Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

“Stay with the car. I need to make a call,” he said to Uric and his idiot sidekick.

Not far down A1A, near the Par-3 golf course, a Venezuelan currency trader had torn down an old mansion and was currently pouring the foundation for a new 28,000-square-foot villa that he would occupy three weeks a year, at most. Teabull was on good terms with the supervisor of the concrete project, who had done some work at Lipid House.

When the man answered his phone, Teabull said, “Hey, Jackson, when do your guys break for lunch?”

“Twelve-fifteen is our usual.”

“Take ’em all to the crab shack. It’s on me.”

“You’re so fulla shit.”

“No, I’m serious,” Teabull told him. “I’m buying for the whole crew today.”

“What’s the catch?” the concrete man asked.

“You cut me a sweet break on the formwork for our driveway last year. Billed us the residential rate instead of commercial.”

“Yeah, I remember. No biggie.”

“So this is me saying thanks. Who else is working on that site today?”

The concrete man said, “Nobody. Just us.”

“Then you should take a whole hour,” Teabull suggested. “Try the tuna poke. It’ll blow your mind.”

He returned to the seeping Malibu, wrote down the address for Uric and told him exactly what to do. He explained that the deepest pours would be the load-bearing footers for the outside walls. “If you can’t find anything wet enough, leave the premises immediately.”

“My life motto,” said Uric.

“You’ve got shovels?”

The Prince said they were in the back seat. Uric asked Teabull if he’d brought their money.

“What a comedian. Ha, ha, ha,” the property manager said. “When the job’s done is when you get paid—and it’s a long damn way from being done.”

He scowled at the puddle swelling beneath the car. The drip of foul fluids had become audible.

“You need to get the hell outta here,” Teabull said.

“Where? We got, like, three hours to kill,” the Prince complained, tapping the face of his wristwatch.

“I don’t care where you go. Pick a beach. Find a dog. Throw him a fucking Frisbee, whatever. Just get this damn car off the property.”

Uric and the Prince drove to the luncheonette at Green’s Pharmacy, ordered breakfast, and sat at the counter for the rest of the morning. Like most burglars, they looked night-worn and skittish. Still, nobody asked them to move. Shortly after noon, they departed for the villa-under-construction near the Par-3. There they scouted for signs of workers or other possible witnesses, but saw no one.

Uric parked the Malibu between a pair of rotund mixing trucks. The drivers were gone, but they’d left the drums turning to keep the compound loose. Uric and the Prince prowled around the property, checking inside the ground frames to find the freshest pour. One long section of concrete, the base for an east-facing wall, was still wet. When the Prince tossed a rock, it landed with a plop. Just for kicks, he lobbed another one.

Uric ran to the car and backed it flawlessly as his partner directed him to the closest dumping position. The men then snatched the shovels from the rear seat and began digging in the wet cement and aggregate, creating a hole that seemed plenty deep for corpse concealment. Once the site was ready, the interment would have to be completed swiftly, before the concrete began to harden.

Neither Uric nor the Prince was ready for the sight that assailed them when they opened the trunk of the Malibu. The thawing python hadn’t exploded so much as unzipped, exposing the reason for the lump in its belly—crumpled, corkscrewed remains of a slight, silver-haired woman cloaked in a pale gown.

“Oh f-f-fuck,” gasped Uric, a sentiment repeated more emotively by his sidekick, who commenced to wail and puke.

The stench was otherworldly. Uric covered his mouth and nose, and struggled to remain steady. Now he understood why Tripp Teabull had hired him to snatch the dead snake: There was a dead rich lady inside of it.

Uric knew she was rich because, in addition to expensive-looking clothes, she wore diamond earrings the size of Cheerios and a string of small, creamy-pink pearls. Removing them was a gooey chore that ended with Uric snapping the necklace and sliding the pearls into his hand. Bitterly he wondered how—while killing a whole morning at Green’s drugstore—he’d forgotten to purchase hospital gloves in anticipation of reptile gore.

As he pocketed the moist jewels, Uric kept his back to the Prince, who was down on both knees, forehead in the dirt. When Uric turned around, he barked, “Dude, get in the fucking game!”

Together they hoisted the bony heap from the Malibu’s trunk and placed it into the fresh hole in the concrete.

“Now there’s no room for the snake!” the Prince bleated, violently wiping his hands on his pants.

Uric said, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t you see?”

But the Prince got so freaked that Uric made him sit in the car. Working alone with his shovel, Uric hastily covered the misshapen body and smoothed the surface on the footer. The concrete crew, returning from a long lunch of crab cakes, didn’t look twice at the white car speeding away from the construction site, nor did they glance at the faces of the driver and his companion.

“So, let’s hear your next genius move,” the Prince said.

Uric wasn’t in the mood for sarcasm. “What’s your problem, dickface?”

“I never touched a dead body before is my problem.”

“Chill your pussy ass out.” Uric stomped the accelerator. “The worst part’s over. We are home-fucking-free.”

He was wrong.

Late that night, after too many Captain Morgans, he and the Prince would resume a protracted argument about which of them had shut the Malibu’s trunk—or, more precisely, which of them had shanked the task of shutting the trunk.

Following a tense dinner at KFC they’d returned to their squatter’s condo and were planted in front of the television when the eleven o’clock news came on. The top story was about the First Lady’s motorcade being delayed en route to Palm Beach that afternoon, due to the presence in the roadway of a headless Burmese python. Grisly video focused on the burst predator, stretched across two lanes.

The scene was surrounded by wry-looking cops and tight-lipped Secret Service dudes wearing sunglasses and three-for-one suits from JoS. A. Bank. Visible in the background were the red-striped gates of the railroad crossing that the Malibu had vaulted doing fifty-plus miles per hour, a tooth-cracking jolt that had stunned the car’s unbelted occupants and sprung the unsecured lid of the trunk, resulting in an ill-timed launch of the decomposing snake carcass.

At the end of his story, the TV reporter quoted a White House spokesperson saying that the First Lady was never in danger, and that the motorcade had proceeded to Casa Bellicosa with no further delays. Law-enforcement authorities were said to be investigating how the python ended up on the First Lady’s route.

“I bet they already found the car,” the Prince said dejectedly.

“Oh, right. At the bottom of that canal? No way, José.”

“You were the one in charge of lockin’ the trunk!”

“Bullshit. I was in charge of buryin’ the body,” Uric said. “You’re the one supposed to close the trunk. A retard baboon couldn’t screw up a job that simple.”

The dead woman’s pink pearls and diamond earrings remained in a front pocket of Uric’s pants. He considered the gems a well-earned bonus, and couldn’t think of one good reason to mention them to his partner.

“Can I ask why the hell you call yourself Prince Paladin?”

The Prince said, “That was my stage name. I was in a reggaeton band.”