Something bumped against Marcos's gailoa, and everybody drew back with a gasp, expecting the giant caiman to rise up and snap the boat in two—but it wasn't the overgrown reptile. Will looked down with everybody else and saw a board knocking against the hull.
The board was old and needed paint, but the faded letters written across its sun-bleached face were clear to him in the yellow light of someone's lantern: SUCURI.
His boat hadn't been stolen. It had been destroyed.
So where the hell was Annie?
The sick feeling in his stomach turned into a cold hard knot.
“What is it?” someone asked. “The monster?”
“No, no, no. It's wood,” another answered. “Just a piece of wood.”
“Where's the monster?”
“There!”
“No, there!”
“Shut up, you fools!” Marcos hissed. “It's wood. It's all just wood. Stay sharp! Two thousand reais to the boat that captures the beast. Stay sharp!”
Looking back up to shore, closer now, Will could see the debris strewn across the forest floor and piled up between the trees like tidewrack. Dozens of other boards were drifting out into the river, some of them from her weapons crates, the pieces churned up by the wakes of the boats.
The Sucuri had been blown apart—or torn apart.
Behind him, the cries of “Jacaré!” started up again, with everyone rushing to the far rail, but Will couldn't quite convince himself that a giant caiman had risen up out of the Marauiá and eaten his boat. He didn't care how damn big the animal was. It hadn't been Annie's dynamite going off and taking all her ammunition with it, either. They would have heard an explosion of that size— which brought him full circle back to Tutanji and the cold, hard knot in his stomach.
The shaman had given him the boat, an ancient wreck beached deep in the jungle and overgrown with vines, left high and dry by the receding waters of the annual flooding of the rivers. It had never been much more than a floating hulk, but it had been home for the last two years, until tonight, when he was sure it had been Tutanji who had destroyed it.
So be it, Will thought, his gaze scanning the rubble. They were nearing the end, he and the shaman. The Sucuri was just the first of many things about to change, but the old man had gone too far when he'd taken Annie. Tutanji wouldn't kill her, not outright, but that's as much as Will dared to concede.
Jaguar bait—that's what he'd called her, and Tutanji could be the worst kind of jaguar. He just prayed she wasn't somewhere on the shoreline as broken up as the Sucuri, and the only way he was going to know that was by getting off Marcos's boat.
And swimming to the riverbank.
With a monster caiman thrashing in the water, maddened by pain behind him.
Shit.
Grim faced, he swung his leg over the side rail, hoping the jacaré monstruoso knew who in the hell he was, pasuk panki to the great shaman Tutanji, Master of the Otherworld, and friggin' king of the hoodoo metaphysics of this world.
Shit.
He swung his other leg over, and as soon as he cleared the rail, jackknifed into the river—before anyone could notice that he was escaping, though he doubted if anyone would think it was much of an escape. “Suicide” was the word most likely to come to mind.
The water engulfed him, still warm from the day's sun, the current around the bend strong and pushing him into shore. He dove deep and with every stroke prayed he wouldn't find her hurt, and that the giant caiman wasn't in the mood for man.
THE OLD MAN had disappeared. One minute he'd been with them, leading the way through the forest, and the next he'd been gone. Either way, the pace hadn't slackened, and Annie was bruised from the knees down from all the tree roots she'd run into and tripped over. She'd done her share of rain-forest bushwacking and then some, but she hadn't made a habit of doing it in the dark.
The Indians who'd kidnapped her weren't having any problems. Their naked bodies gleamed in the moonlight, their faces painted black, their torsos red.
The sound of splashing ahead and a sudden sogginess of the earth underfoot warned her they were coming to another stream. They'd already forded three, the last one chest high. She was soaked and more worried than she cared to admit.
She'd never been kidnapped before. It seemed so unlikely, the farthest thing down on her “things I need to worry about tonight” list, but she didn't know what else to call her situation.
He'd destroyed Will's boat, the old man with the enigmatic expression and shoroshoro beads. Blown it to bits—and she'd be damned if she knew how. He'd stayed on the boat alone for a while, then come back to shore and started blowing and singing and stomping. After a few minutes, the Sucuri had crumbled, more imploding than exploding, and taken her guns to the bottom of the friggin' river. It hadn't been much of a boat to begin with, but she would have thought it could hold up to the “I'll huff and I'll puff, till I blow your house down” threat.
She heard the stream up ahead and braced herself. Anacondas were water snakes. They liked grubbing around in forest streams, and they weren't averse to doing it at night, when it was dark, and she couldn't see them.
Damn, she thought, trying hard to distract herself. She'd had some good stuff on that boat, stuff she was going to need, besides the guns, and now it was all floating down the Rio Marauiá. The old man had ruined her.
So who in the hell was he?
She had a few ideas, but none she thought she could handle while she was slogging through a windless swamp and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes while not having a clue as to where she was going to end up.
The Indian in front of her stepped into the stream and sank up to his knees. By his second step, he was in up to his waist and wading deeper. Annie started swearing under her breath. She was going to end up swimming this one, which meant she wouldn't have her footing if something big, and long, and extremely muscular decided to wrap itself around her and pull her under.
She swore again, muttering a stream of invectives as she went deeper and deeper into the water. When the water reached her chin, and she had to lift off the streambed, her panic and anger melded into one perfectly awful emotion, and it was in that state that the name she'd half forgotten and been trying to avoid came back to her, emblazoning itself on her consciousness in fiery letters— Tutanji.
“YOU ARE CRAZY!” Fat Eddie bellowed. “Crazy, Guillermo! One crazy son of a bitch!”
Lying on the shore behind a tree, gulping in a breath, Will had to agree. Those minutes in the Marauiá, swimming in the current and hearing the giant caiman thrashing and lunging about in the water behind him, had been some of the longest in his life. He would swear to feeling the beast snap at his toes.
He looked down, checking his feet for missing parts.
“Hell,” he sighed in relief, letting his head fall back to the ground. All he'd lost was a flip-flop.
“Where are my guns, Guillermo? My fucking Israeli guns?” Fat Eddie shouted from his boat.
At the bottom of the river, Will thought, ignoring him.
“Annie?” he called out, wiping the water off his face.
“You crazy son of a bitch! You won't get away with this!”
Will had to agree to that depressing statement, too. He was beginning to doubt if he was going to get away with anything on this trip.
“Annie?” he tried again from his prone position, listening intently, but still getting no reply.
A shot rang out from one of the boats and ricocheted, pinging off a tree trunk, and he rolled onto his stomach and scrambled farther up the shore, keeping low to the ground.
“Crazy son of a bitch! Next time I see you, my friend, you are a dead man!”
Yeah, yeah. Take a ticket and get in line, he thought, pushing himself to a sitting position behind a broad tree trunk. He sat quietly, catching his breath and letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.
“Annie?” he called out again, looking around. Boards were tumbled around everywhere, all topsy-turvy. His
galley sink was overturned in a pile of rotting leaves. The Sucuri's wheel had caught on a low-lying branch, but Will didn't see any guns and he didn't see Annie. He didn't know whether to be relieved or not. Then he saw the arrow stuck into the ground, a palm-wood shaft with black-and-white striped feather fletching, and at the bottom of the shaft, his bush knife stuck into the ground beside it. A quiver and bow were next to the knife, the whole of the edifice draped in a boar's-tooth necklace.
It was an invitation, painfully clear. Tutanji had her, and if Will wanted her back, he was going to have to come and get her.
More shots zinged into the rain forest, some cracking into trees, others burying themselves somewhere in the jungle. Then the cry of “Jacaré!” went up again out on the river, and Will knew, for the moment, he was forgotten.
He didn't waste the chance.
Slipping the necklace over his head, he scanned the soft ground of the riverbank, until he found what he needed— footprints heading away from the river, into the forest. With only a half-moon to light the way, he picked up the weapons and took off down the path.
CHAPTER 19
REINO NOVO
Fat eddie mano was sweating. Corisco could see the dampness staining not only the man's shirt, but his pants legs, could see a regular stream of sweat running down the man's brow and wished he'd held the audience someplace other than in his richly appointed and extremely difficult-to-maintain office. Rot and mildew were constant enemies, and both of them were born of humidity, the water thickening every square centimeter of air in the tropics. Profuse sweating only added to the problem. Now he not only had to deal with the humidity and the rain and the occasional flooding that did its damnedest to inundate his sanctuary above the riverbank, now he had Fat Eddie adding his own personal water supply to the one place in the whole damned Amazon Corisco tried to keep livable. His damned office.
Nobody else dared to sweat in his office, or even in his presence.
He didn't sweat.
Ever.
A pencil snapped in two in his hand, and with a small sound of disgust, he threw the pieces onto his desk.
“And the woman, Senhor Mano? What happened to the woman?”
Fat Eddie and his ragged little entourage had arrived at Reino Novo just as the sun was setting, the promised emeralds and diamonds in hand, retrieved from William Sanchez Travers the evening before in Santa Maria, apparently mere hours before the man had been eaten by a giant caiman near the mouth of the Rio Marauiá.
It was a mildly interesting story, the type of larger-than-life escapade that could only come out of a landscape as immense and incredible as the Amazon, but it was child's play compared to the reality Corisco would soon impose on the area.
“Ah, the woman,” Fat Eddie said, looking thoughtful, a feat he pulled off with remarkable skill for someone with filed teeth. “Which woman in particular are you interested in, Major Vargas? I have many in Manaus.”
Corisco's mouth twisted in disgust. “I am not interested in any of those putas you sell out of the Praça de Matriz. I want the doctor, the woman on Travers's boat.”
Fat Eddie lifted his arms in a bulky shrug. “The boat was destroyed. I said this, no? And the woman—if there was a woman—maybe she was destroyed, as well.”
“But you didn't find a body.”
“No bodies. No,” Fat Eddie said.
“Her name is Annie Parrish. Doutora Parrish,” he told the fat man, carefully watching him for a reaction. The bastard was lying to him. Corisco knew it. Annie Parrish had been on that boat on the Marauiá last night, and if she wasn't dead, she was somewhere in the forest, but for some reason, Eddie didn't want him to know she'd been on Travers's boat, and that meant the fat man was hiding something.
He wouldn't be for long, though. Fat Eddie's twenty or so men were no match for Corisco's elite squad of soldiers. Torturing Fat Eddie might prove to be a disgustingly fascinating experience.
“Ah, the Woolly Monkey woman,” Fat Eddie said. “I heard she was back in Manaus, but she has nothing to do with me or my business.”
More lies, Corisco thought. Every jagunço from Reino Novo to Manaus knew about the price on Annie Parrish's head by now.
“She is with the River Basin people, a meddler, a cientista. It was you who had her deported, wasn't it?” the fat man continued.
Corisco wasn't surprised by the question. Everyone knew the Woolly Monkey story, even if they knew it wrong. What they didn't know was where Annie Parrish had really been, what she'd been doing, or what had happened to her in Yavareté.
All he cared about now, though, was what had happened to her on the Marauiá. She'd come back to Brazil, and if she wasn't already dead, he wanted her, by God. He wanted her for his sacrifice.
“Yes, I had her deported,” he told Fat Eddie, “but I'm afraid she still has something to do with my business. Something I would like finished.”
“So maybe she's worth her weight in gold?” Fat Eddie asked with a chuckle, his eyes lighting up with avarice. “If someone could bring her to you?”
Corisco snapped his fingers, and Fernando stepped forward. Corisco handed him one of the wanted posters off his desk and gestured for him to give it to Fat Eddie.
“Yes, Senhor Mano. She is worth a great deal,” he said as the fat man looked the poster over and did a fair job of feigning surprise. Yes, she was worth a great damn deal, and the closer she came to slipping through his fingers, the more he wanted her. It was time to send his own men after her. If she'd been near the mouth of the Marauiá last night and her boat had blown up, she couldn't have gotten far. He had men leaving Reino Novo today to capture the rest of the needed cordeiros. He would split them up, and they could search for Annie Parrish, as well. He would put the men under Fernando's command. The giant would sniff her out.
“Then for you, Major, I will find this woman and bring her here. If she is still in Manaus, I can have her picked up in a matter of hours. If she is already on the river, it will take longer, I fear. The Rio Negro, she is a very big place.” He smiled, showing off his sharp teeth.
But not big enough for the two of us, Corisco thought, not in the least bit intimidated by Fat Eddie's gruesome grin. The Night of the Devil was coming, and after the dark sacrifice, Eddie Mano would either be dead or destroyed. Corisco hardly cared which, but he could see where it might be to his advantage to forgo torturing Fat Eddie today in hopes of a greater benefit tomorrow. Annie Parrish was far more important to him than the fat man from Manaus. If Eddie Mano could bring her in, so much the better, and if not, he and his henchmen would become sacrificial lambs for El Mestre.
A startled gasp from one of the jagunços had Fat Eddie turning around. The man was staring at the huge glass tank.
“I see my pet has come out of hiding,” Corisco said, gesturing for Fernando to turn on the lights in the shadowed tank.
The scarred giant moved forward to a bank of switches on the wall and flipped them on one by one. Slowly, by muted degrees, the full dimensions of the tank came into view, the lights coming on in the back first. Full of vegetation and carefully chosen tree trunks with branches for climbing, it looked like the rain forest just outside the door, complete with a small stream running through the middle of it, continuously cycled by a pump from the river.
It was a rare event when the tank's inhabitant could actually be seen. Corisco was pleased by the snake's timing.
“Thirty-six feet, Senhor Eduardo,” he said. “The largest anaconda ever held in captivity. Six hundred pounds. I usually feed him deer. I insist that you come back in a week, as my guest at a function I'm hosting, very elaborate, very festive. You can watch him hunt. It's a fascinating sight, I assure you, nearly as fascinating as watching him swallow his kill.”
Fat Eddie didn't doubt it for a minute. No more than he doubted that Major Corisco Vargas was dangerous, powerfully dangerous, with his own private army culled from the elite Brazilian forces he commanded, and his gold.
Gold was power, and V
argas was loaded with it. Shipping less than half of what he pulled out of the mines, it was said, and using the other half—it was also said—for darkly demonic purposes.
Fat Eddie had to fight to restrain his laughter. The fucking Amazon was full of friggin' demons, and he had met them all. Vargas, a city boy from São Paulo, didn't know the first damn thing about the jurijuri and the brujos, the boraro, and the wawekratins. Whatever the hell he thought he was up to, Fat Eddie's money was on the demons. He just wanted to be around to pick up all the gold when Vargas fell on his prissy, sadistic, epauletted ass.
Idiota.
It was impossible for Fat Eddie to have any respect whatsoever for a man who couldn't think of anything better to do with virgins than to cut them open on an altar—but he wanted the altar. Solid gold, according to rumor, and hidden somewhere around Reino Novo.
He wondered if the altar was what awaited the little cat, when he found her—and he would find her. He'd already set those wheels in motion, ordering a hundred of his jagunços up the river to meet him on the Cauaburi.
The major would pay more than ten thousand reais to have the woman. He could see it in the man's eyes. Vargas wanted the little doutora very badly, indeed.
No body meant she hadn't been on Travers's boat when it had fallen apart, and it had fallen apart. There weren't any burn marks to indicate an explosion. The sucuri had left, that was all, and when the snake had left, the boat had fallen apart and mostly fallen into the river, including the Sucur's cargo.
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