by Lois Greiman
“Yeah?” They were virtually shouting at each other through the rain.
“Became a certified lifeguard at age fifteen.”
He shrugged, a single lift of heavy shoulders. “Then you drive,” he said.
“All right.”
She didn’t notice until that moment that he had a coil of nylon rope in his hand.
“I’m going to tie this to the bumper and run it around that tree,” he said.
She nodded, wondering muzzily if she had been outmaneuvered.
“The ground’s giving way near the edges, so stay to the left of midline. But not too far. And goose it a little.”
She nodded again and scrambled over the console.
He attached the rope to the bumper then strode through the river to the opposite side. Choosing a substantial deciduous, he wrapped the rope around the trunk twice and gave her nod.
Eddy took a deep breath, shifted into first and stepped on the gas. Water sprayed up as she hit the edge of the river. She struck a bump. Something scraped the bottom of the car. Spray peppered the windshield. The backend fishtailed, but she accelerated, heart pumping. Nearly there, nearly… And then the hind wheels sank. There was a clank. The engine stalled.
Eddy cursed fervently, but Durrand was already striding toward her.
“Start it up again,” he ordered. “I’ll push.”
She touched the key, but before she turned it, a battered pickup truck rounded the curve behind them. A man wearing a bright blue raincoat and a slouch hat stepped out, leaving what appeared to be his family behind the foggy windshield. His expression was solemn.
“¿Tiene problemas”
Eddy exchanged a glance with Durrand then stepped quickly out of the Pinto. “Sí. Parece que estamos estancados,” she said and motioned toward the vehicle.
He nodded at her obvious statement and made one of his own, his Spanish lightning fast. “You should not try to cross in such a small car.”
Durrand stood beside her now. “What did he say?”
She repeated his words.
“I think they can get around us.”
“Or they could help us,” Eddy said and glanced up at his impassive face, but he was already shaking his head. “That’s not a good idea.”
“Don’t you trust anyone?”
“No.”
“We can help you,” the Colombian said.
Eddy repeated the words in English, but Durrand responded before she finished speaking. “No.”
“I am Claudio. These are my daughters…” The little Colombian waved toward the battered vehicle behind them. Two girls stepped out. “Bianca and Noa.”
Both looked as shy as fawns, black hair loose around their faces, eyes as bright as agates.
Eddy gave Durrand a look. He scowled, looking a little sheepish.
“All right,” he said.
“If it’s okay with you, Bianca will drive,” Claudio said. “The rest of us will push.”
Eddy nodded, but Durrand spoke again, keeping his voice low. “Tell him you have to drive.”
“What? I’m not—”
“We don’t know these people from Satan.”
“What are you talking about? They’re little girls.”
“Bonnie Parker was a teenager when her crime spree began.”
“Who—” Eddy began, then recognizing the reference to Bonnie and Clyde, barely resisted rolling her eyes.
“Tell them,” he repeated.
She brightened her smile a notch and switched back to Spanish. “I’m sorry. I injured my shoulder while hiking. Do you mind if I drive?”
Claudio shrugged. “No. Of course, not. I have raised my daughters to be strong.”
“Thank you,” she said and headed for the driver’s seat.
The others lined up behind the vehicle. Eddy sank into the Pinto and started the engine.
“When I count to three,” the Colombian said, “you drive forward.”
She did so. The car squiggled on the uncertain surface but in less than a full minute, the little vehicle was idling irregularly on the far side of the river.
Eddy stepped onto the road just a few yards from the others. “We’d like to pay you for your trouble,” she said and managed to refrain from throwing Durrand an I-told-you-so smirk.
“Pay?” The little man shook his head. “It hurts me that you Americans think my people are only after the pesos.”
Guilt flooded her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you,” she said and glanced meaningfully at Durrand. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized little Noa had a 9 mm Walther tipped beneath the Ranger’s right ear.
“Your hands,” the girl said, eyes hard as granite. “Put them up.”
Durrand raised them slowly. “Paranoia,” he said. “You should get some.”
“What’s going on?” Eddy jerked her gaze from him to Claudio. Her voice sounded hollow to her own ears.
The Colombian shrugged. “My darling Noa…” he said and shrugged. “As deadly as she is lovely, yes?”
Chapter 30
The man with the moon tattoo screamed and thrashed. Blood gushed from his eye as Shepherd swung wildly toward the one remaining kidnapper. But he was too far away, already lifting the rifle’s muzzle, already squeezing the trigger.
Shepherd sucked in his breath and breathed a prayer.
And then the shooter fell, toppling over backward, eyes wide, white bandana blooming red at the center.
Shepherd froze, heart pounding, but someone was already approaching. He twisted toward the footfalls, head spinning crazily.
“Amigo.” The man who spoke wore a canvas hat and a vest over a loose-fitting white shirt, but it was his rifle that held Shepherd’s attention. “You are not hurt?”
He shook his head. The movement cast him off balance, but he braced his feet in the uneven foliage and remained as he was. Beside him Moon thrashed weakly.
“Ahh, but you have been in the inhospitable jungle for too long, have you not?”
Shepherd’s gaze crept toward the felled man beside him. His screams had turned to whimpers.
“Would you like a call girl?”
Shep blinked. The sun felt as fierce as a branding iron against his back. “What?”
“I asked what I shall call you.”
“Por favor…”
The little man scowled as he glanced at the man who whimpered on the ground. “Ruben, Jorge, help that poor fellow will you?”
Two men appeared from out of the blue. Bending, they lifted Moon and carried him away. Or, maybe they flew. Though even in Shep’s current condition, that seemed a little unlikely.
“I am a doctor and can help you once we reach my property. But until then, we have a little something to make you comfortable.”
There was a rustle behind him. Shepherd tried to turn to look, but he was already falling, slipping weightlessly into the soft abyss.
Chapter 31
Eddy remained immobile, staring in confusion. Durrand stood just as still, eyes as steady as an osprey’s on the girl with the gun.
The little Latino behind Durrand laughed. “I have tried to raise them right, but times are hard, yes? And there is so much they want: American jeans, American music, American cars, although…” He glanced sadly at the Pinto. “This, it is a piece of shit. Still…” He shrugged. “We are thieves not automobile connoisseurs. Is that not so, girls?”
“Aléjese del coche,” Bianca said.
Eddy shifted her gaze to the elder daughter. The pistol she now sported was trained with deadly accuracy on Durrand.
“What did she say?” he intoned.
Eddy’s throat felt tight. “They seem to want the car.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Tell them we’ll give up our money and our bags if they’ll let us keep the Pinto.”
She almost argued; everything they needed was in those bags: their passports, their weapons, their medical supplies, but in a moment, she understood his line of thinking. Gabe Durrand
might be more devious than she had realized. She nodded. The movement felt jerky. “Please don’t leave us stranded,” she said and shifted her attention to Claudio.
The little Latino raised his brows with interest.
Eddy swallowed and hurried on. “If you let us keep the car we won’t turn you in to the authorities. You can have our money and whatever’s in our bags.”
“Do you hear that, my daughters? They wish to keep that pile of shit. Why do you suppose?”
Bianca smiled. Noa chuckled.
“It’s not what you think,” Eddy hurried to add. “We don’t have anything valuable hidden in it or anything. We just…we don’t know our way around. We could die if left afoot. But we’ve got cash,” she said suddenly and jerked open the Pinto’s back door. A bullet pinged a few inches from her foot.
Eddy spun about with a shriek.
Noa smiled. “Make my day.” She said the words in Spanish, attesting to her familiarity with Hollywood if not with the English language.
“I’m sorry!” Eddy breathed and jerked her hands higher. The trio stared at her, unspeaking. The father, too, now held a gun in one short-fingered hand. Eddy swallowed her bile and wished she had shared Durrand’s cynicism early on. “We don’t have a lot of money. A thousand… Wait. No. Not quite. I paid for the hostel and—”
“Get the bag,” Claudio ordered.
Eddy nodded. Her legs felt stiff, her arms heavy. But she kept them above her head. “Can I…” She paused, swallowed. “Can I put my hands down?”
“Unless you can lift the bag out with your teeth,” he said and chuckled. “That would be amusing, would it not, if she—” he began, but in that instant she grabbed the SIG from the pocket of her pack and swung it toward the youngest girl.
His chuckle stopped abruptly. The world went silent. He had lost his jovial expression. “I knew Americans were silly bastards,” he said, “but I did not think they were suicidal.”
“Take out their old man first,” Durrand said. His tone was absolutely even, but Eddy didn’t bother to shift either her gaze or her aim to the man who covered her.
“I’m an expert marksman,” she said, gaze glued on the girl. If she wasn’t mistaken, she had heard honest pride in Claudio’s voice when he spoke of his youngest. “This is a SIG Sauer 1911. It’s got a muzzle velocity of 950 fps. I can put five rounds into Noa’s lovely forehead before you can squeeze off a single shot.”
“Edwards…” Durrand’s voice was low. “Take out the old man.”
“But you are outnumbered.” Claudio smiled. “And I am certain one of us can shoot you before you take out all of us. Although we have not had your wonderful American training, so perhaps you will not be dead. But…” The smile fell from his face. “It is possible you will wish you were.”
“Edwards—” Durrand said again but she was already pulling the trigger. Noa stumbled backward with a shriek of pain as Eddy dropped to one knee and fired again.
It was over in less than a second. Noa cradled her wounded hand against her chest. Blood seeped between Bianca’s spread fingers, dripping down her arm. Their father lay on the ground, moaning as he clasped his thigh in both hands.
The youngest girl snarled something and reached for her pistol with bloody fingers, but Eddy sent it skittering through the mud with an additional bullet.
“Get your father on his feet.” Her command was almost unrecognizable to her own ears.
The girls stared at her for an instant then seeming to realize their good fortune, hurried through the rain to retrieve their diminutive father.
“Now get the hell out of here,” Eddy ordered.
The trio struggled toward their pickup truck, Claudio hopping miserably between his daughters. In a matter of minutes, they were gone.
Gabe stared after them. “Didn’t they train you to go for the body shot?”
“What?” Eddy turned toward him. Her vision was bleary, her legs unsure.
He glanced at her. “Are you—” he began, but she jerked away, stumbled off a few steps then bent double and vomited silently onto the riverbank.
Chapter 32
Eddy was asleep, curled up in the passenger seat, knees tucked nearly to her chest, downy lashes soft against her apple dumpling cheeks. She really did look like an elf, or a fairy. Shit! What had he been thinking?
Gabe ground his teeth and faced the road ahead. It was still raining. The roads were deteriorating by the second, which meant they would have to hoof it soon; the fairy was going to have to get wet. Soaked, in fact. Drenched. And maybe killed. Or tortured.
God, he wished he had her gift for silent vomiting.
Seeing a break in the jungle on his left, he goosed the Pinto’s pathetic engine. They bumped off the so-called road and into the vines, but they didn’t make it twenty feet up the mud-slick hill before the engine failed.
Beside him, Edwards woke, dewy-eyed as a bottle-fed lamb as she yanked a hand toward the dash with a gasp.
The world seemed silent after the clatter of the engine. Dusk was just falling, though the dark, low-slung clouds made it seem later.
“What’s going on?” Her voice cracked a little.
“We’ll have to leave the car here.”
She took a second to digest that information. A second longer to absorb the abysmal conditions outside their questionable refuge. “Are we going to try to hide it?”
He gave that some thought. “The jungle might do the job itself. I’ll take the keys and hope we can come back for it. But it’s not registered in our names, so it shouldn’t come back to haunt us.”
On the other hand, she already looked a little haunted. But that wasn’t his concern. She’d signed up for this little slice of perdition of her own volition and she was a big girl.
She glanced over at him as she laced up her boots. “What’s wrong?”
For a big girl, she had seriously tiny feet.
“Nothing,” he said and shoved Noa’s Walther into his pack. If they acquired any more weapons, they’d have to rent a U-Haul.
Edwards pulled her pant legs down over her laces and straightened, lips pursed. Lifting the GPS from the dash, she tapped a couple of buttons and scowled at the screen. “Looks like it’s about ten kilometers to Angels Falls. Just a little farther to the gulch.”
Ten klicks. How far was that on fairy feet?
She shoved the GPS into her pack. “That’ll take what? Four, maybe five hours?”
He was tempted to call the whole thing off, to get back onto the road and return to Bogotá, but the putrid Pinto probably wasn’t going to start, and that dumbass Shepherd was still MIA.
“Durrand?” she said.
He bumped his mind back into gear and took a chug from his camelback. It wouldn’t be long before they had to filter any water they found. They wouldn’t do Shep much good if they were puking up their guts from giardia or whatever creepy little organisms were found in these parts. Of course, Tinkerbelle had already ralphed twice with nary a giardia to be found.
“Depends on the terrain,” he said, happy as hell he could remember what she’d been talking about. “We’ll probably be lucky to get there before dawn.”
“Then we’d better get at it,” she said and stepped out of the car.
He didn’t have much choice but to follow suit.
The rest of the night was like a quaint little version of hell. The rain was nonstop. The footing was horrendous, slick as petroleum jelly with roots and rocks protruding at bone-jarring intervals. It was as dark as pitch inside the bowels of the jungle, but they kept going, creeping forward with nothing but their pale headlamps to light their way.
“Durrand.” Edwards’ voice was raspy and faint. She stopped, bending slightly to catch her breath. They’d been climbing steadily for over an hour. His right thigh pulsed with pain and his latest gunshot wound wasn’t attributing to his comfort. “Do you hear that?”
He held his breath and gripped his sidearm. “What?”
“Water.”
He stared at her and let his hand relax on the butt of his pistol. “It’s raining,” he said.
She might have given him a peeved look, but who the hell could be sure in these damned nightmare conditions. “It sounds like a waterfall. I think we’re getting close.”
He took a moment to concentrate, and maybe…maybe she was right. Then again, maybe it was Guapo Herrera pissing on their boots.
Optimism…it scared the shit out of him. “We’ll set up camp once we reach the other side,” he said.
They trudged on, tripping, gasping, moving at a snail’s pace. But finally they stood at the edge of the falls. The rain had stopped, but the wind had picked up, chilling their damp bodies and chasing the clouds over the moon and beyond.
“Look at that,” she breathed.
“What?” he asked and found his pistol again, but she remained absolutely still for a moment, suggesting they weren’t about to die…at least not in the next few seconds.
He glanced to the left where the cliff arced away. Here, beyond the canopy of the trees, it was brighter. Plump droplets sprayed into the darkness like diamonds on black velvet, and below them, the river wound away like a chain of silver to some unknown destination.
“That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” Her tone was awed, her back unbowed.
His bitched like a bleeding ulcer.
“Maybe we should pitch the tent here.” She turned toward him. Her eyes were bright, and her shirt was plastered to her body, showing every delicate curve.
He hauled his gaze away. What the hell was the matter with him? It was bad enough he’d dragged her to this godforsaken piece of nowhere without treating her like she was a damned sex object. “No,” he said. It sounded like his throat had been cleaned with battery acid. “We’ll stay on schedule. Cross now. Get a couple hours of sleep and do reconnaissance in the morning.”
She nodded, humped her pack like a good little soldier, and gazed into the fast-flowing stream a few feet in front of them. “It doesn’t look like it’s more than a few inches deep here,” she said and stepped toward the water.
He caught her by a strap. “Me first.”
