Wild Orchids

by Karen Robards

  Tunafish grimaced. “Think they’ll find us?”

  Max looked grim. “Eventually. It might take them a while. Ortega knew the route we were taking, and knowing him I would guess that this plane is equipped with a homing device. He wouldn’t let that much dope out of his care without some sort of insurance that it would turn up where it was supposed to. I imagine Minelli told whoever he was talking to where we took off from and where we intended to land, and how much flying time we had before we crashed. So they should have a pretty fair idea of the general area we’re in. And I sent that damned mayday, so the feds will be hot on our trail. Ortega and the feds have a head start—they were probably monitoring us on radar when we went down—but for the kind of haul we’re talking about here, I imagine the mob will do a pretty good job of playing catch up. In fact, they’re probably all three hot on each other’s tails right now. So it’s just a matter of who gets here first: Minelli’s pals, Ortega, or the feds.”

  “Shee-it.” Tunafish pursed his lips in a silent whistle, while Lora listened to this litany of disaster in wide-eyed silence.

  “Look on the bright side,” Max offered with the flickering of a grin. “If we weren’t loaded down with all this dope, no one would give a damn where we were. At least we can be sure that someone will be coming after us.”

  “Yeah, the lions, the tigers and the alligators. It’s just a matter of who swallows us up first.” Tunafish rolled his eyes. “Man, we got to get out of here.”

  Max shook his head. “We can’t walk out of these mountains. No way.”

  Tunafish looked at him steadily. “You could—and take Lora here with you.”

  “I’m not leaving you, pal.”

  “Don’t be an ass, boss. Think about the lady. Whoever shows up first, it ain’t goin’ to be pretty.”

  “Lora?” Max turned to look at her where she still stood by the gaping hole. Those black eyes met hers steadily. “You heard. You’re involved here, too. What do you say?”

  Lora looked from him to Tunafish. The idea of being in the center of a maelstrom of violence was frightening, but also slightly unreal. What was real was the sweat on Tunafish’s brow and the pain in his liquid brown eyes.

  “I vote we stick together.”

  Max’s hard eyes softened almost imperceptibly as they met hers, and then he was turning back to Tunafish.

  “You heard her. I agree. So we stay.”

  Tunafish snorted. “I never knew you had a suicidal streak, boss.”

  “Just goes to show you don’t know everything about me. Besides, I don’t mean to get killed—none of us will. I have a plan.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Tunafish rolled his eyes again. “Here we go. Lora, hit him over the head for me. Everytime he has a plan, I wind up gettin’ hurt. It was his idea to borrow the plane from Ortega. And—”

  “There’s no use raking up old grievances, pal. Come to think of it, I can recall a few ideas of yours that were real disasters. But that’s neither here nor there. Everybody who’s coming after us is going to be looking for the plane, right? If we stay with it, we’ll be sitting ducks. But while I was scouting around this morning I found a cave. A lot of them, actually; the whole mountain is honeycombed with them. I think we ought to hole up there and take the dope with us. It’s our ticket home. We’re going to hide it—and we don’t tell where it is until we’re safely out of here.”

  Tunafish nodded slowly. “Makes sense.”

  “Lora?”

  “It makes sense to me, too. Only—what about the drugs? It seems wrong to just let Ortega or the mob have them, although I suppose the federales are all right—they’re the police, after all.” She brightened. “If the others get here first, couldn’t we just pour the drugs out?”

  Both men gave her long looks. “Honey, I can see you ain’t never had any real dealin’s with real bad men. They’d grind you up for hamburger if you did that.” Tunafish shook his head at her naivete.

  “We can’t do that anyway. The dope is our life insurance policy. Ortega, the mob, the feds—they’d all kill their grandmothers to get their hands on this much dope. You’ve got to realize that they’re not just going to waltz into the jungle, find the empty plane, shrug their shoulders, and waltz out again. They’re going to look for that dope—and us. And Ortega’s the only one we can do business with. If the feds show up first, or Minelli’s pals, we’ll have to stay out of sight until Ortega gets here. If the feds get their hands on us we’ll go to prison for a long time—yes, you too, Lora. Do you think they will believe you had nothing to do with this? You’ve had some experience with the way they think, so don’t kid yourself. As for the mob, I’d say our chances of coming out of this with a whole skin are slim to none once the mob gets its hands on the dope. So we wait for Ortega. We can trust Ortega—to a point.”

  Tunafish looked skeptical. “I wouldn’t trust that little runt across the street and back.”

  Max looked at him. “You got any better ideas?”

  “No,” Tunafish had to admit.

  “Then that’s what we’ll do. Anyway, Ortega has no reason to kill us—unless he thinks he’s made an enemy of me by tricking me into running the stuff. Ortega doesn’t like having enemies running around loose if he can help it. Well, I’ll just have to convince him that I don’t hold a grudge. It shouldn’t be too difficult—he’s convinced that one day having a more than nodding acquaintance with an ex-DEA agent will pay off. Besides, he’ll be more interested in getting his merchandise back than in us.”

  “You hope,” Tunafish snorted.

  “Shut up, will you?” Max said fiercely with a significant look at Lora, who was looking ever more alarmed. “Everything’s going to work out fine. But I think it would be better if I’m the only one who knows exactly where the dope is. That way, there’ll be less chance of anything going wrong.”

  “Yeah, like somebody torturin’ the whereabouts of the dope out of us before you can make your deal.”

  “Damn it, Tunafish!” Max glared at his friend.

  Tunafish looked apologetic. “Sorry. Uh—you know some place to hide it? That’s a lot of dope to just make disappear.’

  “I found the perfect place. That’s what gave me the idea. Max grinned suddenly at Tunafish. “You got your leg broken on purpose, didn’t you, you bastard, so you wouldn’t have to help me haul those crates up a mountain?”

  “It was totally premeditated,” Tunafish returned solemnly. “Well, boss, there’s no point in sittin’ around. You may as well get started.”

  “Yeah.” Max got to his feet. Crouching so long must have hurt his knee, because he flexed it briefly, his mouth contorting in a grimace. But he quickly banished any sign of discomfort when he saw Lora’s eyes on him, and turned back to Tunafish. “You feel up to standing guard over the stuff here? All you have to do is sit in the shade with a pistol.”

  Tunafish looked insulted. “What do you think I am, some kind of pansy? I can do anything you can—except walk, and maybe some other things I ain’t thought of yet.”

  Max grinned. “Just asking. Okay, you keep watch here and I’ll move the cargo up into the cave. Lora, you’ll stay with Tunafish.”

  “But I can help.” While she might not be able to lift as much as he could, there was no reason why she couldn’t carry lighter loads. If he did it all by himself, it would take him hours. . . .

  “You stay with Tunafish.” It was a brusque order. Lora’s eyebrows lifted at the highhandedness of it. Her mouth opened to protest, but Tunafish forestalled her.

  “I don’t need no babysitter. And you need someone to ride shotgun for you.”

  Max looked from one to the other of them. They stared back at him with identical expressions of determination. His mouth moved wryly.

  “Whatever you say, both of you. But Lora, it’s a steep climb and I’m going to have my hands full. Don’t expect me to help you.” His voice was much cooler when he addressed her.

  Lora lifted her chin at him. “Fine.”


  “Let’s get on with it, then. Tunafish, put your arm around my shoulders. Lora, get under his other arm.”

  XV

  It was almost dark by the time Max finally got the contents of the cargo bay up the mountainside and into the cave he had found. The work was backbreaking, and Max had, of necessity, done it all himself. Lora’s job had been to walk along beside him with a pistol in her hand, in case Minelli or DiAngelo should take it into their heads to jump them. As it happened, they had encountered nothing scarier than a foraging anteater, which made Lora jump but didn’t count as threatening. Lora was so nervous she was not sure that it wouldn’t have been a relief to have Minelli and DiAngelo stage an ambush, just to get it over with.

  The cave was about half a mile up the mountain, situated so that it overlooked much of the jungle valley below, including the site of the crashed plane, although the thick quilt of treetops hid the plane itself from view. It took more than three dozen trips through the dense jungle undergrowth and over a steep, narrow path (made by goats according to Max) up through the rocks before the job was finished. Lora was exhausted as she stood armed guard over the entrance to the cave while Max made one final trip back down to the plane to get Tunafish. All the dope was inside, but he had told her not to enter. He had a surprise for both her and Tunafish, he said. Lora didn’t much trust his surprises. She didn’t know what worried her more: the dark, echoing, hopefully empty cave at her back, or the possibility of Minelli and DiAngelo appearing. She would shoot them, if necessary, she told herself, fingering the trigger of the pistol and praying she wouldn’t be put to the test. To be perfectly honest, she wasn’t sure she could.

  When at last Max came into sight with Tunafish slung over his shoulder, Lora heaved a sigh of relief. She walked forward quickly, meaning to help them.

  “For God’s sake, don’t shoot us.” Max sounded edgy, and Lora was affronted until she looked down at the gun. With Max in view, it had no longer seemed necessary to keep a deathgrip on it, so she had let it slump and its nose was, to her chagrin, pointed directly at the center of Tunafish’s broad back, which happened to be covering Max’s heart. Even she knew better than to point a gun of any description, much less one that she knew was loaded, at anyone. . . .

  “Sorry,” she said, and made no protest as Max reached out with his free hand and removed the pistol from her grasp, tucking it into the waistband of his jeans as he continued to help Tunafish toward the cave. Tunafish was sweating profusely, and if ever a black man could be said to be white under the dark pigmentation of his skin, Tunafish was that man. His complexion was a chalky gray. . . .

  Lora could perceive no way she might help, so she trailed along behind, feeling useless. Worse, she felt like a burden. She was more helpless than Tunafish in this hostile environment, and without Tunafish’s excuse of a broken leg. Max was already carrying Tunafish inside the mouth of the cave, and Lora followed glumly, scrambling over the loose shale. It took a few minutes for her eyes to adjust to the cool darkness, but when they did they widened.

  All around her, flat sedimentary rocks rose in tiers to form a huge, round cavern. The ceiling must have risen to a height of thirty or more feet. Lora cast an uneasy glance up into the lofty darkness, at the stalactites like huge stone teeth dripping from the ceiling, and tried not to imagine what else could be up there. She was sure she didn’t want to know. Max had built a fire close to the mouth of the cave, and had stuck leaf-wrapped sticks into clefts in the wall to serve as torches for illumination. The effect was eery, as if they had gone back thousands of years in time. On the walls, faded paintings of feathered warriors with flattened foreheads and ferocious dark eyes seemed to leap as the flames threw shadows over them. Lora stared at them, moving closer.

  “Are they real?” she asked, scarcely daring to believe what she was seeing.

  Max had gotten Tunafish settled, seated on a rocky shelf with his back propped against the wall, and was watching her. “Authentic Mayan cave drawings,” he confirmed. “Probably over a thousand years old.”

  “That’s unbelievable,” Lora breathed, eyes wide as she pondered the ancient beings who had stood just where she was standing centuries before. She took another step forward, and something crunched beneath her feet. Looking down, she saw that the smooth stone floor was littered with broken bits of pottery. From the same Mayans, she presumed, crouching to touch some reverently. She glanced around to see what other ancient wonders waited for her discovery. There was nothing else. Literally nothing.

  “What did you do with the drugs?” Her voice echoed her amazement. She had watched with her own eyes as he had carried crate after crate of bagged white powder inside.

  Max shook his head. “We have an agreement, remember?”

  Lora knew she was better off not knowing, so she didn’t ask again. But she wondered madly.

  “I’m going to go back and see what else I can rummage up—maybe there are some blankets or something in the plane’s overhead compartments. I won’t be long.”

  With that brief comment, and after wordlessly handing her back the pistol, Max disappeared back into the deepening gloom of the jungle. Lora looked after him with a frown. He was so distant with her—had been ever since she had made that instinctive protest against him shooting DiAngelo. Was he angry at her? She hated the idea of Max being angry with her. He was all she had, out here in this savage wilderness. She realized that she depended on him utterly, and didn’t much like the realization. It wouldn’t do to let herself come to need him. . . . Was this a part of Stockholm Syndrome, too? Lora wished she could remember more of what she had read on the subject, but at the time she had never expected to find herself in this situation. But something was happening between her and Max, had been happening ever since she had first laid eyes on him, in fact, and she had to know what it was. She was too sensible, too sane and levelheaded to get involved with a man like him—so why was she so worried about his safety as she watched him disappear into the night? Why did she care that he might be angry with her?

  “You like him, don’t you?” This was Tunafish, speaking in a more serious voice than she had yet heard him use. Lora turned to look at him, having to strain to see him in the deepening shadows.

  “Who?” The question was purely defensive, and at Tunafish’s skeptical look she realized that she sounded like a coy teenager. She smiled wryly, and inclined her head. “Sometimes.”

  “He’s a good man. One of the best.”

  “Have you known him long?” She shouldn’t want to know about him, Lora thought. It was safer not to know too much. She didn’t want this disconcerting physical attraction between them to go any further. It would be disastrous if she started to see him as a man she could learn to care for. . . . But she couldn’t stop the question. She wanted to know all she could about the enigma that was John Roberts Maxwell, whether it was prudent or not.

  “Since we were kids. We grew up together in Houston. We kind of lost track of each other after I dropped out of school and Max went on, but we met up again in ’Nam. He was my C.O. over there for almost three years. When Bravo Company got him, he was a lieutenant right out of college, green as grass, and if I hadn’t stood up for him there were a few times that some of the guys might have blown his ass off—uh, sorry. But he learned fast, and when he did, there wasn’t a better officer over there. Most of us got out alive because of him.”

  Lora moved closer without even realizing that she had done so. “He—you both—fought in Vietnam? In the army?”

  Tunafish nodded. “We ended up in Army Intelligence. Recon work, mostly. Behind the enemy lines, real hush-hush stuff. But relatively safe. At least, if we did our job right. We were not supposed to let the gooks know we were there while we found out what they were up to, and if they didn’t know we were there they couldn’t shoot us. Elementary, huh? Only it didn’t always work.”

  “Were you wounded?” She was standing right beside him now, and as she spoke she unconsciously dropped to her knees at his
side. The fact that she was nominally supposed to be on watch had completely faded from her mind. The gun dangled unnoticed from her hand, its barrel resting on the cold stone floor.

  Tunafish grinned at her, the whites of his eyes and the gleam of his teeth very bright in the darkness. “Everybody who served in ’Nam was wounded, I think. Don’t ask me where I got hit, ’cause I ain’t tellin’. It’s downright undignified. Max got it in the knee. Shrapnel. That’s why he limps. He’s lucky he didn’t lose that leg.”

  Lora was silent for a moment. “Tunafish—have you heard of Mei Veng?”

  The grin disappeared from Tunafish’s face as abruptly as if someone had wiped it away. “What do you know about Mei Veng?” The question was harsh; his eyes on her were wary.

  “Max mentioned it in connection with killing people.”

  “Yeah.” Tunafish’s face was very bleak. Lora waited, but he said nothing else, just stared off into the distance as though he was seeing something in the darkness that she could not.

  “Tunafish?” Her voice seemed to surprise him, because he almost started as his eyes turned back to her. “Tell me about it. Please.”

  Tunafish looked at her for a moment, unspeaking. Then he shook his head.

  “I’m real surprised Max even said the name. As far as I know, he’s never told anyone about it. We’ve never talked about it between us. It’s not the kind of thing you talk about.”

  “Tunafish, please. I want to know. I—need to know.”

  Tunafish stared at her for a long time. Then his eyes moved again to look out at the infinite darkness beyond the mouth of the cave.

  “Mei Veng was a village in ’Nam. Little village, you know, with old men and women and little kids. We were checking it for reds, it was supposed to be sympathetic toward the Vietcong, when this little kid in a diaper walks up to some of our guys. Well, we were ready to shoot anyone who made a move, but who wants to shoot a little kid? Only the kid had a grenade stuffed in his diaper. It blew him to hell along with three of our guys. That’s where Max caught the shrapnel. Then all hell broke loose.”