River of Eden

by Glenna Mcreynolds

  They hadn't had time for two words since leaving RBC, and if at all possible, she wanted to keep it that way until they reached Santa Maria.

  Stretching out a cramp in her back, she cast her gaze across the water and around the surrounding trees, seeing little in the darkness. She could hear the forest, though, everything wet and dripping, filling the night with small cascades of water and a metronome of droplets falling from leaf to leaf to river—and she could smell it. The sheer greenness of the rain forest filled her senses, indulging her with all its rich fecundity. For a woman who'd grown up on the barren, windswept plains of Wyoming, the Amazon basin was a paradise. It was as far away from the two-bit, flyblown ranch she'd called home as a girl could get and then some—and maybe even a little bit farther than that from where she was standing, right smack-dab in the middle of a swampy nowhere.

  She'd kept to the course he'd set during her turns at the wheel, but didn't have a clue as to where they were tied up, except she was damn sure it wasn't nearly far enough away from Manaus. They had jigged as much as they'd jagged through the igapó, the flooded forest. A couple of times when they'd come out onto the Rio Negro, she'd wondered if they hadn't actually gone in circles—and she couldn't seem to get the picture of Fat Eddie following them through the rain out of her mind. Why hadn't he just stopped like the police? Unlike the Sucuri, the black speedboat hadn't had so much as a canopy on it for cover.

  A startled croak followed by a few clattering notes came out of the darkness, a sudden counterpoint to the frogs and cicadas. Annie turned to peer over the bow, her brow furrowed, wondering what kind of bird was making the sound.

  “Roraima limpkin,” Travers said behind her—and she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  Damn. He moved like a cat, or something even more silent and deadly that she didn't even want to think about, not while she was on a boat named Sucuri.

  “Roraima limpkin. Right. I've heard of them,” she said, turning to face him, forcing her pulse to slow down. “Never seen one, though.”

  They were both soaked, and had been all day, but once again, whereas she was in full control of her clothes, his seemed to be sliding off his body. If it wasn't for his hip bones and shoulders, he'd be naked, his khaki pants and palm-tree shirt in a pile at his feet.

  Buttons, she felt like telling him. Buttons were put on shirts and pants for a reason—though she doubted if he gave a damn about buttons. He looked a little tense, as if maybe Carlos's hangover remedy had only lasted so long and then up and left him high and dry.

  “Not many people do.” He dropped a screwdriver and a wrench into the toolbox on the deck, then picked up a rag and began wiping the grease off his hands. Light from one of the lanterns played across his face, throwing shadows into the hollows of his cheeks and along his jaw. It was a strong jaw, his nose elegantly shaped. His eyebrows had a sharp curve to them, a pair of arched, dark lines contrasting with the pale streaks in his sun-bleached hair.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a chill even in the humid heat of the night.

  “But you have,” she guessed, giving him credit where credit was due, and then angling just a bit, unable to help herself. After all, he was the infamous William Sanchez Travers. “I bet you've seen a lot of things not many other people have seen.” Like lost cities of gold and forbidden shaman rites involving chunks of rock crystal. Like a place no one else had ever been that he hadn't told another soul about—just as she'd never told another soul about what she'd seen and where she'd been.

  His soft, self-deprecating laughter took her by surprise. “Yeah, I guess so, some things most people wouldn't want to see. How about you? You've been around.”

  “Plants,” she said, deliberately understating the obvious, wholly intrigued by his answer. Everybody in the Amazon liked seeing gold—so maybe that rumor was a bit off the mark, despite its popularity and his bracelets. “That's all I ever see, everywhere I go. Plants. Sometimes there's something interesting sitting on one or eating one.”

  “Like a woolly monkey,” he said, looking up and pinning her with his gaze.

  Well, she thought, he'd cut right to the chase, using the last two words she wanted to hear—“woolly monkey.” They weren't a question, yet those two words questioned everything about her—including her competence and her integrity. Damn him. She should have eaten alone and left his dinner on the stove.

  “I've seen a few monkeys,” she conceded without conceding a thing. “Even eaten a few, but tonight it's prato feito with a fish I found in your cooler.”

  His grin, once again, was anything but reassuring.

  “I'll bet you've seen more than a few, Dr. Parrish, but there's only one I'm interested in hearing about, and given our departure from Manaus, I figure the quicker you tell me what I want to know, the better off we'll be.” He dropped the rag into the toolbox. “Come on. There are dry towels inside.”

  Which he could stuff in his ears, if he thought she was going to tell him anything. Far from being daunted by his audacity, she was amused. Nobody, but nobody, got the best of Annie Parrish. She'd been playing by boy's rules since she'd been old enough to walk and chew gum at the same time.

  “Actually, by my figuring, all I owe you is the hundred and twenty reais you've probably already spent, with maybe a refund for keeping your boat afloat,” she said, following him into the main cabin.

  “We were shot at.” He opened a cupboard and pulled out two large towels, handing her one.

  “You're the one who knows Fat Eddie Mano and hangs out with garimpeiros, not me.” She gave her hair and face a quick drying off, then draped the towel around her shoulders, her demeanor as ingenuous as she could make it—which she knew for a fact was pretty damned ingenuous. He hadn't dreamed up his “jaguar bait” insult without some incentive. He'd just misinterpreted the clues.

  “Fat Eddie wasn't shooting at us. The police were, and you've got a history of trouble with the police, serious trouble. How long have you been back in Brazil? A week?” He started to shrug out of his shirt.

  Annie deliberately turned toward the stove and began filling her plate.

  At her silence, he continued, obviously knowing exactly how long she'd been back.

  “The Manaus police aren't known for their efficiency.

  It probably took them the whole week to figure out you were in town and about two seconds to decide to finish whatever unfinished business you left behind when they kicked you out of the country. That's what I want to know about—what you were up to that got you kicked out, and why in the hell you came back, and don't try to pawn me off with the peach palm business. Not even Gabriela is buying that.”

  “Go to hell,” she said pleasantly, spooning a chunk of fish on top of her rice.

  “Funny you should mention that,” he muttered, rummaging around in the cupboards behind her. Something clanked, and he cursed, and unbelievably, the sound tweaked her conscience.

  It had been a long day, with little to eat and plenty of hard, physical labor, especially for him. It was a miracle that he'd held up as long as he had, especially since he'd been dead drunk asleep when she'd come aboard at dawn.

  “Look,” she said, relenting a little as she spooned around for another piece of fish. “We don't know each other well enough to argue about anything, and there's no reason we can't keep things that way. All we really have to do is get to Santa Maria. I'm happy to help out where I can, no refund. You keep the money. Let's just work together to get up the river.”

  I'll be a son of a bitch, Will thought, squinting over his shoulder at her with a sense of utter disbelief. The woman had the balls of a bull and all the friggin' philosophy of a Girl Scout.

  Let bygones be bygones?

  He didn't think so, not when he would be pulling slugs out of his bulkhead, not after the painfully lousy day he'd suffered through. Carlos's cure had lasted almost until noon, when it had worn off with a vengeance. He'd been paying hell ever since, wanting nothing more than to just tie up
and wait the damn storm out—an option unavailable to him because of his passenger and the trouble he was sure she'd dragged into his wake. The police had no gripe with him.

  She was a real piece of work, all right, and it was completely against his better judgment that he let his gaze drop down the length of her body—for about the hundredth time that day. Fluffed up by the towel, her hair was doing that stick-out-all-over thing again, but he had to admit that on her it looked good. Or rather, she looked good whether her hair was sticking out or not. Her face was delicate in profile, her nose slightly upturned with a dusting of freckles, her glasses reflecting the amber glow of the lanterns. Her shirt was still two sizes too big, and her shorts were all bags and sags, but the legs inside the shorts from mid-thigh down were perfect—which had been his problem all day.

  Perfect legs, the kind a man wanted to eat his way up—a thought he'd had more than once since the first time he'd come up from the hatch and found himself at eye level with the backs of her knees, a thought that unnerved him more than the bullets lodged in the Sucuri's hull. A lot more. He didn't have time for her, or her trouble, or her knees, yet there she was, on his boat, and for the next three days, in his life.

  Take a woman up the river, Gabriela had said, and then made it impossible for him to refuse. Or so he'd told himself last night.

  It had been a mistake. One he was paying for. In the cruel light of a head-splitting hangover and a truly rotten day, he had to ask himself who he'd been kidding. Sure he took passengers all the time, nearly every trip, but he usually had enough sense to steer clear of the ones who were more trouble than they were worth—and Annie Parrish was nothing but trouble.

  He should have put her off the Sucuri at the dock. Carlos's cure must have temporarily clouded his judgment— either Carlos's cure or Dr. Parrish's legs. He honestly wasn't sure which. He did know this trip up the river wasn't like any of the others he'd taken in the last two years, and that alone should have been enough reason for him to have told her no in Pancha's, or told Gabriela no, or to have abandoned her when she'd gone off to get Carlos that morning.

  Gabriela was right. He was nearing the end. The end of what, he wasn't sure. But since putting Corisco Vargas's face on Tutanji's demon he'd felt a lot of endings looming near. Perhaps Vargas's life, perhaps his own. Certainly his bargain with Tutanji and all the mysteries that had held the two of them together since the night the great sucuri, the giant anaconda, had awakened him from his dreams.

  Even for an Eunectes murinus, the animal had been big, twelve meters, over thirty-six serpentine feet of pure constricting brawn.

  A faint ripple of unease coursed its way down his spine, following a path Will could have traced in his sleep. He had not forgotten. He had not forgotten anything, not the pain, the power, or the fear. The teeth marks on the front and back of his left shoulder were over a hand-span apart. Tutanji had stood by and watched as he'd been bitten, and then made it even further impossible for him to ever forget. The monstrous snake would be with him for the rest of his life, the marks on his shoulder proof of the pain and fear, the marks down his back proof of the power he'd glimpsed, the power that had bound him to the jaguar shaman.

  A sudden wave of weariness had him dragging his hands back through his hair. This was no time for him to be looking at a woman's legs.

  He pulled a dry T-shirt out of the cupboard and slipped it over his head, and was just about to lay things out for the good doctor a little more clearly, let her know her options were a little slimmer than she thought, when a sound came to him from off the water, a low vibration he almost felt before he heard it. In seconds, the sound clarified itself into the recognizable rhythm of an outboard motor chugging along at quarter speed.

  She heard it too and whirled around, her gaze snapping to his, and for the first time all day, he thought he detected fear in her eyes.

  Her words confirmed it.

  So did the sound of her voice.

  “Fat Eddie was still following us when we slipped into that first channel into the igapó,” she said.

  He'd figured as much, but hadn't really thought the man could keep on their trail through a whole day of rain. He should have known better. This whole trip was turning into one disaster after another. Meeting up with Fat Eddie in a backwater swamp half a mile off the main river and a hundred miles from anywhere else was way down at the bottom of his list of safe things to do on a Saturday night, but he was guessing the odds were pretty good that the increasingly loud chug-chug-chug coming across the water was the sound of the fat man in pursuit.

  Like any good crook who'd gone on to claim the title of “Boss,” he was dangerously tenacious.

  “Don't worry. Nobody boards the Sucuri, not even Fat Eddie Mano.”

  That was the second time he'd told her as much, Annie thought, and she hoped to hell he was right. She watched him pull out the pistol he'd kept shoved in his pants, his face a mask of quiet concentration as he checked the load, his hands skilled in handling the weapon.

  Her own hand was clenched into a fist at her side. The absolute worst ending to the day she could possibly imagine was about to happen—Fat Eddie Mano and Johnny Chang pulling up alongside in their little black speedboat while she and Travers sat like a couple of dead ducks in the middle of a nowhere swamp all by themselves. Calvary, her ass. She was tempted to tell Travers that she had two Israeli Galils, a nickel-plated Kalashnikov, a couple hundred rounds of ammunition, an old Remington rifle with twenty-eight boxes of cartridges, half a dozen 9-millimeter Brazilian Taurus handguns with a stockpile of bullets, twelve grenades, and twenty sticks of dynamite in two crates on his upper deck—but something told her that might not exactly be the kind of news he wanted to hear right now.

  CHAPTER 7

  Guillermo! a voice called out of the darkness. William!

  It was Fat Eddie, all right, Will thought, shoving the pistol back into his pants and covering it with his T-shirt. He'd know that voice anywhere, gravelly, with every word sounding half swallowed, as if it were too much effort for mere syllables to fight past all the rolls of fat to freedom.

  He stepped halfway out the door, motioning for Annie to stay put.

  “Senhor Eduardo,” he answered, hailing the small spotlight he saw winding toward the Sucuri through the trees. It was one of those quirky local facts about a place that while a sizable portion of the one million residents of Manaus knew or had heard about Fat Eddie Mano, the big man himself answered only to Mr. Edward.

  “You stay in here,” he told his passenger, reaching up and dousing the cabin's lantern. Shadows fell inside the room. “It's probably best if the fat man doesn't know Amazon Annie is back on the Rio Negro and heading to Santa Maria.”

  Amazon Annie? Annie wrinkled her nose. Next to “woolly monkey,” those were her two least favorite words. The alliterative nickname made her sound like some two-bit matinee heroine out of the forties.

  “I hate that name,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, can't say as I blame you, so let's keep it to ourselves.”

  A beam of light streamed through the cabin's window, just missing her, and continued on, sweeping over the Sucur's deck. She glanced out the window and saw a huge, shadowy shape behind the wheel adjust the light until it fell directly on Will where he stood in the doorway.

  He lifted his hand in front of his face to shield his eyes.

  “Remember, stay in here and keep out of sight,” he said under his breath, then walked out onto the deck.

  “Guillermo, men amigo!” the fat man said.

  “Oi, Senhor Eduardo,” Travers replied, his voice a warm and lazy drawl Annie barely recognized, his words slightly slurred. If she hadn't known better, she would have sworn he'd spent the last few hours tossing back shots and chasing them with beer, just a guy out on the river who wasn't going to let a few bullets at dawn ruin his whole day.

  “Tudo bem?” the fat man asked, and Annie felt the speedboat bump up against the Sucuri.

  “You b
ent. You bent,” Travers replied, and the two men fell into an easy chat about the weather, and the rain, and the river. Annie couldn't see Travers from her position by the window, but she could see Fat Eddie, at least his back, the fat straining at the seams of a striped brown and orange shirt, his black ponytail making a chunky question mark at the base of his neck. He was amazingly huge, seemingly too huge to move, certainly too huge to climb out of the speedboat and board the Sucuri—not without sinking them both.

  She waited to see if Johnny would appear from beside the gargantuan man and add a greeting. When he didn't, she figured he was standing stoically near the helm, hidden by the fat man's bulk. Every time she and Johnny had met, he'd had a thug standing near, silent and threatening. It was probably to her advantage if Johnny wasn't “amigos” with Travers. She didn't think this was the time or place to be admitting she knew Johnny Chang, either.

  Of course, there was the possibility that Fat Eddie and Johnny didn't even know she was on the Sucuri. No one could have seen her from where she'd been inside the cabin. She hadn't been at the porthole that long.

  “The police this morning. It was close for you, no?” Fat Eddie asked when the conversation drifted into a lull.

  “Yes, close. Obrigado, your interference was much appreciated,” Travers said.

  “De nada, Guillermo, de nada. I am pleased to see you safe, but what of the woman? The little blond cat?” Fat Eddie rasped in his strange, word-garbling voice. “Where is she?”

  Annie's heart sank into her stomach. So much for not being seen.

  “Elena Maria Barbosa?” Travers asked with drunken artlessness, rattling off some unknown woman's name without a moment's hesitation. “I left her in Santo Antonio, gave her back her money. She was trouble, senhor. This morning, well, I was still too drunk to notice, but today on the river, ahh”—he made a sound of disgust—“today I could tell she was trouble.”