Another period of contemplative silence that Lightstone felt powerless to break enveloped them.
'So' — she stood up and glided toward him — 'setting aside the self- serving viewpoints of those black widow spiders, male or female, where does that leave us?'
'Well, actually, I was going to suggest dinner.' Lightstone hesitated. 'But all things considered, I'm not sure…'
The lovely gold-flecked green eyes so completely engulfed him, he forgot what he wanted to say.
'I agree,' she replied, undoing the clasp on the strap of her overalls. 'That's not a good idea at all.'
Larry Paxton stared pensively at his watch.
'Okay,' he addressed his crew, 'that ought to do it.'
After glowering fiercely at the Bravo Team leader, Dwight Stoner opened the chest freezer, reached in, lifted a one-by-two-by-four-foot crate out of the bottom, pivoted around, and thrust the crate deep into a plastic wading pool full of ice.
Then, as the Bravo Team leader stood over the pool with the pump 12-gauge and Thomas Woeshack stood ready with the fire extinguisher, Stoner and Takahara quickly backed all of the screws out of the top of the crate using the two battery-powered multispeed drills.
'Okay, you two ready?' Paxton asked.
'I am.' Mike Takahara rested his hands on the crate top and looked at his huge partner.
Stoner nodded grimly.
'All right, one… two… three… now!'
At Larry Paxton's command, Takahara pulled the lid off the crate and lunged out of the away so Stoner could flip the heavy crate upside down on the ice.
All four agents stared wordlessly at the overturned crate, which initially moved a little, but eventually grew still.
Larry Paxton glanced down at his watch again. 'Okay, thirty more seconds, just to make sure.' The team leader counted down the time, then nodded to Stoner and stood ready with the shotgun.
The huge agent looked up to confirm that Mike Takahara had the snake hook ready. Then, in one quick motion, he leaned forward, grabbed the crate, lifted it up, and leaped back. 'Shit!'
KA-BLAM!
The edge of the crate caught Paxton's shoulder, causing him to stagger backward and accidentally trigger a round of bird shot off into the warehouse ceiling. The spreading pattern of small pellets narrowly missed one of the high-intensity ceiling lamps as they punched through the thin aluminum panels.
'Jesus Christ, Paxton!' Dwight Stoner screamed as he dropped the crate and grabbed his ears. The other three agents appeared equally disoriented and deafened by the incredibly loud and reverberating blast.
It took the stunned agents several seconds to regain their senses and return their attention to the wading pool.
To their amazement, two extremely thick-bodied snakes, each approximately sixteen inches long, with broad scales arranged in alternating reddish brown and tan rings, lay immobile on the six-foot-diameter bed of ice.
'Are they dead?' Concern clouded Thomas Woeshack's boyish features.
'Who the hell cares? Get those damned things into that terrarium, now!' Larry Paxton ordered, still squinting from the effects of the unexpected, close-proximity shotgun blast as he first gingerly rubbed his throbbing shoulder, then racked another round into the smoking shotgun's chamber.
Using the snake hook, Mike Takahara quickly transferred each of the snakes from the bed of ice into an open terrarium nestled into an identical bed of ice in the adjoining plastic wading pool. As soon as he completed the transfer, Stoner quickly snapped one of the specially designed feeding lids in place, held the terrarium — staring nervously at the two still-immobile snakes now mere inches from his face — while Takahara hurriedly wrapped duct tape around both ends of it to make sure the top stayed on. Then he carefully placed the terrarium at one end of the bottom shelf of a long three-tiered plywood-and-stud-beam rack of shelves that the agents had constructed along the back wall of the warehouse.
All four agents then breathed an enormous sigh of relief.
'Which ones are these?' Thomas Woeshack asked as he brought his nose close to the glass.
'Common Death Adders,' Mike Takahara replied.
'Far as I'm concerned, there ain't a goddamned thing common about a snake with death for a middle name,' Larry Paxton commented as he snapped the shotgun's safety back on and set the weapon aside.
'Hey!' the team's Eskimo agent/pilot exclaimed excitedly. 'I think they're starting to move!'
'Well, thank God for that,' Larry Paxton muttered sarcastically as he looked down at his watch, then back up at his fellow agents. 'It's now nine o'clock. A mere thirteen hours since we started this job, and we've already unloaded a whole two crates. The way I calculate it' — the team leader added, glaring over at the two duct-tape- wrapped terrariums at the far end of the long shelf, 'at this rate, it shouldn't take more than oh, say, two months, tops, to unload the rest of the damned things.'
'You really think this system will work for those tarantulas, too?' Thomas Woeshack asked skeptically.
'I think we need bigger wading pools, and a lot more ice,' Dwight Stoner commented darkly.
Larry Paxton favored his subordinates with a withering glare.
'It may be necessary to modify our system to deal with the situation at hand,' the Bravo Team leader acknowledged. 'If we need to, we will. That's why they call us Special Agents.'
'Speaking of Special Agents, I wonder what Henry's doing right now?' Mike Takahara asked his exhausted colleagues.
'I don't know.' Larry Paxton snorted as he rubbed at his aching shoulder again. 'But whatever it is, I hope the hell he's in some serious pain.'
'And scared out of his mind?' Dwight Stoner offered.
'Oh yeah.' Paxton nodded his head agreeably. 'That too. Definitely.'
Henry Lightstone gasped in both fear and pain when the sharp claws dug into his leg.
'Quit… complaining,' the sensuous young woman responded in a breathless voice. Her entire body gleamed with perspiration and her gold-flecked green eyes smoldered with a seemingly endless supply of passion and desire. 'My nails aren't… that long.'
Every muscle in Henry Lightstone's own glistening body tensed as he fought to fend off a combination of physical and emotional sensations that seemed — from his highly stimulated point of view during those few uninhibited hours — determined to overwhelm him absolutely.
'Not you — her!'
'What?'
Karla raised her upper body to peer over her shoulder, and then arched her back and moaned as his hands roamed over her slick swollen breasts gleaming in the glow of the night light.
'When did… she get here? Supposed to be… locked up!' She briefly tried to control herself, but then abandoned that in favor of fully enjoying her fully aroused if slightly distracted partner.
'No idea… never saw her come down.' Lightstone gasped, torn between passion and self-preservation, when every shred of his awareness converged on the woman's increasingly focused, heated, and frantic movements. 'I wasn't paying… any attention.'
'Good!' She began to kiss him passionately while rubbing her sweat- slickened breasts against his heaving chest.
Realizing that all sense of control had rapidly deserted him, Lightstone growled deep in his throat, and then flipped them both over so she lay on her back with her long silky legs tightly wrapped tightly around his waist and her arms around his neck.
You're insane, Lightstone, he told himself. Absolutely fucking insane.
He sensed, in the midst of absolute bliss, the force of the panther's head butting hard against his own and, without thinking, he shoved the huge cat aside, then proceeded to ignore both the subsequent roar and the sharp pain across his arm as he gave in to an ancient and ultimately irresistible urge…
Only later, as he lay on his back, trying very hard to control both his breathing and his emotions — Karla snuggled tightly against his right shoulder and sighing sleepily, and the panther snuggled in tight against his neck and other shoulder rumbling contentedly — did Henry Lightstone finally realize that a goodly amount of the glossy sheen on his chest, arms and shoulders was definitely not sweat.
