Yet there she stood, not five feet from shore with the day bearing down on her and a crumpled piece of sweat-stained paper in her pocket telling her she was doomed.
“Could you speed this up a little, Carlos?” she muttered to the old man in a whispered aside.
“Yeah, Carlos,” Travers mumbled in Portuguese, slanting her a wry glance from beneath his lashes. “The lady is on a schedule, a tight schedule.”
Annie didn't deign to respond. She obviously hadn't spoken softly enough, but she hardly cared. The important thing was to get under way.
“Tight schedule,” Travers repeated, a grin flickering across his mouth, and she dared to hope. He could drink himself into a coma after he got her to Santa Maria, and he probably would, but his grin was an undeniable sign of life.
He was coming around.
“I was on a schedule,” she said doggedly and watched his grin broaden before he turned away and buried his face behind his hands with another soft groan. Long swaths of sun-streaked hair fell over his fingers. For a moment, she feared he'd peaked and was heading back down. Then he let out another soft sound and dragged his hands back through his hair.
Relief flooded through her. He was definitely coming around.
Three days, she told herself, that's as long as she needed him to stay on course. Three days if everything went as planned, which of course it never did on the river. She knew that as well as he, but she was working with a schedule anyway, a tight, year-long schedule with only one goal—to get herself back to the exact spot where she'd been standing when that woolly monkey had fallen out of the sky and landed in her arms.
Carlos had given a slight nod in answer to her question and was shaking his shinki-shinki a bit faster. When the old man handed her a cigar out of his pocket, she didn't hesitate to take it. She bit off the end, spit it out the porthole, and bent toward the stove. With a few good puffs, she had the cigar glowing and smoking.
Good God, Will thought, squinting over his linked fingers and watching her blow a smoke ring into the air. Carlos cackled behind him, and Will could imagine that the old man would get a kick out of smoke rings, the drama of them if nothing else.
At Carlos's direction, Annie Parrish applied her healing witchery to him, wreathing him in cloud after diaphanous cloud of tobacco smoke, following a path set by the shaman's sheaf of leaves. The gringa doctor's help seemed to inspire the old man to new heights of singing. Carlos's voice rose higher, the words of the chant filling the small cabin, bound by smoke and the underlying shhh-shhh-whoosh of the Piperacea leaves.
It was at times like these when Will really began to wonder what had happened to his life. He'd had such a promising future. He could have eventually left the tropics and gone back to a professorship at Harvard. He could have written more books, done a lecture tour, become the director of some famous botanical garden, and in his waning years, dictated his biography to some eager graduate student. God knows, the possibilities had seemed endless.
But here he was, his head splitting in two, hungover in a hammock hanging inside a bucket of a boat, going up the Black River one more time, maybe for the last time. He barely had two hundred reais to his name, including Annie Parrish's fare, and didn't need the bare two hundred he had. Sometimes he felt as if he'd disappeared, a feeling Tutanji would only confirm. Dr. William Sanchez Travers had disappeared. Tutanji had called him into the rain forest, and there in the green twilight of a lost glade he'd been devoured by the old shaman's spirit anaconda.
At least that was Tutanji's story. As Will remembered it, there had been way too much blood for the snake to have been a spirit.
Another wreath of smoke settled about his head, and Will realized he was feeling better. Carlos was no Tutanji, and a store-bought cigar was not a forest shaman's roughly rolled sheaf of green tobacco, but the healing ritual was working. He'd expected it to work. He'd been in the forest too long not to take comfort where it was offered, and too long to underestimate the power of a shaman's spells—even a citified, acculturated shaman like Carlos.
When the old man offered him the cup of the steeped brew, he downed it in one foul, bitter-tasting, leaf-laden swallow. Instantly, a trembling seized him, and all Will could do was hold on for the ride.
Jamming the cigar between her teeth, Annie put one hand on his shoulder to help hold him steady and lifted her other arm to check her watch through the clouds of smoke—eight o'clock. Great, she thought. Carlos was moving at record speed. Will Travers was shaking like a wet dog, and if he didn't fall out of his hammock and knock himself out, they should be on the river within the hour.
A flash on the water drew her gaze to the window, and she swore, one crude word filled with all the frustration of the morning. A boat was approaching the dock from downstream, coming around the point that separated RBC from Manaus.
“We've got company,” she said, looking around for a pair of binoculars, knowing down to the marrow of her bones that her luck had just run out.
“I'm not in the mood,” Travers grumbled, his body slowly settling into a state of calmness beneath her hand, stage two of Carlos's mystery cure.
There wasn't a botanist or biochemist at RBC who hadn't tried to analyze the ingredients in the hangover infusion. All they'd ever come up with was a few innocuous plants that could never elicit such a dramatic, but brief, physical reaction. The secret had to be in the old man's well-guarded admixtures.
“Then maybe you should fire this tub up and get us out of here, before we get boarded by—” She paused and reached for the binoculars she spotted hanging above the wheel. Putting them to her eyes, she let out another curse. “By the police.”
“No one boards the Sucuri,” he told her simply, and at the sound of the words, an ill-omened trickle of fear wound down her spine.
Lowering the binoculars, she turned to face him, her mind coming to a slow halt, the police forgotten.
“Sucuri?” she repeated. “That's the name of this boat?”
The wan flash of his grin as he rose to his feet was hardly reassuring, and Annie had to wonder why a woman with a morbid fear of snakes would stay on a boat named after the biggest, most powerfully gargantuan serpent to ever thrash a path through the Amazon—and contrary to what people thought, snakes did thrash, especially giant anacondas, sucuri, especially when they had something big in their coils, something about the size of a female Wyoming botanist.
She knew it all for a fact.
She'd seen it a thousand times in her dreams.
CHAPTER 6
The shrill blast of an airhorn drew her attention back to the open window and the boat bearing down on them. Dropping the cigar into the empty pot, she gripped the sill with her hands and leaned forward. Even without the binoculars, she could now see the insignia of the Manaus police painted on the small speedboat, and she didn't know which was worse, the launch headed toward her, or the one she was standing on.
Sucuri. Who in the hell would name their boat after the world's biggest snake? Herpetologists could argue all day long about which was longer, anacondas or reticulated pythons, but pound for pound, there was more snake per foot of an anaconda than any other animal in the suborder Serpentes. Big and muscular, and uncommonly aggressive, they defied comparison in the snake world. Annie had never seen one in the wild, and for that she could only thank God.
On the other hand, she'd had more than her fair share of encounters with the Brazilian police, particularly in Yavareté, and she'd be damned if she was ready for another one.
The airhorn blew again, and she whirled to face Travers. She didn't have a choice, it was the Sucuri or nothing.
“You know, getting involved with the police could really slow us down,” she said as calmly as she could.
“I'm not planning on getting involved,” Travers said around a yawn.
Of course he wasn't, she silently snapped, about to tell him he wasn't going to have much choice if he didn't get moving. Then he lifted his arms above his head in a long, languo
rous stretch, and Annie could only stare, not sure what held her attention more, the sheer nonchalance of his movement in the face of disaster—or the pistol shoved into the waistband of his pants.
One thing she did know for sure: she hadn't thought everything through nearly as well as she should have.
“Son of a bitch,” Travers muttered in mid-stretch, his attention arrested by something through the window. In a single stride, he moved to where she was standing, half trapping her between the narrow counter and his large, warm body as he looked over her head to the river beyond—effortlessly breaching the barrier she'd set up around herself after Yavareté, getting closer to her than she'd allowed anyone in nearly a year.
The macaw feathers were still in his hair, she noted from somewhere close to the edge of panic, the quills tied into the dark strands behind his ear with a strip of red cloth. The genipa paint had been washed off in the rain, or maybe in a shower. Amazingly, even in the smoke-filled cabin, he smelled faintly of soap.
“Tchau, Carlos. Obrigado,” he said gruffly, turning to the old man and moving away from her toward the helm after no more than a few seconds of contact.
It was a few seconds too many. She'd once canoed over two hundred miles of the Javari River in a dugout with three Indian guides and two Carmelite nuns and never once felt overcrowded—but she didn't think Travers's thirty-foot-long riverboat was going to be big enough for the two of them, and not because he took up too much room. Despite his size, lean and broad shouldered, and standing almost a foot taller than she did, she could have held him off, if she'd wanted to hold him off.
That she hadn't lifted a hand to do so was incomprehensible. Her instincts and reactions were honed for self-defense, and had been long before she'd gotten in over her head with Vargas in Yavareté.
So what in the hell was going on? she wondered. He wasn't harmless. She'd figured that much out in Pancha's. And he wasn't to be trusted, the drunken state she'd found him in that morning was proof enough of his unreliability. That only left one possibility, one she refused to entertain.
Forcing herself to take a breath, she turned back to the window. What she saw made all her unsettling thoughts about Will Travers vanish.
Her mouth fell open in astonishment. Never, ever had she seen such a sight. It was Jabba the Hut with a black ponytail and a flowing black mustache piloting a much too small speedboat and sending up a rooster tail of water as he rounded the point.
“Is that who I think it is?” she asked, her eyebrows arching nearly into her hairline.
“Fat Eddie Mano or the cavalry,” Travers said, twisting the ignition with one hand and tapping gauges with the other. “Take your pick.”
She'd heard of him, the fattest man in Manaus and the underworld warlord of the stretch of the Amazon running from the jungle city to Santarem, but for all her waterfront dealings, she'd never seen him. According to Johnny Chang, very few people ever did. Fat Eddie held court in a warehouse near the Praça de Matriz, and petitioners of any and all ilks came to him. Most were dealt with by subordinates. A select few were allowed into Fat Eddie's inner sanctum—and a few of those never came back out, making getting in to see Fat Eddie a dubious honor at best.
“Cavalry?” she repeated, watching in amazement as the huge man in the little black boat swerved in front of the police launch. The man with Fat Eddie raised a machine gun into the air and fired off a few rounds.
Merda, she thought, blanching. It was Johnny Chang, his bald head gleaming in the morning sun, his signature queue flying in the wind.
“Yep. The fat man is heading them off at the pass. If you want to bail out, this is the time,” he said. “I'll see you get your money back and drop your cargo at Santa Maria.”
It was a reprieve, if she dared to take it. Any innocent person would have jumped at the chance.
She didn't budge—a fact he noted with a questioning lift of his eyebrows.
She looked away, toward shore. Carlos was already halfway up the dock, but bailing out really wasn't an option available to her, not with Johnny Chang on board the black speedboat.
“I'm staying,” she said, forcing herself to face him.
“Then cast off.” Travers nodded toward the door.
Annie didn't need to be told twice. When the last mooring line hit the deck, the Sucuri drifted out into the current, no more than a hundred yards ahead of the two speedboats, and Annie didn't see any way in hell for them to stay ahead.
She hadn't counted on Fat Eddie. The fat man sliced his boat in front of the police, nearly crashing into them. More shots were fired, but by the police, and not into the air. A bullet thudded into the Sucuri, and Travers swore. Annie's heart leapt into her throat. She'd known there was danger in returning to Brazil, but she hadn't expected to get shot at before she'd even left Manaus.
“Get down,” he ordered, gunning the motor for more speed, steering the Sucuri as close to the shore as he dared. Tree limbs slapped against the boat and scraped along the hull.
Annie only partially obeyed, keeping her head high enough to scan the riverbank for a channel. A small tributary emptied into the Negro about five miles upstream. During the rainy season when all the rivers flooded their banks, a number of channels were created through the trees and vegetation, all of them running downstream toward RBC. She was sure Travers was doing what she would have done, trying to make it into one of the channels. They could wind around in the resulting maze of trees and water, maintaining cover while making their way up the shoreline.
Another round of gunfire peppered the air, making her flinch. If Johnny had squealed on her to the police, why in the hell was he in that boat with Fat Eddie? she wondered. And if the lot of them were after Travers, she was making one hell of a mistake heading farther up the river with him.
God, just let her get to the Cauaburi, she prayed.
A rumble of thunder rolled across the sky, dragging her gaze heavenward. Beside her, Travers said something under his breath, a soft word that skimmed across her consciousness and made the hairs rise on the nape of her neck without actually registering.
She started to ask him what he'd said, but was stopped by a fresh spray of bullets strafing the deck. Merda. She ducked farther behind the helm, looking up again as the light fell all around. Banks of clouds were rolling in from the horizon, blocking out the sun. Lightning streaked in a jagged bolt across the darkening sky, followed by a thunderous cracking sound.
“I'll be damned,” she whispered. She'd seen some fast-moving storms in her time, but this one had come out of nowhere. The next crack of thunder reverberated along the length of the river and brought a deluge in its wake. The heavens simply opened up. Sky-high sheets of rain washed over the boat in long, world-drenching, gray waves, coming in through the windows and soaking them both. The decks were instantly awash in water.
Annie turned to check behind them and could just make out Fat Eddie's boat plowing slowly upstream against the current and the rain, stymied by the sudden downpour, but still heading toward them. The police had pulled up at the RBC dock, the dark shapes of officers swarming toward the shore. Two took up posts on the dock and knelt into firing positions. Over the sound of the storm, she heard the cracking reports of a few more shots, but nothing reached the Sucuri, and in the next moment, the boat slipped into a channel, gliding between the towering trunks of two half-submerged lupuna trees.
Releasing a pent-up breath, she rose to her feet, only to have her illusion of momentary safety undermined by his next words.
“Maybe you better go below and start the pump, before we start to sink,” he said, as if the possibility were more inevitable than not.
She glanced toward the floor and saw water disappearing through the cracks in the boards between her feet. Her mouth thinned in frustration and a surfeit of nerves She should have known his boat wouldn't be any more reliable than he was himself.
“Where's the hatch?” she asked, telling herself she'd made the right decision. She'd wanted out of
Manaus, with all her cargo intact, and for better or worse, that's exactly what she'd gotten.
“Mid-deck. There's a bucket down there, too, in case you need to bail.”
Dear God, she thought. It was going to be a long three days.
HOURS OF BACKBREAKING LABOR LATER, the friggin engine room was relatively dry, the storm had slacked off to a slow, intermittent drizzle, and by her reckoning, they hadn't even made it to Nova Airão. Three days, hell. It was going to take a week to get to Santa Maria.
Travers had moored the boat in a slow-moving backwater thick with trailing vines and overhung with the graceful sweep of palm fronds. Tree frogs and cicadas sang all around, setting up a nighttime chorus as the sun's last rays slipped below the canopy and sunk them into darkness.
Annie lit the two kerosene lanterns she'd found and hung them from the upper deck rail, where they cast broad pools of yellow light over the boat. Travers had a flashlight in the engine room.
“How's it going down there?” she asked, kneeling by the hatch. Contrary to her first opinion, the Sucuri leaked like a sieve, and its old pump needed a full-time nursemaid to keep it running.
A grumble was her reply.
The backbreaking labor had actually mostly been his, but listening to him cuss and bang around in the engine room all day had pretty much worn her out. That and peering through the rain, trying to keep to the course he'd kept coming up to set and adjust.
“I've got food ready.” A cooked meal, she almost added. Lunch had been a few thoroughly inadequate bites of manioc bread spread with hot pepper sauce— all she'd been able to grab with one hand on the wheel. She'd been starving most of the day, and after they'd moored for the night, she'd had no qualms about helping herself to his kitchen and his supplies. She'd worked her way up too many rivers not to know a helping hand was always welcome.
Travers made another unintelligible reply, his voice no more than a mumbled echo in the cramped confines of the engine room, and Annie rose to her feet, not exactly disappointed. The meal she'd made of beans, rice, and fish wasn't going to get any better by sitting around, but neither was it going to get any worse, and she'd just as soon Travers stayed where he was until she'd eaten and gone to bed.
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