Stu’s head disappeared, and an instant later, Angie’s took its place. She eased through the doorway, the shotgun angling upward across her chest and left shoulder. Slowly she lowered the barrel toward the tub and snugged the butt of the gun against her right shoulder. I heard the slight scrape of the snake’s scales on the bathtub; I heard the deep breaths Angie was taking through flaring nostrils; I heard the metallic click as she released the safety. “Doc, you might want to cover your ears,” she said. Moving almost imperceptibly, she leaned closer to the tub, close enough to see the snake. “Damn,” she said, “that is one mean-looking snake.”
Maybe it was the vibration of her voice, or maybe it was a slight movement of the barrel; whatever it was, something triggered the snake again, and as I watched in horror, it whipped around and lashed directly at Angie.
I was alive, but I was blind. No, actually, I was not blind, I realized as the smoke and my mind began to clear and I saw light streaming through the doorway from the bedroom beyond; I was in darkness because the bathroom lightbulb had shattered when Angie had fired the shotgun.
“Talk to me,” I heard Stu calling. “Doc? Angie? Are you okay?”
“I’m all right,” I said. “But I’m not so sure about Angie.” She was slumped against me, her body rotated from the recoil of the shotgun. “The snake was going for her when she pulled the trigger.” Suddenly I had a bad thought. “Stu, watch out. I’m not sure about the snake. It’s too dark and smoky in here for me to see.”
“I’m watching out,” he said.
Angie groaned and stirred. “Wow,” she said. “Remind me not to do that again.”
Stu appeared in the doorway with a flashlight, whose beam—a solid-looking shaft of light in the smoke—darted back and forth from Angie to me to the wreckage of the bathtub. “You all right?”
“I guess,” she said. “Not sure. A place on my right leg hurts. I might be snakebit.”
“Doubtful,” Stu answered. He bent down, and when he straightened up, he was holding a foot-long piece of the snake’s tail. It was the only piece of the snake that the shotgun blast hadn’t shredded. “Angie, one; snake, zero.” He played the light slowly over the tub, which had been reduced to fiberglass splinters, then added, “Bathtub, minus one.” He turned and shone the light on the shotgun, which Angie was holding loosely, the barrel pointing at the floor. “That’s a Mossberg 500 tactical, isn’t it.” He wasn’t asking; he was pronouncing. “That thing packs a punch.”
Angie nodded. She stared at the shotgun as if she were staring at a ghost. The peppery odor of gun smoke hung heavy in the air; underneath that scent, subtler but unmistakable, was the metallic tang, the rusty taste, of blood. The taste that would have hung in the air at Kate’s house.
It was true, what Angie had said at Shell’s a few days before. All roads—or at least this road, smelling of blood and brimstone—led to her sister.
It also, I realized, led to my father.
Remember me, remember me, remember me.
Chapter 23
I did end up getting a shower; the manager of the Twilight—whose anger at the damage done by the shotgun was tempered by his fear of a cottonmouth lawsuit—grudgingly put me in bungalow number two, which was a dead ringer, stain for stain, for number three. But I did not get the several hours of sleep I’d hoped to get.
Instead, I read the next entry from the diary, which Vickery had handed out at the end of the day. I should have known better than to read it so late at night. Like the television documentary about the lost boys of Sudan—the haunting film that had kept me awake the night I’d first arrived in Tallahassee—the diary was the stuff of nightmares. It would have been the stuff of nightmares, that is, if I’d been able to sleep after reading it. Surely the boys of the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory and the boys of the Bone Yard had also earned the label “lost.”
Buck wasn’t even over his beating when it happened. He still had scars from the worst of the cuts the strap give him, and he still walked with a limp. But he was getting better.