“Don’t. Don’t reach for anything. And stop your damn squirming. Spread your arms—not like that, dumbass. I want your hands away from your body; as far from the gun as you can get them.”
I lay in a sodden crevice between trees. My shoulders were blocked by coiled roots and deadfall. I scanned the area around my head before threading my left arm through the tangle. Then, with exaggerated difficulty, I extended my right hand until it rested behind the roots. It was because of what I had just seen: a flash of silver. My pistol had landed there.
“What’s your problem, girl?”
“It hurts. I think you broke my arm.”
“Good. Your shooting hand. Tell me the truth. Where’s that goddamn key?”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s a python on my boat. Look for yourself. It crawled up there to get warm.” In a hurry, I added, “Don’t—I was lying!” because he straddled me, moving as if to crush me with a knee.
“No more of your bullshit. Where is the key?”
“In my bag,” I said. “There’s a zipper pocket on the flap. The key’s in there.”
The man stepped back and went through the bag. As he scattered my things on the ground, a baritone voice called, “Hey . . . Buddy. Buddy Luck! Don’t leave me, man. I’ll triple what I paid. Are you there? Goddamn it . . . ANSWER ME.”
Larry howled in response, “Kiss my ass, Martinez!” and held up the spare boat key in triumph. Then, looking down, started to say, “Put on your dancing shoes, girl, because—”
That’s as far as he got before he saw the pistol; me, sitting up now, my eyes staring cold, ready to pull the trigger. And I would’ve done it, shot him square in the chest, had he moved toward me. Instead, he backed away and dropped the machete as if in surrender.
It was a ploy to defuse my willingness. He waited until I was getting up, then sprinted toward the water, using trees as cover.
I followed. By the time I exited the mangroves, he was almost to my skiff, which had drifted a little but not far. A huge man with a charred mustache was easily tracked over the pistol sights, yet I didn’t fire. His back was to me; he was slogging along, muck up to his knees. An easy target.
That’s not the only reason I didn’t fire. I wanted to see what happened. If he made it to the boat and climbed aboard, yes, I’d pull the trigger—better to wound an unarmed man than to be lost to a place like this.
It all depended on the python. Larry hadn’t noticed what resembled six feet of fire hose stretched across the stern. The tail, my warning flag. That’s all that was visible. It lay as motionless as a hose, too. The snake was still a lifeless lump due to hypothermia.
Larry doesn’t know that, I thought. When he sees what’s in there, he’ll panic again and run.
If he didn’t . . . ?
That decision could wait. I would let it play out, watching from the water’s edge.
Larry stumbled, fell sideways. His bulk made a mighty splash, displacing a geyser that sprinkled the deck of my skiff.
I watched the python’s tail twitch, then twitch again. Or was it an illusion created by waves rocking the hull?
The big man righted himself, tried to stand and fell forward, but this time lunged within a body length of the skiff.
I watched the python’s tail slowly curl itself into a question mark. Or was that imaginary, too? When angry, I am often guilty of perverse hope.
Larry did something smart that Roberta and I had learned weeks ago. He closed the distance by belly crawling, then reached up and slapped a big hand on the gunnel so he could hang there and catch his breath.
My eyes swung, hoping for a reaction, but there was nothing to watch. The python’s tail lay as immobile as a frozen chunk of pipe.
I’d holstered the pistol but drew it when the man noticed me for the first time. Immediately, he turned his back and hollered, “Once I get the motor started, you’re welcome to come aboard. But not with that damn gun.”
“Look what’s on the deck,” I said. “You might change your mind about me and my gun.”
He swung his head around, still sitting on his butt in the water. “In here?” He rapped the hull with his knuckles. “I don’t give a shit. All I know is, you won’t shoot an unarmed man in the back. That would look real good in a magazine, the famous girl fishing guide . . .” His voice trailed off because of a sudden change in my behavior. He’d seen a swift shift in countenance, and I’d raised the pistol as if to shoot him in the head. “Hey, don’t! I said you can come along. What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“I warned you,” I said, barely able to whisper. “Move . . . Get away from there.”
The man considered the pistol’s angle and looked up to see what I was aiming at. His brain had only a microsecond to process the image—a swaying lamppost with a serpent’s head, a flicking tongue the width of a pitchfork.
I fired.
The python struck.
Larry screamed.
TWENTY-NINE
More than a month after returning from Choking Creek, I drove Roberta to her obstetrician’s office in South Fort Myers. We were unaware that March 30, a Friday, was considered National Doctors’ Day until we entered to find baked goods on a tray in a room decorated with balloons. Fittingly, they were about fifty-fifty pink and blue.
I am not a bows-and-ribbons type of person, so could only pretend to appreciate their gaiety.
Roberta said, “See why I like the place? Only a woman doctor would feed me brownies before ordering me to lose weight. Not that she will”—my friend and business partner took a bite—“but she might if someone doesn’t finish off that fudge. Get to work, Hannah, or I’ll have to fight that skinny nurse for the tray.”
I selected crackers and a wedge of cream cheese instead. Roberta felt betrayed until I opened my shoulder bag and produced a jar of marmalade, which I dolloped out liberally.
“Is that new?”
“Right off the stove. I made a fresh batch yesterday.”
“Not that. That! I don’t remember seeing it.”
She was referring to the vintage leather bag I’d placed beside my chair. Yes, it was new. A present to myself after, despairing, finally throwing away my favorite shoulder pack. Bloodstains are tough to remove from ripstop nylon. I associated them with Larry Luckheim, another form of stain. He’d bled a lot—not an episode I cared to revisit. An afternoon spent answering questions from police, then reporters, had taken the dazzle out of what happened after the python anchored its teeth in Larry’s head.
“Try this,” I said, and heaped marmalade onto a cracker.
With roots in 4-H homemaking, Roberta would not have faked her wonderment when she took a bite. “Oh my lord . . .” Her eyes widened “You made this?”
I showed her the hand-lettered label:
Mother Tree
Sour Orange Marmalade
“Incredible. And so . . . different. I’ve never had anything that comes close.”
“It’s easy to make. Just sugar and oranges, then a lot of boiling. Separate the pulp, and the more sliced peeling you add, the better. That makes it gel—the natural pectin in the skin. You already know the real secret.”
“Special oranges.” She smiled, and reached for another cracker.
Special. Yes, they were.
In the vintage leather bag was my laptop. Through emails, Dr. Gentry and her husband had kept us updated on their campaign to make our efforts profitable. An application for a provisional patent had been filed. Every t and i crossed and dotted. According to their inside sources, ours was the first to claim a foothold in an important, esoteric niche.
Roberta got up to use the restroom, muttering something about “Even faucets get a break.”
Pregnant women, I had learned, do love a good joke about peeing.
I watched her waddle away, then opened my computer and found Dr. Gentr
y’s most recent email.
Ladies, I had a great conversation with Vern Norviel of Berkeley, one of the nation’s leading legal experts on intellectual properties and biotechnology. I have good news. Sequencing of samples you provided last month suggest they are more closely related to original Spanish seed stock than any previously tested. Congratulations!
According to Vern, if the clones prove to be more resistant to parasites/pathogens, the beneficial DNA from your plants can be reproduced. This is done via a gene processing device, then inserted into the DNA of modern varietals. The technique is a genetic breakthrough, recently named with the acronym CRISPR. (See below.)
Vern is going to put me in touch with Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church (he was the first to do Neanderthal sequencing), who might be willing to join in as a partner for profit (and fun).
There was still a lot of lab work and experimentation to be done, of course. Various scion varietals would have to be grafted onto our Spanish rootstock, then nurtured to fruition—something Roberta looked forward to during her maternity leave. The process was daunting. It would be two years or more before any conclusions could be drawn regarding how resistant our hybrids were to citrus greening disease. Yet, at any stage of the process, Dr. Gentry had told me, I could sell my percentage of the partnership and walk away. She had an investor who’d already offered 1.5 million dollars for my share, and the Gentrys were confident the figure would double within a year.
Roberta returned from the restroom only to be summoned by the nurse. I shouldered my new bag and went out for air, focusing on the door rather than a room full of very ripe, rosy-cheeked women. How much champagne and backseat jockeying, I wondered, did their numbers represent?
My peevish attitude accompanied me outside to the parking lot, where I rationalized my mood. Seduction isn’t a word, it’s a drama. Implied are three components: an instigator, a willing participant, and an objective, although the participant can be just as eager; slyer, too.
I was also aware the objective might be a whistle-stop. Or a life-changing destination.
As the women inside might agree, the distance that lies between the two is incalculable.
• • •
Marion Ford was on my mind. Under the guise of awarding him a partnership, I’d hoped to meet him for dinner to explain the windfall he might share.
Pure optimism on my part. The biologist is a difficult man to locate, let alone pin down. I think it was only out of concern for my mental health that, a few days after my return from Choking Creek, he answered the phone.
“How’re you holding up?” he’d said. “That was quite a story in the newspaper.”
Ford didn’t read newspapers, but the deception was a kindness. Because of recent headlines, I couldn’t fuel my skiff without being gawked at or congratulated for courage I do not possess.
“Fine, just fine,” I replied.
The biologist understood. He skipped to the reality of the matter, saying. “Yeah. It can take a while.”
We’d met at sunset on Useppa Island, a small, historic resort that lies equidistant between his lab and my transient floating home. Dinner transitioned smoothly into a night in the Barron Collier Suite, on the second floor of the Collier Inn.
Champagne wasn’t involved; several margaritas were. Ford is not an abstemious man, but he is disciplined. It took some effort to charm him into more than one drink.
Charming him into bed proved more difficult. The dangers were obvious, and my efforts had the flavor of desperation, which we both realized. With a less understanding friend, I would have felt humiliated.
With the big Victorian suite to myself, I slept alone.
Long after midnight, wearing a silken robe, I’d gone out on the balcony and counted stars. Literally counted them. It was a technique the biologist had suggested when overwhelmed by emotion or the horror of certain events.
“Do math problems. It’s the only way to disengage the right side of the brain. You’ll be surprised.”
Ford, a left-brained pragmatist, was correct if I used a pencil and paper, but counting stars did not work. Details, odors, sounds—particularly sound—came spiraling back. All I had to do was close my eyes to relive events in present tense:
Larry Luckheim clings to my skiff, unaware of the monster elevating itself behind him. He says something defiant—the words don’t register because my world has gone silent. The chrome pistol barrel is all I see until, there it is! the serpent’s head, a mass of diamond scales wherein twin goat’s eyes glow. Its mouth is stitched. In my mind, a flash association is made: a zombie; the way a zombie’s lips are sewn.
The mouth opens. A tongue slaps out, two pitchfork probes taste the air. They taste Larry’s skin, the heat of his flesh. The tongue slaps data back inside to a reptilian brain.
The python stiffens, alert. Its Doberman-sized head tilts toward the water. My gun sights are not wide enough to frame the distance between the two lucent eyes.
The snake sees Larry.
I attempt to shout but can only whisper, “Move! Get away from there.”
Larry, looking up, screams. I pull the trigger once, twice, yet the python strikes, and the fang-on-bone crunch is sickening. Twenty feet of reptile has spilled itself into the water before I realize the screaming has stopped.
The man’s head has disappeared inside the snake’s hinged jaws. The man’s body is aswarm with frantic scales and splashing while the python coils. A squealing noise escapes the chaos. It ascends to penetrating animal decibels.
I lower the pistol as I watch. I turn away, nauseated . . . then stumble toward the machete, unsure if I am willing to help.
I am not willing but do it anyway when I hear Larry moan, “Help me, I’m hurt . . . I can’t see!”
The snake, in its death throes—and a bullet in its brain—has released the man who intended to rape me. This is something Larry will admit when he’s out of the hospital and in a prison psych ward. He has lost an eye, and most of his mind, but a bit of his conscience will return.
On Useppa Island that night, more than a month ago, no wonder it had been impossible to sleep.
Now, alone in a parking lot, waiting for Roberta, the details had lost some of their sting but not all. Just as the biologist had counseled, it would take a while. A lifetime, perhaps.
Raymond Caldwell had proved that. A week after his “disappearance,” a weary search party, while hacking through vines, found a giant loaf of reptilian scat. Inside were fragments of hair and bone . . . and one shiny, bright copper bracelet.
When detectives yet again challenged my decision to rescue Larry but leave Caldwell behind, I silenced them with a truth that was also a lie:
I only had one pair of handcuffs.
• • •
The obstetrician was a methodical woman—very thorough, Roberta had warned—so I waited in my SUV rather than a room full of balloons and cheery women who had not shared a smile when shuffling off to pee.
That was okay. I had work to keep me busy while awaiting appointments of my own. Inside my vintage leather shoulder bag, separated from the laptop compartment, was my checkbook, my wallet, and other business-oriented necessities. A folder containing documents relating to Salt Creek Gun Club was there, but no signed deed.
Not yet. Lonnie Chatham, not by choice, had entered a labyrinth known as the criminal justice system. In the cement cap of a weir that spilled water, police had found her confession written twenty years earlier. In the crocodile pond, they’d also found a femur belonging to the real Sabin Martinez, a professional “Lysol man” who, for reasons unknown, had fallen for at least one fatal lie.
That’s what I suspected anyway. And what I intended to tell the district attorney later in the day—among other things, including my conviction that Reggie had been murdered, too. Dear, dear Reggie. In this life, there are people we meet too late to apprecia
te all that is good and loyal in them, or to benefit from what they have to teach.
I’d thought a lot about the little chauffeur. It is impossible not to cling to the past. And just as impossible not to move on.
My deposition was scheduled for four p.m. It was now one-thirty, which wasn’t much of a cushion on a day that included a meeting with the Gentrys and, hopefully, the Friday-night party at Dinkin’s Bay, where the biologist lived.
Maybe he would be there; more likely, he would not. A man on the run does not keep a calendar, nor is he likely to answer the phone.
Marion Ford was on the run. Before Useppa, I’d only suspected the motives for his sudden departures and long absences. That night, though, he’d told me just enough to spare my feelings.
As a seductress, I was a failure. As the friend of a man in danger, however, my desire to provide comfort was genuine. The next morning, very early, we had both found solace in a space that, only twice in my life, had I allowed myself the freedom to explore.
I had no problem admitting this to myself—unlike my first indiscretion. With the biologist, it was different. Once, we had been lovers. Like me, he lived alone. He would probably die alone. Marion Ford would never have cause to say to me, “Please admit it was more than just a kiss.”
Kermit Bigalow had said something similar. Just thinking about those words still caused me to wince with regret.
In my bag was a letter I’d written to Sarah, expressing my sadness about the death of her father. I’d gone on and on, about what a fine man he was and how much he’d cared for her, because I knew the letter would never be sent. It was my way of attending a funeral I had no right to attend.
I opened the letter now and reread a passage about fishing, and my boat, if she’d like to drive it, and the wealth she might inherit thanks to a project her father had been working on prior to his death.
That was enough. I couldn’t send the letter, and I couldn’t read it again without bawling, so I put it away and checked the time.
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