A Fortune in Blood: A Florida Action Adventure Novel (Scott Jarvis Private Investigator Book 7)

by Scott Cook

  “I like them long and thick,” She quipped, pinching my ass.

  I ignored this and dug another length of line from the cargo area. I quickly used it to lash the steering wheel. I turned the engine off and listened.

  I thought I’d seen the headlights of the truck go by on the main road fifty yards away after we’d turned. Something told me he’d be back, though.

  When I heard the sound of an engine approaching from far off over the sounds of night birds, monkeys and insects, I knew our pursuers had figured it out.

  Her stick was a bit too long, but I snapped off one end and jammed it between the seat and the gas pedal. It was only depressed about halfway, but that’d do. I removed the stick, started the engine and then replaced the stick again, the motor revving up.

  “What the hell are you doing?” She asked.

  “Got anything valuable in the bags?” I asked in return.

  She frowned, “Nothing too special. Clothes and stuff.”

  “Good,” I said. “Stand back.”

  “What the fu—“

  I squatted on the driver’s seat, gripped the shifter and pulled it down into drive. The motor whined and the Jeep bucked for a second. I hoped it wouldn’t stall.

  It didn’t, and the vehicle began to move forward, picking up speed quickly. I leapt sideways out of the door and managed to keep my footing by landing in an awkward run. I stumbled to a halt near Andrea.

  Her mouth was wide open and I turned to look. The Jeep was moving along the dirt road at about twenty miles per hour and in a display of absolute dumb, once in a lifetime luck, it T-boned the front left quarter panel of the truck which had just slowed to make the turn.

  The crash managed to turn the truck away from us and sent both vehicles into the jungle on the other side of the street. The Jeep eventually stopped, its motor revving down as it buried itself into the underbrush. The stick must have slipped off.

  “Holy shit!” Andrea gasped and began to laugh. “You are truly one crazy son of a bitch!”

  “Now why would you say something so insensitive?” I asked as I led her behind a stand of trees including one huge Guanacaste on which I’d leaned the Aprilia.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Jarvis,” She mocked. “Guy slides down a rope into my room, shoots two guys and then gets me into a high-speed chase complete with blazing guns.”

  I shrugged, “This isn’t a normal night for you?”

  She just shook her head, “now you’re gonna get me on that bike?”

  “Yup.”

  “And I suppose I’m riding bitch?”

  I grinned at her as I started the motor and slung my rifle over my shoulder, “The way you drive? Talk about crazy… come on, Frick and Frack aren’t gonna be distracted long.”

  I could already hear loud Spanish voices out on the main road. And as I walked the bike out from the trees, I clearly saw the Jeep being backed out of the foliage.

  “They’re stealing our ride,” Andrea said as she mounted behind me.

  “Well, it’s only fair,” I said. “We did ding theirs. Hang on.”

  “What about this gun?” She asked.

  “Slide it into the waistband of your jeans at the small of your back,” I instructed, “In fact, here.”

  I unslung the AR-15 and placed it on her, the strap over her left shoulder and under her right arm.

  “Why am I holding the gun?” She asked as she wrapped her arms around my middle and held tight.

  “Just in case we need to shoot,” I said. “I can’t do that very well while driving this thing.”

  I put the bike in gear and opened up the throttle. Even as I sped down the dirt road I saw the headlights of the Jeep behind us reflected in my side mirrors.

  “These guys are persistent,” I said, “What’d you do to piss them off?”

  “Me?” She quipped. “I’m just an innocent damsel.”

  I laughed, “I’ll bet.”

  She leaned forward and ran her tongue from just under my ear to the collar of my shirt. It sent a tingle all the way up and down my spine.

  “Trying to kill us?” I asked.

  She laughed, “Hey, you’re the one who put something powerful between my legs. You started it.”

  I had a feeling this would be a long but interesting night…

  Chapter 27

  The road, or maybe trail would be more accurate, was rutted, pitted and uneven. It inclined slightly as we made our way into the interior and it began to wind its way into the hills.

  Although the Aprilia was designed for this type of terrain, I couldn’t put on much speed due to the rough and rutted road. Especially with a passenger clinging to me. There were more than a few places where even “goat path” was a fairly generous descriptor.

  More than once, the rutted dirt road shrunk down to little more than a game trail, with all manner of branches and vines encroaching so far toward the center that I had to slow down so Andrea and I wouldn’t be lashed to shreds.

  The most unfortunate aspect of my choice of getaway trails was that my stolen Jeep, which had now been re-acquired by Garcia’s men, was making better work of the trail than my motorcycle.

  Although I couldn’t see the Jeep, I could hear its occasional passage not far behind us. Branches snapped and the engine revved loud enough on occasion to be heard over the bikes. Random but frequent flashes of light broke through the foliage from the Jeep’s headlights. All manner of night creatures whooped and shrieked and hollered and howled, adding to the general air of chaos.

  On top of that, the passenger was obviously taking pot shots out of his window. Every now and then a single crack could be heard that was most certainly not a branch. Sometimes it was a series of sharp cracks, which told me that the high-powered bolt-action rifle they’d started with wasn’t their only armament.

  “I think they’re getting closer, Mr. Bond,” Andrea quipped, her body pressed close to mine. “Can’t you speed it up a bit?”

  We were already doing a little over twenty miles per hour and it felt just on the edge of disaster. I shook my head, “Not if we want to stay mounted, no.”

  “You’d be surprised how well I can stay mounted,” she jeered.

  “Seriously?” I shot back over my shoulder. “Is that all you ever think about?”

  “No… I also get excited about money and booze.”

  To be fair, she was probably trying to keep her fear from growing out of control. I understood that. I was certainly no one to judge when it came to making mood-lightening wise cracks.

  We crested a small rise and the jungle opened up a bit. There was a half mile or so stretch of arid land before the road rose again out of a shallow valley and into larger hills and a forest. The road looked a bit more passable through the open area, although it was dark and I couldn’t be entirely certain of that.

  “Shit…” I muttered. Hang on!”

  I shifted into third gear and throttled up. The bike picked up speed and the ride became noticeably bumpier. But it was okay, I felt like I could keep control at what was now just over forty miles per hour.

  A moment went by and Andrea shouted into my ear: “The Jeep is behind us! They just came out of the jungle!”

  Naturally. My only hope was that the road was too bumpy for the driver to make any kind of good practice with his long gun. Hard to aim at a moving target from a moving vehicle that was jouncing all over the road. Of course, they could always stop and draw a bead on us then only we’d be moving and in a relatively straight line directly away from the shooter.

  “Well, this licks ape,” I grumped.

  I reached out and adjusted my left side mirror. I could see the Jeep’s headlights and they looked to be receding.

  “Fuck…” I moaned. “Hold on, Andrea, they’re stopping!”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  Her answer came in the form of multiple bullets that missed us by a very uncomfortable margin and kicked up dirt and gravel just ahead and to our right.

&n
bsp; I killed my headlight and began to swerve. I doubted this would work very well, but we were only seconds from the next rise and the cover of the forest.

  “Why are they trying to kill us?” She asked with evident fear in her voice now.

  “Beats me! You tell me, they’re after you.”

  Suddenly the bike was jolted. It was as if we’d been kicked by a giant mule. I felt rather than heard the rear tire explosively decompress. I was far too busy trying to control the fish tailing that the breeched tire had started to worry about anything else.

  I think the only thing that kept me from dumping the bike was that we were now going up a fairly steep incline and more of our weight was settled toward the rear of the bike, adding stability. I was able to get the Aprilia under control and gunned the throttle, down shifting into first and climbing the hill at lower but steadier speeds.

  We were now within a fairly dense forest and I turned the headlight back on as we crested the rise. The trail looked to dip down again almost immediately and then rise once more up an even steeper hill two hundred yards away. I released the throttle and braked us fast.

  “What!?” Andrea asked, breathing hard.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just great… why are we stopping?”

  “I gotta tinkle,” I said with a wry grin. “Gimme the rifle.”

  As she worked to unsling the AR from her back, I walked the bike a little further ahead on the road, put it in gear and gunned it. The motorcycle wheeleied and shot out from under me, going an impressive fifty or sixty feet down the hill before slewing sideways and tumbling the rest of the way, the engine still sputtering.

  “Into the woods!” I said, pointing to the northwest side of the road, “and I’m on this side. We’re gonna have company soon, I should think.”

  Andrea looked at the tumbled wreck of the bike fifty yards away and thirty feet below, “What the hell…”

  “Move!” I said, yanking the pistol from the back of her jeans and pressing it into her hands.

  “What do I do with this?” She asked in confusion.

  I huffed, “when the bad guys appear between us… fu-cking shoot em’ in the head! Just make sure it’s them and not me. Don’t aim too low.”

  She was about to protest but the sound of the Jeep’s engine laboring up the slope in low gear silenced her. She darted into the underbrush and I went to my side. I found a spot next to an old gnarled tree of some kind and lay prone behind a thick root that stuck up nearly a foot from the loam. I was also covered by a thicket of bushes that nearly met the tree on my right.

  The Jeep crested the rise and came to a stop almost directly in front of me. The driver shut down the engine. He’d obviously seen the Aprilia ahead and below, lying on its side at the edge of the road. Even after rolling over several times, the bike’s motor was still sputtering and the headlight was still casting a lance of white light into the underbrush.

  The driver exited the Jeep cautiously, a pistol in his hand. He crouched low next to the Jeep and moved forward. A bright flashlight clicked on in his left hand and he used it to scan the road and foliage along the sides ahead of him.

  I didn’t see his partner, though. I knew there were two men in the Jeep because when they were in their truck earlier, one had to have been driving while the other did the shooting.

  So where was the fourth man?

  The answer was obvious, of course. He’d probably gotten out of the jeep and was making his way up the hill on foot. They’d assumed an ambush and they’d been right.

  I picked up a golf ball sized pebble and lobbed it behind the Jeep as best I could from a prone position. It wasn’t a great throw, landing just a few feet behind the vehicle. Yet it made enough of a sound in the quiet night that it got the driver’s attention.

  “Jose?” he hissed over his shoulder. “Mida… Jose? Donde esta?”

  There was no answer. Jose, wherever he was, had either not heard his partner’s quiet interrogative or he was wisely keeping his yapper shut. Unfortunately, that’s the moment that Andrea decided to play action hero. She shouted something incoherent and emptied her ten round magazine at the driver. Amazingly, as she couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away, she missed with every single shot, accomplishing nothing.

  Well, nothing good at any rate. She had managed to alert the man to her exact position by the noise of the discharges and of course the muzzle flashes. The man whipped around on one knee and aimed his weapon.

  I cursed under my breath, “Aqui, puto!”

  That stopped him long enough for me to draw a bead on him and squeeze off a burst. My rounds hit him squarely in the side. He cried out in terror and agony and pitched over sideways.

  I knew I had to move. Jose was somewhere out there and the three of us had given him plenty to aim at. I rolled behind the tree and began to move as silently as I could deeper into the forest. A good thing, too, because the side of the big tree trunk that faced the road was spattered by several rounds a bare heartbeat later.

  This Jose was a cool customer. He’d crept up close enough to make a good guess as to the location from which my shots had come. He could probably also guess where Andrea was, too.

  I’d moved ten yards southwest, angling parallel to the road and down the hill we’d driven up. Moving stealthily, especially at night, was extremely slow going. You had to place each foot fall or each grope just so or you’d snap a twig or rustle the bushes just a little too loudly and give your position away.

  That’s why when another three round burst rattled out, I was a little grateful to hear the passage of the bullets through the leaves not very far from Jose’s first attempt at me.

  I also thought I saw his muzzle flashing in front of me. Unfortunately, the sound of a person crashing through underbrush exploded across the road and thirty yards from me.

  Jose laughed and started running in the direction of the sound, firing his weapon.

  I cursed and got to my feet, moving quicker than I’d like toward the road and open ground. I lost sight of Jose and when I stepped out onto the road I still couldn’t see him.

  Suddenly, a woman screamed and two weapons went off simultaneously. Then a man and a woman both screamed virtually in unison. I bit my lip and started running.

  “Andrea!” I barked.

  I moved as fast as possible while keeping low. My heart raced with fear. I felt a stab of guilt when I realized the fear was less for her personal safety for its own sake than for the loss of what help she might provide in finding Clay and Declan.

  “I got the fucker!”” Came an exalted cry from the woods near the jeep.

  As I got to the driver side, Andrea burst from the woods covered in leaves and wearing a huge smile on her face.

  I stopped and caught my breath, “You all right?”

  She flew into my arms and started to laugh and shake, “Woo… that was scary shit! Glad I reloaded.”

  “Are you hit?” I asked, pushing her to arm’s length and seeing blood spattered on her floral blouse.

  “No…” She huffed, “it’s his. He was damn near on top of me when I shot him. I guess his finger was on the trigger as he was falling… Wow that was… something…”

  I sighed, “Christ, I’m tired of this shit… okay, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Nice of them to bring our ride back,” She quipped.

  She then turned back to me and put her hands on my upper arms. She leaned in and kissed me. Her kiss was hot and urgent, her tongue probing and her soft full lips caressing. The lingering scent of her perfume, an undertone of her womanly aroma and her excitement was having a strong effect on me. I felt myself becoming aroused and rather quickly.

  “That was… exciting,” She whispered. “I was so scared for a few minutes… but now that I got that bastard… OH God… I need a good fuck… I need it bad.”

  “Andrea…” I tried to protest.

  “Oh, come on, big boy,” She said, breathing heavily and trailing her finge
rs down my chest and stomach. She pressed her flattened hand against my crotch and moaned, “Oh yeah… I can feel that you’re already hard, so don’t’ pretend you don’t want to.”

  Speaking purely from the physical side, she was right. Her beauty and her unbridled desire was intoxicating me with a heady elixir of animal lust. However, my mind protested and I had to back away.

  “We can’t,” I said as sternly as I could. My breath was already a little short. “Not now. Not like this. We might still be in danger. Let’s get to safety and think about… other things… later.”

  Even in the low light, I could see her eyes flash with anger. It took her a few seconds, but she managed to get control over herself. I wondered if it took as much fortitude as it’d taken for me to resist. I couldn’t lie to myself, she was exciting and I knew without a doubt that giving in to her would be memorable.

  “Fine,” She huffed, “be a fuckin’ Boy Scout.”

  We got back into the Jeep and I turned it around and drove back the way we’d come. When we got to the paved road we’d first turned off, I went left and drove us back to the steamboat.

  She didn’t speak to me until we were well away from the dirt road. Finally she sighed and glanced in my direction.

  “I guess you were right,” She said reluctantly, “but I’m not happy about it. I have to say, though, either I’m losing my looks or touch or mojo or whatever… or you’ve got some strong ass will power.”

  I laughed, “The latter, I assure you. There’s nothing remotely unattractive about you, Andrea. It’s just… it’s just that things are complicated right now, on many fronts.”

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” She asked not without empathy.

  I glanced over and only frowned.

  “I get it,” Andrea replied. “Lisa is gorgeous. And… and I know what you two once meant to each other.”

  I wanted to say that I hoped we still meant something, but decided to err on the side of caution.

  “But she’s in Missouri and she’s with Miles now. Sorry, superhero, but that’s the truth. I don’t get it either, for what it’s worth. Maybe it’s just time you moved on.”