Wild Orchids

by Karen Robards

  Maybe that was her attraction for him. Maybe, as old age crept up on him—he was thirty-seven, after all, only three years from forty—he was ready for milk instead of whiskey. Maybe he needed a change of pace. A prim little schoolteacher from the cornfields of Kansas, to be exact. Max thought of the last lady who had figured prominently in his life, and had to grin; whatever else Conchita was, she was certainly no lady. She was hot and wild and always ready, a tempestuous Latina with masses of curling black hair and eyes as dark as his own. And a body—Max thought of that body with the appreciation of a connoisseur. Her body was womanly and ripe, just the way he liked his women to be. Though, he reflected, it wasn’t any more voluptuous than Lora’s. . . .

  The comparison annoyed him. What the hell was he doing, sitting out here on a rock in the middle of nowhere mooning about a woman who clearly regarded him as a cross between Al Capone and Richard Speck? Oh, she was hot for him, he knew. It would be damned easy to take her to bed if he wanted to. Max grinned without much humor. If he wanted to! Who was he kidding? He was dying to take her to bed, hungry to take her to bed, physically aching to take her to bed—but it went against the grain to make passionate love to a woman who looked at him at least half the time as if he’d just crawled out from under the nearest rock.

  That was partly his fault, he acknowledged, but the acknowledgment didn’t make him feel any better. All right, so he had kidnapped her, and scared her a little in the process—what else could he have done under the circumstances? He was running for his life at the time, and it hadn’t been a moment to be too particular about his methods. If he had it to do over again, he would have done everything precisely the same. . . .

  Well, not everything. He would have made her. He’d had lots of chances, and he’d blown every one of them. When, for example, partly to teach her a lesson and partly to get her out of those damned wet clothes that she was afraid to take off in case she incited him to rape her, he’d stripped her naked and tied her to the bed. . . . Max thought of how she’d looked naked, her lush, creamy body stretched helplessly against the brightly patterned blanket, her eyes as they stared up at him frightened and at the same time fascinated. . . . No matter what she probably would have yelled afterward, it wouldn’t have been rape. He could have had her wanting him in a matter of seconds, but something had held him back. What? A sense of decency, perhaps? Max quickly rejected that. If he’d ever had a sense of decency, it had vanished long ago.

  So why hadn’t he fucked the hell out of her that morning at Ortega’s? That was the real question, the one that had been eating away at him ever since. She’d wanted it that morning, been as hot as Conchita at her horniest. He’d woken to find her rubbing her butt (crammed into those skintight blue jeans, another ridiculous precaution on her part against rape) against his crotch, savoring his hardness. Max thought about how soft her skin had felt beneath his hands, the way her breasts had overflowed in his palms, the stiffness of her nipples beneath his questing fingers, her soft moans of pleasure. He had given her much pleasure. . . . Max pictured her as she had been then, her back to him, her head thrown back as she writhed and moaned with excitement. . . . He could see her, smell her, feel her wetness. . . . The mere memory made him hard as a spike. Just like he had been then. But though he clearly had had every right after that, though he knew he could have had her moaning for more in a matter of minutes, he had allowed the loathing in her eyes after he had pleasured her and she had come to herself again to stop him from doing what he had, at that moment, wanted to do more than anything in the world. He was not used to women looking at him like he was a pile of fly-covered shit. . . .

  She had been horny, and she had used him to get off on. That was the unvarnished truth of that incident. He had realized it the moment he had seen that look of revulsion on her face as she floated back down to earth and remembered exactly who and what he was. The knowledge had angered him so much that he had been stopped in his tracks. Like a fool . . . If he had it to do over again, he would drill her until she fainted from exhaustion, and to hell with how she looked at him. But that was the trouble with life: one never got to do anything over again. Do something once, and it was carved in stone.

  He could still have her, he knew. Anytime. It would require no work at all on his part. She would fall like a stone if he so much as kissed her cheek. She wanted him every bit as badly as he wanted her, if not more. So what the hell was holding him back?

  Max knew the answer to that even as he asked himself the question. He hadn’t made a woman like her in years. A nice woman, a lady. Not since he’d last made love to Marybeth, his ex-wife. Sweet little Marybeth, whom he’d married just after he got out of ’Nam and who, in the course of a few months, had torn him up as badly as ever the Vietcong had. She’d wanted too much of him. He hadn’t been able to give her a steady, solid husband with a nine-to-five job, a nice house in the suburbs, two point five kids. . . . She had wanted a rock to lean on, and at the time he had needed a rock himself. What she hadn’t wanted was a husband who woke up in the middle of the night screaming with nightmares, who broke into tears at the drop of a hat, who limped and shied at every sudden noise and couldn’t hold a job even as a grill cook at a McDonald’s. . . . He had known he was a failure as a husband, known that Marybeth was unhappy, and he hadn’t even much cared. Her very gentleness had goaded him to hurt her. And when he’d said the nastiest, most hurtful thing that had come to his mind and watched the tears drip down her cheeks, he hadn’t even felt like the bastard he knew he was. He’d just felt angry with her for marrying him. She should have known what she wanted, should have known that he wouldn’t fit the bill. She’d been over twenty-one, after all. But of course, women didn’t have that much sense. Women—ladies, in particular—all seemed to want white knights and heroes, and he was fresh out of heroics—then and now. And that was the reason he was wary of Lora: like Popeye, he was what he was and that’s all that he was. He wanted her like hell—but just for a little while, just until he got his fill of screwing her. While she—he knew her type. She would hate herself if she had sex without being in love, so she would sooner or later convince herself she was in love with him. Then she would want commitment, marriage and kids, and a house and a job for him . . . God, no! He wasn’t falling into that trap. Not again.

  There was another reason, too, although he didn’t like to admit it even to himself: with Lora, he was vulnerable. And he hated being vulnerable. He hated needing anyone or anything. If life had taught him just one lesson, it was the value of self-sufficiency. And Lora was making him feel less self-sufficient than usual. Last night, when he had had the nightmare again—he hadn’t had the damned thing in years, it must have been seeing all that dope that had brought it back—he had welcomed her arms around him like a baby welcomes its mother’s. God, he had actually cried in her arms. . . . The thought made him sick to his stomach. When he had recovered sufficiently to realize what he was doing, he had been horrified—and even more horrified to discover how good it felt to be held by her, comforted by her. She brought out a side of himself that he thought life had stamped out of him, and it frightened him. He didn’t need her, didn’t want to need her, didn’t want anything from her except a little sex. He certainly didn’t want her motherly comfort or her pity—or, if she should talk herself into it, her love.

  The very idea made Max jump off the rock and start to stride away from the pool. He had taken only a few steps when he became aware of a discordance in the atmosphere. There was a faint, almost imperceptible noise behind him. Max heard it, and his body stiffened in preparation. He was too canny a jungle fighter to show that he had heard—whatever it was would be on him in an instant. Instead, he trained his every nerve toward the faint rustle of the undergrowth and continued to walk, poised and ready.

  The faint sounds behind him continued. A twig cracked, then another. This was no animal stalking its prey. The movements were too clumsy. Therefore it almost had to be Minelli or DiAngelo, or both. He had
been expecting an ambush sooner or later. . . .

  “Maxwell.”

  To his surprise, DiAngelo stepped out from behind a tree dead in his path. Funny, he hadn’t been expecting that—they were more clever than he’d thought. DiAngelo held a pistol, and Max remembered that he had escaped with one. And that pistol was aimed straight at his own heart.

  “What do you want, DiAngelo?” Max was alert but calm. Clearly audible footsteps told him that Minelli was walking up behind him, making no effort to conceal his presence now.

  “Guess.” DiAngelo smiled evilly, the grin splitting his thin face. Minelli reached around him to pull the pistol from his waistband.

  Now was the time, Max knew. Now, while Minelli was close. With two of them, he would have to make it fast and good. For a split second, Max wondered if his body was up to it. The last time he had tried it, during his stint with the DEA, his knee had thrown his timing off. But then he’d only had one opponent, so timing hadn’t been crucial. In this case, with two fit men and a pistol trained on him, he’d better get it right. Or die . . .

  He caught Minelli’s reaching arm, jerked him around in front of him, and chopped down hard on the man’s neck with the side of his hand. Minelli crumpled without a sound. The pistol DiAngelo held blasted, but Max was already diving beneath the line of fire. The bullets whistled harmlessly over his flying back as his head sank with a satisfying thunk into DiAngelo’s cadaverous belly. DiAngelo toppled backward with a bellow. While he was still recovering his senses, Max performed a particularly nasty maneuver on his balls. He had used that trick a time or two before, and it had never failed to incapacitate. It didn’t fail this time, either.

  Max rolled off DiAngelo, who was gasping for air and rolling about on the ground in agony. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Minelli was just beginning to come to. Max scooped up the pistol, stationed himself so that he could cover Minelli and DiAngelo impartially, and waited. He could not help a pardonable pride that, despite being out of practice and having the disadvantage of a bum knee, he had not forgotten his training.

  “You bastard!” This was Minelli, who was rubbing the side of his neck and glowering at Max.

  “Easy, boy.” Max waved the pistol at him and Minelli subsided, sitting down heavily on the mulch-covered ground and rubbing his neck with a groan.

  “Oh, God, I think you’ve crippled me.” This moan came from DiAngelo, who was still lying on the ground clutching his balls, although he had quit squirming like a worm on a hook.

  “Probably.” If Max sounded indifferent, it was because he felt indifferent.

  “What are you going to do to us?” This was Minelli again, looking up at him apprehensively. Max pursed his lips and lifted his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.

  “You can’t kill us!”

  Minelli sounded alarmed, as well he should be, Max thought. Every instinct he possessed warned him to shoot both of them here and now, before they could cause anymore trouble. If he didn’t, if he let them live, they would cause him no end of headaches. He was as sure of that as he was that the sun would come up in the morning. But there was a problem: he was, to a certain degree, responsible for Minelli’s and DiAngelo’s well-being. He had been paid, well paid, not only to break them out of jail, but also to deliver them in one piece to whoever was waiting at Puerto Cortés. Of course, the situation had changed drastically, but he still had his reputation to think about. To date, he had never failed to deliver the goods as promised and paid for.

  He scowled, and his fingers tightened on the pistol. Minelli looked alarmed, and DiAngelo actually let go of his balls. Max looked at them in disgust. If he had had any sense, he thought, he would have left them to rot in prison. His instincts had warned him about this job. . . . Well, it was too late now.

  “All right, I’ll keep you two sleazeballs alive. But I warn you, one wrong move from either of you, and you’re both history. I could always tell your pals that you died in the crash.” That had just occurred to him, and it was tempting. He could waste them where they were, bury the bodies, and no one would be the wiser. Except Tunafish and Lora. Lora would wonder where Minelli and DiAngelo had gotten to sooner or later, and if he wanted her to keep her mouth shut he would have to tell her. . . . Then she really would look at him like the creature from the Black Lagoon. Goddamn it, he swore bitterly, and lifted the gun menacingly.

  “Just give me a reason. Please,” he growled.

  The look on his face must have reflected his inward fury, because Minelli held up both hands, palms outward in surrender, while DiAngelo looked like he wanted to piss in his pants. Max stared at them in disgust. Christ, how did he get into these situations?

  “Stand up, turn around, and put your hands behind your backs. Both of you.”

  They obeyed with an alacrity that would have been funny if he had been in a mood to laugh; he wasn’t. Scowling, Max kept the pistol trained on their backs with one hand while he took off his belt with the other. Then he had DiAngelo tie Minelli’s hands. Max checked Minelli’s bonds, then tied DiAngelo, who he considered the lesser threat, to the other end of the long thong himself, using his teeth to tighten the knot. With the two men roped together, it would be impossible for one to try anything. A fact he viewed with some regret.

  “All right, move. To your right.” The two men, sullen-faced and silent, obeyed. Staying carefully behind them, the pistol at the ready although he didn’t expect to need it, Max directed them back toward the cave. By the time they reached the foot of the cliff, both men were panting with exertion. Blood ran down their faces from dozens of scratches inflicted by branches that they had been unable to push out of their way with their hands tied. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed around the bloody scratches. Max directed them to climb the crumbling rock, totally unmoved by their obvious misery. They could count themselves lucky he had not killed them outright, as every vestige of his common sense was still shouting that he should. Talk about vipers in the bosom. . . . .

  XVII

  The presence of Minelli and DiAngelo in the cave further complicated an already tangled situation. With Tunafish unable to stand without assistance, there was only Max to find food, fetch water, assist with Tunafish’s most private requirements, and keep guard over the two men. Lora did what she could, but those things were largely beyond her scope. She could not go into the jungle alone. Neither could she stand guard over Minelli and DiAngelo. If they managed to get free of their bonds, they would overpower her in a matter of moments, gun or no gun. Tunafish could guard them, but Tunafish was at times almost out of his mind with pain. He didn’t complain, even managed to joke about it from time to time, but Max had known him too long. He could see the desperation in Tunafish’s eyes. Max knew that he was inhaling smack when the pain was worst, but under the circumstances, who could blame him? Max was almost glad they had the damned dope. . . .

  The jungle was beautiful with a wild, savage beauty that he admired despite the harrowing circumstances. Everyday, as he fished in the pool that still reminded him of Lora’s eyes, much to his annoyance, or gathered fruit or branches for the fire or performed one of a hundred other tasks, he discovered new wonders. Like the flowers. Gorgeous tropical flowers that covered the jungle floor like a carpet in places. Orchids in lush shades of purple and orange and white grew everywhere, thrusting up from the ground like weeds. So did poppies. Amapola poppies, with their velvety scarlet and black petals and heady aroma that caused giant bees and flies to swarm around them like addicts. These poppies grew all over Mexico, in vast fields. They were a cash crop, raised and razor-harvested for their white gold: opium.

  Seeing the poppies growing wild brought back memories, some bad and others worse. In his days with the DEA, Max had spent a goodly amount of time in the remotest areas of Mexico. The mestizos who populated the villages raised poppies like Americans raised corn. It was their livelihood. Most times it was done willingly; sometimes the peasants had to be coerced into the business. But if they valued their lives
, they cooperated. The Mexican drug families were a vicious lot. They thought nothing of wiping out entire families, entire villages. When word of these atrocities got around, the next village was more amenable to doing as it was told. The authorities rarely interfered. They were well paid not to. But since the highly publicized murder of that DEA agent, the authorities had—reluctantly, and only after much whip cracking by the United States—begun to crack down. Not that it would do any good. The smart ones would just lay low until the heat was off and then resume operations again.

  Since ’Nam, Max had never touched so much as a single joint. He had seen what drugs could do to seemingly civilized men, and he hated it. He hated drugs. . . . He hated what drugs did to people; made them crazy, violent zombies with only one goal in life: to get more of the substance that was killing them. He hated seeing kids who thought they could make a quick buck caught up in the dark world of the drug families. Many died. More became addicted. Some went to prison, in the States or in foreign countries like Mexico that had never heard of prisoners’ rights. And some turned into animals as bad as the men they worked for. He thought of Ortega using him to run drugs, and his fingers twitched with longing to close around the man’s pudgy throat. Ortega knew better than to pull such a thing on him—or if he didn’t, he soon would. As soon as Max got himself and the rest of them out of this hellish paradise.