by Carl Hiaasen
“No, sir,” said Angie. “There’s only one item missing, by the way.”
“Which would be…?”
“A dead Burmese python.”
“No shit? How big?”
“Eighteen feet, eleven inches.” Before unspooling the tape measure, Angie had laid out the Lipid House specimen in the parking lot and carefully aligned the severed head with the neck.
She added, “One person couldn’t carry it alone.”
The first cop snorted. “Then how the hell’d a girl your size drag it in here all by yourself?”
“Two sturdy youths from the neighborhood agreed to help me. Ten bucks each,” Angie said. “I told them it was a rubber prop from a movie set. Otherwise they wouldn’t come near it. Somehow it fit in the bottom of the freezer.”
The second cop asked where the python had been found.
“The island of Palm Beach,” said Angie, “winter enclave of the sun-drenched one-per-centers.”
“How’d the damn thing die?”
“I decapitated it with a machete.”
The first cop frowned again. “That’s some sick shit.”
“It’s a state-approved method of euthanizing, sir. You can check it out online.”
“Wait—so whoever broke in and stole your dead snake, they jacked the head, too?”
“They did not.” Angie leaned over and from the deepest corner of the freezer lifted a bulging clear baggie.
“Get that goddamn thing away from me!” the second cop yelled, as his partner thrust the crime report into Angie’s free hand.
Then they were gone.
* * *
—
The lead burglar’s name was Uric. His helper was a dull-eyed fuckwit who worked cheap, basically for cigarettes and Yuengling. The helper wished to be called Prince Paladin. He sat listening to his jams in the grimy paneled van while Uric entered Angie Armstrong’s apartment through the bathroom window.
“It’s not there,” Uric reported crossly when he returned.
The Prince yanked out his earbuds. “So, whassat mean? We don’t get paid?”
“You know anything about computers? Never mind. Dumb question.”
“What’s so ’portant about a croaked snake?”
“I got no idea,” Uric said. “What I do know is that these rich-ass fucks get into some super weird shit. I heard some stories, Holy Christ-ola.”
The Prince snorted and said the only good snake was a dead one.
Uric drove to a mall, parked in front of the Target and leafed through Angie’s checkbook registry. On the 15th of every month she wrote a $118 check that was recorded as “storage rental.” Unfortunately, she didn’t include the name of the company in those entries.
The Prince said, “Shit. We got nuthin’.”
“Bro, I need you to keep the faith.”
“How come? Oh. I get it. ’Til we find the snake.”
“Also, could you shut the fuck up?”
Uric opened Angie’s laptop. He was locked out of the email server, and he couldn’t crack the password. It was aggravating. He suspected that the storage company invoiced electronically, which would have provided both the name and address. After several minutes he gave up, got out of the van and placed the laptop beneath a rear tire of a Suburban LTZ parked beside him.
The Prince said, “How come you did that?”
“To crush the damn thing. What else?”
“But that’s, like, what they call ‘destroying stolen property.’ ”
“There’s no such crime, Prince. The stealing is the part that’s against the law.”
“Maybe the chick just dumped the snake in a ditch.”
Uric said, “No way.”
Angie Armstrong had intended to deliver the giant python to a state laboratory. Tripp Teabull had shared this intel with Uric during their phone conversation, before they settled on Uric’s fee. For some reason, Teabull didn’t want the monster corpse donated to science.
The Prince hopped out and retrieved the laptop. He asked Uric to read through Angie’s check register again and see if there were any men’s names. Uric found an entry for a $250 check that said: Joel/birthday. The Prince tried “Joel” as a password, adding combinations of double numerals that might be associated with a likely year of birth. No luck.
“Try ‘69,’ ” Uric said.
“Seriously? Not even bikers use ‘69’ in their passwords anymore.”
“I do, asshole.”
The Prince tapped in the numbers. “Nope, not it. Hey, what does this chick call her business?”
“Discreet Captures.”
“D-I-S-K-R-”
“No, Your Highness.” Uric spelled it for him. “And don’t put a space in.”
“Yo, score!”
Uric grinned—maybe he’d underestimated this bozo. “Give it here,” he said, reaching for the laptop.
Scrolling through Angela Armstrong’s inbox, he spotted a recent email from Safe N’ Sound Storage. The company’s South Dixie Highway location was displayed at the top of the bill, along with the number of Angie’s warehouse unit: K-44.
The following afternoon, Uric ambled out of the Safe N’ Sound office with a short-term rental contract for unit K-39, and a punch code for the security gate. After dinner he and the Prince stole a white Chevrolet Malibu from an alley behind a discount liposuction clinic. They spent the next stretch of time watching Game of Thrones repeats in some careless fool’s unlocked condo.
At two-thirty in the morning they returned to the warehouse yard. Uric put a sun mask on his face and used a long-armed bolt cutter to sever the wires on the video cameras mounted at both ends of the K corridor. The inexpensive padlock on Angie’s unit succumbed with a clap like a .22.
There was little of value inside except a chest freezer, also locked. The Prince used a crowbar to pop the lid, cursing at the sight of the unbagged, headless python coiled like a psychedelic fire hose. Uric teetered backward.
Although both men were strong and tall—the Prince in his slides stood six-three—they were anxious about transporting the frozen reptile. Their main concern wasn’t the weight—somewhere north of a hundred-and-fifty pounds was Uric’s guess, judging by the length and the whopping lump in its belly—but rather it was their mutual aversion to snakes of any size.
Uric had dropped one of his latex burglary gloves after leaving Angie’s apartment. He’d meant to swing by CVS and steal new pairs for him and the Prince, but he’d forgotten, so they used rags to mummy-wrap their hands. The python’s rigid circularity allowed the thieves to thread it like a tractor tire on a length of loose fence pipe. With cautious half-steps they advanced their frosty load down the K corridor and out the doorway to the parking lot, where they found themselves challenged by the Malibu’s limited trunk space. The Prince was dripping like a plow mule by the time they got the morbid popsicle stowed.
Once they were back on the road, the Prince said to Uric, “Yo, drop me off at that titty bar on Hypoluxo.”
“Drop you off?”
“Yeah. Ain’t we done for the night?”
“No, bro, we ain’t done,” said Uric. “But I agree we deserve some titty time.”
* * *
—
Fay Alex Riptoad was having a golf lesson at the Breakers. From a distance Police Chief Jerry Crosby watched drearily. His only thought: What the fuck is she wearing?
Fay Alex’s shorts, shoes and golf glove were the same shade of lime as the Gatorade with which the chief had rinsed the tobacco from his mouth, back when he played Double-A baseball. Almost all his teammates dipped. Their star closer, a gregarious lefthander named Nuckley, got oral cancer at age thirty-four. By then he was working for Geico at the regional level; fit, married, father of three. They cut a tumor the size of a Bing cherry from under his to
ngue, and eighteen months later he was dead. Jerry Crosby missed the funeral because he was still on road patrol at the time, and his corporal wouldn’t give him the day off. It didn’t escape Crosby’s notice that the corporal was also hooked on dip—Skoal, which had been Nuckley’s favorite brand. The irony was less infuriating than the karmic unfairness that had claimed the cheery southpaw while allowing the ass-wipe corporal to sail on, rolling that perpetual plug in his cheek, spitting the brown juice-crud into a coffee mug on his desk.
Crosby’s own dream of a major-league career had ended with blown-out knees. He married a high-school girlfriend and for a long time worked as a foreman at her family’s citrus packing plant in Sebastian. The groves eventually were sold to a Brazilian fashion model seeking unlimited tons of grapefruit pulp for a dye-free exfoliating scrub that she was trying to launch. Crosby’s favorite uncle, a cop, talked him into joining the Rockledge city force. He discovered he enjoyed small-town law enforcement. When his wife was offered a good paralegal job down in Wellington, Crosby sent his application to the police department in gilded, fussy Palm Beach. He’d never set foot on the famous island but he knew that violent crime there was rare, which was his wife’s only stipulation. The rest of South Florida, she said, was a damn shooting gallery.
And, as Crosby expected, Palm Beach wasn’t a hotbed of felony activity. The day-to-day challenge was trying to deal with a pampered, demanding, half-paranoid citizenry. It took a while for Crosby to adjust, but he advanced up the ranks due to an innate politeness, whiteness, and lack of a redneck accent. Since becoming chief, he’d also been well-served by an uncommon immunity to condescension.
He’d given up all forms of tobacco after his pal Nuckley died, though these days he kept a bong hidden in his office for the occasional crisis. It was the best way to unwind from absurd stress in an absurd town. Once the mystery of Katherine Fitzsimmons’s disappearance was solved, the chief planned to celebrate with the blinds drawn.
“Jerry! Come over here!” From the driving range, Fay Alex Riptoad was signaling with what appeared to be a lofted iron.
Crosby began the uncomfortable walk, drawing the usual stares from other club members. The Breakers employed its own agile though low-key security team, and calling uniformed officers to the property was discouraged except when incidents became unmanageable. Delivering an update on a Missing Persons investigation didn’t qualify as an emergency, but Fay Alex set her own rules. As the chief approached, she shooed away the golf pro, whose relief was manifest in each departing stride.
“Give me the latest. Let’s hear it,” demanded Fay Alex, her sun-spotted claws planted imperiously on the grip end of what was now identifiable as a Callaway nine-iron, its shiny blade embedded in the spongy grass.
The chief said, “We collated all the videos from security cameras in the neighborhood. There’s no sign of Mrs. Fitzsimmons, or anyone resembling her, walking the streets during the critical time frame.”
“And what about the koi pond at Lipid House?”
“We’ve done two dives, Mrs. Riptoad. No remains have been recovered.”
“Suppose we call that good news, shall we? Kiki Pew’s boys are a wreck. The grandchildren, as well.” Fay Alex unplugged the nine-iron from the emerald turf and placed it in her golf bag. “And what about the Missing Persons alert? Any new tips?”
The police chief thought: Why couldn’t we do this on the phone? Standing among the candy-hued golfers, he felt like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl.
“Mrs. Riptoad,” he said.
“What is it, Jerry?”
“Do you know how many people Mrs. Fitzsimmons’s age go missing in Florida? They get disoriented. Light-headed. Confused. They wander off. Or just get in their cars and start driving. Sometimes they even go to an airport, buy a random ticket and board a plane.”
“Your point being?”
“Each time that happens,” Crosby explained, “worried relatives notify the authorities, who send out a bulletin like ours, which gets some media attention for a short while. Then, a few days later, another missing-senior alert is issued for someone new…”
Fay Alex made no effort to hide her disdain. “Surely they’ve got a ranking system. You’re telling me what—that some senile retired shoe salesman who stumbles away from a retirement home could knock someone as important as Kiki Pew off the top of the list?”
“We’ve had no leads that could be considered credible.”
Fay Alex, crossing her damp matchstick arms, said, “Ah, then you did receive some tips!”
“Just one.”
“I haven’t got all day, Jerry.”
Which was horseshit, he knew. Fay Alex had all day, every day.
He said, “Some tourist in Macau claimed to have had his palm read by a woman who looked like Mrs. Fitzsimmons. She spoke fluent Portuguese and wore an opal stud in her left nostril. The tourist had been smoking opium, by the way—”
“Enough, for Christ’s sake. Eeeeee-nough.” Fay Alex laser-drilled the chief over the rims of her oversized shades. “In other words, you’ve got nothing. Zilch-o.”
“It appears she never stepped off the grounds of Lipid House,” he said.
“Come on. You still think she got trashed and fell in the pond?”
“I didn’t say that. Our job is to eliminate the obvious scenarios, and there’s no evidence she ever left the party. No video, no eyewitnesses.”
“Not a party, not a party,” Fay Alex groused. “A charity ball.”
“My advice to the family is post a reward. That always reboots media interest, and it might shake loose some helpful information.”
“Information such as what? My God, you’re not actually suggesting there was oh, what…do you people call it?”
“Foul play,” the chief said.
“Foul play, yes. Here on the island? Get serious.”
Jerry Crosby didn’t live on the island. He lived miles away on the mainland, in a western municipality that grandly called itself Royal Palm Beach.
No beach, of course, and all the royal palm trees got there on a truck. Yet the chief really liked the town—lovely parks, excellent schools. Last July 4th, there were post-pandemic fireworks, a Skynyrd tribute band and a bass fishing derby.
“What kind of reward do you suggest?” Fay Alex Riptoad asked.
Crosby said the larger, the better.
“How large? Fifty thousand? A hundred?”
“That should be plenty.”
“Fine, Jerry. I’ll speak to the boys.” Fay Alex unfolded her arms and peeled off the lime golf glove. “You think Kiki Pew’s dead, don’t you?”
“With each passing day, it seems more likely. I hope I’m wrong.”
“The Potussies are having lunch today at Casa Bellicosa. I’ll not mention your fears about foul play. Possible foul play.”
“There’s no point,” the chief agreed. “Not yet.”
* * *
—
Most days, Angie Armstrong liked her job. She chose to believe she was extending the life expectancy of every creature that she relocated from a traffic-clogged suburb to a safe, quiet place. She was aware that some of her transportees—raccoons, in particular, which adapted ingeniously to life among humans—didn’t appreciate being moved to a habitat where there were no garbage cans to pillage.
Angie felt that all wildlife was better off in the true wild, or the nearest thing to wild that still existed in a state with twenty-two million humans. She felt childishly hopeful every time she opened a travel kennel and watched her relieved captive scamper into the scrub, out of sight. Angie would usually stay for a while, shutting her eyes, listening closely until all she could hear was sweet pure silence; then she’d get in her truck and drive back to the city.
No removal calls had come in all morning, leaving Angie time to sit around wondering why
anyone would go to the trouble of stealing a headless reptile from her storage freezer. Pruitt had been her prime suspect in the apartment break-in—until the warehouse job happened. Appraised together, the two crimes pointed to a more complicated motive than the vengeance fantasy that was driving the ex-poacher.
Angie assumed that her laptop and checkbook entries had led the apartment burglar to the storage unit. Maybe the creep was looking for dope or valuables, but the fact remained that he’d swiped the dead python—and he couldn’t have done it alone.
While she was fixing breakfast, Angie’s attention was drawn to a breaking story on the local TV news: The family of a missing elderly woman was offering $100,000 for information leading to her whereabouts.
It was a strikingly large sum, so Angie wasn’t surprised to learn that the lost woman was a winter resident of Palm Beach. Her name was Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons, age seventy-two.
Such disappearances weren’t uncommon in South Florida, though few families could afford to post six-figure rewards. Angie assumed that Mrs. Fitzsimmons, like many of the elderly who went missing, struggled with Alzheimer’s or some other dementia. Perhaps her family had asked the authorities not to publicize that. An accompanying photograph showed the woman wearing a droopy Santa hat and posing in front of a Christmas tree.
The newscaster concluded his report with a detail that made Angie flip her omelet into the garbage pail and reach for the phone—Mrs. Fitzsimmons had last been seen the previous Friday night at a charity event on the grounds of Lipid House. Only twenty-four hours later, Angie was called to the estate to remove the gorged Burmese python.
Mystery solved: The lump was the missing widow. Had to be.
She made three rapid-fire calls to Tripp Teabull but he didn’t answer, so she ran to her truck. The drive up the interstate to Southern Boulevard was painless, but after leaving the highway Angie began encountering roadblocks—a sure sign that the President was either in town, or on the way.
Angie doglegged northbound on Dixie to the Royal Park Bridge, crossed over to the island, and doubled back down South County toward Lipid House. From the front, the place looked deserted. She made a slow roll past the forged black gates before circling the block. Finding the rear service entrance open, she parked between two supernaturally shiny landscape trailers. Stepping out of the pickup, she was assaulted by the high-pitched din of mowers and gas-powered hedge trimmers. Evidently the bird-themed topiary was being re-sculpted into chessboard pieces, in advance of another gala.
