Squeeze Me Read online

  “Impressive,” Angie said.

  “How quickly can you get that thing out of here? We’ve promised the guests a nighttime croquet match. The glow sticks are already fastened to the mallets. Where’s the rest of your team?”

  “I don’t have a team, sir.”

  Teabull gave Angie the same up-and-down she always got, being female, five-foot-three and barely a hundred pounds. Usually she didn’t need assistance on a job. This time would be different.

  She said, “I’ll come back in the morning with some help. Meanwhile don’t let that sucker out of your sight.”

  Teabull blanched. “No, we can’t wait! Whatever needs to happen, make it happen now.”

  Angie was staring up at one of the largest pythons she’d ever seen, and she’d seen some jumbos. This one had arranged its muscular length on a long horizontal limb. The reptile was deep into a post-meal stupor; a grotesque lump was visible halfway between the midsection and tail.

  “Anybody missing a goat?” Angie asked.

  “Mauricio will help you handle this,” said Teabull, and introduced the head groundskeeper.

  Mauricio looked as if he’d rather be in the front row at a German opera. He told Angie that one of his mowing crew had spotted the giant snake in the tree that afternoon.

  “It hasn’t moved an inch since then,” he said.

  “We’re hoping the damn thing is dead,” Teabull added anxiously.

  “Oh, it’s the opposite of dead,” Angie informed him. “It’s digesting.”

  The trunk of the ancient banyan presented a dense maze of vertical roots. Angie wasn’t wearing the right shoes for such a slippery climb.

  “I’ll need an extension ladder,” she told Mauricio, “and a pistol.”

  From Teabull: “Absolutely no gunfire at this event!”

  “Well, we’re looking at about eighteen feet of violent non-cooperation,” Angie explained. “The recommended approach is a bullet in the brain.”

  “Hell, no! You’ll have to do it another way.”

  “Then you will have to find another wrangler.”

  The band had started playing—Cuban music, a well-meaning tribute to the Buena Vista Social Club. Soon the guests would be twirling drunkenly all over the grounds. Teabull wore the face of a climber trapped on a melting ledge.

  “Five thousand cash,” he whispered to Angie. “But we’re running out of time.”

  Angie put a hand on Mauricio’s shoulder and said, “Sir, would you happen to have a machete?”

  * * *

  —

  The Burmese python is one of the world’s largest constrictors, reaching documented lengths of more than twenty feet. Popular among amateur collectors, the snakes were imported to the United States legally from Southeast Asia for decades. But because a hungry baby python can grow into an eight-foot eating machine within a year, owners often found themselves having second thoughts. Consequently, scores of the pet snakes were set free.

  Only in southern Florida did the species take hold, the hot climate and abundance of prey being ideal for python reproduction. A relatively isolated population exploded to a full-blown invasion during the early 1990s, after Hurricane Andrew destroyed a reptile breeding facility on the edge of the Everglades. The storm liberated fresh, fertile multitudes, and today the Burmese is one of the state’s most prolific and disruptive invasive species. An adult female can lay as many as ninety eggs, which she will encircle and guard from predators.

  Like all constrictors, pythons encoil their prey, squeezing the breath out of it. By disengaging their jaws, the snakes are able to swallow animals of much larger girth, which are typically consumed head-first. In this way the furtive intruders have decimated native Everglades wildlife, including marsh rabbits, raccoons, otters, opossums, and full-grown deer. Adult Burmese pythons will even drown and devour alligators. To the chagrin of suburban Floridians, pythons will leave the wetlands to travel long distances. Frequently they are discovered prowling residential neighborhoods, the signal clue being a sharp dip in the cat population.

  To stem the onslaught, authorities have recruited both lay hunters and experienced reptile handlers by offering hourly wages and bounty payments that escalate per foot of snake. While the frenetic capture videos are wildly popular on YouTube, the removal program has so far proven to be biologically inconsequential. Although hundreds of pythons have been caught and removed, biologists believe that many thousands more are still on the loose, mating insatiably.

  Despite their startling size, individual specimens aren’t easy to find. Their skin is lightly hued, with chocolate-brown patches creating puzzle-board patterns similar to that of a giraffe. Even the beefiest of pythons can be astonishingly well-camouflaged in the wild, and experts cite their “low detectability” as a primary challenge for hunters.

  “Where the hell did it come from?” Tripp Teabull grumbled about the one in the tree. “And why did it show up here, of all places?”

  “Sir, you’ve got a pond full of slow, dumb fish. However, that”—Angie cocked her trigger finger at the exceptional lump in the python—“is something else.”

  Mauricio and a co-worker arrived with a ladder that unfolded to twenty feet. With Angie’s assistance they notched one end into a cabled tangle of banyan branches directly beneath the quarry, which remained motionless.

  “You think there’s more of those fuckers around here?” Mauricio asked.

  Angie said this was the first one she’d ever heard of on the island. “What do you suppose she ate?”

  The groundskeeper exchanged a tense glance with Teabull. “How do you know it’s a she?” he asked Angie.

  “The biggest ones always are.”

  “Then maybe she didn’t eat anything,” Teabull cut in. “Maybe she’s just pregnant.”

  Angie chuckled. “Sir, that’s not a baby bump.”

  Scientists in the Everglades have implanted transmitters in captured pythons and released them to help locate “breeding aggregations,” groups of randy males that communally cavort with a lone large female. That telemetry tracking has led to the interruption of many amorous assemblies but, so far, it has failed to stop the epochal march of the species. Although many pythons were found dead one winter after a rare hard freeze, the hardy survivors rebounded and—thanks to natural selection—produced new generations able to withstand colder temperatures. Nonetheless, Palm Beach County, which on some January nights experiences temperatures in the thirties, was believed to be safely north of the invaders’ comfort zone.

  “We should fill in that damn koi pond,” Teabull said, “if that’s the big attraction.”

  Angie asked him if any domestic animals were allowed to roam the grounds of Lipid House. Teabull said absolutely not.

  Mauricio spoke up. “We got a few iguanas. Everybody’s got iguanas.”

  “Have any neighbors complained that their pets have gone missing? Like maybe a Rottweiler,” Angie said, “or a miniature pony.”

  “That’s not funny,” Teabull snapped.

  “Sir, I’m serious.” Angie’s habit of saying “sir” was the result of a childhood rule imposed by her father, whose own father had been a career Marine. She said, “These snakes feed only on live prey. Are you sure no animals have disappeared in the neighborhood?”

  Teabull shot another uneasy look at Mauricio before saying, “I’ll ask around.”

  Angie turned to the groundskeeper. “All right, let’s see that blade of yours.”

  Because of their gluttonous threat to Florida’s shaky ecological balance, all captured pythons are supposed to be euthanized. A gunshot is the most humane way, but another state-approved method is decapitation by machete. The one that Mauricio loaned to Angie Armstrong was practically new.

  Teabull said, “One more thing, Ms. Armstrong. Could you please move that thing off-site before you
kill it?”

  “Sir, I’m loving your sense of humor.”

  “There are nine hundred guests here tonight!”

  “Okay, we’ll do it your way,” Angie said. “But I’ll need four of your strongest security guys to help me wrestle it out of the tree. My experience is that large men are often terrified of snakes, so please find me a crew that isn’t. FYI, their tuxedos are going to get trashed big-time. A python that size shits like a fire hose.”

  As he eyed the immense silent presence up in the banyan, Teabull reconsidered his position. Trying to take the beast alive would turn into a spectacle. The wrangler was right—an inconspicuous removal would be possible only if the snake was limp and unresisting. In other words: dead.

  Teabull sought assurances from Angie that the act could be carried out quietly, and with a minimum of gore.

  She said, “I’ll try not to bloody your landscaping.”

  Her tone rankled the caretaker, whose priority was to prevent guests from learning of the reptile’s presence on the property. The fallout would be devastating.

  Hosting parties, weddings and fundraising galas such as the White Ibis and “Stars for SARS” was a lucrative industry in Palm Beach. Competition among mansions had always been intense, but it had turned cutthroat after the social drought inflicted by Covid-19. This was supposed to be the season of the big rebound. Owners of old island estates were counting on event revenue to offset their overhead—parabolic property taxes, criminally priced hurricane insurance and six-figure landscaping fees. Half the fucking pool boys drove Audis.

  Sponsors of charity balls were seldom fazed to learn that the one-night rental fee for Lipid House was a quarter of a million dollars, not including custom catering. However, rumors of goliath pythons could wipe out a season’s worth of bookings. The five grand that Teabull had offered the female wildlife wrangler was a bargain; the trust that owned the estate had been prepared to pay ten.

  Still, the machete and all its messy possibilities made Teabull nervous. In particular he was fretting about that dowager-sized lump in the snake.

  “So, you’ll be cutting off its head,” he pressed Angie Armstrong, “and that’s all, correct? No further chopping.”

  “Sir, I’m not fixing cutlets. I’m neutralizing an invasive.”

  Angie hated to kill anything, but the magnificent python had signed its own warrant. Dead or alive, it would be delivered to wildlife officers. The next stop was a biologist’s dissection table. Angie expected to collect no bounty for the specimen because Palm Beach was outside the state’s hunt-for-pay zone.

  “We’ve moved your vehicle to our rear gate,” Teabull informed her, “to expedite the departure phase. Is there anything else you need?”

  “A backhoe would be swell,” Angie said.

  Teabull hoped she was joking. “I’ll leave you to your work,” he said, receding into the cover of the topiary.

  “Wait—what about my money?”

  “Your fee will be in the console of your vehicle, Ms. Armstrong.”

  “Just call it a pickup truck, sir. That’s what it is.”

  But Teabull had already slipped out of earshot. Mauricio steadied the ladder while Angie climbed.

  The machete was sharp. It worked fine.

  THREE

  The Cornbright spawn arrived the following morning at their missing mother’s house. They were met by Fay Alex Riptoad towing the police chief, whose presentation was brief: The statewide Missing Persons alert had generated a dozen false sightings and one random marriage proposal, in the event Kiki Pew was found alive. Other tips, none especially promising, were being pursued.

  At Mrs. Riptoad’s instruction, the chief didn’t tell the two Cornbrights about the half-eaten Ecstasy tab found by the pond. He likewise avoided the subject of the tennis pro, who’d been interviewed and cleared of suspicion. (At the time of Kiki Pew’s disappearance, young Constantin was entertaining one of the other Potussies aboard a chartered Falcon, somewhere in the skies between Jackson Hole and Lantana.)

  “We’re doing everything possible to locate your mom,” Jerry Crosby said to the Cornbright sons. “Did either of you speak with her that day?”

  The answer was no, although each claimed to have left voicemails on her cell phone. That was bullshit, as the chief well knew, for Kiki Pew’s Samsung had been found in her purse. The device held no messages from Chance or Chase.

  Both had distanced themselves from their mother after she married Mott Fitzsimmons, who perceptively viewed his stepsons as lazy trust-fund sucklings. Following Mott’s death they and their families began turning up in Palm Beach more frequently, usually on short notice. Their wives were gratingly deferential, their children unremarkable in every aspect. Kiki Pew feigned a doting attitude though she never embraced the role of grandmother. As for her sons, she remained wary of—and occasionally amused by—their competitive campaigns to re-connect.

  On some level, Chance and Chase cared about their mother and were alarmed by her disappearance. However, their emotions were also steered by the knowledge that their deceased stepfather had left no lineal descendants. That meant his wealth had streamed directly to the already-loaded Kiki Pew, whose only heirs were Chance and Chase themselves. It couldn’t be presumed that the windfall from Kiki Pew’s future passing would be divided evenly, for she evaded the subject in family conversation. As a result, her sons had been jockeying artlessly for her favor since the day Mott Fitzsimmons died.

  “Was your mom a good swimmer?” the police chief asked.

  On this topic the Cornbright brothers disagreed. The tie was broken by Fay Alex Riptoad, who bragged that her friend was “quick as a harp seal” in the lap pool at Casa Bellicosa.

  Jerry Crosby excused himself and drove to Lipid House, where he was perturbed to find nobody watching the koi pond. He walked the shoreline and observed schools of chubby fish lolling near the surface, but no deceased widow.

  Had it been summertime, the chief thought, a corpse would have surfaced by now. However, today’s forecasted high was only sixty-eight degrees, which meant it was cool enough at the bottom of the pond to forestall post-mortem bloating. A new diver was summoned to do a second search. She, too, came up empty-handed except for a be-slimed magnum of Dom.

  Crosby was puzzled. If Mrs. Fitzsimmons didn’t drown, then what the hell happened?

  Soon the caretaker Teabull appeared, saying he’d been at meetings off-property all morning. He blamed the head groundskeeper for failing to station cadaver scouts around the water.

  “Nobody on the staff has come across anything unusual?” Crosby asked.

  “So far, no.” If questioned on this point later, Teabull would argue that, in Florida, a snake in a tree could hardly be classified as a police matter. The whole damn peninsula was crawling with reptiles.

  He said, “We had had the usual level of security here for the Ibis Ball—team of six, all ex-military. One of them used to bodyguard for Pink.”

  “Really?” The police chief actually smiled. “I’m a big Floyd fan.”

  “Not Pink Floyd. Just ‘Pink.’ ”

  When Crosby stared back at him blankly, Teabull said, “She’s a major female recording artist. Huge. Point is, no intruder could’ve slipped past our team. The property was totally secure on the night Mrs. Fitzsimmons turned up missing.”

  The chief nodded though his gaze kept drifting to the koi pond. “Let’s say she’s not in the water, Mr. Teabull. What do you think could’ve happened?”

  “Maybe she decided to leave the grounds and walk…wherever.”

  “Wearing one shoe?”

  “She’d had numerous vodka drinks and a dose of Ecstasy. I’ve seen people with less crap in their system strip naked and bark at the moon.”

  “But your security guys—”

  “Their job is to keep uninvited individuals out of t
he event—not to stop our guests from leaving,” the caretaker said. “Besides, Mrs. Fitzsimmons had a driver waiting. They would have assumed she was heading for her car.”

  This time Jerry Crosby didn’t nod. “So let’s say she makes her way to the street, starts walking for unknown reasons in an unknown direction and then…something really bad happens. In this neighborhood—the most crime-free zip code in forty-eight states.”

  Teabull frowned. “This is the new reality. No place—even the island—is one hundred percent safe anymore.”

  In his python panic, the caretaker hadn’t coached himself for the possibility that local law enforcement might devote extra effort to the case of a missing Potussy. The police chief seemed annoyed to see there were no video cameras mounted on the grounds.

  “Surveillance devices would make the guests uneasy,” Teabull explained. “This isn’t a Nordstrom’s at the outlet mall. Nobody’s stealing our flatware, Chief Crosby.”

  Which was totally untrue. Some of the town’s richest geezers were avid kleptos. Pocket-sized shit disappeared from Lipid House during every gala—the Sumatran teak cocktail forks, Baccarat salt shakers, scotch-infused toothpicks, even the fucking porcelain coasters. The problem had gotten so bad that Teabull now replaced purloined valuables with cheap knockoffs, and instructed all catering firms to double-count their knives and spoons before departing.

  The chief said: “We’ve interviewed all the other nearby property owners. Nobody saw Mrs. Fitzsimmons in the neighborhood during or after your event.”

  Teabull forced a chuckle. “That’s not surprising. Everybody’s in bed or passed out drunk by nine.”

  Crosby said most of the residents had home-security systems with high-resolution cameras. “Once we collect all the tapes, we’ll basically have the whole street covered for that night, from several angles.”

  “Well, there’s a lucky break.” Teabull suppressed an impulse to vomit in the ferns.

  The chief put on his sunglasses and fished the car keys from a pocket. He said, “So far, Mrs. Fitzsimmons hasn’t shown up in any of the videos we’ve reviewed. There’s no indication she ever got outside these walls.”