by Tara Janzen
“Yes, senhor,” he repeated. “She is worth my life, but what good is she to me, if I am dead?”
Back on familiar ground, the fat man relaxed his furrowed brow, and his grin returned. “Dead men don’t need women. This is true, my friend.”
Behind him, Will heard the boats arriving and tying up. Men began jumping onto the dock. He glanced over his shoulder to get an idea of how many reinforcements Eddie had called in, and swore under his breath. His odds, already bad, had just become impossible. There were dozens of boats on the river, all shapes and sizes, all of them with at least seven men on them.
“Marcos. Olá,” Fat Eddie called out. “Que é que você sabe?” What do you know?
A tall, powerfully built man brushed by Will where he stood on the edge of the dock. Marcos was better groomed than most of Eddie’s henchmen, with a fairly clean, blue T-shirt tucked into a pair of recognizably khaki slacks, and a cowboy hat set at a rakish angle over his neatly trimmed black hair.
He bent to whisper in Fat Eddie’s ear, handing him a piece of paper.
“You left her on the Rio Marauiá, Guillermo.” Fat Eddie’s smile broadened. “Marcos saw your canoe coming into the Negro. I’m sure you would have told me this yourself.”
Will wouldn’t have put money on it. He’d been planning a nice, simple lie about leaving her in Barcelos. With that option gone, he was going to have to rely on Annie. Fat Eddie looked down at the paper Marcos had handed him, and his smile grew even wider. “Incrível,” he exclaimed and looked up at Will. “It seems you are right, Guillermo. She is worth much more in one piece. Ten thousand reais more.”
With that, he burst into another round of rolling laughter, setting his whole body shaking like a boatload of Jell-O.
Sweet Christ, Will thought, staring at the paper Fat Eddie was waving around. Even in the fading light, he could see the worst—Annie’s face on a wanted poster with a bounty of ten thousand reais printed in big bold numbers at the bottom, and the words “Wanted Alive” printed at the top.
Right then and there, she became the single most amazing woman he’d ever met anywhere on the planet. She was like a friggin’ magnet for disaster, and how in the hell he’d ever thought he could simply give her a lift up the river without his whole life coming unglued was beyond him, totally beyond him.
He swore, a single succinct word that didn’t begin to encompass his frustration. She’d said she’d decided to stay, and he doubted she’d waited too long after he’d left to break out something a damn sight more deadly than her 9 mm handgun.
He only hoped she wouldn’t hesitate to use it.
CHAPTER ~ 18
Full dark had fallen by the time Fat Eddie’s henchmen had gotten him levered into his little black speedboat and headed down the Rio Negro to the Marauiá. Motoring up the mouth of the tributary in Marcos’s gaiola riverboat, Will spotted his landmark, a lupuna tree towering above the rest of the canopy, its crown silhouetted by a waning half-moon. The Sucuri was tied up in the igapó on the other side of the tree.
There was no way for Fat Eddie and his half a dozen boatloads of goons not to see the Sucuri once they passed the bend. Annie was smart, though, he kept telling himself. She wouldn’t take any chances. She’d seen Johnny Chang’s head. She knew the price she was going to pay, if Fat Eddie got a hold of her. She just didn’t know there had been another price put on her head. Will only wondered how good she was with her Galils and how long she would hesitate before she used them, and whether or not she could manage to protect herself without killing him by accident—and it would be an accident, if she shot him. She more than liked him. He knew it down to his bones.
Standing on the deck, he watched the night-black wall of the jungle slip by. The river was quiet, the sound of rushing water a low undercurrent as their boats turned into the bend and passed beneath the lupuna tree.
“How much farther, Guillermo?” Fat Eddie asked from where he was shoehorned into the speedboat running alongside the gaiola.
“A few more miles, senhor,” It wouldn’t be much of a lie in about another minute, but it might buy her a few extra seconds, when she would see them, but they’d all still be looking up the river for her.
“Marcos?” Fat Eddie called out.
“Sim, senhor?” the man answered.
“Put Guillermo in front. The woman has guns, many guns.”
Marcos didn’t hesitate, grabbing Will by the arm and shoving him toward the bow of the boat.
Okay, Annie, he thought, stationing himself at the prow, a gun at his back. Be careful.
As they came fully around the bend, he was relieved to see she hadn’t put out a lantern. Then he was concerned. She should have lit a lantern by now—unless she was lying in ambush.
Honest to God, he wouldn’t put it past her. She hadn’t survived all these years without a sixth sense for danger.
But as the boats continued up the river, Will realized there was more than just a lantern missing. The whole damn Sucuri was gone.
He swore under his breath, leaning forward on the rail and scanning the western shore, looking for the pale silhouette of a boat floating on the water—and not finding it.
Son of a bitch. She’d stolen the Sucuri, and ten to one said she was heading straight for Vargas. It hadn’t taken her long to make her decision, either. Hell, she must have practically followed him down the Marauiá to the Negro and just missed Marcos. God knows where she was now. The Cauaburi was only fifty miles west of the Marauiá, the two rivers on a parallel course as they wound down from the Venezuelan highlands to the Rio Negro. She’d be at the mouth of the Cauaburi by morning, and he knew from Fat Eddie that Vargas was patrolling the whole river. If she lasted until dark tomorrow, it would be a miracle.
A great commotion from the other boats brought his head around.
“Jacaré! Jacaré!” the men shouted. “Um monstro!”
Will couldn’t see the jacaré, the caiman, they were pointing at, but every man jack of them was shouldering a rifle or pulling a pistol and holding their lanterns high. Some of the men were laughing, but it was laughter with an edge of fear.
Fat Eddie motored toward the fray as the boats began circling around in the middle of the river, a broad grin splitting his face as he pointed into the water.
“One thousand reais to the boat that brings me the beast’s hide!” he shouted.
“Um jacaré monstruoso!” Another boatload of men caught sight of the reptile.
“Jacaré! Jacaré!”
More men took up the shouting, the activity on the boats growing more frenzied. A few men fired off shots. Others were dragging out ropes and pieces of net. Marcos’s boat moved closer, with Will torn between watching for the giant beast and trying to find some sign of Annie or the Sucuri where he’d left them at the shoreline.
Damn it all! What in the hell was she thinking to head for Reino Novo alone? It didn’t make sense.
“Ooohhh!” A wave of fearful awe rose in a crescendo, and Will whirled around—just in time to see a huge, leathery snout rising out of the water, rows of fearsome, conical teeth bared and glinting in the light of a dozen lanterns, the animal’s knobby, scaly hide cutting through the inky black surface of the water in a long, unbelievably long, unbroken line.
Sweet Jesus! His breath caught in his throat on an instant of pure primal fear. The thing had to be twenty feet or more, an unheard of length for an Amazonian caiman.
Two thousand reais!” Fat Eddie shouted louder, maneuvering his boat nearer the action. The flotilla of boats and men drifted and motored closer to the shore, ineffectually trying to cage the caiman thrashing in the water. Nets had been thrown into the river, and shots were still being fired off. Someone had gotten a hold of the gargantuan reptile with a boat hook.
God, what a beast, the hide easily worth double the two thousand reais Fat Eddie was offering, but it wasn’t going down without a fight. Water was flying everywhere, waves splashing into the boats, the caiman’s tail cracking agai
nst the surface of the river.
With everybody overly excited, circling around each other, and shooting off their guns, Will figured it was only a matter of minutes before somebody got killed. He hoped to hell it wouldn’t be him.
Letting out a strangled bellow, the animal sank back below the water, taking the nets and boat hook with him, and in a heartbeat, all the laughing and shouting stopped. Tension filled the air as men watched over the sides of their boats, playing out rope where they still had a hold on the caiman, everybody waiting, some in anticipation, some—from the looks on their faces—in abject dread.
Will’s gaze was pulled back toward the shore. It didn’t make sense for Annie to have left him, but there wasn’t a person in the Amazon who could have taken that boat away from her. No one boarded the Sucuri. No one.
Except for Tutanji.
The thought came out of nowhere to take hold of him, and with his own sense of abject dread, he felt his heart sink into the vicinity of his stomach.
The old shaman could have come this far south.
He thought back to Annie’s nightmares and what she’d said about the sucuri on his boat, and his sick feeling got even worse. He didn’t understand Tutanji any more than he had to, but during the year he’d spent with the Dakú, he’d understood the shaman enough to survive. Annie didn’t stand a chance. Will didn’t care how smart she was, or how strong she was, no woman was a match for a payé witch doctor with Tutanji’s skills. The old man had nearly killed him half a dozen times with his concoctions and his trials, always pushing Will to his limits, to the end of his rope, and then cutting him free to fall where he may. Will’s future had been read and molded as much by his failures as his successes. They were all the same to Tutanji, whose only goal was to destroy the demon who had invaded Dakú land, his method of destruction to create his own white devil to fight the white devil who dared to bring his sorcery to the lost world at the headwaters of the Cauaburi and the Rio Marauiá.
Something bumped against Marcos’s gailoa, and everybody drew back with a gasp, expecting the giant caiman to rise up and snap the boat in two—but it wasn’t the overgrown reptile. Will looked down with everybody else and saw a board knocking against the hull.
The board was old and needed paint, but the faded letters written across its sun-bleached face were clear to him in the yellow light of someone’s lantern: SUCURI.
His boat hadn’t been stolen. It had been destroyed.
So where the hell was Annie?
The sick feeling in his stomach turned into a cold hard knot.
“What is it?” someone asked. “The monster?”
“No, no, no. It’s wood,” another answered. “Just a piece of wood.”
“Where’s the monster?”
“There!”
“No, there!”
“Shut up, you fools!” Marcos hissed. “It’s wood. It’s all just wood. Stay sharp! Two thousand reais to the boat that captures the beast. Stay sharp!”
Looking back up to shore, closer now, Will could see the debris strewn across the forest floor and piled up between the trees like tidewrack. Dozens of other boards were drifting out into the river, some of them from her weapons crates, the pieces churned up by the wakes of the boats.
The Sucuri had been blown apart—or torn apart. Behind him, the cries of “Jacaré!” started up again, with everyone rushing to the far rail, but Will couldn’t quite convince himself that a giant caiman had risen up out of the Marauiá and eaten his boat. He didn’t care how damn big the animal was. It hadn’t been Annie’s dynamite going off and taking all her ammunition with it, either. They would have heard an explosion of that size—which brought him full circle back to Tutanji and the cold, hard knot in his stomach.
The shaman had given him the boat, an ancient wreck beached deep in the jungle and overgrown with vines, left high and dry by the receding waters of the annual flooding of the rivers. It had never been much more than a floating hulk, but it had been home for the last two years, until tonight, when he was sure it had been Tutanji who had destroyed it.
So be it, Will thought, his gaze scanning the rubble. They were nearing the end, he and the shaman. The Sucuri was just the first of many things about to change, but the old man had gone too far when he’d taken Annie. Tutanji wouldn’t kill her, not outright, but that’s as much as Will dared to concede.
Jaguar bait—that’s what he’d called her, and Tutanji could be the worst kind of jaguar. He just prayed she wasn’t somewhere on the shoreline as broken up as the Sucuri, and the only way he was going to know that was by getting off Marcos’s boat.
And swimming to the riverbank.
With a monster caiman thrashing in the water, maddened by pain behind him.
Merda.
Grim faced, he swung his leg over the side rail, hoping the jacaré monstruoso knew who in the hell he was, pasuk panki to the great shaman Tutanji, Master of the Otherworld, and friggin’ king of the hoodoo metaphysics of this world.
Merda.
He swung his other leg over, and as soon as he cleared the rail, jackknifed into the river—before anyone could notice that he was escaping, though he doubted if anyone would think it was much of an escape. “Suicide” was the word most likely to come to mind.
The water engulfed him, still warm from the day’s sun, the current around the bend strong and pushing him into shore. He dove deep and with every stroke prayed he wouldn’t find her hurt, and that the giant caiman wasn’t in the mood for man.
~ * ~
The old man had disappeared. One minute he’d been with them, leading the way through the forest, and the next he’d been gone. Either way, the pace hadn’t slackened, and Annie was bruised from the knees down from all the tree roots she’d run into and tripped over. She’d done her share of rain-forest bushwacking and then some, but she hadn’t made a habit of doing it in the dark.
The Indians who’d kidnapped her weren’t having any problems. Their naked bodies gleamed in the moonlight, their faces painted black, their torsos red.
The sound of splashing ahead and a sudden sogginess of the earth underfoot warned her they were coming to another stream. They’d already forded three, the last one chest high. She was soaked and more worried than she cared to admit.
She’d never been kidnapped before. It seemed so unlikely, the farthest thing down on her “things I need to worry about tonight” list, but she didn’t know what else to call her situation.
He’d destroyed Will’s boat, the old man with the enigmatic expression and shoroshoro seeds. Blown it to bits—and she’d be damned if she knew how. He’d stayed on the boat alone for a while, then come back to shore and started blowing and singing and stomping. After a few minutes, the Sucuri had crumbled, more imploding than exploding, and taken her guns to the bottom of the friggin’ river. It hadn’t been much of a boat to begin with, but she would have thought it could hold up to the “I’ll huff and I’ll puff, till I blow your house down” threat.
She heard the stream up ahead and braced herself. Anacondas were water snakes. They liked grubbing around in forest streams, and they weren’t averse to doing it at night, when it was dark, and she couldn’t see them.
Damn, she thought, trying hard to distract herself. She’d had some good stuff on that boat, stuff she was going to need, besides the guns, and now it was all floating down the Rio Marauiá. The old man had ruined her.
So who in the hell was he?
She had a few ideas, but none she thought she could handle while she was slogging through a windless swamp and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes while not having a clue as to where she was going to end up.
The Indian in front of her stepped into the stream and sank up to his knees. By his second step, he was in up to his waist and wading deeper. Annie started swearing under her breath. She was going to end up swimming this one, which meant she wouldn’t have her footing if something big, and long, and extremely muscular decided to wrap itself around her and pull her under.
>
She swore again, muttering a stream of invectives as she went deeper and deeper into the water. When the water reached her chin, and she had to lift off the streambed, her panic and anger melded into one perfectly awful emotion, and it was in that state that the name she’d half forgotten and been trying to avoid came back to her, emblazoning itself on her consciousness in fiery letters—Tutanji.
~ * ~
“You are crazy!” Fat Eddie bellowed. “Crazy, Guillermo! One crazy son of a bitch!”
Lying on the shore behind a tree, gulping in a breath, Will had to agree. Those minutes in the Marauiá, swimming in the current and hearing the giant caiman thrashing and lunging about in the water behind him, had been some of the longest in his life. He would swear to feeling the beast snap at his toes.
He looked down, checking his feet for missing parts. “Hell,” he sighed in relief, letting his head fall back to the ground. All he’d lost was a flip-flop.
“Where are my guns, Guillermo? My fucking Israeli guns?” Fat Eddie shouted from his boat.
At the bottom of the river, Will thought, ignoring him. “Annie?” he called out, wiping the water off his face.
“You crazy son of a bitch! You won’t get away with this!”
Will had to agree to that depressing statement, too. He was beginning to doubt if he was going to get away with anything on this trip.
“Annie?” he tried again from his prone position, listening intently, but still getting no reply.
A shot rang out from one of the boats and ricocheted, pinging off a tree trunk, and he rolled onto his stomach and scrambled farther up the shore, keeping low to the ground.
“Crazy son of a bitch! Next time I see you, my friend, you are a dead man!”
Yeah, yeah. Take a ticket and get in line, he thought, pushing himself to a sitting position behind a broad tree trunk. He sat quietly, catching his breath and letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.
“Annie?” he called out again, looking around. Boards were tumbled around everywhere, all topsy-turvy. His galley sink was overturned in a pile of rotting leaves. The Sucuri’s wheel had caught on a low-lying branch, but Will didn’t see any guns and he didn’t see Annie. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. Then he saw the arrow stuck into the ground, a palm-wood shaft with black-and-white striped feather fletching, and at the bottom of the shaft, his bush knife stuck into the ground beside it. A quiver and bow were next to the knife, the whole of the edifice draped in a boar’s-tooth necklace.
