by J. A. Jance
Standing there with my escape hatch open, I realized suddenly that I had another serious problem—I was buck naked. All my clothes were in the other room along with the snake.
Public opinion and shards of broken glass were nothing compared to my dread of the snake, which I imagined was lying in wait, lurking there just outside the bathroom door.
Casting my fate to the winds, I gathered one more towel, tossed it out the window in front of me in hopes it would protect my bare feet from the broken glass. Then, standing on tiptoe on the edge of the tub, I clambered up the wall and wiggled my bare butt out the window.
Thank God I didn’t get stuck.
CHAPTER
7
Shorty Rojas seemed a little surprised when I turned up on his doorstep wearing nothing but a towel and an off-the-shoulder smile. Unperturbed by my tale of the snake, he gave me a bathrobe and a pair of rubber thongs. The robe, a shocking pink chenille, evidently belonged to Dolores and came close to wrapping around me twice. The thongs, blue rubber dime store jobs, were definitely Shorty’s. They were wide enough for my feet, but my heels hung off the back end by a good inch and a half.
I wanted him to exhibit some visible reaction when I told him about the snake. I wanted him to act like it was something out of the ordinary, for him to be more upset, but Shorty Rojas wasn’t the excitable type.
“Happens every time we have a flood,” he said with a shrug. “Them snakes hole up in the bank along the river. When high water gets to ’em, they go looking for someplace warm and dry. What’d you do, leave your door open? Hang on a minute. I’ll go get my snake stick and a burlap bag.”
He pulled a much-used Stetson down from a hook on the wall near the door and shoved it on his head.
“You mean this kind of thing happens often?” I asked.
Shorty didn’t answer. When he returned to the door, instead of packing a gun, which was what I wanted and expected, he was carrying a gunnysack and a stick the size of a cane with a leather noose hanging off the bottom end.
“What the hell are you going to do with that thing?” I demanded.
Shorty looked down at the stick. A leather thong ran up one side of the stick. He slipped it up and down, tightening and loosening the noose. “I’m gonna catch me a snake,” he said impassively. “Take it back outside where it belongs and let it loose.”
“You mean you’re not going to kill it?”
“No, I’m not going to kill it.” He sounded offended, not only by the question but by the implied stupidity behind it. “If every snake in this danged world disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, we’d all be overrun with varmints in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
With a derisive snort and a shake of his head, Shorty Rojas headed up the trail. Chastened, I followed meekly behind.
“Where is it?” he asked over his shoulder as we trudged along.
“I never turned on the lights so I didn’t actually see it,” I admitted, “but it’s somewhere right near the door. At least that’s what it sounded like when I left.”
“If the snake’s by the door, how’d you get out without getting bit?”
“I climbed out the bathroom window.”
He stopped in the glow of a yard light and looked up at me, consternation written on his face. “Out the window, no shit? Musta been a tight fit.”
“I broke out the glass.”
“I see,” he said, and continued on.
Feeling like a cowardly jackass, I stayed outside, hovering nervously on the rim of the porch while Shorty cracked open the door, switched on the light, and peered inside.
“See him?” I asked.
“Nope. Not yet. Probably slipped under a bed or into the closet, looking for someplace to hide, I reckon. You stay outside,” Shorty added. “I’ve got boots on. You don’t.”
Carefully he slipped inside the cabin, easing the door shut behind him. I stood outside, gazing forlornly in at the window while he searched the cabin for the snake. For several anxious minutes I was afraid he wouldn’t find the snake at all, that people hearing the story would assume I had made the whole thing up in a fit of alcohol-withdrawal-induced paranoia.
But then, much to my relief, I saw Shorty struggling with the stick inside the closet. A few minutes later he returned to the door and opened it. Behind Shorty, I saw the empty snake stick leaning against the wall beside the open closet door. In one triumphant hand Shorty held a writhing burlap bag.
I recoiled from the bag in alarm. “Don’t worry,” Shorty said reassuringly. “It can’t hurt you now. Come on in and get some clothes on.” Holding the bag well away from his body, he tied the neck of it in a solid knot, shaking it once to be sure it would hold.
Gingerly I stepped in over the threshold, warily watching the bag, but also looking around the room for any further sign of danger. “What if there’s another one?” I asked. “Is that possible?”
“I suppose,” Shorty replied. “Possible, but not likely, especially since this one here’s a pet.”
“A pet?” I couldn’t believe my ears. “Are you kidding? I thought you said it came from the riverbank.”
“Not this one. It’s somebody’s pet snake all right, one that got loose somehow. And not very long ago, either, from the looks of it.”
“How the hell do you know that? What’s he doing, wearing a dog tag?”
I had given up all hope of taking a shower. Instead, I went to the closet to get some clothes, pulling everything to one side and examining every corner of the closet before I took down my shirt and trousers. In the process I noticed that all of Joey Rothman’s belongings had been removed, not only from the closet but from the rest of the cabin as well. It was as though someone had come through the place and erased every trace of his occupancy.
Shorty set the wriggling bag down near the door and walked into the bathroom, where he examined the broken window. “How come you didn’t take the glass out?” he asked.
“Pardon me?”
“The glass, how come you broke it? Those panes just sit in the frame, you know. They lift right out.”
“You could have fooled me,” I told him with a nervous laugh. “I must not have been thinking too straight. That snake scared the living shit right out of me.”
Shorty retrieved his stick from beside the closet and set it near the bag while the snake rattled ominously. Even muffled by the burlap bag, the sound was enough to make my skin crawl. But Shorty didn’t seem remotely disturbed. If anything, he seemed to be struggling to suppress a grin.
“What the hell’s so damned funny?” I demanded.
“Him too,” Shorty answered, allowing himself a discreet smile.
“What do you mean?”
“Look over there,” he said, pointing. “See that mess there under the corner of the bed?”
I looked where he pointed and was rewarded with the sight of a small, stomach-turning mass of white fur and tiny tails.
“What the hell is that?”
“Snake’s dinner—dead white mice,” Shorty answered. “He scared you, but you musta scared him pretty good too. He barfed his guts out. You ever see any white mice in the wild, by the way?”
“You’re saying I scared him?”
The idea of the snake being frightened of me was so laughable that I felt an almost hysterical chuckle welling in my throat. But Shorty Rojas wasn’t laughing.
“You bet. Coiling up and striking is hard work for snakes. Bothers ’em. Upsets their digestive tracts, especially if they’ve just been fed.”
I wondered suddenly if Shorty was having a bit of old-fashioned cowboy fun with a tenderfoot city-slicker from Seattle, but there was no hint of amusement about him as he spoke. The smile no longer flickered around the corners of his mouth. The twinkle was gone from his eyes. He seemed dead serious.
“How do you happen to know so much about snakes?” I asked.
“My cousin’s kid, Jaime. He went to the university and works in Tucson now at a place called the
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. He claims snakes are more scared of people than we are of them. He says that after a captive snake gets fed, it needs to be left alone and quiet until it has a chance to digest the meal, twenty-four hours or so anyway.”
Shorty was quiet. The snake rattled one more time as if to remind us that it was still present. Hurriedly, I pulled on a pair of socks and stuffed my feet into my other pair of shoes. I glanced in his direction and found Shorty staring at the lumpy burlap bag, regarding it with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Even without the mice, I would have known,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I was back at the closet pulling out a sports jacket. I was cold, much colder than the temperature in the room warranted.
“It’s the wrong kind of snake,” he answered. “We have diamondbacks around here, and some Mohave rattlers. Even a few speckled, but this here’s charcoal gray with no markings whatsoever. I’d say it’s an Arizona black from up around the Mogollon Rim. I can’t remember seeing one of them around here before, not ever.”
“If it’s somebody’s goddamned pet snake, what the hell was it doing in my cabin?”
For the first time the full implication of the snake being a “pet snake” hit me. If somebody had planted it in my room, then that somebody had tried to kill me with it as sure as I was standing there. Assault with a deadly weapon. A living deadly weapon.
I turned on my heel and stalked out the door, not even thinking now about the snake in the burlap bag as I walked by it. Someone had just tried to murder me. I wanted to know who the hell that person was.
“Where are you going?” Shorty asked, following me out onto the small porch.
“To call the sheriff. If somebody’s trying to knock me off, I want a detective down here on the double, taking prints and finding out what the hell is going on.”
“There’s already been so much trouble today, with the boy and the flood—” Shorty began, but I cut him off.
“The flood’s one thing, but believe me, Joey Rothman’s murder and this snake are connected. Whoever killed Joey just tried to get me as well. I’m calling the sheriff.”
With that, I left Shorty there on the porch and bounded up the trail. At the door to the dining room I almost collided with people coming out. Not bothering to apologize, I stormed past them. Halfway down the administrative wing’s hall I ran full tilt into Lucy Washington, who was coming from the opposite direction.
“What’s got into you now?” she demanded, stopping in her tracks and barring my way with both hands on her hips. Her full lips ironed themselves into a cold, thin line. She was still packing a grudge from our previous encounter.
“To see Mrs. Crenshaw,” I answered.
“Like hell you are. She’s not here and neither is the mister. What do you want?”
“To call the sheriff’s department.”
She bared her teeth in a forced smile. “Oh, do tell. We’re not going to go through all that again, are we, Mr. Beaumont?”
“We sure as hell are,” I muttered.
Instead of backing away from me, Lucy Washington stepped forward until the top of her head almost touched my chin. There was no getting past her on either side. Lucy Washington was almost as wide as she was tall. Her ample breadth filled up the hallway.
“Now you listen to me, and you listen good. Mr. and Mrs. Crenshaw gave orders that they are not to be disturbed. Period. By you or anybody else. And if you pull the kind of stunt you did last night, if you go near a telephone without permission, I’m calling the cops myself. I’ll have your ass thrown in jail. Understand?”
I tried to be reasonable. “Look,” I said. “Somebody put a snake in my room, a rattlesnake. Shorty Rojas just now got it out.”
Santa Lucia smiled. “Sure he did, and Jesus Christ himself is out in the kitchen helping Dolores Rojas wash all the dishes.”
Out of nowhere, Kelly appeared at my elbow. She was evidently ready to let bygones be bygones.
“Daddy, where were you? We got you a plateful of food, but if you don’t come right now, there won’t be time enough to eat before we have to leave for Wickenburg.”
“That’s right,” Lucy Washington said, flashing me another smile, square-toothed and insincere. “You just do that, Mr. Beaumont. You go have yourself some dinner with your family and get yourself all calmed down. You’ll feel better once you have something to eat.”
“What’s the matter, Daddy?” Kelly asked. “This has been such a terrible day already, how could anything else go wrong?”
Santa Lucia had me right where she wanted me and she knew it. I wasn’t about to say anything more about the snake in front of Kelly or Karen or Scott. It would have scared them to death.
“Nothing’s the matter, honey,” Lucy said. “You take your daddy along with you, feed him his supper, and take him to the meeting. If I happen to talk to either Mr. or Mrs. Crenshaw, I’ll let them know you want to talk to them. They might call in.”
Provoked but letting it pass, I turned and marched away with Kelly following close at my heels. Karen and Scott were still waiting at a table near the center of the almost deserted room. A plate full of cold roast beef and mashed potatoes sat at a clean place setting next to Scott. I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t want to have to sit down and make some kind of phoney excuse or polite conversation. It was far easier to avoid the situation entirely.
Halfway across the room I stopped abruptly and turned around, catching Kelly by surprise. “I’ve got to go see somebody, Kelly. Thanks for getting my food, but I just can’t eat right now. I’m not hungry.”
Hurt, she looked up into my eyes. “You can’t? Daddy, tell me. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
Unfortunately, I’ve always been a terrible liar. Kelly knew it, saw through what I said, but I hurried away before she had a chance to call me on it. Once outside the ranch house, I half walked half ran back down the muddy path to Shorty’s mobile home. He was standing outside, hat pulled low on his forehead, smoking a cigarette, and peering through the inky darkness in the direction of the roiling flood.
“Still hasn’t crested,” he said, looking up as I stopped next to him. “But I think we’re going to be fine. Those sandbags will do the trick.”
“I didn’t come to talk about the flood, Shorty. Where do the Crenshaws live?” I asked.
“In town. Why?”
“That damn nurse again, Lucy Washington. She won’t let me near a phone to call the sheriff. What about you? Would you let me use yours?”
“Would if I could,” Shorty replied, “but the phones are out of order. Have been for a while. Half an hour or more. I tried calling Jaime just as soon as I got back from your cabin. I wanted to ask him what to do with your friend.”
“What do you mean what to do with it?”
Shorty tossed his cigarette. “Hell, man, if I turn it loose here, the damn thing will die. It’s probably never lived in the wild. Besides, it doesn’t belong here. This isn’t its territory. I thought maybe Jaime could keep it in the museum, but I couldn’t reach him. Incidentally, you want to see him? Not Jaime, the snake, I mean. I put him in one of Dolores’ big gallon jars.”
I didn’t much want to see the snake, and yet I did, too. Shorty led me inside. On the floor just inside the door sat a commercial mustard jar with the snake coiled up in the bottom. A series of air holes had been punched into the jar’s lid. The snake must have been at least three and a half to four feet long. Folded back upon itself to accommodate the shape of the jar, its exact size was difficult to discern. It was a deep charcoal gray, black almost, with no markings of any kind. The rattles, somewhat lighter in color, stood upright almost like an antenna in the center of the coil. The snake regarded me malevolently while its wicked-looking forked tongue flickered in and out.
An involuntary shudder shook me, bringing me back to the problem at hand. “I’ve got to talk to the Crenshaws,” I said. “Would you take me to thei
r place?”
Shorty glanced at his watch. “You’re not going to the meeting? The vans will be leaving in a few minutes.”
“Goddamnit, Shorty. Person or persons unknown tried to kill me this afternoon. It’s about time someone at Ironwood Ranch took that news seriously. I sure as hell do.”
I doubt Shorty Rojas had ever quite come to grips with the essential differences between wrangling horses for a dude ranch and doing the same thing for a rehab joint. He hailed from a simpler, less complicated time long before the red-taped vagaries of the Louise Crenshaws and Lucy Washingtons of the world reigned supreme. People were people to Shorty Rojas, regardless of whether they were dudes or drunks.
I’m sure he shouldn’t have, but when I asked him for a ride, he looked at me appraisingly, then shrugged. “Don’t suppose it’ll hurt nothin’ if I take you there. When you finish, I can still drop you off at the meeting later.”
I followed Shorty outside to an elderly Ford pickup parked ten yards up the hill. “Get in,” he said. “She ain’t pretty, but she’ll get us there.”
The pickup fired up after only one try. It slipped and slid some in the muddy track. As we started up the hill, an unopened can of Coors rolled out from under the seat and banged against the side of my shoe. When I reached down to pick it up, it was icy cold.
“Sorry about that,” Shorty said sheepishly as I handed it back to him and he returned it to its place under the seat. “I like to have a cool one of an evening.”
“No problem,” I returned.
We sailed out of the parking lot just as people were beginning to climb into vans for the ride to the meetings in town.