River of Eden

by Tara Janzen

  No, he answered his own question and flipped off the radio. He was done listening to Fat Eddie. By tomorrow night he’d be in Manaus, safe, while the fat man would be in Reino Novo, fighting it out with Vargas and whatever devil beast appeared. All Marcos had to do was get around the group of Vargas regulars behind him in the forest and make a break for the river.

  Fat Eddie could go to hell, he thought, then grinned at his own cleverness, because, of course, hell was exactly where Fat Eddie was going.

  ~ * ~

  Blue orchids tumbled down over three of the tree branches above where Annie was sitting. Two trees over, another group of orchids bloomed in luscious profusion. To her right, a munguba was literally drenched in blooming Aganisia cyanea.

  Unbelievable, she thought. She knew botanists who would give a year of their career to see such a sight. And there she sat, no newspapers, no specimen jars, no camera—nothing to record or collect the second most amazing find of her life.

  Or rather the third, she admitted, lowering her gaze from the trees to Will. He was so beautiful, sitting next to her in the half-light of the forest floor, his muscles moving in smooth precision as he repacked the arrows in his quiver, his hair falling across the back of his neck, the blond streaks gleaming a dull gold to match the bracelets hanging low on his wrist. He’d melted her down to a sated, wanton lethargy with his lovemaking, making more of a woman out of her than she’d ever been before—and being a woman was still the one thing she couldn’t afford.

  Hell.

  She wanted him, and wanting him wasn’t smart, wanting him threw all kinds of monkey wrenches into her plans for the future, if the two of them even had a future, considering the direction they were headed and what he was determined to do and notwithstanding her own commitment to doing whatever it took to get back what was hers—which she was finally ready to admit was a damn sight more than the orchid Vargas had stolen.

  Will had been right. She wanted what Corisco had taken from her in Yavareté—a piece of her pride and some indefinable aspect of her sense of security. She’d always taken care of herself and come out in one piece, until the Woolly Monkey Incident, and that friggin’ jail cell, and the creepy freaking things that had gone on in there, and the awful Fernando with his damned Instamatic.

  Her face paled, and she looked aside—another memory she’d spent the last year avoiding every time it had come to mind.

  “Annie?” Will touched her arm, and she let out a beleaguered sigh. She’d lied to him, and a part of her had known it even as she’d been doing it. She’d been lying a lot since she’d come back. She’d lied to Mad Jack before she’d left, telling him she was on her way to Costa Rica to do cloud forest research—and surprisingly enough, she could live with most of those lies.

  But she didn’t want to have a lie between her and Will. Not him. God, they’d been closer than their skin, and she wanted all of that free of lies.

  “You were right in Barcelos. I came back to do some damage.”

  “To Vargas?” he asked, sounding like he already knew the answer to the question.

  She nodded. “I tried to buy a shoulder-fired, antiaircraft missile and launcher in Manaus, but Johnny Chang absolutely wouldn’t sell me one, saying Fat Eddie would have his head if one of his rocket launchers came up missing—but hell, we saw how much good that did him.”

  “A rocket launcher?”

  She glanced up and caught his gaze, and had to work damned hard not to go all mushy. She had problems, real problems, and she still wanted to kiss him. She wanted to suck on his mouth and crawl on top of him, and she could see where that was going to be a full-time problem from here on out.

  Damn.

  “Yeah. I bought those guns from Chang thinking I was just going to use them for self-defense, but it was a hell of a lot of guns.”

  “A hell of a lot,” he agreed, his eyebrows still arched in surprise.

  “Enough to go upriver and blow Corisco’s operation sky high,” she confessed, “and I knew it. I could have started in Reino Novo and finished in Yavareté and made the world safe for...” Her voice trailed off, and her hand came up to her brow, rubbing at the sudden ache in her temple. Damn, she thought again, forcing herself to take a breath.

  “Safe for what, Annie?”

  “Well,” she said, stalling for a second, trying to put a good face on the destruction that somehow had always been at the back of her mind. “I guess I was going to make the world safe for me and figured a whole lot of other people would benefit from it, especially if I blew up the jail in Yavareté.”

  “What happened there?” His voice was soft but insistent, telling her he hadn’t missed the implications of what she’d said, or of what she hadn’t said, and sitting in the orchid-drenched glade, after making incredible love, he wanted to know the terrible things that had happened in Yavareté.

  She took another breath to steady herself before she spoke. “Technically speaking, it wasn’t rape.” And maybe that’s why she’d spent the last year dismissing what had happened, shrugging it off. She hadn’t been raped, and she’d healed from the beatings with only one small scar to show for her time in chains, one small scar she could have gotten anywhere.

  He smoothed his hand down her arm, his fingers coming to rest in a firm but gentle grip on her wrist. “Technically speaking, then, what was it?”

  She looked up. His eyes were very dark, his face set in tight lines.

  “Have you been to Yavareté?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seen the jail?”

  “It’s cinderblock,” he told her. “Looks unstable and wet and twenty bucks says it’s crawling with cockroaches the size of rats, and rats the size of small dogs. It’s close to the river, has no windows, and during the rainy season, another twenty says it floods.”

  “Yeah, that’s the place.”

  “So what happened?” He moved his hand up to cup her chin and leaned in closer. “You never told Gabriela, but you are going to tell me.”

  Yes. She figured she was.

  “It was very strange.” She glanced away again.

  “How strange?”

  “A ménage a trois of sorts, I guess”—she shrugged—“where my part was to be manacled naked to the wall, which I really hated, with Vargas tripping out on some strange brew he’d cooked up in a pot, and his oversized guard dog, Fernando, clicking away with his friggin’ camera. There was incense and blood, and for three days I pretty much felt like a living sacrifice just waiting to happen. But the worst part”—she paused for a moment, her brows knitting together—“the worst part is I know I got off easy. I wasn’t the first woman to hang naked in that jail cell. There were clothes, some of them bloody, and I was just so damned scared that I was going to end up the same way.”

  “Was there anybody else? Any witnesses?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “People on the river leave Vargas alone. They don’t mess with him, and I think because of that he’s been getting away with murder. I don’t know about the rumors of the virgins on the altar of gold, but I think he’s murdered women in that jail cell.” She lifted her gaze to his. “The place reeks of death.”

  She felt his hand tighten on her chin, saw the spark of fury light in his eyes.

  “Gabriela said he beat you.”

  “Yeah, but he never really touched me, not inside, not where it would have counted. I was his prisoner, but not his victim. I never let him have that.”

  She never let him have that. Will lowered his head on a deep exhalation, releasing her chin and running his hand back through his hair. He’d wanted to know, and now she’d told him. My God. He’d underestimated her from the very beginning. The stories hadn’t been wrong. She was no cat snack. She was Amazon Annie, and not because she’d managed to drag a load of illegal guns up the Rio Negro, or because she’d walked the Rio Vaupes, or because seeing Johnny Chang’s head hadn’t scared the holy shit out of her—but because even three days in the hellhole of Yavareté wasn’t enoug
h to make her forget who she was. He didn’t know many people with that kind of strength.

  “Somebody must have loved you very much when you were growing up,” he said, looking up at her from over the top of his hand. “if it wasn’t your mother, who was it? Your dad?” Amazing Annie, he wanted to call her, with her wild hair, sweet mouth, and those gold-green eyes.

  “Partly,” she said, a small smile curving the corner of her lips. “But I also had Mad Jack, and he told me I was the greatest thing since sliced bread every day of my life after my mom left. For a kid only a couple of years older than me, that was pretty cool.”

  “Pretty cool,” Will agreed softly, falling even more in love. He offered her his hand, and when she took it, he rose to his feet, pulling her with him. “We better get going. We have to catch up with Tutanji and the others.”

  “Yeah. We wouldn’t want to dawdle.” Her smile broadened into a grin. She was so pretty.

  “Yes, we would.” He leaned down and kissed her, then kissed her again. “I’d like to stay here with you, in this place, forever, just let time and Vargas and the river pass us by, but today we’ve got to make tracks.”

  “To Reino Novo?”

  “For me,” he said. “I want to send you north with the rest of the women.”

  “North?” Her eyebrows rose. “Where north?”

  He hesitated for a minute, then pulled a roll of paper out of his quiver. “Fat Eddie’s men aren’t too far behind us, and behind them is another bunch of guys who I think were sent by Vargas.”

  “By Vargas? For what?”

  In answer, he handed her the paper, and when she unrolled it, she swore.

  “Son of a bitch.” It was the wanted poster, and now he knew the picture had been taken in Yavareté. “Where did you get this?”

  “From Tutanji. He was going to turn you in for the money.”

  “Why?” she asked, legitimately confused. The Dakú were the least acculturated Indians in the Amazon. They didn’t even have metal tools, not so much as an axe.

  “Last night, by the fire, Tutanji told me Vargas is holding a hundred Indians and caboclos in cages at Reino Novo, many of them Dakú. He thought he could buy them back with the reward money!”

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I think Vargas is going to kill them for his Night of the Devil.”

  Annie blanched. “A sacrifice. Yes. I can imagine him doing something that horrifying. He likes to kill things. In Yavareté, he used to kill pacas with this special poison he kept in a gold box. Then he’d cook up their brood and drink it with a bunch of other stuff in it. He spilled a lot. Believe me, it was not a pretty sight.”

  “What kind of poison?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure. It’s a powder, an iridescent powder, some kind of hemorrhagic toxin. After he gives it to the animals, all their blood comes gushing out.”

  “Kingmaker beetle,” he said. “The ground-up carapace is an iridescent, hemorrhagic poison, but the beetle itself is extremely rare, worth a hundred times its weight in gold. That’s kind of an expensive way to get paca blood.”

  “Yeah, well, I think he likes the way the blood gushes out way too much to care how much it costs.” Her hand came up in an absent, fluttering gesture, as if she were trying to push the subject away, and he imagined that she was. “I don’t suppose we have time to go back to where the Sucuri sank to try to salvage some of the guns I bought?”

  “No,” he said, reaching up and giving her cheek a brief caress, his gaze skimming over the scar above her temple. “Not today.”

  Whether she’d been victimized by Vargas or not didn’t matter, not anymore. Will was going to kill him, because he wasn’t nearly civilized enough to let the bastard live—not even close.

  CHAPTER ~ 24

  The sky grew overcast as they followed a game trail north through the forest. Annie had traveled with Indians and with other scientists, and Indians were quieter and faster on the trail. Will covered ground like an Indian.

  About a mile or so from the glade of the blue orchids, the first rain washed down through the trees, a gentle shower dampening the hot earth and rising again as steam. In minutes, they were walking through a dreamscape of dripping leaves and white vapor. Will kept a steady pace, and Annie stayed with him. She hadn’t argued with him about going north, but just like the night the Sucuri had sunk, she felt in her gut they should stay together.

  She was about to say as much, when he came to a sudden stop.

  She’d heard it, too—a gunshot. Their eyes met, and when the next shot sounded, they both took off at a run. More shots came after the first two, and the sounds of distant screams and shouting. By the time they reached the place where the attack had taken place, the battle was over and the Indians were gone, but plenty of evidence to what had happened remained. Calabashes of chicha, a fermented drink, had been smashed. Manioc gratings were strewn everywhere. The trees and plants surrounding the bare place in the trail where Tutanji’s tribe had been caught were riddled with bullets, their leaves and fronds in shreds, but there were no dead bodies.

  “Gather what food you can,” Will said after a quick look around. “I’ll be back.”

  He started to disappear into the forest, then stopped and took off his machete.

  “Here,” he said, handing the big knife over. “Don’t be afraid to use it.”

  “I won’t be,” she assured him, slipping the knife through the belt on her shorts.

  “Good.” He kissed her cheek, and then was gone, melting into the trees.

  Annie looked around the trail. The Indians had been disarmed. Bows and blowguns were tossed aside. Everything they had been carrying had been haphazardly thrown into the bush. All the food containers had been smashed, their contents poured onto the ground.

  Even abandoning all standards of sanitation, she barely came up with half a dozen pieces of cassava, the bread made from manioc. Abandoning even more standards, she shoved them into her pockets. By the time Will returned, she’d salvaged what she could.

  “They’re not too far ahead of us,” he told her, breathing hard. “It’s not Fat Eddie’s men. I would have recognized them.”

  “So who is it?”

  “Pishtacos.”

  “The fat-eaters?” Pishtacos were the bogeymen of the Amazon.

  “According to Tutanji, they’ve been raiding all along the river, pishtacos and garimpeiros, and taking Indians to work in the mines. It’s the ones who can’t work anymore who are put into the cages.”

  “Indians don’t last very long in the mines.”

  “And their women fare even less well in the brothels,” Will agreed. “The best I can tell, Vargas must have sent out two parties of men to track you, the group on Fat Eddie’s men’s tail, and one down from the mines, the ones who did this. We’re close enough to the Cauaburi now for them to have gotten this far.”

  “And we’re following the ones who did this, right?”

  “Right. Help me find some darts, and be careful. They’re all tipped with curare.” Curare was the famous hunting poison of the Amazon.

  With a blowgun Will picked up from the side of the trail and a few darts found here and there in the bush and slipped into his quiver, they took off, running along the forest path, following Vargas’s garimpeiros and their captives.

  Hours later, Annie sank down on the trail next to where Will had stopped for a moment, her muscles aching, her breath ragged. She’d been up north for a year, and a week on a riverboat hadn’t done a damn thing to reacclimate her to the equatorial tropics.

  God. She was drenched in sweat, the air temperature felt about a hundred and twenty, and the humidity had been hovering all day between “downpour” and “drizzle.”

  “Tired?” he asked, kneeling down beside her.

  “A little,” she lied, wiping the moisture from her brow.

  “Here,” he said, pulling the top off a gourd kept tied on the same string as his quiver. “Open your mouth.”
>
  She did as he asked, and he scooped out two fingerfuls of a green powder and put it on her tongue. It was like talc, very fine and smoky tasting.

  “Make a paste out of it with your saliva, and just let it sit in your mouth for as long as you can,” he said, dipping out a larger scoop for himself.

  “‘What is it?” she asked.

  “Something from Tutanji.” He smiled. “It’s good for you.”

  They sat silently for a few minutes, waiting for the plant powder to take effect, and eventually, Annie wasn’t so hungry, the heat wasn’t so terrible, and she had the strength to get to her feet.

  When he asked if she was ready to go, she didn’t hesitate. The next time they stopped, dusk was falling and they were nearing the river, and she could hear Vargas’s men and the Indians up ahead. Women were crying. Men were shouting, and Annie wondered how in the hell they were going to save anybody from a bunch of armed men.

  Will had a plan, though, and it started with him taking feathers out of his hair and working them into hers. He tied them on top, a dark green parrot and the black toucan, letting them stand straight up.

  “There,” he said with a quick grin, sitting back on his haunches and checking out his handiwork. “You look like a bird. Now I’m going to make you look like the forest.”

  Using a handful of mud like an artist’s palette, he painted triangles and stripes on her face, and she helped by putting stripes down her arms and legs. When he was finished, he handed her his bow and the gourds on his quiver, keeping only the blowgun.

  “We’ll follow them to their boats and make our move on the beach. You stay hidden where you can see what’s going on, and when the time comes, head for the last boat. That’s the one we’re taking to Reino Novo.”

  She nodded, hoping to hell it was dark by then, because feathers or no feathers, she would stick out like a sore thumb in the company heading down to the riverbank.