“Very nice,” Annie had to agree. The woman had treated her with all the kindness of a sister.
“Smart, too.”
“Harvard, wasn't she?” Annie asked, though she knew perfectly well that Dr. Erica Grunstead indeed came from the same prestigious Harvard line of Amazonian research scientists as Dr. William Sanchez Travers.
“Three years behind me. I knew her in Cambridge.”
“Oh.” Annie was completely disgusted with what that little news item did to her.
“She hasn't changed much. Still real pretty. Knows how to use a comb. Doesn't know how to detonate a grenade.”
He was baiting her. Annie knew it, and still rose to her own defense. “It's the humidity that makes my hair fluff out like this.”
“Right.” He laughed. The bastard laughed, and her cheeks burned. “Annie, we're going to have a hell of a lot more than one more day together on this damn boat. Barcelos was supposed to be the solution. It wasn't the problem.”
“Barcelos was your problem,” she pointed out. “I'm not the one being chased up the river by a couple of garimpeiro jewel thieves.”
“No. You're the one with the piranha-toothed, machete-wielding psychotic on your trail.”
Damn him. She was too tired to fence with words. “You should really let me win once in a while just to keep the game interesting.”
“You can have the galley award,” he conceded graciously. “Erica didn't cook, and you've done a real nice job with the meals.”
She shot him a look that would have killed a lesser man, and ran into a grin that was pure, unadulterated mischief. It curved the corners of his mouth, lit the depths of his eyes, and did the most awful thing to her heart.
“Are you going to make a career out of teasing me?” she groused, trying to counteract the damned sense of longing his grin inspired.
“But it's true,” he said, all innocence. “She couldn't boil water, or gut a fish, and not once, the whole week she was on my boat, did she make me want to back her up against a wall and kiss her until our eyes crossed.”
Innocence should have been difficult to hold on to after a statement like that, but he managed without so much as breaking a sweat. Annie couldn't say the same for herself. The picture he'd put in her mind made her feel flushed all over. She wanted to tell him that he must be mistaken, because for the most part, men did not find her particularly attractive, especially after they got to know her.
But he wasn't most men, and he had no reason to be intimidated by her intelligence, or her degrees, or her wealth of experience tracking over a large section of the world's last unknown rain forest, a deed that set her outside the realm of most men's egos. And he certainly didn't have any reason to be intimidated by her reputation. His easily exceeded hers on all counts, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and would continue to so right up until she brought back the Epidendrum luminosa. Then all bets were off.
“I don't know why not. She's damned pretty.” She shrugged, holding on to her nonchalance by a thread.
“And you are something else,” he said, his smile fading. “Did you know your nose was crooked?”
“Yes,” she said ascerbically.
“And when you smile, which you don't do very often, one of your eyes scrinches up more than the other?”
“Don't you have a life?”
“God, I used to, Annie.” A sigh left him, and he took another long drag off the cigarette. “Up until about two days ago, I had a life I was working real hard to keep, but you have thrown a giant wrench into my plans. I've got to get rid of you, and I don't have a damned place to put you.”
“Put me where I paid you to put me, or help me get my canoe and put me up on the Marauiá.” She could make it to the Cauaburi on her own from there.
“Actually,” he said, turning his attention to Juanio and giving him a shake. “I'm thinking about leaving you here.”
“Here?” She didn't understand. They weren't anywhere. Then it dawned on her. “The hell you will.”
“Nice island in the middle of the river. You've got enough firepower to blow half the state of Roraima to hell and back, if half the state of Roraima decides to come up the river—and I can return in a couple of weeks to pick you up and take you to the Serra da Neblina on the Venezuelan border. We'll go straight up the Marauiá and find your Aganisia cyanea.”
“I won't let you do it, Will,” she warned him. “I won't.” Being stranded on an island in the middle of the Rio Negro during her prime orchid-hunting weeks was out of the question, unacceptable, but she didn't believe for a second that he hadn't already made up his mind. Like her, he was running out of options.
“And how are you going to stop me, An—” The last thought he had was that, damn, she could really move fast.
CHAPTER 14
It was the dead of night when Will awoke, the only sounds the flowing of the river and the hum of cicadas on the shore. He lay on the floor where she'd left him. No lantern was lit inside the cabin or anywhere on the boat. They were moving slowly through the water with Annie at the helm, piloting by the light of the moon, the engine throttled down, the sky above them a ribbon of darkness studded with stars.
Mutiny, he thought. That's what they called what she'd done. Mutiny. She'd put a pillow under his head, though, and that was sweet. He didn't hurt anywhere, and it took him a minute to remember exactly what she had done to him. She hadn't kicked him, or hit him. She'd grabbed him. Grabbed him on the side of his neck and checked him out like a library book.
He turned his head one way and then the other, making sure he still functioned and having a look around. There was no pain, no permanent damage—and no Juanio.
Now what in the hell had she done with the garimpeiro? Will wondered. Probably the same thing he'd been planning on doing. They seemed to think a lot alike. He just hoped she'd asked all the right questions before she'd gotten rid of him.
He carefully stretched his legs and arms, and again found no damage. Actually, he felt pretty good, pretty rested. It had been a hell of a last few days, with not much sleep to go around. His inadvertent nap might have been just the thing he needed.
Stretching himself out again, he folded his hands under his head and settled in to watch her. She was hell on a man. She was hell on him. Where he was going, she couldn't go. Where she wanted to go, he couldn't let her. And where he needed her to go was a place he couldn't get to from where he was.
Damn. The island had been his best idea, maybe his last idea.
“I think we're in love,” he said, loud enough to make sure she heard him. “What do you think?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “I think we're in trouble. How do you feel?”
“Refreshed.” He told her the truth and was heartened to see her relief. She hadn't wanted to hurt him. “So what do you call what you did to me?”
“Vulcan death grip,” she said without batting an eyelash.
“Will you teach me?”
“Nope.” She turned back to the helm and made an adjustment with the wheel. He felt the Sucuri respond.
“Is that what happened to the Woolly Monkey garimpeiros ?”
“Mostly.”
An ambiguous answer if he'd ever heard one, or maybe a warning that she had plenty of other tricks up her sleeve.
“With a Vulcan death grip on our side, we should be unbeatable.”
“I doubt it,” she said, tilting her head to look up through the window at the sky. A small tree limb slapped against the bulkhead, plastering the window with leaves, before snapping off.
She didn't budge, but Will leapt to his feet. “Whoa, Annie. You're way too close to shore.”
He reached for the wheel, but she'd already killed the engine.
“Shh,” she said. “Listen.”
He cocked his head and soon enough heard what she wanted him to hear.
“Plane,” he said.
“Look.” She pointed out the window, at a small beam of light rising out of the trees on a bend i
n the river. “This is its third pass in the last hour.”
The light quickly grew bigger, and Will realized it was a spotlight shining down on the river, sweeping along the shore, looking for something.
He didn't have a doubt that something was the Sucuri.
“What did you do with Juanio?”
“Well, I thought about dumping him overboard, but I didn't do it until we were just above Losas, so I'm not sure that counts. All he had to do was float down and hit the dock. I watched somebody pull him in.”
Losas was a fishing camp north of Barcelos. Two or three boats were usually in residence, and others were always coming and going. It was exactly where Will had planned on dropping off the Brazilian.
“Did you question him first?”
“Wrung him out all the way down to his skivvies, took every salient fact he had in his head, and almost got enough information to fill a thimble.”
“So you didn't learn anything.” He couldn't keep the disappointment out of his voice. Luiz had been the one they should have dragged on board. Juanio had just been taking up space.
“Well, he did have one thing to say, just one, and he said it over and over and over, babbled it, actually. To be honest, whatever brain cells he had before he got on your boat were scared out of him the minute I opened that cabin door, and now he's running on empty. Or so I thought. He obviously had enough gumption left to tell somebody about us, somebody with a radio. I don't know what in the hell else they'd be looking for out here at three o'clock in the morning.”
Will didn't, either.
“It's got to be Vargas,” he said. “Fat Eddie only had one plane, and that was the one we left in pieces in Barcelos.”
“That was Fat Eddie's plane?”
He nodded. “Luiz was his pilot.”
“Does Fat Eddie know his organization is falling apart around him?” she asked, craning her head back to keep the plane in sight.
“He's got to be figuring it out by now. The power is shifting all along the river, and if Vargas has his way, it will all be coming to him. Guys like Fat Eddie are going to end up running numbers games on the streets.”
“No way,” she said. “Fat Eddie Mano has owned Manaus for twenty years. He isn't going to give it up without a fight.”
“This from a woman who just stole a whole load of his guns.”
She let out an unladylike snort. “He's got plenty more where those came from, and let's keep the record straight. I paid good money for what I got.”
“But to the wrong person.”
She shrugged. “Illegal arms sales are a bitch to keep aboveboard.”
A classic bit of waterfront philosophy, Will thought, refraining from an incredulous snort of his own, and just the sort of thing that kept her in trouble. “So what was this thing Juanio kept saying?”
She turned to face him, her eyes locking onto his, and he immediately realized she was far more tense than he'd thought, given her easy banter.
“He kept saying noite do diabo, noite do diabo, night of the devil. Or sometimes he'd get it a little twisted around, and it would come out diabo noturno, night devil, but those few words and that one burning concept pretty much encompassed his whole vocabulary and every brainwave he generated. Noite do diabo.”
Will swore softly under his breath. Maybe he didn't have as much time as he'd thought. Maybe Vargas was moving his plans forward faster than expected.
They waited a minute in silence as the plane passed them by and continued on down the river, its light sweeping the shoreline. When it was out of sight, he leaned around her and started the engine.
“So what's this noite do diabo?” she asked, stepping aside and letting him have the wheel.
“It's a superstition that's taken hold in the goldfields along the border. The garimpeiros have gotten it in their heads that there's going to be a Night of the Devil, a night when the devil comes down the river and destroys everything in his path, stealing souls and tearing up the rain forest. West of São Gabriel, people seem to think the demon will take the shape of a jaguar. East of São Gabriel, they say it's going to be an anaconda.”
“An anaconda? Like the one I saw in here.”
“No,” he said. “No, not like that one. They're talking cosmic proportions, like the ancestral anaconda, the one that brought the Indians here in the beginning and gave them this place and all the gold. In some ways, the miners see it as a purging of their sins. They poison the rivers with mercury, bring malaria and disease, steal women, enslave the Indians and caboclos with debt servitude, and this will be the forest's retribution. You know the situation.”
It was the other rape of the rain forest, the creation of hundreds of illegal mines in the Amazon Basin.
“Yes, but a Night of the Devil? That seems a bit big for a bunch of garimpeiros to come up with on their own.”
“Well, it has another side. Anyone who survives will be rich beyond their wildest dreams, cleansed of all their sins.”
“By the devil?” She sounded highly skeptical, with good reason. It was a stretch for anyone with an ounce of catechism under their belt.
“God and the devil share a lot of space down here.” He turned the wheel, taking them back out into the current.
“So who's the devil? Vargas?”
“I think so.”
“But Juanio thinks it's you.”
One of his eyebrows arched. “Did he say that?”
She nodded. “On the dock at Barcelos. He said this was the devil's boat, and Luiz said without you the boat was just a boat.”
“Ah, that's right,” he remembered. “But then he went on to talk about the true devil. I may get credit for being a minor demon, but I don't think I have the necessary reputation to get tagged as the true devil.”
Annie tended to agree, even after what she'd seen in the cabin.
“I'm in trouble here, though, aren't I?”
“I think we established that fact the morning we left RBC.”
“I'm not talking about Fat Eddie. I mean with you, with the tattoo, with the snake rising up out of this place when Juanio and I boarded without you.”
He eased the Sucuri a little farther from shore, piloting around a downed tree.
“That wasn't for you, Annie. I can't say that I exactly understand what happened, but I know the warning was for Juanio. I won't hurt you, and I've been doing my best to make sure nobody else does, either, but the spot you're in seems to get tighter every time I turn around.”
“What about your spot?”
“My spot hasn't changed that much. I half suspected somebody might try to get Eddie's cache, but they never would have found me in Barcelos or anywhere else if…”
“It hadn't been for me,” she finished for him, when his voice trailed off.
He shrugged. “I don't need anybody's help to find trouble.”
She seemed to accept his exoneration, her gaze drifting back to the river. She looked exhausted, and the fact made him feel guilty as hell. He remembered how soft she'd been to hold in the cantina, how she'd held on to him, her mouth hot and sweet, and she'd known about his tattoo then. Of course, she hadn't yet seen the sucuri.
Damn snake.
Moonlight and tiredness gave her a starker look, turning the warm blond of her hair to cool silver, drawing a tightness at the corners of her mouth, smudging the skin beneath her eyes.
“Why don't you get some sleep. I'll wake you when we get to the mission.”
“Can't. Too scared,” she said bluntly.
“Of me?” He should never have stopped kissing her, Juanio and Luiz be damned. Should never have let her board the Sucuri with Juanio, except she'd been safer on the boat than with Luiz—or so he'd thought before he'd known about her Vulcan death grip. She could have handled the garimpeiro, just like she'd handled the others.
“No. Of dreaming about the snake I saw when I opened the door, a green anaconda, upward to thirty feet or more and five hundred pounds, a real mother of a Eunectes murinus,
huge, almost took up the whole damn cabin—definitely female, so it's not you.”
There was a compliment in there somewhere, if he worked at it hard enough.
“It was pretty dark in here,” he said. “Even an expert herpetologist would have needed a better look than you could have gotten to sex a snake, any kind of a snake.”
She let out a weary laugh and dragged her hand back through her hair, shaking her head. “No. I recognized her. She's the snake from my dreams. She's been with me on the black-water rivers since I first stepped foot in the Vaupes three years ago. What I can't figure out is what she was doing on your boat while I was awake.” She laughed again, tremulously. “God, I'm not sure I even want to know why she was on your boat.”
Every now and then, something happened that made Will think he'd been in the Amazon for too long, way too long. It was an enormously big place, the river a thousand-headed hydra draining an area of almost three million square miles, and it was forest, endless forest, living and breathing, eating the equatorial light and turning it green—deep, lush, full of spirits and demons, who were often one and the same. Sorcery abounded, a place where invisible darts were secreted in the wrists of shamans who could send them flying through the dark to pierce an enemy's skin. A place where people were descended from jaguars, the proof in their blue tattoos and the palm spine whiskers arcing gracefully from above their upper lips. A place of sympathetic magic where there were no gods, only beings, some seen, some unseen, and man was not separate, but moved within the same stream of breath as every creature, every plant, every living thing in this world and the other. It was a fluid place, geographically and within the mind's consciousness.
He'd been lost in it, been found, and once been close to death, wrapped in the coils and held by the daggerlike teeth of a snake that was also the sucuri on his boat. He should have died. Instead, he'd killed the snake, Tutanji's anaconda, an act of survival he had yet to escape, and he had to wonder what in the hell the old shaman's spirit-serpent was doing in Annie Parrish's dreams. That's what made him think he'd been in the Amazon too long.
Three years ago, she'd entered the land of the black-water rivers and had her first anaconda dream. Three years ago, he'd killed a giant anaconda while journeying up another black-water river in the northwestern frontier of Brazil. Hell. He had been in the Amazon too long.
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