The Orchid Keeper: A Sean O'Brien Novel

by Tom Lowe

  Santiago said nothing. He lifted a plastic stir stick from the table and twisted it between two fingers. “And you need to be more cautious. How did they find and track you to the condo?”

  “I wasn’t in a position to ask them. But let me assure you of this … I did everything humanly possible not to leave a trail.”

  “The old man saw you.”

  “That was because he was out there. Now, he’s gone. I did the job, and that means that you and your client are more, shall we say … secure. You need to get me to the place in Argentina.”

  Santiago tilted forward, his eyes drifting across Fazio’s face. “I detect a veiled threat. You were spotted. The witness had to be eliminated, and now you have the security of my client to leverage a safe house for you in South America.”

  “You made the offer. I did the job. The heat is rising, and I need to get out, okay?”

  “Yes, you did the job. But there’s one more thing that needs attending. After that, your ass is on a plane.”

  • • •

  Joe Billie was sitting on the fender of his truck when we turned off the Tamiami Trail onto Gator Gully. He was whittling a stick, slivers of bark between his high boots. He stood and greeted us both with hugs. Wynona looked at him and asked, “How’s Sam Otter?”

  “I wish I could give you an accurate answer. When the top medicine man in the tribe gets sick, who does he see for a second opinion? Nobody. His coloring is off. Eyes not as bright as they used to be. But shoot, he’s a hundred years old.” Billie chuckled, a breeze tossing his long hair. “I remember his eyes when I was a boy. When Sam would take a group of us boys out in the glades for his fabled walks and talks, I always felt his black eyes could literally see through me, at least into my heart. He taught us a lot.” Billie reached in the front seat of his truck and picked up a leather satchel, the exterior worn and soft from years of use.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Wynona asked.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Is it a medicine bundle?”

  “No, at least not the kind Sam Otter uses. It’s more of a natural tool kit.”

  “Did Sam give it to you?”

  “He loaned it to me.”

  “What’s in it?” I asked.

  Joe smiled. “I’m really not sure of all the things. Sam tells me what he wants me to know.”

  “I remember meeting him. Although he spoke very little English, he communicated well.” I glanced at the satchel. “If it weren’t for Sam Otter, I’m not sure we would have seen or at least understood the nature of the juvenile vultures we saw that day. We didn’t find the body. They did.”

  Joe looked up at the sky, toward the northeast. He watched two carrion birds ride the air currents. “Maybe today they can help us find what’s left of the drone.”

  Wynona glanced at the sky, nodding that she understood the undertone in Billie’s statement. He lowered his eyes to both of us. “You two want to climb in my truck and we’ll head out there?”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  • • •

  A half-hour later, we stopped at the fallen cypress tree and got out of the truck. The afternoon sun was hidden behind steely gray clouds in the west, a light breeze stroked the sawgrass. Wynona said, “This is where we believe the shooter took the shot.”

  Joe looked at the ground near the toppled tree, walking up close, his eyes searching. Wynona said, “It’s been gone over here with a fine-tooth comb. Outside the things I mentioned to you, the cigar, food wrapper and whatnot, we couldn’t find any ATV tracks in this area.”

  Joe said nothing. He knelt down, using his fingers to touch the earth. He stood and looked at the fallen tree, the two small marks on the trunk. He raised his eyes and stared into the northwest. “How far in that direction was the man who died?”

  Wynona glanced at me, arching her eyebrows. “About 150 yards.”

  “Show me.”

  EIGHTY-FIVE

  We got back in his truck and drove the distance. When we parked, Wynona led him to the area where Thaxton’s backpack and drone control were found. She pointed. “This is where he dropped them, or at least it is where we found the things. A blood sample was removed from here. The sample matched Thaxton’s blood type and DNA. Somehow, he managed to run, walk, or crawl the distance to the reservation where the body was found.”

  “The man had a strong will to live,” Joe Billie said, looking up at the ashen sky, the wind playing in the leaves atop the cypress trees. He watched an Everglades kite fly low over the sawgrass. He set the leather satchel on the ground and carefully opened it. Joe lifted out a small pouch, about the size of a change purse. He reached inside and used his fingers to pinch a yellow powder that looked like oak pollen. He turned, tossing it up in the air. He studied the way the powder drifted.

  Wynona said nothing, watching Joe. He set the small pouch back in the satchel and removed what looked like a large wing feather from an eagle. He opened the door to his truck and removed a tarnished brass Zippo lighter, using his thumb to turn the wheel, striking the flint and igniting a yellow flame. I could smell the brief odor of lighter fluid in the wind.

  Joe lit the tip of the feather, watching the flames grow as the fire devoured the feather, the smell was like hair burning. He looked in the direction the smoke rose, watching it snake up through the cypress trees, and drift toward the west. He said nothing, simply watching the smoke and leaves.

  Wynona motioned toward the south. I saw what I assumed was a vulture until it flew closer, still at least a thousand feet above the glades. Then I spotted the white-feathered head. A bald eagle rode the air currents, turning its head and looking down on the earth. Wynona smiled, her beauty even more radiant in this environment. She looked over at Billie. “Did you somehow call that eagle?”

  “I did nothing. Only what Sam Otter instructed me to do.” He observed the eagle for half a minute, watching the bird surveying the Everglades. “We’re looking for a manmade object … a drone. For the most part, something with an engine on it is usually pushing against the wind.” He looked over to me. “I know you’re a sailor, Sean. Against the wind can work both ways on a sailboat. But if you’re an eagle, you look not to fight the wind, you want to ride it. Burns less energy. Not as tiring, and the wind will take you places it wants you to go. The eagle just soars. Watch him.”

  There was no wing movement, only the large bird’s outstretched wings, soaring. Billie nodded and said, “If the drone was flying about as high as the eagle is now, and it was close to the same time of day …” He paused, watching the bird ascend in a westward direction. “Then the drone—if, at that point, the propellers were not pulling it in the opposite direction, it may have flown off toward the west.” He grinned. “Let’s hope it didn’t fly all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.” He started walking in a westward direction.

  Wynona looked at me. She pulled her hair back and fastened it into a ponytail. “I’d suggest we follow him.”

  “Good suggestion.”

  Joe Billie led us through hardwood hammocks filled with oak, slash pines and palms, into wetlands, the water up to our knees. He stopped about every one-hundred feet or so and simply stood in silence, watching movement in the sawgrass or the leaves, listening to the rustle of palm fronds. Wynona didn’t ask him questions. I wasn’t sure what questions he could or wanted to answer.

  We walked. We sloshed through brown water. Mosquitoes following us. Joe stopped abruptly. He pointed to a motion in the sawgrass. Whatever was causing the tops of sawgrass to tremble, was much larger than a rabbit, and longer. He walked closer, quickly rushing but not touching whatever was moving. A large Burmese python emerged from the grass, crawling down the game trail we followed. Its mid-section was as thick as my thigh, the skin a perfect checkered camouflage of brown, olive green and yellow.

  Joe watched it as if he was watching an alien life form. “They were never in here when I was a boy. People, many from the Miami area, would buy the snakes as pe
ts. But when the animals got too big to care for, they’d bring them out to the glades and release them. Except for large gators, the python has no natural enemy here—not good for the glades.”

  Wynona said, “We didn’t grow up with giant pythons crawling through the reservation.”

  I watched the snake slither off into the grass. “I’d estimate that one would go at least fifteen feet, maybe closer to twenty.”

  Joe looked up to the sky. The eagle was no longer visible. “Come … I think we are getting closer.”

  We followed him less than one hundred yards, moving away from the game trail, wading through waist-high sawgrass. We walked through a piece of Florida that was vanishing. It was the River of Grass in its most primal embodiment, flat as a prairie. Above us, a sapphire blue bowl stretched to the ends of the glades, cotton white clouds the size of the Himalayas drifting in the sky. The warm breeze across the land frolicked with the sawgrass, in fields of motion like swells on the surface of the sea.

  We came closer to one of the islands in this ocean of grass, a grove of old-growth cypress trees, the wind causing Spanish moss to sway from the limbs. I estimated the strand of trees was not more than five acres. Joe stopped, turning back to us. “Perhaps the reason the search teams didn’t find the drone is because they were looking on the ground and not in the air.” He motioned toward the trees. “Look up at the tallest one in the center, the old man of the group. You can just make out the drone on one of the lower branches. Sean, I think you are probably tall enough to reach the branch and shake down the drone.”

  Wynona and I looked in the direction Joe Billie pointed. Near the end of a low-hanging limb, there it was, like a silent bird roosting. The black drone tucked at the end of the branch. He was smiling. I looked at him thinking what an amazingly skilled tracker he was. “I think you’re right. I can probably reach it. You want to stand under the limb to catch the drone?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  The three of us waded through water a few inches above our ankles. We walked around cypress knee roots that protruded up and out of the murky water like wooden spikes on the floor of a murky cave. When we got to the base of the tall tree, I stepped up on its massive, gnarled roots and reached for the limb. Joe stood in water directly below the drone. Wynona said, “Please try hard no to drop it. If there are images on the video card, being submerged in the water won’t help us.”

  He stood with outstretched arms. “Okay, Sean. Give it a little shake.”

  I grabbed the limb with both hands and shook it. The drone immediately fell into Joe’s arms. He caught it and grinned. “This is no diving bird. Its plastic feathers are not wet. Maybe it has something to show us.”

  Wynona said, “Nice catch. I so hope there are images on the video card that will help us.”

  EIGHTY-SIX

  The three of us stood under the branches of the deep-rooted cypress tree, a tree that Joe Billie said was tall when Sam Otter was a boy. It wasn’t the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but, in a remote sense, it felt like there was a forbidden trait to it with tap roots that began in the soil of Eden. I thought about the huge snake we’d just seen. The great tree was a standing monument to time itself. When I shook the limb, the mechanical fruit that dropped from the branch had an ominous feel to it.

  The drone, with its four rotors, jet black aluminum body, was foreign to everything around us, yet it might unveil evil walking in its most visual form. Joe handed the drone to Wynona. “It’s all yours.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “Let’s cross our fingers, hoping there is something we can use.” She opened the slot where the micro SD card was stored. “It’s in here. My laptop is back in Sean’s Jeep. I wish we had an airboat to get us there sooner.”

  • • •

  An hour later, just as smoky embers of a crimson sun were shut out through the blinds of lead colored clouds, Wynona set her laptop on the hood of my Jeep and lifted the screen. She inserted the SD card and waited a few seconds for the file to load. Joe Billie and I stood beside her, me on the right, Billie on the left. She said, “There are a lot of video files on here. But the one we’re most interested in seeing is the final file … or at least the last couple of files. So … let’s scroll down to that area and see what we see.”

  She started the playback at the beginning of the video frame. The image was on the full-screen. The footage was of the Everglades, maybe five-hundred feet above the sawgrass. I could tell that Thaxton had been an excellent aerial photographer. The video scenes were all smooth. Nothing jerky, the movements fluid and with a cinematic look and feel. We watched a deer on the ground run, zig-zagging through shallow water and sawgrass.

  The drone flew over a flock of roseate spoonbills feeding in the shallows of a mangrove framed estuary, golden sunlight reflecting from the water. More than two-dozen of the pink birds wading. None looking up at the drone. It moved away from that perspective, back over the sawgrass, this time gaining altitude. Within a minute, I began to recognize some of the area because it was what we’d just been walking through on the way to finding the drone.

  The next image also was recognizable. We could make out the fallen cypress tree lying on the ground in the distance, the drone beginning to descend as it approached. “Check that out,” Wynona said.

  Joe looked the screen. “The man in the video is attempting to hide behind the toppled tree.”

  I nodded. “But there is no place he can hide from the aerial advance. He’s standing, and from that distance, I recognize him.”

  “You do?” Billie asked.

  “Yeah, we do,” said Wynona.

  The drone moved closer. We could see the fear in the face of Michael Fazio.

  “Looks like he’s going to shoot at it,” Billie said.

  We watched as Fazio aimed his rifle in the direction of the drone and fired shots directly at it. We could see the puffs of white smoke at the end of the barrel, the anger in his face.

  But it was the next shot that I felt in my heart.

  Fazio crouched back down next to the tree. He took careful aim, not at the drone … but rather at the man flying the drone. He sighted through the scope, taking his time. One shot. One final puff of smoke. “That’s it,” I said. “From the camera on the drone, Thaxton saw his own killer aiming at him and taking the fatal shot.”

  “Incredible,” whispered Wynona. “What a horrible way to see your assassination in a video monitor you’re holding. Almost like watching fate or the future a split-second before it happens. And no way to prevent or change the consequences.”

  We watched the drone from that point, quickly gaining altitude. Maybe now at a thousand feet above the sawgrass. In the wide angle, we could see Fazio scatter something in the area where he stood.

  Wynona said, “He must have picked up the cigar stogie and food wrapper from some spot where he saw Craig Moffett siting on his ATV, drinking beer, smoking weed and leaving a trail.”

  I said, “All Fazio had to do was carefully pick up some litter and deposit it where he wanted. Planting physical evidence. But he never bargained for an eye in the sky that caught it all.”

  The drone ascended a little higher, now flying erratically. Twisting over the Everglades. The camera picking up more of the horizon, the sun setting far in the distance where the sawgrass merged into a vista of purple and golden clouds. We could see a flock of white pelicans beating their wings, moving from north to south, toward the Ten Thousand Islands.

  And then we saw an eagle. Not beating its wings, but rather spiraling over the Everglades. It seemed to eye the drone as a curiosity in the shared sky before catching an updraft and soaring toward the sunset.

  The drone did the opposite. It descended, snaking its way over the wetlands like a chaotic bird not sure where to alight. It dropped lower, now maybe two-hundred feet above the ground. The drone seemed to pull out of its aerial freefall, climbing up for a few feet before fluttering back toward earth. Out of energy. No gentle hand to guide it. But
the boughs of an old cypress tree were there to catch it, the drone falling through the limbs and Spanish moss. The eye of the camera capturing it all. Finally, the drone came to a rest, the leafy moss-laden branch catching it. In the breeze, the tip of the limb barely moving, left to right, like an unseen hand rocking the cradle.

  And then the camera eye closed and faded to darkness..

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  Joe Billie stepped back from the computer screen, his dark eyes unreadable. He looked across the glades. “That camera on the drone, like the eye of an eagle, caught it all.” He turned back to us. “Now, what can you two do?”

  Wynona closed her laptop. “We can arrest Michael Fazio and charge him with first-degree, premeditated murder.”

  I picked up my phone, scrolling to the app and looking at the digital map. I could see Fazio’s car was back at the condo. “Looks like he’s home, or at least his car is back there.”

  Wynona’s phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen. “It’s Eric Valdez, FBI.”

  She answered, and he said, “Wynona, we have the guy’s ID.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You were right about the player part, at least in terms of South Florida politics. Guy’s name is Simon Santiago. He’s a former lawyer, disbarred seven years ago after his third DUI, the last one crippling a young mother in a car accident. Santiago is one of the partners in a national lobby firm called the Carswell Group. Its corporate offices are here in Miami. The company leases two floors in one of the most expensive office towers overlooking Biscayne Bay.”

  She drew in a deep breath and released it. “Well, the person he was meeting with is Michael Fazio. He’s a hitman. And we just watched aerial video shot by a drone, capturing Fazio shooting Joe Thaxton.” She gave Valdez more details including the murder of Chester Miller. “So, what we’re looking at is an assassin who shot and killed two people in the glades. And we believe the guy Fazio was meeting … this Simon Santiago, is complicit in the murders.”