Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

But before I left the building I wanted to know what was inside the pink envelope that Frances had set in her box just before she barged by me and stashed it in the trunk of her car. I wanted to know what had made her look at me that way through the window of the Sharpe house, what had forced her to leave her job for the rest of the day.

I went down to the evidence room and asked the deputy for the case no. 98-1145 boxes, just logged in. I signed for it, then looked through Frances’s heavy box of smut, but the pink envelope wasn’t there. It wasn’t in any of the other boxes we took, either.

I went back upstairs to see if Frances might still be around. She was. I saw her sitting in Sheriff Jim Wade’s office, intently leaning toward him as she talked. There was no sense in interrupting. Whatever was eating at Frances wasn’t mine to know. There would be some rational explanation for the missing envelope. Besides, I had two listing agents waiting for me, and ten more to go after that.

Shopping Carter was gone when I came down the steps a few minutes later.

Hypok pulled his van into the last parking area in Caspers Wilderness Park, circled the lot once, then backed the vehicle into a space. He always drove his van rather than his car when he had interesting things to accomplish. There were no other vehicles this deep into the fragrant scrub woods, and there was a nice circle of shade from a big oak tree behind the lot. He turned off the engine and wiped his face with his hand. He pulled the half gallon of generic tequila from under the seat and took a long drink. Then another. The big bottles lasted him two days usually, but the stuff evaporated faster if he was under particular stress. Lots of that lately, he thought. Frankly, this was the last place he imagined he’d be this afternoon, after last week’s failed mission. But now he felt great.

He looked in the back of the van at all his jars and pillowcases and burlap bags, filled with snakes again. They were active because it was warm back there, and he could see the bags and pillowcases moving. He wondered again at how easy this was to do now, compared to how hard it was to do last week. Now it felt right again, overwhelmingly right, now was a time for change, for the shedding of skin, for renewal. After all, it was springtime, wasn’t it? Look at his own new, clean-shaven face. His freshly cut, bleached and swept-back hair. The new white paint job for his van — an impulse, really, not quite a precaution, just an urge to change its color. Now, letting some of his snakes go. It felt right. He felt giddy about it all, but still right.

He reached back and lifted one of the glass jars. Holding it between his legs he opened the lid and pulled out the nice mountain king snake he’d caught up in the San Bernardinos years ago. It was a beautiful thing, he thought: red and white and black, with a curious little face and the sweetest disposition. He let it explore his arm. He thought about what he was doing. There was some sadness in this, for sure. Still, he was committed now, he was consolidating himself, trimming his past, becoming whole. He felt capable. Capable of this act. Capable of rational things like letting his beloved creatures go free, like changing the way he looked again, things like convincing Collette to take her house — his house — off the market, when he had convinced her to sell it in the first place. What a sane, bold stroke the unlisting had been. An example of capability and consolidation, of course correction. He smiled to himself, picturing that listing agent traipsing through his place with her provocative perfume, instructing him on all the things he’d have to do to sell it, I mean what your sister will have to do in order to sell it. He’d been quite drunk at the time. He hadn’t quite foreseen that people would be allowed to just show up and go through his home. And what about the guest house in back? How could he possibly find a better setup than that? He’d called Collette two days later and all but ordered her to take it off the market. Collette could care less, of course, so long as she either made money on a sale or continued to save taxes and build equity in something she didn’t have to pay for.

Solid.

Capable.

Firm.

He had already put the bags and jars in cardboard boxes, and knew it was going to take four trips if he carried one box at a time. They weren’t heavy, really, but they were fairly large and wouldn’t stack well. Besides, who knew how far he’d have to hike in order to find the perfect spot?

He got out and locked the front doors, then slid open the side and brought out one of the boxes. The pillowcases on top were all moving as he set it on the ground, and the rattlesnakes buzzed in their jars, coiled and looking up at him. He shut and locked the side door, then picked up the box and headed down the trail with it.

Past a stand of live oaks, through the toyon, down a gully rimmed by prickly pear and wild cucumber, then into the meadow. The area looked different than when he was last here, dropping off Item #2, but that was three weeks ago and the season hadn’t really turned yet. It was also in another part of the park altogether: no reason to visit it again, really, because the cops, if they’re smart, might expect that. Now the purple lupine and yellow mustard smeared their colors on the hills and even the dour oaks were vibrantly green. Bees. Bees everywhere, buzzing, dizzying, hypnotizing bees.

It was surprisingly hot. He could feel the sweat rolling down his sides and the dampness of the box up against his chest. He climbed a hillside and found a very nice outcropping of rocks just over the crest, the kind of place snakes love. He set down the box and looked around. There was a creek about a hundred yards away. It would be dry by summer, but the soil around it was dark now and that meant moisture. To his left the rocks clung to the hillside in a long band. There were rock roses with nice yellow blossoms growing in the cracks. Past the creek the hillside rose steeply, clotted with cactus and more rocks. Perfect, Hypok thought: the whole place is snake heaven.

Though it made him sad, he let the mountain king snake go first. It was a hard one to catch — three years of hiking the mountains in the spring before he’d found one this big and this well marked. He knelt by the rocks and the snake slid off his palm and lay in the brush. Its tongue was working fast and its head was raised just a little: Hypok wondered what it must feel like to spend five years in a cage, then be suddenly released to the vast distances of nature. He watched its sides expand and retract slowly, slightly, as it breathed. The king snake lowered its shiny black head and eased into a crack in the rocks.

“See you, little king snake. Kickie some buttie.”

Hypok felt everything swell up inside him then, the sadness and the courage and the urgency and the excitement all boiling together. He waited for them to pass. That was always the way it was. Something had to give. That is nature. And nature is change. The shed had begun again and he would emerge from it soon, fresh and brilliant. Singular and unique. Composed and purposeful. Not stressed by contradiction and not paralyzed by doubt. He would be, finally, his true and actual self.

So he worked quickly, trying to take his mind off of things, trying to focus on just one feeling at a time. He got the box and carried it a few yards before he felt positive about the location. He knelt again. The two red rattlesnakes buzzed lethargically as he opened their jar and held it upright over a large flat rock. They didn’t want to come out. Hypok noted that snakes almost always want to crawl back into confined space rather than explore an open one, and he couldn’t blame them for that. The world was full of threat. He pulled them bodily from the jar and tossed them, one at a time, into the grass before they could turn and bite him. Like the mountain king, the rattlers lay in the sun for a moment, stunned by their liberty, before gliding under the big rock. Then the Russell’s vipers from Bangladesh; the horned desert vipers from Kuwait; the dwarf adder from Little Namaqualand; the rhombic night adder from Botswana; the yellow eyelash vipers from Costa Rica; the green palm viper from Honduras; the eight-foot bushmaster from Peru; and the ferde-lance from Mexico.