Lucy's Money: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 4)

by J. J. Henderson

  The best she could manage was, “Research. And I guess I don’t need to ask why you’re here.” The tone was wounded aggression; she hated the way she sounded.

  “Hey, every time I come to San Jose I come here for a beer. This place puts on a good show, you know?”

  She looked over the room, looked at him, said, “I’ve seen better,” and then left.

  Radiating feminist angst, she was left alone on her ten minute walk back to the hotel, where she slipped in the door and hiked upstairs, exhausted. She quickly stripped, went to bed, and fell asleep before ten pm. In the morning she had a river to run.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TORTUGUERO

  Two days later Lucy found herself on board a rapido bus headed to the jungle lowlands of Costa Rica’s northern Caribbean coast. For twenty minutes, in a pounding rain, barrelling downhill over the switchbacks and precipitous slopes of the road through Braulio Carrillo National Park, the bus driver had been maneuvering to pass a huge truck laden with fat hardwood logs—reminders that in spite of its tiny size and vocal ecological constituency, Costa Rica’s fabulous forests were still preyed upon by the vultures of extractive industry. But environmental issues did not occupy Lucy’s mind at the moment. She was worried. Terrified. Visibility sucked, major potholes pocked the road, a cliff rose up on one side and fell away on the other, and several dozen cars were lined up behind them, every single one by its pushy, honking, headlight-flashing presence goading the bus driver to make a macho move and pass the truck. Every time the driver yanked the bus out to the left, ready to go for it, a convoy of cars led by a single horn-blasting truck or bus inching uphill towards them sent him dodging back into his slot behind the logging truck. Another near miss. Each time he made this move, Lucy watched, horrified, white-knuckled and breathless, awaiting the head-on collision. The driver hunched forward in a lurid cocoon of dangly plastic decorations and snapshots of his sweetie and a blaring AM radio, blithely chewing gum and talking on a cell phone while juggling 40 or 50 lives. Apparently Lucy alone was concerned; looking back from her second row seat she could see that no one paid the least attention to the driver. People read, looked out the window, chatted, ate, fed their children; one woman knit a pair of tiny pink socks.

  She gazed out again. The mist parted, and she saw a waterfall pouring a hundred feet down a green cliff. Along the roadside, thick stands of umbrella plants wavered and shimmied under the weight of the rain. She gave up her grip to fate, leaned back in her seat, and opened her notebook. She was not going to die today. She didn’t deserve it. Not after yesterday, when she’d spent seven dull-as-dirt hours on the phone, verifying information about hotels and restaurants till her ears bled data. She felt a certain satisfaction at having completed a good chunk of the rote work. Now she was adventure-bound. The raft trip had been great, a whitewater thrill bomb, but she’d been in somebody’s else hands. Now she was on her own again.

  They bombed down onto flatter terrain and after while entered bananaland, where the jungle had been leveled and replaced by endless acres of banana trees, each displaying bunches of bananas enclosed in bright blue plastic bags. The bags would be filled with insecticide and chemicals deemed essential to marketing bananas where winter was cold and people liked their fruit in uniform: industrial agriculture gone tropical. Later, after the harvest, many of the bags ended up in the Caribbean, where they would be mistaken for jellyfish and eaten by turtles that would then choke to death. Unlike the complex ecosystems of the rainforest and jungle, mono-crop plantings like bananas couldn’t hold the ground; when the hard rains fell—it rained over 400 inches a year on Costa Rica’s east coast—the earth from these fields washed into the rivers and down into the Caribbean, where it settled on fragile coral reefs and destroyed them.

  Lucy sighed. Sometimes environmental awareness was such a pain.

  After snaking through the last section of the highway, a noisy tangle of depots, trucks, railcar containers, gas stations, and gritty roadside operations devoted to the needs of industrial agribusiness, they passed the Chinese cemetery on the hill and crept into Puerto Limón, the run-down capital of the Costa Rican province of Limón.

  Puerto Limón felt down-at-heels, faded, forgotten. Lucy knew why the town suffered: it belonged to Costa Rica’s black citizens, brought over in the 19th century from Jamaica to work the railroad, now defunct; the cacao crop, destroyed by monilia fungus and never recovered; and the banana crop, increasingly mechanized. These black Ticos had been legally banned from traveling over the mountains to San Jose for decades, and though the ban had been lifted years back, barriers still existed between Caribbean Costa Rica and the rest of the country.

  The bus stopped in front of a raunchy old station just off the town square. Lucy hauled her small pack a few quick blocks down a promenade towards the waterfront. Lined with run-down tourist shops and populated by a few young men wearing the furtive mien of the marginal hustle, the brick-paved, pedestrians-only promenade looked like a high concept tourist-attracting amenity that had gone bad fast. But down at the waterfront end she checked into a breezy, pink and blue two-story hotel—only slightly decrepit—tucked into a nice spot between a flowery park full of coconut trees and a small beach. She took possession of her room, then got out a camera and hit the streets.

  She put her camera away and headed back to her hotel as evening fell, tropical style, day to night in a few scant minutes. There, she ate rice, beans and chicken—the Costa Ricans called these basic plates casados, and every restaurant served them—and then holed up in her room with a novel, hoping for an early night. Loud disco music drifting across the park kept her awake until after two. She woke exhausted at dawn, dragged herself out of bed, put her poncho on over her clothes, and headed out into the morning downpour in search of a boatman to take her up the canals to Tortuguero.

  On the docks at Moin, a five minute cab ride north from Limón, Lucy found three boats to choose from. Looking at a long haul up a jungle waterway, weather and conditions unknown, she opted for Doris, a boat with padded seats and clear plastic rain-stopping curtains extending down from the roof canopy. As an added bonus, the captain of Doris—a dignified, fiftyish black man called Carnation James, who’d named the boat after his wife—turned out to be an expert wildlife spotter and howler monkey caller. Fifteen minutes into the trip the rain let up, and after slinging back the plastic curtains to open up the view of the jungle on both banks of the canal, James woke the dozing Lucy with a series of barking calls that perfectly mimicked the howler monkey. A troop of howlers barked back. James cut the engine and handed Lucy a pair of binoculars. He pointed at a green wall of jungle. “Right there, Miss Lucy,” he said. “Bunch a howlers.”

  Lucy found them, had a good look, and handed the glasses back. “They’re a cute lot, aren’t they?” she said. “But what a racket!”

  “They got this special voice box,” James said, tapping his chest. “Make ‘em sound big, eh? Hey, hush now, there’s a caiman.” He pointed at a log-like form on the edge of the canal, and handed Lucy the glasses again. Sure enough, that log had eyes. As James coasted near, it gave her a toothy grin then sank into the depths.

  Over the course of a three-hour cruise through the jungle-lined canals and rivers that served as the only road north to Tortuguero, in intermittent rain showers, they spotted seven Jesus Christ lizards, so called because they walked on water, four sloths, sixteen bird species including three types of parrot, a trio of muddy, somnolent alligators, four blue morphos, and busy troops of white-faced, squirrel, and howler monkeys. And then they arrived at Tortuguero, the town. Lucy got off at the town dock, fished out a camera, slung her pack over her shoulder, and spent the next hour photographing Tortuguero. Nestled beneath a grove of coconut palms on a narrow band of land separating the river from the sea, the hamlet consisted of a few dozen scattered wooden houses and small hotels or cabinas linked by sandy footpaths snaking through rough, tufty grass. A single sand road ran from one end of town to the other.
Lizards skittered everywhere, chased by gulls, skinny cats, and skinnier dogs. Lucy photographed kids on a soccer field, dogs on a path, monkeys in a tree, big waves crashing on an empty beach. They warned her not to swim: there were undertows, riptides, sharks. No matter, the windblown, brown-stained sea did not look at all inviting.

  Lucy bought a soda at the town’s tiny grocery, then paid two dollars to a guy with a motorized canoe to take her a mile upriver to the Turtlehead Hotel, Manny Sky’s Caribbean operation. He was comping her for a night, with lunch, dinner, breakfast, and a boat tour of the national park thrown in. He’d even offered to fly her over from San Jose in one of the company planes, since he had an airstrip on the beach across the river from the hotel, but Lucy wanted to take the boat trips up and down the canals and river. It wasn’t often you got to a place that couldn’t be reached by road.

  Lucy showed up in time for rice, beans, and fresh fish at a table shared with Francesca Marquez, a local girl from Limón, now river guide and hotel manager, well-acquainted with every form of plant, animal, and scoundrel in Caribbean Costa Rica. “North of here,” she said to Lucy as they lunched beneath an umbrella on the hotel’s riverside deck, “you get up between Sarapiqui and Barra del Colorado and the bad boys come around, on the beach, in the river, the canals, every place. You got leftover contras from Nicaragua living up there in the jungle, don’t know anything but fighting and hiding, and you got boats and little planes coming in from Colombia, looking for a place to land, reconnoiter, refuel, even maybe transfer from boat to plane, plane to boat, a load of contraband, you know, cocaine, maybe trade for guns, maybe trade for money, I don’t know, but this place up there, Barra del Colorado, nothing but a couple fishing camps, more jungle like this, a woman alone you don’t need be going there, see?” She smiled. “You stick here, we look around the jungle in the morning, then you go south, see Puerto Viejo and Cahuita, then go back to San Jose, do your work, OK?”

  Lucy shrugged. “I was just curious about what’s up there. I mean you’d think the farther you get from civilization the wilder it gets, right?”

  “Jungle’s same up there as is here. Same monkeys, crocodiles, poison dart frogs and such. And you don’t want to be getting on one of those boats that go up the San Juan to Sarapiqui. Too strange in the jungle round there. Last year two German girls, they got kidnap by some boys up there. Cost their daddies each ten thousand US.”

  “Kidnappers? Who were they?”

  “Former contra, dope dealer, I don’t know. This man called Manuel, trying to be like—you know that man in Mexico, the revolutionary guy in Chiapas?”

  “Subcommandante Marcos? Yeah, I know who he is, but what could a former contra possibly have in common with—”

  “Nothing. That’s the point. This man put on some revolution talk to get people sympathy. But he just a bad boy want some money. Got it, too, and they never found him. Still up there somewhere, unless maybe he go up into Nicaragua or down Panama, Colombia. The girls were released OK, though, so no one thinks so bad of him. Specially since they have a picture of one of the girls kissing him, put it in the paper when they still in his hands. Some weird shit, as you might say up in the USA, eh?”

  “I had no idea,” said Lucy. “Costa Rica’s supposed to be the safety zone for tourists.”

  “Oh, it’s very safe, long as you avoid a few trouble spots. That’s true in the U.S. too, wouldn’t you say?” she smiled. “I mean, I’ve never even been to the U.S. but I know there are places in Miami, Detroit, New York, or Los Angeles where I should not go, where I could get shot because everybody has a gun, is this not true?”

  “Well, yeah, but those are cities, not jungles.”

  “Whatever,” Francesca said. “Listen, I have to go back to work. Got two or three planeloads of guests coming in this afternoon. I’ll see you at dinner or on the boat, first thing in the morning.”

  Lucy and six others boarded the hotel tour boat after breakfast at six a.m., and soon Francesca Marquez steered the quiet-running craft into a side canal and plunged into the water network that laced through Tortuguero National Park. Francesca had a talent for spotting wildlife and within an hour they’d seen dozens of monkeys, caiman, Jesus Christ lizards, parrots, and a host of other creatures. Francesca swerved with practiced ease through the canals, completely assured of her whereabouts as she worked the boat up obscure, blackwater passages, pointing out orchids in the trees, interesting birds, bizarre bugs, and troops of cavorting monkeys.

  Their destination for a snack break off the boat was a small cabin on a small island in a slow-moving stream, where a pair of young Canadian men were living for the season, researching wildlife and generally watching over the jungle. The Canadians had been there for seven weeks on a stay meant to last until February. Along with her tourists Francesca carried two plastic containers of supplies—food and drink, batteries, insect repellent, books, magazines, and a couple of pieces of mail—for the Canadians.

  They reached the cabin around 9 a.m. A motorized dinghy floated alongside a small dock. From there, a short path led to the cabin. Francesca pulled up to the dock next to the dinghy and waited for the boys to emerge. When they failed to appear she called out. “Clive, Francois, we here boys, come and get it!” No one responded. She clambered out, tied the boat up, and then helped her passengers from boat to pier. They ambled up towards the cabin and had a look around. Francesca headed into the cabin, and came out a moment later. “It’s odd,” she said. “All their gear’s here, but they not here. Strange.” She looked worried.

  “Let’s eat,” said one passenger. “I’m starved.”

  “Yeah. Wow, what a trip it was getting up here,” said another.

  “My butt hurts,” whined a third. “And we didn’t even see one jaguar. I thought there would be jaguars.”

  “What’s up?” said Lucy quietly to Francesca. “Maybe they’re just, I don’t know, doing some exploring?”

  “Can’t walk more than fifty meters from this cabin without running into deep water,” Francesca said. “With alligators. And they have just the one boat there,” she nodded at the dinghy, then put on a smile. “Hey, folks, there’s some snacks in that bag. I need to call the hotel on the two-way radio inside, let them know we’re OK, so help yourself. You can set it up on that picnic table.” While the others set up to eat, Lucy followed her into the cabin.

  Lucy’s eyes quickly adjusted to the dim light. Two cots, two tables, some shelves holding books and food containers, a portable stove. A small outhouse visible through a window on the back wall. A short wave radio sat on one table. Francesca fired it up. She played with dials for a moment, then put on the headset and started talking. “The boys not here, the boat is here, I don’t know.” She paused. “No, no sign. Nothing seems to be taken. No.” She looked at Lucy. “Did you hear anything sound like a motor, other than ours, today?”

  “You mean like another boat?” Lucy said. Francesca nodded. “No,” Lucy said. “Nothing but birds, bugs, and monkeys.”

  “No, I didn’t, and my guests didn’t either, so—” Francesca stopped as she was interrupted, then went on. “Chain saws? No. I thought those men had been—Really! Jesus Mary and Joseph. Yes. We will. OK. Bye.” She hung up.

  “What’s up?” Lucy asked.

  “Well, one of these boys’ jobs is to—there have been some loggers cutting down and stealing hardwood trees in the park last few years, since you can make so much money off that wood nowadays. One job for the boys is to scare these loggers off, you know, just by bein’ here. They arrested these four men and put them in jail for a while but they just now tell me they got out of jail last month and so maybe, I don’t know. “Anything can happen back here, you know. Not like you got your police station around the corner. They’s also some animal poachers around, shoot a jaguar for its skin. Steal parrots out of the trees. I wish I know.”

  “So what now? I mean, are we in danger?”

  “No, no. I’m just worried is all. I like these boys. The
y doing good work here, you know? Manny’s going to get after the national police to see if he can get a couple of officers to bring a boat in here and look around. Meanwhile, we should grab a bite to eat and then head back. I know you going to meet Carnation and his boat at eleven.”

  While Francesca went to tend to her guests, Lucy wandered off behind the cabin. She followed a small trail to the bank of another canal. As she approached she heard something slither into the water, and two large black birds flew up into the air, shrieking at her in what sounded like irritation.

  She saw it as she reached the river bank, and covered her mouth, almost retching at the sight: white, bloated, half-eaten, clothes trailing, legs on the muddy bank, head facedown in the murk, a human carcass swarming with the kinds of small things that feed on flesh. She screamed, “Oh my God!” as she turned and ran, stumbling back towards the cabin, nearly crashing into Francesca who’d come running when she heard Lucy scream. “Back there,” Lucy said, looking back. “One of your—boys—I think.”

  “Keep the others away,” Francesca said. But that was not possible. And so in the course of the next hour they all saw the bloated, rotting, half-eaten corpse, and they clustered fearfully on the dock while Francesca with Lucy’s help did what needed to be done: called for help, pulled the corpse onto the shore, covered it with plastic bags they’d carried food in. And then waited for the men from the lodge to arrive, followed by officials from the Tortuguero National Park headquarters.

  The story became a trip and a fall and a hungry alligator. A case of really bad luck. But Lucy had seen the corpse; and yes, it had been snacked on by alligators, and birds, and reptiles, and bugs, and fish. But Lucy had seen gunshot wounds once or twice in her life and no wild animal carnivorous or otherwise had shot the gun that put the bullet hole in the side of Francois’ head, even if Francesca insisted that a gator had done it. Lucy was in no mood to argue the point.