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.