Squeeze Me

Angie Armstrong runs a wildlife removal business called Discreet Captures in southern Florida. On this day, she’s been called to capture a raccoon who is running amok in a family kitchen in Boca Raton. Once she succeeds in trapping the creature, she relocates it to the Seminole reservation, choosing the spot based on the driving scenery: “There were closer places to have staged the release, but she enjoyed the long ride across the blond saw grass marsh. It was a rare stretch of South Florida interstate with a view that wasn’t savagely depressing” (16).

Back at home, Angie finds her stepson, Joel, has arrived for a weekend visit. Joel has remained on good terms with her long after his father, Dustin, divorced her. He suggests they go out to dinner. Their plans are interrupted when Angie receives a call from Tripp Teabull, the manager of Lipid House. He offers her $2,000 if she will come immediately. Teabull doesn’t specify the type of animal Angie is supposed to capture.

When she arrives, Angie is confronted with a huge Burmese python lazing in a banyan tree near the koi pond. The lump in its stomach suggests that it has eaten recently. South Florida is plagued by this invasive species, but Angie has never seen one this big and never in Palm Beach. Teabull insists that she remove it immediately and increases his offer to $5,000. After haggling with the manager about the most inconspicuous way to dispatch the snake, Angie decides to chop off its head with a machete. The body will be taken to wildlife officers for dissection.

The following day, Kiki’s sons from her first marriage arrive. Now that Kiki is dead, her second husband’s estate might pass to them. Chase and Chance Cornbright have been competing for their mother’s affection for years with just this moment in mind:

It couldn’t be presumed that the windfall from Kiki Pew’s future passing would be divided evenly, for she evaded the subject in family conversation. As a result, her sons had been jockeying artlessly for her favor since the day Mott Fitzsimmons died (27).

They question the police and the manager at Lipid House, but their mother’s remains have not yet been discovered.

Meanwhile, Angie goes about her daily animal removal duties. Each night at six o’clock, she receives a threatening phone call from a poacher named Pruitt. He is the reason that Angie lost her job as a wildlife officer and spent time in jail. Angie caught Pruitt in the act of slaughtering a baby deer that he had run over with his boat motor. When she apprehended him, she fed his hand, the one that had been holding a knife to butcher the deer, to a semi-tame alligator named Lola. Sadly, Lola was euthanized, Angie went to jail, and Pruitt got off with a light fine—the judge choosing to go easy on the now-handicapped man—and a $6,000 prosthesis.

The next night, Angie comes home to find her apartment ransacked. She assumes that Pruitt is the burglar, but the only items missing are her checkbook and laptop. She later finds the checkbook in a nearby dumpster. At three in the morning, Angie receives a call notifying her that her storage unit at Safe N’ Sound has also been vandalized.

Unbeknownst to Angie, two dim-witted hoodlums named Uric and Prince Paladin have been hired by Teabull to steal the snake carcass. They search her apartment, taking her laptop and checkbox to get the address of her storage facility. They then break into her unit and make off with the snake.

Later, Angie arrives with the police to investigate the scene of the robbery. She keeps a freezer there, in which she stores dead wildlife before she can dispose of them. This is where she temporarily placed the python remains. Nothing has been stolen but the carcass. Only its severed head is still inside the freezer.

A day later, Angie is watching the local news and sees a reward offered for the missing Kiki. She realizes that Teabull probably arranged the python theft to avoid the scandal that would ensue if the socialite’s remains were discovered inside the snake. Nobody would ever want to rent his venue again. Angie goes to Lipid House to confront Teabull, but he isn’t there. Instead, she speaks to Mauricio, who advises her to forget the incident if she knows what’s good for her.

Hours later, Uric and Prince Paladin arrive back at Lipid House and ask Teabull what to do with the snake carcass. The manager is furious that they haven’t already buried it far away. He instructs them to go to a construction site near the golf course. He arranges for the work crew to take a long lunch and tells his henchmen to dump the python into a freshly poured section of concrete for the building’s foundation.

When the two thieves arrive at the site and open the trunk, they see that the snake has exploded, revealing the contents of its stomach. A dead woman is inside. Prince Paladin manages to steal the woman’s jewelry while Uric is digging a hole in the fresh concrete. Uric then dumps the body and covers it over, but there is no room left for the snake. The thieves drive away from Palm Beach, not realizing that the trunk latch is open and the snake carcass has spilled out onto the road.

Later, the First Lady, codename Mockingbird, is returning to the island when her motorcade is stopped because of an obstruction. A dead snake is sprawled across the highway. Mockingbird gets out of her limousine to have a look. The story makes the eleven o’clock news.