"I honestly did not intend to raise more scrutiny from the police by revealing our meeting, Mr. Freeman," Sims suddenly said. He obviously wasn't as focused on the snake as I was.
"I guess it just sort of spilled out as they were questioning me. They are very persuasive. In an unsettling way."
"They do have that effect on people," I said, trying to concentrate on both the environmentalist's words and the shift in the lump of muscle under my hands. "But why do you think they called you in to begin with?"
"That's a bit of a mystery in itself," he answered. "They'd already talked to Professor Murtz, who is the head of the lab. They wanted to know about the milking of snake venom, which we do some of right here. The process is really quite easy. You see, the fangs are really like big needles themselves," he said, twisting up the head of the snake in his hand and somehow squeezing the jaws to make them open to expose the half- inch gleam of needle-sharp bone.
"You get them over a funnel with some rubber-like membrane stretched over it and let them sink their fangs in. They think it's something's skin and pump away.
"Most of the time they're more than anxious to bite. A snake is a survivalist, the venom is its protection and its means to a meal, so they're instinctive with it. You anger them, they're going to hit you. So the hard part is handling them over and over because, eventually, you're not going to be quick enough."
I watched Sims pick up the hypodermic and then hold the syringe in his own mouth while he probed the snake's skin, running his hand over the cream-colored diamonds, looking for a spot to stick it. He motioned for me to bend up the tail and decided on a place near the base. As he held the animal's head away, he slid the needle under a scale and pumped the chip in. When he finished, he swabbed the spot and then motioned to the cooler and we lifted the snake back into the ice chest and closed the lid.
"Professor Murtz already gave the police all of that information the first time, and how dozens of people from scientists to snake hobbyists to any good Southern snake hunter could do it," Sims continued as he stripped off the gloves. "We could never figure why they were so interested and I thought that was why they called me in this time. But somehow they kept turning me toward the meeting at Loop Road and when your name came up I got the impression that I wasn't telling them anything that they didn't already know."
"Yeah. My name just happens to come up a lot in places where I'd just as soon it didn't," I said, rubbing my palms together, still feeling the slick smoothness of the snake and the cool tingle of my own nerves.
Sims wrapped up the hypodermic and put the package back in the drawer and then washed his hands in a stainless steel sink built into the counter. I wondered if I should do the same.
"They knew you were there," he said, turning as he dried his hands with a paper towel and reading the flash of confusion that must have shown in my eyes. "At the hotel bar. I don't know how, but I'm positive they already knew it. They just wanted to know why."
It took me a second to gather myself. Of course they knew. Why the hell wouldn't Hammonds know? He'd been trailing me ever since I pulled up to the ranger's dock with news of a killing.
"I don't doubt it," I said to Sims. "I'd still like to know myself why it was that I was there."
The environmentalist seemed to consider the question for a few seconds as he oddly and carefully folded the damp brown paper towel in his fingers. Then he tossed the square into a wastebasket, walked over to grip both handles of the ice chest and lifted it off the table. He nodded his head to the door.
"Let's go drop this off," he said and I followed, holding open the door and wondering why I was letting him lead again.
We loaded the cooler into the back of the van and as Sims drove out to an empty asphalt road leading east he explained, as best he could according to him, what he knew of my invitation to Loop Road.
"You've got to understand, Mr. Freeman, there are generations of folks out there in the Glades that have lived lives far different than what modern-day people think of as Floridians."
"Yeah, I got that lesson from Gunther," I said, watching the road stretch out in a straight line into nothing but low-hanging green brush. Sims had no air conditioning in the old van and even the wind spilling through the open windows was hot. I was thinking about the warming state of the rattlesnake sliding around in the cooler behind us.
"What I mean is that, for some of them, the Glades is their neighborhood and you can't just move into the neighborhood without being noticed and without becoming suspect." He let the statement sit, waiting for my response.
"You mean my place in the old research shack?" I finally said.
"Glades folks notice something like that. People have used that old place for years when it was empty. But they also have respect. Your presence was known but no one was really sure what you were up to. They knew you weren't a hunter, or a fisherman. There was speculation that you were doing some kind of night research, but the professor and I couldn't come up with anybody who knew you."
"And how exactly did all this discussion come up?" I asked.
By now Sims had turned off the pavement and pulled onto a dirt road. It too was posted with a no-trespassing sign and bore the logo of the power company. Sims downshifted and started south down a lane that was flanked on either side with mangroves and long finger islands that stretched out into standing water.
"These are cooling canals. Man-made for discharging the water from the reactor," Sims said, answering the question I hadn't asked and avoiding the one I had.
"The company has acres and acres of property out here but although they can keep the people out, they can't easily control the animals that find their way in here. That's why they employ Professor Murtz and myself. To keep track of the native populations and monitor their growth and migrations. It makes them look environmentally concerned and benefits us at the same time. We have even developed a breeding ground for the American crocodile in here that almost singlehandedly rejuvenated a species that was very much on the endangered list only a few years ago."
As we jounced down the rutted road I tried to pull him back to my invitation to Loop Road.
"And the discussion about me being the new mystery man living in the old research shack?"
"I don't know who brought it up first. Word gets passed along out there and you rarely know the source, or even the truth of the stories. But it got to the bar. And then Blackman said he'd heard that you had been questioned by the police in connection to the killings of the kids."
"I suppose that eased some of the pressure among the natives."
"I don't deny that," Sims said as he slowed and then stopped the van in the middle of the road, in the middle of nowhere. When he got out, I followed. "There'd been a lot of talk since the child killings started. Some of it working off the same whiskey-inspired threats that had gone on for years about stopping the western flow of the suburbs," Sims said as he opened the back doors of the van and hauled out the ice chest.
"It was crude stuff at first. Like 'It's about time' and 'More power to 'em.' But then the investigators and agents started questioning people at their camps and ranches and folks started getting nervous."
He set the chest down in the dust about ten yards away and came back to the van. I watched the lid like it was going to pop open like some jack-in-the-box.
"They would have loved to have an outsider like you get blamed. But then we heard about you and Gunther. And as far as I know, it was Gunther who said you'd been in law enforcement up north. That's when Nate Brown decided we ought to talk to you ourselves."
I watched as Sims reached into the van and pulled out a golf club. A putter I thought at first. Then I looked closer at the head and saw that the shaft had been sheared off and the end had been bent to form a hook.