Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“What are you even doing here?” he asked.

“I work here, same as you. What’re you saying, exactly? It got away, or there was no snake to begin with?”

The former, he assured her, though the question was understandable. Mass hysteria had been Raymer’s own first thought. Somebody yells Snake! and everybody sees scores of them all over. But that was before he and Justin entered apartment 107. It hadn’t taken Justin long to suss out what was going on in there. No pots, pans, plates, bowls or silverware in the kitchen. Just a ratty couch facing the small television in the living room. A minifridge stocked with cheap beer under the window. The larger kitchen fridge, with most of its shelving removed, had been completely repurposed. Justin had noted the temperature setting and removed the one flat box, holding it out to Raymer and saying, “Snake?” When the shape of the box altered subtly before Raymer’s eyes and he took a quick, involuntary step backward, Justin grinned and returned it to the fridge. “No doubt about it, this guy’s in business.”

The guy being “William Smith,” according to Boogie Waggengneckt, who’d never met him and claimed to have learned only the day before what was in the UPS packages he’d been signing for. Nobody else at the Arms seemed to have met the guy, either.

The bedroom in 107 was heavily curtained, so dark inside that Raymer instinctively flipped the switch, which of course did nothing at all. There was just enough light from the front room for them to make out the cages stacked on the bed and along one wall. When Justin turned on his flashlight, there was a chorus of rattles and hisses, but it was the dark, relentless, ropy movement that caused Raymer to back into the front room, his stomach roiling with rancid Twelve Horse ale. When Justin emerged a few minutes later, carefully shutting the door behind him, he was carrying a blue plastic pail of the sort you’d take to the beach for a small child. This one was full of handguns. “Not just the snake business, either,” Justin said, handing them to Raymer, who examined several of them. The serial numbers, no surprise, had all been filed off. “You’ll find drugs as well, I can almost guarantee it.”

It had taken them and two additional officers, together with the apartment house’s manager, three nerve-racking hours to complete the search for the missing snake, after which Raymer had ordered the Arms locked down and the entire complex to be surrounded with crime-scene tape.

“Did I hear you right?” Justin asked him when they were back outside in the parking lot. Justin was still in his waders, leaning against his van and smoking a cigarette. “You live here?”

Raymer, deeply embarrassed, winced. “I had no idea.” What one of his neighbors was up to, he meant, though it was possible Justin had merely been commenting on the fact that the place was a sty and not the sort of place a police chief would call home.

“Well, you wouldn’t, necessarily. These guys don’t linger. They set up shop, do their business and get the fuck out of Dodge. Three, four weeks, max.”

“You’ve run into this before?”

“Heard about it. Mostly down south.”

“Why an apartment house instead of someplace out in the sticks?”

“You’d have to ask them, but cost is a factor, I imagine. Plus rural folks tend to be nosy. Observant. Welfare types mind their own damn business. They got too many problems of their own to worry about the neighbors. If it hadn’t been for the power outage, you probably never would’ve known this guy was even here.”

“Explain the fridge, then? And the air-conditioning?”

“Below sixty degrees, snakes basically hibernate. With the AC running, they’d wake up every couple of days, drink some water, go back to sleep. You wouldn’t even need to feed them.”

“Whereas in ninety-five-degree heat?”

“Wide awake. Hungry. Pissed off.”

None of it made any sense to Raymer. “Okay, but why?”

“There’s a growing market for exotic reptiles. Boas don’t make bad pets, actually. Gotta remember to feed ’em, though. One lady down in Florida drove to the market for milk. Gone, like, ten minutes. Came home to this very fat snake in the baby’s crib.”

Raymer considered sharing this story with Charice now. Maybe she’d go away and leave him alone.

“So what you’re saying is, it got away?” she wanted to know, still obsessed by the cobra. “Got away where? What if it bites some little kid?”

“The kid dies.”

“That’s cold.”

“We searched until it was pitch dark, okay? What do you want from me?” He intended this to be a rhetorical question, but he could tell she didn’t get it. “Please? Pretty please? Could we continue this conversation after I get dressed?” He pointed at his office chair, over which he’d draped his pants. “If you won’t go away, could you at least hand me those?”

She did, reluctantly, making forceps of her thumb and index finger. Could you blame her? The waistband was still soggy with perspiration. He’d have to drop the whole uniform off at the dry cleaners.

“We should be doing something, is all I’m saying,” Charice told him, backing off a little. “Serve and protect, right?”

“I wish we’d settled on that instead of We’re not happy until you’re not happy. ”

“There you go putting in that extra ‘not’ again.”

Rising, he turned his back to her, pulled on his trousers and immediately felt better, as only a man who’d never felt comfortable in his God-given body will. “Volunteers are going door-to-door in the neighborhood,” he assured her, “warning people not to let their children play outside until it’s found.”

“What if they don’t find it?”

“According to Justin, it’ll probably just slither off into the woods and die of starvation. Or cross the road and get run over by a car.”

“Probably, huh?”

“Or freeze to death when the weather gets cold.”

“It’s the beginning of summer. We’re in a heat wave.”

Bending over to tie his shoes, Raymer suddenly felt dizzy, and when he straightened up the room started spinning. He had to grab the corner of the desk to keep from keeling over.

“Chief?” Charice said, her voice sounding very far off.

“I’m okay,” he said, blinking her back into focus, his equilibrium slowly returning. “Just a little woozy.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

Good question. He’d skipped breakfast and had had no appetite after what’d happened at Hilldale. “Yesterday?”

“No wonder,” she said. “Okay, then. You’re coming home with me.”

“Umm…”

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that mean, ‘umm’?”

“I mean, there’s a department rule against fraternizing.”

“Don’t worry, slick. I got my own rules about that. What we’re talkin’ about is food, not funny business. My damn fool brother was supposed to come over, but he’s too upset over his baby got scratched. So I got a whole fridge full of food and nobody to help me eat it.”

“Really?” Though still faint, he was hungry.

“Fried chicken. Collard greens. Black-eyed peas. Grits. Watermelon for dessert.”

“We’ll have to stop by the Arms so I can change.”

“Hold on a minute,” she said. “You believed me just now?”

“Umm.” He felt himself flush darkly. By not picking up on her joke, he’d managed to insult her. “I’m sorry, Charice. I’ve lived right here in Bath my whole life. When it comes to black people, I know you and Jerome. And Mr. Hynes,” he added, remembering the old man.

“And you think Jerome would eat a single collard green?”

“I don’t know. I just wish…”