Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

“How’d the damn thing die?”

“I decapitated it with a machete.”

The first cop frowned again. “That’s some sick shit.”

“It’s a state-approved method of euthanizing, sir. You can check it out online.”

“Wait—so whoever broke in and stole your dead snake, they jacked the head, too?”

“They did not.” Angie leaned over and from the deepest corner of the freezer lifted a bulging clear baggie.

“Get that goddamn thing away from me!” the second cop yelled, as his partner thrust the crime report into Angie’s free hand.

Then they were gone.

—

The lead burglar’s name was Uric. His helper was a dull-eyed fuckwit who worked cheap, basically for cigarettes and Yuengling. The helper wished to be called Prince Paladin. He sat listening to his jams in the grimy paneled van while Uric entered Angie Armstrong’s apartment through the bathroom window.

“It’s not there,” Uric reported crossly when he returned.

The Prince yanked out his earbuds. “So, whassat mean? We don’t get paid?”

“You know anything about computers? Never mind. Dumb question.”

“What’s so ’portant about a croaked snake?”

“I got no idea,” Uric said. “What I do know is that these rich-ass fucks get into some super weird shit. I heard some stories, Holy Christ-ola.”

The Prince snorted and said the only good snake was a dead one.

Uric drove to a mall, parked in front of the Target and leafed through Angie’s checkbook registry. On the 15th of every month she wrote a $118 check that was recorded as “storage rental.” Unfortunately, she didn’t include the name of the company in those entries.

The Prince said, “Shit. We got nuthin’.”

“Bro, I need you to keep the faith.”

“How come? Oh. I get it. ’Til we find the snake.”

“Also, could you shut the fuck up?”

Uric opened Angie’s laptop. He was locked out of the email server, and he couldn’t crack the password. It was aggravating. He suspected that the storage company invoiced electronically, which would have provided both the name and address. After several minutes he gave up, got out of the van and placed the laptop beneath a rear tire of a Suburban LTZ parked beside him.

The Prince said, “How come you did that?”

“To crush the damn thing. What else?”

“But that’s, like, what they call ‘destroying stolen property.’ ”

“There’s no such crime, Prince. The stealing is the part that’s against the law.”

“Maybe the chick just dumped the snake in a ditch.”

Uric said, “No way.”

Angie Armstrong had intended to deliver the giant python to a state laboratory. Tripp Teabull had shared this intel with Uric during their phone conversation, before they settled on Uric’s fee. For some reason, Teabull didn’t want the monster corpse donated to science.

The Prince hopped out and retrieved the laptop. He asked Uric to read through Angie’s check register again and see if there were any men’s names. Uric found an entry for a $250 check that said: Joel/birthday. The Prince tried “Joel” as a password, adding combinations of double numerals that might be associated with a likely year of birth. No luck.

“Try ‘69,’ ” Uric said.

“Seriously? Not even bikers use ‘69’ in their passwords anymore.”

“I do, asshole.”

The Prince tapped in the numbers. “Nope, not it. Hey, what does this chick call her business?”

“Discreet Captures.”

“D-I-S-K-R-”

“No, Your Highness.” Uric spelled it for him. “And don’t put a space in.”

“Yo, score!”

Uric grinned—maybe he’d underestimated this bozo. “Give it here,” he said, reaching for the laptop.

Scrolling through Angela Armstrong’s inbox, he spotted a recent email from Safe N’ Sound Storage. The company’s South Dixie Highway location was displayed at the top of the bill, along with the number of Angie’s warehouse unit: K-44.

The following afternoon, Uric ambled out of the Safe N’ Sound office with a short-term rental contract for unit K-39, and a punch code for the security gate. After dinner he and the Prince stole a white Chevrolet Malibu from an alley behind a discount liposuction clinic. They spent the next stretch of time watching Game of Th rones repeats in some careless fool’s unlocked condo.

At two-thirty in the morning they returned to the warehouse yard. Uric put a sun mask on his face and used a long-armed bolt cutter to sever the wires on the video cameras mounted at both ends of the K corridor. The inexpensive padlock on Angie’s unit succumbed with a clap like a .22.

There was little of value inside except a chest freezer, also locked. The Prince used a crowbar to pop the lid, cursing at the sight of the unbagged, headless python coiled like a psychedelic fire hose. Uric teetered backward.

Although both men were strong and tall—the Prince in his slides stood six-three—they were anxious about transporting the frozen reptile. Their main concern wasn’t the weight—somewhere north of a hundred-and-fifty pounds was Uric’s guess, judging by the length and the whopping lump in its belly—but rather it was their mutual aversion to snakes of any size.

Uric had dropped one of his latex burglary gloves after leaving Angie’s apartment. He’d meant to swing by CVS and steal new pairs for him and the Prince, but he’d forgotten, so they used rags to mummy-wrap their hands. The python’s rigid circularity allowed the thieves to thread it like a tractor tire on a length of loose fence pipe. With cautious half-steps they advanced their frosty load down the K corridor and out the doorway to the parking lot, where they found themselves challenged by the Malibu’s limited trunk space. The Prince was dripping like a plow mule by the time they got the morbid popsicle stowed.

Once they were back on the road, the Prince said to Uric, “Yo, drop me off at that titty bar on Hypoluxo.”

“Drop you off ?”

“Yeah. Ain’t we done for the night?”

“No, bro, we ain’t done,” said Uric. “But I agree we deserve some titty time.”

—

Fay Alex Riptoad was having a golf lesson at the Breakers. From a distance Police Chief Jerry Crosby watched drearily. His only thought: What the fuck is she wearing?

Fay Alex’s shorts, shoes and golf glove were the same shade of lime as the Gatorade with which the chief had rinsed the tobacco from his mouth, back when he played Double-A baseball. Almost all his teammates dipped. Their star closer, a gregarious lefthander named Nuckley, got oral cancer at age thirty-four. By then he was working for Geico at the regional level; fit, married, father of three. They cut a tumor the size of a Bing cherry from under his tongue, and eighteen months later he was dead. Jerry Crosby missed the funeral because he was still on road patrol at the time, and his corporal wouldn’t give him the day off. It didn’t escape Crosby’s notice that the corporal was also hooked on dip—Skoal, which had been Nuckley’s favorite brand. The irony was less infuriating than the karmic unfairness that had claimed the cheery southpaw while allowing the ass-wipe corporal to sail on, rolling that perpetual plug in his cheek, spitting the brown juice-crud into a coffee mug on his desk.

Crosby’s own dream of a major-league career had ended with blown-out knees. He married a high-school girlfriend and for a long time worked as a foreman at her family’s citrus packing plant in Sebastian. The groves eventually were sold to a Brazilian fashion model seeking unlimited tons of grapefruit pulp for a dye-free exfoliating scrub that she was trying to launch. Crosby’s favorite uncle, a cop, talked him into joining the Rockledge city force. He discovered he enjoyed small-town law enforcement. When his wife was offered a good paralegal job down in Wellington, Crosby sent his application to the police department in gilded, fussy Palm Beach. He’d never set foot on the famous island but he knew that violent crime there was rare, which was his wife’s only stipulation. The rest of South Florida, she said, was a damn shooting gallery.