by Tom Lowe
“You move and you die.” Santana’s voice was calm. It was more of a matter-of-fact than a death threat. “Throw the gun toward the river, and I won’t snap your dog’s neck. Remember that I have a gun pointed directly at your chest. Come on your porch, O’Brien. We’re going to sit down to hear you speak your last words on earth.”
I tossed the Glock and came up the steps entering the porch. Santana sat in a rocking chair, holding Max in his lap, her eyes wide. He pointed a pistol at me and kept the other hand clapped on the back of Max’s neck. She was nervous, her tiny body trembling. She looked at me with pleading eyes.
“No reason to hurt my dog.”
“Dogs were my competition for food. As a child, I used to have to compete with them for scraps from garbage cans. Let’s make this quick, O’Brien. I have other matters to attend to. Places to go, but I wanted to hear your last words, especially since you mentioned Josh Brennen. No one, at least no one alive, knows that Brennen is my father. How did you find out? Doesn’t matter. You’re about to die, so the secret remains with me. The bastard son, as you called me.”
“That’s what he called you.”
“How did you know him?”
“We had drinks together. He always spoke his mind around me. Funny how too much single malt can open a man up. Open up his most hidden secrets.” I slowly inched closer as I spoke. The spearhead I found was sitting on the table where I had left it. It was the best thing that I had to a weapon.
“That’s far enough,” he said, standing.
“Let Max go. Let her go outside.”
He lowered Max to the porch. “Let’s hear what the old man told you.”
Max looked up at me. “I’ll put the dog outside.”
“Don’t touch the rat! What did he tell you?”
“He told me you’d never cut it in his world. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if you had a dozen bastard brothers and sisters.” I inched closer to the table. “He was proud of his conquests with the dark-skinned women. He said no matter how you tried, Santana, you could never be better than Richard.”
“He’s the weak son! The gay son!”
“And you were the Guatemalan bastard child! Richard fit in. You, Brennen said, never would. Never could.”
I was less than five feet from the spearhead. “He told me that the only thing you two had in common was the color of the eyes. He said you may have had his eyes, but you’d never have his balls. Never be the man he was. He loathed you, Santana, no he pitied you. Said you’d never be more than a tomato picker. Said you didn’t have the intelligence to cut it in his world. He never even knew your mother’s name. Called her a brown whore.”
“You’re a liar.” He kicked Max in the side like he was kicking a football. I sprang for his gun — a second too late. The shot tore into my gut with the force of a baseball bat hitting me at full swing, knocking me to the floor. I rolled toward the table, grabbed the spearhead, and came up, hitting Santana hard in the center of his forehead. The sound was like an axe striking a piece of treated lumber. Blood squirted. I slashed out again with the spearhead, the thrust tearing his shirt, exposing his chest. Looking back at me were two large tattoos of cobras. Eyes glowing like coals.
He wears the mark of serpents on his body
Santana laughed. “You can’t kill me! Survival is what I do. A gut shot is a slow, painful way to die, O’Brien, but it’s most fitting for a detective like you. When you see my old man in hell, tell him his tomato picking bastard son said fuck off.”
My eyes couldn’t focus. Santana stood over me. “I might just sit here in this rocker and watch you die. That’s the part I enjoy the most. All that nasty bacteria flooding your bloodstream. You’re swimming in your own blood and shit, O’Brien. By the time they find you, your dog will have starved to death, or maybe the rat will eat your body. ”
My mind was spinning. The frogs and cicadas sounded like they were in my brain. They changed their singing into chanting, pulsating chants like an angry crowd at a boxing match. I felt a darkness closing in on my consciousness. Then I heard Max’s frantic barks, almost like howls. I crawled on my hands through the stickiness of my own blood. My mind was racing and a dimness enveloping me as I crept toward the kitchen. I shook the encroaching dark shadows from my mind and tried to sit up. Max’s barking was growing weaker or I was fading. I wasn’t sure which. I stood, held my hands to my wound, and limped into the kitchen. My long bow was in the corner with the single arrow next to it. I picked them up and staggered out the back porch door. Max went ahead of me. Barking and limping down to my dock.
The full moon was at a forty-five-degree angle to my back. The moon and floodlights illuminated my entire yard in a soft light that carried beyond the river. On the dock, I could see Santana untying a boat. The look on his face was of disbelief and then amusement. He said, “Are you a walking dead man?”
I notched the arrow shaft in the bowstring. I kept inching closer. I was about seventy feet behind Max as she approached the dock barking.
“I like your fighting style, O’Brien. You rise from the grave, break out an antique killing tool, and you want to do battle again, but it is your last fight.”
I was now close enough to see the red eyes of the snake tattoos on his chest.
He pointed his pistol at Max. “Your dog will be dead before you could ever shoot that thing. You’ll probably miss me by twenty feet. It’s dark. You can barely stand. You’re bleeding to death inside. Am I looking a little blurry to you right now, O’Brien? My, you don’t seem well. You’ve resorted to a primitive bow. You’re dying. Say goodbye to your noisy dog.”
My mind played back Joe Billie’s voice. Keep both eyes open, block everything else out but the spot — then let go.
Santana pointed the pistol. I pulled the bowstring back to the side of my cheek, elevated the tip of the ancient arrowhead, focused on his chest, and let go. The arrow hit dead center between the snake eyes. Santana fell backwards into the river. He tried to swim on his back against the current. His body jerked like electric jolts alternating through his limbs. Only the feathers on the shaft protruded out between the tattooed snakeheads. His arms flailed, slapping the water.
There was a loud splash from the water’s edge. In the moonlight, I could see a large alligator swimming fast toward the dying man. The gator attacked Santana in the midsection, its jaws and teeth popping ribs, bone, and cartilage like twigs. The animal lifted Santana out of the water, tossed its massive head back, and rolled.
I wobbled back to the dock. I could feel vomit rising. My legs felt like they weren’t part of my body. My eyes couldn’t focus. I stumbled, dropped the bow, and fell next to Max. She was crouched in the grass, and I couldn’t tell if she was hurt. I crawled to her and held her trembling body in my arms. “You’re okay now…hold on Max…”
I coughed blood. The murkiness swirled in my brain. The sound of crickets faded. Lying on my back, I clutched Max to my chest as a meteor shower burst across the dark purple sky, the afterglow locked in my retinas, the silence of heaven’s fireworks falling on my ears. I watched a gray cloud slowly consume the moon, the light fading like a dying flame at the end of a match.
It was now very dark and a cool wind blew across the river sending a chill through every nerve in my spine. I felt my body shivering. The ink silhouettes from the river were rising all around me. I was soaring with no horizon. No control. Tumbling from an abyss and freefalling through a black hole where no one kept records. I was the product of my being, falling or soaring on the sum of who I was. There were no limbs to break my fall. There was only the sense of absolute nakedness. Nothing could be concealed or cancelled. Nor did I care to try. Planet Earth had been here five billion years. My life, as it ended, was less than one second of Earth’s existence. In this scope of things, did my moment, my comma in time, mean anything? My mind was no longer attached to my body. Maybe it never was.
Sherri stood on the bowsprit of our sailboat, her hand reaching out toward me, t
he wind blowing through her hair. God, she was beautiful. I tried to call her name, to tell her I loved her, but I had lost my ability to speak. There was the sound of a woman’s voice. Someone far away singing. Then a dark fog came off the sea from nowhere, and I could no longer see Sherri.
There was a cool sensation deep inside my gut, like a drug was being released inside the skin. I opened my eyes and saw Joe Billie kneeling next to me. In a slow motion voice, a strange voice, I heard myself say. “You’re not real…you’re a dream…none of this is real…”
He watched me without speaking, and he looked at the wound in my stomach. The sensation in my bowels went from cold to fire and back to coolness.
The darkness rose again. I was below the surface of the ocean at night trying to swim to the lights of my boat. I held my breath and kicked. I was rushing toward the light at the top. In a second I would breathe! I broke through the translucence and gulped in air.
* * *
The lights from an ambulance and police vehicles raked across the limbs of the live oaks. I could hear a helicopter circling, and my thoughts dissolved to the dark valley of Afghanistan at sunset, the choppers like black locusts against a purple sky.
Lifting me onto the stretcher, a paramedic said, “You’re gonna make it! Hang in there. Your dog will be okay, too.”
EIGHTY-TWO
Nick’s voice sounded like a dream. “He’s awaking up!” I heard him say. “Sean, about time you stopped sleeping.”
I opened my eyes, blinked a few times, looked at the tubes running into my arms, the digital graphics monitoring my heart, and I glanced at the foot of the bed. Nick stood next to Dave, and both had big grins on their faces.
I said, “So, where’s the tin man?” My voice sounded like it came from Oz.
“If that’s Dan Grant, the detective,” Dave said, “he’ll be back.”
“How you feelin’ Sean?” Nick asked.
“Better than the last time I looked. How long have I been in here?”
Dave crossed his arms. “Three days. You were in IC for the first day. Lots of blood loss. When the EMTs got there, they said you looked like your body had gone into some kind of hibernation, sort of like those wood frogs we were talking about. Looks like your system had shut down, somehow, before it could bleed out. Santana did a number on your lower extremities.”
“Don’t tell me…”
“You’re okay there, old friend, but he tried to rearrange your intestinal tract.”
“How bad?”
“It’s all stuffed back in there. Surgeons sewed you up in a lot of places internally. Flooded you with a few liters of bacteria-killing agents. You ought to have one hell of an aftertaste in your mouth until that bleach gets out of your system. The docs checked for polyps while they were in there. Clean as a whistle.” He laughed.
“Where’s Max? Is she okay?”
“Fine,” Dave said. “Vet put some stitches in her. She’s waiting for you.”
Nick grinned. “I take her swimmin’ when you get all well. I know she’s a hot dog but she think’s like a lab.” He laughed and then his face became creased with concern. “What happened, Sean? Where’s the bad guy, Santana? Did he get away?”
Dan entered the room. I could tell he was worried. “Sean, it’s good to see you awake. How’re you feeling?”
“Considering the circumstances, I’d say okay.”
He smiled. “Must have been one hell of a fight. Lauren Miles called us when she heard Santana was heading for you. We found the rental car near your house. A patrol unit picked up a kid who said some ‘crazy white dude’ pulled a gun on him and made him walk away from the car.”
“That wouldn’t have been you, would it, Sean?”
“My memory is a little hazy.”
“Don’t see how Santana got near your place if he didn’t come by car.”
“Came by boat.”
“That how he got away? Using a damn boat?”
“He didn’t get away.”
“He didn’t? There wasn’t a body, but we did find drops of his blood on your dock. It was within six feet of the blood from you and your dog. So what the hell happened to Santana?”
“Best I can remember, he seemed to have lost his balance on the dock, fell in and couldn’t swim very well. Then he got in the mouth of a big gator.”
“Sean,” Dan sighed. “We found blood all over your porch, a big damn spearhead covered in blood. On the dock, we found a bow lying next to you and your dog. Looks like you had some kind of Custer’s Last Stand going on, a one-man war against Santana. Did you shoot him with an arrow?”
“I was shot in the gut. How could I pull back a sixty pound bow?”
“So, for the record, since we may never recover a body, Santana shot you, you hit him with your spearhead, he lost his balance, fell in the river, and was eaten by a gator.”
“It’s all kind of a blur after I was shot.”
Dan closed his note pad. “I’ll just get a statement on tape. You took out the most prolific serial killer since the Green River Killer.”
We talked about all the multiple investigations into the murders. A half dozen agencies, including the FBI, INS, Border Patrol, FDLE, the sheriff’s departments from three separate counties in Florida, two in Texas, and one in Los Angeles, were sharing notes, files and extradition proceedings. In addition to the arrests of Silas Davis and Hector Ortega, others that worked for them were arrested and charged with dozens of counts, including trafficking in human beings, slavery, prostitution, and murder.
Nick was late for a date with a schoolteacher whom he’d been eyeing since she moved into the new condos across the street from the marina.
After they were gone, Dave looked at the wires, tubes, and bandages holding my body together. He lowered his voice. “You could have died, you know that?
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s very noble to offer yourself as the bait, but not smart, especially with someone like Santana. You should have had backup right there at the house with you.”
“I did. Max bit his ankle.”
Dave grinned, his week’s worth of stubble was a bluish gray from the lights of the monitors. His eyes were red-rimmed, heavy, dark circles from worry and lack of sleep. “Sean, is he dead? Is all that about the gator true or is it some metaphor you’re using to explain maybe something that’s unexplainable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Santana resurfaced once before, could he do it again?”
“Not this time. His evil will resurface, but his body won’t rise up again.”
Dave nodded as a nurse entered. She was in her fifties, hair beginning to gray, lines on her face traceable to compassion, to her heart. “Are you hungry?”
“I could use something to get the taste of a nuclear meltdown out of my mouth.”
She laughed, “I’ll see if I can find a good meal for you.” As she took my pulse, she looked at my hands. “You still have a little of that dirt under a couple of fingernails. Thought I got it all out. Hands were filthy when they brought you in.”
“I guess I had some blood on them.”
“Yes, you did. You also had something else on them.”
“What?”
“The same stuff that was in the wound on your stomach. Mud! Some kind of dark mud. Lucky that didn’t kill you! Who in their right mind would risk infecting a wound with mud?”
EPILOGUE
They’d wrapped it in newspaper. I took it out of my Jeep, careful not to drop it on the parking lot. It had been a month since I was out of the hospital, but lifting the weight of the headstone, I could feel the beaded scar on my gut pull a little.
Max followed at my heels, sniffing the ground as we walked to the gravesite. The morning sun was edging above a tree line to the far right of the county cemetery. The grounds smelled of fresh cut grass, crushed acorns, and wet dirt.
The grave marker, county-issued, was a small white cross with a seven-digit number on it. I pulled it out of th
e ground. Then I unwrapped the newspaper and set the headstone on her grave. It read:
Angela Ramirez
1992–2010
I stood there minute longer, said a silent prayer, and made the sign of the cross. Then I heard a bird start to sing. A cardinal, its feathers like that of a ripe strawberry, jumped between branches on the lone oak, singing. Its voice sounded like a flute warbling in the wind, its head and shoulders moving side to side with the swagger of a rock singer.
I smiled and said, “Sing on bird…sing on.”
I picked up the discarded grave marker, the newspapers, and turned to Max. “Let’s go, Max. We have some sailing to get to.”
* * *
I rented the 42 Beneteau from a bareboat charter company out of Key Largo. I’d brought enough groceries and ice to last for two weeks, that’s if I wanted to stay out that long. I thought about sailing over to Bimini, find a quiet cove, listen to good music, catch a lot of fish, and simply do a lot of nothing. Then, again, I might sail down beyond Key West to Fort Jefferson and spend some time where the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf became one sea.
But there was a place I wanted to visit first.
Once clear of the marina, I wanted to turn off the Perkins diesel, open the spinnaker, and hoist the mainsail, but I kept her under motor for a few miles. I punched the coordinates into the GPS and followed the satellite toward the place where I had said goodbye to Sherri. Max hopped from one seat to another in the cockpit, barking at the soaring pelicans, and enjoying the movement of the boat.
After a half hour, I went below and opened the refrigerator, taking out the long stem red rose I’d brought aboard. Back in the cockpit, I checked the coordinates. I was within one hundred feet of where I’d released Sherri’s ashes into the sea. I cut the diesel, stepped to the bowsprit and stood there for a moment.
“I miss you. Max misses you.” I tossed the rose into the ocean. It floated on the surface and began to drift away in the current. I watched it until the red bloom was a dot on the horizon.