different than what modern-day people think of as Floridians."

"Yeah, I got that lesson from Gunther," I said, watching the road stretch out in a straight line into nothing but low-hanging green brush. Sims had no air conditioning in the old van and even the wind spilling through the open windows was hot. I was thinking about the warming state of the rattlesnake sliding around in the cooler behind us.