Lowe, Tom - Sean O'Brien 08

by A Murder of Crows

  “She needs to be found in twenty-four hours. If they’re drugging her and shipping her out to be used in the sex trade, she may already be gone. Did Joe’s sister, Nita, call him?”

  “Yes. That’s the other thing; he spoke privately with her, and then left her home. Sean, I’m afraid Joe’s trying to hunt down the mob.”

  “And he has one of my guns and a lot of rounds. I’ll be there soon.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I just entered the Hawkins ranch property. I’m convinced they worked with Carlos Bertoni to kill Lawrence Barton. I told you about Bertoni on the surveillance video from the dialysis clinic parking lot. I have to get a confession from one or both of the Hawkins’. I have to get Joe off the hook for this.”

  “Are you by yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sean, please call the county for backup.”

  “There’s no time. If the cavalry arrives with bells, whistles and sirens, things could go south quickly. I have a plan, and if all goes really well, it should work.”

  “Please, be careful.”

  “I hope your interagency can find Joe and Kimi. Every minute counts. I’ll be there as soon as I can, and I hope it’ll be to give them both a hug. Bye.”

  He got out of the Jeep, reached into the backseat, removing a blanket from a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, ratcheting a shell—buckshot, into the chamber. A deerfly buzzed around his head as he got back in the Jeep and drove toward the ranch compound.

  He slowed in front of Hawkins’ driveway. The Harley was parked near the bunkhouse cabin. Mostly likely, Bobby Hawkins was home. Lloyd’s truck was parked next to the main house, close to a horseshoe pit under the shade of the oaks. O’Brien shut off the Jeep’s motor, slipped the Glock under his loose shirt and got out. The engine ticked as it cooled. A rooster crowed from somewhere behind the house. The dog stood, a low-slung shadow among the oaks. Staring at O’Brien. Silent.

  The front door made a creaking sound as it opened. Lloyd Hawkins walked out on the porch, denim shirt outside his jeans. His son, Bobby, dressed in a white sleeveless tank-top undershirt and jeans, followed him. When they opened the screen door and stepped outside, O’Brien could see Lloyd was barefoot. Bobby wore new cowboy boots.

  Lloyd crossed his arms. “Back again?”

  “I think I left my cell phone. I would have called you to tell you I was coming, but with no phone it’s not easy.”

  Hawkins said nothing, as if he were trying to decide whether O’Brien was lying, and if so … why? “Whereabouts you think you left it?”

  “Near the old mound. I spotted a wild boar. It was huge, like a small rhino. In the excitement, after snapping a picture of it, I may have misplaced the phone. I’d stopped to get a small rock out of my shoe.”

  Bobby said, “You appear to be the type fella that don’t get too excited about much.”

  “Not really. I look forward each year to watching Shark Week.” O’Brien glanced at Bobby’s boots. He looked over to Lloyd and said, “Thanks for the tip on that western store, Blair’s, in San Angelo. I almost ordered a pair of Tony Lamas from them, but then I thought how I’ve never bought shoes or boots without first trying them on. Any stores near here? I’m hoping not to get snake bit. Boots would help.”

  Bobby said, “Best place in the state is Dave’s Western World. It’s a good ways from here, Clewiston. But, for me, it’s worth the drive.”

  O’Brien smiled. “Appreciate the tip. It’s a small world. That’s the same place someone else suggested for me. He’s a big Italian-American guy … Carlos Bertoni. You know him?” O’Brien watched Bobby’s face tighten, jawline popping, jugular vein thumping in the side of his neck.

  “No, never heard of him.” He crossed his arms, and glanced toward the road before cutting his eyes back to O’Brien.

  Lloyd licked his dry lips. “When I’m huntin’ snakes, I generally wear a pair of LaCrosse boots. A rattler’s fangs can’t penetrate them. Lemme show you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Come here. Take a look.” He headed toward the right side of the main house, past the horseshoe pit. Bobby walked alongside his father. O’Brien followed. He figured one of them was armed. Any abnormal movement of their hands, and he’d have the Glock out and pointed in less than a half second.

  They stopped near a row of what looked like three chicken coops on stilts, about four feet off the ground. A blue canvas tarp, anchored by three fist-sized rocks, covered the tops. Some of the canvas hung over the side of what O’Brien could tell was three wire-mesh cages. Lloyd used the palm of his hand to wipe pooled rainwater from the canvas. He tossed the rocks on the ground and pulled off the tarps, like a magician jerking a tablecloth from under the plates and candelabra.

  The instant buzz of rattlesnakes came from the cages. O’Brien could see at least three large snakes in each cage. Most were thick as O’Brien’s wrists, coiled in strike positions, rattles sounding like an angry swam of killer bees. There was a sudden musty smell of dead fish in the humid air.

  Lloyd grinned. “There’s plenty like these on the property. Lots of money in snake venom for medical snakebite antidotes. I’m usually milking them once a week. After a while I’ll turn one lose, find more. Sort of like a deadly game of catch and release. Rattlers are in the first two pens. Cottonmouth moccasins are in the last cage.”

  Bobby looked at O’Brien’s boat shoes and half grinned. “You’d better be careful out there. Any rattler the size of these boys could easily take a fella your weight down hard. I saw one strike an eight hundred pound wild pig. The boar made it about fifty feet before wobbling and falling over stone dead.”

  Lloyd nodded. “And without your phone, you’d never be able to call us for help.”

  “Maybe I’ll find my phone before a rattlesnake finds me.” O’Brien turned, watching the men in the reflection from the front windshield on Hawkins’s truck. He walked back to his Jeep and started it. Driving away, he looked in the rearview mirror.

  Lloyd Hawkins was opening a door to one of the cages.

  ONE HUNDRED

  O’Brien had set the trap. And now he waited for them to take the bait. He didn’t think it would be too long. Would they come together? A father and son death squad, or would Bobby call one of Dino Scarpa’s soldiers for guidance, maybe reinforcement. The mob might have muscle working out of Tampa. Someone could be at the ranch within thirty minutes of receiving the call and the order for a hit.

  Or maybe Bobby would try it by himself. Bring it on.

  O’Brien drove toward the mound. He’d stop by the area where he first found the trail camera and do some repositioning with it. Hidden cameras worked with capturing the movements of unsuspecting animals. He knew it would do the same if he could hide it well enough and entice one or both Hawkins into the camera’s frame.

  He drove quickly, dust trailing his Jeep. Within a few minutes, he’d arrived. O’Brien got out, dropped the extra ammo clips in his pockets, and ran to the camera strapped to the tree. He unbuckled the strap, checked the battery life on the camera, and ran back to his Jeep, driving deeper into the ranch property.

  He came closer to the mound, a portion of it visible over the tree line of palms and oaks. He remembered what Dr. Beverly Sanchez had told him when Lloyd Hawkins was taking them around the property on the ATV’s. “As we approached the mound, Lloyd Hawkins suggested that we split up. He would lead my colleague, Eric, to the right or in a northward direction on their ATV’s. I was supposed to go southward, or to the left. We’d all meet up somewhere on the far side of the mound.”

  O’Brien mumbled, “To the right it is.” He gunned the Jeep, leaving tracks in the earth, easy for Bobby or Lloyd Hawkins to follow. After driving more than one hundred yards and the immense mound now to O’Brien’s left, he stopped. The forest, thick woods similar in look and feel of a jungle, was to his right.

  He got out of his Jeep, noting wild hog tracks in the soft soil. He looked toward the woods for a
tree that he could use to mount the camera. He needed something offering concealment, but close enough for motion detection; yet providing a position to capture video toward the area of his Jeep. He found a sabal palm, at least thirty feet high, with the clear field-of-view he wanted, and it was hidden just enough to make it difficult for the camera to be seen.

  O’Brien strapped the camera to the tree, pointing the lens toward the Jeep and mound in the background. “Okay,” he whispered. “We’ve got some two-legged animals I expect will be in the crossing sooner than later. I might be wrong, but you are my silent witness.”

  He noticed something else. Less than twenty feet farther into the bush, green honeysuckle vines hung over something that had a different shape from anything in the surrounding landscape. It had the appearance of a raised embankment with a concave center. Large limestone rocks were exposed through areas where the vines didn’t cover.

  O’Brien stepped over to the area, listening for the sounds of ATVs, a truck or even a motorcycle. There was nothing but the humming of cicadas and the sweet smell of honeysuckle blossoms, the intense sun heating the back of O’Brien’s neck. He used his hands to part the hanging vines like stepping through the opening in a stage curtain.

  The air beyond the vines was cool. The cave dark, quiet. O’Brien used the flashlight on his phone to shine light inside. He stood at the mouth of a limestone cave, barely distinguishable from the terrain except for the earth’s pushup of boulders in the shadow of the Indian mound.

  O’Brien stepped inside. The limestone was cool to the touch, the sheen of groundwater on the rocky ground. In the light from his phone, he could see the discarded rattlesnake skins, the snakes having slithered into the cave to shed their skins against the jagged rocks. Even the serrated patterns of rattles were visible from the previous skins. He walked a few feet into the cave. Darkness all around. He could smell the faint odor of charcoal and bat feces. O’Brien spotted the remnants of an old campfire, rocks the size of cantaloupes arranged in a circle.

  He looked at his watch. He needed to get back outside in the event the Hawkins’ decided to pursue him. He turned to leave. Maybe it was because of his height, or maybe it was because most people never look up, especially when walking through a dark cave. But just above the exit, O’Brien noticed a limestone rock, a slight outcropping, that looked like a natural ledge fairly flat. And almost imperceptible, to the right side of the rock, O’Brien could see something that didn’t look like it was formed from nature.

  It was manmade.

  He pointed the light farther upwards. The object was less than a quarter inch long—the only visible part was small. But he thought there was more. O’Brien braced himself on the rock outcropping from the wall, and hoisted up closer. In the light from his phone, he could see the object was the tip of a knife blade. He reached up, stretching his arm, lifting the knife from the outcrop. He dropped back to the floor of the cave, shining the light on the knife.

  It felt like a timepiece in his hand. Very old. The handle was made from carved bone or mastodon tusks, the blade about a foot long. No rust. O’Brien thought it resembled the early Bowie knives. He ran his thumb along part of the edge. Still sharp. How many years, decades, or centuries had it been here? Undisturbed. Missed by generations of people who no doubt had entered the cave. The old knife was left behind, hidden by someone who’d likely used it to skin animals for food and fur. Maybe to defeat enemies.

  Or maybe to challenge a treaty with the U. S. government.

  Was it Osceola’s knife? O’Brien slid it under his belt and walked out of the cave. In the distance, he could hear the sound of an ATV.

  And closer, he heard the grunts of a wild boar.

  ONE HUNDRED ONE

  O’Brien made his way quietly through the foliage. A dragonfly, big as a small bird, whipped through the underbrush, chasing mosquitoes. O’Brien paused. Stood motionless. A large wild boar and a smaller sow rooted in the moist ground about fifty yards away from the Jeep. The animals stopped. Heads cocked. Horseflies orbiting around them.

  Within half a minute, Bobby Hawkins came racing around the south end of the mound on an ATV. The hogs ran towards O’Brien’s Jeep, turned and trotted into the woods. O’Brien called Dave and said, “Keep the line open, record the audio, if possible. I’m going to try to send you a live audio feed, if I don’t get shot.”

  He heard Dave exhale into the phone. “Maybe it won’t come to that.”

  “I’ll also send you images I hope to capture from the trail camera that I have hidden and focused on the area next to my Jeep.”

  O’Brien placed the phone in his shirt pocket, instinctively touched the Glock wedged under his belt, and walked toward his Jeep as Bobby arrived.

  He wasn’t wearing a helmet, but he was wearing a gun. A revolver in a holster strapped to his upper right thigh. Hawkins parked, turned off the engine. He sat there for a moment, nodded at O’Brien and said, “Wild hogs don’t like the sound of a 4-wheeler. That boar could debone a man, even a big guy like you, in three heartbeats. Looks like I got here just in time.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t come on horseback. Horses are quieter.”

  Hawkins grinned. “I’ve seen that hog before. Some are inbred. Others got roots goin’ back to the conquistadors when they unloaded hogs from the Spanish galleons on Florida beaches. We got packs of ‘em roamin’ out here on the ranch. Feral, mean-as-hell, wild hogs. They root in the soil and cause ruts in the land, like a drunken man plowed it. Dad let some hunters come in here to thin out the hogs. Two big boars, and I do believe you were lookin’ at one of ‘em, killed two of the hunting dogs. And these hunters used big damn pit bulls to hunt. Two more were sliced open to the bone. One lost an eye.”

  “Looks like this area is a game crossing, the land going from the mound, through the hardwoods and eventually down to the river.” O’Brien waited, drawing him out.

  Bobby gazed towards the brush where the hogs disappeared, then turned his head back to O’Brien. Bobby’s eyes were listless, as if his mind was three chess moves away from forcing a compromise out of his opponent. “Did you find your phone?”

  “Yes. Right where I’d left it.”

  He shook a loose cigarette from a pack, placing the cigarette behind his right ear. “I’m all for helping Joe Billie, too, but the cops went over this place with a fine-tooth comb. Maybe you oughta let ‘em do their job.”

  O’Brien stepped a little closer. He watched Hawkins’ eyes, looking for the slightest indication he may draw his pistol. “Your family friend, Joe Billie, could wind up on death row. He needs all the help he can get.” O’Brien figured that even with his Glock tucked under his belt beneath his open shirt, he would have the advantage. The reason was because Bobby Hawkins didn’t know O’Brien was armed. And that fact alone would make Hawkins’ reach for his gun slower. It’s much easier to kill an unarmed man. A leisurely draw of the pistol would suffice.

  Hawkins reached for the cigarette perched behind his ear. He used a vintage gold Zippo lighter, deeply inhaling the first drag, white smoke streaming out of his nostrils. He glanced up at O’Brien, spitting a piece of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. “You won’t find anything out here. Joe’s a good guy. He’s been cuttin’ palmetto limbs since his daddy taught him how. But sometimes even good people can turn bad.”

  “How do you figure that, Bobby?”

  “You know … shit happens. Life gets in the way. Looks like Joe and the dead guy had a nasty history together, and Joe must have caught the dude out here diggin’ around the temple mound. Man, this place is like the fuckin’ Vatican to Catholics. Or Mecca to Muslims. It’s a holier-than-thou place for the Indians. Maybe Joe was cuttin’ the fronds, decided to hit some weed, climbed up on the mound to meditate or something, and then he saw Barton diggin’ for bones. That’d piss me off too, and I don’t have a drop of Seminole blood in me.”

  “So that’s the way you see it?”

  “All the evidence points that way.”
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  “Only because somebody pointed it that way.”

  “Who could do that way the hell out here?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Dude, I don’t like your tone. Remember, you’re a guest on our property.”

  “Did you put the crow feather in Joe’s truck?”

  “Why would I do that? I don’t give a shit if Joe gets in a brawl with a bone hunter. That’s his biz.”

  “What’s your biz?”

  “What do you mean?” He took a deep drag off the cigarette.

  O’Brien saw a shadow sweep the ground. He glanced up, a large black crow flying from the river, over the treetops, calling out in a series of cries that reverberated through the woods. The bird alighted in a tall pine, looking down at the men. “You know, Bobby, researchers have proven that crows have remarkable cognitive skills.”

  “They’re a pain the ass.”

  “Crows remember things very well. They remember when they’ve been wronged and who did it.” That crow called out and another one arrived. “If someone mistreats them, crows never forget a face.”

  “What are you gettin’ at?”

  “The crows that just arrived. They know you. They recognize your face.”

  “That’s bullshit. Crows are lazy and dumb. Even if they could recognize me it’d be because I live here.”

  “You live back there at the ranch compound. Eleven thousand, five hundred acres is almost eighteen square miles. The mound right here is in the most remote part. The only way those crows would care to recognize you is if you did something to one of them.”

  Hawkins dropped his cigarette, using the heel of his cowboy boot to crush it. He looked up at O’Brien and smirked. “You must be tokin’ off the same pipe Joe Billie smokes. Maybe Joe planted some weed out here in God’s country. Maybe he was harvestin’ more than palmetto fronds. Hell, Lawrence Barton could have been his partner for all we know … a drug deal gone bad.”