Black River (Sean O'Brien Book 6)

by Tom Lowe

  A sixty-four-foot Bertram sport fishing yacht cut through the marina, running lights ablaze, big diesels rumbling, a party of five mixing cocktails on the deck, the captain pushing the throttle a little beyond the courtesy, no wake zone. Within thirty seconds the rollers spread across the waterfront, causing moored boats to rock, tugging at their spring lines. Max barked one time, the yelp more of a protest than a bark.

  Dave lifted his drink off the table and said, “I’d like to think that guy’s a new boat owner and he hasn’t learned the easy touch of getting in and out of the marina, but more likely it’s someone who can’t spell the word consideration.”

  O’Brien had just disconnected from the call, jotting down the phone number at the bottom of the picture. He stared at the photo and said nothing. Dave puffed his cigar and studied O’Brien for a moment. “I’ve seen that look on your face too many times, Sean. Something’s happened or happening, and it’s beginning to suck you into the wormhole. Do you mind me asking who was on the other end of the line? If it was your stock broker, I’d infer that you lost a bundle.”

  “It was the antique dealer, the guy who couldn’t place the name or face of the man who bought the painting of this woman.” O’Brien motioned to the picture on the table.

  “What’d he say? Did he say how he suddenly remembered the buyer’s face?”

  “He saw it on television, on the news. It was a picture of the man wearing a Confederate uniform.”

  Dave’s eyebrows rose. He sipped his whiskey, cracking a piece of ice between his back teeth. “Was the unlucky fella, the guy who was shot and killed on the movie set, the buyer of the painting?”

  “One and the same. The dead guy’s name is Jack Jordan. The antique dealer said the man came in the shop a few months ago with his wife and they bought the original oil painting of the woman in the photo and a stack of old magazines.”

  Dave blew air out of his cheeks, his eyes watching the lighthouse. “This is unsettling, maybe a game-changer. It might be a good point in time for you to call your client and politely decline his open offer for you to find and retrieve the painting.”

  “Why? Police are saying the shooting appears accidental. The deceased man’s widow may have the painting. Maybe, at some point, my client could buy it from her.”

  “That’s possible. However, if you accept the job, your journey could take a fork in the road that may lead you to some murky places. I don’t say that without duly considering the hypothesis. What begins as a lost-and-found may reverse itself and turn into something found and lost. You’re helping an old man find something lost, and by doing so you find the evidence that proves his relative wasn’t a coward in battle…this noble effort may lead to a mystery better left in the past. Why? Well, ask yourself this question: is this chain of events coincidental or are there other forces, darker forces, at play here?”

  O’Brien said nothing for a long moment, Gibraltar, rocking slightly in the changing tide. “It could be a fluke, nothing more or less. Like you suggested, if this guy, Jack Jordan, had a man-cave, maybe the painting is there.”

  Dave finished his Irish whiskey, lifting Max to his lap, scratching her behind the ears. A salty breeze puffing across the harbor from the ocean, the moving beam from the lighthouse piercing a hole into the dark far out over the Atlantic. “And there could be a hibernating grizzly bear in that abandoned man-cave. You know, Sean, most of reason and deductive logic in life begins with a given—a postulate that can’t be proved or disproved, but the preponderance of reason sets the outer perimeter and everything works inward from there, sort of like working in from the borders of a known circle. That doesn’t exist in the shadowy world you often find yourself in because evil has no borders, no limits, and no presumed axiom from which to start. It’s just there, my friend. And your circle can grow outward because the criminal mind is without conventional reason. So you fight the fight, but never define the undefinable because it’s always just over the horizon…in any and every direction. And there lies evil.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing criminal about this. You’re reading the tea leaves and there’s nothing in the bottom of the cup, at least not yet.”

  “I’m not reading tea leaves, I’m reading the way that you’re looking at the face of the enigmatic woman in the photo. Don’t let it become the face of unreason, the image of Medusa. Want another drink?”

  “I might need one after what you just said, but right now, I’m going to have a long walk with Max on the beach, then take a shower and hit the sack.”

  O’Brien was in a dimly lit room, hot air rife with the stench of mouse feces, dead cockroaches in the corners. He sat, stripped to his waist, against a concrete wall, his hands cuffed to a chain locked to a large ring in the center of the floor. His face was bloodied, left eye swollen, lower teeth loose. He could hear them outside the door. He knew the sounds of their boots walking by, the slow stride of the heavier guard, and the lighter steps of the slender guard.

  Held prisoner for three weeks in a darkened room, O’Brien felt his senses—hearing and smell—becoming more acute. He could smell the heavyset guard at the door as he turned the key in the lock. The odor was always worse after lunch when the jowly man ate garlic-laced raw lamb, falafel, and tabbouleh, all washed down with sweet wine, except for the parsley pieces that stuck in his small teeth.

  There was another sound. Not the noise of boots. It was the softer pace of sandals. Sandals worn by the interrogator. The man entered the room, followed by a tall gaunt-faced man with a knife in his tunic. The interrogator wore the clothes of an afghan warlord—taqiyah hat, thawb coat, a Berretta 9mm strapped to his hip. He carried a wicker basket in one hand. He stood in front of O’Brien and then squatted—eye to eye. “You know, Major O’Brien, they are not coming for you. They disavow your very existence. You are, to them, expendable…collateral damage, as was my son when one of your president’s drones killed him and seventeen other children under the age of twelve.”

  O’Brien said nothing.

  The interrogator leaned in closer. O’Brien could smell old sweat on his clothes and goat cheese on his breath. “Abdul is so impatient.” The interrogator cut his dark eyes to the man standing at the door. “Abdul has beheaded seven infidels, and his knife is dull. So the process takes a while.”

  The man slowly opened the top of the wicker basket and reached inside. There was the buzzing of flies mixed with the stench of rotten flesh. He lifted the decapitated head of a man O’Brien knew well. Maggots wriggled in the eye sockets. The interrogator held the head by the hair, waving it less than a foot from O’Brien’s face. “If you don’t tell me what I must have, Major O’Brien, this is what will happen to you. He was your friend, yes? Guess what my men have done with your friend’s head…they used it as a soccer ball. And now they need another one.” The interrogator grunted, a slow grin forming, his black eyes as detached as a dead mackerel.

  O’Brien awoke and sat straight up in bed, breathing fast, sheet soaked from perspiration, his heart hammering in his chest. He looked out the porthole from Jupiter’s master berth, the moon over the harbor, its milky light reflecting from the dark water. The digital clock on the nightstand read 4:37. He reached for a water bottle next to the clock and took a long swallow, the water doing little to quench the burning in his gut.

  Max raised her head, staring at O’Brien from where she slept curled in a ball at the foot of the bed. “It’s okay, Max. Just a dream…one that keeps coming back. Do you ever dream? Let’s go topside for some air, okay? It’ll be dawn soon.” O’Brien slipped on his jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, and boat shoes. He lifted Max off the bed, went onto the cockpit and climbed the stairs leading to the fly bridge. He settled into the captain’s chair, Max on his lap, the marina soaked in darkness.

  A gentle breeze coming in from the Atlantic caused Jupiter to pitch slightly. A sailboat halyard at the top of a mast clanked a half dozen times in the draft. O’Brien watched a shrimp boat enter Ponce Inlet, churning its way sl
owly up the bay, soon to dock at one of the seafood processors. He could just hear the drone of the boat’s diesels as it chugged upriver, white and red running lights iridescent over the black water.

  He thought about the events of the last twenty-four hours, his eyes scanning the horizon toward the ocean, his thoughts playing back what Dave had said between sips of whiskey. Was it the whiskey talking or did Dave have a valid point? “So you fight the fight, but never define the undefinable because it’s always just over the horizon…in any and every direction. And there lies evil.” He remembered what Nick had said while making his crab boil. “So grandma is having a conversation with the dead lady in the painting. I told you that thing might be cursed.”

  O’Brien watched the glow of a pink light bloom from the dusky water far out into the Atlantic, beyond the horizon, the appearance of a new sunrise, the promise of a new day. He pulled the photograph of the painting from the file folder, stared at the woman’s face in the picture, and then watched the rosy bloom in the eastern sky. He rubbed Max’s shoulders and said, “Max, you’re a lady. We can’t find the lady in the painting, but we might find the painting. And if we’re lucky, it’ll answer some questions and speak volumes for someone.”

  Kim Davis tried to make sleep come to her. But it was elusive, the dream-weaver playing a stealthy game of hide-and-seek. Kim lay in her bed, the chirping of crickets outside her small home, soft glow from the moon backlighting the thin, white curtains across her window. She glanced at the clock on her nightstand. The red numbers glowed: 4:07 a.m. She thought about the old man who seemed to come from nowhere, asking for Sean, asking for a favor—to search for a Civil War era painting.

  Was it just coincidental that a Civil War re-enactor was killed on the movie set?

  She thought about her few hours on the set waiting for a casting call.

  She pictured the re-enactor, the man with the long sideburns who looked at her that morning on the set in a strange way—a way no man had ever looked at me before. Although her bedroom was warm, she felt a chill. She turned toward the single bedroom window, pulling the sheet over her bare shoulder.

  Then she saw it. Out of the corner of her eye. A shadow against her drapes. Maybe it was a bat. Maybe it wasn’t really there.

  But the noise was real.

  Something in her front yard. The sound was as if somebody opened her mailbox that was attached to a wooden pillar near her front door.

  She slipped quietly out of her bed. Heart hammering. Palms sweaty. Kim tiptoed across her bedroom to the window. She used both hands to just open the drapes, afraid of what might be staring back at her.

  Nothing. Nothing but the glow of the moon over her yard. She looked toward her white Toyota in her driveway. She could see no one. Palm fronds swayed slowly in the night breeze, the tiny flicker of heat lightning far away in the distance. Then she looked at the porch, the front porch swing scarcely moving in the draft

  Her eyes scanned the area. Something was different. But what was it?

  The mailbox.

  She’d checked the mail when she came home from work. And she remembered closing the lid. Now it was open, yawning in the night.

  And something was protruding from the mailbox.

  Joe Billie lived so far off the grid that O’Brien wondered if Billie even had a birth certificate. O’Brien thought about that as he set out at dawn to find a man who could only be found if he wanted to be found. O’Brien didn’t know if Billie was home. He never did. Billie didn’t have a phone. He didn’t own a computer. O’Brien wasn’t sure if Billie drove a car. He did own a canoe. His universe—the natural world, was larger than the World Wide Web, but far removed from social networking. The tweets he paid attention to come from birdsong in the cypress trees near the St. Johns River. Even among the Seminole Indians, Billie, full-blooded Seminole, was a mystery. He’d spend time with family on the reservation in South Florida, but he kept his distance from the casinos owned by the tribe and controlled by a select few within the tribe.

  Their paths first crossed one summer morning when O’Brien was working at the end of his dock, repairing some boards. He looked up and spotted Billie in the distance, bronze face shadowed under a wide-brimmed hat, walking in chest-deep water, tapping the river bottom with a wooden pole. Between the pole and his bare feet, Billie would find and retrieve ancient arrowheads from the river mud. He was undaunted and seemed impervious to the possibility of being pulled beneath the water by alligators, some more the thirteen feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds.

  O’Brien thought about that as he drove back in time down the winding gravel road leading to Highland Park Fish Camp. He thought about Billie’s constant awareness of the natural presence honed from biology of survival, from a DNA helix spiraled by endurance and inherited from the collective souls of the elders, the handed-down genes of a shaman.

  The old fish camp was a throwback to Florida of the 1950’s, timeworn cabins with screened-in porches, Airstream trailers anchored beneath live oaks cloaked with pewter beards of Spanish moss. O’Brien could hear the muffled sound of a boat motor on the river in the distance. There was the scent of wood smoke, fresh pine needles, and damp moss in the still air.

  It was in the most remote section of the fish camp where Joe Billie lived, away from fishermen and families renting cabins for long weekends on the water. His trailer sat on cinderblocks beneath pines and oaks, the decades-old Airstream’s traditional polished exterior now covered in age spots from time, tree sap, and roosting birds. To the left of the trailer, a canoe was turned upside down, perched on logs a foot off the ground.

  O’Brien parked and got out, Max scampering from the Jeep’s open door, squatting to pee near a rotting tree limb covered in salmon pink mushrooms. “Max, let’s go see if Joe’s home.” She cocked her head, sniffed the mushrooms, and trotted behind O’Brien down a pine straw path to the trailer’s front door.

  O’Brien knocked. Silence coming from the trailer. There was the chortle of two ravens flying over the pines in the indigo blue sky, the birds making a half circle high above O’Brien before heading toward the river. An acorn dropped from an oak and bounced off the trailer’s roof. In the distance, rifle shot echoed across the river somewhere in the Ocala National Forest.

  “What brings you to my place in the woods?”

  O’Brien turned around and smiled. Joe Billie, six-two, notched brown face with a hawk nose, could look O’Brien directly in the eye. And he did. He wore faded jeans, black T-shirt and a wide-brim, fawn-colored hat. In his left hand he carried a paperback novel. Billie grinned and squatted as Max ran up to him, her tail wagging, eyes bouncing. He lifted her up in one large brown hand. He held her against his wide chest and said, “I will never forget the time Max had her first encounter with that big rattlesnake. She showed no fear.”

  O’Brien smiled. “I believe she thought the rattle was a toy.”

  “She’ll know better next time.”

  “How’ve you been, Joe?”

  “Okay. You?”

  “Good.”

  “I rarely see you when things are good, Sean.” Billie smiled.

  “You’re not an easy man to find, good or challenging times.”

  “I’ve been building a few chickee huts for outdoor bars and restaurants. That work takes me into the ‘glades where I harvest palm fronds for the thatched roofs. The fronds are getting harder to find.”

  “I have something that’s hard for me to find.” O’Brien stepped closer to Billie and opened the file folder. He lifted out the photo of the woman standing next to the river. “This picture was taken around the time of the Civil War. Do you recognize that place on the river?”

  Billie shifted Max to his left hand and held the photo with the right hand. He stared at the image, his dark eyes alternating between the woman in the photo and the river in the background. “The lady is beautiful. Who is she?”

  “I’m not sure. A painting was made from this picture. An elderly man hired me to
find the painting.” O’Brien told Billie some of the story and added, “I have no idea what the secret of the river may be, but if I find that spot on the river I might have a better clue. Any idea where I might find it.”

  “I recognize the area. It’s changed a lot since that picture was taken.”

  “Can you give me directions?”

  “Yes. At that point, the river is wide and deep. After the third Seminole War with the U.S. government, things kinda came to a draw as the Civil War broke out in North Florida. The army forgot about the Seminoles, having driven most into the ‘glades. A few still managed to live in and around the river. Some of the elders spoke of their grandfathers seeing a bizarre incident one night on the river. I don’t know if it’s the secret of the river. I do know where it happened.”

  “Where?”

  Billie looked at the picture. “Here…where the woman is standing. It’s a bluff overlooking the river. That’s the place where something very bad, very dark, happened.” He handed the photo to O’Brien.

  “What happened, and how do I find this place?”

  “You don’t. At least not quickly.” Billie glanced toward his canoe. “I’ll take you there, and the best way is to journey by water. Then I’ll tell you what happened on the river, and I’ll point out how I recognized the place…most people wouldn’t.”

  After sunrise, Kim Davis slipped on a sweatshirt, pulled up her jeans, then opened her front door to step out onto the porch. She was barefoot, the concrete cool on her soles. She walked toward her mailbox and stopped in her tracks. The mailbox, mounted vertically on a wooden beam, was wide open. Sticking out of the opening was a blood red rose.

  Kim lifted the rose out of the box. A note, attached by a white string, was written in what appeared to be font from a manual typewriter. Kim could hear a dog barking from the next street. Her temples were pounding, adrenaline flowing. She glanced around her yard. It was there in the grass. She held her breath for a second.