Fear itself

yearbook, class of ’95; the second was a full-face shot from the Cook County morgue, class of ’99.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Miss Delamour?”

“Not Delamore, it’s Dela-moor, comme le francais.”

“Sorry, Miss Dela-moor.”

“Aah, call me Rosie, ever’body else does.”

Plastered, Linda told herself-four o’clock in the afternoon and she’s plastered. Interviewing drunks was like fishing-you let them ramble a bit, then you reel them in, let them ramble, reel them in. “Rosie, I’m calling about your son.”

“Got no son.” The way she said it, though, it was less a denial than it was a renunciation. “Tried to explain, he didn’t wanna hear.”

“Explain what, Rosie?”

“Why.”

“Because I’m trying to get in touch with him.”

“No, why-explain why. Why I left.”

Oh, swell, thought Linda: it’s turning into an Abbott and Costello routine. “When was this, Rosie?”

“Too late. It was too late. Guess I waited too long. To call.”

Linda tried again-this could be the break they were looking for. “Rosie, I need to know when you last spoke to Simon.” Elementary psycholinguistics: “I” statements often elicited responses where questions failed.

“I dunno, this year, last year-no, wait, I remember. It was February-February fourth. Missy’s birthday. He wouldn’t lemme…said it would only…wouldn’t lemme…”

Not recent, then, thought Linda, as Rosie began sobbing on the other end of the line-so much for our big break. “February fourth of this year?”

A drawn-out, drunken wail that under other circumstances might have been almost farcical, followed by an extended silence broken by the clink of ice in a thin-walled glass. “Rosie?”

“Who is this?”

“Linda Abruzzi.” Linda decided not to identify herself as an FBI agent just yet-she didn’t want to arouse any maternal protective instincts. “I’m trying to get hold of Simon-it’s very important.”

“S’matter, he knock you up or something?”

“No, I-”

“Listen, Bootsie honey, I haven’t seen my children since nineteen fifty-one. That’s, uh-That’s almost-That’s a helluva long time. He don’t know where I am, and if he ain’t home, I don’t know where he is. So unless you get some kind of weird kick out of making old ladies cry, why don’t you let me get back to my shows and I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.”

“Rosie, there’s something you should-”

Click. Linda redialed, but the phone was now off the hook. Fuck it, she thought, putting down the phone and picking up the fax from the medical examiner in Berkeley again. Let somebody else tell Rosie her daughter’s dead and her son’s a monster-there must be people who get paid for that.

5

Simon hid in a utility closet off the snake exhibit area until the last employee had left the reptilarium a little after seven-thirty. When he emerged with his pencil flashlight (the Volvo, having belonged to Nelson, was well- stocked with flashlights, flares, and even a first-aid kit), the snake room was pitch-dark save for the red glow of the exit lights over the doors.

The glass fronts of the snake cages were set flush into a curved wall ringed by a sloping carpeted ramp from which the public could view the snakes in safety. Simon circled the ramp all the way around to the back, until he reached the door marked Staff Only-No Public Access, which led, he had learned that afternoon, to the workroom in the center of the circle of cages. It was locked, but a hard kick sprang it; a moment later Simon found himself inside the workroom, surrounded by cages containing a veritable who’s who of the world’s most venomous snakes.

The flashlight beam darted around the circular walls. Here a black mamba (which was actually kind of gray), there a spitting viper, a hooded cobra, an eight-foot python, a Florida cottonmouth, a Texas diamondback rattler. He hadn’t come for any of these, though. The mambas were too fast and agile, the rattlers too noisy, the cobras, cottonmouths, and vipers too venomous, and the constrictors not venomous at all.

No, what Simon had come for was the humble eastern coral snake, Micrurus fulvius fulvius, a red-, yellow-, and black-banded member of the Elapidae family, which, with its small mouth, short fangs, and delayed-action, borderline-lethal neurotoxic venom, was perfect for his purposes. Even better, for educational reasons, the three coral snakes were housed with members of various mimic species-nonvenomous, look-alike milk snakes, scarlet snakes, and scarlet king snakes. Surely the reptilarium staff wouldn’t miss just one coral and one scarlet king out of that whole tangle.

Simon grabbed a leather gauntlet and a snake hook, which was basically a golf club with a hook on the business end instead of a club head, and dragged a plastic garbage can over to the cage. Carefully he opened the trapdoor in the back, and holding the flashlight in his mouth, the garbage can lid in his bare hand, and the snake hook in the gloved hand, he gingerly extended the hook into the pen and positioned it under the neck of one of the corals, which accommodatingly wrapped itself around the shaft.

This was the most dangerous part of the transfer-for a few seconds, as he lifted the snake-on-a-stick out of the cage, there were only two feet of haft between his gloved hand and the deadly reptile curled around the base of the hook, with nothing at all to prevent it from slithering up the shaft and past the gauntlet, and sinking its stubby fangs into his upper arm. But the coral knew the drill-lazily it unwound itself and dropped into the garbage can. Simon quickly clapped the lid on-fait accompli.

Half accompli, anyway. The nearest scarlet king snake to the hatch proved equally cooperative; the only danger in this second transfer would have come if the coral had made a break for it when Simon raised the lid to drop the king in. But luckily the coral, having recently been fed, was already fast asleep again, curled peacefully in the bottom of the can, dreaming, no doubt, of fat rats and juicy, slow-moving mice.

6

“We should have called first,” Dorie had said repeatedly, from behind the wheel of Pender’s rented Toyota- the winding, cliff-hugging, two-lane stretch of Highway 1 between Carmel and Big Sur was definitely not a drive for a one-armed man.

“You should have called first,” announced the young neohippie who greeted them at the door of the Lethe Institute Retreat Center of Hot Springs. Behind her, a great empty cathedral of a room-vaulted ceiling, redwood beams, and through a picture-window western wall of rose-tinted glass, nothing but ocean and sky. The smell of incense hung in the air; New Age space Muzak filled the room, where half a dozen figures in white meditation pajamas were either performing yoga exercises or training for jobs as circus contortionists.

“So I’ve been told.” But Pender, who was wearing one of his new hula shirts and his glorious new wide- brimmed white Panama, had learned over the years that it was more difficult for somebody to turn him away from their door than it was for them to refuse him an interview over the phone. And having parked the Toyota at the top of what seemed like a sheer cliff and descended a flagstone path so steep it would have given a Grand Canyon donkey second thoughts, he was not going to be dismissed by some flunky quite so easily. “Why is that, exactly?”

“Because Dr. Luka won’t see anybody without an appointment,” said the young woman.

“I see. And what’s your name?”