by Tara Janzen
Rousing herself, she slipped out of the hammock. Her glasses were close at hand on a small shelf, so was the gun she’d taken out of one of her crates while Travers had tied up the boat, a 9-millimeter semiautomatic Taurus. She buckled the holster around her waist and put an extra magazine in her fanny pack.
Outside the cabin, the world was cool and serene, blanketed in a heavy layer of mist rising off the water. Trees loomed in the white drifts of vapor. Somewhere, something splashed in the river. It was Annie’s favorite time of day, before the sun burned a blazing path along the equator and turned the forest into a sauna.
Stepping over to the port side, she noticed the Sucuri’s canoe was missing. Travers wasn’t asleep, she realized. He was gone. The information settled in without too much alarm. Even if he’d wanted to abandon her—which he probably did after the Fat Eddie fiasco—she was nearly one hundred percent sure he wouldn’t abandon his boat.
Nearly.
She glanced over her shoulder at the jungle of trees and lianas rising from the flooded forest and the long greenish and white aerial roots of the aroids going down. If she had to, she could find her way out and back to the main flow of the Rio Negro.
Her gaze slid over the trees and epiphytes sheltering the boat. Every species was familiar to an eye trained to find the unfamiliar. The river was not at full height, and with the morning mist draping around every branch and limb, much of the canopy was still out of sight. But there were orchids up there somewhere, and the rainy season was a good time of year to find many in flower.
Annie, though, had honed her interest down to just one species of orchid, Epidendrum luminosa or Epidendrum parrishi. Her hand absently went to the fanny pack belted around her waist. She hadn’t decided yet what to name the exquisite anomaly she’d discovered on the Cauaburi. Certainly the latter classification would assure her renown throughout the remaining history of the world, another comforting thought on a cool Amazonian morning when she found herself alone, as usual, and somewhat lost, which was not exactly unusual. The rain forest was a big place, and she’d wandered too far from home on more than one occasion.
A bright spot of red on the water caught her eye, a ceiba flower, and she bent down to scoop it up as it floated by. With her fingers just breaking the surface, a dark, sinuous form streaked away from beneath the boat and disappeared into the watery shadows below the trees.
She jerked back, the flower forgotten, her pulse racing. Sucuri, the image flashed through her mind.
Peering into the dark water, she strained to see what was undoubtedly already gone. After a minute of fruitless searching, she told herself the animal had probably been a caiman, or one of a hundred large species of fish that inhabited the rivers of the Amazon, but least likely an anaconda. Contrary to her nightmare, giant snakes were not lurking in every pool.
Curious, though, she leaned over the side of the deck and let her gaze run over the hull, looking for the damn letters she might have seen yesterday morning, if the paint had been in better shape. As it was, she could just make out a blue CUR above the waterline. The SU at the beginning of the word was hopelessly chipped. The I at the end was no more than a faint bluish-gray shadow blending into the weathered plank it was painted on, but it was there, SUCURI.
“Merda,” she swore under her breath. She rose to her feet and wiped a hand across her damp brow. Johnny was dead, murdered by Fat Eddie Mano, his head severed and waiting to be shrunk by a Jivaro tribesman, his body dumped in the river for fish food.
“Sucuri, hell,” she muttered, turning toward the cabin. She needed a cup of coffee.
Inside, a fresh stalk of bananas hung from a hook in the ceiling. Papayas and guavas were piled in a basket on the counter. She set a pot of coffee to start on the kerosene stove and opened a cupboard, looking for sugar. On her fourth door, she came to a sudden halt, her search forgotten.
Books. Dozens of them.
Lifting her hand, she ran her fingers across the spines, encountering a veritable cornucopia of classic Amazonia, books on botany, plant structure and classification, books written by the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century botanists who had explored the Amazon and the Andes, discovering thousands of new plants for western science. She owned them all and had been deeply influenced by most of them, especially the works of Spruce and Schultes, and the adventures of Humboldt and Waterton. Their true-life stories in the tropics had become the stuff of dreams for a girl living on the dry, western plains of North America.
And Travers had them all, including his own, hardly the library of a man who’d completely abandoned botany for criminal vice. She could only conclude that on some level, he was still in the game.
A small smile curled her mouth. The Dr. William Sanchez Travers whose name was on the books would have been damned impressed by what she’d found up on the Cauaburi.
The last book in the row didn’t have a title on the spine, and when she pulled it down, she saw only one word on its cover: TRAVERS.
An excited thrill went through her. His logbook.
A thousand rumors had gone around about him, one for every day since he’d disappeared—and she was holding the answers to them all. Heady stuff for someone who needed a little leverage after Fat Eddie had all but pronounced her dead.
With only the faintest twinge of guilt, she opened to the first page—and frowned. Her brow furrowed, and she pushed her glasses a little higher on her nose.
“I’ll be damned,” she muttered, flipping through the pages one by one. The dates were there, starting well before his disappearance, along with line after line of daily entries—every one of them written in a language she didn’t even recognize, let alone understand.
But the details—her gaze skimmed another dozen pages, all of them covered with a distinctively illegible script and spare, concise drawings, both botanical and geographical.
Forget the rumors, she thought. He hadn’t been lost for a moment, let alone a whole year. He knew exactly where he’d been every minute of every day, but without a latitude and longitude or a translation, he was the only one who knew.
So what had he been doing? she wondered, paging forward through more of the log.
And what was he hiding?
A splash outside brought her head up and her hand to her gun. Her heart pounded in her chest. If it was Fat Eddie and his goons, this could prove to be a pretty short trip for somebody.
Leaning forward, she peeked through the window and saw Travers pulling up in his canoe. He was naked from the waist up, propelling the boat through the water and leaving a swirling trail of mist in his wake.
She unconsciously relaxed her grip on the pistol, her sense of danger forgotten as she watched him—lithe and powerful, the muscles in his chest and arms bunching with each paddle stroke. With his hair damp and his skin sheened silver with morning dew, he was the river creature again, a picture of primitive grace and near preternatural beauty.
Her mouth thinned into a tight line. It was the last thing she wanted to admit, the absolute last—that he was beautiful.
With an annoyed admonition at herself to stop staring, she started to turn her attention elsewhere, but got sidetracked by two white scars marking his chest above his heart, just under the curve of his shoulder, an interesting detail she tucked away. Anything could have happened to him. She had a few scars herself and wouldn’t have given his a second thought, until he glided by her down the side of the boat, and she saw his back. Startled, she could only stare, her breath caught in her throat.
He’d been tattooed, thoroughly, disconcertingly, the images running in a line down his spine from the base of his neck to below the waistband of his shorts, their crude precision far beyond what could be achieved with genipa or rocou body paint. She’d seen the design before, two snakes intertwined, one dark, one light. It was common up on the Vaupes River in Desana territory.
He’d been changed by it—the truth came to her with chilling clarity. Whoever had marked him, had changed him. Without
knowing when, where, or why he’d been tattooed, she knew she was looking at the moment when he’d ceased being Dr. William Sanchez Travers, world-renowned botanist with the Harvard pedigree, and become what he was today... a mystery.
Snakes. God. Her nemeses. No artisan had put the paint beneath his skin. The serpents were crudely drawn, yet there was power in the simple, bold lines crossing and recrossing each other down his back.
Eaten by an anaconda, so the rumor went, and so it might have been, she thought, her gaze drifting down the long, intertwined curves, his former life devoured by what had happened to him.
Travers shrugged into a shirt he’d picked up out of the canoe and turned toward the cabin. For a moment, he stood still, looking off into the mist-bound forest, and her gaze went to the chunk of rock crystal and the jaguar teeth hanging from the cord around his neck—a shaman’s crystal.
Another uneasy sensation coursed a path up her spine. This was him, she realized, not the reprobate of the rumors. He was no waterfront tramp, no drunk, no matter how drunk he’d gotten with Fat Eddie. He was something altogether different, and this was his place—the wild river and the rain forest.
In Pancha’s she’d wondered if he knew how to use the crystal. It was considered a powerful talisman, both a protection from one’s enemies in the Otherworld, and a way of seeing beyond the boundaries of this world. In Pancha’s she’d wondered just how far over the edge he’d gone.
Far enough and then some, she decided... and then some more. She glanced down at the book in her hands. She doubted if Gabriela had underestimated him, but she knew Fat Eddie had, and so had she. Before his disappearance, he’d been a lauded naturalist, a scientific adventurer who had built a reputation for going beyond the proscribed boundaries of conventional wisdom, geographically and academically.
She would put a dollar to anyone’s dime that he hadn’t changed in that respect, that he was still going beyond the proscribed boundaries, maybe even into the shaman’s realm—or so he might believe. She lifted her gaze from the intricate writing and botanical drawings in his log. She wasn’t sure what she believed about him, but there he stood, the most brilliantly infamous Harvard ethnobotanist to ever come out of the Ivy League, with row upon red row of shoroshoro seeds wrapped around his ankle, barefoot and more than half naked on the deck of an Amazon riverboat with feathers tied in his hair.
And that tattoo, the shamanic abstraction of a man’s cerebral fissure if she’d ever seen one, and she’d seen plenty up on the Vaupes.
His existence didn’t revolve around something as simple as taking passengers up and down the river or being the fat man’s pawn, quite the contrary. The edge he’d gone over was the border onto an abyss—and there the hell she was, trapped with him on a boat named Sucuri.
CHAPTER ~ 10
Releasing a deep breath, Will glanced over his shoulder toward the cabin where he’d left her sleeping. She’d ruined him. One little blond-haired, too-smart-for-her-own-good woman with two crates of illegal guns had gotten on his boat and ruined him. It seemed almost impossible.
He’d spent two years working the river, getting to know every caboclo settlement and tributary on both shores, and doing a lot of chasing of his own tail, and the same trip that had finally nabbed him Corisco Vargas had also saddled him with Annie Parrish—the one-woman riot squad.
Good God. His life was on the line, and she was gnawing at the rope.
The signal he’d been waiting for sounded through the trees, a pounding rhythm of manguare drumbeats that would be picked up and repeated the length of the river north, and those who understood the message would be warned to beware and to watch for the Sucuri.
“Watch her sink like a stone or go up in flames,” he muttered, heading toward the main cabin. Fat Eddie was out for blood, more than blood, if he could get it.
While Will would be the last person to certify his waterfront amigos as reliable, they all knew chaos when they saw it, and when he’d finally raised Diego Martinelli in Santo Antonio on the radio just before dawn, the old sot had confirmed that chaos had arrived with hellfire and a torch.
Stepping inside the cabin door, he was surprised to see his own personal bête noire awake and stirring. She looked slightly rumpled, but no worse the wear for their long night.
Good, he thought, she’s going to need her strength—just as he was going to need his to keep from shaking her, or doing something really stupid, like making a pass. Anything between them had nowhere to go. He wasn’t crazy enough to let it go anywhere. But rumpled, like everything else, looked good on Annie Parrish. Damn good. In that respect, she was the most amazing creature. Wet, muddy, scraped up, and wild haired—she managed to look good through it all, fresh faced and soft skinned, her small body lithely curved, her eyes bright and curiously aware behind her gold-rimmed glasses.
And the little white T-shirt she’d put on that morning looked especially good.
It fit.
It more than fit, and all he could think was that she’d picked a damn poor time to run out of baggy shirts. God help him if it rained and she got wet.
“Good morning,” she said, her expression oddly subdued, wary even.
Justifiably wary, in his opinion.
“Not exactly,” he said, not even attempting to lie. It was a hell of a morning, no matter how he looked at it. He had to get rid of her, the quicker the better, and he’d be damned if he knew how to do it.
She accepted his curmudgeonly greeting with an equanimous nod and a question. “The manguares. What are they saying?”
“It’s a warning to stay off the main river. Fat Eddie torched Santo Antonio about ten o’clock last night,” he said, reaching past her and pouring himself a cup of coffee. “They’re still fighting the flames.”
He sipped the hot brew, strong and black, and had to admit she made good coffee. The prato feito she’d made for dinner had been good, too, even if he had eaten it hours later.
“Fat Eddie set the town on fire?” A note of guilt crept into her voice. Also justifiable in his opinion.
“Actually, just the dock, but then somebody’s fishing shack caught on fire, and it was all downhill after that.” He took another sip, looking at her over the rim of his cup. She’d done a good job of making herself at home in his galley, such as it was, but he didn’t recall culinary skills as being at the top of his list of desirable traits in a woman. As he recalled, he’d usually just stopped at desire, his and the woman’s, and called it good.
“Was anybody hurt?”
“Not when I talked to my friend on the radio this morning, but I thought it best to send out a warning. There’s a rubber-tappers settlement not too far from here, and an Indian village a few miles beyond that.”
She glanced away at his answer, doing that slow sweep of the eyelashes thing that he swore to God he’d never noticed on another human being. But he noticed it on her. He noticed how long her eyelashes were, their color a golden brown to match her eyebrows. He noticed the softness of her cheeks... her mouth.
His gaze drifted farther down the front of her T-shirt, over her shorts and down the length of her legs, before settling on her bare feet. He’d like to call it good with her—but the last time he’d checked, and appearances aside, he didn’t have a death wish.
He sighed and lifted his gaze back to her face. He was glad to see she was wearing a gun. He was afraid she was going to need it. He didn’t know what was in her little black pack, but when he’d left her shortly after dawn, she’d had it buckled around her waist, and she’d worn it all the previous day. It was the only thing she owned that he hadn’t gone through with a fine-tooth comb—and what an amazingly deadly cache of treasures she had hauled on board his boat. If he’d been a policeman, he would have arrested her himself.
But she’d looked damned sweet asleep—damned sweet and perfectly, metaphorically edible—her body limply relaxed in her hammock, her lips partly open. He’d wanted to kiss her, press his mouth to hers and slip his tongue insid
e, taste her. He’d wanted to feel her come awake in his arms, rise against him and return his kiss. Instead, he’d checked to make sure her pistol was loaded and closed the door behind him.
“São Gabriel is out, but I think we can make it to the Salesians at Barcelos tonight,” he told her. “If we can get Gabriela to call in a plane, Bogotá is still your best bet for an international flight, but Venezuela is closer, and anywhere out of Brazil will be enough to throw Fat Eddie off your trail.” It wasn’t that he didn’t have a plan. He just didn’t have a way of forcing her to buy into it—other than force itself. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he certainly wasn’t above it. Not by a long shot.
“And your trail?” she asked, surprising him by meeting his gaze directly, a flash upward of hazel eyes shot through with green and gold.
She was a cat. Fat Eddie had gotten that much right. “I can handle Fat Eddie.”
“So can I.” She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. She was still wary, still looking guilty as hell, but there wasn’t any hesitation in her statement. She could handle Fat Eddie.
He didn’t doubt that she would try. She’d made her claim to fame long before the Woolly Monkey Incident.
What he couldn’t figure out was why she would still want to “handle” the fat man. Merda, she’d seen Johnny Chang’s head.
“There’s a point where ambition crosses the line into foolishness.” And she was skirting the edge.
“If I get there, I’ll send you a postcard,” she said coolly, too coolly to suit him.
“It’s not just Fat Eddie Mano,” he said, though he knew damn well that she knew the facts as well as he did. “He’s got a hundred jagunços working for him and access to hundreds more.”
“You’re not working for him. Wherever you’re taking his gemstones, it’s no favor to him,” she said, surprising him again.
Okay, he thought, she’s shrewd, just one more reason to get rid of her.
“Let’s say it’s mutually beneficial,” he conceded, and so help him God, she smirked, twisted her lips up into a wry little curve that all but called him a liar.
