and peered inside and then reached one hand into the space. His movements seemed too slow for what I knew was inside, but his arm came out with the spade-shaped head of an adult rattlesnake gripped in his hand. When three feet of the animal was out of the chest, he grabbed the middle with his other hand and gestured at me to hold on to the last three feet.
“Tight. But not too tight,” he said. “Just keep him from wriggling while we stretch him out on the table.”
I don’t know why I followed his instructions. But now I had half of a six-foot poisonous snake in my hands. The skin of the animal was smooth and the body felt as hard as a giant hose under full pressure. As I worked to pin it against the stainless table it flexed, and when I tried to keep it from curving, my hand slid up against the grain of its scales and the edges scraped roughly across my palm. When I repositioned my hand, I laid it higher and then slid it smoothly down the cool body.
“He’s been on ice for about fifteen minutes so he’s feeling pretty sluggish,” Sims said. “Just hold him here while I get this chip in.”
I couldn’t see the snake’s head. Sims kept his left hand locked just behind the flanged jaws which, I assumed, kept the animal from twisting around and biting him.
“I honestly did not intend to raise more scrutiny from the police by revealing our meeting, Mr. Freeman,” Sims suddenly said. He obviously wasn’t as focused on the snake as I was.
“I guess it just sort of spilled out as they were questioning me. They are very persuasive. In an unsettling way.”
“They do have that effect on people,” I said, trying to concentrate on both the environmentalist’s words and the shift in the lump of muscle under my hands. “But why do you think they called you in to begin with?”
“That’s a bit of a mystery in itself,” he answered. “They’d already talked to Professor Murtz, who is the head of the lab. They wanted to know about the milking of snake venom, which we do some of right here. The process is really quite easy. You see, the fangs are really like big needles themselves,” he said, twisting up the head of the snake in his hand and somehow squeezing the jaws to make them open to expose the half- inch gleam of needle-sharp bone.
“You get them over a funnel with some rubber-like membrane stretched over it and let them sink their fangs in. They think it’s something’s skin and pump away.
“Most of the time they’re more than anxious to bite. A snake is a survivalist, the venom is its protection and its means to a meal, so they’re instinctive with it. You anger them, they’re going to hit you. So the hard part is handling them over and over because, eventually, you’re not going to be quick enough.”
I watched Sims pick up the hypodermic and then hold the syringe in his own mouth while he probed the snake’s skin, running his hand over the cream-colored diamonds, looking for a spot to stick it. He motioned for me to bend up the tail and decided on a place near the base. As he held the animal’s head away, he slid the needle under a scale and pumped the chip in. When he finished, he swabbed the spot and then motioned to the cooler and we lifted the snake back into the ice chest and closed the lid.
“Professor Murtz already gave the police all of that information the first time, and how dozens of people from scientists to snake hobbyists to any good Southern snake hunter could do it,” Sims continued as he stripped off the gloves. “We could never figure why they were so interested and I thought that was why they called me in this time. But somehow they kept turning me toward the meeting at Loop Road and when your name came up I got the impression that I wasn’t telling them anything that they didn’t already know.”
“Yeah. My name just happens to come up a lot in places where I’d just as soon it didn’t,” I said, rubbing my palms together, still feeling the slick smoothness of the snake and the cool tingle of my own nerves.
Sims wrapped up the hypodermic and put the package back in the drawer and then washed his hands in a stainless steel sink