Double blind

Chapter Twenty-four

When Henry Lightstone and Bobby LaGrange turned into the small industrial park a little after nine that Wednesday evening, they drove through the dimly lighted complex and pulled into the parking area in front of Bravo Team's rented warehouse.

When Lightstone shut off the engine, they could hear Dwight Stoner's distinctive booming voice, and Larry Paxton yelling something in reply.

"You call this a covert operation?" LaGrange commented as he and his former partner stared at the intensely bright light streaking out from under the roll-up door, around the drawn window and door shades, and through the fairly impressive gaps in the aluminum siding beneath the roof. Compared to this display, the rest of the warehouses in the small industrial complex appeared abandoned.

"Yeah, me too. I guess they're arguing over who gets to put the neon sign up," Lightstone commented sarcastically as he and LaGrange walked up to the small metal door and knocked.

When Larry Paxton opened the door, a blast of brilliant light nearly drove the two men backward.

"Jesus Christ, Paxton, what the hell — " Lightstone shielded his eyes to keep from being blinded.

"Get your butts in here before the damned thing escapes," the Bravo Team leader muttered as he yanked the two men into the warehouse and slammed the door.

"Before what escapes?" Bobby LaGrange's blinking eyes immediately focused on the red warning labels covering several of the wooden crates stacked in the middle of the warehouse floor. Around them, he saw an incredible assortment of haphazardly scattered cardboard boxes, bags, cans, power tools, and lumber that covered most of the concrete floor.

"The goddamned snake," Larry Paxton replied in a voice that gave the distinct impression of rapidly approaching hysteria.

"You guys let one of those things get loose?" Bobby LaGrange instantly moved to an open section of concrete and began scanning the surrounding piles of cardboard and assorted debris for movement.

"One?" Dwight Stoner's deep booming voice echoed across the cavernous warehouse. "Yeah, right, that's a laugh."

Larry Paxton glared at the ex-Oakland Raider turned agent.

"Hey, what happened to the rental car?" Lightstone asked, noticing the shattered windshield and the huge dents on the top of the hood.

"Go ahead, Paxton." Dwight Stoner waved the snake net in his massive hand encouragingly. "You're the team leader around here. You tell the man what four highly trained covert federal agents have been doing here the last couple of hours."

"Things got a little bit out of hand for a while, but we've almost got it under control," Paxton started to explain when Thomas Woeshack's head popped up from the other side of the pile of terrarium boxes.

"Yeah, you should have been here, Henry. It was awesome! We were trying to hurry and get them all in the terrariums 'cause we don't them to die of hunger or thirst when all of a sudden, we had snake babies! A whole ton of them. And then Mike starts yelling 'Tape the lid shut!' and Larry's screaming 'Oh shit!' over and over again. But before Stoner and I could find the tape, the babies were everywhere. Must've been a hundred of them!"

"You guys let a hundred baby snakes get loose in here?" Henry Lightstone shook his head in amazement as he ran his hand over the huge dents in the car hood.

"Yeah!" Woeshack's eyes gleamed with delight. "Common Red-bellied Blacksnakes. Really evil-looking! And man, you should've seen Stoner. Soon as those little snakes started coming out through those gaps in Mike's transfer contraption, he jumped right up on that stack of crates, and then the whole stack started hissing and thrashing around like crazy, and he screamed and jumped all the way over there to the rental car and — "

"I think I get the picture."

Henry Lightstone nodded his head thoughtfully as he picked up a couple of the snake hooks littering the floor and walked back to where Paxton and Bobby LaGrange stood.

"There wasn't no hundred baby snakes." Larry Paxton switched his supervisory glare to Woeshack. "According to Jennifer, Common Red-bellied Blacksnakes only have about twelve babies in a batch — "

"I think you mean 'offspring in a litter,'" Lightstone corrected his superior as he handed one of the snake hooks to LaGrange. "Twelve offspring in a clutch, if they're egg-layers, or twelve offspring in a litter if they're live-bearers. I assume Common Blacksnakes are live-bearers?"

"Yeah, whatever," Paxton acknowledged absentmindedly. "Anyway, we've already found twenty-three of the little buggers, which means — Hey, wait just a minute now! How come you know so much about snakes all of a sudden?" the Bravo Team leader demanded.

"You mean like this one?"

Henry Lightstone suddenly thrust the snake hook down behind Larry Paxton's feet, squatted, and stood holding a small, frantically wiggling black-and-red snake just behind its head with his thumb and forefinger.

"What the hell!" Larry Paxton's eyes bulged as he hurriedly searched the floor around his feet.

"Just gotta know where to look, Paxton." Lightstone glanced around the floor again and casually brought the wiggling snake up to eye level.

"What the hell are you doing, holding a poisonous snake like that in your bare hand?" Larry Paxton demanded, his eyes still round as he watched the tiny reptile furiously try to work itself loose enough to bite its captor.

Henry Lightstone examined the snake's gaping mouth critically. "Come on, Paxton, a little guy like this can't do much damage. Little baby fangs like that, it probably would've taken him a good thirty seconds just to chew through your sock. And even then, he probably wouldn't have given you much of a jolt. They like to save their venom for something that looks good to eat.

"Which reminds me," Lightstone went on, "you really don't have to worry too much about food and water for a few days with reptiles at this temperature, but it'll be a lot easier to get all the snakes into the terrariums before the babies hatch out. And another thing," he added, glancing down at Paxton's low-cut tennis shoes, "most professional snake handlers wear high-topped leather boots. Cuts down on the number of trips to the emergency room."

"I ain't no professional snake handler!" the Bravo Team leader snapped irritably.

"Yeah, no kidding." Henry Lightstone scanned the surrounding floor again. "Anybody got an extra snake bag handy?"

"Right here!"

Mike Takahara ran up with a long, narrow canvas bag and held it open as Lightstone thrust his hand deep into it. As Henry removed his hand, the tech agent clamped his own around the neck of the bag and tied it shut with the attached canvas straps.

"Twenty-four!" Takahara's voice echoed in the cavernous warehouse holding the snake bag up triumphantly.

"Thank God," Dwight Stoner tiredly agreed as he and Woeshack came up beside Paxton. "We've been looking for that damned thing for the past hour." Then a puzzled frown crossed the huge agent's face. "Hey, wait a minute." He looked at Henry suspiciously, then glared at Paxton. "How come he found it so fast?"

"And caught it with his bare hands, too," Thomas Woeshack reminded them.

"The bastard knows something about snakes." Larry Paxton looked like someone who had been thrashing in a pond convinced he was about to drown at any moment, only to discover that the person sitting on shore observing him was an off-duty lifeguard.

Henry Lightstone shrugged. "Bobby and I were interested in herpetology when we were kids."

"But that was before we discovered girls." Bobby LaGrange smiled helpfully. "I take it you guys are still working yourselves up to that stage?"

Larry Paxton stood momentarily speechless.

"You mean you — " It took the nearly apoplectic Bravo Team leader several seconds to finally get the words out. "You left the four of us here — four people who don't know shit about snakes, in a freezing warehouse full of some of the most poisonous snakes in the whole damned world — to try to figure out how to put snakes that are too big into terrariums that are too small… with nobody bothering to tell us that some of the damned things might be pregnant and start squirting out baby snakes right and left… while you and your ex-partner here — "

"Were out risking our lives purchasing Bigfoot evidence?" Henry Lightstone finished with an innocent look on his face.

"Actually, that's not exactly true," Bobby LaGrange pointed out. "I didn't risk anything except my reputation and my bank account. And the way you explained the situation to me, you really didn't buy anything from her, Henry. It was more like a gift, wouldn't you say?"

"Yeah, good point."

"Her?" Four voices practically howled in unison.

"The witch," Bobby LaGrange explained helpfully. "Personally, I think Henry's in love. I've seen that look in his eyes before, but he won't admit it."

"You let him buy Bigfoot evidence from a witch?" Dwight Stoner demanded. "What happened to the old fart soothsayer?"

"Wow." Thomas Woeshack looked duly impressed.

"What does she look like, Henry?" Mike Takahara asked.

"Well, I think she's pretty attractive… as far as witches go, anyway," Lightstone added with a cheerful smile as he looked around the warehouse. "I would've called and told you guys all about her, but I gather you haven't installed the phones yet?"

"Next item on the list," Mike Takahara promised.

"And while we're on the subjects of lists," Lightstone interrupted. "You guys need to cut down on your lights in here, or do a lot better job in sealing off under the roll-up door, around the window and door shades, between the aluminum siding and the roof. Looks like a carnival show out there."

"Door, window, and roof seals, check," the tech agent muttered as he made a few cryptic notes.

"Another thing," Lightstone went on. "Looks like I'm going to need some halfway decent ID after all."

"Okay." Mike Takahara looked up from his notebook. "What do we know about you so far?"

Lightstone paused for a moment. "Let's see, I'm in between jobs, my girlfriend took off on me a few weeks ago, and I'm out here to look up Bobby — a guy I went to school with when we were kids."

"Any particular discussion on location where you two went to school?"

"No."

"What about your name?"

"I'm locked in on 'Henry,' but no last name yet."

"Okay. Bobby's got a pretty strong Southern accent for somebody who grew up in San Diego. Why don't we see if we can get you away from the West Coast. Maybe somewhere back East. How does North Carolina sound?" The tech agent looked over at Bobby LaGrange.

"Why don't you make it South Carolina," Bobby LaGrange suggested. "I've got relatives down in Beaufort, so I can fill Henry in on the appropriate local color. And as far as the local people around here are concerned, all they know about us is that we moved here from Miami."

"South Carolina's fine with me," Lightstone agreed. "Just get it as soon as you can, and make sure whatever name you come up with can stand up to a half-decent background check."

"Yeah, that's right, you never know what a witch can find out if she really puts her mind to it," Thomas Woeshack pointed out.

"I think I need to sit down." Larry Paxton fumbled for one of the overturned boxes.

"Uh, not there, Larry." Lightstone quickly reached past the Bravo Team leader with the snake hook, knelt, and stood with another tiny wiggling black snake. "Kinda cute little critters," he remarked to Takahara. "Got another bag?"

"Don't worry, Larry, he always did that when we were kids, too. Used to drive me crazy." Bobby LaGrange smiled sympathetically as he watched the visibly shaken Bravo Team leader gingerly kick at the box, move it out into a bare patch of concrete floor, then look around once more before finally sitting down uneasily.

"That's twenty-five, Paxton," Dwight Stoner pointed out with a menacing edge to his deep voice. "What about that 'two-times-twelve is twenty-four' bullshit you've been handing us all evening?"

"Actually, those clutch and litter numbers are usually plus or minus a whole bunch," Henry Lightstone pointed out. "At least that's the way it worked for all the North American snakes Bobby and I raised, and I'll bet it's pretty much the same thing for Australian snakes, too. So if I were you guys, I'd keep my eyes open, just in case."

Larry Paxton gave him a venomous look.

"And just what, exactly, makes you think any of us intend to have any part of our anatomy anywhere near this place from now on, now that we know about you two junior herpetologists?" he asked reasonably.

"Hey, Bobby and I'd be glad to help. Honest. Giant spiders give me the willies, but snakes are cool. But as it turns out, I've got a date with the witch for breakfast tomorrow, and unfortunately" — Lightstone looked down at his watch — "I told the folks at the forensics lab to call me at Bobby's house around ten to tell me what they found out about the Bigfoot hair we dropped off this afternoon."

"Those lab folks must not have much of a social life," LaGrange observed. "But then, I suppose if they started hanging out with people like you and your witch friends instead of working all night" — he poked his ex-partner good-naturedly — "they'd probably end up having to exorcise the whole lab on a regular basis."

"Which reminds me," Henry Lightstone added after he dropped his latest captive into Takahara's snake bag, "Bobby and I probably should keep our distance from this place for a while. We're pretty much linked together now as far as my cover goes, and with all the bright lights, yelling, and screaming going on here, you guys are about as covert as a carnival. If anybody like the Sage or the Witch spots Bobby and me out here, they're liable to think we're a couple of federal wildlife agents running a snake scam on some poor Mexican Mafia gang down in Nogales. Then they'll never show us their mythical beast."

"Or offer to sell us any of their genuine mythical souvenirs," Bobby LaGrange added.

"Which probably wouldn't make Halahan very happy, although why he could possibly care, one way or the other, completely escapes me." Lightstone admitted.

"However, he is the boss." LaGrange reminded his ex-partner.

"Exactly. Which means we'd better get going." Lightstone looked around one last time. "You guys going to be okay out here on your own for a couple more days?"

"Oh hell yes." Larry Paxton stretched his arms to take in the expanse of Bravo Team's assigned warehouse operation. "We've only thirty deadly poisonous snakes, a dozen man-eating crocodiles, and 750 giant tarantulas to transfer into 120 terrariums in the middle of a freezing warehouse which we can't warm up because if we do, everything in the crates will go bat-shit… and if we don't get them into the terrariums pretty soon, we're going to be up to our butts in thirsty baby snakes, and probably baby spiders, too, for all I know.

"Plus," he went on dramatically, "it only took the four of us twelve hours, $2800.00 in tools and lumber and shit, one squashed rental car, two rolls of duct tape, and a down payment on my nervous breakdown to unload one whole crate, which means we've only got seventy-one measly crates to go. So don't you worry none about us. We'll be just fine."

"See," Henry Lightstone assured his dubious former partner as they headed back to the truck, "I told you they'd be okay once they got a system going."