“Sounds like a winner to me. Believe it or not, I do actually have a job in Knoxville.”
“Sure you do,” he cracked.
The crime-scene techs and I spent the next three hours packaging skeletal material for shipment to the Gainesville lab for processing the next day. It was nearly midnight by the time we reached the Twilight Motor Court. Eighteen hours had passed since I’d closed the ill-fitting door of bungalow number three in the predawn darkness. If someone had told me at the time that I’d look forward to returning to the musty room and crawling beneath the stained bedspread, I’d have laughed. Yet here I was, eager to lean into the rusty, dribbling excuse for a shower, scrub off the day’s worth of sweat and dust, and then sink into the dank, lumpy mattress.
I left my grimy clothes on the bathroom floor. The floor was dirty, but at least I could see the film of dirt on the linoleum and gauge its depth. The nastiness lurking within the shag carpet, on the other hand, was unfathomed… and possibly unfathomable.
I reached behind the slimy shower curtain and twisted on the taps all the way. The pipes groaned and clanged, and a trickle of reddish brown emerged from the showerhead. I let the water run while I brushed my teeth at the sink. By the time I’d finished brushing, the shower was running clear, more or less, and lukewarm.
Half the shower curtain’s rings had ripped through the plastic. Carefully, so as not to tear the rest of the curtain loose, I slid the rings along the rod to open the curtain.
The motion of the curtain unleashed an explosion at my feet. I yelled and jumped back just as a four-foot water moccasin — its body as thick as my wrist — thrashed furiously in the tub and then turned and struck at the thin film of plastic between me and him.
I fell back against the sink and then — as the snake reared up, cobralike, and opened its mouth wide — I pulled my legs up onto the counter. “Stu!” I shouted. “Stu! Can you hear me? Stu!”
A minute later, I heard a knocking at my door.
“Stu? Help!”
The knob rattled and the door scraped across the carpet. “Doc? You got a mouse?” I heard a chuckle.
“Stu, have you got your gun?”
“Doc?” The panic in my voice finally registered with him. “What’s wrong? Is somebody else in here?”
“Not unless you count a big cottonmouth,” I said. “It’s here in the bathroom. It’s in the tub at the moment, but I’m thinking it could get out pretty easily. Be careful.”
“Okay, I’m coming that way,” he said. “Exactly where are you?”
“I’m up on top of the sink, where any sane person would be.”
“Don’t move. And make damn sure to let me know if that snake starts over the side of that tub.”
“Trust me, Stu, the whole county’ll know if that snake starts out of the tub.” Moving slowly, I wrapped myself in a towel.
I could hear his breathing as he approached. “All right, I’m getting close to the door. He’s staying put?”
“Yeah, he’s still wiggling around some, but he’s still in the tub.”
Stu’s head ducked quickly around the door and then withdrew, then reappeared more slowly, and he stepped into the doorway. Just as he did, I heard Angie’s voice coming from the doorway of my room. “Hey, guys?”
“We’re in the bathroom,” I called. “Me and Stu and a huge water moccasin.”
Either the news of the snake or the silhouette of the gun in Stu’s hand made a big impression on her, because she exclaimed, “Oh, Jesus.” After a moment, she added, “Stu, how good a shot are you with that?”
“Well, I keep qualifying every year,” he answered without looking around, “but they’ve never thrown a pissed-off snake at me on the firing range.”
“I’ve got a shotgun,” she said.
“A shotgun? Where? In the Suburban?”
“In my hand.”
“What? What are you doing with a shotgun in your hand?”
“Well, right now, I’d say I’m coming to kill a snake with it. Unless you’d rather take the shot with your sidearm.”
“Hey, be my guest.”
“Okay, here I come.” I heard the unmistakable click-slide-click of a shell being racked into the chamber of a pump-action shotgun. “I’m right behind you, Stu. Is your safety on?”
“It is now. Is yours?”
“It is. All right, you want to trade places with me?”
Stu’s head disappeared, and an instant later, Angie’s took its place. She eased through the doorway, the shotgun angling upward across her chest and left shoulder. Slowly she lowered the barrel toward the tub and snugged the butt of the gun against her right shoulder. I heard the slight scrape of the snake’s scales on the bathtub; I heard the deep breaths Angie was taking through flaring nostrils; I heard the metallic click as she released the safety. “Doc, you might want to cover your ears,” she said. Moving almost imperceptibly, she leaned closer to the tub, close enough to see the snake. “Damn,” she said, “that is one mean-looking snake.”
Maybe it was the vibration of her voice, or maybe it was a slight movement of the barrel; whatever it was, something triggered the snake again, and as I watched in horror, it whipped around and lashed directly at Angie.
* * *
I was alive, but I was blind. No, actually, I was not blind, I realized as the smoke and my mind began to clear and I saw light streaming through the doorway from the bedroom beyond; I was in darkness because the bathroom lightbulb had shattered when Angie had fired the shotgun.
“Talk to me,” I heard Stu calling. “Doc? Angie? Are you okay?”
“I’m all right,” I said. “But I’m not so sure about Angie.” She was slumped against me, her body rotated from the recoil of the shotgun. “The snake was going for her when she pulled the trigger.” Suddenly I had a bad thought. “Stu, watch out. I’m not sure about the snake. It’s too dark and smoky in here for me to see.”
“I’m watching out,” he said.
Angie groaned and stirred. “Wow,” she said. “Remind me not to do that again.”
Stu appeared in the doorway with a flashlight, whose beam — a solid-looking shaft of light in the smoke — darted back and forth from Angie to me to the wreckage of the bathtub. “You all right?”
“I guess,” she said. “Not sure. A place on my right leg hurts. I might be snakebit.”
“Doubtful,” Stu answered. He bent down, and when he straightened up, he was holding a foot-long piece of the snake’s tail. It was the only piece of the snake that the shotgun blast hadn’t shredded. “Angie, one; snake, zero.” He played the light slowly over the tub, which had been reduced to fiberglass splinters, then added, “Bathtub, minus one.” He turned and shone the light on the shotgun, which Angie was holding loosely, the barrel pointing at the floor. “That’s a Mossberg 500 tactical, isn’t it.” He wasn’t asking; he was pronouncing. “That thing packs a punch.”
Angie nodded. She stared at the shotgun as if she were staring at a ghost. The peppery odor of gun smoke hung heavy in the air; underneath that scent, subtler but unmistakable, was the metallic tang, the rusty taste, of blood. The taste that would have hung in the air at Kate’s house.
It was true, what Angie had said at Shell’s a few days before. All roads — or at least this road, smelling of blood and brimstone — led to her sister.
It also, I realized, led to my father.
Remember me, remember me, remember me.