Slither by Ed N. White

This is a crime scene. I shouldn’t be here; I’m not a cop anymore. So, I ducked under the yellow tape strung across the two trellis supports and picked the lock. Dusting residue coated surfaces in suspect locations; someone had cut two patches from the cheap gray rug. A ceiling fan with a squeaky bearing rotated slowly, which helped me breathe because the smell of death hung like diesel exhaust.

I went straight to the bedroom where they found her; the fan was off, and the foul odor permeated the space like rotting meat. The killer had written large, streaky, blood-brown letters spelling “REGRET” on the lime green, flamingo stenciled wall above the headboard, scarred with the marks of her futile struggle. Two bottle flies were sucking at the stain. Someone had spread newspaper pages over the puddle-soaked mattress where she had bled out. Chalk-encircled dark patches on the rug looked like a stepping-stone path from the door to the sagging bed. I snapped a few quick pics with my phone, eager to escape. The crime scene cleaners were coming this morning.

This is the third victim in four months, and the cops had no suspects, only more questions. Three beautiful young women came seeking fun and excitement at this coastal tourist town. Instead, three women looking nearly alike ended their vacation in body bags. What little forensic evidence the cops had collected suggested this horror was the work of one man. One vicious demon who may be in an air-conditioned room with his feet up in a recliner, sucking on a beer and watching the Rays win another one. Someone who was planning his next move at this very moment. He wouldn’t stop until they caught him, and the question was, how many more girls would die before then?

The public outcry and the media pressure were intense, and the cops were on this 24/7 but getting nowhere. That’s where I come in.

Acting on a tip, I called her father, Jim Sturdevant, in Cedar Rapids, speaking rapidly to get my pitch in his ear before he slammed the phone. I gave him my credentials, stressing my arrest record as a cop while glossing over why I am no longer a cop, but told him I would get results. I gave him my rate, explained what the expenses would cover, and didn’t sugarcoat it—this stuff costs real money. He wanted real results. We made a deal. But talk is cheap, and I had to start somewhere, so I called my ex-partner to boost me.

#

“Lieutenant Petrova, please. BJ calling.” The desk officer put me on hold. I wonder if they have a stop order in place.

“Petrova.”

“Victor, it’s Bobby Jack. I’m working with the Sturdevants. Trying to get them some closure.”

“What do you want from me?”

“What do you think—you know what I need?”

“Yeah, for you to drop dead and blow away.”

 “But that ain’t happenin’ Vik. So, I’m gonna find this mutt and drag him in, chained to the hitch on my truck. The quicker you help, the quicker this problem will go away.”

“Play nice, Bobby, or we’ll be dragging you in. The street thinks it’s a guy named Kreamer, with a K. We’re working that angle now, going through all the databases, but so far, shit out of luck. We can assume it’s a big guy with powerful hands. Like the other victims, he strangled her first, then mutilated the body postmortem. That’s not public knowledge; you didn’t hear it from me. Be careful, Bobby. I don’t want to see a bag with your name on the tag.” Victor cut the call and probably went for more coffee. At least he gave me a warning. In our world, a partner stays a partner for life, especially after you’ve saved his life once or twice. But I didn’t flinch at this news; it attracted me like catnip.

#

 Kreamer with a K. I Googled it, and the only local thing that hit me was a place called Kreamer Island, a forgotten postage stamp in the middle of Lake Okeechobee—a three-hour drive from here. So I headed to Pahokee, where I could rent an airboat, settled on a guy advertised as Captain Billy, and found him at a small lakeside beach. He was jockey-size, with a sharp face and dark eyes shaded under a Sun Cube fishing hat with a neck flap. His skin, sun-dried like a raisin, made it impossible to gauge his age. Maybe fifty, so he had a decade on me. I told him I wanted to go to Kreamer Island, and he asked, “Why?” Then followed that by telling me, “There’s nuthin’ there ‘cept water moccasins, pythons, gators, mosquitoes, and old tires.”

“What about the old tires?” I felt like that was a stupid question and expected a foolish answer. He said, “Tire dumping started in the ’70s until the mainland bridge burned.” I asked if anyone lived there. He spits brown juice onto a hermit crab crawling at his feet and says, “Not for years. It was a fishing village with a few buildings and some residents at one time, but the ’28 hurricane took care of that. The water rose to ‘bout twenty feet, ‘sposedly one hundred people died on Kreamer. After that, it became a ghost town.”

We made a deal, and he pocketed my C-note. Then he gave me acoustic earmuffs and pushed off, schussing through the swamp grass with the airplane engine cranked. It didn’t take long to get there at 40 m.p.h. When he throttled down and feathered the prop, the flat-bottomed aluminum boat scraped onto the island. A minute later, my stomach caught up with it. I got dizzy when I stood up, and he caught my arm with a powerful grip and helped me step out of the boat onto a spongy mass. “Thanks, I’m a city guy. I do better on sidewalks.” I laughed. He didn’t.

He opened the cooler, took out a Keystone, slipped it into a foam koozie, settled back into the pilot’s chair and said, “You’re lucky it’s been so dry. The ‘skeetas ain’t too fierce right now but the heat is making the snakes a little frisky, so watch yourself, city guy.” He thought that was funny. “Be careful where ya’ step. I’ll give ya’ an hour,” was his only advice.

I found a pile of rotted car tires. The rubber was so decomposed that the harmful chemicals had already leached out, and the current concern was aesthetics, as the county hoped to build a tourist park here and had to get rid of the tire mounds. Due to the arid weather and excessive heat over the past two weeks, the water trapped in the tires had evaporated. Mosquito breeding was taking a break. I quickly slopped more tires together, built a tower and lofted myself four feet above the surrounding flat terrain. The air was still. When I opened the Velcro flap on the thigh pocket of my tactical pants, it sounded like a band-aid being ripped off a hairy arm. I took out a high-power zoom monocular and scanned the horizon, traversing slowly as I fought to keep my balance on the shifting rubber mound.

A ramshackle structure caught my attention a hundred yards to the north. It was nothing more than some weathered boards, but they had a shape suggesting someone had cobbled them together for shelter. I pocketed the monocular and crouched to use my hands to help clamber down to the dry grass below. Something slithered to my left, and I saw the last eight feet of a giant ball python as it slowly worked through the grass, searching for prey. I warily traversed the yardage to the assumed shelter, now holding my 1911 Colt .45 alongside my left leg. I wasn’t taking any chances with a killer or a snake. It seemed like each step would slide back a little before the next one as my anxiety reached Defcon two. My tee shirt soaked tight to my body, sweat trickled under my ball cap and dripped from my Ray-Ban frames. I don’t like these swamp jobs—I’m a city guy.

My phone chirped a call. “Yeah, Vic, something new?”

“Yeah, maybe; I was at the autopsy, pretty girl, nice rack. Doc Ferenz matched his hand with the bruise prints left by the killer on her neck. The guy strangled her with one hand.”

“So?”

“The prints dwarfed the doc.”

“So, yeah, we’re looking for a big guy, I know….”

“Or maybe someone with powerful hands, like a gymnast rings guy—or a jockey.”

Those words froze my breath. Then I heard two clicks behind me, turned, and saw Captain Billy holding a sawed-off double 12 with a pistol grip stock in one hand, pointed at my head, hammers back. Ready. He drew a hand across his throat, and I closed my phone. He said, “Drop the gun.”

Time stopped; the only sounds came from the gulls at the beach and a slight murmur from the tall grass as it shifted with the wind. Then I let out the breath trapped inside me and said, “What’s up with the cannon?”

Captain Billy laughed, which drawled from his mouth like sharp grunts, none funny. “Pretty smart, city boy. How the hell did you figure this out?” He jabbed with the gun as if to force my answer.

I spoke slowly, but my brain was at warp speed, trying to figure a way out—anything. “Care to tell me about it? Any regrets, Bill?”

“Call me Captain Billy Kreamer.”

“Right, aye aye, captain.” Maybe this is it. I must stroke him, boost his ego, and fight for time. “That was my old partner on the phone telling me about the autopsy. He said whoever did that killing sure knew how to pick the best-looking girls.”

“Just like pickin’ oranges. Ya gotta know ‘zactly how and when,” Billy laughed, and I could see now how crazy this nutcase was.

“So, has it gotten any easier? I mean with experience. How many have you done?” My mouth was dry, and each word hurt, but I needed to return to the game. The next step was prayer, something I’m not good at.

“Girls just love airboat rides. There are some that nobody has found yet. I keep checkin’ the papers.”

“Did you hide them? What the hell, you can tell me.”

“I didn’t hide them; I put them in the water.” He chuckled, knowing I knew what that meant in gator-infested Florida.

“So, gator bait. No regrets about that?”

He burst out laughing. The gun lowered a bit, and I had some hope.

“That’s a good one, huh, Captain? So, what’s with this Kreamer thing? Your name, this island?”

“That’s how I got the girls. I told them about my great grandaddy, James N. Kreamer. He was the engineer who laid out the drainage system for old man Disston, who bought millions of acres here in 1881. Then, I’d tell them about the island and offer an airboat ride. Worked every time.”

“So, you lured them here, then what?”

“Whadya think? We’d sometimes mess around a little on a blanket at the beach or go up to my hut. I had to deal with them that wasn’t too pleased.”

“You mean kill them?”

He snorted and flexed one of his mitt-sized hands again. “I’d caress them a little first. Ya know, like when we were in high school. Some of ‘em were okay with that. They’re still alive. Lucky, I guess. All I wanted to do was touch them.”

“So, the unlucky ones, you strangled them here on the island?”

“Some of ‘em I just put into the water and held them under ‘till they stopped kickin’.”

“And the girl in the beach house, you butchered her there and wrote regret with her blood. Why?”

“Dunno. I just thought that would mess with the cops. Ya know, throw ‘em off the scent.”

“Do you have any regrets?”

He made a face and said, “Probably not.”

 My voice was rasping, and my options were running out. I flicked a quick look to the left; sure, I saw something in the grass behind him.

He laughed, “Don’t think yer gonna make a run for it, city boy.”

“I’m cool. I just thought I saw something in the grass behind you.”

“Yeah, that and a dollar bill will get ya a sack a ‘taters.’” He snorted at his joke and repositioned the shotgun, still holding it outstretched in one hand. I knew that took strength.

I leaned forward and gagged and put my hands on my knees, trying to look like I might puke. He quickly snapped the gun up and jabbed it at me. I said, “Hold on, Captain, easy peasy. How about a deal? Just you and me. Nobody must know about any of this.” As I spoke, I saw something black coiled in the grass behind him.

I opened my hands, imploring, like I was ready to offer a deal. I stumbled another step forward. He braced the gun.

One step backward was all he needed. The black coil looked like a fat flexi-hose with an open mouth showing cotton-colored tissue. The flat head was weaving back and forth with jaws spread about the size of my open hand. Fangs.

I said, “Listen, Captain, let’s…” and dropped my open hands, staggered, and stepped forward as if to offer him something. Instead of shooting, he instinctively took one step back….

#

Time flashed in a nanosecond. The bite, the scream, the shotgun blast, and the twisting snake all rolled into one horrible moment. I snatched up my Colt and fired one shot, which slammed into his chest. The screaming stopped.

I called Vic and told him it was over and that I would give my statement when I returned to town. Then, I told him where I was and said they’d need someone to bring back an airboat.

I kicked aside the shotgunned snake pieces, hoisted Billy’s body over my shoulder, picked up the shotgun, and trudged through the tall grass to dump him in the airboat. Then, I called Jim Sturdevant in Cedar Rapids. When I told him what I had done, he asked if I had any regrets. I didn’t answer that question, but I said I was sorry for his loss and sat on the beach with a Keystone from Billy’s cooler, waiting for a rescue.

Ed N. White

Image: Yellow Crime Scene tape with the warning in capitals Crime Scene Do Not Cross. There is a blue light on a vehicle in the background. From Pixabay.com