The Burning Day Read Free Page B

little paranoid, myself. Wiggins was a strange bird, all right, but I’d had limited exposure to accountants, anyway. Maybe they were all weird like him, with archaic clothing and a stilted way of talking.  
    I went back to channel surfing, hoping to find some edifying entertainment. I skipped the movie channels and tried to find something informative. I found a show, ostensibly about food, that featured a portly bald man eating worms and larvae. I switched the channel. A group of heavily equipped men were hanging around an abandoned warehouse at night, trying to find ghosts and not having much luck. One of them had a shaved head. He looked a lot like the man who’d been eating bugs on the other channel.
    I decided to catch some news before throwing in the towel altogether. On the local news, there was a recap of the local mob violence. According to the dour young female anchor, the Birmingham Police were bracing for an all-out war on the streets, one that could break loose any day. The anchor then moved on to a story about a placid, sunny Florida town that was being overrun with huge pythons. The report featured archival footage that showed the town as a dream vacation spot before it had been despoiled by the enormous reptiles. I watched with subdued interest.
    It seemed that many people had bought the reptiles in the 1980s and 1990s as part of the exotic pet fad, only to find that the snakes grew ever larger, and required ever more food. When economic crunches came along, many of those people could no longer afford to feed their beloved monsters. Most of the snake owners were apparently Florida residents, and, doing what they felt was the humanitarian thing, they had let the huge constrictors loose in the swampy, prey-filled environment of the everglades. There, the fearsome animals had found a new home. In short, they had thrived.
    Now, the snakes’ numbers had grown enormously, and they were menacing towns up and down the Gulf Coast, like the tiny idyllic town that was the subject of the news report. I shook my head. There you go, I thought. If man cannot find serpents in the Garden of Eden, he will bring them there himself. Then he will lament their presence, as if it were none of his own doing.
    As I browsed the cable channels, unbeknownst to me things were unfolding across town in a way I could never have foreseen. I didn’t get that from the television news, or any of the illuminating programs I flipped through; I was to learn about it all, days later. Although I didn’t know it at the time, two men were talking in the back room of a bar. I had met both of them, one very recently and one a long time ago. What they were talking about was going to have a tremendous impact on my life, the life of certain people moving around me, and the fate of the city itself.

 
    Chapter 3
     
    The conversation had started out unpleasantly. One man was trying to strike a bargain. The other was, in the beginning, listening patiently if noncommittally.
    “What I have here is a real chance to score some big money,” one man, the visitor, was saying. “I just need a little help locating a certain broad.”
    Behind the desk, Longshot Lonnie O’Malley sat still as a snake, coiled and ready to strike. “Why should I help you?” he said. “So you have a scheme to rake some lawyer over the coals. Good for you. It’s not exactly my racket. If that’s all you got to lay on the table, you’re wasting my time.”
    The other man became immediately patronizing, and tried to cover his fear. “Oh, I understand that, Mr. O’Malley. There is no way I would have come here if I didn’t have something for you that I believe would be of tremendous interest and value to you. By the way, the man in question is an accountant. Perhaps quite wealthy.”
    “Whatever. So out with it already!”
    “Of course. First, allow me to provide a little background.” Longshot sighed, but his visitor held up one hand. “Please. I assure you, all will be