I wanted yell. Wanted to stand and shake the Spaniard back into his original form. I could only sit and stare. I was without any power of movement or speech. Then, not unlike a marionette with a single string attached to one body part, I saw my arm rise in front of me, my hand changing into a hairy, yellow claw with curved predator talons hard as a cow’s hoof. A white dove nested in my palm, its eyes bright as rubies. It flapped its wings and soared around primeval cypress trees, its white body now a comet streaking into an ancient forest dark as the universe.
I mustered enough power to close my eyes, but not the insanity. I couldn’t stop the Mardi Gras parade of crazies dancing around the spring. They ran amuck all night, a playbill of freaks in an outdoor theater of the bizarre. I heard the flames in the campfire laughing, the white noise of hot ashes a constant static in my head, the spring bubbling and swirling, a witches’ brew with chemical green colors, the mist from its surface settling over the forest floor and causing a feral odor to rise from underneath moss and leaves.
If I was witnessing a Midsummer Eve’s dream, it was a macabre nightmare. Bad dreams retreat, become an ebb tide when you awake. I longed for sleep, to enter a place where the subconscious was a safer harbor than the conscious mind.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
I awoke in a strange bed, and to the medicinal smell of a hospital. The odor of adhesives and mercurochrome mixed with my dried sweat under the clean, white sheets. There was the electronic, off-key harmony of life-sustaining machinery all around me.
Dave Collins, sitting in a chair near the only window in the room, looked up from reading the Wall Street Journal. His bifocals perched near the tip of his nose. “Lazarus rises,” he said, smiling.
“Feel like I flat-lined. Where am I, and how long have I been here?”
“Halifax Hospital. This is your second day of sleeping like you were drugged.”
“I was.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Joe Billie.”
“Your Seminole friend?”
“We’d both been shot. We were on our last leg running from men who wanted our heads. Billie mixed some concoction out there in the forest, by a spring. I was feverish, but I remember watching him. I drank some of the stuff. He said it’d kill the fever, stop the infection. He drank it, too. Is he here?”
“You mean as a patient?”
I nodded.
“Not that I’ve heard. You were found alone, Sean.”
“Where?”
“Lying by a hiking trail near Highway 19. Two campers found you. FBI, ICE, Homeland, and God knows who else, have been out there combing the forest since you called Detective Sandberg after finding Luke Palmer’s body hanging from a tree. That much I know. One of the federal agents offered the information because they wanted to question me about you — quid pro quo tactics. The rest, you’ll have to tell me.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“That you were a very skilled, former homicide investigator who’d prefer to be fishing or teaching. You championed traditional police procedure; however, circumstances of late involved you by default, not by desire.”
I said nothing for a moment. “How’s Elizabeth?”
“She’s well. Max is her shadow. Nick’s keeping an eye on her while I’m here.”
“Dave, please get back there now.”
“She’s in good hands. I can help you with—”
“Do you know how many bodies the feds found out there?”
“I heard the body count is at six.”
“Did they ID any of them?”
“Luke Palmer, and that’s tragic.”
“Anyone else?”
“I have a knot forming in my gut, Sean, only because I have a feeling you’re going to tell me something I suspect.”
“Izzy Gonzales is dead. He was about to feed me a .45. I managed to discharge one of his booby traps, a .12 gauge by using a hidden tripwire. He was so high on drugs I think he forgot the trap was even there.”
Dave said nothing. He stood from the chair, his nostrils flaring as if the air had been vacuumed out of the room.
“By your reaction, it’s obvious the feds didn’t say they’d found Gonzales’ body.”
“Maybe they didn’t find it.”
“I believe Pablo Gonzales saw, or could have seen, the whole thing.”
Dave’s eyebrows arched. “What do you mean?”
“There’s a surveillance camera mounted to a pine tree. It overlooks the marijuana operation. The camera is hardwired to a heavy-duty battery and probably a wireless Internet connection. There’s a satellite dish next to it. I’m sure it’s sending a live feed to whoever has password access to the site.”
“So somewhere in Mexico, Pablo Gonzales is watching his inventory… and as an added feature, he sees the director’s cut of his nephew’s death.”
I said nothing and fell deeper into thought, watching the sunset fill the room with light that looked as if it had been filtered through a glass of red wine.
Dave stepped to the side of my bed. “What happened out there?”
I told him everything, at least everything I could remember. I reiterated finding Luke Palmer swaying from a hangman’s noose, details of Izzy’s attack in the forest, the Neanderthal and the machete-swinging man dying in the pot field. Dave listened closely as I detailed how the bomb was dropped on the assassin team before they could put a hundred rounds through the window in our concrete bunker. Finally, I put together some of the bizarre scenes I witnessed while under the influence of whatever Joe Billie had mixed in the water bottle.
Dave said, “Everything you’ve told me sounds eerily like modern scenes from Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost. In this case, the national forest is the stage where the devil seems to have set up shop after being expelled from paradise. All the characters are there, and maybe Pablo is Satan in this version of poems.”
“My head’s pounding enough as it is.”
“Sorry. Even if Pablo Gonzales saw the death of his nephew, saw that you killed him in self-defense — it won’t mean anything to a man like Gonzales. Killing a family member of the most powerful drug lord in the world doesn’t happen without deadly repercussions. For these pack leaders, it’s all about honor, family loyalty and saving grace — an eye-for-an-eye. The feds will hunt for Billie to corroborate your story. If he’s hiding on the reservation, that won’t be an easy thing to do.”
I said nothing.
Dave held his eye glasses in one hand. Through the merlot light from the window, I could see his fingerprint smudges on the lenses. He blew air out of his big chest. “They found your car, towed it in. This will get a lot worse before it gets better. Now I understand why you wanted me to keep a close eye on Elizabeth. It’ll come down to revenge for honor and the loyalty of protecting the dishonest, dysfunctional family. Sean, the proverbial shit is about to fall from a hundred-year storm, and you’re, unfortunately, stuck in the middle of it.”
EIGHTY-EIGHT
Dave was about to leave my room when there was a cursory knock, and four people entered without invitation. Detective Sandberg nodded when he saw me. He was followed by two men and one woman who walked in with government issued body language to complement their dark suits. Sandberg said, “Glad to see you made it out of those woods alive. Some didn’t.”
I said nothing.
He continued. “These folks are with the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They’ll do the introductions.”