The Black Butterfly

An apology and a new chapter.

There is a perfectly good reason most novelists don’t serialize the novel they are working on. You post a chapter, now you’re stuck with it. What if you post five chapters of a novel called LILY and then decide to make a big change? What if you decide to title your novel THE BLACK BUTTERFLY and start it over again? Because you are not a good planner. You are not one of those (sane) writers who plan and outline. You are a creature of impulse and liable to change your mind, liable to make mistakes. You wrote and posted those chapters without ever realizing what kind of novel you were writing. You imagined it was a harmless story about little girls, one of whom imagines her wishes come true. But now you have had a realization. You woke up and realized your novel is indeed about two little girls, one of whom imagines her wishes come true, but it starts with a violent crime. The little girls, bless ‘em, are going to discover they have a killer living in their neighborhood.

Now, guess what? You have to start all over again. What do you say to the kind-hearted readers who were reading the first version?

Sorry!

The Black Butterfly, a novel by Gary Arms

Chapter 1/ Joe Molto Ain’t a Talker

Trooper Joe Molto got the call about a 211 in progress at a convenience store and then five seconds later received the call that the robber had left the store, was armed and dangerous. The second call included the description of the robber’s car, identified by color and model. Joe Molto the first responder saw this car ahead of him on the highway. He called it in and gave chase.

Joe was on the guy’s tail, going a hundred miles per hour, when he got an idea. He came up beside the guy. He could see the robber, see him plain. A heavyset guy. The robber was wearing a black ski mask and a wife beater undershirt.

Just a month ago, Joe had successfully completed a driving course for cops. He’d learned how to nudge another car off the road without doing much damage to his own vehicle. He decided to give it a try. Joe was that kind of guy, he enjoyed adrenalin.

He got up even with the car he was chasing, his siren whooping, and was just about to execute the maneuver and veer into the driver’s side of the guy’s car, when he saw something that changed the situation completely. Beside the robber was a young woman. A hostage, not a girlfriend. He realized she was a hostage in a flash. That happened to him sometimes. Thinking with my gut, he called it.

Joe hesitated and did not veer into the other car. If he did, the other car would be jolted onto the shoulder of the highway and would probably flip, roll. If that happened, he might kill the hostage. He was just about to take his foot off the gas and fall back behind the other car when he realized something important. While he had been distracted, scoping out the hostage and choosing not to execute the maneuver, the robber had raised his right hand. It contained a pistol.

The robber fired through his open window. Joe felt a shock. His foot came off the gas pedal. He felt the shock through his entire body. Everything changed in that moment. Everything.

Joe reached up with his right hand and found blood. A lot of blood. He clamped his fingers over the wound in his neck, trying to stop the flow of blood. His car slowed.

Behind him, a dozen other troopers were pursuing the robber. Their cars one by one flowed past him, going a hundred miles per hour. Joe slowed, slowed more, pulled over to the shoulder, came to a complete stop. With his right hand clamped over his neck, he tried to use his radio to call for help. He could not speak. His voice was disabled.

Joe thought, I’m dying. This is it.

The other cars were ahead of him now, moving rapidly out of sight, sirens screaming.

Joe decided he was not dying, at least not dying real quick. He wasn’t passing out either. He pulled back out into the highway, driving with one hand on the wheel and one hand on his neck. He followed the sirens.

There was a wooded area up ahead, beside an exit. All the troopers and their cars were collected there. The car the robber had been driving was there too. The driver’s door was open. The robber was gone. The troopers were clustered around the robber’s car, looking inside.

The robber had shot the woman he kidnapped in the head and fled before the troopers arrived.

Joe climbed out of his car, holding his throat. He couldn’t talk. It took a moment before any of the other troopers turned around and saw him.

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Joe remembered the butterfly tattoo. The heavyset guy who had shot him had been wearing a ski mask and a wife beater undershirt. His left shoulder was visible. It displayed a tattoo about the size of a man’s hand. a black butterfly with its wings outspread.

They never caught the guy who robbed the convenience store, shot Joe in the throat, and murdered the hostage. He had been wearing surgical gloves, so no fingerprints. The car, a copper brown Malibu, had been stolen earlier in the day. The security cameras in the convenience store didn’t reveal much. The robber entered the convenience store with his gun out, wearing the ski mask. The butterfly tattoo was visible on his shoulder. The hostage, Debbie Thorp, was behind the counter. A model employee, Debbie Thorp had worked for the store for two years and three months when the robber came through the door, holding his pistol. She gave him all the money in the cash register, no problem, but for some reason he’d made her come with him, pushed her in front of him as he left the store, made her get into his car.

There wasn’t much in the till, less than two hundred dollars. The store had been robbed before, so store policy was never to keep too much cash in the till. The clerk had done what she was trained to do, handed the money over to the robber right away. She did not scream, did not protest or delay, did everything right. He still kidnapped her. He shot a highway patrol in the throat, stopped his car at the edge of the woods beside the offramp, shot and killed the hostage, a single mom with a kid, shot her in the head, killing her instantly, and then he disappeared into the woods.

He never got caught. It was an embarrassment to all the law enforcement in the area.

Joe did not recover from his injury the way wounded law officers do in the movies. Getting shot changed him, took something out of him. The doctors patched him up. His wound healed. He learned to talk again. But afterward, he never had much to say. He started drinking every night. His wife left him. He quit the highway patrol and lived on his pension. People said he took anti-depressants.

After his wife left him, Joe improved in at least one way. He quit drinking. He moved into the house where he had grown up. His parents were dead, so that house was his inheritance. He didn’t have any siblings, had been renting out his parents’ house. When it became available, he bought the house across the street and used it as rental property. Joe lived alone in his house with his dog. People in the neighborhood said it was best not to bother him.

“Joe Molto ain’t a talker,” they said. “But he’s a good guy.”

Years passed.