She’d keep right on running after what she wanted.
His pulse quickened as it hit him. Her dino wasn’t here on Singapore—it was three hundred-some miles to the southeast! If Raine hadn’t been knocked on the head in the slums of the city last night, sold off into white slavery or worse…If she was still free and alive, then—He blew out a breath and put his fingers to the keyboard.
Marc, get me a flight to Pontianak, Kalimantan, soonest possible, by whatever means necessary.
Cade sat, fingers poised, frowning into space. He had the name and address of Lia’s mother in Pontianak. His PA had obtained that info from the admissions office at NYU. If she was free, that would be where Raine was headed—tracing the next link on a chain that led to a fortune in bones. With any luck he’d cross her trail there.
“Just tell ’em the truth,” Zack advised two days later, as he helped Raine put her kayak over the side, two miles off the western coast of Borneo. “You intended to fly from Singapore to Kalimantan, but you met this incredibly sexy man, who invited you to sail there instead.”
“Sounds vaguely plausible.” Raine laughed as she slid down into the craft, to sit with her legs stretched before her, bobbing in the long Pacific swells. She reached up for her backpack, then her parasol. Stowing them in the aft compartment, she battened down its cover, then adjusted her spray skirt.
“Entirely plausible. You had a mad, passionate, high-seas affair…”
“Or would have, if his parrot had liked me. But, alas…”
“That’s why you—?” Zack stopped, realizing she was teasing, and shrugged. “Ah, well. Some other time, in some alternate reality?”
Raine held his rueful gaze—and smiled. Anything’s possible. She couldn’t say why she hadn’t responded to his advances. Too obsessed with her coming search? She’d been dreaming of T. rexes every night.
Or, maybe stung by Cade’s betrayal. Her confidence had taken a knock, once she realized the she’d misjudged the man entirely. If Cade could blithely frame her for a capital offense, then he surely must have murdered Lia.
And, if I can fall for a calculating killer, then maybe I shouldn’t be let out alone—much less choose my own lovers!
Besides which, Elsa the parrot didn’t want her aboard. “Silly slut!” she screeched now, hanging upside down from the boom. “G’wan, you cow!”
Zack smacked his forehead as Raine laughed aloud. “I did not teach her that.”
“It’s like five-year-olds and curse words. If it gets a good reaction, they repeat it. My sister Jaye has a gray parrot who’s just as possessive. I could show you the scars…”
“I’d like to see them.”
She smiled and held up her left hand. “Little finger.”
He kissed the triangular scar, then leaned down, gave her a swift kiss on the mouth. They squeezed hands and let go. “Well,” he said huskily. “You’ve got my e-mail address. Use it, if you need anything. Or if you’re ever in the mood for a cruise.”
“I’ll do that, Zack, and…thank you.” She back-paddled from between the hulls, then steered out into the open sea. The swells were darkening to teal, the sky turning to tangerine. She aimed her bow east, toward the first lights blooming in the city of Pontianak, province of West Kalimantan.
She glanced back once. A black form against the bright sky, the captain looked after her, leaning out from one hull, gripping a shroud. He’d yet to raise the sails. She waved her paddle overhead in one last farewell, then turned and stroked on, right…left…right. Some mystery back there, and perhaps that had been another reason for her detachment.
He wasn’t who he said he was.
Searching the first night for something to read, after she’d finished her trick at the helm, she’d checked out his well-stocked bookcase. Flipped through a tattered paperback on tropical trees, bound with a rubber band. Its middle pages had been glued together, then hollowed out—to hold two passports. Each with a clean-shaven photo of Zack, but a different name entirely.
And maybe that explained why he’d not been willing to take her all the way to shore. Not welcome in Indonesia? Whoever he was, he’d claimed to be in too much of a hurry. Bound south for the Solomon Islands.
But in the last glimpse Raine got of him, just as she reached the shallows, his catamaran was skimming north. Up the coast toward Sarawak.
Not her business. She shrugged, stepped out into cool, ankle-deep water, sand fine as silk, and stretched. Borneo at last!
“Does she speak English?” Cade asked the nurse. The woman hadn’t smiled once as she led him to the ward that Lia’s mother, Sebang, shared with five other patients. Now she fluffed Sebang’s pillows, then straightened on the far side of the narrow bed, regarding him with dark, indignant eyes. The other women glared from their cots.
With less than twenty-four hours in Pontianak, he already found that unnerving. Smiles were a reflex courtesy here in Borneo, no matter the underlying mood. Cade pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat beside the patient. “Does she—”
The woman burst into rapid Bahasa Indonesia. Lia’s mother replied in a liquid murmur.
The nurse looked up. Clasped her hands before her. “She say no.”
She’d said a lot more than that. Cade nodded amiably as he studied this older version of Lia. Despite the bruises on her face and her blackened eyes, she looked not a day over thirty. A beauty like her daughter, he suspected, from the regal way she sat, propped against her pillows; she was too battered to be certain.
“Then would you tell her, please, that I come from New York City, in America, where I met her daughter Lia. And that I’m very sorry for her loss.”
While the nurse translated, he studied Sebang with growing outrage. The neighbors next door to her little guesthouse had said only that she’d had an accident, was now in hospital. But this was no accident! Those were finger marks imprinted on her upper arms. Her lip was split.
“Who did this?” he demanded. He didn’t even know that Raine was on the island, but if she was and she’d done this—ordered it done…
Sebang stared up at the ceiling fan revolving above, sighed and spoke softly.
“She says an American man,” the nurse snapped. “He come asking questions.”
Cade gritted his teeth. “What did he want?”
Sebang’s eyes filled slowly with tears. “He wish to know,” she said in clear English with an odd echo of Texas, “where I get the package that I mail to my daughter.”
Cade drew a harsh breath. Damn all the taking, breaking, Ashaways straight to hell! “I, also, have come to ask about that package, Ibu Sebang.”
Her bitter smile stopped midcurve with a wince; she nodded. “This, I think.”
“But first, I make you this promise. When I find the man that hurt you, I’ll break his head.”
She covered her swollen mouth with her fingers and giggled. “You like my husban’, Frank.”
After that, the nurse huffed off on her rounds. While the ceiling fan flickered, and the sun crept from one side of the ward to the other, Cade sat and listened. He heard the whole odyssey: how the prettiest woman in a tiny upriver town, a Dayak widow with a girl child, had married a Chinese trader. A match made for lust on his side, and more practical reasons on hers, Cade suspected. But judging from her wistful smile, it had worked.
She’d followed her man to Pontianak, helped him run his store down by the docks. They’d wanted more children, a son, but none had come. So her husband had taught Lia to keep the accounts; the girl was most amazingly smart. All her teachers said so.
When Lia was twelve, her stepfather made his yearly trip to Djakarta to purchase trade goods. The ferry had capsized; there were no survivors.
Being a practical woman, the pretty widow soon dried her tears and looked around. This time she chose an arrangement with a Texas oilie, Frank.
Frank stayed for four years, till his company transferred him to Kuwait and his stateside wife decided to join him there. But he’d made a
promise before he left. That he’d pay for clever Lia to go to college—go to college in America!
Sebang’s eyes brimmed over. “How I wish he never keep that promise!” She wiped her cheeks with graceful fingers. Gave that painful smile. “But Lia, she never satisfy. She say this a small town—this, the only one she know. She say she want it all.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She want to eat life.”
But life ate her, was the thought hanging between them. Cade nodded heavily. Add it to the score he’d collect from the Ashaways.
“That package, I think it very bad luck,” Sebang added matter-of-factly.
The tooth and the watch had been sent down the Kapuas River, from Sebang’s hometown of Long Badu. Sent to Lia by her stepcousin, son of the brother of the Chinese trader; his family owned the only store in that town.
The items had been taken in trade, was all Sebang knew. The cousin had hoped that clever Lia, in America, could learn their true worth and make a fine deal. She could keep half, and send him half.
And I bet he’d have whistled for his share, was Cade’s private guess.
So Sebang had packed the things and mailed them off to Lia.
Six weeks later, her daughter was dead.
And now this. A man came asking about the tooth, a man she didn’t like. Didn’t trust. When she refused to tell him anything, he’d beaten the information out of her, squeezed her bottom and walked out into the night, chuckling.
I’ll more than break his head, Cade promised himself. “Could you tell me what he looked like, this man?”
He looked like…an American. Apparently to Indonesians, they all looked much the same. Cade came away with a description that could have fit half the men in New York City. Not ugly, not handsome. Not fat. Big and tall.
“Taller than me?” he’d tried. “Or shorter?”
Sebang’s smile held a hint of devilment. “Never tell a man that he be shorter!”
Cade smothered his laugh. Here was the one who’d eat life. He gave her no more than a year, before she chose her next lucky lover.
“’Bout the same size,” Sebang added, with that odd hint of a Texas drawl layered over East Indies tact. “A soldier, I think.”
She couldn’t say why, when Cade questioned her, but she stuck to that notion. Not a backpacker. Not a businessman. A soldier. “A man who think killing is a joke, I think.”
They were sitting roughly a mile south of the equator, but Sebang rubbed the goose bumps on her bruised arms and, meeting her swollen eyes, Cade felt a chill. “But you told him everything he wanted to know?”
“Everything.” She nodded sorrowfully.
“Good. That was very wise. Then he won’t come back to trouble you.”
Cade reached into the pocket of his khaki suit and pulled out his checkbook. Cash might be crass, but it could smooth the jagged edges on a world of hurt. “And now I should tell you, Ibu. The reason I came today, was that I owed your daughter money.” He wrote out a figure that would give Marc heartburn, when he balanced the books. The amount he’d intended to offer Lia for her tooth.
No problem. He’d take it out in trade when he met Chuckles, who’d pinch a woman’s ass after he beat her.
Chapter 18
Doing people favors just didn’t pay. If he’d known he was headed for Putussibau—known the flight schedule—Szabo would have wrung Lia’s mama’s neck.
But he’d got the information he’d come for, and he’d figured he’d be long gone from Pontianak before the cops could comb the town, and she had a pert little ass; he’d let her live.
Big mistake. Turned out there were only two commercial flights a week to Putussibau, the closest you could fly to the headwaters of the Kapuas. The next one wouldn’t leave for three lo-ong days.
So he’d hustled out to the airfield on the edge of town, the strip the Bible thumpers flew out of. Asked politely if he could buy a ride out on a Mission flight. But they’d looked him up and down, then wanted to know if he was carrying any weapons?
Holier-than-thou types always rubbed him wrong. He’d made a crack, saying, “Heck. My whole body is a lethal weapon.” Which with Ranger training, it was, though he’d only been kidding.
They’d stiffened up like a couple of goosed nuns and told him their planes were full-up with God’s cargo this week; maybe he should try them the next?
Szabo knew a brush-off when he heard it. If it had only been the pilot, he’d have showed him the Indian handgun he’d bought in the marketplace, soon as he got to Pontianak. Stuck it in his sanctimonious ear and hijacked the damn plane.
But there were two of them plus a mechanic, lounging around the hangar. So he’d said, “Up yours, Jacqueline,” and walked out.
The upshot was: here he was, leaning on the rail of a riverboat as it pulled away from the dock, out into the mile-wide Kapuas. Five days to Putussibau by water, sleeping on deck with the headhunters and their pigs and chickens and squalling babies. Then one more day by canoe up to Long Badu, the town where the tooth and his granddad’s watch had come from.
Really should have wrung her neck. He sighed and scratched his arm, where Lia’s bite was still itching him—then straightened with a yelp. Was that—? Holy shit, it was! The dang woman had more lives than a cat!
Here came Raine Ashaway, sitting in one of those tricycle pedicabs, with the driver pumping away on his pedals behind her. In the shade of her parasol, her smile sparkled as she looked all around. She flashed it at Malays and beggars and dirty mutts and the cats that prowled every roof. You’d think she was pedaling through paradise, not a dirty river town.
Just then, as the boat completed its turn out into the current and blasted its horn, her eyes lit on him! She laughed and waved, calling something he couldn’t hear over the rumble of the big diesels as they kicked into gear.
He bared his teeth in a wide grin and waved back madly. “Don’t know when to quit, do you, babe?”
If she followed him into the jungle, she’d learn soon enough.
It had taken Raine a full day to placate the Imigrasi, then the police, then the military commander of Pontianak. Once they’d forgiven her her unorthodox arrival, they had to be convinced that an unaccompanied American woman should be allowed to travel upriver alone. More bribes, more batting of eyelashes—more gritted teeth, but showing frustration was a major faux pas in Indonesia; the worst kind of ill manners.
It would be smartest to leapfrog over the boys in uniform. Get to the jungle as soon as she could. Besides, Kincade had stolen a march on her, with his tube of lethal toothpaste. He must be somewhere up ahead.
Raine’s only hope was that finding Lia’s mother might have slowed him down. Since Ravi had told her about Lia’s cousin in Long Badu—that the tooth had come from there—she could skip a step that presumably Kincade had to complete.
Don’t panic, she told herself as the pedicab trundled out of town, toward the airfield. Even if Cade had caught yesterday’s flight to Putussibau, she might beat him yet. If she could beg or buy a seat on an MAF plane to Long Badu.
But the missionaries proved to be as conservative and territorial as the soldiers—and much less susceptible to batting lashes. Unmarried blondes—in pants!—who’d never even heard of their sect, much less signed up for it, ought to go directly to Babylon, not jaunting off into the interior. When she gave them her cover story, that she’d come to photograph orchids for a botanical magazine, they simply glowered. Too fun, too frivolous, she supposed.
They demanded to know if she carried tobacco for the natives? Alcohol? Firearms? Pornography? Comic books?
“None of the above,” Raine insisted, trying not to laugh. “Please, I have a deadline to meet on this article. And my friend Ohara said you might help me.”
Dropping the Aussie’s name tightened their lips—and turned the tide. Apparently Trey’s friend was their Mission’s source of kerosene and plane fuel, at cost, even though they condemned the oilie’s freewheeling morals.
Grudgingly they g
ave her a seat in the rear of the ancient single-engine Piper, jammed in amidst boxes of baby formula and laundry soap, batteries and gumdrops. The pilot handed her the headphones she’d need to wear during the noisy flight, and told her they’d take off as soon as the other passenger arrived.
The mechanic slammed the cargo door, and the humid heat trapped within the little plane rose from sweltering to sauna. Up front the pilot completed his checklist, gave a signal to the mechanic, who spun the propeller. The engine coughed, then roared. Apparently they’d wait no longer for the missing passenger. The mechanic pulled out the rear chocks—just as somebody yelled over the engine racket.
“Sugar!” was the pilot’s comment, if Raine read his lips correctly.
The door opened. Cade swung up into the plane, grabbed his backpack, which was jammed in after him. He yelled something to the pilot—and glanced around. Raine showed her teeth. Sugar didn’t begin to describe it.
His own shock faded—to a wolfish smile.
The plane trundled over the grass, then hurled itself down the runway, straining toward the sky.
Given the drone of the engine, conversation was impossible—not that Raine meant to converse with the rat. And ripping his ears off wasn’t practical, half a mile in the air. She settled for staring out her window while the world rolled beneath them at a pace that felt as slow as walking.
For the first few hours they followed the course of the Kapuas. A wide, dark, busy river in the coastal flatlands. Rafts of timber poled by tiny figures floated down from the distant rainforests. River steamers and sailing praus glided upstream and down. The Dayaks’ longboats looked like water bugs, skating in and out of the traffic.
As the Piper droned on, the forest closed in on the rice fields. The river narrowed and showed lacings of white water. Beyond the blur of the plane’s propeller, low lush mountains bucked toward the sky.
Behind them the clouds darkened to purple and steel and Raine remembered Trey’s briefing on the weather: “Borneo has a wet season—and a hot.” October was the tail of the hot season, but storms were still to be expected. She’d been warned that the rivers could rise twelve feet or more when a cloudburst passed through. She tapped the pilot—Roger—on the shoulder and gestured behind when he turned.
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