Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

Afterward, Teabull met up with the torch artist in the parking lot of a Walgreens.

“Well?” Teabull asked.

“Easy peasy.”

“Did she freak out?”

The arsonist chuckled and showed his rubber mask to the caretaker.

Teabull grimaced. “Mitch McConnell?”

“Scary shit, right? The store was all out of Nixons. You got my money, chico ?”

Teabull had not ordered Angela Armstrong killed because—unlike the death of Uric and his dipshit partner—hers would have drawn plenty of police and media attention. He hoped she was sharp enough to connect the burning of her truck to the Fitzsimmons matter, and would be deterred from future meddling.

If not, she still had no way of proving what had really happened to Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons. Without the testimony of the python thieves, Teabull thought, nobody would ever believe Angela Armstrong.

He was wrong about that.

At dawn on the morning after the firebug-for-hire bombed Angie’s pickup, Palm Beach Police Chief Jerry Crosby sat watching and re-watching street-cam video of a white 2014 Malibu SS jouncing at a stupid speed over a railroad crossing. The impact popped a plastic logo off the car and flung open the trunk. Out flew a flexible mass that resembled an intricately embroidered hawser; it uncoiled in midair before landing in the middle of the street on the other side of the tracks.

The Malibu kept going. Moments later, a line of flashing lights approached from the opposite direction—a ten-vehicle motorcade, mostly black SUVs, which rolled to an organized stop. Motorcycle cops followed by armed men in plain suits swarmed both lanes to surround the road obstruction, which was unidentifiable in the video. Crosby knew what he was looking at: an enormous headless snake. He wondered which of the SUVs was carrying the First Lady of the United States.

After hiding the thumb-drive of the video, the chief drove to the SunTrust bank. His stakeout team was already in place—six officers in three unmarked sedans, and a pointlessly masked sniper on the roof. Inside the lobby, the branch manager and tellers waited anxiously, coached on how and when to duck.

Ten o’clock came and went. No sign of Uric Burns. At eleven sharp Crosby’s cell phone rang. It was Angie Armstrong.

“You got him?” she asked.

“Not yet. He’s late.”

“Shit. Shit. ”

The chief said, “Maybe he chickened out.”

“Impossible. Nothing would scare that moron away from a hundred grand. If you told him it was powdered with anthrax, he’d still show up.”

“Then where the hell is he, Angie?”

“Something major must’ve happened. Something not good.”

“We’ll give him till noon,” Crosby said.

“Don’t bother. If he’s not there by now, he’s not coming.”

She was right. Uric Burns wasn’t on his way to the bank. He was hanging dead from a weed-choked bridge in a bankrupt development called Blue Pelican Shoals.

The bridge, which connected two of the bare subdivided tracts, crossed a tea-colored drainage canal that for marketing purposes had been renamed Soldier’s Creek. Stocked with feisty peacock bass, the waterway was popular with local fishermen, one of whom had made an errant cast and snagged the pants zipper of Uric Burns, whose body had theretofore gone unnoticed due to the short length of the homemade noose. The dead man wasn’t swinging above the water but rather appeared cinched to the bridge rail, his slack form resting high against one of the support columns. Attached to his crotch by two #1 treble hooks was a bullet-shaped bass lure called a Zara Spook, realistically painted to mimic a native leopard frog. The lure was connected by thin braided line to a rod and reel belonging to a teenaged boy who was skipping school.

The boy looked up from the canal bank to see what he’d snagged, dialed 911, cut his line with a knife, and walked away. It was the third dead body he’d found while fishing, but such was the reality of a childhood spent outdoors in Florida. It was a testament to the teen’s passion for angling that he’d never considered getting a new hobby.

—

“You’re not one of my lawyers,” Diego Beltrán said to the woman.

“I lied to get in here.”

“Why?”

“I have a personal interest in this case,” Angie said.

“Your hand’s bleeding.”

“I punched out a guy.”

“Just now? Who?” Diego asked.

“One of the demonstrators.”

“Right in front of the jail?”

“He got up in my face,” Angie said, “which was rude.”

“Those screamers are out there all day and night. I can hear ’em from my cell.”

“No way. These walls are too thick.”

“Then I hear ’em inside my head,” said Diego, “which is even scarier.”

“Well, the one I hit—he’s in the back of an ambulance with a headache and a splint on his nose. I’m betting he’s done for the day.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

Angie introduced herself and told Diego the whole story. He said he didn’t believe it.

“Which part?” she asked.

“The mega devil snake, for starters.”

She showed him the cell-phone photos of the dead Burmese, her ransacked apartment, her burgled storage unit and her burned pickup truck.

“No offense,” said Diego, “but you don’t look like someone who wrestles wild animals for a living.”

“Actually, this is the only pants suit I own. The briefcase is a prop, obviously. Found it at the Dollar Tree.”

“How’s a fake lawyer with a fake briefcase going to help me?”

Angie warily nodded toward a corner-mounted fisheye camera, which Diego had already spotted.

“Are there microphones, too?” he whispered.

She shook her head. “Not allowed. This room is for attorney conferences.”

“And, now, fake attorney conferences. So are we pretending you can get me out?”

“As in free?”

“Back to ICE detention,” Diego said.

He knew the immigration case wasn’t going to disappear, and he doubted that even his real lawyers could win a petition for asylum. Given a choice, he’d rather get deported to Tegucigalpa than rot in a Florida jail with a lynch mob outside.

Angie said, “The only state charge against you is possession of stolen property. That’s usually a low-bail offense, which means the feds are pressuring the cops to keep you locked up here. “

“The stolen property being that one little pearl I found? Dios mio. ”

“Honestly, the jewelers association should give you a lifetime achievement award. Retail prices doubled after the President mentioned your conch pearl in that press conference.”

Diego felt beaten down. He rubbed his eyes and said, “How did this even happen to me?”

“Bad luck. You happen to be the brown-skinned Fiend-of-the-Month. Your mug shot’s all over Fox and CNN. The White House wants you alone in a cell with real bars, not a fenced courtyard with picnic tables and soccer games.”

“I get that. So, what’s your secret plan?”

“The priority is to get you exonerated,” Angie said. “ Officially exonerated, if possible, but otherwise we go to the media. That would be me telling everything I know about the Fitzsimmons case—starting with the fact that you couldn’t possibly have killed the woman that night because she was already dead by the time you came ashore.”

“But you never saw her body, Ms. Armstrong.”

“No—and it’s Angie—but I saw the lump. And those snake pics I took, don’t you think the Palm Beach Post would put one on the front page, along with my harrowing first-person account? But we don’t make that move unless the cops and prosecutors won’t back down.”

“They know I’m innocent. They know.” Diego told Angie about Chief Crosby discovering another conch pearl on the same railroad tracks.