The tables became quiet. Someone asked the bartender to crank the volume.
“What’s going on?” asked Serge.
“Shhhhh. You’ll miss it.”
“… Investigators were initially baffled by the bodies of two young men, who appeared to have been killed by giant constrictor snakes. While reports of large exotic pets being released into the wild are well documented, no confirmed fatalities have ever been reported. Complicating matters were severe facial injuries that couldn’t be explained by any known pets. Official spokesmen said the case was going nowhere until a break came, of all places, from a video anonymously posted on YouTube. The popular Internet site reported record-breaking hits until the video was taken down at the request of authorities, but not before our station was able to obtain a copy. The footage is too offensive to air, but it begins with a pair of so-called skinheads attacking a homeless man beneath an underpass near Jacksonville’s picturesque St. Johns River. The video then jumps to a predawn scene where the tables have been turned and the skinheads are under attack. Meanwhile, law enforcement has requested that anyone with information please contact them, but so far all the department’s anonymous tip lines have been swamped by callers registering support for the perpetrators …”
The TV image switched to a police captain at a podium. “Two people are dead, and there’s at least one very disturbed person out there. So if you don’t have any pertinent information, please stop calling us and laughing.”
The anchorwoman returned. “While this station continues to stand by its policy of not airing the graphic footage, our own science editor Mary Nelson is here to explain the physics of how the young men died. Mary? …”
“Jennifer, I’m standing in the outdoors section of a local Home Depot. To the stable individual, everything here appears innocent and cheerful. But to a heart filled with malice, evil lurks beneath the begonias. I’m now holding up an unassuming garden hose. This is the type with small pinholes that collapses flat and was used extensively to irrigate lawns in the nostalgic days of old Florida before built-in underground systems became the rage. It was a pair of hoses just like the one in my hand that police have identified as the murder weapon and is now on sale for a limited time … Back to you …”
“Thanks Mary … Later in this broadcast: It was supposed to be a fun outing, but in the end a bear lay dead and a father was thankful for his son’s remote-control helicopter …”
The kamikaze opened a laptop on the table. “Check it out. I captured the video before they took it down.”
The table gang got up and crowded around the notebook’s screen, showing grainy, low-light footage of two people wrapped ankle-to-shoulder in green hoses. They slowly crossed a lawn like inchworms.
“… Now the Action Five business report. Brad?”
“Jennifer, all area home improvement stores are reporting a huge run on garden hoses …”
The loan consolidator: “Newspaper said they were in a race to get to the shut-off valve before the automatic sprinkler system came on and filled the hoses.”
“So what?” said the fertilizer salesman. “How can water in those hoses hurt them?”
“Can’t if they’re regular hoses,” said Serge. “But like the TV lady said, those are the special irrigation kind.”
“Irrigation?”
“Roll up flat,” Serge continued. “Hundreds of tiny holes. Stretch ‘em across a lawn, turn on the water, and they expand into thick round hoses spraying a light but high-coverage mist that results in a magnificently lush tropical landscape, unless they’re wrapped around skinheads, then it’s a landscape of justice.”
“I remember those,” said a pharmaceutical salesman from Savannah. “My grandfather used them in the sixties.”
“Very big in this state when I was a kid,” said Serge. “Evokes idyllic childhood memories, getting goose bumps stroking the hose’s sleek rubber skin the other night. I mean decades ago.”
Someone pointed at the screen. “They made it to the valve. They’re trying to switch the lever with their noses.”
“They’re bashing each other’s faces!”
“Look at ‘em go!”
“This is too sick to watch. Can you enlarge it?”
“The sprinklers just came on! The hoses are expanding!”
“They’re seizing up! … Ooooo …”
“Jesus! Look at the blood flow from those head wounds!”
“Why is it spurting so much?”
“Fun fact,” said Serge. “Most people think constrictor snakes-and now irrigation hoses-kill prey through strangulation, when death actually comes from high blood pressure. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta calls it the silent killer.”
The hotel robbery crew was divided into two groups: talent and muscle. Talent was thinning out. The muscle took the form of the Jellyfish/Eel’s personal bodyguards, who were required when the gang locked horns with another crew in a turf dispute and won a messy, decisive victory. There was little chance of the rival faction reconstituting, and they weren’t very tough anyway, but why take the chance?
Muscle had the stomach-and voracious appetite-for violence. Talent didn’t. Several had been shanghaied from the remnants of the capitulated gang. Their hallmarks were tedious preparation, stealth and intel, which helped avoid any contact with the marks, who were never harmed. Consummate gentleman bandits.
Muscle had a more inelegant approach.
Talent wore overalls, and right now four of them stared down at the precedent-setting deviation of an unconscious salesman and maid on the room’s tiled entryway.
A light knock at a door. Everyone knew who it was.
“Answer it.”
“I’m not going to answer it.” Another quiet knock.
“Someone has to answer it.”
“So you answer it.”
“Damn.” The one with the false GARY stitched over his pocket forced himself toward the door on licorice legs. He checked the peephole from habit and undid the chain.
Two massive bodyguards pushed their way inside, followed by a taller, thinner person in a brown leather jacket. A glowing blob peeked out the neckline of his dark T-shirt.
Two trailing bodyguards covered the flank. They made a last visual recon of the hall before coming inside and bolting the door.
The Eel squatted and felt the victims’ wrists. Weak pulses.
He stood back up. He never spoke loudly, never had to. “They get a look?”
“No, I mean, the guy. We jumped him immediately. I don’t know. He- … I think the maid can identify us.”
Moaning from the floor.
Without fanfare or urgency, the Eel slowly slipped his hands into leather riding gloves that matched his jacket. Then he grabbed a lamp off the dresser, snapping the plug out of the wall, and brought the base down hard, over and over, striking both heads with a series of stomach-churning thuds that started with a thick resonance and eventually became squishy. One of the overalls ran in the bathroom and hugged the toilet.
The Eel set the lamp back. “Where are the stones?”
“C-c-couldn’t find them.”
“Check the light switches?”
Energetic nodding. “Just like you said.”
An intimidating pause. He held out a palm. “Screwdriver.”
One of the gang practically fell over himself fishing a slot-head from a toolbox and slapping it into a gloved hand. The Eel went to the wall. “Check this one?”
More nodding.
He unscrewed the faceplate. Nothing there. Then he unscrewed the switch itself, carefully removing the mechanism and letting it hang from two copper wires. He reached into the back of the junction box and retrieved a small white envelope. The contents emptied into a leather palm. The gang stood stunned at the sight of a dozen near-flawless Peruzzi-cut diamonds in the two-to-four-carat range. He gently poured them back into the envelope.
“How’d you know those were there?”
“Our inside source,” said the Eel. “Same info I gave you.”
“But we just thought you meant the faceplates, not behind the switch.”