A Scourge of Vipers

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This is a work of fiction. Although a few of the characters are named after old friends, they bear no resemblance to them. For example, my old high school chum Bruce McCracken never worked as a private detective. A handful of real people, including New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, are mentioned in passing, but they have no speaking parts in the story. Although I borrowed the colorful nickname of a former Rhode Island attorney general, the fictional and real Attila the Nun are nothing alike, and the character’s actions and dialogue are entirely imaginary. References to Rhode Island history and geography are as accurate as I can make them, but I have played around a bit with time and space. For example, Hopes, the newspaper bar where I drank decades ago when I reported the news for the Providence Journal, is long gone, but I enjoyed resurrecting it for this story.

A snake-that’s what Mario Zerilli had called me. And now, just an hour later, something was slithering across my cracked kitchen linoleum. It was three feet long with lemon racing stripes twisting the length of its brown body. I watched it slide past the wheezing fridge and veer toward the kitchen table where my bare feet rested on the floor.

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