driver made a bathroom stop at the Pompano Beach service plaza. He was away from the truck for fewer than six minutes on the afternoon of the security breach, but there was no video because the camera posted in that quadrant of the parking lot had been disabled by someone with a pellet gun.
Later, the director of the Secret Service would be summoned before a Senate subcommittee and questioned about why Mastodon’s Key Lime pies hadn’t been transported in an unmarked vehicle. The director would explain that the small bakery didn’t own any trucks without signage, that the cost of using a government rig would have been exorbitant, and that in any case the hardworking couple that made the pies felt it was good advertising to have the bakery’s name on display, especially when delivering to such a prestigious zip code.
The time was five-twenty p.m. when the tangy shipment from Marathon arrived at the service entrance of Casa Bellicosa. Two white-clad Brits on the kitchen staff stood in wait while the driver, whose name was Guppo, backed up the gaily painted Betancourt Pastries chariot. It was he who noticed that the truck’s cargo compartment wasn’t locked, but he assumed he’d forgotten to do it. He rolled up the door, stepped into the cooler, pulled the wide tray from the rack, and let out a sound that changed from a quizzical hum to a terrified shriek.
A long mottled snake had threaded itself among the delicacies. It wasn’t moving because reptiles become dormant in cold temperatures, a herpetological fact unknown to Guppo. He reasonably feared he was about to get chomped and possibly squeezed to death.
So he dropped the heavy tray of presidential pies and ran.
The British kitchen workers resisted the impulse to follow him. They knew Mastodon would go raging apeshit without his beloved dessert, though the pies scattered in the truck looked unsalvageable. When the tray had fallen, the plastic containers popped open. Now the silky coils of the great python were smeared with citrine filling, whipped Chantilly cream, and crumbs from the fractured graham-cracker crusts.
However, in a lone corner on the other side of the motionless beast, sat a single, intact Key Lime pie. The lid of the container had been sprung, yet the fluffy treat looked perfect.
“I’m going for it,” one of the workers announced.
“Are you crazy?” said the other. “Let the fat toad eat ice cream!”
“My visa’s up next month. If I do this, I’m golden,” the brave one said. “Maybe I’ll even get a raise.”
“Or maybe you’ll get your dumb ass strangled,” said his co-worker, and took off.
The brave one pressed his back to the inside wall of the bakery truck, edged nervously past the torpid snake, and picked up the miracle pie. He balanced it one-handed over his head as he sidestepped out of the cooler, and he continued carrying it that way as he hurried to the Casa Bellicosa kitchen, where he arrived beaming.
* * *
—
“This is fun,” Angie said. “The Three Musketeers, together again.”
They were gathered in the dark around her pickup, which she’d parked next to the Betancourt Pastries truck at the delivery ramp of the President’s mansion.
Chief Jerry Crosby asked, “Did you bag the damn thing?”
“Yes, sir. Wanna see?”
Special Agent Paul Ryskamp was all business. “In your professional opinion, how did this happen?”
“Someone put the snake inside the bakery vehicle,” Angie said. “There’s no natural way it could have gotten there.”
“Maybe it crawled in through the cooling system.”
“No, it’s way too thick to fit. Anyway, pythons hate the cold.”
“So the person who did this,” said Crosby, “knows how to handle those things.”
“And also where the President gets his pies.” Angie looked at Ryskamp. “Wasn’t there a big write-up about the bakery in USA Today?”
“Two weeks ago,” the agent acknowledged tightly.
“Paul, at first I didn’t recognize you out here. But, dude, you are rockin’ that charcoal suit.”
“Enough, Angie.”
The chief said, “Can we all agree that monster snakes aren’t all of a sudden showing up in Palm Beach just because they’re bored with the Everglades? Some sick son of a bitch is targeting this community.”
“Looks that way,” said Ryskamp, “but let’s hear from the expert.”
Angie wasn’t positive she detected sarcasm, so her response was straightforward: “I agree—there’s no way this is random. This third one clinches the deal.”
“It’s not number three,” Crosby said bleakly. “It’s number five.”
“What the fuck, Jerry? Why didn’t you call me about the other two?”
“Because I didn’t need you to come catch them. They were already