“Getting ready to go,” I replied, shoving the Photostat into my day pack.
“Where are we going today?” he asked.
I dug the medicine bowl out of my day pack and handed it to him. “I need to go where this was found.”
“Yanomamo,” he murmured. His forefinger traced the jaguar pawprint idly.
“And that narrows down my search to what? A million square kilometers of rain forest?”
Carlos grinned. “No, gatinha. I can take you to someone who can tell you exactly where this came from. A scientist.”
“Chico said you knew the area.”
“I do,” he said, flashing a charming smile that fell strangely flat. “I know every airstrip in the northern Amazon.”
Great. Now I’d have to risk exposing my mission to someone who just might deduce what I was after. Someone who might give Lawrence Daley the same information. This trip was getting more difficult all the time.
An hour later we piled out of a battered taxi and strode through a scattering mist toward the airstrip. A beat-up Cessna Caravan 675 squatted behind a sheet metal shed. At least the plane looked relatively new. Riding in it couldn’t be any worse than riding ten miles in a shockless Chevy over the pocked and jutted road to the airstrip. The runway, predictably, was a ribbon shaved out of the jungle, bounded by ever-encroaching forest currently being beaten back by a small army of machete-wielding Indians.
When we approached the shed, its crooked wooden door shoved open and a smallish Brazilian stepped out to yell at Carlos. Carlos started shouting back with equal verve in what I gathered was some kind of bargaining behavior.
Then a fresh-faced, good-looking young white guy bounded out of the shed, carrying a backpack, a tripod and a camera case.
“Oh no,” I said to Carlos, interrupting his shouting match and thumbing at the college boy as he joined us. “He’s not sharing my plane.”
College Boy pushed his wire frames higher on his nose and held his hand out to Carlos. After a shake, he launched into a spate of excellent Portuguese that, judging from Carlos’s raised eyebrows, surprised the pilot as much as it did me. The Brazilian stood back and grinned. Then College Boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills that could choke a horse.
“We had a deal,” I reminded Carlos. “You. Me. The plane. No one else.”
“Excuse me,” College Boy said in English, turning to me.
“What.”
His smile didn’t falter. “I’m Dr. Richard Kinkaid. I’m headed out to Ixpachia Research Station.” He shoved his glasses further onto his nose. “I’m an entomologist,” he added, as though that would somehow make a difference.
I looked him up and down. Right. A bug nerd. A Milquetoast bug hunter with an oversize camera and no idea how to take care of himself outside a graduate school laboratory. I read the tea leaves and didn’t like what I saw.
“No,” I said to him. “You may not share my plane.”
“If the pilot’s willing to take me, it’s not your concern.”
“And I won’t take you to your research station, even if I knew where it was.”
“I have a map—”
“And I won’t pull your ass out of the jungle when you get burned by fire liana.”
“Fire liana?”
“Or stung by Dresk’s beetles.”
“I have an antidote for that—”
“Or get a limb chewed off by a hungry jaguar.”
“Jaguars don’t—”
“Or get shot with a poisoned arrow by one of the several hostile indigenous peoples.”
At that his strong face solidified to stone. Arrogant jungle newbie on his first field trip. His presence was an unacceptable risk. We glared at each other.
“Not interested,” I clarified.
“But I am,” Carlos cut in. “Ixpachia Research Station is where we are going. However, my rates are rather steep.”
The bug nerd turned his back on me to juggle his tripod under one arm as he counted out bills. Carlos’s eyes widened.
“Hey,” I said to Carlos, grabbing his sleeve to take his attention off the cash. “I paid for your exclusive services.”
“You got those last night,” he said with an intimate leer.
My face heated up. “I paid you good money for a solitary trip. A flight in, five days working in the jungle, a flight out. I’m not sharing my plane.”
“But his money’s as good as yours.” Carlos’s perfect white smile would have dazzled me yesterday. Today it just made me mad. “And the flight is dangerous, is it not? Should I not be paid for the work as much as I can get?”
“We had a deal.”
He chuckled. “Gatinha, my word is true, but money is life.” He waved at the bug nerd. “Bring your gear, amigo!”
The Brazilian cackled as I stumped along behind Carlos and the bug nerd, fuming. I’d have a word with Chico next time I saw him. For now, I’d deal with it. But I didn’t have time to baby-sit anybody. Scooter was my priority. Everybody else would just have to get by.
Carlos jerked the Cessna’s cargo door open for us. A whoosh of stifling hot air fell out. The plane was just this side of a stripped-down drug runner: a pilot’s seat, electronics and little else. Even the passenger seats were gone. Good old Carlos must have a day job flying snow. Maybe dodging the joint Brazilian-American drug-enforcement guys had made him arrogant with the average sightseer. He was used to flying much richer cargo than what I’d bring back.
“Let me get that for you.” The bug nerd reached for my duffel bag.
Hell, why not let him play gentleman and throw out his back? Maybe I’d make this trip alone after all. But he easily swung the heavy duffel bag into the cargo bay with one arm. Then he hopped into the plane after it, holding out his broad hand for my day pack and smiling at me like this was a Boy Scout jaunt to Camp Okefenokee.
“I got it.” I kept my day pack and climbed into the plane. I settled down across from the open cargo door and hoped he wouldn’t start talking.
Up front, Carlos flicked switches and turned dials. A few minutes later, the Cessna’s single engine fired up. The bare metal wall I leaned against vibrated from my neck all the way to my butt. Even my ankles tingled from the jarring.
The bug nerd shoved his gear against one of the plane’s exposed steel ribs and scrambled up to the cockpit.
“The engine doesn’t sound right to me,” he shouted over the guttering noise.
Carlos shook his head. “This plane is safe, my friend. Go take a nap.”
“But the mechanical clatter—”
“It’s nothing!”
The nerd’s firm jaw tightened, then he yelled, “So where are the parachutes?”
Carlos flashed the nerd a dark look and jerked his head toward the cargo bay. Get out of my face. I could read the message from halfway down the plane. Carlos might be a good guy as far as illicit dealings in the jungle go—meaning he wouldn’t kill anyone without a good reason—but, like me, he was a mercenary who needed to eat. Mouthy pip-squeak “experts” got tossed out the cargo door at seven thousand feet.
Besides, the bug nerd had given him the full payment up front. Dumbass.
The nerd flopped down again across from me, mindless of the open cargo door to his left. He closed his eyes, apparently taking Carlos’s nap suggestion seriously. He wore pristine trekking gear that looked like it’d been ordered out of a Whole Earth Catalog: heavy canvas pants, a shirt a size too big for him, what had to be day-hiking boots made by Birkenstock. His dark brown hair lay longish on his collar, highlighting prominent cheekbones, a strong jaw and chiseled lips. I wondered briefly what he’d look like with a ponytail but decided “tasty” wasn’t a word a woman like me should use. The wire frames slipped a half inch down his nose. He didn’t move.
I turned my attention to the shed. The Brazilian who apparently acted as the local air-traffic controller was nowhere to be seen. Nothing out there but trees and bugs and already-intense heat.
; The plane lurched forward. The Cessna stuttered and jerked toward the dirt runway. Deep jungle green rolled by. Workers’ arms rose and fell, blades slashing and hacking. Carlos turned the plane’s nose due west and the shed came into view again. A very dark man, maybe half Negro, half Indian, stood beside the shed, staring at us. Carlos stopped the plane to check something.
The staring man strode toward us purposefully, his gaze unwavering. A chill shot through my veins. Carlos fidgeted with controls, and still the man walked, unhurried and deliberate. How could someone stare so long without blinking?
Then the man grasped the open cargo doorway and leaned in. Twin puckered scars etched his face, neck, and the part of his collarbone I could see beneath his ragged shirt. Around his neck, a leather cord held a single jaguar tooth—a canine. His huge hands gripped the doorway with such strength I had no doubt he could bend the metal if he chose. Black eyes stared at me.
Directly at me.
The chill in my veins dropped to a freeze. He didn’t glare; his eyes were as emotionless as those of the jaguar he’d killed for its tooth.
Endless darkness welled up in my periphery. The plane’s metallic clatter heightened into deafening howls and screams and roars. The world dropped away from my feet, leaving me standing in utter blackness, alone. I no longer hunkered down in a Cessna waiting to go into the jungle. The jungle had come for me, and what hunted me breathed hot and heavy on my neck. I spun. Nothing. I spun again. Nothing. Panicked, I struck out with both arms, swinging wild. If I could just see.
As if in answer to a prayer, a dim yellow light grew near my feet, filling the darkness with itself, illuminating nothing. A single sound cut through the cacophony: a slithering hiss that singed my spine with fear and brought bile into my throat. I knew what it was. The yellow light sharpened into two flat, slitted, alien eyes. Pit viper. The kind of venomous snake whose head would chase you after you’d severed it from the body. Low words, words I didn’t understand but whose meaning I knew instantly, told me to leave this place. What waited for me in the trees was hissing death.
Abruptly, the vision disappeared.
The empty cargo-bay door yawned. Outside, trees and undergrowth lurked behind the sagging shed. The shaman—if that’s what he was—had disappeared.
Once the Evil Eye has its grip, you’re lost. The open cargo door tempted me to leave. I could jump out now before my curse found me. Jump out, go home, save myself. My fingers itched for my day pack.
I shook my head to clear it. Medicine man tales, I said to myself. Shaman lies. I’d had a hallucination due to fatigue and stress. I lived in a world of science and technology. The Evil Eye was like the boogeyman, meant to scare and intimidate you into doing what someone else wanted. It couldn’t catch me or keep me. It couldn’t prevent me from going deep into the jungle.
“Let’s get this show on the road!” I called up to Carlos.
He gave me a thumbs-up. The plane jerked twice, then bumped down the strip, gaining speed. Straight brown tree trunks and masses of green leaves flitted by. Carlos pulled back on the stick and abruptly we were up, over the treetops, heading northwest.
Heading to a place where I wasn’t welcome.
But I’d survive.
Scooter’s life depended on it.
Chapter 4
Stuttering. It’s not a good sign at five thousand feet, whether it’s the pilot or the plane. In this case, it was the plane.
The bug nerd’s eyes opened, glared briefly toward Carlos’s broad back, and closed. I knew that look: You’re the tough man, you handle it.
Brilliant emerald treetops fluffed the ground. From above, the canopy shows you a solid-looking mass with an occasional peep-show peek at the really good stuff underneath. To see the real wealth of species—the dozens of monkeys, thousands of birds, bazillions of insects—you have to go in from the bottom.
North-north-west, where we were headed, the canopy abruptly rose and fell with the stubby Guiana Highlands. The high point, Serra do Apiau, was only around 3,300 feet, not even as high as most of the hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And nothing like the Rockies.
But the terrain wouldn’t make a nice landing pad. By the increased clattering of the engine and the intensity of the frown the bug nerd cast in Carlos’s direction, maybe we were going to need one.
On cue, the Cessna fell several feet, tossing my stomach up around my ears. Carlos’s right hand felt around over his head for some controls. The bug nerd got up, grabbed a steel rib and leaned out the cargo door. His hair whipped his left ear. He held his glasses in place with his free hand. Not a good place to be sick, I thought, but he levered himself back into the plane and headed to the cockpit.
I didn’t catch his first shouted words, but there was no mistaking the pale grimace of fear Carlos shot him in response. Time to be worried, I gathered. I got up and joined them, hanging on to a steel handhold over my head like a professional New York commuter.
“What’s going on?” I yelled over the chatter and chuff.
“Bad fuel!” the nerd shouted. “The engine’s about to quit!”
“Over my dead body!” Carlos spun dials. I could see his feet working some kind of pedals. “She hasn’t let me down yet!”
“If it’s bad fuel, you don’t have a choice!”
“Come on!” Carlos yelled at the plane. “We’re less than thirty miles from the strip!”
An earsplitting screech went off somewhere near my head.
“Shit!” Carlos shouted.
The plane shuddered, nose tipping. Chuff, chuff, a slower chuff, then the prop wound down like a bad dream. The engine spat and quit. The alarm screamed.
“Hold on!”
Carlos kept one hand tight on the W-shaped wheel and flipped some more switches. The one gauge I recognized—the altimeter—confirmed the hard lean pulling me forward. The nerd braced himself where the copilot’s seat should be and grabbed the matching wheel.
Out the window by Carlos’s head, various trees were rapidly becoming recognizable to my naked eye. Another bad sign.
“You’d better get back!” the nerd yelled at me. “We’re going to have to make an emergency landing! Find something to strap yourself down with!”
“Emergency landing?” I shouted back. “Where?”
“Airstrip ahead!”
I looked out the front windshield. A tiny airstrip, much tinier than the tiny airstrip we’d left an hour earlier, had been scraped out of the jungle. To my untrained eye, we looked way too high to land on that little ribbon. Next to it, a bevy of shacks and huts surrounded a huge, muddy gouge in the hillside that spewed brown water down a channel, feeding into a natural stream off the Rio Branco.
A gold mine. Probably illegal. Definitely dangerous. All male, all testosterone, all heavily armed.
“Get back!” the nerd shouted again, his eyes intense behind his lenses.
I hand-over-handed my way back down the twelve feet of cabin space and looked around. No parachutes. Nothing to use as a tie-down. In frustration I kicked my day pack and duffel into the tail area, then settled into my original seat, across from the open cargo door. The wind gushing in smelled greener, more lush, wetter. My shoulder fit snugly against the plane’s rib cage. The plane bucked and wobbled. My only comforting thought was that if I whacked my head good and hard during the crash landing, I’d at least be unconscious during the rape later.
Sudden tears stung my eyes. Dammit. A girl in my position wasn’t supposed to be afraid. Where’s your guff? Scooter’s voice chided gently. No girlie of mine is goin’cry, he had said over countless jammed fingers (softball), skinned knees (tree climbing), and a broken arm (off-road motorcycle). No ladybug I know is goin’ be skeered, he told me during storms (including two tornadoes), as I rode The Demon (his meanest adopted mustang), and after falling fifty feet down Eagle’s Nest while tethered to a threadbare rope (rock climbing).
No, sir. I scrubbed the tears away. I ain’t skeered.
The C
essna skittered sideways and dropped. When my butt made contact with the floor again, I grabbed the nearest tie-down ring. We bore down on the trees. Thick, humid wind flushed the fear stench from the plane. My mind flashed on tree limbs snagging our landing gear to pluck us from the sky.
That was my cue to worry about one thing at a time. No need to wear myself out over everything at once. Worry about the airplane end-over-ending first, a crash landing second, and getting raped third. Got it. I gritted my teeth.
The plane shuddered. Up front, Carlos knelt by an open compartment door, fiddling with something inside. The nerd wedged himself into the pilot’s seat and leaned on a control. I felt a glimmer of hope. Speak immaculate Portuguese and fly a plane? We might get out of this yet. The nerd shook his head, then hit the control again. Out the cargo door, I started seeing branches instead of leaves. We were dropping into the airstrip ribbon way too fast. The engine spat, choked, then rumbled.
Outside, the propeller hitched a couple of times before catching a groove to spin smoothly. The Cessna’s nose picked up just in time for its landing gear to smack the ground with the delicacy of a brick. I lost my grip on the tie-down ring and rolled toward the tail, my ribs grinding over protruding metal bits. The bouncing plane sailed up, fishtailed, hopped sideways, straightened out. We whacked the strip again and started to slow.
I looked up. The forest grew taller and taller and taller toward the windshield. The nerd stood his ground. We’d lose this game of chicken, no doubt about that. I took a deep breath and tried not to panic.
The Cessna abruptly skipped, wheels barking on the dirt, and jerked to a halt. I skidded face-first several feet and stopped where I’d started this trip, near the cargo door.
There was no sound other than the engine’s stutter and the rumble of generators filtering through the trees. From my sprawled landing position, I surveyed the crew. Carlos crouched next to the pilot’s chair, his arms curved over his head. Kinkaid sat in the chair, his hands still locked on the wheel.
The Orchid Hunter Page 6