Wild Orchids

by Karen Robards

  “One moment.”

  “Blammm!” the sound of an explosion nearby nearly deafened her. She whirled, jumping a foot in the air, to stare at the closed door, behind which she heard a yell and the sound of running feet. From somewhere near at hand came the sound of crashing walls, and then the scream of a siren.

  “What . . .” She turned back nervously to glance at the officer, who was looking pleased.

  “Good, it is on time,” he said. Lora stared at him, then took a small step backwards. What on earth was going on? There was a rattling noise at the window, and Lora looked up to see a heavy iron chain being passed around the bars.

  “What . . .” she started once more, but again he held up that silencing hand.

  “In a moment.”

  Beyond the window, Lora heard the sound of a car engine. The chain tightened—and then the window, bars, frame and all, popped out of the wall, falling to the ground outside with a crash and the rattle of dislodged mortar. Lora was left gaping at the jagged hole.

  “Out the window. Hurry!”

  At once all of Lora’s suspicions crystallized into rampant paranoia, and she started slowly backing away. An officer of the Federal Judicial Police should not be telling her to climb out the window. . . . Was it possible that she was being set up? But for what? So that she could be killed while supposedly trying to escape? But how would that benefit anyone?

  “Por Dios, Señorita Harding, I have been sent by Max! To rescue you! He is waiting for us outside! We must go instantly, or we are discovered!”

  “I don’t believe you.” She was right, it was a set-up. There was no way Max could know where she was. And the idea of him rescuing her—a wanted criminal rescuing her from the police—was laughable. This was an elaborate charade devised by someone, she felt sure, to get her to admit that she knew far more about Max than she had told. Perhaps they suspected she was his girfriend. . . .

  “Madre de Dios!” From the sound of his voice, it was a curse, and the expression in his chocolate brown eyes as they met hers was distinctly unfriendly. He moved toward her, his hands reaching for her, the expression in his eyes determined—and Lora backed away just as determinedly.

  “Don’t make me use force, Señorita Harding! Max might not like it.”

  “I don’t know anything about Max. And I don’t want to know anything about Max. Just go away and leave me alone. Please.”

  “Cristos!” He stopped, glared at her, and swung on his heel, stepping up to the window in a single movement and leaning out, whistling softly. Lora watched, interested despite her wariness. What was he up to now?

  The man said something, apparently to someone outside the window. Then he jumped down from the chair with the air of a conjurer and gave her a smug look. Outside the window there was a thump and a scraping sound—and then a rough black head and a pair of broad shoulders appeared, followed in short order by the rest of him. Max!

  “What are you doing here?” Lora gasped the words, casting a scared glance over her shoulder at the closed door. Sirens wailed madly outside, accompanied by shouts and screams and the sound of squealing tires and running feet. The police would probably come bursting in here at any instant. . . .

  “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” Max said with withering sarcasm, glaring at her from his perch in the ruined window. He was dressed in the same ordinary white t-shirt and blue jeans that he had worn since Ortega’s—and nothing had ever looked so good to her in her life. The smaller man said something to him in Spanish, and Max grunted.

  “Come on, Lora, we don’t have all night. We have to get out of here.”

  “I can’t go with you. I’m under arrest—sort of.”

  “And you’ll stay under arrest—sort of—for the next twenty years if you don’t come with me now. For God’s sake, Lora, I told you not to go to the police! It’ll take ’em a year just to make up their minds what to do with you, and then I’ll bet a thousand dollars they’ll decide you’re an accomplice of mine and lock you up for the rest of your life.”

  “I can’t just—escape!”

  “Why not? People do it all the time. Believe me, I know.” His eyes narrowed at her. He took a deep breath. “This is a hell of a time to be having this conversation. Clemente and I are leaving. You can come with us or not, it’s up to you. But if I were you, I wouldn’t want to still be here in the morning.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look around you. Do you want to try to explain that you had nothing to do with any of this—or the explosion?”

  “You did that!” she gasped, listening to the commotion that seemed to be coming from the far end of the jail. Max was no longer listening. He had jumped down into the room, jerking his thumb at Clemente to indicate that the man could leave. Clemente needed no second urging. He leaped to the chair and wriggled out of the window with the agility of a snake. Max turned to look at Lora.

  “Well?”

  She stared at him, thoughts tripping over each other as they rioted through her mind. She couldn’t just escape—but, as he said, did she want to be here tomorrow to explain tonight’s happenings to the sour-faced captain on top of everything else? She shuddered.

  “All right, I’m coming!”

  He already had a foot on the chair, but he turned back to offer her a hand. She let him pull her up beside him, and then she was scrambling headfirst through the jagged-edged window with his hand on her behind giving her a helpful boost. The feel of his hand against that part of her anatomy made her jerk away. She lost her balance and would have crashed to the ground on the other side if he had not grabbed her ankle, stopping her headlong descent. Dangling head down, she had just a second to notice that the opposite end of the jail seemed to have been reduced to rubble. People she assumed were fellow prisoners were fleeing every which way into the darkness while policemen armed with flashlights and pistols ran after them, weapons firing with sharp pops. The siren wailed from directly overhead, and Lora assumed that it must be set into the top of the building. Three police cars were parked near the site of the explosion, their headlights trained on what just moments earlier had been the rear wall while their sirens wailed in unison with the one on the roof. No one paid the least attention to them as Max lowered her to the ground. Lora stood up just as Max jumped down beside her. The brown sedan was parked nearby, a chain still dangling beneath it. Max caught her hand and sprinted toward it, dragging her with him. Clemente was ahead of them. Two men, prisoners from their clothing, darted past them to vanish in the darkness. Then Clemente was opening the sedan’s door and flinging himself into the driver’s seat. The engine turned over.

  They reached the car. Max jerked open the rear door and thrust her into the backseat, then jumped in beside her, slamming the door shut. As soon as they were inside, Clemente gunned the car; the shriek of tires joined the infernal din of the shrieking sirens. As they sped down the hill away from the riotous confusion of the police station, Lora saw another police car screech to a halt beside the pile of mortar that had once been the rear wall. A heavyset man climbed slowly out, staring at the destruction as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. With a shudder Lora recognized the captain. . . .

  “I don’t believe this! What have you done?” Lora turned to fix accusing eyes on Max as Clemente sent the car careening through the night. The rattle of the chain beneath them grated on her ears.

  “Gotten you out of jail. Don’t bother to say thank you. Step on it, Clemente, we’ve been gone too long already. Tunafish’ll be getting antsy.”

  “Sorry I took so long, Max, but that idiot cop wanted to call Mexico City to confirm my identity. Good thing we cut the telephone wires. Everything went well after that—until the lady here decided to give me a problem.” This last was accompanied by a reproachful glance at Lora, thrown over Clemente’s narrow shoulder.

  “I—” Lora started to defend herself, but was silenced by a warning shake of Max’s head.

  “You know women, amigo, always arguing,” he
said to Clemente with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Not an ounce of proper gratitude.”

  Clemente nodded once in reply, his attention focused once more on the dark road as they left the lights of the town behind.

  “You think I should be grateful to you?” Lora’s voice rose incredulously. “I would never have been in jail in the first place if it hadn’t been for you!”

  “You wouldn’t have been in jail if you’d listened to me,” he retorted coolly, turning those eyes that gleamed like twin hunks of jet in the darkness on her. “I told you not to go to the police.”

  “Criminals always say that. Victims rarely listen. Of course I went to the police. You kidnapped me! Besides, you took all my money! What was I supposed to do for gas?” Her earlier grievance rose to the fore, and she gazed at him indignantly.

  “I forgot about that,” he admitted, not sounding particularly regretful. “But you still shouldn’t have gone to the police. That was really stupid.”

  Lora stared up at him, totally at a loss for words. That was not to say that she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to say to him. The problem was, she could think of too much. And all of it was insulting. She bit back the words. Arguing would serve no purpose now. For better or worse, she had let him “rescue” her from the clutches of the police. There could be no going back. She didn’t like to contemplate what the captain’s reaction would be to her escape. Certainly she didn’t want to experience it firsthand.

  “How did you know where I was, anyway?” That question had been teasing at the corners of her mind.

  He turned his head to look down at her again. The faint moonlight filtering through the tinted window formed a triangular wedge on his cheekbone. The rest of his face was deep in shadow; she could barely make out the villainous mustache and square, unshaven jaw—but she had no trouble at all seeing the glitter of the darker-than-the-night eyes.

  “One of Ortega’s hangers-on spotted the car in front of the police station, and after it stayed there for several hours reported the information back to Ortega, who is always very interested when one of his recent guests decides to visit the police. Ortega conveyed his interest to me. I assured him that your sudden chumminess with the authorities could have no connection with him, but I’m not sure that he believed me. I decided to check it out, as I was still in the area, though I couldn’t believe that you were actually stupid enough to go to the Mexican police. But there couldn’t be two orange Volkswagens with their front ends smashed in in this part of Chiapas. I had Clemente make some inquiries, and it wasn’t hard to find out what happened. In a town the size of Comitán, everyone knows everyone else’s business. I thought about leaving you to the wolves, but since I had to assume some responsibility for the predicament you were in, I decided to get you out. Although not without some misgivings. You are a real pain in the ass, you know.”

  “So are you,” Lora said with feeling, and would have said more if Max hadn’t leaned forward suddenly.

  “It’s up here on the left. Keep an eye peeled, it’s easy to miss.”

  “Sí.” Clemente too was leaning forward, scanning the seemingly impenetrable wall of jungle that rose on either side of the narrow road. “Ahh.” He braked suddenly, throwing Lora forward. Before she had recovered her balance, he and Max were out of the car, dragging what seemed to be a narrow section of jungle to one side. Then they were back in the car and driving through the opening they had created. Clemente stopped again on the other side, and both men got out to drag the concealing foliage back into place. They got back in, and the car moved slowly forward without lights along what seemed to be a surprisingly good road. All around the car the jungle loomed, dark and menacing. In the distance came the scream of a small animal as a predator claimed it. Lora shivered, shrinking back into the velour upholstery of the backseat. She would have liked to scoot closer to Max, but she wasn’t feeling too sure of anything at the moment, especially him.

  “Where are we going?” The question had a quavery quality to it she hadn’t intended.

  Max turned his head again to look down at her. This time there was no beam of moonlight to illuminate his face. This far into the jungle, the foliage blocked out every moonbeam.

  “There’s a small airfield up ahead a ways. We have a plane waiting to take us out of the country.”

  “What on earth is an airfield doing in the middle of the jungle?”

  He grinned. She could see the white gleam of his teeth even through the darkness.

  “A well hidden airfield is very useful in some professions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, drug running—there’s probably more dope grown in these mountains than corn, it’s big business around here, and the growers need a way to get it out of the country; then there are the guys who smuggle guns into Nicaragua and El Salvador; and the other guys—or sometimes even the same ones—who smuggle refugees out; and it’s useful for men like Ortega, who can’t pass through a border in most of the free world without worrying about being arrested. He needs an airfield where he can fly in and out.”

  “What exactly does Ortega do, anyway?” The question, which had been nagging at her ever since she first stepped into the man’s elaborate parlor, was almost a whisper. In the front seat, Clemente snorted.

  Max looked at her for a moment. She thought he was going to refuse to answer. Then he shrugged and said, “He’s a businessman, pure and simple. He’ll turn his hand to anything that offers a big enough profit. Drugs, guns, phony money, refugees—you name it, he’s got a finger in it. But he’s smart about it; in all these years he’s never been nailed with the goods. I’ve known him for quite a few years, and we’re friends of a sort, but I wouldn’t trust him across the street and back—not unless he was being well paid to be trustworthy.”

  Lora listened to this chilling recitation with growing horror. The worst part about it was that Max seemed so unconcerned about Ortega’s crimes—was Max involved in drugs and guns and all of that, too? She didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was overwhelming. No wonder the police were so eager to arrest him. He would probably go to jail for the rest of his life if he was caught. And deservedly so, she told herself firmly, trying not to think of him pinned in a small cell until he was withered and old. A criminal deserved to pay for his crimes.

  “Here we are.”

  They pulled out of the jungle into a cleared area the size of perhaps three football fields placed end to end. There, barely visible in the darkness, was a lumbering, propeller-driven aircraft painted in shades of camouflage green. Lora stared at it with some misgivings. They were going to fly in that? It looked like something left over from World War II! Clemente drove up beside it, and a door over the wing slid open. Obviously, their approach had been observed.

  “You took your own sweet time, Maxwell!” A leonine head with overlong black hair thrust out of the door in accompaniment to the angry voice. Lora looked up at the heavyset stranger as Max, who had pulled her from the car, thrust her toward a set of steps that led to the wing. Clemente brought up the rear as the propellers began to turn, slowly at first and then with increasing speed.

  “We were gone just as long as it took,” Max replied coolly. “You—” He was interrupted by the sudden blaze of lights that seemed to spring up out of nowhere to bathe them all in a noonday glow.

  “Alto! Federales!” The words, yelled over a loudspeaker, froze them all momentarily in their tracks.

  “Christ! Get out of the way, Minelli!” Max recovered first, grabbing Lora around the waist and lunging up the steps and into the plane with her.

  “Alto!” The command to halt boomed again as Clemente leaped through the door right behind them. A loud burst of gunfire exploded. Bullets raked the plane just as the man called Minelli banged the door shut. Max shoved her to the floor of the cabin as bullets whined and twanged above, hissed, “Stay down!” and sprinted, bent almost double, for the cockpit. Clemente, Minelli and the other man in the cabin dropped to the a
isle between the seats, lying on their stomachs with their arms covering their heads. Lora, after one quick horrified glance, followed suit.

  “Tunafish, let’s get this baby out of here!” The roar was Max’s. It was punctuated by more gunfire. A profusion of bullets thudded into the metal fuselage in a series of staccato ta-tats. Lora winced and covered her head as round after round of ammunition spat at the plane that started bumping over the ground, gaining speed, and finally, sluggishly, lifted into the air.

  XI

  “How in hell did the feds get onto us?” The enormous black man at the controls of the C-47 Gooney Bird relaxed his fierce grip on the wheel as the plane climbed safely into the night sky.

  “Got me.” Max shrugged, taking over control of the plane from the copilot’s seat. “My guess is they weren’t after us, particularly. They probably got tipped off to stake out the airfield, and we walked into it. Must have thought we were druggies. The feds have tightened up enforcement since that DEA agent bought it a while back.”

  “Yeah.” The black man nodded. “Don’t matter now, anyway. Did you get the woman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any problems?”

  “None worth mentioning. Except what you saw.”

  “Must be a hell of a woman for you to go to all that trouble.”

  Max lifted his eyes from the shifting clouds that all but obscured the moon and the mountains below to give the grinning man a quelling look. “Just drop it, okay?”

  “Anything you say, boss.” The grin widened, revealing strong white teeth that stood out vividly in the gleaming dark brown face. Max threw him an irritated look.

  “Can it, Tunafish.” Then he realized what he had said, and grinned himself. Tunafish’s nickname was always good for a laugh or two, at least for everyone but Tunafish.