by Tara Janzen
“Is that who I think it is?” she asked, her eyebrows arching nearly into her hairline.
“Fat Eddie Mano or the cavalry,” Travers said, twisting the ignition with one hand and tapping gauges with the other. “Take your pick.”
She’d heard of him, the fattest man in Manaus and the underworld warlord of the stretch of the Amazon running from the jungle city to Santarem, but for all her waterfront dealings, she’d never seen him. According to Johnny Chang, very few people ever did. Fat Eddie held court in a warehouse near the Praça de Matriz, and petitioners of any and all ilks came to him. Most were dealt with by subordinates. A select few were allowed into Fat Eddie’s inner sanctum—and a few of those never came back out, making getting in to see Fat Eddie a dubious honor at best.
“Cavalry?” she repeated, watching in amazement as the huge man in the little black boat swerved in front of the police launch. The man with Fat Eddie raised a machine gun into the air and fired off a few rounds.
Merda, she thought, blanching. It was Johnny Chang, his bald head gleaming in the morning sun, his signature queue flying in the wind.
“Yep. The fat man is heading them off at the pass. If you want to bail out, this is the time,” he said. “I’ll see you get your money back and drop your cargo at Santa Maria.”
It was a reprieve, if she dared to take it. Any innocent person would have jumped at the chance.
She didn’t budge—a fact he noted with a questioning lift of his eyebrows.
She looked away, toward shore. Carlos was already halfway up the dock, but bailing out really wasn’t an option available to her, not with Johnny Chang on board the black speedboat.
“I’m staying,” she said, forcing herself to face him.
“Then cast off.” Travers nodded toward the door.
Annie didn’t need to be told twice. When the last mooring line hit the deck, the Sucuri drifted out into the current, no more than a hundred yards ahead of the two speedboats, and Annie didn’t see any way in hell for them to stay ahead.
She hadn’t counted on Fat Eddie. The fat man sliced his boat in front of the police, nearly crashing into them. More shots were fired, but by the police, and not into the air. A bullet thudded into the Sucuri, and Travers swore. Annie’s heart leapt into her throat. She’d known there was danger in returning to Brazil, but she hadn’t expected to get shot at before she’d even left Manaus.
“Get down,” he ordered, gunning the motor for more speed, steering the Sucuri as close to the shore as he dared. Tree limbs slapped against the boat and scraped along the hull.
Annie only partially obeyed, keeping her head high enough to scan the riverbank for a channel. A small tributary emptied into the Negro about five miles upstream. During the rainy season when all the rivers flooded their banks, a number of channels were created through the trees and vegetation, all of them running downstream toward RBC. She was sure Travers was doing what she would have done, trying to make it into one of the channels. They could wind around in the resulting maze of trees and water, maintaining cover while making their way up the shoreline.
Another round of gunfire peppered the air, making her flinch. If Johnny had squealed on her to the police, why in the hell was he in that boat with Fat Eddie? she wondered. And if the lot of them were after Travers, she was making one hell of a mistake heading farther up the river with him.
God, just let her get to the Cauaburi, she prayed.
A rumble of thunder rolled across the sky, dragging her gaze heavenward. Beside her, Travers said something under his breath, a soft word that skimmed across her consciousness and made the hairs rise on the nape of her neck without actually registering.
She started to ask him what he’d said, but was stopped by a fresh spray of bullets strafing the deck. Merda. She ducked farther behind the helm, looking up again as the light fell all around. Banks of clouds were rolling in from the horizon, blocking out the sun. Lightning streaked in a jagged bolt across the darkening sky, followed by a thunderous cracking sound.
“I’ll be damned,” she whispered. She’d seen some fast-moving storms in her time, but this one had come out of nowhere. The next crack of thunder reverberated along the length of the river and brought a deluge in its wake. The heavens simply opened up. Sky-high sheets of rain washed over the boat in long, world-drenching, gray waves, coming in through the windows and soaking them both. The decks were instantly awash in water.
Annie turned to check behind them and could just make out Fat Eddie’s boat plowing slowly upstream against the current and the rain, stymied by the sudden downpour, but still heading toward them. The police had pulled up at the RBC dock, the dark shapes of officers swarming toward the shore. Two took up posts on the dock and knelt into firing positions. Over the sound of the storm, she heard the cracking reports of a few more shots, but nothing reached the Sucuri, and in the next moment, the boat slipped into a channel, gliding between the towering trunks of two half-submerged lupuna trees.
Releasing a pent-up breath, she rose to her feet, only to have her illusion of momentary safety undermined by his next words.
“Maybe you better go below and start the pump, before we start to sink,” he said, as if the possibility were more inevitable than not.
She glanced toward the floor and saw water disappearing through the cracks in the boards between her feet. Her mouth thinned in frustration and a surfeit of nerves. She should have known his boat wouldn’t be any more reliable than he was himself.
“Where’s the hatch?” she asked, telling herself she’d made the right decision. She’d wanted out of Manaus, with all her cargo intact, and for better or worse, that’s exactly what she’d gotten.
“Mid-deck. There’s a bucket down there, too, in case you need to bail.”
Dear God, she thought. It was going to be a long three days.
~ * ~
Hours of backbreaking labor later, the friggin’ engine room was relatively dry, the storm had slacked off to a slow, intermittent drizzle, and by her reckoning, they hadn’t even made it to Nova Airão. Three days, hell. It was going to take a week to get to Santa Maria.
Travers had moored the boat in a slow-moving backwater thick with trailing vines and overhung with the graceful sweep of palm fronds. Tree frogs and cicadas sang all around, setting up a nighttime chorus as the sun’s last rays slipped below the canopy and sunk them into darkness.
Annie lit the two kerosene lanterns she’d found and hung them from the upper deck rail, where they cast broad pools of yellow light over the boat. Travers had a flashlight in the engine room.
“How’s it going down there?” she asked, kneeling by the hatch. Contrary to her first opinion, the Sucuri leaked like a sieve, and its old pump needed a full-time nursemaid to keep it running.
A grumble was her reply.
The backbreaking labor had actually mostly been his, but listening to him cuss and bang around in the engine room all day had pretty much worn her out. That and peering through the rain, trying to keep to the course he’d kept coming up to set and adjust.
“I’ve got food ready.” A cooked meal, she almost added. Lunch had been a few thoroughly inadequate bites of manioc bread spread with hot pepper sauce—all she’d been able to grab with one hand on the wheel. She’d been starving most of the day, and after they’d moored for the night, she’d had no qualms about helping herself to his kitchen and his supplies. She’d worked her way up too many rivers not to know a helping hand was always welcome.
Travers made another unintelligible reply, his voice no more than a mumbled echo in the cramped confines of the engine room, and Annie rose to her feet, not exactly disappointed. The meal she’d made of beans, rice, and fish wasn’t going to get any better by sitting around, but neither was it going to get any worse, and she’d just as soon Travers stayed where he was until she’d eaten and gone to bed.
They hadn’t had time for two words since leaving RBC, and if at all possible, she wanted to keep it that way until they re
ached Santa Maria.
Stretching out a cramp in her back, she cast her gaze across the water and around the surrounding trees, seeing little in the darkness. She could hear the forest, though, everything wet and dripping, filling the night with small cascades of water and a metronome of droplets falling from leaf to leaf to river—and she could smell it. The sheer greenness of the rain forest filled her senses, indulging her with all its rich fecundity. For a woman who’d grown up on the barren, windswept plains of Wyoming, the Amazon basin was a paradise. It was as far away from the two-bit, flyblown ranch she’d called home as a girl could get and then some—and maybe even a little bit farther than that from where she was standing, right smack-dab in the middle of a swampy nowhere.
She’d kept to the course he’d set during her turns at the wheel, but didn’t have a clue as to where they were tied up, except she was damn sure it wasn’t nearly far enough away from Manaus. They had jigged as much as they’d jagged through the igapó, the flooded forest. A couple of times when they’d come out onto the Rio Negro, she’d wondered if they hadn’t actually gone in circles—and she couldn’t seem to get the picture of Fat Eddie following them through the rain out of her mind. Why hadn’t he just stopped like the police? Unlike the Sucuri, the black speedboat hadn’t had so much as a canopy on it for cover.
A startled croak followed by a few clattering notes came out of the darkness, a sudden counterpoint to the frogs and cicadas. Annie turned to peer over the bow, her brow furrowed, wondering what kind of bird was making the sound.
“Roraima limpkin,” Travers said behind her—and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
Damn. He moved like a cat, or something even more silent and deadly that she didn’t even want to think about, not while she was on a boat named Sucuri.
“Roraima limpkin. Right. I’ve heard of them,” she said, turning to face him, forcing her pulse to slow down. “Never seen one, though.”
They were both soaked, and had been all day, but once again, whereas she was in full control of her clothes, his seemed to be sliding off his body. If it wasn’t for his hip bones and shoulders, he’d be naked, his khaki pants and palm-tree shirt in a pile at his feet.
Buttons, she felt like telling him. Buttons were put on shirts and pants for a reason—though she doubted if he gave a damn about buttons. He looked a little tense, as if maybe Carlos’s hangover remedy had only lasted so long and then up and left him high and dry.
“Not many people do.” He dropped a screwdriver and a wrench into the toolbox on the deck, then picked up a rag and began wiping the grease off his hands. Light from one of the lanterns played across his face, throwing shadows into the hollows of his cheeks and along his jaw. It was a strong jaw, his nose elegantly shaped. His eyebrows had a sharp curve to them, a pair of arched, dark lines contrasting with the pale streaks in his sun-bleached hair.
She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a chill even in the humid heat of the night.
“But you have,” she guessed, giving him credit where credit was due, and then angling just a bit, unable to help herself. After all, he was the infamous William Sanchez Travers. “I bet you’ve seen a lot of things not many other people have seen.” Like lost cities of gold and forbidden shaman rites involving chunks of rock crystal. Like a place no one else had ever been that he hadn’t told another soul about—just as she’d never told another soul about what she’d seen and where she’d been.
His soft, self-deprecating laughter took her by surprise. “Yeah, I guess so, some things most people wouldn’t want to see. How about you? You’ve been around.”
“Plants,” she said, deliberately understating the obvious, wholly intrigued by his answer. Everybody in the Amazon liked seeing gold—so maybe that rumor was a bit off the mark, despite its popularity and his bracelets. “That’s all I ever see, everywhere I go. Plants. Sometimes there’s something interesting sitting on one or eating one.”
“Like a woolly monkey,” he said, looking up and pinning her with his gaze.
Well, she thought, he’d cut right to the chase, using the last two words she wanted to hear—“woolly monkey.” They weren’t a question, yet those two words questioned everything about her—including her competence and her integrity. Damn him. She should have eaten alone and left his dinner on the stove.
“I’ve seen a few monkeys,” she conceded without conceding a thing. “Even eaten a few, but tonight it’s prato feito with a fish I found in your cooler.”
His grin, once again, was anything but reassuring. “I’ll bet you’ve seen more than a few, Dr. Parrish, but there’s only one I’m interested in hearing about, and given our departure from Manaus, I figure the quicker you tell me what I want to know, the better off we’ll be.” He dropped the rag into the toolbox. “Come on. There are dry towels inside.”
Which he could stuff in his ears, if he thought she was going to tell him anything. Far from being daunted by his audacity, she was amused. Nobody, but nobody, got the best of Annie Parrish. She’d been playing by boy’s rules since she’d been old enough to walk and chew gum at the same time.
“Actually, by my figuring, all I owe you is the hundred and twenty reais you’ve probably already spent, with maybe a refund for keeping your boat afloat,” she said, following him into the main cabin.
“We were shot at.” He opened a cupboard and pulled out two large towels, handing her one.
“You’re the one who knows Fat Eddie Mano and hangs out with garimpeiros, not me.” She gave her hair and face a quick drying off, then draped the towel around her shoulders, her demeanor as ingenuous as she could make it—which she knew for a fact was pretty damned ingenuous. He hadn’t dreamed up his “jaguar bait” insult without some incentive. He’d just misinterpreted the clues.
“Fat Eddie wasn’t shooting at us. The police were, and you’ve got a history of trouble with the police, serious trouble. How long have you been back in Brazil? A week?” He started to shrug out of his shirt.
Annie deliberately turned toward the stove and began filling her plate.
At her silence, he continued, obviously knowing exactly how long she’d been back.
“The Manaus police aren’t known for their efficiency. It probably took them the whole week to figure out you were in town and about two seconds to decide to finish whatever unfinished business you left behind when they kicked you out of the country. That’s what I want to know about—what you were up to that got you kicked out, and why in the hell you came back, and don’t try to pawn me off with the peach palm business. Not even Gabriela is buying that.”
“Go to hell,” she said pleasantly, spooning a chunk of fish on top of her rice.
“Funny you should mention that,” he muttered, rummaging around in the cupboards behind her. Something clanked, and he cursed, and unbelievably, the sound tweaked her conscience.
It had been a long day, with little to eat and plenty of hard, physical labor, especially for him. It was a miracle that he’d held up as long as he had, especially since he’d been dead drunk asleep when she’d come aboard at dawn.
“Look,” she said, relenting a little as she spooned around for another piece of fish. “We don’t know each other well enough to argue about anything, and there’s no reason we can’t keep things that way. All we really have to do is get to Santa Maria. I’m happy to help out where I can, no refund. You keep the money. Let’s just work together to get up the river.”
I’ll be a son of a bitch, Will thought, squinting over his shoulder at her with a sense of utter disbelief. The woman had the balls of a bull and all the friggin’ philosophy of a Girl Scout.
Let bygones be bygones?
He didn’t think so, not when he would be pulling slugs out of his bulkhead, not after the painfully lousy day he’d suffered through. Carlos’s cure had lasted almost until noon, when it had worn off with a vengeance. He’d been paying hell ever since, wanting nothing more than to just tie up and wait the damn storm out—an option unavailable to
him because of his passenger and the trouble he was sure she’d dragged into his wake. The police had no gripe with him.
She was a real piece of work, all right, and it was completely against his better judgment that he let his gaze drop down the length of her body—for about the hundredth time that day. Fluffed up by the towel, her hair was doing that stick-out-all-over thing again, but he had to admit that on her it looked good. Or rather, she looked good whether her hair was sticking out or not. Her face was delicate in profile, her nose slightly upturned with a dusting of freckles, her glasses reflecting the amber glow of the lanterns. Her shirt was still two sizes too big, and her shorts were all bags and sags, but the legs inside the shorts from mid-thigh down were perfect—which had been his problem all day.
Perfect legs, the kind a man wanted to eat his way up—a thought he’d had more than once since the first time he’d come up from the hatch and found himself at eye level with the backs of her knees, a thought that unnerved him more than the bullets lodged in the Sucuri’s hull. A lot more. He didn’t have time for her, or her trouble, or her knees, yet there she was, on his boat, and for the next three days, in his life.
Take a woman up the river, Gabriela had said, and then made it impossible for him to refuse. Or so he’d told himself last night.
It had been a mistake. One he was paying for in the cruel light of a head-splitting hangover and a truly rotten day, he had to ask himself who he’d been kidding. Sure he took passengers all the time, nearly every trip, but he usually had enough sense to steer clear of the ones who were more trouble than they were worth—and Annie Parrish was nothing but trouble.
He should have put her off the Sucuri at the dock. Carlos’s cure must have temporarily clouded his judgment—either Carlos’s cure or Dr. Parrish’s legs. He honestly wasn’t sure which. He did know this trip up the river wasn’t like any of the others he’d taken in the last two years, and that alone should have been enough reason for him to have told her no in Pancha’s, or told Gabriela no, or to have abandoned her when she’d gone off to get Carlos that morning.