Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen Page 0,76

big enough to choke somebody,” Angie heard herself saying, “just not big enough to swallow ’em.”

Jerry Crosby pressed his knuckles to his temples and walked away mumbling.

Ryskamp said he was done, too. He took out an unmarked envelope and handed it to Angie. She grinned and said, “That was fast. Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t do anything that could put you back in prison.”

“Who, me?”

“One more thing,” the agent said. “Since I’m ninety-nine-point-nine-percent sure the Secret Service has no profiling formula for individuals who drive around ‘unleashing’ giant snakes, my last question is: What kind of psycho should we be looking for?”

“I have no idea, Paul. But if I were you—”

“Oh, absolutely. We’re taking the President and First Lady back to Washington.”

But the President and the First Lady refused to go.

* * *

—

The daily deluge of death threats had dropped to a trickle, but Diego Beltrán knew better than to relax. Now that the venture capitalist charged with making child pornography had fallen seventeen times on his fork in the cafeteria, Diego was the highest-profile inmate at the Palm Beach County Jail.

Held alone in a cell, he felt scalding stares whenever he walked down the corridor. He was the only prisoner branded a killer terrorist by the President of the United States, and there was no Honduran brotherhood to protect him while he was in custody. The other inmates derisively called him “Pinky” because of the conch pearl he was alleged to have stolen from the rich old woman he was alleged to have slain.

Diego kept his mouth shut. Every few days the garrulous scumbag in the cell next to his would be replaced by a new garrulous scumbag, who immediately would try to initiate incriminating conversation. It was from one such aspiring snitch that Diego first heard of DBC-88, the Diego Border Cartel, a nonexistent alien gang of which he supposedly was the leader. Diego couldn’t stop himself from chuckling when the snitch—an addled fentanyl mule from southern Mississippi—asked if he and his friends could join the group.

The other prisoners knew little about Diego except what they’d heard, and they were suspicious of his unwillingness to open up. One of many personal facts that he chose not to share was that he’d learned how to box while in college, won several amateur matches, and on two occasions had knocked a larger opponent unconscious. That information would have been useful to a man named Tuck Nutter. He was doing eight months for stealing Amazon packages from the porch of a group home for seniors, though he considered himself first and foremost an American, and a thief second.

One day Nutter was approached in the chow line by an inmate who said a group of patriots on the outside was offering serious bank for the death of Diego Beltrán. When Nutter asked who those people were, he was told they were part of a small but well-connected organization dedicated to saving the country from a takeover by dark-skinned, non-English-speaking foreigners.

Nutter, a fledgling white supremacist who shared similar views, asked how much money was being offered.

“Six thousand dollars,” the inmate whispered, and handed him a shiv.

“Tell ’em I’ll do it for fifty-six hundred. Aryan discount.”

Although he’d never killed anybody, Tuck Nutter was under the misimpression that it happened all the time in jails and would be easy to get away with because prisoners didn’t rat each other out.

The weapon was the sharpened handle of a plastic soup ladle. Nutter tested it by stabbing his mattress and was satisfied with the damage, although the rounded spoon end of the shiv proved awkward to grip. For days he continued to rehearse by goring his bedding, and then one afternoon he contrived to be in the shower area at the same time as Diego Beltrán.

It was a galloping ambush, and poorly executed. Nutter slipped on the wet tiles, clipped a faucet with his hip, and dropped the shiv. While fumbling to retrieve it he left his upper body unprotected and Diego, wearing only a towel, threw a flurry of upper cuts that flattened the hapless porch pirate. He awoke with swollen eyelids and a cracked sternum in the medical wing of the jail.

The next morning, when Diego met with his defense lawyers, he told them what had happened. They promised to try to get him transferred to a more secure facility.

“How about ICE detention?” he said. “I was safer there.”

“We’re still working on that.”

“Is the President’s mob still outside?”

“Not very many.”

“It’s definitely trending the right