by Sunny
After picking up a rental car, we drove downtown and stopped at a dive shop to buy some knives—a weapon of sorts, albeit of a fishy kind. Still, a sharp blade was a sharp blade, even though it wasn’t silver. I immediately felt better with it strapped to my waist. Nolan and Chami picked up sun-blocking T-shirts and wide-brimmed sun hats, the type that draped down in back, protecting the neck as well as shading the face. With sunglasses in place, smeared with SPF 100-plus sunscreen, they were good to go. Or as good to go as they could be in this hot weather.
We checked into a hotel, unloaded our stuff, and I called the local tour company.
“Adventures Naturale,” a girl answered with a musical island accent.
“I was interested in booking your jungle horseback-riding tour,” I told her.
“For when, please?”
“Today.”
“Sorry, ma’am, too late. We’re completely booked. How’bout two days from now?”
“We’re not staying that long,” I said, frowning. “What about tomorrow?”
“Nothing. We’ve been real busy since all the news coverage. You another reporter?” She sounded hopeful.
The no I was about to say impulsively changed to, “Yes, I’m with the”—I cast wildly around for a name and said the first one that popped into my mind—“National Enquirer. Can I ask you some questions, Miss . . . ?”
“Francisca Montalbo,” she supplied eagerly, and spelled out her name for me. Getting detailed information from her was very easy after that.
Armed with a detailed map of the island and the rough location of where Dante had been spotted, we drove six miles south to El Cedral, touted as the oldest town in Cozumel. It turned out to be a little village with lots of stuff to sell to tourists. The Mayan ruins it was famed for was an old, disappointing rock and concrete building the size of an outhouse that we couldn’t go into, but since we weren’t really tourists, that didn’t bum us out.
Ours wasn’t the only car parked along the road. I counted three jeeps and four other rental cars, but only saw two tourists browsing the little street-side shops. The other occupants of the vehicles seemed to have disappeared into the jungle down the horseback path, intent perhaps on finding a saber-toothed tiger.
With the sun glaring down on us, we set out on foot. Once out of sight, we stretched our legs and senses, loping quickly down the trail. It was a jungle but the foliage was only just above our heads; it did nothing to shelter us from the direct rays of the brilliant sun. Less than a mile out we came to an abrupt halt, or rather Nolan did. Since he was in the lead, Chami and I stopped as well. “Do you sense that?” Nolan said, gazing ahead.
“Sense what?” I asked, wiping my brow. I was hot and sweaty, but the other two were panting already, their body’s mechanism for expelling heat. Their skin beneath the white paste of their sunscreen, I noticed, had deepened to a bright pink.
“There’s another Monère here, several miles north ahead of us. And it’s not Dante.”
“He has humans with him,” Chami added, sniffing the air. “Armed with guns.”
“We have to go back,” Nolan said, turning around.
“No,” I said, blocking his path.
“It’s not safe for you,” Chami murmured behind me.
Typical males, ganging up. So close . . . no way was I turning back.
“You said you sensed only one Monère.”
“With other men who are armed with guns,” Nolan answered. “We only have knives.”
“Then we’ll avoid him. Do you think he’s sensed us?”
“Likely not,” Nolan replied after a brief moment, confirming what I’d suspected, that Nolan’s and Chami’s senses were keener than most, likely something that increased with age and power. Theirs were certainly much better than my own ability. I couldn’t sense the other Monère yet, which meant that he probably hadn’t sensed us either. Goody.
“Plus, it’s only an hour until sunset. They’ll probably head back soon, before it gets dark.” I pulled out the map to study. “Instead of turning back, it makes better sense for us to cut east for several miles, then continue north, parallel to them, just out of their range.”
Doing so, however, turned out to be much harder than I’d expected. With no trail, we had to pick our way slowly and carefully through the thick brush so as not to make too big a racket and give ourselves away. Nor was hacking out a path acceptable for the same reason: too much noise.
We’d managed to head out only about two miles east when the sky began to darken. Sunset had finally come.
“How are you guys holding up?” I asked in a low, muted voice.
“Better now,” returned Chami, just as quietly. Taking out a handkerchief, he began wiping the sunblock off his face.
Noise alerted us. Excited raised voices.
“They must have picked up our scent,” Chami hissed. “They’re coming after us.”
“Split up,” Nolan said tersely. “I’ll go north. Chami, you go south. We’ll act as decoys and make plenty of noise; that plus the obvious smell of our sunscreen should draw them after us. Milady, you keep heading straight. You’ll come out of the jungle in a mile or so onto the coastline highway. Stay on the road; there’ll be hotels and resorts. Go to the nearest one and wait for us there.”
Chami and Nolan turned and started crashing through the foliage in opposite directions. Heart racing, I made my way forward as quickly and quietly as I could.
Rapid commands were issued in Spanish, and twigs and branches snapped and cracked as our pursuers split up. But it wasn’t into two parties, it was three, and the one coming after me was moving silently and swiftly with a tangible, distinct presence that brushed up against mine. It was the Monère and he was after me.
No need for silence or stealth now. I leaped and sprang in inhumanly long bounds, crashing through the underbrush at a speed that would have left a human far behind. But my pursuer wasn’t human. He proved that by keeping pace with me, and even more worrisome, narrowing the distance between us. The rubbing of awareness between us was like an invisible marker getting closer and closer. Whoever he was, he was superbly fit.
I broke out of the jungle onto the edge of the highway and took in my situation in a brief, panicked glance. The human heartbeats that I had heard and used as guidance were those of men my wily hunter had posted along the road, not of tourists or staff from a nearby hotel as I had been expecting, though one such resort was visible several miles down the road. I knew they weren’t innocent tourists because they were carrying small automatic pistols that looked like mini machine guns.
That smart son-of-a-bitch Monère had set a trap and flushed me out into the open.
The gun-toting men posted along the empty, narrow highway seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see them. What to do? Normally I would have tried to bluff my way out: Nothing but a lost tourist. Thank God there’s a hotel down the road! Could you let me pass? But the hypercharged presence behind me closing in fast negated that option, so I simply turned and ran north up the road, and didn’t even try to pass for human. I ran full out, which meant I was just a blurring streak to the other men.
Gunshots rat-a-tatted behind me, whizzing by, spraying the ground around me.
“No disparar!” roared my pursuer. I hoped like hell he was telling his men not to shoot me, which it seemed he had because no more gunshots sounded. But my hopes of getting away died when I heard a soft swoosh and felt something painful thud into my back. Reaching between my shoulder blades, I yanked out a blood-tipped dart.
Well, fuck, I thought, as I felt the strength leech out of my body at alarming speed. The bastard shot me with a tranquilizer dart. I might have preferred being shot with a real bullet instead. This was just too damn embarrassing.
My unchecked momentum took me a few more strides before my legs stopped working. One minute I was running full out; the next moment I slammed to the ground as my legs suddenly collapsed beneath me.
There was a bright flash of sp
lintering pain as the right side of my head hit something hard on the ground. Then, lights out.
FOUR
ONE MOTHER OF a killer headache had me in its merciless grip as I sluggishly rose back to consciousness. I groaned, raised a hand to touch the side of my head, and whimpered when my fingers touched the egg-sized lump over my right temple.
“Easy, lucerito,” murmured a voice that was velvet soft, an alluring sound that made me want to open my eyes.
I cracked my lids open a cautious sliver. When my head didn’t explode, just kept to that constant pounding headache, I opened my eyes fully.
“Ow!” I said for lack of anything else better to say as I stared up at a dark, masculine face. A stranger I didn’t recognize, sitting next to me as I lay in bed. Gingerly I sat up and took in my surroundings. A strange man, a strange, luxuriously furnished bedroom . . . and we were not alone. Two other Latino men were in the room with nasty-looking guns in their hands. Bodyguards. Their weapons weren’t pointed at me yet, but I had the feeling that they would be if I so much as blinked wrong, which was a complete puzzle. This whole thing was, actually.
“Where am I? And who are you?” I asked woozily, fighting back a groan as my shift in position added in nausea to the mix. I had to swallow and close my eyes for a brief second before the headache lessened back down to not-wanting-to-puke-your-guts-out bearable.
My eyes reopened and focused on the unfamiliar face in front of me. He was a very attractive devil, I observed distantly like someone viewing a lovely work of art. He had glossy black hair and dark eyes, but whereas my skin was fair, his was tanned, though not as swarthy as his two armed bodyguards.
For the moment, my discomfort preempted feelings of anything else like alarm, but it hovered close, within touchable reach.
“You are in my home in Cancun,” said Mr. Dark and Lovely. His English was perfect, accented lightly with a sexy Latin cadence and fluidity. “My name is Roberto Carderas. What is your name?”
“Lisa. Lisa Hamilton.” I blinked again, as if that would help clear up his words better. “Cancun? You mean, like in Mexico?”
Roberto nodded, his dark, intelligent eyes observing my reaction.
“Why the hell am I in Mexico? I live in Manhattan. My job . . .” Worry spiked, intensifying the blistering headache.
“What do you do?” asked Roberto.
“I’m a nurse.” God, there was nothing but confusion in my head. Confusion and pain. “What day is today?”
“Wednesday.”
“Crap, I should be at work! It’s nighttime. Is Mexico in the same time zone as New York? What the hell am I doing in Mexico?” I muttered. “I have to call the hospital and let them know I won’t be able to come in tonight.” Carefully, I turned my head, searching for a phone.
“Easy, lucerito.”
I didn’t know what the heck lucerito meant, only that it sounded almost like an endearment. “Do I know you?” I asked.
“You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Meeting me on the island. On Cozumel,” he clarified.
“No. Where’s Cozumel?” I’d heard of the popular vacation destination but didn’t know its exact location on the map.
“It’s an island not too far from here,” he said. “You fell and hit your head, and I brought you to the mainland. The hospitals are much better here than the small clinic they have on the island. They x-rayed your head and determined that you had no fracture, just a bad concussion, so I brought you back to my home to rest. Did you come with anyone else? A boyfriend or perhaps a husband?”
“No, no one. Just me.”
“No family?” he persisted.
“No.”
“What about friends?”
I shook my head, immediately regretting the action as another severe wave of pain pounded my skull, enough to make me cry out. When the sharp pain eased back to a bearable throb, I focused on . . . what was his name again? . . . Roberto.
“Why did you help me?” I asked. “We obviously don’t know each other that well, do we?”
“No, I saw you on the island. I was vacationing there myself. As to helping you—it was the decent thing to do.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, touched by how much trouble and expense he seemed to have gone to help me. “I’ll pay you back,” I assured him.
“De nada,” Roberto said, dismissing my pledge with the easy, telling grace of someone accustomed to wealth. “No need to pay me back. Medical care is much less expensive here in Mexico than in the United States. It pleases me to be of service to you.”
“No, I insist.” Then wondered if I could make good on my words. I didn’t know how much money I had with me, much less why the hell I’d traveled here in the first place. “Where is my purse?”
“You did not have one. Just your passport, credit card, and some cash you were carrying in your pocket—” Roberto gestured to the bedside table where the items he had mentioned were laid out. “—and a knife.”
“A knife?” That was a surprise. The knife, I noticed, wasn’t with my other things. “Are you sure it was mine? I don’t carry a knife.”
“You had it strapped in a sheath around your waist.”
“I did? How odd. I wonder why.”
My reply had him studying me more closely and no wonder. He was probably wondering if the strange woman he had played Good Samaritan to was crazy or violent. I was wondering that, too. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what had happened to me, or make any sense of where I was or what the hell I was doing in Mexico.
I eased my way carefully over to the bedside table to look over my stuff. The passport was familiar, but I didn’t recognize the credit card. My uneasiness grew. It had my name printed on it, but it was as unknown to me as the knife they claimed to have been strapped to my waist, and was issued by a bank I didn’t recognize.
I counted out a little over two hundred dollars in cash, American money, nothing converted to local currency yet. I held out two hundred dollars to Roberto. “I know it’s probably not enough—”
“Keep it,” he said in that smoothly accented voice. “I insist.”
It felt oddly vulnerable to be here, among all these strange people.
“Are they your bodyguards?” I asked, glancing nervously at the men standing by the door.
“Sí.”
“Why do you have bodyguards?”
“I am a wealthy businessman, and as such am a target,” Roberto said. “Kidnapping and ransom, unfortunately, is common here in my country.”
“Oh, for a moment I thought they were here to protect you against me,” I said with a weak grin, inviting him to share in the humor of the ridiculous thought. But Roberto didn’t smile. Just gazed at me with careful, probing intentness.
“Why would you think that, querida?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because they’re staring at me so suspiciously.” That and the fact that their guns were drawn, if not pointed.
The reassuring smile he gave me made him even more attractive. “Forgive their diligence. They are paid to be suspicious, and you are, after all, a strange woman that I have brought into my house.” He murmured something in Spanish and his men holstered their weapons. And some tension I hadn’t known I felt eased within me.
“Can I use your telephone to call my work?”
“Of course,” Roberto said graciously. He stood up, and I noted that he wasn’t just handsome but tall as well, an inch, perhaps, shy of six feet. “I have a phone in the other room. I will get it for you.”
It was only when he left the room that I noticed something I hadn’t noticed earlier, in those first confused moments after waking up with that dreadful headache. I felt him. Was aware of him in a way I wasn’t aware of the other two men in the room. When Roberto returned a few seconds later with a cordless telephone in hand, that sparking awareness shimmered between us again, growing stronger with each step he took closer to me, something I’d never felt before. A connection,
for lack of a better word.
My heart kicked up its rhythm with a few hard beats and my hand trembled, faint but visible, as I held it out for the phone.
“Allow me,” Roberto said. “It’s a bit complicated to call out of the country. If you will be kind enough to give me the numbers, I can place the call for you.”
He punched in a set of numbers then entered in the area code and phone number of the hospital I gave him. I heard the call go through, and he handed the phone to me. Four rings later I got an automatic recording that said, “This number has been disconnected or is no longer in service . . .”
I hung up. “I’m sorry, I got an out-of-service recording,” I said, thinking that he must have dialed it wrong. “Can we try again?”
I waited until he had entered in the country code. “Can I try dialing the rest of it, please?”
“Of course.” He handed me the phone.
“Do I need to dial 1?”
“No, just the area code and phone number.”
I entered the numbers and got the same recording. “That’s odd.” I frowned. “I know for sure that’s the correct number. We must be doing something wrong.”
“I have placed many calls to the United States and have had no trouble before,” Roberto said. “Is there someone else you can call?”
Only one other number came to mind, a nearby restaurant where I frequently ordered takeout. Roberto entered the first string of numbers and allowed me to input the rest.
“White Elephant,” answered a familiar voice. “How can I help you?”
“Hi, Joey. It’s me, Lisa.”
“Hey, Lisa. Long time no hear,” Joey said cheerfully. His strong Brooklyn accent made me feel almost homesick, though his words puzzled me. I didn’t think a day or two constituted a long time, even though I practically ate there every day. “Listen, Joey, I tried calling St. Vincent’s Hospital and got this no-longer-in-service recording. Did they change their number or something?”
“What number did you call?” Joey asked. I could hear sounds of the small, busy restaurant in the background.
