The Butterfly Forest

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.