Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (45 page)

“No lights, Stan!”

“Just making the ID, Terry. Fret not.”

“Put us down on the street behind Wytton,” I said. “If he’s there, I don’t want to spook him.”

“I’ll drop you down his chimney if you want.”

“Behind Wytton, far end of the block.”

“You’re there.”

Then the chopper dropped like a rock and my stomach bounced off the roof of the cockpit. Frances said “Woooh,” and steadied herself while she drew and readied her sidearm, then reholstered it under her coat.

“If he’s not there yet?” she asked.

“We’ll wait.”

“This thing is making me sick.”

“Think pleasant thoughts.”

“That’s why I checked my Sig.”

The helo swept into a big semicircle and came in low onto Hurst Street, just behind Wytton.

“Put us down at the far end,” I said. “We’ll go over the fence.”

“Ro
ger,
” said Stansbury. “So it is written, so it is done.”

I dropped to the asphalt of Hurst Street, road gravel stinging my face as I ducked the rotors and made for the sidewalk. Frances ran behind me. Johnny Escobedo and two prowl cars pulled up silently to the curb. There we were, a magnificent seven.

We huddled while I used my notepad to sketch the general layout of the Lumsden place. I ordered one deputy around to the main house to block the drive with his car, jump the wall and take the front door. Another one at the back of it, and one on each side of the guest unit. Johnny would follow me in, then Frances.

“Vests and shotguns,” I ordered.

Hypok lay in the half light on the bed and ran his gloved hand over the pale blue dress, over the hip of Item #4. He lay behind it, but not too close, turned as it was toward the big cage. He remote-shot a couple of images of them on the digital cameras tripoded behind and above him. The smell of years came from his mother’s old red wool bedspread and Hypok felt like his mind was anchored not in the present at all, but free to skip back and forward in time, a nimble, lively little water bug glancing upon the tops of things. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.

“Valeen?”

“
Umm-mm-MMM!
”

“There you are! I’m here, too. What’s Collette doing in the potty?”

Hypok, propped on one elbow, looked across the Item to Moloch’s world, pleased to see him curiously tasting the air with his tongue, patrolling one wall of his cage with excruciating patience. He looked down at himself, pressed out hard against the new skin like a shiny tent. He began the undulation.

“What’s Collette doing in the potty?”

“
Hmm-mmm-MMA!
”

He giggled. “Umm-hmm. She
is?
”

Movement. Rhythm. Touch. Loretta asleep at his feet. Back to Missouri and the warm humid nights, back to the smells of his sisters around him, the room that somehow retained the smell of bacon and gardenias, back to the knowledge that his body was growing into feelings he already possessed, that he was soon going to experience them as he was born to. So close so many times, almost there, almost to the brink, almost to … what was it … release? An explosion of some kind? Undulate. Then back to the farmhouse in Arkansas and the terrible days of Ernie Mears and his mother locking him in the storm cellar for “things” undone with Valeen and Collette, for the neighbors’ rabbits he stole from the hutch and strangled, for just about anything at all that would keep him locked away while they drank and yelled and mounted each other all over the house like animals, actually found them once on the kitchen floor with the soup boiling over and Ernie’s overalls down around his boots and Wanda on all fours with her face glazed toward the window,
reaching for her beer on the floor beside her.
Then, onto better days for sure, those back in Hopkin when he began to truly know himself and what could happen if he could only arrange things correctly, and he discovered with Item #1 just how to direct the scene to excite and satisfy himself, how the pageant needed to be acted, how the final tableaux he had photographed with the cheapie Kodak burned in his mind like an eternal coal until he could muster his wit and stamina enough to begin the whole production again. Puxico. Fordyce. Hopkin. Tustin. Point to point, memory to memory, past to present and back again, all tied up into one. He clicked the digital camera again, capturing the present for the future.

Undulate. Closer.

Girl smell. Girl warmth. Girl touch. Contact.

“
Nmm-nmm-NMM!

“No? Are you sure? Collette’s getting a
what
from the bathroom?”

Then the sudden flash of light outside the windows and the sudden realization of what he had heard but not heard in his excitement—the faint overhead drone of an airborne machine coming closer, going past … coming back again?

Loretta stood on the edge of the bed and whined.

Then the light was gone and Hypok lay frozen.

Listen. Undulate. Listen.

But even with the windows closed against the cooling spring night he heard that machine coming closer again, sneaking through the night as if he were too stupid to notice something that rucking obvious; he was sure of it now, the faint, fast
botta-botta-botta
of blades in air and he rose from the bed and parted the blinds enough to see the lighted craft settling to earth somewhere on the street behind his.

Up with the zipper.

Although Crotalus horridus can be a ferocious foe, he will gladly flee if given an opportunity.

He let go of the blind, went to the bed, lifted Item #4 and took it around to the side of Moloch’s world. Moloch watched him. He stripped the hood off it, men opened the door, unslung the struggling thing from his shoulder and dumped it in. He fetched Loretta from the bed and threw her in, too. Then he slammed the cage door shut and locked it with the key he kept hanging on a nail by the cage and dropped the key down the toilet and flushed it

Finally, he got his .44 magnum from under the bed, opened the front door, locked it behind him before slamming it, then he slipped around to the side of the guest unit, up the fire ladder he’d installed there for just such an occasion, onto the roof and into the dark sturdy branches of the sycamore tree through which he climbed onto the rose fancier’s roof, then down to the lowest part of it before he dropped to the ground and began weaving through the backyards of the houses over fences and hedges with the dogs barking but it didn’t matter, he was light afoot and armored in his fresh skin, in possession of a lethal fang, not so much immune to the night as a part of it.

Let them try to find me.

We jumped the wall at 8:02
P.M.
There was a light on in the guest house. One of the deputies shone his flashlight beam against the door as I ran up the stairs onto the porch, took three short steps and lowered my shoulder. It took one more charge to break the thing open and I flew through its unresisting swing, rolling to the floor and up with my .45 out front and my finger finding the trigger, Johnny and Frances beside me in a heartbeat, all three of us screaming and my nerves fried.

When I burst into the back room I could hardly believe what I saw. A glass cage took up the whole wall. There was a snake in it almost as big around as a man, too long to even guess at. Part of it was looped around and over a dollhouse. The other part was spilled out to the cage bottom and coiled around a little girl. Her head and neck and shoulders stuck out from the rolls of muscle at a strange angle, like she was rigid. A hand protruded from between two massive coils. Her mouth was taped shut but she looked through the glass at me with huge dark eyes. Her face was pale purple. I couldn’t tell if she was alive. The snake had its mouth over her shoes and ankles, about halfway to her knees.

“God in heaven,” said Frances.

“Mother of Jesus,” said Johnny.

The girl blinked.

“You
bastard!
” screamed Frances. She knelt and emptied her 9 mm into the glass. All the bullets did was punch little holes through it and knock puffs of dust off the drywall behind it.

“Door’s fucking
locked.!
” yelled Johnny.

I zipped up my jacket halfway, held the left side over my head and jumped through the glass. I think I bounced off the tree inside. I landed in gravel, on my back, my legs up. I righted myself and stripped the jacket back. The snake had already disgorged the girl’s feet and his head was about two feet off the ground, his tongue loping out ahead of him as he moved toward me. I shot him between the eyes. His head dipped like someone had slapped it. Then he rose up palebellied above me and I could see the jagged exit hole in his jaw. I shot him twice more, up through the bottom of his head. He writhed higher, coils loosening on the girl and his green body twisting to expose the plated yellow stomach. His mouth gaped. I stepped under the head and tugged on the girl, with the pistol still ready in my right hand. The huge reptile body rolled away from her—green revolving into yellow, then into green again—and I lifted the girl up and out and hugged her against me. Something small and brown fell to the ground but I couldn’t see what. I looked to Frances, waiting just outside the shard-toothed hole I’d made, her arms reaching through.

“Give her to me, Terry. Here!”

I’m not sure why I didn’t. Why I couldn’t. It was like I wasn’t supposed to, like she was mine and there wasn’t anywhere in the world she could be safer than in my arms. And though I’d had that thought before in my life and been wrong, some things are born into a man and you can overrule them but you can never make them go away.

“
Terry! Give her over!
”

I stood there for just a moment in the ocean of twisting scales, with the girl held tight to my chest, then I passed her into Frances’s waiting arms. She was light, and loose as a beach towel.

Johnny helped me through to the other side. I looked back and saw a small dog scratching up against the glass, trying to reach the hole I’d made. Johnny reached in and scooped it out.

Two paramedics rushed through the doorway, then ran to Frances. One of the deputies charged in right behind them with his shotgun lowered and I thought for a second he was going to blow everyone there to smithereens. “House is empty, sir. Grounds, too. There’s nobody here but us.”

“He’s in the neighborhood,” I said. “Everybody door to door.”

“You’re bleeding,” said Johnny, and when I looked down at myself I could see the slick red soaking my shirt and pants. I felt like I’d been punched in the ribs. In fact, I felt great because I knew I’d just done a good thing, whether the girl made it through or not. I felt lucky.

Louis pushed his way past the uniform and held up his radio. “Terry, he’s down in the flood canal behind the street. Stansbury was strafing south with the light—guy wearing something shiny was hauling ass north. Suspect stopped under the bridge and hasn’t come out.”

I heard a gasp, then a gentle male expletive from the other side of the room. Frances looked up at me from the paramedics. “She’s breathing.”

I approached and looked down at her, a skinny little girl wrapped in a blanket. Her eyes were terrified, but she was drawing breath deep and fast. Someone had gotten the tape off her mouth. I took a flashlight from one of the uniforms.

“Let’s go get him.”

The flood control channel ran behind Hurst Street. Louis kept up radio contact as he led us through a backyard and over a cinder-block wall. The lights in the houses were coming on and I could hear dogs barking from the yards on either side of us. A quarter mile south I saw the chopper hovering and a bright cone of light flaring down to earth. We climbed the chain link and landed heavily on the other side.

In the dim moonlight I could see the ditch was deep, with high, sloping, concrete walls and a flat bottom to carry the floodwaters out to the Pacific. Stansbury held the helo low over the street, a few hundred yards away. It looked like the bird was held up by the stanchion of its own white light. I heard Stansbury’s voice rasp over Louis’s radio: “
still under the bridge here, haven’t seen him move in over a minute
…
I’d get on him if I were you flatfoots
…”