“Why are we stopping here?” she asked, and stopped when she saw Jack’s drawn expression.
“I’m grazed. Doesn’t hurt too bad, but I need to get a look at it. See if you can find something we can fix a bandage out of, would you? Doesn’t have to be elegant, just functional.”
Drake opened the passenger side and stared at the blood. “Jesus. You’re hit…”
“Keep your voice down. I know I’m hit. Go inside and buy a bottle of the strongest booze they’ve got. Vodka, preferably. I’ll need to sterilize this.” Jack caught his look. “Drake, I’ll live. It’s just a flesh wound.”
Drake nodded and jogged to the bar entrance while Allie dug through the backpacks and extracted one of Jack’s white undershirts.
“Will this work?”
“Looks like it. We can stop at a drugstore once we’re in San Antonio. It’s only got to hold for an hour or so. Can you drive?”
“Of course I can. You’re the one who got shot.”
“Then I’ll slide over.”
“Okay.”
He took the shirt from her and moved to the center position on the bench seat and tried not to think about sitting in his own lifeblood. Drake returned with a bottle of rotgut vodka and handed it to him. Jack twisted the top off and poured the alcohol on his side, wincing as the vodka did its work, and then loosened his belt and slid the folded undershirt into place over the wound.
“There. That should do it,” he said. He pulled his belt free before re-strapping it around his upper waist so it would hold the shirt in place. “Let’s get moving.”
Drake had stepped away from the truck and was peering beneath it. When he returned to the passenger door, he had a grim expression.
“We’ve got a problem. A bullet must have hit the radiator. Looks like we’ve lost most of the coolant.”
Allie slid behind the wheel and looked at the dash. The temperature gauge was three-quarters to the red. She turned to look at Jack, who shrugged.
“We can stop and get more water later. Right now, keep the speed down and an eye on the gauge. It’s cool enough out that we should be able to make it. As long as it doesn’t get much hotter, we should be okay. But sitting here, it’s not getting any cold air blowing on it. Let’s go.”
Drake climbed in and shut the door after himself, trying to stay away from Jack so as not to jostle his wound. Allie reversed out of the lot and pulled off. San Antonio was a good hour away, assuming they made it.
Allie settled in at fifty, and the temperature needle crept upwards before stopping a few millimeters below the top of the range. Drake studied Jack’s profile and saw he was sweating in spite of the chill.
“I don’t understand one thing. How did they find us?” he asked.
Jack winced. “Do you have another cell phone you didn’t tell me about?”
“Of course not.”
“Damn. Then it must be Allie’s. I don’t have one. That’s the only possibility. Nobody knew where we were going. They must have put two and two together and somehow gotten hers. I should have thought of that.”
“They’re tracking my phone?” Allie asked.
“I think so, honey. Pull over.”
She did and raced around to the bed to retrieve her cell from her bag. When she had it, she returned to the cab and removed the battery. “What do I do now? Is this good enough?”
“Nope. Put it on the ground and run it over. And the first road we come to heading south? Take it. They’re tracking us, so they know we’re on this road. Probably thinking we’re headed to San Antonio. So now we’re not going to do that. We’ll head to Corpus. If necessary, we’ll hotwire a car to get there if the truck gives out.”
Drake could see the conflict in her eyes as she placed the phone on the asphalt and returned to her position behind the wheel. She pulled forward and heard a sickening crack as it shattered, and then the rear tire rolled over it. She braked and put the truck in neutral, and got out again to inspect her handiwork.
She was back in ten seconds. “It’s history.”
“Good girl. Now let’s make ourselves history as well.”
Back on the dark two-lane road, they came to an intersection and took a right, and found themselves driving through more farmland, the engine in the danger zone as they drove south. Drake looked through his window at the landscape moving by and considered that they’d crossed an important point of no return. There was no way to pretend that this was all a big mistake or that Jack had been unduly paranoid. The Russians were on their tail and wouldn’t stop until Drake had found the treasure, or died trying.
Which it would be was anyone’s guess. But he didn’t intend to go down without a fight.
They’d find he was tougher to take out than they’d assumed. He might not know everything there was about guns, but he’d dropped enough felons to feel confident in his abilities, and he could always learn to shoot better.
Now he just needed to figure out how to survive in a hostile jungle while looking for an impossible-to-find lost city, and he’d be golden.
He took another look at Jack and was glad the man was on his side.
Maybe they actually had a chance. Between the three of them, maybe it could be done.
He sighed, tired, the adrenaline burnt out of his system, nothing left but fatigue. He rubbed his eyes, and when he looked up again, he was no longer hesitant about what he was going to do.
If there actually was a Paititi, he’d figure out how to locate it, Russians or no Russians. He had the journal, so he had an edge, even if it was a slim one.
The question was whether it would be enough.
Chapter Fifteen
Vadim and Sasha trudged down the road, their rented sedan dead a mile behind them, the windshield shattered from a shotgun blast, the driver-side front tire flattened. Vadim’s face was bleeding from safety glass that had sprayed across his cheek, and Sasha had his tie wrapped around his left arm where he’d been nicked by a few shotgun pellets that had winged their way through the car.
“What now?” Sasha asked in gruff Russian, his breath steaming before him.
“We find a vehicle. We take it. Then we continue until successful,” Vadim said angrily. “What do you think we do?”
“I was thinking about how the girl’s phone stopped transmitting. Looks like they worked that one out.”
“Only a matter of time.”
“Yes, well…which brings us back to question of what we do now.”
Vadim’s eyes narrowed to slits, rage building in him, driving him forward as his blood dried on his face. “I don’t know. But we will think of something – just as we always do.”
“I wish we had accessed some heavier artillery,” Sasha complained, patting the Ruger 9mm in his jacket pocket. “I, for one, did not expect the boy to travel with an arsenal. The only things missing were grenades and a bazooka.”
“A mistake we will certainly not make again.”
A frigid gust blew across the adjacent field, carrying with it the scent of freshly plowed soil. Tendrils of ground fog seeped over the furrows, the land stretching as far as they could see in the gloom, the only sound in the quiet night their footsteps crunching on the gravel underfoot and the hiss of their labored breathing.
“The larger oversight was underestimating their resourcefulness…that they were onto us. That changes the situation. But it also tells us something – they either have the journal, or they know where it is.”
“The lawyer already told us the boy has it.”
“But the boy probably does not understand its significance. Now that his father’s associate is involved, we have to assume he does. And that he also realizes that no place is safe for him. For any of them.” He paused, thinking. “What would you do if you knew that the devil was coming for you and you couldn’t go home?” Vadim asked rhetorically.
“I would go after whoever was hunting me.”
“Ah, but that is impossible for them. We don’t exist. The old man isn’t st
upid. He knows the stakes. The only thing we can assume is that they’ll try to find the Inca city themselves.”
“But can we be sure of that?”
“It is the most probable outcome.”
Sasha spit. “I hate that jungle. Hated it then, and I hate it even more now.”
“As do I. But it holds our future. And this time we will prevail.”
~ ~ ~
Allie emerged from the twenty-four-hour drugstore on the outskirts of Corpus Christi with a roll of gauze, a bottle of iodine, tape and pads, two liters of orange juice, and a container of Pedialyte. Jack gulped the juice greedily, his body depleted by blood loss, and downed the Pedialyte by the time they’d rolled out of the lot.
The engine was still holding out, although strained to its limits. Drake was relieved when they eased to a stop in front of a fleabag motel that wouldn’t care much about formalities like identification as long as their cash was green. He went in with Allie and got two rooms from a sleepy East Indian clerk listening to a radio broadcast that sounded like cats rolling down a slope in a barrel.
Drake helped Jack to the first room as Allie backed the truck into a dark recess by a dumpster so that the bullet holes in the tailgate wouldn’t be obvious. Upon her return, she stripped the clotted T-shirt from Jack’s side and examined the damage before twisting the cap off the iodine.
“This is going to hurt. It’s a flesh wound, but deep. Looks like it cut through one of your love handles,” she warned, and Jack nodded.
“I’m not using them for anything. Do your worst.”
His sharp intake of breath hissed as the liquid bubbled into the wound, and Drake could see moisture well in his eyes, an involuntary physical response to the pain. Allie fished a small first aid kit out of Jack’s bag and poured another dollop of iodine onto the bullet hole – thankfully a clean entry and exit that had missed any organs. After blotting it, she squeezed two drops of Dermabond adhesive into the entry wound, and Jack reached down and held it closed with his fingers. She went to work on the exit hole and repeated the procedure, pressing the flesh together until it had sealed.
“That’s pretty amazing stuff,” Drake said as she returned the tube to the kit.
“A friend of mine who works in the ER got me some. It’s prescription, but it’s basically superglue without the compound that generates heat. I use it for mountain biking spills. It can be a lifesaver out in the boonies,” Allie explained.
“Only a graze, it was the blood loss that was worrying me,” Jack said, and looked up at Drake. “I suppose we should add some basic first aid to the bag of tricks I teach you. If we hadn’t had the Dermabond and we’d been in the jungle, you might have had to heat your dad’s sword up and cauterize it. Trust me. I’ve had to do that, and you never forget the smell.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Drake looked around the shabby room, whose sickly cream-colored walls reminded him of pus. The carpet was stained and threadbare in places, and the bathroom door hadn’t been properly repaired where a prior guest had punched a hole in it. The impressionist print of a woman staring off over a field of wildflowers made him unaccountably sad, and he realized that it was lack of sleep more than anything that was wearing at him. He checked the time and saw that it was 4:20 a.m., and couldn’t help but yawn. “Sorry. I’m beat.”
“I think we all are. Let’s get a few hours of shut-eye and then figure out what we’re going to do,” Jack suggested. “Figure nine we’ll hook up?”
“Fine by me. I’m right next door if you need anything.”
“I’m just going to get the rest of our stuff so nobody steals it out of the truck. I’ll be back in a second,” Allie said.
Drake caught Jack’s worried look. “I’ll go with you.”
Allie didn’t argue, and as they walked to the darkened form of the Chevrolet, Drake instinctively scanned the lot. Nothing. All quiet.
“How much time do you think we have before they find us?” he asked.
“Who knows? Hopefully my dad has some idea. He usually does. It’s his world, not ours.”
“It’s ours now.”
Drake helped her with the shotguns and backpacks. They carried the bags back to the room, and Drake saw the dark circles under her eyes when the light hit her face. The night had been hard on all of them.
He hung out the Do Not Disturb sign and locked his door before setting his backpack onto the bed. How had it all spun so out of control so quickly?
Drake brushed his teeth, shrugged out of his clothes, and set the alarm clock for eight thirty. He laid the SIG Sauer next to it, within easy reach. After a quick look around the room, he moved the lone wooden chair to the door and leaned the back against it, wedged under the knob, as additional insurance against intruders. He was so tired it didn’t even strike him how odd that would have seemed to him just a few short days before. Now, it was just something he did. Automatic. Reflexive. As he drifted off to sleep, his last thought was to wonder how much else about his life was going to change before this was over.
His dreams were uneasy. Silent figures lurked in the shadows outside his room and, before he could come fully awake, were inside and pointing the ugly snouts of silenced pistols at him, the SIG Sauer now useless only a foot away. Both had stockings pulled over their heads, distorting their features. The nearest one, with a body like a bear, swung his pistol and slammed the butt into Drake’s head. Drake saw pinpoints of light.
Drake bolted awake, the sheets soaked with perspiration, his heart trip-hammering in his chest, his hand groping for the SIG Sauer. It took him a few seconds to realize he was still in his bed, the chair undisturbed, his only companion the slow ticking of the heater grate.
Drake stood, shaking his head, and shuffled to the bathroom half asleep. The tap water was icy cold and tasted like metal and chlorine, but he didn’t care. He drained the cup in two gulps and peered at his watch. 5:47.
The rest of his slumber he spent tossing and turning, a headache pulsing behind his eyes as his body tried to get the sleep it needed. When he cracked a lid open to check the time, warm sunlight streamed through a slit in the curtains, and he saw it was 8:00. He threw the covers aside with a sigh and switched off the alarm before heading to the bathroom, any further chance of sleep lost to the day’s advance. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror – his red eyes, face drawn with fatigue, three day’s scraggly growth on his normally chiseled jaw – and a single word sprang to mind to describe his reflection.
Hunted.
Chapter Sixteen
The interior of the restaurant was jarring, all bright yellow and orange veneers apparently deliberately chosen for their perkiness. The other patrons were also travelers – grizzled truckers with weary scowls, families in transit – all looking out of place and ill at ease, counting the minutes until their time was up in the cheery purgatory and their journey could continue. Jack sat next to Allie on one side of the booth, Drake on the other, drinking bottomless cups of mediocre coffee, after they ordered from a waitress who’d greeted them with a toothy smile and vacant eyes.
Of the three, only Jack looked better; his color had returned along with his trademark steely determination in his gaze. Like Drake’s, Allie’s face showed signs of the stress, her easy grin nowhere in evidence, replaced by a thin humorless line as serious as a firing squad.
The server arrived with their meals and set platters of artery-clogging lumps before them before strutting off to the next patrons with a swish of her ponytail. Allie’s fruit plate was probably the only thing that hadn’t been churned out of a slaughterhouse, but at that moment it all smelled heavenly, and Drake attacked his meal like it owed him money.
Once they finished with breakfast, Jack cleared his throat and began to speak in a low voice.
“I’ve given this a lot of thought. A private investigator might have done the phone tracking, and could probably, with enough time, get bank records and credit card statements. So we should assume they’ll do exactly that. We can
use that to our advantage by creating a false trail for them to follow to oblivion.”
Drake nodded. It made sense.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. How much money do you have on you?” Jack asked him.
Drake eyed the ceiling and did a quick calculation. “A little over thirty grand.”
Jack looked surprised. “With you?”
“Yeah. It’s a long story.”
“Doesn’t matter. That’s a stroke of luck. With that kind of cash, you can do whatever you want, within reason. It buys you a lot of flexibility, so you don’t have to use your credit cards at all unless you’re deliberately leading them on a goose chase.”
Allie finished her coffee. “How much do we have?” she asked Jack.
“I’ve got almost fifty thousand in gold coins, and fifteen in cash. I can convert the gold wherever. For now, we’re set. If this goes longer than a year, then it gets sticky.”
“But your pension payments go into the bank during the interim, right?” she asked.
“Correct.”
Drake sat back. “I’ve also got seventy grand coming from Patricia’s estate. For all I know, it’s already in my account.”
“Then you’re set. But getting it out without leaving a trail could be difficult.”
“Yeah, but I’m going to have to go to the bank anyway to get my passport. Like I said, it’s in a safe deposit box there. I can always withdraw a bunch of cash when I pick it up. Now that I’m carrying thirty around, I can see that it’s not as bulky as I’d have thought. Two pockets in my cargo pants. Piece of cake.”
“The good news is that there are no forms to fill out or boxes to check leaving the U.S. So if you don’t declare it, you’d only be in violation of your destination’s laws. And my experience is that places in South America aren’t doing full body searches on arriving passengers,” Jack said.
“That’s good to know.”
“So here’s what you’re going to do, Drake. Book a flight home, paying cash. Take a taxi to the bank. Pull the money and the passport, and then get the hell out of there. Hightail it to a border city and walk across. From there, you can get to wherever. Peru. Brazil. Bolivia.”
Ramsey's Gold (Drake Ramsey Book 1) Page 10