Mack Dane thought: This is some advertising gimmick.
To her credit, Mrs. Gilbert held her own against stiff competition. She outmuscled a jewelry dealer from Brooklyn and the vicious wife of a Miami city commissioner to capture three of the prized shopping bags.
“Look, Sam!”
“Really,” Sam Gilbert muttered.
“What did you win?” Mack Dane asked.
“I’m not sure,” Mrs. Gilbert said. The shopping bags were stapled shut. She ripped one open and fished inside.
Her hand came out with a bracelet. The bracelet had a pattern of pale yellow chain, and looked like rubber. The odd thing was, it appeared to be moving.
It was a live snake.
Mrs. Gilbert was speechless. Her eyelids fluttered as the snake coiled around her creamy wrist. Its strawberry tongue flicked in and out, tasting her heat.
“Jesus Christ,” said her husband.
It was not a big snake, maybe three feet long, but it was dark brown and fat as a kitchen pipe. The snake was every bit as bewildered as the Gilberts.
Behind Mack Dane a woman shrieked. And across the deck, another. A man yelled out, “Oh my God!” and fainted with his eyes open. As if jarred from a trance, Mrs. Gilbert dropped the brown snake and back-pedaled; her jaw was going up and down, but nothing was coming out.
By now each of the shopping bags (exactly two hundred in all) had been opened with the same startling results.
The sundeck of the Nordic Princess was crawling with snakes. King snakes, black snakes, blue runners, garter snakes, green snakes, banded water snakes, ring-necked snakes, yellow rat snakes, corn snakes, indigo snakes, scarlet king snakes. Most of the snakes were harmless, except for a handful of Eastern diamondback rattlers and cottonmouth water moccasins, like the one in Mrs. Gilbert’s prize bag. Skip Wiley had not planned on dropping any poisonous snakes—he didn’t think it necessary—but he’d neglected to tell Tommy Tigertail and his crew of Indian snake-catchers. The Seminoles made no distinction, spiritual or taxonomical, between venomous and nonvenomous snakes; all were holy.
As the reptiles squirmed across the teak-wood, the crowd panicked. Several men tried to stomp on the snakes; others rushed forward brandishing deck chairs and fire extinguishers. Many of the snakes became agitated and began snapping in all directions.
Mrs. Gilbert, among others, was bitten on the ankle.
Her husband the doctor stood there helplessly.
“I’m just a radiologist,” he said to Mack Dane.
The captain of the Nordic Princess looked down from the wheelroom and saw bedlam on his ship. To restore order, he blew the ship’s tremendous horn three times.
“What does that mean?” cried Sam Gilbert, who was carrying his wife around on his back.
Mack Dane did not care to admit that although he was a travel writer, he knew nothing about ocean liners. So he said: “I think it means we abandon ship.”
“Abandon ship!” screamed Mrs. Gilbert.
And they did. They formed a flying wedge, hundreds of them, and crashed through the rails and ropes of the upper deck. The Gilberts were among the first to go, plunging seventy feet into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving the ship to the damnable snakes.
As soon as he hit the water, Mack Dane was sorry he’d said anything about jumping overboard. The water was chilly and rough, and he wondered how long he could stay afloat. It also occurred to him, in hindsight, that sharks might be infinitely worse than a bunch of frightened snakes.
The Nordic Princess came dead in the water, towering like a gray wall above the frantic swimmers. Fire bells rang at both ends of the ship. Mack Dane could see crew members on every deck throwing life preservers and lowering the dinghies. The ocean seemed full of shrieking people, their heads bobbing like so many coconuts.
Mack Dane noticed that the mystery helicopter was circling again, firing its hot-white spotlight into the water. Occasionally the beam would fix on the befuddled face of a dog-paddling tourist.
From the helicopter drifted a melody, muted by the engines and warped by the wind. It was not a soothing song, either. It was Pat Boone sounding like Brenda Lee. It was the theme from the motion picture Exodus.