John Godey: The Snake

After that, his tour of duty was finished. But instead of going to bed, he went down to the morgue.

The patient's eyes were open, and they seemed to Papaleo to be bewildered, as if he too was trying to fathom the cause of his death.

Papaleo closed the eyes, not from sentimentality but because-he told himself with a nervous smile-he preferred working without anyone watching him.

He ran his hands over the torso absently, as Shapiro had done earlier.

The skin had begun to cool, and to gray down from the smooth brown of a young man who had been, Papaleo guessed, in quite good health. The mouth was open in a crooked gape, and the lips and chin were smeared with hardening mucus. He ran his eyes down the body from top to bottom, as if taking inventory. Then his eyes travelled upward again to the thigh, to the patch of bloodied grime on the trousers.

After a moment's hesitation he opened the belt buckle and started to roll the trousers down, but changed his mind. He took a scissors from the pocket of his jacket, and firmly slit the trouser leg up from the cuff to the hip. He spread the material carefully to the side and bent over the thigh. The skin was abraded and slightly stained by blood. Bending still closer, he noticed four small perforations in the skin, partially obliterated by the abrasions. So it was overdose after all, despite the contraindicative symptoms!

But his certainty was short-lived. Why would an addict use his thigh when his arm was clear? And how could he be thought of as an addict if there were only the four marks, and no signs of needle tracks? And why four marks, of equal freshness? The four perforations seemed to be in two sets: one pair about six inches above the knee, the other two or three inches higher. The perforations in each set appeared to be about twelve millimetres apart.

With his nose almost touching the thigh he studied the marks. They certainly could be an injection of some sort, though with a rather large needle. But who would inject in pairs? Bites of some kind? Fang marks?

But fangs would make much bigger and more ragged holes. Insect bites? Too large, and not with that spacing. No insect he had ever heard of bit that way, in pairs. Besides, who would stand still for four such bites or stings?

Fangs, then. What had fangs? Dogs, cats, lions, tigers… come on, Papaleo. Snakes? A poisonous snakebite in Manhattan? Anyway, snakes didn't strike that high. They might bite a hand or finger if they were held, but they usually struck the foot or lower leg. Besides, so far as he knew, snakes secreted a hemotoxic poison, which destroyed the red blood corpuscles and resulted in discoloration and swelling of the affected area due to local hemorrhages. Nothing like that here. Snakebite?

Forget it, Papaleo. Still, shouldn't he tell Shapiro about the perforations? Yeah, sure, wake him up, wake up the boss and face that curled lip and those glittering eyeglasses… Forget it, Papaleo.

Nevertheless, he decided to read up on snakebite in Beeson and McDermott before he hit the sack. But by the time he got back to his room he was feeling too damn exhausted to start rummaging for a book. Instead, he fell on his bed fully clothed and went to sleep.

A half hour later the M.E.'s death wagon backed into the receiving bay.

The attendant signed a receipt for Torres's corpse, and took it away for storage in the city morgue until the M.E.'s office could schedule it for post-mortem examination.

The snake woke shortly before dawn. At once, its long tongue began to flick in and out through a rostra opening in the margin of its upper jaw that allowed it to emerge even when its mouth was shut.

The two tips of the forked tongue fitted into ducts communicating with the snake's Jacobson's organ, which lay in a depression in the roof of the mouth. The sensory epithelium of the Jacobson's organ responded to odour substances conveyed to it by the tongue, and interpreted them as a chemical computer might do, in terms of the quality of the atmosphere, of the presence of another animal, of prey.

The findings of the Jacobson's organ disquieted the snake. And so, when it slipped through the branches of the tree and down the trunk, it chose not to wander off in search of water. Instead, moving in slow ripples, it drank the dew from the grass. Then, despite its hunger, it did not go in search of food, but wound back up the tree until it found the place where it had been before.

It slept again.

At much the same moment, Arthur Bennett stumbled on a body. His first thought, when he saw it lying on the walk, was that it was some other wino sleeping it off. But when he saw its size, he decided that it was that big bastard who had beaten him up a month ago and damn near punched his eye out.

His immediate impulse was to cut out, but when he touched his eye, still scabbed in the process of healing, he got mad. Stepping forward a pace, he launched a thudding kick to the ribs. He was bringing his foot back for a second kick-although by now he had remembered that the bastard who had punched his eye was a black guy-when he saw the dark blood staining the front of the T-shirt and the linen jacket.

Bennett recoiled, then stepped forward again and looked at the body. The eyes were open and glassy. One arm was bent back underneath. The white captain's hat had fallen away and lay nearby, incongruously balanced on its rim. There was a good-looking box a little distance away. He looked dead, but to make sure, Bennett let him have a couple more kicks in the ribs.

He found the wallet, first try, sticking up from the breast pocket of the linen jacket. fie cackled with pleasure. He leafed through the wallet quickly and gasped with delight: bills a half-inch thick-twenties and fifties and even a few hundreds. He slipped the money into his pants pocket, and looked around him. Nothing in sight. He began to work feverishly, eager for what other wonders he might discover. In the jacket pockets he found a pack with half a dozen cigarettes in it, some keys, a crumpled dollar bill, two packages of matches, a disposable lighter, a packet of salted peanuts, a bloody crumpled handkerchief, some foreign coins. In the body's left-hand pants pocket he found a package of condoms, in the right a handful of U.S. coins. Everything went into his own pockets. When he had picked the body clean he put the sailor cap on his matted white hair, and giggled when it slid down over his ears. He picked up the box-the cover was busted, but it was still a fine box-and put it under his arm.

He decided to get out of the park real fast. He had entered on Fifth Avenue near the Metropolitan Museum, not too worried about walking through, because no self-respecting mugger would waste his time on an old wino bum (though some of the mean ones would hurt winos just for laughs), but now, with his loot, he felt different.

He pushed the hat to the back of his head so it wouldn't swamp him, tucked the box under his arm, and hurried along the path toward Central Park West.

The snake basked on the surface of a large black rock a short distance from the tree it had sheltered in, its eleven-foot length spread out to the sun in an extended sigmoidal flex. At 7:30 A.M. on the third day of the heat wave, the sun already burned relentlessly through the city haze.

The snake was poikilothermal-a cold-blooded animal. Its temperature was not constant, like that of most animals, but modulated with the temperature of its environment. Because cold exerts a narcotic, potentially killing effect, snakes predominate in the tropics and subtropics and thin out in number and species in the temperate regions moving toward the poles. Yet, a common viper is known to inhabit an area above the Arctic Circle and parts of Siberia.

Scarcely stirring, the snake warmed up its blood until some instinctive thermostatic reflex warned it that it had reached the optimum temperature. Then it slid away from its exposed position on the rock and into the shaded underbrush near its tree.