The Butterfly Forest (Mystery/Thriller) (33 page)

There was a seventh man.  He stepped from the concealment of stacked pot plants and walked to us.  Even before he came close, I knew that I was watching Izzy Gonzales approaching.  He juggled a .45 caliber pistol in his right hand.  A gold wedding band and matching gold watch on his left.  Then he came near enough for me to see the faint acne scars on his face.  Despite the scars, he had a swarthy, handsome look and moved with the bravado of a matador, daring and taunting.  He said, “You two have some pretty big cojones to walk in here.  But the element of surprise was not yours to be had, eh?”  He grinned.

I said, “That’s because Ranger Ed alerted you.”

He smiled, and then turned his head to me, reminiscent of a parrot, a bead of sunlight in one eye, heat spilling from the other.  He waved the pistol recklessly and looked around to his men.  “Ranger Ed, he has been a most useful person.  Give that cocksucker a raise!”

 I watched him glance to his far right.  I cut my eyes in that direction and saw a weatherproof video camera secured to the side of a pine tree.  A cord ran down the tree to a car battery and something locked in a metal box.  A satellite dish, no bigger than a large pizza, pointed to the blue sky. 

I opened my arms, gesturing and taking a small step backward at the same time.  Billie followed my lead.  “I know who you are, Gonzales.  Your face has been all over television lately.  As a matter of fact, I doubt that you could walk in any airport in America and get a flight back to your Uncle Pablo’s hacienda.  You’d be picked up.”

His nostrils flared and he stepped closer, eyes red and dilated.  “If my uncle was standing here, he’d have those men cut off your head and take it down to the river so the gators could play water polo with it ‘till your head got the size of a golf ball.  So you think I would be arrested?  For what, huh?  You believe that old fucker, the one they arrested on triple murder charges is gonna testify he saw me do anything?  He’d have to resurrect himself like Jesus Christ to do that, comprenda?  I know about you, dude.  Ranger Ed filled me in.  You’re Sean O’Brien, an ex cop who’s shackin’ with the mama of the gal I smoked.  So you got a hard on for me, Izzy Gonzales, a simple businessman, trying to be left alone to run his business without interference.  We fulfill a vast need.  Now, you and your friend here are making it most difficult for me.  No one’s gonna fuck up my business.”

“You brought the heat when you put a bullet in Mark, Molly and Nicole.”

“Dude, you give me too much credit where it is not due, okay?  I didn’t waste that bitch.”  He looked over his shoulder at Soto.  Billie and I took another step backwards.  I glanced down and saw the green and yellow twine less than a foot behind us.  Two more feet and we’d have Gonzales in range of the hidden shotgun.  He laughed and said, “That was Frank’s gal, the one with the butterfly wings.  After he finished fuckin’ her, Tiny over there got a turn, and later on Ranger Ed wanted his turn.  But there was a little problem, butterfly babe was still alive.  Now Ranger Ed is one sick fuck.”  He looked at Soto.  “Tell these gringos, Soto.  Tell them how Eddie gets his rocks off.”

Soto grinned, touched his dark glasses and said, “He fucks dead girls.”

I glanced at Billie.  In the split second that our eyes locked, I knew he was in sync with what I was about to do.  And I hoped he was fast enough not to get caught in the crossfire.  “Gonzales, we know you enjoy killing innocent girls, people like Molly Monroe who was only in this forest to release endangered butterflies.  You didn’t have the balls to get close enough to look her in the eye when you shot her with a rifle.  You’re a punk and a coward trying to impress your psychotic uncle.”

His eyes opened wider, his head rotating back to me similar to a lizard.  He stepped forward and boasted, “When I kill you, O’Brien, I’ll be close enough to spit in your eyes.  Like a fuckin’ cobra!  Blind you with speed.  You and your Indian brother are about to be dead brothers.”

    He came toward us and raised the .45.  I could smell the burnt odor of smoked marijuana on his clothes, nostrils red from coke.  Billie touched the hilt of his knife.  Gonzalez taunted, “Pull on that blade.  You won’t get it outta the leather before I take your head off.”

His eyes were on Billie long enough.  I dropped to the ground, at the same instant using my left foot to trip the stretched twine.  Gonzales moved his gun toward me.  A half second too late.  Billie jumped to his right.  The shotgun blast deafening.  The impact tore through Gonzales’ neck and face.  Other shots fired.  One ripped into my backpack.   Billie’s right arm was a blur.  His knife hit the giant in the sternum.  I rolled up with my Glock in my hands and tried to aim through the shotgun smoke at Soto.  I fired two shots in Soto’s direction.  A man wielding a machete charged me.  I shot him in the chest, his body falling hard two feet in front of my head.  I heard running, shots firing.  

When the smoke cleared, Soto was gone.                

EIGHTY-TWO

Soto and the rest of the Mexican workers had vanished in the mix of smoke and dirt kicked up from the gunshots.  I slowly stood and looked at Joe Billie who was still sprawled on the ground.  “You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, but you’ve been hit.”

I felt the warmth of my own blood seeping inside my shirt and flowing through the hair on my chest.  A burning pain radiated from my shoulder into my upper chest and right arm.  One of Soto’s bullets had gone completely through my shoulder.  I moved my hand and arm, and then rotated the injured shoulder.  It was painful but functional.  I didn’t think the round hit a bone.  I was lucky.  Not so for Izzy Gonzales.

The body lay on its back.  One of the buckshot had entered Gonzales’ left eye spraying brain matter across the blooming white and yellow honeysuckle.

I glanced up at the surveillance camera mounted on the pine tree and wondered if the most ruthless drug lord on the planet had just watched me kill his only nephew.  I knelt by the body, kept my back to the camera, slipped the small GPS transmitter from my pocket, lifted Gonzales’s belt and shoved the transmitter into his underwear, the smell of feces and urine hitting me in the face.  My head pounded, the pain now coming in waves.  I knew I would go into shock if I didn’t stop the loss of blood.

I said, “We need to get to the Jeep.  I’ll try to call for help.”  Billie nodded and ran to the dead man who lay on his back, the knife buried to the hilt in his chest.  Billie leaned over, pulled the knife out of the body and wiped the blade clean on the man’s shirt.

I fought back nausea.  “Let’s get out of here before they come back.”

“They never left.”

“What do you mean?”

“Looks like more arrived.”  Billie pointed toward the far end of the field, barely visible through the marijuana.  I could see two black pickup trucks pull to a stop, a black SUV Escalade and another SUV that I recognized.  It was Ed Crews’ official park service vehicle.  He stood next to Soto who seemed to be yelling into a hand-held radio, his arms flailing.  I counted three more men in addition to the laborers who’d been swinging machetes.  The other recruits were biker or gang types with lots of hair, leather, the inflated swagger of the hunt, and the arsenal of machine guns in their hands.

I used my teeth to tear a piece from my shirt, folded the cloth and pressed it against the bullet hole in my shoulder.  I knew blood was flowing from the exit wound.  But at the moment there was nothing I could do.  “Let’s go!” I said.  Grabbing my shotgun, Billie and I ran toward the east, the direction we’d left the Jeep.  I hoped I wouldn’t bleed out before we got there.

After about a half mile, I had to stop.  I took off my belt, used what was left of my shirt to make a bandage for the exit wound.  “Joe, take this shirt, press it against the wound in my back, then tighten my belt around both bandages.  I held the blood-soaked piece of shirt to the entrance wound.  Then he tightened the belt around my shoulder, covering both the entrance and exit wound.  Sweat rolled from my face and down my chest, mixing with the streaking blood.  “Think they’re following us?”

Billie looked back in the direction we’d come.  “I can’t see any of them, but I think we’d better keep moving.  The Jeep is close.  Let me help you.”  He slung my left arm over his shoulder, gripped it with his left hand, and held my side with his right.  We walked as fast as we could through the darkening forest.  

EIGHTY-THREE

Someone, maybe Ed Crews, had come across my Jeep before we did.  The front tires were cut and flattened.  I found my cell phone, pushed the on button: roaming—no signal.  “Get in, Joe.  Even with two flat tires, we might put some distance behind us and them.”  I started the Jeep, put it in gear and pulled out of the sand, the flat tires sounding like flags ripping in a hurricane.

Within a few minutes, we found a spur road.  A golden moon rose through the pines, reminiscent of a medieval platter.  I figured the rough, unmarked road was used by the Gonzales gang to move in and out of the forest, courtesy of a senior ranger who looked the other way, or diverted attention the other way for another, more lucrative cash flow. 
Bastard!

The road was pocketed with large holes, ruts and an occasional fallen log.  The Jeep felt more like a sled.  Each gopher tortoise hole sent a booming shock through the frame and into our bones.  “You want me to drive?” Billie asked.

“I’ve never seen you in a car.”

“Now’s a good time to learn.”  

I wanted to smile, but I felt like it would require more energy than I could spare.  I tried to focus on my hand-held GPS.  The road we were on wasn’t found on the satellite. “Where the hell are we?”

“About three miles northeast of the river,” Billie said.

“It feels like we’re driving on the moon, craters and all.’’  The pain was so severe over my left eye I had to close it to see where I was driving.  My mouth tasted like metal, and I could smell my blood and sweat coalescing across my chest and down my back.

 Lights in the rearview mirror caught my attention.  “They’re coming!  We can’t outrun them with two flat tires.”  I gunned the Jeep, swerved around a hole that looked more like the opening to a cave, and pushed the speed to thirty-five miles an hour.  We bounced so hard the moon shot over a tall pine, and our heads hit the roll bar.

I touched the .12 gauge between the seats.  “As good as you are at throwing a knife, it won’t mean shit now.  They have machine guns.  They can take us out before we can return fire with a shotgun.  My Glock won’t match their firepower.  We need to get off this cattle trail, maybe lose them in the woods.”

Billie looked in his side mirror and said nothing.

I rounded a curve, almost sliding into a pine tree and floored the gas pedal.  The noise was similar to a mule-drawn plow breaking hardpan soil.  We drove on for another mile, the lights gaining on us around each turn in the primitive road.

I caught the muzzle flash on the side of the car about one hundred feet behind us. A bullet came through the seats between us and shattered the front windshield.  “Next curve I’m pulling off in the woods!  I gotta kill the lights!”  The instant I came around another turn, I turned between two large pine trees, killed the headlights and drove under the light from the moon.  We moved wildly through the forest, dodging trees, plowing over fallen logs and crossing shallow creeks, the engine finally stopping in water almost up to the floorboard.

We sat there for a moment looking to see if lights were following us.  All we could hear were sounds from the motor ticking and water sluicing against the tailpipe, hissing.  The smell of decayed leaves and sulfur mixed in the steam coming up under us made me nauseous.  “C’mon, Joe.  Looks like this is where we walk.”  I grabbed the shotgun and my Glock as Billie picked up his backpack, and we both stepped out into water that came above our knees.

We sloshed to dry land on the other side of the swamp, wet leaves and vines clinging to our legs and arms.  We saw something moving at a blistering speed before we heard it.  A fighter jet flew over us, two hundred yards above our heads.  The roar of its engines followed three seconds behind it.  “Hope that’s part of the search party.”

Billie said, “A nice, fast helicopter would do better.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that jet has anything to do with us escaping from a band of drug runners who would laugh and take turns slitting our throats.”

I saw flashlights moving in the direction of the road.  “They found where we left the road.  They’re following us on foot.”

EIGHTY-FOUR

We ran the opposite direction from where the flashlights zigzagged through the trees.  Buttery radiance from the full moon drifted down through the branches, illuminating moths and mosquitoes, creating a trapped and eerie image around us like dust caught in a cone of light over the dark felt of a pool table. 

“I see ‘em!” one man bellowed out.

I could hear the men running, snapping branches and saplings as they closed the distance behind us.

They stopped.

We stopped.  I tried to hold my breath, blood trickling out of my wound.  Mosquitoes whined and orbited our heads.  I saw the white burst of a machine gun.  The rounds tore through limbs above our heads, raining down leaves and shattered branches.