“That’s it!” Kinkaid shouted.
“This way!”
I was right about the path under the generator shed: the noise reverberating down onto my head made my eyes water. But the path was also dry, at least here, so we scrambled along relatively easily until we came to the shed’s backside where the spillway vomited its mercury-tainted waterfall.
Mercury doesn’t smell, which is what makes it so dangerous—you can’t tell poisoned water from safe water. I felt a twinge of gladness Kinkaid had taken the time to sabotage the generators. It wouldn’t stop the mining for good, but it’d slow it down a little.
Kinkaid jumped over the spillway and turned to wait for me. I’d already committed, was in the air, when I saw the Shotgun Kid step out from behind a boulder, his gun trained on Kinkaid. No time to react. I landed, held up my hands and, heart pounding, waited to be shot.
“Come with me! Quickly!” the Shotgun Kid said in English. He motioned with his gun and didn’t try to take my useless one.
If the Shotgun Kid held a grudge against El Capitan and the donos, I reflected, Kinkaid and I just might have gotten very lucky.
I nodded at Kinkaid. We followed the Kid deep into the forest, well away from the struggling pistoleiros. When we were some distance up the hillside and the noise of the now-gagging generators had become a dull grumbling, we hunkered down behind a stone outcropping. The Kid put down his gun. Kinkaid took off his glasses and started wiping at the mud smears with his surprisingly clean shirttail tugged out of his pants. I tried to wipe some of the muck off my legs to disguise the fact my hands were shaking uncontrollably. Helluva adrenaline kick.
“My name is Porfilio,” the Kid said. “You must take a message for me to the Yanomamo village. You a friend of the Yanomamo, right?” he asked Kinkaid.
Kinkaid’s eyes narrowed, wary. “I’m a scientist,” he said, “and I don’t like what the gold processing does to the water. It’s illegal.”
“So is destroying someone else’s generators,” I remarked.
“Yes,” Porfilio said, ignoring me. His gaze, wide-eyed and earnest, latched on to Kinkaid. “I know. I want to bring the Yanomamo and the mining together, not to fight. The colonel will destroy the village. He will not listen to me. Which is why I must fight him myself.”
“Why would he destroy the village?”
“To stop the Yanomamo from being in his way. The little villages are banding together to come destroy the mine. Rumors of fighting everywhere. The Yanomamo want their land back.”
Kinkaid nodded. “So you want to negotiate a truce.”
“More than a truce,” Porfilio said solemnly. “A partnership. Stop the mercury. Stop the tearing up of the land. Stop the killing of Yanomamo, of miners.”
Kinkaid put a hand on Porfilio’s shoulder. “What’s your message?”
I stared at the two of them while they kept talking—two idealists out to save the world. If my hand hadn’t been so slimy I would have slapped my palm to my forehead in disbelief. Time to excise myself from this little do-gooder club and be on my way.
Then Kinkaid nodded, shot me a quick glance…and nearly knocked the breath out of me. His angular face intense, his longish hair slicked back, glasses off, and an eight-hour beard scruffing him up, he could have passed for a bedroom fantasy involving black leather and scented oil.
And dammit, his eyes were a deep, deep brown. My very fave.
“I’ll take your message,” he said to Porfilio. “I’ll help in any way I can.” They shook muddy hands on it. Friends of the Earth, I thought, in more ways than one. What next? Cut their palms and become blood brothers? But Kinkaid’s hand, grungy as it was, looked strong and capable, like it could accomplish anything he wanted it to.
I cleared my throat. “We gotta get outta here. What’d they do with our stuff? The stuff from the plane?”
“I took it,” Porfilio said proudly. “I bring it to you tonight.”
I shook my head. “With your friends looking for us everywhere? No good. I plan on being miles into the jungle by nightfall. It’s now or never.”
Porfilio’s face darkened as he considered this. It obviously bugged him not to give my gear back, but was it worth the risk? Then his black eyes cleared and he nodded. “Go to the other side of this hill and wait for me in the little cave. I meet you there soon.”
I didn’t like the wait, inevitable as it was. But the prospect of spending twelve hours in the open jungle at night without my first-aid kit or fresh water didn’t appeal to me, either. The research station might be able to provide supplies, but we had to get there first, and it was a good fifteen miles away.
“Okay,” I said finally. “The little cave. If you don’t show up in an hour, we’re going anyway.”
Kinkaid put on his glasses, ruining the fantasy. “It’s not safe to leave without our gear.”
“No, but it’s not safe to stay for long. We can’t afford to hang around until the bad guys find us.”
“I will hurry,” Porfilio said. “Here.” He dug into his leather ammo pack and plucked out a handful of shells. “In case they catch me and come after you.”
I took the shells, suddenly feeling like hell for making him go get my gear. If El Capitan suspected the Kid of screwing him over on our behalf, El Capitan would doubtless de-capitate him. Based on the conversation I’d heard earlier, Porfilio already walked a thin line with Goldtooth.
But Scooter came first. I’d been fooling myself to believe I could get by without my climbing gear. I needed that stuff, bad, or else Scooter didn’t have a chance.
After Porfilio took off, Kinkaid and I hiked around the hill. It took me a half hour to find the little cave, which turned out to be an oversize cleft in the rocky northern face. Still, there was room to wedge ourselves inside. A good-size manioc tree shielded the entrance. Kinkaid shoehorned himself in to sit sideways, his long legs stretched across the cave. I followed, sitting to face him. If I pressed my sore ribs hard against his calves, I could just stay in the shadow, out of sight. I loaded up the rifle, then laid it across my lap.
“I don’t know your name,” Kinkaid said after a while.
I picked up a stick and started digging mud out of my boot soles. “Robards.”
“Is that your first name or your last?”
“My first is Jessie.”
“Short for Jessica?”
“Yeah.”
“You study bromeliads, huh?”
“Look, you don’t have to make small talk.”
He fell silent. The dim light threw his cheekbone into sharp relief. Just under his lenses, that pinup bad boy impression lurked, taunting me. Okay, he’d landed the plane and saved my life. He’d made a helluva jump into a mining pit, was cool as a cucumber under gunfire, and managed to single-handedly shut down the compound’s generators. But I didn’t want to be his friend.
I guess that didn’t mean I had to be an ass, though.
“Sorry,” I said. “Busy day.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So you’re an entomologist,” I said. “What are you doing at the research station?”
“That’s base camp. I’m here looking for the Traça do Corpse.” He sat up a little straighter. “A colleague of mine spotted it last week. It’s huge—” and here he demonstrated with his hands “—a wingspan of nine inches, and pollinates an orchid—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “What is it? A bee? A beetle? What?”
“Traça,” he said, pushing his glasses up his aquiline nose. “A moth. The Corpse Moth.”
Not the Corpse Moth. The Death Moth.
According to Harrison’s notes, that moth was the Death Orchid’s sole coevolved partner. Sighted last week, it would have been out pollinating the Death Orchid, which itself would have been blooming. And the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
I looked at the man who happened to be the straightest line I had at my disposal.
My days of working alone were over, a
t least for now.
Chapter 6
After Porfilio brought our gear, we took a few minutes to rearrange. Without his camera and tripod, Kinkaid was traveling light, so he took on some of my climbing gear to even up the weight distribution. I strapped on my lightweight headlamp for the hike. Kinkaid’s map showed his research station to be about fifteen miles away, and if we hiked the rest of the evening and all night, we’d be within spitting distance of it by dawn. I hoped he was up to it. I didn’t want to hang around while he caught his breath.
Hiking through the jungle at night even under a full moon isn’t particularly easy. You think the jungle’s alive during the day, but it’s ten times more that way when the sun goes down. Every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth creeps out, and at the pace I set, there wasn’t time to make sure every stick was actually a stick before stepping over it. For the sake of speed, I’d take my chances getting stung and bitten. Come daylight, I’d have thirteen days left.
If Scooter was hanging in there. Not knowing how he was doing gnawed at me.
We stopped around two in the morning for a break and something to eat. When I eased my duffel off my aching shoulders, my sudden ravenousness surprised me. On the move, I don’t really think about anything except where the next foot goes. I dropped my duffel between my feet on a moss-covered rock and dimmed my headlamp so I wouldn’t blind Kinkaid.
“Here.” He held out some kind of granola-based tree-hugging vegan Buddhist energy bar, which I accepted without an ounce of shame.
“Thanks.”
He hadn’t said a word since I struck out into the forest, and he had kept pace over some messy ground, even without his own headlamp. I was starting to doubt he was a jungle newbie.
“Do you always know where you’re going?” he asked as he tore into his energy bar’s recycled paper wrapper.
“I always know where I am, and I guess that’s the real issue.”
“How do you do that?”
I shrugged. “Internal compass, I guess. My great-uncle once took me blindfolded out into the middle of two hundred acres of cornfield, but I found my way home almost immediately.”
“How old were you?”
“Nine.”
Kinkaid meticulously folded his wrapper and tucked it back in his bag. “That’s kind of young to be left like that in the middle of nowhere.”
I shrugged again. “He knew I’d find my way home. It was an experiment. I bet he was never more than fifty yards away the whole time.”
His glasses glinted as he nodded. The contrast of darkness and dim light made his angular features stronger, more classically handsome. After a while he said, “How far do we have to go?”
“I’m figuring another eight miles. Are you up for it?”
“Sure.”
“Not like hanging around the gym, is it?”
I sensed more than saw his smile in the dim light. “I don’t hang around a gym, but I know what you mean.”
He shifted his weight to put a hand against a Tachygalia myrmecophilia tree but suddenly jerked away. Kinkaid really did know his field stuff, I gathered. The Tachygalia myrmecophilia has one of those coevolving relationships with a vicious biting ant. There isn’t enough deet in the world to stop those ants when they think their home is threatened.
“What does your moth look like?” I asked, trying to sound casual. If the moth was attracted to the orchid’s coloring because the flower looked like its mate, I’d have another clue about what I was looking for.
“My colleague told me it looks remarkably like a Laothoe populi, except several times larger.” Excitement tinged his voice. “I want to see for myself, though.”
I could relate. There’s nothing like poking around the woods and swamps for endless days and nights looking for any clue—a tiny sprout in a tangle of weeds, the whiff of a scent you’d never smelled, a leaf shape that didn’t look quite like it fit. The thrill of the hunt was my favorite part. Then to discover that the little clue you’ve been looking for is gravy. It was one reason I was glad to be traveling at night. During the day, it’s too easy to get distracted by the decadent display all around me. I couldn’t afford the luxury of distraction on this trip.
The good news was that Laothoe populi, if I remembered what few bug facts I’d learned in grad school, had the pearlescent black wings whose color had been smoked into Harrison’s medicine bowl. It sounded like I was on the right track.
Trying to tamp down another excitement-provoked adrenaline surge, I hitched my duffel onto my back. “Ready to go?”
“Why are you doing this?” Kinkaid asked.
“Doing what?”
“Taking me to the Ixpachia station.”
“It’s the same general direction as where I’m headed.” I dialed up a brighter beam, shooting a swath of light into the darkness.
“You don’t seem the kind of person who’d do this out of the kindness of your heart.”
“I’m not. But two things. First, I owe you. You saved my life.” And I always try to pay my debts. “Second, there might be a botanist at your station who can help me out.”
“With your bromeliads.”
“Yep.” I started off, but looked back when I didn’t hear him behind me.
“Bromeliads,” he said again.
“Bromeliads,” I replied.
We looked at each other for a long moment. Then, even though he must have known I was lying, he followed me.
The Ixpachia Research Station was a considerable step up from the mining compound in terms of amenities. The buildings that ringed its large open area had screened doors and freshly thatched roofs. There wasn’t a mess hall, so to speak, so I had to assume it was every scientist for himself when it came to cooking. Sometimes if you park near a village, an Indian will cook for you in exchange for rum or whiskey. As long as you didn’t look too hard at what was in your soup, you’d eat pretty good.
Speaking of, I was starving. And what I wouldn’t give for a shower and a mudless set of clothes.
Those thoughts dropped out of my head when a contingent of intellectual types piled out of the buildings at our arrival. A tall, bearded guy who looked to be in his robust sixties strode out from the crowd. His white, bushy hair stuck out all over his head and bobbed as he walked toward us. A grin broadened his face.
“Rick!” he said, shaking Kinkaid’s hand heartily. “Glad you made it!”
“Thought I wouldn’t for a while there.”
“You look like hell. Have you been wrestling with a wild hog?”
Kinkaid flashed that bad-boy-having-fun grin. “Jessie, this is Dr. Darrin Yagoda, an old professor of mine from the University of Florida. Darrin, this is Jessie Robards, the lady who got me here.”
I got the impression Yagoda summed me up in one word: trouble. His handshake lacked both enthusiasm and warmth. What? Was I treading on someone’s toes by showing up?
“Don’t worry,” I said to Yagoda. “I won’t be around long.”
His gray eyes widened at that. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need,” he said quickly. “I just didn’t expect Rick to have company.”
“Neither did I,” Kinkaid said, smiling, “but I’m glad I did. Where’s breakfast?”
“Come on.” Yagoda hooked an arm over Kinkaid’s shoulder and ushered him toward one of the buildings, leaving me standing there.
Unsure whether Yagoda intended me to follow, I did. I wanted breakfast and I wanted it now. No amount of our host’s pretending I didn’t exist changed how loudly my stomach was growling. When they reached the building, Kinkaid dropped back and waited for me while Yagoda went on inside.
“Be patient,” he said in a low voice. “He’s rough around the edges, but he’s okay.”
“Old friend of yours?”
“My doctoral dissertation advisor eight years ago or so.”
Eight years? That put Kinkaid in his early thirties, just a few years older than me. No way. He looked all of twenty-four. Maybe he was a prodigy.
“All I want is something to eat and someplace to crash for the day,” I said. “Then I’ll be on my way.”
“That’s what I can offer,” Yagoda said from his makeshift fireplace. “Come on in, Ms. Robards.”
“I suspect it’s Dr. Robards.” Kinkaid’s eyes sharpened behind his glasses. “Though she hasn’t admitted it.”
I smiled at Kinkaid but didn’t answer yea or nay. A good plant collector, especially a mercenary like me, doesn’t tell anything more than she absolutely has to. The last thing I needed was these people to try to stop what I was doing because they hated private collectors. Or worse, carry stories about me to other drop-in visitors who happened to be my competition.
Which got part of my brain wondering if Lawrence Daley was on his way down to Roraima while another part took note of Yagoda’s posh setup.
The main area consisted of a cooking fireplace where something delicious-smelling stewed merrily, a worktable cluttered with a microscope, mounting board, and several bottles of alcohol, and a couple of hand-built bamboo chairs. Yagoda must be big man on campus to rate a hut with a separate sleeping room. A doorway on the back wall led out to a little patio deck where a rusty pipe dribbled water. The bathroom, I gathered.
“Have a seat.” Yagoda gestured to the chairs, which Kinkaid and I took. “I hope you like agouti.” He raised a challenging brow at me as he dished out of the cook pot to fill a bowl.
“I love jungle rat,” I said, then leaned conspiratorially toward Kinkaid. “Tastes like chicken,” I assured him, prompting a thin bark of a laugh from Yagoda.
“Tell me about the Corpse Moth,” Kinkaid said as Yagoda walked over to hand him a wooden bowl filled with stew and a palm-size piece of bread to eat with.
Yagoda shook his shaggy head. “Why don’t you eat first. You look like you’ve hiked all night.”
“We did.” Kinkaid tore off a piece of bread and tucked it gingerly into the stew.
The big man paused in the act of handing me my bowl to stare at Kinkaid. I reached up and took the bowl out of his hand but he didn’t notice. The rich aroma rising off the stew got my stomach growling again.
The Orchid Hunter Page 9