Murder on the Orient Espresso(43)

Pavlik was watching me. ‘Ready, Maggy?’

I met his gaze and nodded. Since one eye was on each side of the creature’s head, I had to pick left or right. Choosing the former, I waved at it. The snake turned the other way and looked at Pavlik, as if to say, Is this broad serious?

Meanwhile, Hertel was still compulsively sharing. ‘Feller told me if you scare ’em right after a big meal, they—’

‘Try making noise,’ Pavlik said out of the corner of his mouth. He was stone still, the knife unwavering in his hand.

‘Hey!’ I yelled, jumping up and down. ‘Anaconda. Over here!’

The snake reared its head like the cobra in Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Even though my brain told me this wasn’t a venomous snake, my feet didn’t believe it.

In fact, they had recovered impressively from their previous jelly-like state and were now backpedaling rapidly into the water, demanding to know why we believed Hertel’s claim that this was a python at all. After all, we’d just met the man, and—

‘Blaaaaaaaah!’ An explosion in front of me.

A full lower-third of Potter was now hanging out of the snake’s mouth.

‘Holy shit,’ I said, taking another half-step back. ‘What’s—’

‘Blaaaaah!’

Now I could see Potter’s belt.

‘Kill it, kill it!’ I screamed in horror as I fell backwards onto the bank. ‘It’s spitting out Larry Potter so it can eat me!’

‘Blaaaaah-blaaaaah.’ The snake’s eyes were huge and it looked … well, concerned?

‘Like I was saying,’ Hertel had come from behind to help me up, ‘I hear tell you scare one of these things after a big meal and—’

‘Blaaah! … Blaaah … Blaaaah!’

Pavlik had the knife poised, but was holding fast. ‘Sounds like it’s got something stuck in its throat.’

Under the circumstances, I couldn’t think of anything to say other than, ‘the whole damn monster is its throat,’ and anyway, speech had momentarily left me. I kept my mouth shut.

‘Yup,’ Hertel said, ‘kind of like he’s hockin’ up a loogie. Or a “Larry” maybe?’ The ancient engineer was laughing as he offered me his hand.

I pushed his helping hand away and got up under my own steam. ‘That’s in poor taste.’

‘Taste,’ Hertel was still chuckling. ‘Now there’s another good one.’

I weighed the flashlight in my hand, considering which critter I should knock senseless – or more senseless, in Hertel’s case – with it.

‘Blaaah – blaaah! … Blaaaah … BLAAAAAAH!’

I turned around in time to see the entire body of Laurence Potter erupt from the snake’s mouth and land in the water, face-down, not two feet away from me.

‘Holy shit.’ My stomach was heaving and I pleaded with whatever was in it – a little cake icing and a lot of espresso martini, probably – to stay down there.

‘No wonder the poor bitch had trouble getting your reviewer in. And out,’ Hertel said, coming up beside me. ‘That thing there had to get hung up somewhere along her gut.’ He pointed.

‘That thing there’ was a staghorn handle, buried past the base of the blade in Laurence Potter’s back.





SEVENTEEN





‘I guess we can eliminate “accident” as the cause of death.’

The statement was my weak attempt at bravado as the python – Burmese or African rock, with my money on the latter – shuddered its last on the opposite bank.

With me refusing to touch any part of Potter that had been inside the snake, the sheriff and I managed to drag Potter’s body onto what passed for dry ground on the railway bed near the locomotive. We stood and watched while Hertel – finally, and mercifully – left us to climb onto the train in search of help, Pavlik instructing him not to provide any details to even the hoped-for helpers.

‘Unless that snake managed to hop up into the train and steal the knife from the cake,’ Pavlik said, ‘I think we can assume Potter was stabbed and either fell or was tossed off well before it got hold of him.’

I shivered and glanced toward the gaping snake carcass. The python had split its sides – and not in the good way – during the final effort to urp up the reviewer.

Pavlik, who’d been crouched down examining Potter’s body, rose to his feet. ‘The knife is plunged in so deeply a good portion of the handle isn’t even visible. We won’t know for sure until the autopsy, but I can’t imagine a person being strong enough to do that.’

I lifted my eyebrows. ‘So we’re back to the snake as cause of death?’