Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

Brick Head relayed this information to his lapel and awaited instructions. Dutifully he stayed beside the pickup as Angie inched forward in the valet line. Ahead of them, couples were emerging with varying degrees of fragility from limousines, hired sedans and private luxury cars. Angie noted an absence of SUVs, which are impossible to exit gracefully in formal wear. All the women wore long gowns; evidently the men had been ordered not to deviate from tuxes.

Finally Brick Head tapped on Angie’s windshield and said, “Mr. Teabull wants you at the service gate right away. You’ll definitely need to turn around.”

But Angie was too far along for that; in her rearview glowed a train of headlights stretching all the way to the road. Brick Head attempted to create a gap in the line, but the hunched white-haired driver of the Jaguar glued to Angie’s bumper refused to yield, defiantly rolling up his window when the security man approached.

The procession moved slowly toward the portico, where an elaborate ice sculpture spelled out “Stars for SARS!” above a foaming neon-blue fountain. Brick Head slipped into the shadows as Angie’s pickup—caked with swamp mud from the raccoon transport—began attracting comments. When she braked to a stop beside the ice sculpture, the valets reacted with wary reserve. None ventured forward, so Angie cranked up the radio and waited.

A person that could only be Tripp Teabull appeared, roughly shoving one of the valets toward the truck. As soon as Angie stepped out, Teabull hustled her away from the curious guests.

On the veering golf-cart ride through the topiary, she asked, “Who are tonight’s ‘stars’?”

“Pardon me?”

“I know SARS is the disease, but who are the stars?”

“Technically SARS is not a disease, it’s an illness,” Teabull said. “The stars? Well, let’s see—Dr. Oz, Jack Hanna, Ann Coulter, and a former Mrs. Ron Perelman. They’re all on-site this evening.”

Angie whistled. “ Th at is a recipe for crazy.”

Teabull parked beside a pond that was dimpled by cruising goldfish. Instead of yellow crime tape, purple velvet ropes had been strung through brass stanchions to secure the area to be avoided. Patrolling the perimeter were Brick Head and several other bodybuilder types. At Teabull’s command, one of the guards unclipped a segment of the cordon so that Angie and the caretaker could enter. They crossed a soft flawless lawn to a corner of the property illuminated by triangulated mobile floods. The powerful white beams were fixed high in a lush old banyan tree.

Teabull pointed needlessly with his own puny flashlight. “See?”

“Impressive,” Angie said.

“How quickly can you get that thing out of here? We’ve promised the guests a nighttime croquet match. The glow sticks are already fastened to the mallets. Where’s the rest of your team?”

“I don’t have a team, sir.”

Teabull gave Angie the same up-and-down she always got, being female, five-foot-three and barely a hundred pounds. Usually she didn’t need assistance on a job. This time would be different.

She said, “I’ll come back in the morning with some help. Meanwhile don’t let that sucker out of your sight.”

Teabull blanched. “No, we can’t wait! Whatever needs to happen, make it happen now .”

Angie was staring up at one of the largest pythons she’d ever seen, and she’d seen some jumbos. This one had arranged its muscular length on a long horizontal limb. The reptile was deep into a post-meal stupor; a grotesque lump was visible halfway between the midsection and tail.

“Anybody missing a goat?” Angie asked.

“Mauricio will help you handle this,” said Teabull, and introduced the head groundskeeper.

Mauricio looked as if he’d rather be in the front row at a German opera. He told Angie that one of his mowing crew had spotted the giant snake in the tree that afternoon.

“It hasn’t moved an inch since then,” he said.

“We’re hoping the damn thing is dead,” Teabull added anxiously.

“Oh, it’s the opposite of dead,” Angie informed him. “It’s digesting.”

The trunk of the ancient banyan presented a dense maze of vertical roots. Angie wasn’t wearing the right shoes for such a slippery climb.

“I’ll need an extension ladder,” she told Mauricio, “and a pistol.”

From Teabull: “Absolutely no gunfire at this event!”

“Well, we’re looking at about eighteen feet of violent non-cooperation,” Angie explained. “The recommended approach is a bullet in the brain.”

“Hell, no! You’ll have to do it another way.”

“Then you will have to find another wrangler.”

The band had started playing—Cuban music, a well-meaning tribute to the Buena Vista Social Club. Soon the guests would be twirling drunkenly all over the grounds. Teabull wore the face of a climber trapped on a melting ledge.

“Five thousand cash,” he whispered to Angie. “But we’re running out of time.”

Angie put a hand on Mauricio’s shoulder and said, “Sir, would you happen to have a machete?”

—

The Burmese python is one of the world’s largest constrictors, reaching documented lengths of more than twenty feet. Popular among amateur collectors, the snakes were imported to the United States legally from Southeast Asia for decades. But because a hungry baby python can grow into an eight-foot eating machine within a year, owners often found themselves having second thoughts. Consequently, scores of the pet snakes were set free.

Only in southern Florida did the species take hold, the hot climate and abundance of prey being ideal for python reproduction. A relatively isolated population exploded to a full-blown invasion during the early 1990s, after Hurricane Andrew destroyed a reptile breeding facility on the edge of the Everglades. The storm liberated fresh, fertile multitudes, and today the Burmese is one of the state’s most prolific and disruptive invasive species. An adult female can lay as many as ninety eggs, which she will encircle and guard from predators.

Like all constrictors, pythons encoil their prey, squeezing the breath out of it. By disengaging their jaws, the snakes are able to swallow animals of much larger girth, which are typically consumed head-first. In this way the furtive intruders have decimated native Everglades wildlife, including marsh rabbits, raccoons, otters, opossums, and full-grown deer. Adult Burmese pythons will even drown and devour alligators. To the chagrin of suburban Floridians, pythons will leave the wetlands to travel long distances. Frequently they are discovered prowling residential neighborhoods, the signal clue being a sharp dip in the cat population.

To stem the onslaught, authorities have recruited both lay hunters and experienced reptile handlers by offering hourly wages and bounty payments that escalate per foot of snake. While the frenetic capture videos are wildly popular on YouTube, the removal program has so far proven to be biologically inconsequential. Although hundreds of pythons have been caught and removed, biologists believe that many thousands more are still on the loose, mating insatiably.

Despite their startling size, individual specimens aren’t easy to find. Their skin is lightly hued, with chocolate-brown patches creating puzzle-board patterns similar to that of a giraffe. Even the beefiest of pythons can be astonishingly well-camouflaged in the wild, and experts cite their “low detectability” as a primary challenge for hunters.

“Where the hell did it come from?” Tripp Teabull grumbled about the one in the tree. “And why did it show up here, of all places?”

“Sir, you’ve got a pond full of slow, dumb fish. However, that ”—Angie cocked her trigger finger at the exceptional lump in the python—“is something else.”