Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

So he dropped the heavy tray of presidential pies and ran.

The British kitchen workers resisted the impulse to follow him. They knew Mastodon would go raging apeshit without his beloved dessert, though the pies scattered in the truck looked unsalvageable. When the tray had fallen, the plastic containers popped open. Now the silky coils of the great python were smeared with citrine filling, whipped Chantilly cream, and crumbs from the fractured graham-cracker crusts.

However, in a lone corner on the other side of the motionless beast, sat a single, intact Key Lime pie. The lid of the container had been sprung, yet the fluffy treat looked perfect.

“I’m going for it,” one of the workers announced.

“Are you crazy?” said the other. “Let the fat toad eat ice cream!”

“My visa’s up next month. If I do this, I’m golden,” the brave one said. “Maybe I’ll even get a raise.”

“Or maybe you’ll get your dumb ass strangled,” said his co-worker, and took off.

The brave one pressed his back to the inside wall of the bakery truck, edged nervously past the torpid snake, and picked up the miracle pie. He balanced it one-handed over his head as he sidestepped out of the cooler, and he continued carrying it that way as he hurried to the Casa Bellicosa kitchen, where he arrived beaming.

—

“This is fun,” Angie said. “The Three Musketeers, together again.”

They were gathered in the dark around her pickup, which she’d parked next to the Betancourt Pastries truck at the delivery ramp of the President’s mansion.

Chief Jerry Crosby asked, “Did you bag the damn thing?”

“Yes, sir. Wanna see?”

Special Agent Paul Ryskamp was all business. “In your professional opinion, how did this happen?”

“Someone put the snake inside the bakery vehicle,” Angie said. “There’s no natural way it could have gotten there.”

“Maybe it crawled in through the cooling system.”

“No, it’s way too thick to fit. Anyway, pythons hate the cold.”

“So the person who did this,” said Crosby, “knows how to handle those things.”

“And also where the President gets his pies.” Angie looked at Ryskamp. “Wasn’t there a big write-up about the bakery in USA Today ?”

“Two weeks ago,” the agent acknowledged tightly.

“Paul, at first I didn’t recognize you out here. But, dude, you are rockin’ that charcoal suit.”

“Enough, Angie.”

The chief said, “Can we all agree that monster snakes aren’t all of a sudden showing up in Palm Beach just because they’re bored with the Everglades? Some sick son of a bitch is targeting this community.”

“Looks that way,” said Ryskamp, “but let’s hear from the expert.”

Angie wasn’t positive she detected sarcasm, so her response was straightforward: “I agree—there’s no way this is random. This third one clinches the deal.”

“It’s not number three,” Crosby said bleakly. “It’s number five.”

“What the fuck, Jerry? Why didn’t you call me about the other two?”

“Because I didn’t need you to come catch them. They were already dead. One got chopped to pieces by the Revlon yacht last night while it swam through the inlet. The other was hit by an asphalt truck on A1A at dawn this morning, only a thousand feet from the front gate of this place.”

“Sweet Baby Jesus,” Angie said.

It was another crisp, clear night, and there were trim men in gray suits all over the place. Like Paul Ryskamp, they were armed.

Angie had never been to the Winter White House before, and she was impressed. Even the service driveway had a postcard view of the Intracoastal, bathed by the tropical lights of the West Palm skyline. The Casa’s croquet lawn was even more pristine than the one at Lipid House, although no club members or guests were playing. Likewise, the tennis courts and sapphire swimming pools sat empty. Angie knew it was because the President was in residence. Tonight he was dining privately with his nutritionist, according to Spalding’s sources, and wanted quiet on the grounds. A couple of long-scheduled events had to be rescheduled, including a Humane Society fundraiser featuring rescue cats dressed as figures from Persian mythology.

“How large were the other pythons?” Angie asked Jerry Crosby.

“Double XLs.”

“If this were a natural population shift, we’d be finding all different sizes,” she said. “So it’s not a migration, it’s an unleashing.”

The chief looked stricken. “Please find another word for it.”

Ryskamp, holding a finger on his earbud, said, “You can’t weaponize a damn python. They hardly ever go after humans, correct?”

“One of ’em sure as hell went after Mrs. Fitzsimmons,” Crosby cut in mordantly.

“No, Paul’s right,” Angie said. “Maybe somebody’s just trying to scare the shit out of people. Somebody who gets off on all the panic, like a firebug.”

Crosby said hiding a python in the presidential pies was more than a prank; it was a message. Ryskamp agreed, saying, “Whoever did it knew the route and destination of the bakery truck. That is of serious concern to us.”

Several members of the wait staff emerged on a vape break. Ryskamp motioned for Angie and the police chief to follow him down to the seawall. When they were out of earshot, the agent said: “Here’s what’s happening tomorrow in my world: At nine sharp I’ll be patched into a video conference with Washington, and a person making way more money than I do will ask me—dead seriously—if these snakes pose any threat to the President and his wife. And my answer will be…?”

“A qualified no,” said Angie.

“Despite what happened at Lipid House?”

“Paul, I don’t know a single documented case of a Burmese swallowing anything—man or beast—as gi-normous as the President.”

Crosby, who’d made the mistake of googling “fatal python attacks,” described a grotesque video supposedly taken in an Indonesian rain forest. “The victim was a logger at least six-two. They found his body when they cut open the snake with a chainsaw.”

“No, that whole thing was fake,” Angie said. “Same for all those anaconda videos from South America.”

Ryskamp stared up at the constellations and took a long, quiet breath. “Okay, what about the First Lady? She weighs a hundred and twenty-one pounds.”

“The python would have to be exceptionally large and hungry,” Angie explained, “and the First Lady would have to be exceptionally unlucky. These things aren’t like Rottweilers—you can’t train ’em to seek and attack.” She smiled grimly. “Can you guys believe this fucked-up conversation?”

Ryskamp remained focused and unflappable, which Angie found attractive; the man had his act together.

He said, “The three of us know one key fact my superiors don’t know, and probably don’t wish to be told: An eighty-eight-pound woman that the President claims was murdered by terrorist immigrants was actually inhaled by a mutant reptile. So the challenge for me is how to do my job and protect the boss without exposing his Diego riff as total bullshit, which would infuriate him and undoubtedly jeopardize the careers of the folks I’ll be speaking with tomorrow. Angie, being the expert, I bet you can’t rule out the possibility that a python larger than the one at Lipid House would be capable of eating a human that weighed more than the late Mrs. Fitzsimmons.”

She said, “Maybe. But a whale like POTUS is definitely safe.”

“Still, there are guests and visitors to Casa Bellicosa who could be, theoretically, on the menu.”

“Size-wise? I guess it’s possible.”

“Ever heard of a python killing somebody and not eating them?”