The Butterfly Forest (Mystery/Thriller) (3 page)

“That’s so true,” she said.  “Simple… sweet.  No complications.”  She dug in her purse.  “Here, take my card.  This is the address of my restaurant.  We’re open for breakfast and lunch only.  Please stop by.”  Then she leaned in and hugged me, her hands holding my back and not letting go for a long moment.  I could smell her perfume, the scent of shampoo in her hair like orange blossoms.  As she hugged me, I watched them swab blood samples from the pavement.  I thought about the sneer on the man’s face as he kicked me, eyes filled with loathing, hatred boiling like the heat from the parking lot.                                               

FOUR

My impromptu stop had eaten a hole into the day.  I altered my errands to now include Max.  I had planned to spend a few hours at Ponce Marina reworking the wooden trim on my twenty-year-old Bayliner before heading back to my old house on the river. 

But Max’s bladder is even smaller than her patience level.  I’d swing by, pick her up, and drive to another store before leaving for the forty-minute trip to Ponce Marina.  I thought about the attack from the perp in the Walmart parking lot, and I thought about Elizabeth Monroe and her daughter as I drove down my long driveway, oyster and clamshells popping beneath the tires.  A red-tailed hawk flew from the top of a palm tree, beating its wings twice, soaring across the St. Johns River.

I’d bought the place out of a foreclosure estate sale not long after my wife Sherri died of cancer.  The rambling house was more than sixty years old, built on an ancient Indian shell mound.  Its frame was made from heart-of-pine, but its soul was held up by cypress pilings driven deep in the old mound.  It came with a tin roof, rough-hewn floors, coquina and rock fireplace, a large screened-in porch overlooking the river, and a guardian heart left behind from six decades of sheltering families.

Now the old home’s family was Max and me, and I’d brought my own ghosts.   

As I parked beneath a live oak older than America, I could see Max jump from her rocking chair to the floor of the porch.  She paced, a slight whimper of excitement coming, her pink tongue almost wagging like her tail.

“Have you been holding down the fort, little lady?”

Max responded with a single bark.  Walking up the porch steps, I saw her attention quickly divert to a lizard scampering across the outside of the screen.  I opened the door and Max trotted out, licked my hand and found a shady patch of grass to pee.  She looked back over her shoulder at me.  Eyes bright.

She was all of nine pounds—a dachshund with the heart of a lioness and the body of a slender warthog.  Her brown eyes, with their enduring natural eyeliner, had their own sense of excitement as she played hide-and-seek with the lizards.  I’d convinced her to stay away from the alligators.  She was a dog that left sleeping logs alone.

“Hungry, Max?”  That was all it took to have her attention.  She trotted up the steps and bolted past me as we entered the kitchen.  I poured her favorite lamb and rice mixture into her bowl and fixed a hot mustard, onion and turkey sandwich for myself, and opened a Corona. “Let’s eat on the dock.  Quite a morning.  I’ll tell you all about it.”

My dock stretched forty-five feet into the river.  To my left, the river ambled beyond an oxbow.  To my right, it crept around a bend, thick with bald cypress and palm trees.  The river flowed north 310 miles from its birthplace west of Vero Beach all the way to the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville.  My location was one of the most remote along that path—near the midway point.  The Ocala National Forest was across the river.  My closest neighbor was less than a mile downriver.

I sat on the long wooden bench I’d built at the end of the dock.  Max finished her food and rested on her haunches.  She didn’t blink as she waited for me to toss her a piece of my sandwich.  She’d been my companion since Sherri’s death.  My wife had adored this expressive little dog; memory of her was kept even more alive with Max by my side.  I watched an osprey dive in the river, catch a small bass and fly to the top of a dead cypress tree.  Ovarian cancer had taken Sherri’s life, but somehow I felt a bit of her spirit live through little Max.  No one is wired to know his or her fate.  Maybe, somehow, Sherri knew she would die early, and that was why she seemed to truly live for the moment.  Even when very sick, she was always engaged with the art of living.

Max barked.  “Okay, kiddo.  I don’t mind sharing.”  I tore a small piece of turkey from the sandwich and tossed it to her.  She seemed to smile as she chewed.

The wind picked up and brought the scent of jasmine, honeysuckle and wet moss downriver.  The flawless blue sky was such a rigid sapphire canvas, I felt as if I could have written across it with a piece of chalk.  What message would I leave?  Maybe warn the spring breakers on Daytona Beach to watch for rip currents?

A fisherman motored in a small boat down the middle of the St. Johns.  The wake from his engine lapped across the river and rocked a baby alligator from its nap and cradle on a fallen log.  Max and I watched the tiny gator swim from the cypress knees through tannin water the shade of old pennies.  Spanish moss hung from low-lying cypress limbs like long, gray beards swaying in the breeze, tickling the river’s belly.  Leaves from a bamboo tree near the bank fluttered down on the surface as if the silent wind whispered an invitation to dance with an invisible partner.

The pirouette ended when my cell phone rang and changed the tempo.  Max cocked her head and looked at the phone lying on the bench beside me.  I answered.  Dave Collins, one of my marina friends, was on the line.

“Sean, there was a news blurb on Channel Nine.  They mentioned your name.  Hell, they had pictures of you talking with two attractive women in what appears to be a crime scene right in the middle of a Walmart parking lot.”

“Happened this morning.”

“Are you okay?”

“I have a sore elbow.  One of my ribs lets me know it’s there when I sneeze.”

Dave chuckled.  “Looks like this isn’t something to sneeze about.  They say you prevented a kidnapping, maybe even two killings.  They gave a traffic ticket to the perp.”

“Traffic ticket?”

“He blew through a light on his bike outside of Lakeland.  A trooper pulled him over, wrote him a ticket and let him go before hearing that there was a BOLO out for him.  Perp’s name is Frank Soto.  Long rap sheet, strong-armed robberies and drug running.  He’s a former biker, an enforcer, a guy who’s sent in to settle scores.  A hit man.  You managed to stop one nasty bastard.  Let’s hope he doesn’t plan to return.”

I said nothing.  Looked down at Max.  Watched a dragonfly hover over the river.  I thought about the eternalness of evil, buried in landfills, resurrected by scavengers, the abhorrence encircling the innocent like smoke from a smoldering fire.

“You there, Sean?”

“I’ll call you back.”

FIVE

Luke Palmer could smell the residue from exploded bombs.  He could smell old money, too.  Somewhere in here, somewhere in the Ocala National Forest, was a half-million dollars in money.  It was hidden before Hoover’s agents killed Ma Barker and her son, Fred, in a five-hour gunfight back in1935.  It was a gunfight that ended with four thousand rounds ripping through the Barker house. 

Palmer looked to the cobalt sky, the drone of a Navy fighter jet in the eastern horizon, returning for another pass.  Within seconds, the F/A Hornet roared less than two hundred feet above Palmer’s head, the force and noise from the engines shaking the palm fronds, making dead leaves flutter to the earth.  Thirty seconds later the jet was over the Atlantic, banking north to return to its base in Jacksonville.  He knew their schedules.  In the mornings, they flew over the bombing range, which was smack in the middle of a national forest.  Sometimes they’d drop them at night, not long after sunset. 

Palmer waited a minute more and walked across the perimeter boundary.  A dirt road encircled the range.  He ignored the no trespassing signs and stayed in the shadow of the pines and oaks. 

Much of the land was pock-marked by fifty years of Navy training.  Palmer had heard it was the only place in the East where live bombs were dropped.  And he heard that somewhere in here the Barkers had buried a fortune.  He carried a small shovel, backpack stuffed with a tent, beef jerky, and a jug of water he’d dipped from Alexander Springs.  He could survive here.  After forty years in prison, he could survive anywhere.  For a man in his mid-sixties, he was still strong.  Wide, powerful shoulders, angular face, full head of cotton-white hair and a deep pink scar rooted through his right eyebrow.

He remembered the last time he saw Alvin Karpis.  It was 1969 in San Quentin, and Karpis was up for parole.  Palmer was only twenty then, muscular as a bear.  He’d saved one of America’s most notorious gangsters from a prison hit.  Snapped the wrist of the punk who slipped up on Karpis with a shank.  He thought about that as he unfolded a piece of gray paper, soft and worn as an old dollar bill.  He studied the crude drawing again, remembering the day Karpis handed it to him. “Say you’re from Florida?”  Karpis asked, lighting a smoke in the prison yard.

“Born in Jacksonville.  Family pulled out when I was five.”

“Florida’s where the FBI shot all day long to take out an old woman and one of her sons, near Ocala.  Shot up their house like Swiss cheese.”  Karpis lowered his voice, looked at a guard tower across the yard and said, “When I get outta here.  They’re gonna follow me for the rest of my life.  I owe you one, Palmer.  You mind swamps?”

“What’d you mean?”

“Ma Barker’s youngest boy, Fred, buried a trunk full of money from bank jobs. Buried it in the national forest there.  I’d scouted and picked the location.  That way we figured it could withstand the test of time, no development, and not many people.  Fred carved two hearts on the tree to mark it.  I’m gonna draw a map for you.  If you ever get out of here, the stash will be waiting for you.  Fred and his mother were killed three days after they buried it.”      

Palmer never saw Karpis again.  The man who taught “Little Charlie Manson” to play a guitar in prison, the man who J. Edgar Hoover called public enemy number one, supposedly died of suicide after he was released.  Palmer didn’t buy it.  A man doesn’t survive that long in the pen to kill himself after he’s released.

 He mumbled, “Two miles west of Highway 19.  Half mile east of Farles Lake.  West from the head of a spring.  Beneath the biggest oak in the forest.”

He walked through the area, around thick trees, pines and oaks that were inter-cut with dirt roads, which crisscrossed around earthen markers, bunkers and cleared terrain that easily would be seen as targets from the air.  The morning sun licked the back of his neck.  He unfastened a button on his shirt, felt heat escaping, his body odor mixing with the smell of sulfur, burnt gunpowder, and fresh pine resin heavy in the air.  He worked his way through woods littered with charred and splintered trees, the sap from broken pines still oozing like blood from troops fallen in battle.  

If he was lucky, something he’d never been, he wouldn’t have to dig in a fucking bombing rage.  He believed that the spot he was searching for was just a little northeast of the range.  He headed in that direction, soon walking through a field of Black-Eyed Susan’s blooming and swaying in the breeze.  Yellow butterflies darted from the flowers.  Palmer remembered that his mother loved those flowers, used to put ‘em in a vase.  That was until his father, a mean drunk, shattered the vase on the kitchen table.

Palmer spotted a large oak, far from the closest tree line.  It towered over the other oaks.  Within a few minutes he was at its base, wild azaleas blooming all around it.  “Hey tree, where’s the trunk?” he grinned and mumbled to the tree.  “Tree… trunk.” 

He used a steel rod with a T handle to prod beneath the soil.  When he felt something that could be a trunk, he’d stop and dig.  Nothing.  Nothing but ants, roots or rocks.  Karpis had described the box as heavy, solid metal, like the reinforced steel from a trunk.  Air tight.  Palmer thought about that as his prod hit something.  Root?  No, too hard.  Rock?  Maybe. 

He dropped to his knees and used the army shovel to dig.  The soil was wet.  Muck like.  Two feet down. 

Perspiration rolled off his face, the salty sting of sweat in his eyes.  He ignored the mosquito whining in his ear.  Concentrated on digging.  He could smell earthworms, tree bark, and wild azaleas blooming.

Three feet down.  A rock.  A damn rock the size of a grapefruit.  “Shit.”

There was a noise.  Talking.  Palmer stopped digging.  He saw birds scatter from the trees closer to the spring bed.  Someone was coming.  He heard laugher, the voices of a man and a woman.  People.  How many?  Somebody way the hell out here, walkin’ through the fuckin’ forest like they were going to grandma’s house. 

Luke Palmer stood quietly, held the hunting knife by his side, and crouched behind the brush to wait.

SIX

The whine from the engine of a small plane sounded in distress.  From the end of my dock, I looked up to the east as the pilot began a skywriter’s message.  He formed the letter G, the engine sputtering, the G clinging to the cloudless, blue sky.  I stood, reached in my pocket and read the name and address of the restaurant on the card.