Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen Page 0,17

sweet pure silence; then she’d get in her truck and drive back to the city.

No removal calls had come in all morning, leaving Angie time to sit around wondering why anyone would go to the trouble of stealing a headless reptile from her storage freezer. Pruitt had been her prime suspect in the apartment break-in—until the warehouse job happened. Appraised together, the two crimes pointed to a more complicated motive than the vengeance fantasy that was driving the ex-poacher.

Angie assumed that her laptop and checkbook entries had led the apartment burglar to the storage unit. Maybe the creep was looking for dope or valuables, but the fact remained that he’d swiped the dead python—and he couldn’t have done it alone.

While she was fixing breakfast, Angie’s attention was drawn to a breaking story on the local TV news: The family of a missing elderly woman was offering $100,000 for information leading to her whereabouts.

It was a strikingly large sum, so Angie wasn’t surprised to learn that the lost woman was a winter resident of Palm Beach. Her name was Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons, age seventy-two.

Such disappearances weren’t uncommon in South Florida, though few families could afford to post six-figure rewards. Angie assumed that Mrs. Fitzsimmons, like many of the elderly who went missing, struggled with Alzheimer’s or some other dementia. Perhaps her family had asked the authorities not to publicize that. An accompanying photograph showed the woman wearing a droopy Santa hat and posing in front of a Christmas tree.

The newscaster concluded his report with a detail that made Angie flip her omelet into the garbage pail and reach for the phone—Mrs. Fitzsimmons had last been seen the previous Friday night at a charity event on the grounds of Lipid House. Only twenty-four hours later, Angie was called to the estate to remove the gorged Burmese python.

Mystery solved: The lump was the missing widow. Had to be.

She made three rapid-fire calls to Tripp Teabull but he didn’t answer, so she ran to her truck. The drive up the interstate to Southern Boulevard was painless, but after leaving the highway Angie began encountering roadblocks—a sure sign that the President was either in town, or on the way.

Angie doglegged northbound on Dixie to the Royal Park Bridge, crossed over to the island, and doubled back down South County toward Lipid House. From the front, the place looked deserted. She made a slow roll past the forged black gates before circling the block. Finding the rear service entrance open, she parked between two supernaturally shiny landscape trailers. Stepping out of the pickup, she was assaulted by the high-pitched din of mowers and gas-powered hedge trimmers. Evidently the bird-themed topiary was being re-sculpted into chessboard pieces, in advance of another gala.

Passing through a regiment of sweaty lawn workers, Angie counted four men in straw hats spaced around the shore of the koi pond, as if serving as sentries. Eventually she spotted Mauricio, the groundskeeper, wearing industrial earmuffs and sprawled in the shade of a massive strangler fig. He got up and led her to an out-building where badminton rackets hung on paneled walls and lacquered croquet mallets, arranged by color, lined the floorboards.

Sliding the earmuffs down around his neck, Mauricio said, “What brings you back to this side of the bridge?”

Angie said she needed to speak with Teabull.

“He’s off-property today. Whassup? Don’t tell me they shorted you on the pay.”

“No, sir. It’s about Mrs. Fitzsimmons.”

“Who?”

“The woman who disappeared from here the night before Teabull called me to come get the python from the tree,” Angie said.

Maurice got fidgety. “What about her?”

“You’re in a tricky position, loyalty-wise. I totally understand. But somebody stole that Burmese. They broke into my warehouse unit.”

Mauricio reacted with a baffled grunt. “Who’d want to jack a dead twenty-foot snake?”

“Actually, it was eighteen-eleven. My first question was why. The second was how they knew it was me who had the remains. Did you mention my name when you told people about the euthanization?”

Mauricio raised his hands. “The what?”

“When I chopped off its head.”

“Are you kiddin’? I didn’t even tell my wife. Mr. Teabull, he was hard-core about that. The whole staff got the same order: ‘Don’t say a word about what happened.’ ”

Angie picked up a red croquet mallet and let it swing by the tip of the handle from her fingers, like a pendulum. “Looks brand-new,” she said.

“They get polished every week. Even the mallet heads.”

“Every week? This is a whole other universe.”

“Anybody can take the ride. All you need is