Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 103, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 625 & 626, March 1994

Hamadryad by William Beechcroft

© 1994 by William Beechcroft

After retiring from Maryland Public Television, where he was director of development and information services and had a hand in launching, among other things, Wall Street Week, William Beechcroft, a.k.a. William Hallstead, moved to Florida. The Sunshine State has since become the setting for many of his stories, including this tale of a gangster from up north...

Ten miles north of Fort Myers — where the Tamiami Trail arrowed through miles of scrub and sand and the fringes of Punta Gorda hadn’t shown up yet — Sammy “Little Shot” Pippitone pushed himself straighter behind the wheel of his rented Honda Civic. The Garden of Serpents should be coming up soon, according to the info he’d been given yesterday. Out here in the southwest Florida boondocks, he ought to be able to make the hit Q & E — quick and easy — then zip back down to Southwest Regional and catch a redeye back north in time for an early breakfast in Manhattan.

Sammy’s nickname hadn’t come from his smallness, though he wasn’t a lot bigger than a slightly oversized jockey. They called him “Little Shot” because he was at the bottom end of the caliber scale from Orlo “Big Shot” Orsini. The Big Shot packed one of the new .50-caliber Desert Eagles, a monster hand-cannon with huge, half-inch-diameter Spear Lawman ammo that would stop a charging rhino if there’d been one up in Queens to try it on. It also made a gut-jarring bang you could hear from Borden Avenue all the way up to 44th, even with heavy traffic.

Sammy Little Shot hated Orlo’s kind of slam-bang service. Sammy considered himself an artist at what he did. No big boom. He used a sweet little .25-caliber Sterling Model 300, a six-shot automatic only four and a half inches overall — not much more than eight inches with its fat steel carrot of a noise suppressor threaded to its muzzle. Sammy never called the fat carrot a silencer. There was no such thing as a “silencer,” but the suppressor cut the Sterling’s normal bark to no more than a sput. Sammy always placed that little sput just an inch from the mark’s skull, just behind the ear. The neat, quiet work of an artist.

He’d gotten the Sterling here in the bag he’d checked through from JFK. The airlines didn’t often x-ray checked baggage. If they did, his bag carried a phony name and address tag. And he was always careful to case the crowd at baggage pickup, willing to let the bag stay on the conveyor if he spotted any security waiting. At Southwest Regional, nobody had looked suspicious about anything. A holiday crowd.

There the place was, maybe a mile ahead on the right, a one-story, pink stucco building done in phony Spanish hacienda style. Sammy let the speedometer begin to slip back from sixty-five. The speed limit was fifty-five, but everybody else was topping that. A cream and brown RV blared past to his left as he pulled off the road and found a slot in the sand and crushed-shell parking lot.

Lester Biorkin, the target’s name was. Or had been. Now the Federal Witness Program called him Louis Burke, according to Sammy’s briefing phone call yesterday. As far as the Family was concerned, the FWP was a great help. The Family had a mole there, and the mole could turn up just about anything they wanted. At the moment, they wanted Biorkin, who had done three hateful things that upset them. First, a year ago he had witnessed from his taxi up in Harlem the disposal by gunshot of Don Dominic Giovanchi. That wouldn’t have been bad if Giovanchi’s recycling had been handled by one of the Family’s routine disposers. But the hit had been made personally by Don Edmundo Carli himself. “I owe him that honor,” Don Carli himself had explained it to his worried security pros. Anyway, who’d of thought a dumb taxi driver would be wandering along Lenox Avenue just as Don Carli’s .45 brightened the night? Who’d of thought the driver would recognize the distinguished shooter? But worst of all, who’d of thought the hack driver would do the second hateful thing: be dumb enough to testify and put Don Carli himself up the Hudson in Ossining for twenty-five to thirty-five?

Worse. When word from Don Carli himself came down out of Sing Sing, a worker shooter named Skagg had been sent to Miami to take care of Biorkin. Dancing through Biscayne Boulevard traffic a couple of feet behind Biorkin, Skagg went under a gravel truck, or so the story went. That was the third hateful thing. Biorkin made it across the highway, but Skagg was roadkill. At that point, the Family decided a worker shooter had been a bad choice, and they contacted a specialist shooter, namely Sammy Little Shot.

Now here Sammy was, sliding one slender, polished black Thom McAn out of the Honda to the dusty parking surface, then the other. Wrong shoes, he knew, but he hadn’t had much time to put his wardrobe together for this little swing south. It had been “Five Gs and leave now, or be picky, wait for the next one, and hope you don’t starve in between.” Nice way the Family had of putting things. So here he was. The blue and white seersucker pants would be okay, the button-down white shirt would pass. The blue poplin jacket was already too hot, but he couldn’t take it off because that would expose the handgrip of the Sterling stuck in his waistband.

He left the car unlocked in case he’d need to make a speedy exit, shaded his eyes, and looked up at the facade of the Spanish hacienda. And that was when he felt icy slivers prickle his spine. All through the plane trip down to Fort Myers then back up here by Japanese scooter, he had pushed to the back of his brain just where he had to go to find Biorkin-Burke. The Garden of Serpents was a tourist attraction, a goddamned snakearium, and if there was anything he hated enough to send cold slivers up his arms just by thinking about it, it was a snake. Hated them even worse than bats, and he hated bats enough to try to stay inside after dark — even in Midtown in winter. The bat hate had come from his mother, when he’d been a kid back in Jersey City. One had gotten into her bedroom and she’d gone bonkers, rolling on the floor, screaming it was going to get in her hair and strangle her. When he was older, he knew that probably wouldn’t have happened, but it never stopped giving him the shakes. Even now, he couldn’t make it all the way through a Dracula movie.

The snake business had started when he was ten. He and a buddy had chased a grass snake under a fence. The buddy ran around the other side, screamed, “I got it!” and stepped on it just as Sammy leaned down with his mouth open. Something green and sour and vile squirted out of the snake’s mouth straight into his. He spit and gagged and spit and thought he was going to die.

As Sammy stared up at the big green and pink lettering across the whole front of the Garden of Serpents, he felt that old gagging urge begin to throb in his throat. The letters were decorated with vines — until a second look showed him the vines were snakes, holding each other’s tails in their mouths. The sun, low on the horizon behind him, made the entwined lettering seem to writhe in its brassy glare. He swallowed his revulsion and walked into the building.

A few tourists fingered the gaudy souvenir display racks that flanked a sales counter on the left side of the tiled lobby. On the right were a pair of restroom doors labeled “Hiss” and “Herss.” The entrance to the exhibits was center rear, a heavy solid wood door with a ticket cage just to its left.

He realized he was stalling, hoping that somehow Biorkin would magically appear, walk out to the parking lot, and make things easy. Sammy didn’t want to go in there. But Biorkin worked here. He had to be out there doing something or other in the exhibit area. To avoid the guy’s leaving through a back door while he stood here wondering about it, Sammy had to make himself go in there. He yanked out his wallet, careful not to expose the gun butt, and handed the five-buck tariff to the bored-looking babe behind the screened ticket window. Then he faced the big, curved-top entrance, took a long, deep breath, and pulled it open.

Years ago he’d read that snakes smell like cucumbers. That might have been a lot of horse hocky, but he could swear that as he stepped through the door, all of a sudden he smelled cucumbers. And there wasn’t a snake in sight. He’d expected a big room with cages along the wall. It wasn’t like that at all. He walked across a sort of hallway, then he was outdoors again, in a big courtyard open to the darkening sky. The central area was crisscrossed by two brick walks at right angles. The walks intersected in the middle, cutting the yard into four sections. In each section was a — what? Some kind of cinderblock ring. Sammy walked over to the nearest one, his shoes scuffing the tanbark mulch. He peered into the big fifteen-foot-diameter well. His blood turned to instant ice. Down there in the bottom of the six-foot-deep pit was a writhing tangle of fat black snakes. Christ, there must be a hundred of them, Sammy realized.

He stumbled backwards until his feet found brick again. A wave of black dots threatened to black out his vision. He fought it off. Okay. He was okay now. But he sure didn’t want to see what was in the other three wells.

The roofed hallway that ran around all four sides of the courtyard was formed by a wall without windows all around the outside, and a low parapet sort of wall around the inside. Widely spaced concrete columns jutted up from the parapet to support the roof’s inside edge. All along the outside wall of this open hallway Sammy made out rows of glass cages. He was glad the light was getting so bad he couldn’t see what was in them.

In a distant comer, a knot of people had gathered around some guy in a white coat. Sammy couldn’t spot anybody anywhere else in here, so he walked across the courtyard toward the gathering. He was careful not to throw any careless looks into the two wells he passed on the way.

Standing at the edge of the little crowd down here in the comer, he could see that the short guy in the white coat was working with something on the edge of the parapet. A citizen with ape shoulders moved aside and Sammy saw what was going on. The white-coat guy had a damned snake right out here with everybody. Only his little pole with a hook at the end was between him and the snake.

Sammy was surprised that he knew what kind of snake it was. The flaring hood was a dead giveaway. This skinny little snake man with brushcut gray hair was diddling around with a cobra. A couple of feet of cobra, and the lousy cobra was getting tired of it. It made a lunge for the guy’s hand. Just as it did, the guy whipped in with the other hand, and Sammy was goggle-eyed. The bony little snake charmer had the thing by the back of its neck.

“You going to show us the hamadryad this afternoon, Dr. Grosvenor?” The speaker was a brainy-looking teenager crowding right in on the cobra act.

“Afraid not, son.” The snake doctor had a voice as dry as scales on leaves. “We bring him out only on Sundays.”

Sammy wondered vaguely what in hell a “hammer dry head” was, but his attention came back to the matter at hand in a hurry. From the shadows behind the parapet an arm reached out to give the snake wrestler a glass flask with rubber stretched across its mouth. The guy with a handful of cobra brought the flask up to the snake, and it zapped its fangs deep in the rubber top. Sammy was revolted, but he couldn’t make himself look away as the yellowish venom drooled down the inside of the glass. The snake’s glittery little eyes looked like he was having a fine old time sinking his fangs into something.

Then Sammy shook his head to break the tight little string of horror that had tied him to the cobra. And he got a look at the guy who’d handed out the flask.

He was tall, with neatly styled black hair and sharp green eyes in the kind of face Sammy had seen as mercenary of the month on Soldiers for Hire magazine. Just the kind of good-looking, overconfident guy Sammy liked to whack. “Gives me a lot of satisfaction,” he had relayed back to Don Carli up there in ’Sing. What he didn’t say, but knew was true, was that whacking a guy like Biorkin here made up some for Sammy’s being so little that everybody was always looking down at the top of his head.

While the spidery snake doctor went on with his show for the tourist trade, Sammy edged over to the parapet where the glass-flask supply ace was idling now that he’d had his big moment. Yeah, this was sure as hell who he’d come here for. Sammy recognized him from the photo the Family had thoughtfully provided.

He felt so good about it, so pleased at the way this was working out, that he smiled at the target and said quietly, “Hi, Biorkin.” Call it bravado or whatever, it was his trademark. The murmured greeting with a big smile just before the whack. It confused them, and a confused target was an easy target.

Biorkin didn’t react at all. Maybe he hadn’t even heard him. Too bad. For Sammy the edge was gone now, and the rest of this would be nothing more than mechanics.

Dr. Brushcut was folding up his act now, and Sammy stayed on the fringe of the crowd as it ambled to the big courtyard door. Near the door, though, he drifted off to the left, then fitted himself neatly behind the roof column in the southwest corner of the yard.

Everybody was out of the place now except for the snake charmer and Biorkin, who was obviously his assistant. Having the two of them in here made things dicey. Then Sammy heard the doc call out, “Good night, Lou,” and he made out the little snaker walking up the hallway on the other side of the courtyard. The light was getting really bad now. The guy turned the corner and came straight down the west hall toward Sammy. But, as Sammy had figured, the snake doctor stopped at the main door, pushed it open, and stepped out of the exhibit yard into the lobby.

This was beautiful, Sammy realized. Only he and “Lou” Biorkin were left in here. Couldn’t have engineered a better setup if he’d planned it.

He listened. The courtyard was dead silent. Had Biorkin somehow slipped out with the crowd? Or maybe out the back? Sammy racked his memory. Was there a back door down there?

Then he heard a rattle. A rattle!! Come on, calm down, he ordered himself. Rattlesnakes don’t make door noises. There was a door back there, and son of a bitch Biorkin was going through it!

Sammy sprinted down the south hallway, first running flat out, then getting a lot more careful as he realized he was ramming along only a foot from the snake cages that lined the outside wall.

He skittered around the southeast comer of the corridor, raced along the east side, and — hell, here it was, a rear door. He shoved down the panic bar. The door wouldn’t budge. It was locked by a key-operated deadbolt. Biorkin had gone out this way, now Sammy had to run all the way back to the main entrance and—

Wait a minute! What was that? He turned toward the courtyard and listened. Footsteps. Sounded like they were going up the north corridor toward the door. The guy was still in here! He’d locked this rear door from the inside, and he was still in here.

Then Sammy heard the stealthy footsteps pause. There was a grating noise, like wood sliding on concrete, and Biorkin’s padding steps picked up again, heading for the main entrance.

Sammy launched himself straight up the middle of the courtyard. Biorkin was still over on the north side, and if Sammy was quick enough, he could reach the main door the same time Biorkin did.

At the midpoint, where the two walkways intersected, Sammy’s leather-soled shoes slipped. He went down on one knee, cracking it painfully against the bricks. He’d told himself he ought to start wearing rubber soles, but he hadn’t found a pair that looked decent. He was up again almost as soon as he’d gone down, but the slip had cost him. He caught a dim glimpse of Biorkin’s white coat as the big main door opened, a flash of the lobby lighting, then the door slammed shut again.

Biorkin was in the lobby, no doubt racing for his car. Now Sammy would have to go out there, get in his own car, tail him until he pulled into his driveway or stopped at some store on the way home, and improvise from there. This thing was getting more complicated than Sammy liked. He reached the end of the main walkway and lunged for the door.

Locked. He shook the handle. Locked with a keyed deadbolt like the door behind him.

This was crazy. Him, Sammy Little Shot Pippitone, the world’s greatest snake hater, locked in with a world-class snake population. He sagged against the door, pulled great ragged breaths, and tried not to go into giggle-sob hysterics. Wait till Big Shot Orsini heard about this! There’d be no end to the ragging Sammy’d have to take.

He tried to concentrate on that funny side of it, but there was no getting around what was going on here. He had let a dumb-ass taxi jock outflank him and lock him in here with hundreds of—

A hot needle of panic speared through Sammy’s tumbling brain. He banged on the door with both fists. “Let me outta here! I’m locked in. Let me OUT!”

He put his ear to the door. Nothing. Biorkin must have been the last person in the place, and now he was gone. Sammy slowly turned and faced the courtyard. Silence. Silence blanketed by darkness thick as a quilt. He could barely make out the rim of the courtyard wall against the overcast, starless night. To his right, almost at his elbow, it seemed, he heard the faint jitter of scales against something dry. A snake over there was shifting around in his cage. An icy tremor skittered down Sammy’s back.

A flicker of dim blue light silhouetted the east wall of the courtyard. What could— Then distant thunder rumbled. He felt it more than heard it, felt it through the thin soles of his city Thom McAns. Did the snakes feel it, too? All around him, he heard rustlings and twitchings.

He didn’t belong here, for Chrissake! Not here in snake city, Florida, ten miles from nowhere.

Out on the Tamiami Trail, a truck howled past. There were people going by not a hundred yards away, but he might as well be on the moon.

Come on, Sammy, think. He backed tight against the door. At least this way nothing could sneak up behind him. Climb out of here, maybe? The only access to the roof over the perimeter hallway was up one of the supporting columns. If they’d been narrow enough to get a grip around, he might have been able to shinny up to the roof. But the columns were too thick for that.

Lightning flickered again. The seconds between flash and rumble were fewer. Damned storm was getting closer. Like he needed that on top of all his immediate problems.

Slow down, Sammy, he urged himself. There were only two problems: get out of here, then whack Biorkin. He wasn’t too worried about the Biorkin part. He had a line on where the guy lived, and the Family had feelers everywhere in case Biorkin skipped. Like he had in Miami. The big problem was right now: getting out of this hell hole before he went... batty.

He would have to think of that! And this was worse than Dracula’s castle. There you only had to worry about the count. Here he was surrounded by hundreds of creepy fang-bearers. The image of the cobra biting into the rubber-topped bottle flashed vividly to mind. How could the snake doctor get himself to even touch the damned cobra? How many cobras were in here with him? What was in the other three wells? Did the snakes out there crawl out of their pits at night and—

Jesus, what was that!

Somewhere over to his left, he’d heard a grating noise, loud and long, like somebody pulling a fire hose around a comer. That sure hadn’t been a snake in a cage. It was right out here in the—

Forked lightning flared overhead, strobed the courtyard white. Seconds after darkness fell back in, he could still see it burned in his eyeballs. Empty, thank God, the walkways making a giant cross.

That’d keep old Dracula away, he thought inanely. Then thunder exploded like a ton of TNT going off.

His ears sizzled from the blast. No, that wasn’t his ears. It was a hiss. He had definitely heard a hiss. And damned close. Just to his left.

He was out of here!

As Sammy leaped into the empty courtyard, he felt something hit his right knee. Then his left shoulder. Soft impacts, but terrifying. Then his face was struck, and he almost laughed through his fright. Raindrops, that’s what was hitting him. Nothing but big, fat raindrops.

He stumbled to the center of the courtyard as the scattered drops became a downpour. Then a deluge. The cascading sheets were shot through with jagged spears of lightning that threw the walkways and the concrete-ringed serpent wells into brilliance that blinded him for seconds afterward.

Hunched against the storm’s beating downpour, squinting into its lightning flares, soaked and shivering, Sammy shoved his right hand under his sopping jacket and jerked out the Sterling automatic. He was sure now that something was loose here, something more terrifying than anything he’d seen in the cages. He didn’t know what it was, didn’t even want to imagine, but he knew it was here because he could feel it, just like he would have felt a hidden shooter from the rival Giovanchi Family.

But there was something worse than a Giovanchi shooter in here, something that made the hairs on his neck stand straight out. With the pistol held in both hands, Sammy crouched, swung around wildly in the inky blackness. What could—

Lightning strobed twice, only a fraction of a second each time, but it etched into Sammy’s retinas a sight so incredible, so terrifying, that Sammy froze tight.

The thing stood taller than Sammy in his shooting crouch. It swayed there, ghostly white with gleaming eyes that stared down at Sammy as hard and merciless as bronze chips.

Dracula! Sammy thought wildly. The crossed sidewalks didn’t mean a thing. For a frozen moment, he crouched motionless, praying that what he’d seen had been an illusion, a figment of panic.

Then his stunned brain jerked back on track and he pulled the trigger. He got off just one wild shot as the hellish apparition crashed in over his extended arms and sank daggers deep into his neck.

“Found him just like that,” Doctor of Herpetology Herman Grosvenor told Charlotte County Sheriff Duncan Bosworth. They stood in the center of the courtyard, flanking the body of the little man in the sodden poplin jacket and seersucker trousers; the little man with two widely spaced, bloody punctures in his neck. Nearby, two more men in county sheriff’s uniforms were supposed to be checking for “clues,” but mostly they stared into the snake wells with obvious distaste.

“And the hama-whatever, you say you found him out of his cage?” Sheriff Bosworth was a big man with a florid face, but Grosvenor could see that under the lacework of beer-bloated capillaries, the sheriff was pale as paste.

“Hamadryad,” Dr. Grosvenor amended. “When I got here, I found him footloose and fancy free.” He looked down at the body. “I don’t know who this unfortunate fellow is, or how he got locked in here. Found him just like this when I opened up this morning.”

“Who was the last one to leave last night?” the sheriff asked as he crouched and kind of aimlessly fingered the deceased’s neck.

“My assistant, Lou Burke. Oh, you mean, could he have left the cage open? Not him, he’s a detail man. It’s more likely this fellow came in a misguided effort to steal the hamadryad and it got out of hand.”

“The thing’s worth money?”

“Well up in five figures, Sheriff.” Dr. Grosvenor frowned. “Funny thing about Lou, though. He called in just after I called you, said an emergency had come up, and he had to quit.”

The sheriff looked up from his crouch. “Quit?”

“As of today. Said he’d be back in touch to tell me where to send his severance check.”

“I’ll check on him, but I can’t say I blame anybody for giving up this kind of showbiz.” Bosworth stood and gazed uneasily around the courtyard. “You’re sure you corralled that hama-whatever?”

“Hamadryad, Sheriff. Our king cobra. I can’t imagine how he got loose, but he’s safely back in his cage. All eighteen feet of him.”

“That’s some hell of a snake!”

Dr. Grosvenor smiled like a proud parent. “The only snake, I like to say, that can rear up and look you straight in the eye.”