Snake Eater Read Online Free Page B

demonstrate that she has enough evidence to justify a trial. If it gets to trial, I’ll ask a friend of mine, a lawyer with a lot of experience at this sort of thing, to come aboard.”
    “You’re not going to abandon him?” said Cammie.
    I shook my head.
    “Because,” she continued, “I can tell he trusts you. He doesn’t trust many people.”
    “I won’t abandon him.”
    She cocked her head at me. “You were probably wondering about us.”
    I shrugged. “None of my business.”
    “Maybe it is,” she said. “Maybe it relates to Daniel’s case. Maybe you can use it. I mean, he really does hate drugs. What they do to people. Despises drug dealers. You should probably know, so you can judge. I doubt Daniel would tell you.”
    I nodded. “Okay.”
    She nodded and stared off toward the river. The Connecticut’s a big broad river out there in the valley. It flows slow and deep through the old tobacco bottom land. It’s not a trout stream, but bass and pike live there, and shad push up from the ocean every spring to spawn, and just looking at it gave me the urge to go fishing.
    “He saved my life,” said Cammie softly.
    “Daniel?”
    “Yes. I was this overachiever from a little mountain town outside of Knoxville. The youngest of eight. I had four sisters and three brothers, two of whom got killed in Vietnam. My momma sang choir in the Baptist church. So did I. One of my teachers got me into Smith College on a scholarship. I was going to be a great artist.” She glanced at me and smiled softly. “I wasn’t ready. I was homesick, I was over my head academically, I had no friends. I made some bad acquaintances.” She shrugged. “Three months after I started my freshman year I was hooking in Springfield for coke money, living with a pimp, scared to death. Daniel found me and brought me here. I was eighteen. He got me straightened out. We lived in a trailer for a while. Eventually Daniel built me a studio and told me to just paint and cherish my life.”
    “What happened to the pimp?”
    “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “This all happened years ago. I used to wake up from dreaming that he’d come for me. I haven’t had that dream in a while.”
    “What about that policeman?”
    “Oakley?”
    I nodded.
    “Well, he was the one who arrested Daniel, of course. Oakley’s had it in for us from the start.”
    “How do you mean?”
    Cammie gazed out at the river. “Small things,” she said. “A ticket for parking in a handicapped zone, when the tire was barely touching the line. He stopped Daniel once in the middle of the afternoon, made him get out of the car and go through a bunch of drunk-driving exercises right beside the road, with all our neighbors driving by to watch. Oakley keeps showing up in the supermarket or the post office or the drugstore when I’m there, just kind of watching me with this spooky smile on his face. I’ll turn around, and he’ll be there, looking at me.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s no one thing. Maybe we’re just paranoid about Oakley. It’s a small town…”
    “Are you afraid of him?”
    Cammie closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she turned to look at me and said, “Yes. I guess I am. Daniel’s not afraid of him. But he worries about me. And now this…”
    “The arrest.”
    She nodded.
    We fell silent for a minute. Then I said, “Was Daniel growing marijuana when you met him?”
    “Yes. He has this terrible raw, weeping rash on his back. From the Agent Orange. He doesn’t talk about his pain, and when you’re with him you’d never know how miserable he is.”
    “He seemed pretty miserable when I saw him in jail.”
    She nodded. “That’s because he didn’t have his medicine. It’s worst at night. When he’s sleeping he moans and thrashes around as if he was having one continuous nightmare.” She looked up at me. “We don’t sleep together. I mean, we’re together, we… we’re lovers, we make love… but he can’t