[Sean O'Brien 03.0] The Butterfly Forest

by Tom Lowe

  We slowed to a fast walk, vines slapping our faces, mosquitoes whining in our ears. From the lower position of the moon, I thought it had been at least a half hour since the bombs hit our pursuers. We heard no one following, only the sound of cicadas and frogs in the night. I said, “We’re both going to bleed out. We’ve got to stop. I don’t know if any of those men survived the bombs. But, I doubt we’re being tracked.”

  Billie pointed through some trees. “Look, under the moonlight, I can see a spring. If we’re lucky, we might find a plant that grows on the spring’s shoulders. It’s part of what I need to make the medicine to keep us alive.”

  “Where’s the other part?”

  “In here.” Billie took off his small backpack, rummaged inside it and removed three Ziploc bags. Each one filled with a different shade of what looked like dirt and leaves.

  “What’s that?”

  “Herbs. Roots. The key is in knowing which one to mix and how much to mix.”

  “Mix it with what?”

  “Water. Do you still have a water bottle in your bag?”

  “It’s almost empty.”

  “Okay then, we will sip from the earth.” He started walking toward the reflection of moonlight off the surface of the spring.

  “The herbs and stuff…do you always pack that?”

  “No.”

  “Why’d you do it this time?”

  “Well, Sean, sometimes you feel the storm before you see the dark clouds. I felt a storm would overtake us on this little journey through hell.” He turned and walked in the direction of the iridescent water.

  Under the clear moonlight, the spring looked alive, its surface waters shimmering in a luminescent greenish-blue boil. From another angle, it resembled a turquoise diamond. Framed with green ferns and old oaks holding hand towels of Spanish moss, the spring drew you in as if it was a watering hole for the soul.

  Billie said, “This water flows between the fingers of the Breath-maker. It is a healing spring.”

  I sat on a fallen log as Billie hunted through the ferns and water plants. He pulled up two handfuls of a dark green plant. I couldn’t tell if it was a water lily. I didn’t care. He said, “Give me the bottle.”

  I reach in the backpack and found the bottle. There was less than a half inch of water in the bottom. Billie poured it out and stepped to the spring. He filled the bottle about two thirds full, holding it up to the moon to see what he was doing. He sat on the log, held the bottle between his knees and squeezed white liquid from the water plants into the mouth of the bottle. Then he carefully poured about a thimble of his mixture from each plastic bag. He replaced the cap on the bottle, shook it and unscrewed the cap. “Drink two mouthfuls of this,” he said, handing the bottle to me.

  “What’s it supposed to do?”

  “It will help stop the fever, the infection.”

  “I don’t have a fever.”

  “Trust me here, old friend. Yes, you do. The fire grows in you. You just don’t know how hot it will get.”

  He removed the blood soaked bandages from my shoulder. “Drink, Sean, or you will die.”

  “Joe, what’s—”

  “Drink it! If you don’t, you’ll be dead by morning.”

  He walked around the spring, a silhouette against water that looked like it was lit from somewhere deep inside its source. I drank. The mixture tasted like tar, dirt and pine resin. Two mouthfuls down. Fighting back vomit, I set the bottle on the log.

  Billie returned with a dark mud cupped in his hands. He said nothing as he smoothed it over and into my open wound. I could feel the drink burning in my gut. My stomach began to constrict, twist, and my head felt light. Billie turned up the bottle and drank the remaining liquid. He walked back to the spring and applied mud to his wound. Then he built a small fire, the pine and oak popping. He placed dried plants on the fire, inhaled smoke and fanned it toward my face. I watched the yellow flames dancing in front of the lavender spring, which caught and held moonlight in its secret rainbow waters.

  I felt numb. Not just my arms or hands, my entire body was ectoplasm. Whatever Billie had given me was working, or I was dying. I didn’t care. I knew he’d given me something more powerful than the morphine I’d been administered in the first Gulf War after catching shrapnel in the gut. I saw him take a burning stick from the fire and hold it to my wound, bloody tissue cauterizing in a hiss and puff of white smoke. I smelled my burning, charred flesh, my conscious mind seeming to rise from my body for a moment. Then my mind switched to the men who’d been chasing us, thought I saw them vaporize under the white heat of explosions.

  I heard the rotors from the medic choppers coming over the hills. The boom of rocket launchers and small arms fire, fading echoes in the burnt valleys layered with dark stratums of misery. I looked over at Billie. He sat on his haunches, close to the fire, eyes closed, sweat dripping from his face, smoke circling his head in halos.

  I thought I heard him chant. Thought I heard an owl join in, too. A chorus of hoots, chants and groans. Maybe I was making the groans. I wasn’t sure of anything, except the pain was gone. I looked across the fire to the spring. I saw a butterfly emerge from the water, its wet wings glistening, inky-blue bordered with liquid blue like a reflection of a cobalt sky off a still pond. Then two elfish men darted from a dark hole at the base of an old oak. They smiled and held their tiny fists tight as they cheered the butterfly rising from the water. Its face was that of a teenage girl. I recognized the face. She was the same girl found buried in the shallow grave, Nicole Davenport, now smiling, her face flush and pink with color, her eyes smiling and catching the moonlight.

  I tried to shake my head, shake out the illusions, but I couldn’t move any parts of my body. I felt paralyzed. The butterfly girl flapped her wings, the spray of water cool across my face and forehead. The diminutive men danced for a moment, and then one picked up a burning candle from the water, his hands wrapped around a black wrought iron handle. He approached me, holding the candle close to his cherub face, the light from it a radiant spun gold, rising to fill his lime-green eyes. He grinned and backed away, both of the little men retreating behind the ferns.

  From the dark edges of the forest, between the spring and the river, a man rode in on horseback. He was a Spaniard, a conquistador, whose brass armor reflected the moonlight. His eyes were prisms, catching the glow from the spring. He dismounted and stepped to the bubbling water. He dropped to his knees, leaned over and looked at his reflection off the translucent surface. Then he lowered his head and drank from the spring in long, deep sips. He lifted his face, gray beard wet and dripping, the water now radiant pearls falling off his whiskers.

  He turned and stared at me. I tried to raise my hand in a slight gesture. Nothing moved. My mind and body were separated. I looked back at the man. His dark eyes were black marbles pushed into a wax figure, a form whose face now melted, cooled and hardened into a youthful mold. He was no longer a Spanish soldier. No longer part of some ancient ghost armada. The face was younger, much younger. It was the face of Molly’s boyfriend Mark, a bullet hole similar to an inverted red flower in the center of his forehead.

  I wanted to 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.

  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.”

  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.”

  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 C
ollins. 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.”