Serpent's Tooth

by Michael R Collings

  “I’d heard a car drive up just before he staggered in, so I figured I’d let him rest a bit—him being a fairly regular customer and all—and just be sure to get his keys before he tried to leave.

  “I did, too.” Rafferty was almost bursting with glowing self-righteousness, the conscientious barkeep always on the look-out for the well-being of his clients. After serving them poison.

  “You can ask the ki...Carver, there. I heard Johansson calling him for a ride because I took his keys.”

  “Very civic minded of you, I’m sure, Mr. Rafferty,” Victoria said. I could tell she felt the same way about the situation as I did.

  “All right, Rafferty. We have Mr. Johansson sitting in the booth back there by himself. Then what?”

  “For a while I would think he’d drifted off, then he’d shift around a bit. Once he got up to hit the head. But mostly he just sat there, staring.

  “Then, maybe half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, a bunch of locals came in, like I said....”

  Again a distinct hesitation about naming names. I began to wonder about that. And apparently Deputy Wroten did also, because instead of pressing that issue, he again skirted it, as if he wanted to see how long it would take Rafferty to cough up the information Wroten already knew...that it was the man Greta called “Snake” who had entered.

  “They...uh..., they milled around the bar for a while, ordering beers, shooting the shi...shooting the breeze with a couple of guys sitting on the stools, generally acting the way guys act when they stop in here after work, relaxing, letting off a little steam. Mostly laughing and arm-punching over jokes, that kind of thing.”

  He paused and looked down at the pad and pencil with a kind of longing in his eyes, as if he would rather be doing the paperwork—as if he would rather be doing almost anything—than recounting what had happened to Eric Johansson.

  “Then...I don’t remember how it happened, but then they caught sight of the Johansson kid sitting back there in the dark, and they kind of drifted over that way. Not mean-like, not like they were aiming to start any trouble.

  “At first, they just talked to him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, not over the noise in the rest of the room, so they must have been speaking pretty normal to him.”

  “But he wasn’t paying them any attention, was he.” Victoria said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

  Her voice startled me. The little-old-lady pitch was gone and she sounded more like herself, clear-headed, sharp, insightful.

  More than that, what she said startled me. And it startled Rafferty as well because he stopped speaking altogether and just stared at her.

  “Well?” Wroten asked. “Does Miz Sears have it right?”

  “Uh...yeah. One of the guys grabbed Johansson by the shirt and pulled him out of the booth.

  “‘Hey!’ I yelled, and one of them turned to me and said, ‘It’s okay Rafferty, we’re just talking to Spike here’—that’s what they called him sometimes, Spike—‘and we want to make sure that he listens closely.’”

  “‘Yeah,’ someone else said, ‘’cause paying close attention could be good for his health.’”

  “In other words,” Wroten said drily, “several of your customers were manhandling and threatening another of your customers, who had already had too much to drink and was not fully aware of what was going on around him, and you stood back and did nothing.”

  “Uh...it wasn’t like that...uh...I...he....” Rafferty stumbled to a stop.

  I wondered just how much Wroten knew about what went on in a place like Land’s End.

  Given the little scenarios Rafferty had just sketched, and the packet of white powder Allen had no doubt passed on to Wroten during their exchange of information in the kitchen, I was fairly sure that more than state-approved liquors changed hands in the Land’s End.

  “What happened then, Mr. Rafferty?” Victoria said quietly.

  “Then?” Rafferty seemed almost to snap out of a trance. “Yeah, then. Well, two of them grabbed Johansson under the arms and kind of walked him to the door. He didn’t seem to mind.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” Victoria said softly.

  “They stopped at the door and said they were taking him out for a breath of fresh air. And then they went out.”

  “The whole group?” That was Wroten’s voice.

  “Uh...yeah. Five or six of them.”

  “And did you hear anything else while the five or six of them were giving your drunk customer a breath of fresh air?” Wroten’s contempt was clearly evident.

  “No, I didn’t,” Rafferty said firmly. “Not a sound. Not a thing. It’s pretty quiet in here and....”

  At that moment an eighteen-wheeler ripped past on the State Highway. We all heard it clearly.

  “It’s...uh...pretty quiet in here,” Rafferty continued, patently rattled but giving it a good try nonetheless. “I didn’t hear anything, I swear, Deputy.”

  “Okay. What happened then? Did the gang....”

  “Hey,” Rafferty said, again the self-righteous barkeep-slash-public servant, “it wasn’t a gang. I don’t allow gangs in my place. They were just some...uh, guys that stop by now and again.”

  “Like every night?”

  Rafferty didn’t answer.

  “So back to the ‘five or six guys.’ Did they come back in?”

  “No. They left after ten or fifteen minutes. I heard their cars.... No. They didn’t come back in.”

  “And Mr. Johansson?”

  At that, Rafferty had the good graces at least to look down at the bar. He couldn’t meet Wroten’s eyes.

  “Yeah, he did. About half an hour later. He was...it looked like he was drunker than before, I don’t know, like they had all shared some beer or something outside.”

  Even I could tell that Rafferty didn’t believe that pretty little story.

  “And it looked like he must have...uh...fallen down in the parking lot or something. Like he hit his head. Maybe hurt his leg, because he was limping and kind of wincing now and again.”

  “And out of the kindness of your heart, you asked him for his keys because he was too drunk to drive, let him use your telephone to call a friend, and then told him to wait outside until the friend could arrive.”

  Again, not a question but a flat statement. Wroten was as good at that technique as Victoria was. There was no sign of the posturing, swaggering law-man now. Just a good—even outstanding—officer of the law zeroing in on a wrong-doer who had condemned himself by his own words.

  “Look, Wroten, I didn’t want any trouble in here. Outside is outside, you know. I didn’t see anything and I didn’t....”

  “I know, you didn’t hear anything.”

  Rafferty nodded.

  “But you did hear something, didn’t you, Mr. Rafferty,” Victoria said, again so quietly that you could hardly expect anyone else to hear. But we all did.

  Rafferty did not answer. He held stiffly still, as if any movement might give him away. More than his words already had.

  “Okay, Rafferty, just a couple more questions.”

  Rafferty looked up at Wroten with a touch of wonder in his eyes, as if he could hardly believe that the rough part was over with so little damage done.

  “Sure, anything.”

  “You’ve told us pretty much everything that happened to Mr. Johansson while he was here, directly or indirectly, but you seem to have left out the most interesting part.”

  “I did? What would that be?”

  “Just the names of the ‘five or six guys’ that were so concerned for Johansson’s health last night. Names that I’m pretty certain you know.”

  “I...uh...no, I....”

  Again, he stuttered to a halt.

  “Come on, Rafferty. You know the name. Who was so interested in Eric Johansson last night?”

  “That would be me,” said a calm, level voice from behind us.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I suddenly became aware of a sile
nce in Land’s End, a stillness that had not been there when we had entered.

  The old fellows at the far table had stopped talking and were looking our way, but that wasn’t what made the difference. They’d probably been watching us since we came in. We certainly beat the day-time entertainment on television. If there’d been a television handy.

  No, this silence went deeper.

  After a moment I recognized what had changed.

  The subtle click-click-click had stopped, as had the susurrant undercurrent of men’s voices from the other room, the one beyond the closed door.

  Whoever had been playing pool had stopped sometime during our interchange.

  And the door was open.

  A young man stood in the doorway.

  “Why, you must be Mr. Snake,” Victoria said into the silence, her little-old-lady intonations back in full play.

  Even if we hadn’t heard the nickname from Greta Johansson—even as she had been accusing him of murdering her grandson—“Snake” would have been a likely enough guess.

  He was perhaps my age, and tall, easily the tallest person in the bar, and wiry-thin. He had dirty-blond hair that stood straight up in a short, no-doubt fashionable cut, and a fringe of equally dirty-blond beard on his chin. He had high cheekbones and a strong, sensitive mouth.

  But his eyes!

  His eyes were a crystalline blue, lighter than sky-blue, almost as light as the glacial blue you sometimes see in pictures in the National Geographic.

  Terry and Shawn and I had once vacationed in an old mining town in Arizona, and walking down the main street we had seen a huge cluster of crystals, easily five feet long and a foot high, on display in a jeweler’s window. We had to go in and find out what it was.

  The man behind the counter called it “Bisbee Ice,” after the name of the little town. He said it was a gem-quality calcite only found in a single mine, long since played out, on the outskirts of the town.

  I fell in love with the stone. The color was so cool, so clear, so deep, that I had to have a piece.

  Terry ended up buying me 100 carats in half a dozen cut and polished cabochons...and spending over $200 dollars to do it, a healthy hunk of our spending money for the trip.

  Later, he had them set in sterling silver as a pendant necklace and matching earrings. I still had three teardrop cabochons in my jewel case, folded into a bit of tissue paper and tucked into a small compartment. Someday, perhaps when the memory of that visit—the last one we took as a family—is less painful, I will have them set as well.

  The image of Terry and Shawn ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the tray of cut stones as they tried to pick out the perfect ones for me hurt...not as deeply as it would have before I came up here to Fox Creek, I realized with a flood of relief, but it still hurt.

  Even so, I loved the stones.

  I loved their color.

  And here was the same color, looking out at me from eyes that seemed as cold, as deep, as uncaring and as cruel as a glacier.

  Eyes belonging to a man who had an discomfortingly real image of a rattle-snake on his right arm, tail coiled over his muscular shoulder, fully revealed in a white muscle shirt; body tattooed around the length of the arm, seeming to slither and twist with every movement; head—fangs fully extended and so life-like that I could almost see the venom oozing from their tips—a triangular monstrosity on the back of his hand.

  I imagined that if the hand were clenched into a fist, and that fist were flying through the air at me, it would be as terrifying, as menacing, as a striking snake.

  I shivered.

  The man—Snake—glanced at Victoria, studied her for a moment with his head cocked to one side, then made a mock bow.

  “Gracious,” she said in response, “What a polite young man.”

  “Right,” Wroten said. His voice sounded rough in comparison. “And the young man has a name, I believe. We’ve met before, once or twice.”

  “That we have, Deputy, that we have,” the man said, totally unflustered. He angled his head back toward Victoria. “Edward Garton, ma’am.” Again, he made the mock bow. I could almost hear him laughing behind his smile.

  “Oh yes,” Victoria said—gushed actually—“Little Eddie Garton, Why I used to know your mother and father well, although I haven’t had a chance to visit with Myra and Nathan in...well, in far too long. You know how it is with us old folks, it gets harder and harder to get out.”

  At the words “Little Eddie,” the man’s eyes, already cold, immediately dropped a dozen degrees more, to well into the sub-zero range.

  Victoria, I thought, what are you doing? If this is the man who beat Eric so severely, he’s too dangerous to toy with.

  Her next words frightened me even more...for her.

  “I should have recognized you of course, but the last time I saw you—why, I believe it was at another Community Picnic on the 4th of July, over in Central Park, maybe fifteen years ago—you were nowhere near so tall. Or quite so...ah, stylishly ornamented.”

  His hand jerked convulsively, as if he were about to make a fist. The rattlesnake coiled to strike.

  Wroten stepped in, apparently sensing that Victoria was taking entirely the wrong track with his suspect.

  “Mr. Garton, I’d like to ask a couple of questions about last night.”

  Garton sauntered over to one of the tables and dropped down into a chair. Behind him, three or four men, a few years younger than he, clustered by the door, lounging back against the wall.

  But I could tell that, like their master, they were also coiled and ready to strike.

  “I’d ask you to call me ‘Snake,’ like all my friends do, Deputy Wroten, but I don’t think you would. Anyway, what do you want to know?”

  “We’ve been talking to Rafferty here about some unpleasantness last night. Between you and Eric Johansson.”

  “That would be ‘Spike,’” Garton—Snake—said complacently. “We all have names that fit our personalities. I’d introduce you to the rest of the... to the rest of my friends, but I sense that you’re not really interested in their names right now.”

  “I’ll get to that later. Right now, I’d like to hear your version of what happened.”

  “But Deputy Wroten, there is no version of it. There is only the truth. Truth is truth. There can’t be versions of the truth, can there?”

  He was playing Wroten masterfully, skimming on the near edge of insult and non-cooperation but adroitly avoiding crossing any lines.

  I glanced around see where Carver was. He had backed away from us when Snake had entered the room and was now perched on a stool by the bar.

  Good. Keep him out of the worst danger.

  Victoria, on the other hand, had moved closer to Snake and—to my utter horror—taken a seat at the side of the same table, where she proceeded to watch him with a frightening intensity.

  I hoped she was just trying to unnerve him with her presence.

  “All right, Garton. Tell us the truth then.”

  “Well,” Garton said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs at the ankles, revealing heavy, highly polished boots with steel caps on the toes. “Me and a few of my friends came by last night, you know, for a bit of R & R after a hard day at the salt mines”—I heard a derisive snort and was appalled to discover that it had come from me—“and ordered a few beers.

  “Imagine our surprise when we saw our old friend—actually, our new friend, Spike, sitting all by his lonesome at one of the back tables. We hadn’t expected to see him here, but it seemed as if the gods were smiling on us.

  “See, a couple of days ago, Spike had purchased something from me on the promise of paying for it yesterday. Unfortunately, he didn’t show up when he had agreed to, so I sadly had to assume that he was going to renege on his promise.”

  “And what would he have purchased from you, Mr. Snake?” Victoria was leaning forward, as if this was the most interesting tale she had ever heard in her life.

  “You know, ma’am, t
hat has entirely slipped my mind. But I do remember that he owed me some money.” He smiled.

  “Ahh, it’s a curse of the young, isn’t it, faulty memory,” she said, returning his smile.

  “Go on, Garton. And see if you can cut the crap this time.”

  “Really, Deputy Wroten, such language, and with ladies present. But to continue.

  “When we saw Spike sitting all alone back there, we naturally went over to say ‘hello’ and to politely remind him that he owed me money. But to our astonishment, Spike, who is usually most attentive to everything we say, wouldn’t even look as us or answer us.

  “We concluded that, since he had obviously been at Land’s End for some time, he was...how shall I say it delicately...not in full possession of his faculties.”

  “Oh, dear. I was afraid of something like that,” Victoria said, shaking her head.

  “Yes. Well, we felt it incumbent upon us, as his friends, to help him out in any way we could, and since it was stuffy and warm inside, we assisted him outside where he could breathe fresh, clean, wholesome air.”

  “And where you could no doubt bring up the subject of the missing payment,” Wroten added for him.

  “Yes, I’m sure the subject came up at some point. We spoke with Spike for a few minutes but since he made no effort to pay what he owed and indeed seemed to become even drunker by the minute—no doubt he has a weak head for liquor—we decided to let well enough alone and we headed on home.

  “Does that answer your questions, Deputy Wroten?” Garton asked, wide-eyed, the picture of injured innocence.

  “So there was no...uh, discussion of consequences for his not having the money?”

  “That too may have come up at some point. I really don’t remember the conversation that clearly.”

  Wroten pointed to Snake’s hand, which was lying open on the table. It looked as if the rattler were about to slither off his flesh and coil itself in the middle of the table.

  “You seem to have injured you hand.” Not a question, merely an observation.