The Butterfly Forest

EIGHTY-TWO

Soto and the rest of the Mexican workers had vanished in the mix of smoke and dirt kicked up from the gunshots. I slowly stood and looked at Joe Billie who was still sprawled on the ground. “You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, but you’ve been hit.”

I felt the warmth of my own blood seeping inside my shirt and flowing through the hair on my chest. A burning pain radiated from my shoulder into my upper chest and right arm. One of Soto’s bullets had gone completely through my shoulder. I moved my hand and arm, and then rotated the injured shoulder. It was painful but functional. I didn’t think the round hit a bone. I was lucky. Not so for Izzy Gonzales.

The body lay on its back. One of the buckshot had entered Gonzales’ left eye spraying brain matter across the blooming white and yellow honeysuckle.

I glanced up at the surveillance camera mounted on the pine tree and wondered if the most ruthless drug lord on the planet had just watched me kill his only nephew. I knelt by the body, kept my back to the camera, slipped the small GPS transmitter from my pocket, lifted Gonzales’s belt and shoved the transmitter into his underwear, the smell of feces and urine hitting me in the face. My head pounded, the pain now coming in waves. I knew I would go into shock if I didn’t stop the loss of blood.

I said, “We need to get to the Jeep. I’ll try to call for help.” Billie nodded and ran to the dead man who lay on his back, the knife buried to the hilt in his chest. Billie leaned over, pulled the knife out of the body and wiped the blade clean on the man’s shirt.

I fought back nausea. “Let’s get out of here before they come back.”

“They never left.”

“What do you mean?”

“Looks like more arrived.” Billie pointed toward the far end of the field, barely visible through the marijuana. I could see two black pickup trucks pull to a stop, a black SUV Escalade and another SUV that I recognized. It was Ed Crews’ official park service vehicle. He stood next to Soto who seemed to be yelling into a hand-held radio, his arms flailing. I counted three more men in addition to the laborers who’d been swinging machetes. The other recruits were biker or gang types with lots of hair, leather, the inflated swagger of the hunt, and the arsenal of machine guns in their hands.

I used my teeth to tear a piece from my shirt, folded the cloth and pressed it against the bullet hole in my shoulder. I knew blood was flowing from the exit wound. But at the moment there was nothing I could do. “Let’s go!” I said. Grabbing my shotgun, Billie and I ran toward the east, the direction we’d left the Jeep. I hoped I wouldn’t bleed out before we got there.

After about a half mile, I had to stop. I took off my belt, used what was left of my shirt to make a bandage for the exit wound. “Joe, take this shirt, press it against the wound in my back, then tighten my belt around both bandages. I held the blood-soaked piece of shirt to the entrance wound. Then he tightened the belt around my shoulder, covering both the entrance and exit wound. Sweat rolled from my face and down my chest, mixing with the streaking blood. “Think they’re following us?”

Billie looked back in the direction we’d come. “I can’t see any of them, but I think we’d better keep moving. The Jeep is close. Let me help you.” He slung my left arm over his shoulder, gripped it with his left hand, and held my side with his right. We walked as fast as we could through the darkening forest.