by Tara Janzen
Okay, she admitted to herself. She wasn’t any better than he was, and a fat lot of good that was doing either one of them. Hell, all she really wanted was to get to Santa Maria and from there to the Cauaburi.
Her hand went to the small, black fanny pack she’d belted around her waist at dawn, before she’d ever boarded Travers’s damn boat. All she really wanted was a chance to understand what she’d found. She was on the brink of the most exciting discovery of her career, of anyone’s career—and she refused to be waylaid by a thick-bellied, gun-toting, piranha-toothed freak like Fat Eddie.
“Get rid of him,” she muttered under her breath, urging Travers to finish up with the gemstones and send their most unwelcome visitor on his way.
Travers couldn’t have heard her, but he did rise to his feet, and was in the act of pouring the stones back into the bag when something near the waterline caught his eye. His body went still, and he said something soft—words she couldn’t hear, but that caused Fat Eddie to smile again, showing his double row of razorlike teeth.
With a hearty laugh, the fat man reached over the side of his boat, grabbing a black rope and hauling an oddly shaped creature up into the air.
Annie stared at it for a moment, trying to figure out what it was, and then, with an awful wave of shock rolling through her, she knew.
Her knees buckled, and slowly, ever so slowly, she slid down the wall, her hand clasped over her mouth, her mind reeling.
Will felt his stomach roll over. He’d been around. He’d seen a lot of things, and he knew a man’s head when he saw one, even if it had been dragged through the Rio Negro for a few hours.
Kneeling on the Sucuri’s deck, he’d noticed the dark skein trailing off Fat Eddie’s boat into the water. Black, thick, and twisted, it had gleamed in the light, looking too fine to be a rope. Following the dark skein down had revealed the reason for its fineness and the grisly trophy at its end. The river warlord had tied a man’s head to his boat by its long, braided queue.
“Your thief from the warehouse,” he said flatly, when the fat man pulled up his prize. It wasn’t a question. The only question Will had was how Fat Eddie had managed to behead the guy without getting himself covered in blood.
“One of them.” The fat man chuckled. “His name was Johnny Chang. Now all I need is the woman, the blond cat. They’ll make a good pair. No, Guillermo?”
Will shrugged, ignoring the alarm Eddie’s comment generated. He’d seen the man in the speedboat that morning. He’d been stocky, well muscled, and armed with a machine gun. Fat Eddie hadn’t gotten the best of Johnny Chang without one hell of a struggle, and Fat Eddie wasn’t one for struggling—ever. He paid people to do that for him, and any dread the sight of Chang’s flaccid, waterlogged head hadn’t dredged up was more than compensated for by the dire realization that the fat man wasn’t alone. Somewhere out in the swampy channels, someone was watching them—watching for Annie Parrish, the blond cat.
Will finished putting the stones in the bag, careful to keep his attention focused on the task.
“I have a friend from Ecuador, a Jivaro friend, who will shrink the heads for me,” Fat Eddie continued, letting Johnny’s head drop back into the water. “When I hang both of them in the Praça de Matriz, no one will think to steal from Senhor Eduardo again, hey?”
“No, senhor,” Will agreed, shoving the bag in his pants pocket, wondering what kind of guns Dr. Parrish had in her crates and how quickly he could get to them. Whatever she’d bought, it had to be bigger and better than the pistol he had tucked in his waistband. “But only a fool would have stolen from you in the first place. From Yavareté to Belém, everyone knows better than to steal from Senhor Eduardo.”
“Everybody who isn’t already dead—or about to be!” The fat man laughed. “So I am back to Santo Antonio to collect my guns and the little cat’s head. Tchau, Guillermo.”
“Até a próxima, senhor.” Until we meet again—and Will was going to do everything in his power to make sure they never did.
With a short wave, Fat Eddie pushed the boat’s throttle up a notch and spun the wheel to head off into the flooded forest, on a course back to the main flow of the Rio Negro.
Will watched the speedboat’s spotlight wind through the trees and lianas until it disappeared. Then he walked across the deck and blew out both lanterns, plunging the Sucuri into the rich, velvet darkness of an Amazonian night. Santo Antonio was two hours behind them, which gave him and the little cat a four-hour lead.
He hoped to hell it would be enough.
CHAPTER ~ 8
Stepping inside the Sucuri’s cabin, Will felt an instant surge of panic. She was gone.
Damn her. He’d told her to stay put. He swung around to check the deck outside, and a flash of blond hair caught his eye. She was huddled on the floor in a pool of moonlight, her knees drawn up, her glasses pushed up on top of her head with her face in her hands.
He let out a soft curse in relief. She looked damn small in her oversized shirt and ratty tennis shoes, but without a doubt she was the biggest friggin’ disaster to come into his life since Tutanji’s anaconda.
Fat Eddie’s guns, for God’s sake. What was she working on? A death wish?
He let out another curse, not so softly, and her head came up. Their gazes locked in the dim light, hers startled and tinged with wariness, his probably far fiercer than he meant it to be—but damn, she’d cost him.
He’d lied to Fat Eddie Mano to save her, and he could smell his bridges burning the length of the Rio Negro.
“What am I going to do with you?” he asked, a rhetorical question if he’d ever heard one.
“I have to get to Santa Maria.”
That was the last thing he’d expected her to say. She was scared. She couldn’t hide it, not with her eyes that wide and her mouth that soft.
Soft, soft mouth. Sweet legs. God save him. This was a damn poor time for lust to start figuring into his life.
“No good. You heard him. He wants your head, and if you were watching out the window, you know that is not a figure of speech.”
“I was watching.”
Of course she’d been watching, and he’d found her huddled on the floor. It took more than a disembodied head to unnerve Will, but she couldn’t have seen many, and probably none belonging to someone she knew.
“I think we can outrun Fat Eddie to São Gabriel,” he said, wondering where his sense of responsibility for her was coming from, and wondering just how damned misplaced it might be. She’d been around. She was a big girl. She knew the rules. No one who didn’t know the rules and play the game damn well could have hustled Fat Eddie’s guns out from under him. “From there you can catch a plane to Bogotá, or São Paulo, or Rio. Take your pick. Within twenty-four hours after that, you could be back in the States.”
It was the best he had to offer, the absolute best. She had to know it, but she wasn’t jumping at his great plan, only staring up at him, her face pale, and her chin—so help him God—set at a determined angle.
“Fat Eddie owns this river,” he explained further. “You’ve got nothing to look forward to but dying young if you stay.” He couldn’t say it any plainer.
“You don’t know what I’m looking forward to,” she said quietly, adjusting her glasses back down over her eyes and rising to her feet.
A wave of frustration rolled through him, tightening his jaw. She was a big girl all right, and what she had—that damnable unflinching grit—was an admirable quality. It was also the sort of thing that got people killed.
“Yesterday,” he said, “in Pancha’s, when I agreed to take you to Santa Maria, you were a slightly notorious botanist with Gabriela Oliveira’s stamp of approval, a busy woman in need of passage. That started to change last night when Gabriela told me about Yavareté.”
He saw her stiffen and hold herself a little taller.
“Yavareté has nothing to do with you.”
“Maybe not,” he agreed easily enough, “but when Fat E
ddie gets to Santo Antonio, he’s going to know I lied about you, and then he’s going to want three heads to hang in the Praça de Matriz.”
As an accusation, it beat hers hands down—and she knew it. Her gaze shifted away from him with a long sweep of lashes, an action so purely feminine it nearly halted his breath—and he suddenly had a gut-awful feeling that he knew exactly where his sense of responsibility for her was coming from.
His problem wasn’t lust. Not just any woman would do. He wanted her—man to woman, me Tarzan, you Jane. It didn’t make sense, but it didn’t have to make sense. She was just there, a usually sopping-wet little grab bag of a renegade botanist with misbehaving hair, perfect legs, and a backbone of pure steel, and he wanted her—jaguar bait.
He wanted to groan. God, his life was already hanging by a thread. He did not need the trouble she stirred up, literally, by the boatload. What he needed was to get rid of her, and the farther away he could send her, the better.
Amazon Annie, he thought with a stifled curse. With the evidence standing in front of him, it was hard to believe she was the one he’d heard all the stories about. Amazon Annie had bushwacked her way across the watershed of the Vaupes River in eastern Colombia and confirmed half a dozen viable populations of Griffinia concinna, the long-endangered elegant blue amaryllis, a species devastated by the felling of rain-forest habitat from Panama to Brazil. Thanks to her, the botanical garden in St. Louis was cultivating a scientifically viable population of its own. Her published dissertation on the family Bromeliaceae was backed up by years of fieldwork and countless hard-won miles trekking through the tropical forests of South America, and like all the naturalists who had gone before her, every mile had yielded a story of hardship and close calls. Some of her stories had become legend on the Amazon, until the last legend, the Woolly Monkey Incident, had ruined her.
Rallying, she lifted her chin and met his gaze square on. “I owe you for that,” she admitted. “But it’s going to be a hard debt to repay.”
Will appreciated her concession, but in truth, it was an impossible debt to repay.
“I heard you shot your lover.” If she wanted a chance to even the score, he’d just given her one, and by the subtle tightening of her mouth, he knew she understood exactly what he wanted.
“He wasn’t my lover.”
When she didn’t offer anything more than what Gabriela had already told him, Will arched his brow, encouraging her to go on.
“He was a garimpeiro, a gold miner,” she responded defensively. “I didn’t know they were in the area where I was doing my fieldwork, and they sure as hell didn’t expect to find me within a few miles of their camp. It was... uh, a clash of culture thing.”
“Clash of culture?” The look he gave her was purely skeptical. Researchers of her caliber didn’t make their reputations by clashing with indigenous cultures. “And the monkey?”
“A couple of the miners saw fresh meat in the canopy and shot it. I was on the forest floor and ended up with an armful of terrified, bloody woolly monkey. By the time I’d finished it off, the garimpeiros had shown up and were accusing me of trying to steal their game. Things got a little ugly after that.”
Will could imagine.
“So you pulled your gun and shot one of them?”
“No... not quite,” she equivocated. “Back then, I didn’t carry a gun, but one of the miners had one, and there was a bit of a scuffle.”
It was remarkable, he thought, how little information she managed to cram into an answer. He tried to imagine her standing out in the rain forest, covered in monkey blood and “finishing off” the wounded animal with her knife, he supposed, though God knew she could have just wrung its neck with her bare hands. Nothing seemed beyond her. Even so, his imagination hit a brick wall when he came to the part about her coming out one gun ahead in a scuffle with a couple of garimpeiros.
“And from there to Yavareté?” he asked, accepting her condensed version of events for now, taking what she offered without giving her any grief. If she followed his advice and left for Bogotá, she never had to tell him another damn thing for the rest of her life—a depressing thought. If she didn’t leave, he was going to stop being nice.
She mused over his question for a good long while, before she deigned to answer.
“Well,” she started slowly. “The gun aside, I ended up in their camp, an illegal mining operation with the biggest mother lode I’ve seen anywhere in the Amazon. The mine boss wasn’t too happy to see me, but he didn’t want the responsibility of killing a norte-americana scientist outright. So he called in a Cessna and sent me to Yavareté, where his boss could decide what to do with me.”
“Corisco Vargas.”
“Right.” She nodded, a subtle took of relief passing over her face, as if she’d managed to satisfy his questions without incriminating herself in any more crimes.
Well, he was far from being satisfied with her whitewash.
“And Vargas didn’t want to kill you, either.” He made it a statement, since the truth was obvious.
“No,” she said, again without any elaboration. “Three days later, Gabriela came and the next thing I knew, I was deported.”
She made it all sound so straightforward, so simple. A little tussle in the jungle with a dying monkey and a few garimpeiros, then three days in Yavareté with Corisco Vargas.
Will wanted to shake her—shake some sense into her. He wanted to drag Johnny Chang’s head back out of the water and scare the shit out of her. How in the hell, he wanted to ask her, have you kept yourself alive this long?
And that was not a friggin’ rhetorical question. Nobody could skate on that much luck.
Will glanced out the windows fronting the helm. They had to leave, find a new mooring miles from where Fat Eddie had found them.
He angled his gaze back to her. Take a woman up the river for me, William, a botanist working out of Santa Maria... Gabriela had lied to him. Annie Parrish wasn’t just a botanist. At her heart she was something else, something more, and that something more was dangerous. Will had hauled any number of scientific researchers up and down the Rio Negro for RBC, some women, some men. Most had lasted the full term of their grants, a few of them hadn’t.
They had all been fine people, academics with a sense of adventure. He’d never met a one besides himself who could have managed an illegal arms deal on the Manaus waterfront, until he’d met Dr. Parrish, and he sure as hell hadn’t been attracted to any of them—until Annie Parrish.
His gaze skimmed over her. She was still wet, her shirt clinging to the small curves of her breasts, an intriguingly erotic detail of the type he hadn’t noticed in too long to remember.
He sighed, then rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and gave her a sideways look.
You’re both among the very best, and you’re both hell-bent on something up the Rio Negro ...Gabriela hadn’t lied about that. He and Dr. Parrish were both hell-bent on something. Tutanji had set his course, but Annie Parrish was all on her own, and by his estimation was sinking fast. He didn’t know how many pieces Fat Eddie was going to leave her in if she refused to leave the country, but he knew for damn sure he didn’t want to find out.
“Cast off,” he said, turning back to the wheel. “We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”
CHAPTER ~ 9
Annie woke with a start, on the verge of a scream. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs felt crushed, her rib cage cracking, her legs tangled up with a moving, surging force she couldn’t break. She gasped in a breath, opening her eyes wide, ready to fight—but there was nothing, no giant snake squeezing her, no anaconda wrapping her tighter and tighter, using her own exhalations to crush the breath from her body and snap her bones. There was nothing, only the nightmare of being wrapped in coils.
She took another breath and pushed her hair back off her face. It was morning, the boat gently rocking beneath her, the sound of waves lapping up against the hull. A pale light shone through the port window of the Sucuri�
��s small aft cabin. She twisted in her hammock to look out the other window. Leaves, green and dripping, were pressed up against the glass.
She let out a soft curse and dragged her hand back through her hair again. The storm had returned and lasted most of the night, the rain beating at them as they’d slowly chugged up the river. More than once, water had come pouring over the decks, breaching the bow as they had bucked the waves. Just after midnight, Travers had changed course, leaving the main river and once again heading into the igapó. By the time he’d found a suitable mooring, the rain had diminished into a pattering of drops on the roof. Annie had fallen asleep to the soft sound, exhausted from the day’s trials.
Travers had slept in the forward cabin, rehanging his hammock by the helm. The boat was very quiet, and she wondered if he was awake. She didn’t hear anyone moving around, only the scratch of tree limbs scraping against the starboard side and the creak of the hull in the water. Off the boat, the forest was alive with morning. Howler monkeys croaked and roared in the distance, their calls sounding like a herd of prehistoric beasts. Closer to the boat, she heard the squawks and cries of birds rousing from their roosts—comfortingly familiar sounds. With a cup of coffee, strong, black, and Brazilian sweet, she figured she could face the day.
“Damned dream,” she muttered, sinking back into her hammock and rubbing the bridge of her nose. She’d not had it in Manaus, nor during her year stuck in Wyoming, nor in Ecuador or Peru. It was strictly a Black River nightmare, coming to her the first time years ago up on the Vaupes, one of the Rio Negro’s biggest tributaries—and her first night back on the river, it had returned in full force.
She swore again, tying not to let the fact of the dream’s geographical boundaries freak her out any more than usual, just because she was on a boat with the unbelievable name Sucuri. It wasn’t the first time she’d come back to the river and suffered the snake nightmare. It probably wouldn’t be the last.
