Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  The giveaway was the beautiful repeating pattern of diamonds along the snake’s body in sand, dark-chocolate-brown and a pale ivory. This was a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake. Or in the local parlance, a Texas Rattler. Five feet of muscle, the tail end tipped with the telltale warning device, the head end housing a pair of one-inch long, needle-pointed fangs.

  The buzzing rattle increased in volume, and now the snake raised its triangular head away from its coils, eighteen inches off the ground.

  Gabriel’s heart was pounding and despite the breathing pattern, his body was surging with adrenaline. Flight was an impossibility. The only option was fight.

  He could feel the Glock digging into his back. Briefly he considered reaching for it. The snake must have picked up on the movement of his right hand even before he was aware of making it. That fearsome mouth opened and Gabriel got his first sight of the business end of a rattler. The SAS trainer’s voice came back to him now.

  “The venom’s what we call hemotoxic,” the snake expert had intoned, indicating with his pointer the fangs on a hugely blown-up photograph of a rattlesnake’s head. “That means it breaks down blood vessels, blood cells and heart muscle. So apart from the worst pain you can imagine, you’re going to suffer from massive internal bleeding and tissue destruction. Myself, I’d rather take a round from a Kalashnikov.”

  So the pistol was out. But that didn’t leave Gabriel defenceless.

  “Help me out, Master Zhao,” he murmured.

  The snake’s head was now almost two feet above the ground, and its cold eyes were level with Gabriel’s.

  He tensed his muscles, never taking his gaze off that gradually widening mouth with its twin venom injectors, each longer than the top joint of his thumb.

  Sometimes it pays to wait to see what your enemy has planned. Draw them out. Force them to commit, then counterstrike.

  And sometimes it’s best to get your retaliation in first.

  “Now, Wolfe Cub, strike now!” came an old Hong Konger’s voice on the Texan breeze.

  Gabriel straightened his left arm in a lightning-fast strike, hand held rigid as a blade.

  The edge of his hand chopped into the rattlesnake’s muscular body just below the head.

  The impact folded the snake in half around his hand and brought the venom-loaded fangs whistling towards his forearm.

  But the attack was enough. Disorientated, the snake struck wildly, missing Gabriel’s arm by a handful of inches.

  As it recoiled and prepared to attack again, Gabriel sprang upright and danced back out of range, drawing his pistol from the back of his waistband and aiming at the snake’s head.

  His finger was tight on the trigger, and inside the polymer body the triple internal safeties were disengaging and freeing the striker.

  But he held off putting a bullet into the rattler. He watched instead. Waiting to see if it would slither closer. His heart was racing, and sparks were jumping and sizzling in his peripheral vision.

  Then Master Zhao spoke to him again.

  “This is not the time to hesitate. Strike again, Wolfe Cub. End it.”

  He squeezed the trigger.

  The striker rammed home against the percussion cap in the base of the cartridge.

  The 9mm round exploded from the Glock’s muzzle and vaporised the rattlesnake’s head.

  “I honour your life,” Gabriel grunted, the old ritual farewell, before replacing the Glock in his waistband, wiping the sweat from his forehead and resuming his search.

  With his chin scraping against the gritty desert soil surface, Gabriel scanned out from a point six inches in front of his face to a second point a few yards further away. And, yes! There it was. A subtle change in colour and light. The sand absorbing the sun rather than reflecting it. Minute shifts in the movement of individual sand grains as the desert breeze tipped them over the cliff-edge formed where the crater began. He jumped into a squat and began tracing the outline of the depression with his fingers, sticking loose cactus spines and bits of sagebrush around its perimeter.

  The encounter with the rattler and the mounting heat forgotten, Gabriel worked methodically, inserting twigs and spines into the sand every few inches, feeling with his fingertips for the outline of his friend’s body.

  Ten minutes later, it was done: a man’s outline, in narrow, two-inch-long slashes of inky shadow. He stood, took a couple of steps back, and pulled out his phone to take a few pictures. The sharp, thin shadows emanating from the slender pieces of desert plant life were like tiny sundials; they all lined up at the same angle, indicating not time of death but time of discovery.

  Eleven thirty-five in the a.m., Central Daylight Time. God rest his soul, Vinnie Calder was found for the second time.

  Crouching at the spot where his friend’s head had smacked down into the desert, Gabriel surveyed the six-foot, man-shaped depression. Something was tugging at his subconscious. A detail from the autopsy report. He let his eyes wander the perimeter of twigs and thorns, allowing whatever it was to bubble up close enough to the surface that he could scoop it up and examine it. The depression was perfectly symmetrical. Legs akimbo, arms spread wide as if Vinnie had been about to create an angel, flapping his arms to scrape the sand into wings each side of his body.

  Arms?

  No. Not arms plural. Arm singular. That was the detail from the autopsy report.

  He stood, turned, and walked back to the Ram, climbing into the boiling cab and firing up the engine so he could crank up the air to maximum.

  As the interior temperature dropped towards something halfway bearable, Gabriel opened the slim leather messenger bag Terri-Ann had lent him and withdrew the file Detective Casamayor had dropped off at the house. The autopsy report was on top. He flipped to the second page and read aloud a short passage under a heading, “Gross Skeletal Anatomy”:

  “The skeleton is missing its left humerus, radius, ulna and all the bones of the hand. Tooth marks in the scapula and clavicle indicate the body was disarticulated post-mortem, probably by a large predatory animal.”

  He replaced the papers in the file and the file in the messenger bag and sat it beside him on the passenger seat. The view through the windscreen was an undifferentiated expanse of sand and scrub stretching to the distant mountains. Large predatory animal, he thought. OK, so out here we can leave out the reptiles, which leaves two categories: dogs or cats.

  He thought back to his last conversation with Terri-Ann. She’d advised him to take the Mossberg hunting rifle in case he encountered a predator.

  “Who am I looking out for?” he’d asked.

  “Well, you’ve got four big ones to worry about. Bobcats, mountain lions, wolves and coyotes. You probably won’t meet one, ’cause they’re pretty scared of humans, but better safe than sorry.”

  Gabriel laughed.

  “That’s always been my motto.”

  “And you’re still alive.”

  Then a cloud flickered over Terri-Ann’s fair-skinned face. Her mouth drooped. And the life in her eyes that had glittered into being as they prepared the truck vanished like a spark from a campfire rising then dying.

  Gabriel returned his attention to the present. Something, a wolf, coyote, bobcat or mountain lion, had removed Vinnie’s left arm and carried it off. To eat, presumably. He picked up the binoculars and left the cool of the cab. He walked round to the truck bed and placing a boot on the massive rear tyre, hoisted himself up into the loadspace. Then he climbed onto the roof of the cab.

  From his vantage point six feet three above the sand, he began a slow, methodical sweep of the desert using a pattern taught by the SAS reconnaissance instructors. Ten-degree segments, move out from a hundred yards to three hundred, then back in. Rinse and repeat till you’ve done a complete three-sixty. Reverse direction, same parameters. Move out from one-and-three to three-and-six. Keep going until range of binos is exhausted.

  The first fifteen minutes yielded precisely zero points of interest. So did the next fifteen
. And the next. And the next and the next and three after that. Gabriel paused from time to time to retreat to the Ram’s cabin to cool down and drink some water, marking his last recon-point in the dust on the roof.

  Then, after two-and-a-quarter hours, as he forced his scratchy eyes to stay focused, he spotted something promising. About five hundred and fifty yards out, on his six o’clock, he found a pile of boulders. Until then all he’d picked up as the rubber eyecups of the binoculars pressed into his face were tumbleweeds and the occasional cactus. Here was a definite landmark. According to a local wildlife website he’d consulted the previous evening, mountain lions would make simple dens in low-growing shrubs or piles of rocks. Well, here was a possible den.

  He climbed down and retrieved the Mossberg from the cab. He loaded it, worked the bolt back and forth to chamber a round, and set off towards the rock pile. The heat was immense and it felt like a physical weight, pressing down on Gabriel’s head and encircling his limbs with lead weights. He’d fought in worse though, and simply gritted his teeth and kept walking on, closing the gap between himself and the rocks to two hundred yards, then a hundred, then seventy-five, fifty … at which point he stopped.

  He didn’t want to blunder into a family of mountain lions, especially if it was a mother with cubs. And where he killed the rattler without compunction, he knew he’d find it much harder to despatch a beautiful big cat. The boulders represented the only cover in this small acreage of desert, and Gabriel was completely exposed. What was it Fariyah had said to him in one of their sessions? “You have to be comfortable being you, naked on the landscape.” The psychiatrist had meant it metaphorically, the ability to be happy in one’s own skin, without material possessions or emotional props of any kind. Yet out here, in the middle of a couple of hundred square miles of desert, it felt all too concrete.

  He laid the rifle on the ground to his left. Then, still crouching, selected a stone the approximate size and shape of a hen’s egg. He hefted it in his palm, then took a couple of quick steps, right arm stretched behind him like a javelin thrower’s, and pitched it at a forty-five degree angle towards the pile of boulders. It was a decent throw, and the stone clattered off one of the boulders. He saw the puff of rock chips first, then heard the dry clack a fraction of a second later.

  Holding his breath, he waited for an onrushing momma lion, enraged at this attack on her cubs. But clearly, if she’d been using the rock pile as a den, she’d moved on or was out hunting.

  With the Mossberg held across his body, he approached the boulders, breathing as shallowly as he could manage. As he came within a few feet he stopped and observed the ground in front of the boulders. Here and there he saw dried piles of what he assumed was mountain lion shit. Bingo! Just to be on the safe side, he tossed a handful of pebbles into the centre of the boulders. The effect took him by surprise. Instead of a sharp clatter of stone on rock, what reached his ears was an irritable, high-pitched yowling. No bounding, tawny carnivore, however, so he walked towards the source of the noise. Beyond a boulder that came up to mid-thigh on him were three stripy, spotty cubs, sporting dark patches on their muzzles like bushy moustaches.

  “Hey, little fellers,” he crooned to them as he stepped into their domain. “I’m not here to hurt you, so keep it down, OK?”

  Two of the cubs were timid and stayed back, huddled together in the lee of a boulder, but the third – older, braver or both – made repeated feints towards Gabriel’s boot.

  He ignored the cub and began a fast but methodical search of the den, first slinging the Mossberg across his back on its webbing. The ground enclosed by the boulders was bare of anything except a few tufts of tawny fur. He frowned then climbed over the rear wall of rocks. What he saw there caused him to utter a quietly hissed, “Yes!”

  A scatter of sun-bleached bones lay not ten feet from the den. He clambered over the rocks and ran to the bones. No anthropologist, but possessed of a soldier’s rudimentary knowledge of human anatomy, he could tell these were arm bones. Squatting beside them he picked up the three long bones one at a time. The radius and ulna, thinner and slightly curved revealed nothing beyond tooth marks. But the thicker bone of the upper arm, the humerus, yielded a prize he knew would take him one step closer to Vinnie’s murderer.

  22

  You Scratch My Back

  ROUGHLY halfway between elbow and shoulder joints, the humerus bone harboured an intruder. A copper-jacketed bullet. Gabriel pulled a folding knife from his pocket, extracted the big blade and prised the bullet from the bone’s embrace. He held it up to his eye. The round-nosed projectile was distorted but not mangled. The striations from the pistol’s barrel rifling were visible to the naked eye, and Gabriel knew that under a microscope they’d yield the identity of the gun that fired the bullet.

  It was easy enough to imagine the trajectory that had led to the bullet’s ending up in Vinnie’s left upper arm. Once inside the human body, bullets were apt to perform in ways that defied logic. In through the groin, out through the side. In through the face, out through the neck. Oh yes, Gabriel Wolfe, decorated war hero, had seen plenty of ways these small lead, steel and copper intruders could end a man’s life. Or a woman’s. Or, occasionally, a child’s. This one had penetrated Vinnie’s sternum, probably smashed through his heart, and then ricocheted off the interior of the shoulder blade – the scapula the pathologist had called it – before exiting the side of his ribcage and lodging in his upper arm. The autopsy report made no mention of an exit wound, but then, given the state of the body, that was forgivable.

  The bone itself would add nothing to the trail, and as Terri-Ann had only just buried the majority of her husband’s remains, Gabriel made a decision. He dropped the humerus onto the ground and zipped the bullet into a trouser pocket. Leaving the cubs to their squalling, he trotted back towards the Ram.

  He was within thirty yards of the truck when a low, threatening growl made him stop and turn. Crouched low to the ground, its tawny fur almost the same colour as the sandy soil against which it was flattened, was a mountain lion. The cubs’ mother, he assumed. Her haunches were wagging slowly from side to side, and he could see the muscles bunching beneath the pelt as she made ready to charge at this intruder. Maybe she could smell her cubs on him. Maybe she just didn’t like humans on her patch. Either way, he was in trouble.

  Maintaining eye contact, Gabriel matched her crouch. His knees emitted a volley of tight little pops like distant small arms fire, and he noticed with interest the way her ears twitched forwards and back with each miniature detonation. He scraped up a handful of the gritty desert in his left hand and closed his fist, then just as slowly straightened. She watched him minutely throughout his descent and ascent, but she made no move to close with him.

  Not wanting to kill, yet being prepared to kill is, some would say, the mark of a good soldier. Not for the soldier the layman’s gung ho image of someone “paid to kill.” You’re paid to do your duty. To your country, your regiment, your team, your friends. You’re paid to complete the mission, to follow orders. If killing is part of that, so be it. And so it was with the mother lion. Gabriel had no wish to kill her, no wish to leave the three cubs orphans, which he knew would mean food for some predator higher up the food chain. All the same, using the imperceptible movement drilled into him by Master Zhao, he stretched his right hand behind him and liberated the Glock from his waistband. Its barrel clicked against the stock of the Mossberg, and the lion emitted another low growl that set the hairs on the back of Gabriel’s neck on end.

  The growling increased in volume, and she twitched her dark-tipped tail from side to side, looking for all the world like a domestic tabby stalking a wind-up mouse across the Axminster.

  Now she did move, taking a cautious step closer. Then another.

  Gabriel’s pulse was bumping uncomfortably in his throat, and adrenaline was coursing through his bloodstream, making him hyper-alert and as ready to fight as the beast now advancing steadily towards him.
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br />   She closed the distance between them to ten feet.

  He fired a warning shot over her head.

  She reared back and hissed, displaying a magnificent pair of yellowish fangs, fully two inches from gumline to tip. But she didn’t retreat.

  Gabriel pointed the Glock directly at her head and moved his left arm back.

  The next few seconds passed as if in slow motion.

  The cat bunched her haunches once more then unwound her muscles into a spring.

  Catching the initial movement skyward, Gabriel slid to his right, out of her trajectory, and brought his left arm round, opening his fist as it moved towards the lion’s face.

  She passed harmlessly in front of him and caught the handful of sand, grit and dried earth full in the face, most of the small, sharp particles stippling her eyes.

  As she landed, in a half-twist, yowling in fury and batting at her face, Gabriel spun round and tore off towards the Ram.

  He could hear the thud of her paws on the ground as he sprinted for safety.

  Five yards.

  Four.

  Three.

  Two.

  He wrenched open the driver’s door and had his right boot on the running board when the lion sprang for the second time.

  The lion’s left paw hit the edge of the open door, sending her twisting off-target. But the right, even as she spun out of control, raked down Gabriel’s back.

  Without the partial protection of the Mossberg, his flesh would have been sliced down to the bone. As it was, the rifle’s fore-end took the initial force of the strike, before the four claws slashed his shirt into ribbons. His momentum carried him onto the front seat, and he kicked out behind him, catching the lion a glancing blow on the shoulder. But it was enough. As she fell back, he yanked the door handle, slamming the door with a bang.