Snake Eater Read Online Free Page A

ancestry. I guessed her age at twenty-five, but I figured she had looked the same way since she turned thirteen and would still look as good at fifty.
    Then she smiled, and I amended my first impression. She looked better than a young Lena Home.
    She held her hand to me. “Cammie Russell,” she said.
    “Brady Coyne.”
    “How is Daniel?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know how he usually is. I’d say confinement doesn’t suit him.”
    “I can see you’re a master of understatement, Mr. Coyne. He must be climbing the walls. Can we get him now?”
    “If you brought enough money we can.”
    She held up the briefcase she was carrying and nodded.
    An hour later Cammie Russell and I were eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches and sipping coffee on the deck behind Daniel’s house in Wilson Falls. Daniel was slouched in a deck chair with his eyes closed, sucking steadily on a stick of cannabis. His leg no longer jiggled.

3
    T HE DECK ACROSS THE back of Daniel’s house looked out over a meadow that stretched toward a bluff above the Connecticut River. It had once been a tobacco farm, he told me, and he’d lived there since ’73, when he retired from the Army. He rented a trailer and ran a bait and tackle shop for the ten years or so that it took him to realize that he’d never have to go back to the jungles. Finally he managed to accumulate some money, so he bought the land and the shop and built his house and, a few years later, Cammie’s studio down next to the river.
    Daniel’s house featured angled cedar sheathing and glass and brick on the outside, and skylights and fireplaces and vaulted ceilings and massive beams on the inside. He told me he designed it himself, and he and some of his old army buddies did most of the work. It took them a couple of years to complete. The entire back was floor-to-ceiling glass that opened onto the big deck and overlooked the river.
    The house was elegant and modern. It could have been a Better Homes and Gardens model. It contradicted every impression I had formed of Daniel McCloud.
    After Daniel had sucked his second joint down to a quarter-inch nub, he stood up and said he needed a shower. He walked into the house.
    “Is he stoned?” I said to Cammie.
    She laughed. “He never gets stoned. It just eases his pain. It’s the only thing that will.” She was sitting up on the deck rail. “Daniel’s death on drugs. That’s why this business is so unfair. He saw a lot of men get killed over there because they were wasted and forgot to be afraid. It wasn’t until he got back and tried every legal medicine they prescribed that he came to grass. Brian Sweeney put him on to it. The two of them have been trying to get help from the government. Mainly, they’d like to get the law to allow them to have marijuana legally.”
    “No way,” I said.
    She nodded. “‘No farkin’ way,’ as Daniel would say. So he grows his own.”
    “Except they ripped up his garden,” I said. “What’ll he do?”
    She shrugged. “He’s got a little stashed away. Not much. I don’t know how long it’ll last him. I don’t think he could make it without his medicine. In or out of prison.”
    “He can always buy it,” I said.
    Cammie’s head jerked up. “Daniel?” She smiled. “You don’t know Daniel. He would never— never —give money to a drug dealer.”
    “He’s obviously a sick man.”
    “Wouldn’t matter.” She shrugged. “Can you get him off?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “There are plenty of mitigating circumstances in this case. But unless the prosecution screws it up, the facts will be hard to challenge. I mean, they don’t have to prove he was selling it, and he was growing the stuff. So far the police appear to have gone by the book. If it goes to trial we’ll probably have to give them a guilty plea. That’ll be our only chance of keeping Daniel out of prison.”
    “If?”
    “The next step is the probable-cause hearing,” I said. “The prosecutor will have to