“No, I insist, Lucy, this is your job,” he said, laughing as he rolled over onto his back. She reached down and found him.
“My goodness, Krish, you’re—”
“Ready for action. Yes.”
She moved down, put her mouth on him for a moment. He groaned, pulled her around and plunged his face into her as she unwrapped the condom and slipped it on. She was ready when he swung round on top of her, and slid inside, and she screamed softly into his mouth as he kissed her. “God, Krish, that’s—aaah, yes, that’s it,” she said, as he moved in her, his body pressing down on her. He was intent, pushing at her, pushing harder, harder, with the hard ground soft beneath her back through the sleeping bag and the tent, stones pressing into her, vines slithered around her, the sound of animals enveloping her as he pushed and danced in her body, kissing her, breaking her down and waking her again to the pleasures of a new lover. She lost herself in it for a time.
Sex in the jungle. Wow, she thought, as he rolled off of her after while. They were quiet. “That was really…”
“Sexy,” he said. “You are really sexy, Lucy.”
“Hey, thanks, you’re not so…”
“Gotta pee,” he said, and got up into a sitting position. “But I really don’t want to go out there.”
“Me either,” she said, and sat up. They laughed. “Where the hell are we?” She said.
“Listen,” he said. They were quiet. The jungle buzzed and moaned, cried and sang. “It’s the jungle booty call,” he whispered.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said. She unzipped the tent and crawled out into heavy darkness, and rain coming down on the trees overhead. She got about a foot off the edge of the tarp, did her business, then put herself back together. She was back inside the tent, soaking wet, a few seconds later. “God, it is so fucking dark and wet out there we could be at the bottom of the ocean,” she said.
“Except that the sharks are in the river a couple of yards away,” Krish said. “Hey, Lucy, that was…”
“Say no more, Krish,” Lucy said, the realist re-emerging. “Let’s get some sleep, and see how we feel in the morning, when the tequila’s gone and we’re still here.”
“Right on, Lucy,” he said. “Now it’s my turn to brave the storm.” He slipped outside. Lucy slid down into her sleeping bag and zipped up. She was nearly asleep when he came back in a minute later. “So I’ve got my watch alarm set for three a.m. It’s not even eight so we should get plenty of sleep. You got your camera all set up?” he said quietly.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Kiss me once more,” she said softly. He did so, and then she drifted off as he undressed and crawled into his own bag, then turned off the flashlight. As she faded, exhausted in all ways, she scarcely heard the thrumming roar of the rain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A WILD NIGHT AND THE FOLLOWING DAY
Lucy woke in darkness with a slight tequila headache and looked at her watch. It was 3:45 a.m. She looked at Krish, asleep about eighteen inches away. She had had sex with him last night. She didn’t feel badly about it. In fact her crotch tingled a little, a pleasant sense memory. The rain had ceased, judging by the silence, or rather, by the absence of rain, allowing her to hear more clearly the primal sounds of bugs and birds and Krish, snoring lightly. She had another look. He looked almost angelic in repose, and she experienced a moment’s regret as she realized that she would never leave her life to live his, and he would never leave his life to live hers. Beneath the bug and bird sounds she heard another: the serene music of the river. She pulled on her shorts, then laid quietly and savored the sweet strangeness of the moment. Reaching for her camera, she hesitated. Wasn’t that another sound she heard? “Krish!” she hissed. “Krish, wake up!”
He stirred, opened his eyes. “What?” he whispered.
“I hear a motor. They must be coming. Listen.” He did. It grew clearer now, the rising and falling of an engine. They needed to get their asses in gear.
“You’re right!” He sat up and looked at his watch. “Jesus. It’s not yet four.”
“I know. It’s the middle of the night. I hope they use lanterns to do whatever it is they do. There’s no way I can shoot pictures in the dark.”
“Or we can see, for that matter. God, I’m starving. Did we forget to eat last night?” He rooted around in his pack. “Energy bar?”
“Sure.” She took one. They ate quickly while listening to the distant but clearly approaching engine sounds. “At least it’s not raining,” Lucy said as she unzipped the tent and climbed out. Krish followed her, pulling on his pants. “God, I haven’t slept on the ground in years. Feels like I rolled on the rocks all night.”
He smiled, acknowledging what had happened. “You did, Lucy. And I must say, you rock when you roll on the rocks.” She laughed. He approached her, a little tentative, then put his hands on her shoulders. She leaned towards him, and they kissed gently. “You think this ground is hard, you should try a night on the slope of an active volcano.”
She stood back, and looked at him carefully. “I thought we were pretty damned active ourselves. But…um, Krish, now that we’ve—well, listen, I would just as soon keep what happened—what happens between us as simple and straightforward as possible.”
“Does that mean we just had a one night stand? What’s done is done?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I mean I don’t know,” she added. “That sounds so cold, and what happened was anything but cold, don’t you think? But for the moment I would like to—look, man, I live in New York—I even have a kind of regular boyfriend there, believe it or not— and you live in—“
“Fortuna, Costa Rica. Where the hell is that? A boyfriend? That’s the way it is, eh?”
“I think so.”
“But you’ll be around a few days more?”
“Maybe. And maybe we’ll—”
“Have another night? I hope so, Lucy. In a bed, with pillows, music, and champagne. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Sounds romantic.”
“As hell.” He abruptly got business-like. “Yes. And that is most assuredly a boat. Let’s stash the gear and get ready.” They shook out shoes to scatter the scorpions, then put them on. They quickly collapsed and bagged the tent, stashed the bags and tent in their own little borrowed boat, then worked their way down a tiny trail to within fifty feet of a small clearing on the riverbank that Maria had ID’ed as the meeting spot. Soon the noise of the boats grew louder, and after a moment they spotted a low yellow light coming towards them over the water from upstream. As they waited quietly, another light appeared from the south: another boat, only this one sounded larger, louder, more powerful.
As the two boats approached the riverbank clearing simultaneously from opposite directions, Lucy poked her lens out from behind a cover of oversized, bright green and yellow leaves and started shooting, wide open in the absent light. At least the boat lights would show up. The boat coming downstream blinked a light three times, and the other boat responded with three blinks of its own. A moment later both boats converged and ran up onto a bare strip of mud that divided the clearing from the river. Half-a-dozen yards separated them. A man in camouflage fatigues got out of the smaller boat, essentially a rickety –looking motorized canoe, and hung a bright lantern from a nearby branch; and so it was by lantern light that Lucy and Krish watched and photographed as a second man in the boat handed him three crates, one at a time, each containing something wrapped in a blanket. At the same time, the gun-toting cowboy guard Augusto from the Rancho got out of the other, a “cigarette” boat. A light flicked on from the side of the cigarette boat, further brightening the lantern light. From inside the cigarette boat a skinny guy with long hair and a beard handed Augusto a long wooden crate. Then Augusto and the other guys greeted each other like old friends, doing their business while the bearded guy stayed in the cigarette. Lucy snapped away, praying the sounds of the river and the bugs and the birds would mask the sounds of her camera as s
he shot the two guys in fatigues inspecting the two automatic rifles in the crate, looking over the boxes of ammunition, counting the cash, and then taking turns sticking a finger into a plastic bag to sniff/sample the cocaine. They whooped like cowboys as they got their little rush. Augusto cursorily poked at the three crates as if making sure the babies were breathing; that the product was delivered as advertised, and thus still had value. On getting poked one baby began squalling loudly, provoking a round of laughter from the men. At that ugly, mirthful racket another baby began to cry. That inspired Ernesto to poke the third again, and then that one, too, let out a yelp and started crying. Three screaming babies on the river bank, guns and cocaine, men in camouflage fatigues, aglow in lamp and boatlight. The scene was so singularly weird Lucy could hardly keep shooting. She just wanted to stare, quietly aghast, but she was a disciplined shooter and kept firing away. Then her foot slipped as she shifted position, and her sliding foot caught on a branch which broke with a slightly too-loud snap. Krish gripped her arm as the three men stopped talking, stopped laughing, stopped everything and looked their way. They froze. All three babies abruptly stopped crying. The men stared at Krish and Lucy; directly at them, straight through the darkness and the wet green leaves into her scared blue eyes, Lucy thought, crouched and cramped and hardly daring to breathe as she sensed, or imagined she sensed, some sort of large green and purple venomous bug sniffing around her leg, contemplating a crawl uptown. It was not a bug but trickling sweat. Lucy never sweated except when having sex, or so she’d claimed, but would never again make that claim, she told herself, if she got out of this one.
A commotion abruptly broke out in the brush ten feet away from her, and suddenly an enormous dark piglike form burst out of the undergrowth and charged towards the three men and the three babies, swerving at the last moment and crashing back into the brush. Augusto whipped out his pistol and fired blindly once, twice, three times into the bushes after the tapir—Lucy had just enough time to recognize it and think, damn, lucky thing to see a tapir in the wild. Then Augusto holstered his pistol as the babies again yowled and flocks of birds screamed and rose into the dawn sky in terror of the impossibly loud gunshots, and the three men cracked up and started yammering in Spanish about shooting the fucking pig and how could he miss and hey amigo I would have taken that peeggie down if I had this gun loaded, see, as one of the contras picked up a rifle and pointed it wildly at the brush. “Kapow,” he mimed, then swung it around, accidentally, it seemed, towards Lucy and Krish, still frozen in their green hideout. “Kapowee!” he said, faking a shot that would have taken Lucy’s head off had it been real.
Lucy had read many a book and seen many a movie where people wet their pants in sheer terror, and for a moment there she almost accomplished that act. But then the guy lowered the rifle and laughed again, stuck his finger in the plastic bag and honked another taste of the coke, grimaced and howled some ugly thing in Spanish, and fired another shot into the air, setting off the crying babies yet again. As they screamed Lucy promised herself she would never, ever do cocaine again—not that she had in years, but she’d never seen it in such ugly light—and then they watched quietly, and waited, as the two guys climbed into the canoe full of drugs and guns. Augusto shoved them off, one of them pull-started the engine, and they chugged away upstream.
Lucy and Krish watched Augusto bark orders at the skinny bearded guy in the speedboat. He handed the crated babies in—they’d gone quiet again—and then shoved off and clambered aboard himself. They turned off their lights and headed south, upstream.
Krish said, “Quick now, into our boat.”
“We can’t keep up with them, Krish,” Lucy said. “That thing’ll do a hundred miles an hour.”
“I know, but they’re probably going to the Rancho and its just upstream a little ways,” he said as he pulled their little skiff out of the brush and untied it. “Maybe two or three miles. If we can get there right behind them maybe we can—”
“We can what?” Lucy said.
“I don’t know just yet,” Krish said. “But I have this.” He held up a dark, silver blue pistol. “Had it ever since I did my military time.”
“Jesus Christ, K,” Lucy said. “You’re crazy.”
“No, I’m not crazy. We are on a mission, Lucy. You saw what those people were like, here and back at the Rancho. We’ve got to get those babies back to wherever they stole them from.”
“You’re right.” They got in the boat, found paddles, and launched, headed south against the north-flowing current. The other boat had disappeared around a bend, so Krish took a chance and fired up the engine. They’d never stay close otherwise.
“You’re right, Lucy, I must be crazy. Or maybe I’m just really bored with running my business,” he said after a moment, as they rounded a bend. They couldn’t see the speedboat ahead, but still heard its distant motor throb. “Or atoning for the death of my friend. Or dreaming about having another dream like the one we shared last night. Otherwise why would I risk my neck like this?”
“Hey, don’t do it for me, it’s for those kids and their mamas.”
“You’re right, but still. Bad shit happens to kids every day all over the world and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.”
“That’s exactly the point. There is something we can do about it here and now.”
“Oh, by the way, chica, you probably didn’t notice but when those maniacs fired those shots at the tapir and all the birds hit the sky—” he paused.
“Yeah?”
“One of them was a Harpy Eagle. Even in that pale lamplight I caught a glimpse as it lifted into the darkness. It was the first time I’ve ever seen one in the wild. They are extremely rare, and very shy. I’m not really a birder but I’ve been around so many birdwatching tourists this past few years I’ve started keeping a mental list, and the Harpy Eagle was the last one I needed to check off. The only bird in Costa Rica that I hadn’t seen. Until this night.”
“Wow. Between the bad guys with their guns and that crazy tapir I hardly even looked up.”
“What a strange moment that was.” He fell silent. They were chugging upstream, headed south on a river in raw early light. Krish fished a map out and had a look.
“Here’s where we are,” he said softly, pointing at a spot on a minutely-detailed regional map of northern Costa Rica. “The river runs back here. This is where that dock we saw from the Rancho is at. Just around another bend or two, I suspect. The gate to the Rancho is here. And there may well be an alligator or two in the neighborhood,” he said quietly, and switched off his light. “So what do you think, Miss Lucy?”
“Jesus Kee-rist,” she said, playing her flashlight over the water. “Krish, why didn’t you tell me this shit before we got out here?”
“I didn’t know until I got here and saw the water, Lucy. I’ve never been on this part of the river before. But seriously, aside from maybe getting wet, we’ll be fine. The odds of a gator attack are slim to none. OK?”
Ahead now on the right bank they spotted the dock, jutting out into the water, cigarette boat tied alongside. Turning off the motor, Krish turned the boat towards shore and paddled in beneath the trees. He jumped out in squishy mud and pulled the boat onshore. “Now, here’s the plan,” he said. “I think it might work anyway. Oh fuck,” he said softly, interrupting himself. “Keep moving quick as you can now. Up from the water on the double now.”
“What?” She asked, then spotted them, two red eyes glowing in Krish’s flashlight beam, on the bank downstream, where darkness lingered under the trees. “Oh my God,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” Krish said. “He’s not moving—so far. Just keep going. We’re almost—”
“Oh shit,” Lucy said, as the gator slipped into the water.
“Step on it, Lucy. Get your ass out!” She lunged forward, crawling quickly up the steep bank, then turned around as Krish scrambled up behind her. “Ow fuck,” he snapped, as the water boiled behind him. “God damn!�
� he said, kicking and thrashing as he grabbed a tree root to haul himself up the bank. “Bloody beast!” Lucy pointed her light at him. One of his rubber boots was gone. The croc was nowhere to be seen.
“Jesus, that was close,” she said.
“Hope he chokes on it, the motherfucker,” Krish said. “Damn.” He reached into his pack. “I’ve got some sandals in here somewhere—” he pulled out a pair of hiking sandals. “Here, have the other boot, you bastard,” he said, jerking it off his foot and tossing it into the river.
“Are you all right?” Lucy whispered. “God, scary enough for you?”.
“Yes, definitely. But I’m fine,” he said. “I must say, that was as close a call as I’ve had of late.”
“No shit, amigo,” Lucy said. “And they told me Costa Rica was a great place for tourists.”
He flashed his light along the bank, then turned it off. “There’s a trail,” he said softly. “Here’s what I’m thinking.” He told her his plan. “Let’s go.”
As she followed him, gun in hand feeling very heavy and scary, she whispered, “So you’re going to take out Augusto while I hold the gun on the other guy. Then we get the babies and—?”
“We either cut out in their kick-ass boat—if we can get the keys—or if we’ve managed to keep things quiet enough we’ll leave the babies in the boat for the moment and have a look around. That’s what you wanted, right?”
“Yeah. I guess so.” The trail led between the creek on their left and a living tree/barbed wire fence on the right. The fence was in fairly good repair, and at least six feet high, with multiple criss-crossing strands. A serious piece of security.
After a moment they stopped in the trees fifty feet from the dock. They could see Augusto and the bearded kid on the dock, unloading the crated babies, securing the boat, and taking care of business. A gate between the dock and the fence had been left open. Beyond it they could see a trail that led off through the trees. “I bet that leads right to the rancho,” he said.
Lucy's Money: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 4) Page 17
