by Carl Hiaasen
From the truck Angie tried to call Jerry Crosby. He didn’t pick up, so she left a message saying that fucker Pruitt was back in action. Next she tried to reach Paul Ryskamp in the hope he was finished sulking. Since he didn’t answer the phone, she drove to the building where the Secret Service had its West Palm office. Without the keypad code to the agency’s private elevator, Angie found herself staking out the lobby. Her khaki ensemble made it impossible to blend in, and before long an agent appeared, handed her a clip-on laminate and led her upstairs. Ryskamp was dressed in total tiki-bar mufti, including flip-flops.
“I’ll have an apple margarita,” Angie said, “with a floater.”
Ryskamp pointed at the bank of surveillance monitors upon which her movements had been tracked from the moment she’d parked the pickup.
“I tried calling first,” she said. “I figured you were still pissed.”
“I wasn’t, and I’m not.”
“Once again, you’re a terrible liar.”
Ryskamp’s smile wasn’t quite the same as before. “I’m not mad, Angie. But if you’re here to discuss the subject we’ve already exhausted, then Agent Frey will be taking you back downstairs.”
She said, “Don’t worry, I’m not here about Beltrán. This is personal.”
“Have a seat.”
“Man, when you hit the Off switch, you hit it hard.”
“So, what’s up?”
Angie told him about Pruitt’s phone calls to Joel. “Supposedly he moved out of the county and vanished. I need some help, Paul.”
“He doesn’t sound smart enough to vanish.”
“Even if he did, you people can find anybody. That’s your thing. Some meth-head living under a bridge says he’s gonna pop the President, you guys have the crazy fool locked up by the end of the week.”
“Sometimes,” said Ryskamp.
“Pruitt might be in Iceland for all I know, but he’s still gotta pay rent and utilities, or at least have a credit card. For sure his name and address are in a database somewhere.”
“Has he ever done anything worse than make phone calls?”
“Look, he’s threatening my stepson and his girlfriend. I can’t take a chance that he hasn’t suddenly stripped his gears.”
“Say I was able to locate him. Tell me what you’d do with the information, Angie.”
“Notify the authorities that have legal jurisdiction?”
“Give me an effing break.”
“Paul, I promise not to feed any other part of his anatomy to a gator.”
“Honestly? I don’t give a shit if you do, as long as the trail doesn’t lead back to me. Let me see what I can dig up.”
“For real? You’re gonna help me out?”
Ryskamp said, “Go home and do some laundry.”
Angie glanced down, frowning at the stain on her shirt. “It’s just bunny pee. Want to meet up later for a drink?”
“Sorry, I’m working. The President’s in town.”
“No offense, but what are you trying to pull off with this Parrothead look?”
Ryskamp laughed. “Carefree island dude who doesn’t get noticed.”
“Then you need to gain about twenty pounds.”
“Uh, okay.”
“That’s a compliment, sir. Means you’re too cut to be wearing a baggy shirt covered with palm trees.”
As he walked her to the elevator, Angie asked, “Are you and I done, Paul? Date-wise, I mean.”
“I believe so.”
“God, was my Diego plan really so terrible? Before all that, things were going peachy. You even told me I was great in bed. Not just great—amazing.”
“Sssshh,” he said.
“My new plan is cleaner. You don’t have to be involved in any way.”
“We’re on camera,” he whispered without moving his mouth. “And our people can read lips.”
“Uh-oh,” Angie murmured.
As the elevator doors opened, she shook Paul’s hand and said in a clear firm voice, “I appreciate you taking the time to meet me with me, Agent Ryskamp.”
“You’re welcome, Ms. Armstrong. Thank you for dropping by.”
* * *
—
They turned up her Pandora playlist to cover their voices, and they held each other for a long time in the darkness. Mockingbird kept telling him everything would turn out all right, and Keith Josephson kept saying no, it wouldn’t.
“Some of the people who work here know about us,” he said. “They’re talking.”
“Cheap gossip, Keith, that’s all. Nobody can prove a thing.” She didn’t tell him about Fay Alex Riptoad’s loaded remark at the Potussies photo session.
“The agency’s sending me back to D.C.”
“Not happening,” said Mockingbird.
“A special agent named Jennifer Rose will be replacing me on your detail.”
“Definitely not happening.”
Keith said, “The last thing you need is a public scandal.”
“I told you, hon. My husband’s people would do everything and anything in their power to cover this up. And it’s my word against whose? Some nosy busboy from Belgrade?”
“If I don’t go back to Washington, I’m done.” Keith sounded frayed and desolate.
Mockingbird said, “You don’t get it. The Secret Service won’t do anything the White House tells them not to.”
“You’re wrong. And even if for some reason they agreed to leave me where I am, my career’s basically over. Besides, your husband won’t want me around, especially if he finds out what I am.”
“Oh great. Let me guess: You’re a spy.”
“Worse, actually in his eyes.” Keith confided to Mockingbird that his real name was Ahmet Youssef, and explained why it had been changed. “I agreed to do it only because they said they needed me on this detail. Don’t cry.”
“Shit, Keith,” she said, wiping her eyes with the corner of a pillowcase.
“This is all on me. I should’ve been…I don’t know. Stronger.”
“Meaning you should have said no when I hit on you. Right?”
He walked over to the window. “I’m on a flight out of Lauderdale tomorrow night.”
“You could quit and go to work for Black Eagle.” Mockingbird was talking about a private security contractor with which the administration had unsavory ties. “I could set it up with one phone call,” she said, then quickly added: “Never mind. That won’t work.”
“No, ma’am.”
Both of them knew their affair couldn’t survive if he left the agency. They would never get to see each other.
“I should head back to the hotel now,” he said.
“Not yet.”
“Strathman knows I’m here. So do the other agents on the shift.”
“Of course they do.” Mockingbird reached up and turned on a light. “So what? You’re still officially on the job, right?”
“As of tonight, yes.”
“Then please open that bottle of shitty Chablis.”
“Not allowed,” he said.
“The wine’s for me, not you. Stay awhile. Please, Ahmet.”
EIGHTEEN
The Key Lime pie that Mastodon devoured punctually every night came from a mom-and-pop bakery in Marathon. When the President was in Washington, the pies arrived in lots of a dozen on a Grumman C-2 based at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station near Key West. During his vacations at Casa Bellicosa, the pies were delivered by refrigerated truck directly to the mansion. The trip from the Middle Keys to Palm Beach took roughly four hours on the Turnpike, depending on traffic. Typically the driver made a bathroom stop at the Pompano Beach service plaza. He was away from the truck for fewer than six minutes on the afternoon of the security breach, but there was no video because the camera posted in tha
t quadrant of the parking lot had been disabled by someone with a pellet gun.
Later, the director of the Secret Service would be summoned before a Senate subcommittee and questioned about why Mastodon’s Key Lime pies hadn’t been transported in an unmarked vehicle. The director would explain that the small bakery didn’t own any trucks without signage, that the cost of using a government rig would have been exorbitant, and that in any case the hardworking couple that made the pies felt it was good advertising to have the bakery’s name on display, especially when delivering to such a prestigious zip code.
The time was five-twenty p.m. when the tangy shipment from Marathon arrived at the service entrance of Casa Bellicosa. Two white-clad Brits on the kitchen staff stood in wait while the driver, whose name was Guppo, backed up the gaily painted Betancourt Pastries chariot. It was he who noticed that the truck’s cargo compartment wasn’t locked, but he assumed he’d forgotten to do it. He rolled up the door, stepped into the cooler, pulled the wide tray from the rack, and let out a sound that changed from a quizzical hum to a terrified shriek.
A long mottled snake had threaded itself among the delicacies. It wasn’t moving because reptiles become dormant in cold temperatures, a herpetological fact unknown to Guppo. He reasonably feared he was about to get chomped and possibly squeezed to death.
So he dropped the heavy tray of presidential pies and ran.
The British kitchen workers resisted the impulse to follow him. They knew Mastodon would go raging apeshit without his beloved dessert, though the pies scattered in the truck looked unsalvageable. When the tray had fallen, the plastic containers popped open. Now the silky coils of the great python were smeared with citrine filling, whipped Chantilly cream, and crumbs from the fractured graham-cracker crusts.
However, in a lone corner on the other side of the motionless beast, sat a single, intact Key Lime pie. The lid of the container had been sprung, yet the fluffy treat looked perfect.
“I’m going for it,” one of the workers announced.
“Are you crazy?” said the other. “Let the fat toad eat ice cream!”
“My visa’s up next month. If I do this, I’m golden,” the brave one said. “Maybe I’ll even get a raise.”
“Or maybe you’ll get your dumb ass strangled,” said his co-worker, and took off.
The brave one pressed his back to the inside wall of the bakery truck, edged nervously past the torpid snake, and picked up the miracle pie. He balanced it one-handed over his head as he sidestepped out of the cooler, and he continued carrying it that way as he hurried to the Casa Bellicosa kitchen, where he arrived beaming.
* * *
—
“This is fun,” Angie said. “The Three Musketeers, together again.”
They were gathered in the dark around her pickup, which she’d parked next to the Betancourt Pastries truck at the delivery ramp of the President’s mansion.
Chief Jerry Crosby asked, “Did you bag the damn thing?”
“Yes, sir. Wanna see?”
Special Agent Paul Ryskamp was all business. “In your professional opinion, how did this happen?”
“Someone put the snake inside the bakery vehicle,” Angie said. “There’s no natural way it could have gotten there.”
“Maybe it crawled in through the cooling system.”
“No, it’s way too thick to fit. Anyway, pythons hate the cold.”
“So the person who did this,” said Crosby, “knows how to handle those things.”
“And also where the President gets his pies.” Angie looked at Ryskamp. “Wasn’t there a big write-up about the bakery in USA Today?”
“Two weeks ago,” the agent acknowledged tightly.
“Paul, at first I didn’t recognize you out here. But, dude, you are rockin’ that charcoal suit.”
“Enough, Angie.”
The chief said, “Can we all agree that monster snakes aren’t all of a sudden showing up in Palm Beach just because they’re bored with the Everglades? Some sick son of a bitch is targeting this community.”
“Looks that way,” said Ryskamp, “but let’s hear from the expert.”
Angie wasn’t positive she detected sarcasm, so her response was straightforward: “I agree—there’s no way this is random. This third one clinches the deal.”
“It’s not number three,” Crosby said bleakly. “It’s number five.”
“What the fuck, Jerry? Why didn’t you call me about the other two?”
“Because I didn’t need you to come catch them. They were already dead. One got chopped to pieces by the Revlon yacht last night while it swam through the inlet. The other was hit by an asphalt truck on A1A at dawn this morning, only a thousand feet from the front gate of this place.”
“Sweet Baby Jesus,” Angie said.
It was another crisp, clear night, and there were trim men in gray suits all over the place. Like Paul Ryskamp, they were armed.
Angie had never been to the Winter White House before, and she was impressed. Even the service driveway had a postcard view of the Intracoastal, bathed by the tropical lights of the West Palm skyline. The Casa’s croquet lawn was even more pristine than the one at Lipid House, although no club members or guests were playing. Likewise, the tennis courts and sapphire swimming pools sat empty. Angie knew it was because the President was in residence. Tonight he was dining privately with his nutritionist, according to Spalding’s sources, and wanted quiet on the grounds. A couple of long-scheduled events had to be rescheduled, including a Humane Society fundraiser featuring rescue cats dressed as figures from Persian mythology.
“How large were the other pythons?” Angie asked Jerry Crosby.
“Double XLs.”
“If this were a natural population shift, we’d be finding all different sizes,” she said. “So it’s not a migration, it’s an unleashing.”
The chief looked stricken. “Please find another word for it.”
Ryskamp, holding a finger on his earbud, said, “You can’t weaponize a damn python. They hardly ever go after humans, correct?”
“One of ’em sure as hell went after Mrs. Fitzsimmons,” Crosby cut in mordantly.
“No, Paul’s right,” Angie said. “Maybe somebody’s just trying to scare the shit out of people. Somebody who gets off on all the panic, like a firebug.”
Crosby said hiding a python in the presidential pies was more than a prank; it was a message. Ryskamp agreed, saying, “Whoever did it knew the route and destination of the bakery truck. That is of serious concern to us.”
Several members of the wait staff emerged on a vape break. Ryskamp motioned for Angie and the police chief to follow him down to the seawall. When they were out of earshot, the agent said: “Here’s what’s happening tomorrow in my world: At nine sharp I’ll be patched into a video conference with Washington, and a person making way more money than I do will ask me—dead seriously—if these snakes pose any threat to the President and his wife. And my answer will be…?”
“A qualified no,” said Angie.
“Despite what happened at Lipid House?”
“Paul, I don’t know a single documented case of a Burmese swallowing anything—man or beast—as gi-normous as the President.”
Crosby, who’d made the mistake of googling “fatal python attacks,” described a grotesque video supposedly taken in an Indonesian rain forest. “The victim was a logger at least six-two. They found his body when they cut open the snake with a chainsaw.”
“No, that whole thing was fake,” Angie said. “Same for all those anaconda videos from South America.”
Ryskamp stared up at the constellations and took a long, quiet breath. “Okay, what about the First Lady? She weighs a hundred and twenty-one pounds.”
“The python would have to be exceptionally large and hungry,” Angie explained, “and the First L
ady would have to be exceptionally unlucky. These things aren’t like Rottweilers—you can’t train ’em to seek and attack.” She smiled grimly. “Can you guys believe this fucked-up conversation?”
Ryskamp remained focused and unflappable, which Angie found attractive; the man had his act together.
He said, “The three of us know one key fact my superiors don’t know, and probably don’t wish to be told: An eighty-eight-pound woman that the President claims was murdered by terrorist immigrants was actually inhaled by a mutant reptile. So the challenge for me is how to do my job and protect the boss without exposing his Diego riff as total bullshit, which would infuriate him and undoubtedly jeopardize the careers of the folks I’ll be speaking with tomorrow. Angie, being the expert, I bet you can’t rule out the possibility that a python larger than the one at Lipid House would be capable of eating a human that weighed more than the late Mrs. Fitzsimmons.”
She said, “Maybe. But a whale like POTUS is definitely safe.”
“Still, there are guests and visitors to Casa Bellicosa who could be, theoretically, on the menu.”
“Size-wise? I guess it’s possible.”
“Ever heard of a python killing somebody and not eating them?”
“Yeah, Paul, but in most cases it’s a neglected pet that gets aggressive and strangles the owner. Hell, a ten-footer’s big enough to choke somebody,” Angie heard herself saying, “just not big enough to swallow ’em.”
Jerry Crosby pressed his knuckles to his temples and walked away mumbling.
Ryskamp said he was done, too. He took out an unmarked envelope and handed it to Angie. She grinned and said, “That was fast. Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t do anything that could put you back in prison.”
“Who, me?”
“One more thing,” the agent said. “Since I’m ninety-nine-point-nine-percent sure the Secret Service has no profiling formula for individuals who drive around ‘unleashing’ giant snakes, my last question is: What kind of psycho should we be looking for?”
