Squeeze Me Page 7

  Uric ran to the car and backed it flawlessly as his partner directed him to the closest dumping position. The men then snatched the shovels from the rear seat and began digging in the wet cement and aggregate, creating a hole that seemed plenty deep for corpse concealment. Once the site was ready, the interment would have to be completed swiftly, before the concrete began to harden.

  Neither Uric nor the Prince was ready for the sight that assailed them when they opened the trunk of the Malibu. The thawing python hadn’t exploded so much as unzipped, exposing the reason for the lump in its belly—crumpled, corkscrewed remains of a slight, silver-haired woman cloaked in a pale gown.

  “Oh f-f-fuck,” gasped Uric, a sentiment repeated more emotively by his sidekick, who commenced to wail and puke.

  The stench was otherworldly. Uric covered his mouth and nose, and struggled to remain steady. Now he understood why Tripp Teabull had hired him to snatch the dead snake: There was a dead rich lady inside of it.

  Uric knew she was rich because, in addition to expensive-looking clothes, she wore diamond earrings the size of Cheerios and a string of small, creamy-pink pearls. Removing them was a gooey chore that ended with Uric snapping the necklace and sliding the pearls into his hand. Bitterly he wondered how—while killing a whole morning at Green’s drugstore—he’d forgotten to purchase hospital gloves in anticipation of reptile gore.

  As he pocketed the moist jewels, Uric kept his back to the Prince, who was down on both knees, forehead in the dirt. When Uric turned around, he barked, “Dude, get in the fucking game!”

  Together they hoisted the bony heap from the Malibu’s trunk and placed it into the fresh hole in the concrete.

  “Now there’s no room for the snake!” the Prince bleated, violently wiping his hands on his pants.

  Uric said, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t you see?”

  But the Prince got so freaked that Uric made him sit in the car. Working alone with his shovel, Uric hastily covered the misshapen body and smoothed the surface on the footer. The concrete crew, returning from a long lunch of crab cakes, didn’t look twice at the white car speeding away from the construction site, nor did they glance at the faces of the driver and his companion.

  “So, let’s hear your next genius move,” the Prince said.

  Uric wasn’t in the mood for sarcasm. “What’s your problem, dickface?”

  “I never touched a dead body before is my problem.”

  “Chill your pussy ass out.” Uric stomped the accelerator. “The worst part’s over. We are home-fucking-free.”

  He was wrong.

  Late that night, after too many Captain Morgans, he and the Prince would resume a protracted argument about which of them had shut the Malibu’s trunk—or, more precisely, which of them had shanked the task of shutting the trunk.

  Following a tense dinner at KFC they’d returned to their squatter’s condo and were planted in front of the television when the eleven o’clock news came on. The top story was about the First Lady’s motorcade being delayed en route to Palm Beach that afternoon, due to the presence in the roadway of a headless Burmese python. Grisly video focused on the burst predator, stretched across two lanes.

  The scene was surrounded by wry-looking cops and tight-lipped Secret Service dudes wearing sunglasses and three-for-one suits from JoS. A. Bank. Visible in the background were the red-striped gates of the railroad crossing that the Malibu had vaulted doing fifty-plus miles per hour, a tooth-cracking jolt that had stunned the car’s unbelted occupants and sprung the unsecured lid of the trunk, resulting in an ill-timed launch of the decomposing snake carcass.

  At the end of his story, the TV reporter quoted a White House spokesperson saying that the First Lady was never in danger, and that the motorcade had proceeded to Casa Bellicosa with no further delays. Law-enforcement authorities were said to be investigating how the python ended up on the First Lady’s route.

  “I bet they already found the car,” the Prince said dejectedly.

  “Oh, right. At the bottom of that canal? No way, José.”

  “You were the one in charge of lockin’ the trunk!”

  “Bullshit. I was in charge of buryin’ the body,” Uric said. “You’re the one supposed to close the trunk. A retard baboon couldn’t screw up a job that simple.”

  The dead woman’s pink pearls and diamond earrings remained in a front pocket of Uric’s pants. He considered the gems a well-earned bonus, and couldn’t think of one good reason to mention them to his partner.

  “Can I ask why the hell you call yourself Prince Paladin?”

  The Prince said, “That was my stage name. I was in a reggaeton band.”

  “A what?”

  “Before I started dealing pills.”

  “X?”

  “Naw, Vicodins mainly.”

  “And then…?”

  “Then I got busted. This was up around Pittsburgh.”

  Uric said, “So, how come you’re out already? You beat the rap?”

  “I wish. Did six months and three days.”

  “All you got was six months?” Uric snatched the TV remote away from the Prince, who was flipping through channels like a gacked-up chimp. “Six months for opioids? Jesus, did you have to blow the judge? Or just let him blow you?”

  The Prince shrugged and reached for the rum bottle.

  “Oh, now I get it,” said Uric. “The feds cut your time ’cause you flipped. You rat-fucked your friends.”

  “They weren’t no friends a mine. And don’t come down on me, bro. Sometimes you get in a situation, you gotta do whatever it takes.”

  “That’s a true statement, Your Highness.” Uric finished his drink and stood up. “Sometimes you do.”

  SIX

  Angie Armstrong was at the hair salon when her phone began to ring. Her eyes were closed and Mike Campbell’s cosmic guitar solo from “Runnin’ Down a Dream” was playing in her head.

  The man holding the sharp scissors happened to be an ex-boyfriend of solid character. They’d broken up over religious differences; he was a re-enlisted Catholic, and Angie refused to set foot in church—any church, not just his. Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, it didn’t matter. She was not a fan.

  “Under what circumstances,” she’d mused to Martin the hairdresser one Sunday morning in bed, “could you envision Jesus Christ, a humble carpenter, hawking rosaries at the Vatican Gift Shop?”

  That ended their relationship, except for Angie’s monthly haircut. These days they mostly talked about the sorrowful plight of the Marlins or Dolphins.

  “Your phone,” Martin said, snipping briskly.

  “I know.” Angie opened her eyes.

  “Well, answer it.”

  “That would be rude,” she said, “interrupting an artist at his craft.”

  “What’s rude is your choice of a ringtone.”

  “Gaga?”

  “It’s the words.”

  “Shut up!”

  “ ‘Pornographic dance fight?’ ”

  “You, who worshipped Prince,” said Angie, “are complaining about naughty lyrics?”

  Martin snipped faster and louder. “Babe, are you fond of your earlobes?”

  “I’ve been told they’re cute.”

  “Then answer that stupid phone.”

  The caller ID showed a 202 area code, which was Washington, D.C. A man on the other end identified himself as Agent Paul Ryskamp from the United States Secret Service. He sounded legit.

  Angie’s first thought was that Pruitt, her nightly phone harasser, had gone off the rails and called her in as a threat to the vacationing President.

  But it wasn’t that. “We’re contacting you about a large snake in our possession,” the agent said. “You might’ve seen it on the news.”

  “I watched basketball last nigh
t. Heat and Mavs went to overtime. What type of snake?”

  “Burmese python. Been dead for a while.”

  “No problem. A hundred dollars plus gas and tolls,” Angie said.

  “Sounds fair.”

  “I’m curious, sir, how such a specimen ended up in the custody of your particular agency.”

  “Me, too,” said Ryskamp. “When can you be here?”

  “Washington?”

  “No, Ms. Armstrong. We’ve got an office in West Palm.”

  The Secret Service kept an unmarked suite in a downtown office building, from which agents had a distant view of Casa Bellicosa across the Intracoastal Waterway. The space had been selected not for its proximity to the presidential getaway, but rather because the landlord donated half-a-million dollars for media commercials supporting Mastodon during his impeachment trials.

  Paul Ryskamp was waiting for Angie in the lobby. She didn’t pick him out as an agent immediately because he wore board shorts and an untucked, pineapple-themed tropical shirt. With sun-streaked hair and a Gulf Stream tan, he looked more like a tiki bar mixologist-in-training. She guessed he was in his late forties.

  They rode a private elevator to the Secret Service offices. In the kitchen area stood a double-door refrigerator from which the shelves had been removed. Crammed inside the chilled space was an oversized burlap bag, knotted at the top. Ryskamp helped Angie pull the unwieldy load to the floor.

  “I’ll take it from here,” she said.

  Three other male agents wandered in, dressed in standard street-fed fashion. They joined Ryskamp in a semicircle around Angie and the hefty parcel.

  The knot was too tight. Angie took out a small knife.

  “May I?” she asked Ryskamp.

  “God, by all means.”

  Angie sawed off the knot and opened the neck of the bag.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “I know this snake.”

  She unfurled the mammoth Burmese and arranged its reeking limpness along the tile floor. The other agents, their faces now as gray as their suits, exited the area.

  “Something’s missing,” Angie remarked.

  Ryskamp said, “Uh, yeah? The head.”

  “No, sir, I’ve got the head. Something else is gone.”

  “How can you tell it’s the same snake?”

  Angie showed the agent a cell phone photo from the Lipid House incident. “The skin is identical,” she explained. “Each python’s color pattern is unique.”

  “This one doesn’t have a big lump in its belly like the one in your picture.”

  “Exactly. That’s our mystery—what happened to the phantom lump? A.K.A. supper.”

  Ryskamp smiled. “Let’s go down the street and grab a drink. You can tell me the whole story.”

  “First we’ll need a large box,” Angie said, “and a shit-ton of ice.”

  * * *

  —

  The same night as the White Ibis Ball, eighty miles on the other side of the Gulf Stream, a thirty-two-foot boat departed the Bahamian island of South Bimini on a beeline for the coast of Florida. The vessel was overloaded with twenty migrants plus the captain, but the chop was light, the ride smooth. Powered by twin 350s, the boat moved very fast. Nobody got seasick.

  At half-past two, the darkened craft nosed onto a beach across the road from the Palm Beach Country Club. The silent, anxious passengers descended one by one from the bow and began to run. They carried gym bags or backpacks, and not much else. There were six Haitians, five Hondurans, three Chinese and six Cubans, each of whom had paid $8,000 cash to the smuggler.

  For all but one of the travelers, the sprint across the sand would be their first footsteps inside the United States. However, a twenty-five-year-old man named Diego Beltrán was returning to a familiar place. He’d earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of Miami before going home to Tegucigalpa after his student visa expired.

  After seeing his two favorite uncles shot dead by police at a political rally, Diego decided to return to Florida as soon as possible. Knowing the asylum-application process would be slow and complicated, he drove past the U.S. Embassy and straight to the airport. From there he flew to Nassau via Havana, hopped the mail boat to Bimini, and the following afternoon was sitting at a waterfront bar buying bottles of LandShark for a no-name smuggler with a speedboat.

  Diego was the last to debark when they landed on the crystal shore of Palm Beach. He knew by the pattern of the skyline where they were, and how difficult it would be for the others to blend in. When he reached A1A, he turned and saw that the smuggler’s boat was already gone. Diego listened to the fading growl of its engines as he pressed his back against the trunk of a tree on the golf course.

  Before dawn, he undressed and rinsed off in the fairway sprinklers. He waited to drip-dry before donning a Bon Jovi tee that matched his black jeans and black high-tops. Diego was only five-eight, but his upper arms and shoulders were ripped. Clean-cut was the impression he aimed for; before leaving the Bahamas, he’d shaved his beard and neatly trimmed his black hair.

  As the sun rose above the ocean, he walked along the road with an unhurried yet deliberate gait. He didn’t want to look like someone who’d just crossed the Gulf Stream on an outlaw’s midnight run; he wanted to look like an average guy carrying an average backpack on his way to an average job. Maybe he drove a delivery truck for the florist. Maybe he stocked the aisles at the boutique grocery. Or maybe he even worked the cabana shift at the Bath Club, serving chilled mimosas to crepe-faced old millionaires reeking of designer sun block.

  All that mattered to Diego was that nobody paid him any attention. He walked a long way, peeking between the tall sculpted hedges of white stucco mansions grander than anything he’d seen in Miami. He crossed a drawbridge over the Intracoastal and paused to watch a dreamlike procession of southbound yachts, each trailing a seam of froth.

  As soon as his shoes touched the mainland, Diego felt safer. He hoped his fellow migrants would make it safely off the island as well. He’d advised them to scatter and go solo, but those traveling with siblings or cousins were unlikely to do that. The Cubans had rides waiting, but the rest of the boat people were on their own. Diego never expected to lay eyes on any of them again, although he would.

  On his first day he lucked into a job at an industrial park—a small factory that manufactured rainbow-colored beach umbrellas. Several of the workers shared rooms at a local roach-friendly motel, so Diego rented himself a cot between two easygoing Nicaraguans. Almost everyone on the umbrella crew was illegal, like him, but he stood out because of his flawless English. The factory’s manager, an African American named LeVonte, immediately tapped Diego as a bilingual conduit to the other migrants.

  Not long after his arrival, while walking to the factory one morning, he stopped at a railroad crossing to wait for a freight train to pass. It took so long that Diego was afraid he’d be late for work. The moment the last car rolled by, he darted around the warning gates to hurry across the tracks. That’s when he spotted a small bright object among the rock ballast in the gutter between the ties.

  The object was as pink as cotton candy, smooth though not perfectly round. It looked like a natural pearl, though Diego had never seen one that color. He placed it in his pocket wondering how such an exotic-looking gem—real or fake—had ended up on a railroad bed. It seemed like a sign of good things to come.

  But later that same day, Diego was pulled off the stitching line by LeVonte, who whispered, “Tell everyone do not panic, and do not fucking run. These dudes got major guns.”

  “Who?” said Diego.

  The dudes with guns were officers from ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. They were so surprised by Diego’s fluency that the female agent who interviewed him triple-checked on her laptop to make sure he wasn’t legal before seatin
g him in the ICE van. An hour later he was being processed at the benignly named Broward Transitional Center, a for-profit prison owned by pals of the governor who got a $20 million government contract to lock up and feed undocumented aliens.

  In the line of detainees ahead of him, Diego recognized two Haitian women and a Chinese teenager who’d been on the same speedboat from Bimini. They looked downcast, rumpled and hungry. As badly as Diego felt for himself, he felt worse for them.

  When he got to the front of the line, his pockets were emptied and inventoried: seventeen dollars in U.S. currency, the key to a motel room, two packs of peppermint chewing gum, and one lustrous pink sphere that Diego no longer believed to be a lucky charm.

  Still, on the day he was unexpectedly transferred from immigration detention to the county jail, Diego wouldn’t make the connection between the railroad pearl and his ominous change in status from asylum seeker to murder suspect.

  * * *

  —

  Uric saw no downside to killing Prince Paladin. The unreliable fuckhead couldn’t be trusted to keep quiet about the python heist, and he’d rat out Uric in a heartbeat if the cops ever braced him. That was his history.

  Another factor in Uric’s thinking was the mind-blowing $100,000 reward put up by the family of the old lady who’d gotten swallowed by the snake. Uric went on the Palm Beach Police Department’s website and closely read the press release. The money was being promised to anyone “providing information that leads to the safe return or whereabouts of Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons.” Uric focused on the word “or,” which signified to him that a dead body was as valuable as a live one.

  While there would be no happy return of Mrs. Fitzsimmons, Uric could definitely provide the details of her whereabouts. In his mind he tinkered with a script for his phone call to the anonymous tip line, settling on this:

  I heard about that sweet old lady that’s gone missing. Other night at a titty bar I met a dope dealer name of Prince Paladin, he got wasted and started bragging how he offed some rich bitch on the island. He told me he hid her body in concrete at a construction site near a golf course on south A1A. Maybe it was all bullshit, but I’m putting it out there, anyway, in case it was actually him that did it. I’m sure the old lady’s family would feel better to get her back, no matter what.