A Scourge of Vipers Read Free Page B

here.”
    He scurried off and disappeared behind the meat wagon. Two minutes later, a detective with a head suitable for ten-pin bowling and shoulders borrowed from a silverback gorilla stepped from between two of the cruisers and waved.
    â€œMulligan? How the hell are you? Been so long since I seen you I was thinkin’ maybe you croaked.”
    â€œMy new boss doesn’t let me out of the office much, Dude.”
    I’m not one of those assholes who calls everyone “dude,” but I had to make an exception in this case. It was the detective’s nickname, pinned on him when the Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski came out back in ’98. I extended my right hand. Dude crushed it in his simian paw.
    â€œSo what have you got?” I asked.
    â€œA floater,” he said. “Couple of kids from Newport spotted it as they were lining up to get on their bus. They alerted their handlers, who called 911.”
    â€œMale or female?”
    â€œMale.”
    â€œAge?”
    â€œHard to say. The body took a beating from all the flotsam in the river. The M.E. says the carp chowed down on it, too. No wallet on him. Not much face left either.”
    â€œMind if I have a look?”
    He hesitated a beat, then said, “Yeah, okay. But don’t touch anything. And no pictures.”
    He raised the yellow police tape, and I ducked under it. We brushed through the screen of trees and found Glenna Ferguson, an assistant state medical examiner, squatting beside the body. It looked to be about six feet long, clothed in a muck-smeared yellow and black Bruins sweatshirt and what once might have been blue jeans. With the loaded Boston hockey team poised for another deep playoff run and the rebuilding Celtics going nowhere, half the male population of Rhode Island was sporting Bruins gear this spring. I looked closer and saw that the corpse wore one mud-caked running shoe. The left shoe and sock were missing.
    â€œA drowning?” I asked.
    â€œHey there, Mulligan,” Ferguson said. “Might have drowned unless he bled out from the gunshot wound in his neck first. Gotta open him up and look around before I can establish cause of death.”
    â€œHow long was he in the water?”
    â€œA day, maybe less.”
    I squatted for a closer look as she rolled the body to examine the exit wound.
    â€œLooks like a large caliber,” I said.
    â€œMaybe. Hard to be sure yet with all the scavenger damage. It’s through-and-through, so there’s no slug.”
    â€œDamn thing could be anywhere between here and Woonsocket,” Lebowski said. “No point in even looking, cuz we’re never gonna find it.”
    â€œGive me a call when you get an ID?” I asked him.
    â€œSure thing.”
    â€œThanks. I’d really appreciate it.”
    The Dude abides.
    When I got back to the newsroom to write it up, Chuckie-boy had already punched me out. In doing so, he’d violated several state and federal labor laws, but I didn’t hold it against him. He couldn’t allow any overtime if he wanted to keep his job.
    The story, which made me late for my evening feast of canned pork and beans, was worth just three paragraphs on an inside page of the metro section.

 
    4
    I spent the early part of the evening watching my snake explore every inch of the cracked twenty-five-gallon aquarium I’d snapped up at a big discount at Petco on North Main. Where he’d come from remained a mystery. A couple of neighbors thought he might have belonged to the meth addict who got evicted from the third floor last week, but they couldn’t say for sure. I was going to name the snake Chara after the Boston Bruins’ star defenseman, but when I mentioned it to Fadi, the Brown grad student who lived downstairs, he said it was a filthy word in Arabic.
    â€œEat up, Tuukka,” I said, opening the aquarium top and dropping in one of the wriggling baby mice I’d bought. Tuukka