by Alex Gilly
The motel was called the Eden Inn. She took the cheapest room, lay down on the bed, and looked at the ceiling. It was a hideous ceiling, with peeling paint and a damp patch in one corner. She considered taking a walk outside to take in the beautiful colors in the evening sky, but her weary mind could not shake the idea that the desert was crawling with snakes, and she did not have the energy to defy what she knew was an irrational fear. So instead she took an unsatisfying shower—the stall was cramped, the water pressure barely existent—then wrapped herself in the threadbare towel. Realizing she hadn’t eaten, Mona opened the bar fridge and discovered a bowl of apples with a laminated card reading, “Complimentary fruit from the Garden of Eden.”
Mona bit into an apple and called Finn.
“You sound tired,” he said.
“I couldn’t face the road, so I checked into a motel. I’ll be home tomorrow.”
“Good idea. Where are you?”
“The Eden Inn outside Paradise.”
“Sounds nice.”
She took another bite. “It isn’t,” she said. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Anything happening with the complaint?”
“I went to see Klein. He hasn’t heard anything. He said to wait.”
“I’m sorry. But at least I don’t have to worry about something happening to you out on the water.”
“Yeah. Listen, today at Riverside, I found something shocking.”
“What?”
“I think maybe the cartel knows where our drones are flying. That’s why their drug boats are getting past us.”
“How do you know?”
“We haven’t seen a go-fast for months. None of the crews have. I had a hunch something’s not right. So I looked at the flight path data. Every flight, the drone covers 90 percent of the sector. There’s always a corridor left open.”
“You think the cartel knows this?”
“I think they’re seeing the flight paths before the drones fly. Either someone’s giving it to them or they’ve hacked the system. Leela says the system security there is really bad.”
“Who’s Leela?”
“She’s a detection enforcement officer at AMOC. She’s been showing me around.”
Another irrational fear rose up in Mona. She ignored it.
“Do you trust her?” she said.
“Yes,” said Finn without hesitating.
“Have you told anyone else?”
“Klein. He’s taking it to the commissioner.”
“Do you trust him?”
“The commissioner of Customs and Border Protection?”
“No. Klein.”
“He was at our wedding.”
“Of course. Sorry.”
“You sound as tired as I feel,” Finn said.
“So what’s happening next?”
“Klein will tell the commissioner. My guess is, the commissioner will take it to the secretary of Homeland Security.”
For the third time that evening, a feeling of unfounded dread took hold in Mona. “Michael Marvin?”
“No. He’s not confirmed yet. The acting secretary. Steve Fishman. He may take it to the White House.”
“Nick?”
“Yes?”
“Promise me you’ll be careful.”
* * *
Mona fell asleep. She dreamed strange dreams: standing in the desert, looking up at a beautiful cloudless sky, then a moment later standing in a torrential downpour facing Carmen, who was wearing a bikini, steam rising from her burning skin, but Carmen still smiling, a persistent buzzing sound coming out of her mouth. Mona woke with a start. She realized the buzzing was coming from her cell phone vibrating on the bedside table. She reached for it. The call was coming from a number with no caller ID. Butterflies took flight in her stomach.
“Ms. Jimenez?” said a man’s voice she didn’t recognize.
“Yes?”
“My name is Lou Pischedda. I’m the warden at Paradise Detention Center. One of our detainees, Carmen Vega, designated you as her contact.”
“Carmen? Is she all right?” said Mona.
“I’m afraid not, Ms. Jimenez. There’s been an incident. Ms. Vega is dead.”
* * *
“She was still breathing when I got there,” the doctor said.
They were in the warden’s office at Paradise Detention Center. Mona was sitting in one of two visitors’ chairs in front of the warden’s desk. The doctor was sitting in the other. He had a lanyard round his neck with a security pass on the end, the pass resting on the bulge of his belly. His shirt was too tight, the fabric straining away from the buttons when he twisted toward her. His name was Dr. Woods.
“We did everything we could,” the doctor went on.
“The well-being of our detainees is paramount to us,” added the warden. “We’ve never had anything like this happen before.”
Mona’s briefcase was on the edge of the warden’s desk, next to his nameplate: LOU PISCHEDDA. He handed Mona a document.
“The incident report,” he said.
“Who wrote it?”
“I did.”
Mona started reading. Shortly before six the previous evening—about an hour after Mona had left—the guards did their usual head count when the detainees came in from the yard for dinner. The count came up one short. They found Carmen slumped on a bench near the perimeter fence. The bench was not visible from the door leading into the canteen, on account of the tent that had been erected in the middle of the yard. At 6:05 P.M., they called the nurse.
Mona looked up. “The guards who found her. Are they trained first responders?”
“Excuse me?” said Pischedda.
“They found her unconscious and called for assistance. Why didn’t they try to revive her themselves?”
“They followed our protocol. When it’s an emergency of a medical nature, our people are trained to call one of our medical professionals.”
“That’s your protocol in an emergency? Stand around and wait for a nurse to show up?”
The warden’s leather seat squeaked.
Mona turned to Dr. Woods. “It says here, you gave her a shot of epinephrine. Why?”
“She presented a weak pulse. Her tongue was swollen. I determined she had had an anaphylactic episode.”
“You didn’t realize it was a snakebite?”
“Anaphylaxis is one of the symptoms of opioid overdose.”
Mona bristled. “You thought she was on drugs?”
The warden intervened. “It’s around, unfortunately. They find a way—”
“No. Carmen did not use drugs.”
“Well, let’s see what the coroner finds,” said the warden, his show of sympathy failing to mask the condescension in his tone.
Mona turned back to the doctor. “It says here, you called 911 at 7:20 P.M. It doesn’t say when you gave her the epinephrine,” said Mona.
“Shortly before I made the call.”
“How shortly?”
Dr. Woods looked at the warden, not Mona, when he said, “I examined the patient. I determined she was in anaphylactic shock. Accordingly, I gave her a shot of epinephrine. When I saw that the epinephrine was having no effect, I called 911.”
“Are you even able to identify the symptoms of a snakebite, Dr. Woods?”
“If I may, Ms. Jimenez,” said the warden. “I don’t think we can draw any conclusions until the coroner’s office have finished their report. But I’ve heard of cases like this. It’s more common than people think.”
Mona looked at the early light streaming through the high window above the warden’s head. It was 6:15 A.M. She turned her attention back to the warden. Lou Pischedda was bald on top. He was wearing a suit and tie. He looked concerned. Or he was trying to look concerned. One or the other.
“Cases like this?” she said.
“When someone gets bitten and doesn’t realize it, on a riverbank, or in the long grass. It happens so fast, people don’t even real
ize they’ve stepped on a snake. They think it’s just a bug, a hornet, or something like that.” He moved his hands a lot when he talked.
“I thought they rattled,” said Mona. “I thought you could hear them.”
Pischedda shook his head. “Not all the time. Sometimes they’re quiet.”
“So let me get this straight: You think Carmen got bitten by a snake, didn’t realize it, sat down on the bench, and died without anyone noticing?”
“Well, no. She was still alive when we found her. She died in the ambulance.”
Mona searched the report. “At 7:36 P.M. Sixteen minutes after Dr. Woods called 911.”
Neither man had anything to add to that.
“What did you do for those sixteen minutes, Dr. Woods?”
“I monitored the patient.”
Mona stared at him the way a farmer stares down a gun barrel at a fox that’s been taking her chickens. “You monitored her?”
“I made sure her airway remained clear. I gave her oxygen.”
The warden intervened again. “Ms. Jimenez, I really think it’s best if we wait for the coroner’s report,” he said. “To avoid any confusion.”
“I’m not confused,” said Mona. Then she said, “There’s an expression in Spanish: La serpiente se oculta en la hierba.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ve been in the yard. There’s no long grass. It’s just dirt and concrete. If there were a snake on the ground, Carmen would’ve seen it. There’s nowhere for a snake to hide.”
The warden got up. “I don’t think we can help you any further, Ms. Jimenez. As I said to you on the phone, this is an extremely rare and unusual incident. And of course tragic, too. Thank you for coming all the way out here.”
Pischedda gestured toward the door.
“We’ll be in touch,” he said.
* * *
Outside, the cold lingered. Mona got into her RAV, turned on the ignition, and started the heater. The vent started rattling. She dialed Finn.
“Carmen’s dead,” she said. “She was bitten by a rattlesnake.”
She started crying.
“I’m at the detention center. The doctor here didn’t realize she’d been bitten. He didn’t give her antivenin. He wants me to believe that Carmen nodded off. That she was a dope addict.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Finn.
“None of it makes any sense,” sobbed Mona.
“Come home,” said Finn.
Mona composed herself.
“No,” she said. “She’s at the hospital. I need to see her. I’m heading over there now.”
* * *
At Paradise Hospital, Mona asked for whoever had signed Carmen’s death certificate. While she waited, she looked at her reflection in the glass of a painting on the wall behind the reception counter, and wiped away the smudged makeup below her eyes. A balding man in scrubs appeared. He introduced himself as Dr. Aguirre.
“I’m trying to understand what happened to my client Carmen Vega,” she said. “I was hoping to have something to tell her family.”
“For a full report, you’ll need to wait for the coroner,” he said. “But I can tell you right now, your client was bitten by a snake. A big one. Three times on the right arm.”
“How do you know it was big?”
“I’ll show you.”
The doctor led Mona to an office. He sat down at the desk and tapped something into the keyboard. Then he swiveled the monitor around so Mona could see.
Mona found herself looking at a tightly framed photo of human flesh. She saw two dark red dots. The flesh around them was swollen and black.
“This is a photo of one of the places where she was bitten, on the underside of her right arm, just below the elbow,” said Dr. Aguirre. “You see these two red marks? Those are the fang marks. You can tell the size of a snake by the distance between its fangs. There’s almost an inch between these two marks. A snake with fangs an inch apart is a big snake.”
Mona looked away from the screen.
“It’s rare, isn’t it? What happened to Carmen?” she said.
Dr. Aguirre reflected.
“It’s pretty rare to see bites from a snake this big,” said Dr. Aguirre. “And it’s especially rare to get bitten three times like Carmen did. That’s why I took the photo. To show my residents. But it’s not all that rare to get bitten. I’ve been working ER here for ten years, and we get a dozen or so snakebites every year, sometimes during spring, but mostly during summer. We rarely get fatalities, though. The last one I remember was back in 2010, a hiker crossing a stream up in the mountains who got bitten on the ankle. We get more people who die from dog bites than we do from snakes.”
“Dr. Woods, the staff physician out at the detention center? He said he didn’t realize that Carmen had been bitten by a snake.”
“So I understand,” said Dr. Aguirre. His face took on a set expression. Mona sensed that Dr. Aguirre didn’t hold a high opinion of Dr. Woods. She guessed that a feeling of professional solidarity prevented him from articulating it.
It wasn’t a feeling she shared.
“Dr. Aguirre, do you believe Carmen could’ve been saved? If Dr. Woods had proceeded differently, I mean?”
The ER doctor chose his words carefully. “Look, there’s only one thing that works reliably against envenomation, and that’s administering antivenin as soon as possible. If someone gets bitten by a snake, the best thing to do is keep them calm, try to get them to sit up so that their heart is higher than the limb where they were bitten, and get them some antivenin. Usually, that means getting them to the nearest hospital that stocks it.”
“Do you stock it?”
“Of course. This is rattlesnake country.”
“Do you know if they stock it at PDC?”
“What did Dr. Woods say?”
“He didn’t.”
Despite his best efforts, Mona spotted the cloud of disapproval pass over Dr. Aguirre’s face.
“Antivenin is expensive stuff. My understanding is, they do things on a shoestring out there,” he said.
“How expensive?”
“About $2,500 a vial. For a bite from a snake the size that likely bit Carmen, I would’ve used at least ten to fifteen vials.”
A cold rage gripped Mona’s heart. Did Carmen die because the BSCA was cutting costs?
“Dr. Aguirre, can you talk me through what it feels like to get bitten by a rattlesnake?”
“Certainly. Almost immediately, you’d feel a burning pain around the bite. The area around the bite would start swelling. You’d start feeling nauseous and light-headed to the point of throwing up. Your vision might go blurry. You might have trouble breathing. Most people panic, which makes it worse. Eventually, you’d start hemorrhaging internally. In a worst-case scenario, your heart would fail. That’s what happened to Carmen.”
“Dr. Woods believes Carmen may have been high on drugs—”
“If she was, it’ll show up in the toxicology report.”
“—and that as a result, she may not have realized it when the snake bit her.”
Dr. Aguirre sniffed.
“That is not an opinion I share,” he said.
“Do you have any idea how quickly Carmen died after getting bitten?” she asked.
He shook his head. “It depends on the dose. The bigger the dose, the quicker the effect. We’ll have to wait for the toxicology report to find out how big a dose of venom she received, but based on the inter-fang distance, it’s likely to be huge.”
“Dr. Woods gave Carmen a shot of epinephrine. Would that have helped?”
Dr. Aguirre scoffed. “For someone suffering anaphylaxis, yes. For a snakebite? Nothing.”
A moment passed.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Ms. Jimenez,” said Dr. Aguirre. “Your client was unbelievably unlucky. Very, very few people who get bitten by a snake die from it. If you get antivenin within two hours of being bitten, you’ve got a 99 percent chance of surviving.”<
br />
Her voice cracking, Mona said, “Can I see her, Dr. Aguirre?”
Dr. Aguirre shook his head gently. “I’m sorry. Not unless you’re family or have written authorization from them.”
Mona thanked him and headed to her car.
All the way back to Redondo Beach, his words kept running through her mind: Very, very few people who get bitten by a snake die from it.
NINE
MONA got home and went to bed. She slept for twenty hours straight but was still tired when she woke up. Her joints were stiff as rods. The muscles in her neck were all knotted up. She had a headache.
But she made herself get up. She took a steaming-hot shower, then wiped the condensation off the mirror and took stock of what she saw.
She looked terrible—bags under her eyes, pasty-faced.
She got dressed, then returned to the bathroom and started carefully putting on makeup. Today was a day for a generous amount of concealer.
Finn came into the bathroom and looked at her in the mirror over her shoulder.
“You going out?” he said.
“I’m going to the office.”
“Really?”
“I’ll go crazy if I don’t,” she said.
Finn nodded. “I’ll make breakfast,” he said.
Mona came out to a huge fry-up in the kitchen: eggs, beans, bacon, a freshly brewed pot of coffee.
“This is hangover food,” she said.
“You’ll feel better after you eat.”
Mona downed two Advil with her coffee, gave Finn a long hug, then drove to work. On the way in, she listened to the news bulletin on the radio. Some members of Congress had criticized the president’s nomination for secretary of Homeland Security. They were saying his background in the for-profit prison industry created a conflict of interest. Mona lost the signal when she drove into the underground parking garage. She parked next to the white Macan.
The elevator door opened to reveal Joaquin in the Juntos reception area, standing over Natalie’s desk. They broke off their conversation as soon as they saw Mona.