The taller of the two, a man with a cleft chin shaved so close it looked polished, stepped next to my bed. “Mr. O’Brien, I’m Special Agent Dan Keyes, Tampa office, FBI. My colleague is Special Agent Sonja Flores.”
Agent Flores folded her arms over her breasts, dark hair touching her shoulders, deep chestnut brown eyes locked on me like a birddog pointing. She stepped next to my bed, her gun belt making a crackling sound. The Beretta strapped to her curved hip was polished, the smell of gun oil mixed with perfume. I felt my blood rush through my temples and wondered if my IV drip had some morphine in it. She said, “It’s good to see you conscious. How are you feeling, Mr. O’Brien?”
“Better, now, Miss Flores. With these tubes in me, I assume I’m conscious. If not, welcome to my dream.” I smiled.
I saw the pulse in her neck pick up a beat. She gestured to the man at the foot of my bed. “This is Tim Jenkins, senior agent with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, ICE.”
Jenkin’s white hair was neatly parted on the left, eyes unblinking with the blue intensity of a finely adjusted butane torch. The ICE man said, “This is no dream O’Brien. Looks like you left a nightmare in the forest. It’s now an international incident. We have a few questions for you.”
Special Agent Dan Keyes cleared his throat with a grunt. “First, your company needs to exit the premises.”
I said, “My ‘company’ is my long-time friend and personal counsel, Mr. Dave Collins. Anything I say to you can be said in his presence.”
Dave cut his eyes at me, nodded and said, “We’re glad to help you, Agent.”
The man from ICE said to Dave, “Out in the hall, you never told me you were—”
“We were simply trading information, as we are now,” Dave said. “Mr. O’Brien is not charged with any crime, nor is he ancillary to criminal activity. On the contrary, he and Mr. Billie put their lives on the line when they stumbled onto a marijuana operation and were forced into a self-defense situation.”
Agent Keyes almost growled. “We haven’t been able to locate Mr. Billie yet, but we will. And we did find the leftovers in the national forest, it’s a war zone. Some kind of massacre. What happened out there?”
I looked at the two IV’s in my arms. “With all these drugs flowing in me, things are a little hazy. What’d you find?”
“Looks like you found a hell of a lot more than a marijuana operation,” Keyes said. “We’ve talked with Detective Sandberg here. We understand you came up with a composite of someone who resembles Izzy Gonzales, drawn by Luke Palmer after he was arrested for a triple homicide.”
I said, “And now Luke Palmer’s been killed. What does that tell you? Or maybe you didn’t see his body hanging from a tree out there?”
Agent Keyes lips grew tight. “We pulled your background. Went all the way back to when you came out of your mama. O’Brien, I believe you have issues.”
He waited for me to respond. I said nothing. He rocked on the balls of his wingtips for a second. “Thirteen years with Miami-Dade homicide. Internal Affairs ran two separate investigations into your Dirty Harry tactics. A tour of duty in the Middle East. Places we know about include Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan. A lot of your file seems to be, shall we say, incomplete.”
I said, “Classified is a better word.”
Agent Tim Jenkins added, “Dan, let’s cut to the chase with Mr. O’Brien.” He touched the tip of his nose. I could see that he’d lost a piece of his small finger, first joint to the nail gone. “O’Brien, I really don’t give a rat’s ass about any issues you may or may not have. I don’t give a shit about fitting you into some neat profile.”
“Profile? You’re trying to color me with your paint-by-numbers illustrations when you have Pablo Gonzales and his minions growing pot on America soil.”
“Was Izzy Gonzales out there?” asked Agent Flores, her eyes absorbing the room.
“If you didn’t find him that means someone took his body.”
“He’s dead?” the ICE man asked.
“Yeah.”
There was a short knock at my door. Agent Keyes instinctively reached under his coat, his hand touching the pistol grip.
EIGHTY-NINE
Two nurses came into my room, ignored the federal agents, one older nurse saying, “We need to check your vitals. Looks like you’ll be leaving us soon. You were a quart low when you came in. Now, you’re humming along fine.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“You might want to toss those out, hon. They looked like you’d worn them in a war. What’s left of them are in the closet.”
Dave said, “I brought you a fresh change of clothes.”
The nurses left and Agent Jenkins asked, “What happened to Izzy Gonzales?”
“He was a millimeter away from squeezing a .45 into my head. I managed to be a little faster. Did you find Frank Soto?’’
“You mean did we find his body?” asked Agent Keyes.
“Did you find him dead or alive?”
Detective Sandberg said, “No, unfortunately, we didn’t.
Agent Jenkins added, “We found two dead gang members wearing AB tats, three soldiers who looked like growers — one of them blown in half on the bombing range, and Palmer swaying from a tree. Anything we missed?’’
“Yeah, Ed Crews, the park ranger. He was working for them.”
“What?” asked Agent Keyes, his eyebrows lifting.
I said, “I know it’s hard to believe, someone on the government payroll. But it’s true. He was the eyes and ears, giving them the green light to grow, pack and ship.”
“You’d better just start from the beginning,” said Agent Flores.
I told them everything I could remember. They took notes, no one interrupting me. They acknowledged seeing the video camera bolted to the tree. I asked, “Do you know where the images were being seen?”
Agent Flores said, “No, not yet, but maybe that’s where we’ll find Pablo Gonzales.”
“If you can find Izzy’s body, you might find Uncle Pablo,” I said. “Someone must have taken the body out of the forest as Soto and his squad chased Billie and me.”
Agent Jenkins looked at the setting sun through the window, its light was a smoldering red flame heating the belly of a purple cloud. He said, “The body could be on its way to Mexico. Finding it would be like hitting the lotto.”
I smiled. “If you have the right numbers, you hit the lotto. If you have GPS coordinates to Izzy Gonzales, you’d be able to find the body within fifteen feet, anywhere in the world.”
Agent Keyes inhaled, his eyes rolling slightly as he said, “Sounds like a hypothetical road to me, O’Brien.”
I looked at Dave, a glint in his eye. “Dave, would you write down the password and username for Agent Keyes?”
“Absolutely,” he said jotting them on a piece of paper and handing it to Keyes.
“What’s this?” Keyes asked.
I said, “It’s a computer password and username that will let you follow a GPS tracker I put in Gonzales’ shorts after he died. My back was facing the video camera, so chances are Pablo didn’t see me do it.”
The federal agents said nothing. The hum of the cold air through the vent over my bed was the only sound. Detective Sandberg finally said, “You dropped a tracker in a dead man’s fucking shorts?”
“It’s probably the last place they’ll look.”
Agent Flores smiled, her direct eyes looking softer. She said, “Thank you, Mr. O’Brien. We will take everything from here. You can disengage.”
Agent Jenkins said, “That’s not going to be easy. Unfortunately, Pablo Gonzales will think you owe him your life, and he’ll send someone to collect. We’ll do what we can to protect you. You might want to take a long vacation somewhere far away.”