Read A Scourge of Vipers Online

Authors: Bruce DeSilva

A Scourge of Vipers (3 page)

“I'm Mulligan from
The Dispatch
. And who would you be?”

“My name is Kevin Muñoz,” he said, stifling a laugh. “I'm the new press officer for the Pawtucket PD. I'm going to have to ask you to wait back there with the rest of the reporters. I'll have a statement for you in about an hour.”

“Is Detective Sergeant Lebowski on the scene?”

“Yes, sir, I believe he is.”

“Then trot on back where you came from and tell him Mulligan would like a word.”

He raised an eyebrow. I raised one right back at him.

“Okay, sir. Please wait right 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.

“Mulligan? How the hell are you? Been so long since I seen you I was thinkin' maybe you croaked.”

“My 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.

“So what have you got?” I asked.

“A 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.”

“Male or female?”

“Male.”

“Age?”

“Hard 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.”

“Mind 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.

“A drowning?” I asked.

“Hey 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.”

“How long was he in the water?”

“A day, maybe less.”

I squatted for a closer look as she rolled the body to examine the exit wound.

“Looks like a large caliber,” I said.

“Maybe. Hard to be sure yet with all the scavenger damage. It's through-and-through, so there's no slug.”

“Damn thing could be anywhere between here and Woonsocket,” Lebowski said. “No point in even looking, cuz we're never gonna find it.”

“Give me a call when you get an ID?” I asked him.

“Sure thing.”

“Thanks. 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.

“Eat up, Tuukka,” I said, opening the aquarium top and dropping in one of the wriggling baby mice I'd bought. Tuukka Rask was the Bruins' quick-as-a-snake goaltender. Tuukka flicked his tongue at the mouse for a couple of minutes before unhinging his jaw and swallowing it whole. Then he curled up for a nap and stopped being interesting.

I poured three fingers of Bushmills into a reasonably clean tumbler, fired up a cigar, and settled down to watch the second period of the hockey game on my twenty-four-inch TV. Moments after a David Krejci breakaway gave the Bruins a three-goal lead, “Confused” began playing in my shirt pocket. The tune by a San Francisco punk band called The Nuns signaled an incoming call from Fiona McNerney, a former Little Sisters of the Poor cenobite who was serving her second term as Rhode Island's governor.

“Attila the Nun,” the handle a clever headline writer tagged her with because of her take-no-prisoners brand of politics, still attended mass every week, but her wardrobe and manner had become decidedly secular since she was released from her vows four years ago. The stern demeanor she'd adopted as a novice was gone now. Except for the graying hair, she'd reverted to the fun-loving, underage drinking partner I'd loved hanging out with in high school.

“Evening, Mulligan,” she said. “What are you doing right now?”

“Watching the Bs kick the crap out of the Rangers.”

“What are you wearing?”

“My clean pair of Boston Bruins boxers,” I lied.

“Yum! I'll be right over.”

“Time to finally shed your virginity?”

“It
is
a burden,” she said, “but if I ever do the deed, it's gonna be with someone who can shower me with diamonds.”

“Damn. That leaves me out.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“I take it the vow of poverty is history, too.”

“Oh,
hell
yeah. That was just a phase. At the moment I'm sipping Dom Pérignon White Gold from a Waterford crystal goblet.”

“Shall I come over and help you finish the bottle?”

“Please do. I'm making a major announcement in a couple of weeks, and I want to give you a heads-up.”

“How major?”

“I'll be unveiling my foolproof plan to solve the state's budget crisis.”

“Oh, really? The last foolproof plan I heard about was when John Henry emptied his vault to create the greatest Red Sox team ever assembled.”

“When they signed Carl Crawford, John Lackey, Nick Punto, and Adrian Gonzalez?”

“Yeah. Remember how that turned out, Fiona?”

“Not well.”

“But
your
plan is foolproof?”

“Absolutely.”

“This I've got to hear. I'll be right over.”

Ten minutes later, Secretariat's chipped wiper blades slapped futilely at the mist gathering on the windshield, and his one working headlight bounced off a heavy fog that had descended on the city. As I crawled up Waterman Street, my cell played the opening bars of “Headline Hustler” by 10cc.—my ringtone for Chuckie-boy. I considered ignoring it, then reached for it and nearly sideswiped a parked car that materialized out of the gloom.

“Mulligan.”

“It's Twisdale.”

“What do you want, now, Chuck?”

“Channels 12 and 10 are reporting that a small plane has crashed in a residential area near Green Airport.”

“Sorry to hear that, but I'm off duty.”

“I know, but I need you on this.”

“Are you authorizing overtime?”

‘Come on, Mulligan. You know I can't do that.”

“Then find somebody else.”

A year ago, I wouldn't have hesitated. I used to put in a lot of hours that I never got paid for. Back then, I was working for people who cared about the news more than they cared about money, so I did, too. It was different now.

“Look, do this for me and you can take tomorrow off.”

“Tomorrow and the day after,” I said.

“No way.”

“Okay, then,” I said, and clicked off. As I pulled away from the curb, Chuck called back.

“Yeah?”

“Okay, you win. Two days off. But make it tomorrow and Monday. I can't spare you two days in a row.”

“Done. What's the address?”

I finished up with him and called Fiona.

“I need a rain check. Gotta go play reporter.”

“That's a real shame.” She sounded vaguely drunk. “Did I tell you that my announcement was major? Oh, and foolproof? Don't forget foolproof.”

“I remember. But somebody tried to park a plane on a side street near the airport, so I gotta go take some pictures.”

*   *   *

The plane had gone down on Brunswick Drive, less than a half mile south of the airport, in a neighborhood of modest brick and wood-frame houses in the Providence suburb of Warwick. I crept south on Post Road, turned left on Main Avenue, and ran into a police roadblock.

“The plane hit a house, and jet fuel is leaking into the basement,” a uniformed officer told me. “We've got the whole neighborhood cordoned off, and we're evacuating everybody who lives within two thousand feet of the scene. It's a dangerous situation, bud. You need to get the hell out of here. And, hey, you got a busted headlight. Better get that fixed before you get a ticket.”

I thanked him, turned around, worked my way down to West Shore Road, and parked the Bronco on a side street. Then I grabbed my camera and jogged a half mile to the scene, easily slipping by the police checkpoints in the fog.

The fuselage of a small plane was wedged in the wreckage of a red-brick two-story colonial. The aircraft's tail had snapped off and crushed the roof of a Ford Expedition parked in the driveway. The site looked chaotic with police cruisers, ambulances, and fire trucks parked at odd angles all over front lawns on both sides of the street. Some bore the insignias of the Warwick PD and FD. Others were Green Airport security and rescue vehicles.

So far, nothing was on fire, but the damp air reeked of kerosene and, oddly, of french fries. That puzzled me until I remembered reading that jet fuel is sometimes manufactured by mixing distilled petroleum with recycled cooking grease from fast food joints. The street was strewn with what looked like tufts of cotton candy. I bent down, picked up a piece, and discovered that it was the house's fiberglass insulation.

As near as I could tell, I was the only journalist on the scene. With TV helicopters grounded by the weather, nobody else would have pictures by morning. The crash site was a news photographer's dream. Fog swirled around cops and firemen clawing through a tangle of shattered bricks and twisted metal. Everything was in silhouette, backlit by fire department spotlights. I wished my friend Gloria Costa, the great one-eyed photographer, could be here; but like the rest of
The Dispatch
's photo staff, she'd been let go. Last time we talked, she was still looking for work. My photography skills were rudimentary, but I popped the lens cap and started shooting.

It was nearly a half hour before anybody noticed me. Then Oscar Hernandez, the Warwick police chief, emerged from the wreckage carrying a blood-streaked black leather briefcase.

“Mulligan? Who the hell let you in here?”

“Nice to see you, too, Oscar. Whatcha got there?”

“Nothing that concerns you. We're dealing with a perilous situation here. I need you to leave right now.”

“I've been in perilous situations before.”

“Come on, get moving. One spark and this thing could blow.”

“So you're saying I shouldn't smoke?”

“I don't have time for your jokes.”

“If I refuse to leave, are you going to arrest me?”

He shook his head and sighed.

“If you insist on staying, I can't guarantee your safety.”

“Nobody ever has. Can you spare a minute to fill me in on what happened here?”

“Walk with me.”

We strode together down the street to his command car, where he placed the briefcase on the hood.

“The plane is a Beechcraft Premier I, a small twin-engine jet. According to the tower at Green, it took off from Atlantic City shortly after eight
P.M.
The flight plan had it coming straight up Narragansett Bay. The pilot had already begun to descend when the fog rolled in. He was attempting a routine instrument landing, and there was no sign of trouble until the tower lost contact seconds before he was supposed to touch down.”

“How many on board?”

“The pilot and one passenger.”

“Dead?”

“Very.”

“The bodies still in the wreckage?”

“Yeah. Gotta wet everything down to reduce the fire risk before we can cut them out.”

“Anybody home when it hit?”

“A married couple and their three-year-old daughter.”

“And?”

“The adults were watching TV in the family room on the other side of the house. They managed to climb out a window. Their daughter was in a back bedroom on the second floor. The father got a ladder from the garage, climbed up, broke a window, and found her cowering in her closet. Poor little thing was scared to death. He carried her down before the first responders got here.”

“Any of them injured?”

“They're pretty shaken up, but they're all okay.”

“What are their names?”

He gave me a stony look.

“Hey, I can always look it up in the city directory.”

“Philip and Julia Correia.”

“Philip with one
l
or two?”

“No idea.”

“And the daughter?”

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