River of Eden (10 page)

Annie blanched. No wonder the day had gone to hell so quickly. Her name was going to start showing up all over, in all the wrong places, official places.

She had to disappear, the sooner the better. Thank God the northwest Brazilian frontier was big enough to do it in. All she had to do was get out of the swamp without getting shot, get to her canoe in Santa Maria, and ditch Will Travers. On her own, nobody would find her.

“Next time I'll ask for provenance,” she said with false bravado, giving a small shrug and starting to slip away.

She didn't get far. He stopped her with his hand on her waist, holding her where she stood.

“Don't move,” he said, his voice lowering to a dead-serious timbre. “Don't move one inch, unless I tell you
to, and maybe—just maybe—I can get us out of here in one piece.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said, forcing a calmness into her voice she was far from feeling with Fat Eddie less than twenty feet away and Will Travers looming over her.

He held her gaze for a long moment. Amber light from the lanterns gilded the planes of his face, throwing the lean, artful lines and curves of his features into sharp relief.

Annie hardly dared to breathe.

His gaze shifted, drifting downward to her mouth, his lashes lowering, and something about him changed, something subtle but undeniable. Suddenly Annie was even more aware of the nearness of his body, of its sheer physicality, the sound of his breath, his scent—rainwater and a faint trace of engine grease, and the underlying scent of his skin, warm and so very male. He wasn't any closer than he had been, but he felt closer, much closer.

“Yeah,” he said softly, lifting his eyes back to hers. “I'll just bet you can, but it's my boat, and tonight I'm the one taking care of everything. Get used to it, and don't make another move for the door.”

He released her and left, stepping back out onto the deck.

Annie let out a shaky breath. She had to give him points for nerve, but she hadn't survived all her years in the jungles of South America by depending on anyone for anything, and she wasn't about to start now, especially with someone on such friendly terms with an underworld warlord.

Keeping close to the cabin's walls, she slipped back to
the window, where she could see what was going on. Fat Eddie's boat had drifted back toward the bow a bit, and she could see more of him besides his back, more of his face—little dark eyes sunk between heavy lids and fat cheeks, a small, nearly delicate nose looking thoroughly out of place amid his other, overly rounded features, the sweat gleaming on his skin. His black hair had been slicked back with pomade into his ponytail, leaving nary a strand out of place. He didn't look particularly ruthless— until he opened his mouth.

Annie gasped despite herself. He had the dentition of a piranha, his teeth filed to sharp, triangular points, giving his fleshy countenance a demon's grisliness.

“Ah, yes,” the man chuckled with pleasure, leaning over the side of his speedboat to where Travers was kneeling on the edge of the
Sucur
'
s
deck.

Just looking at him made her skin crawl. Men in the Amazon had some pretty peculiar ideas in their heads, ideas about animals and sex. It was all tied up with the social order of machismo, the rabidity of South American testosterone, and the wildness of the local fauna. Annie didn't want to dwell too long on what Fat Eddie's piranha teeth might say about his sexual proclivities. She just knew she was getting a gun out of one of her crates, and she was going to strap it on and not take it off.

“They are beautiful, are they not, Guillermo?”

Diamonds and emeralds—Travers was shaking them out into his hand, showing the fat man without exhibiting any of the aversion churning through Annie's veins.

The stones were rough cut, unfaceted, yet they still caught the light, looking like bright pebbles in the palm of his hand. He had a small fortune's worth in the bag, and Annie wondered who he was delivering them to in
the northwest. After Manaus, there was little but rain forest and
caboclo
settlements all the way to the border in any direction.

And mining camps, she silently added, hundreds of illegal mining camps, run by hundreds of
donos
, mine bosses, who could easily be dealing in gemstones as well as gold.

What in the hell, Annie wondered, had Gabriela been thinking to suggest she book passage with Will Travers? The old doctor had to know what he was—which was everything the rumors had made him out to be and then some. He was intelligent, all right. Annie hadn't been wrong about that, but like him, she'd misinterpreted the clues. The intelligence she'd seen so clearly in his eyes had a decidedly criminal bent. Hustling jewels for Fat Eddie Mano was not the idle pastime of a disenchanted scholar. It was a fully colluded crime… not so very different from buying an illegal stash of guns and ordnance from a piece of waterfront riffraff like Johnny Chang.

Okay, she admitted to herself. She wasn't any better than he was, and a fat lot of good that was doing either one of them. Hell, all she really wanted was to get to Santa Maria and from there to the Cauaburi.

Her hand went to the small, black fanny pack she'd belted around her waist at dawn, before she'd ever boarded Travers's damn boat. All she really wanted was a chance to understand what she'd found. She was on the brink of the most exciting discovery of her career, of anyone's career—and she refused to be waylaid by a thick-bellied, gun-toting, piranha-toothed freak like Fat Eddie.

“Get rid of him,” she muttered under her breath, urging Travers to finish up with the gemstones and send their most unwelcome visitor on his way.

Travers couldn't have heard her, but he did rise to his feet, and was in the act of pouring the stones back into the bag when something near the waterline caught his eye. His body went still, and he said something soft— words she couldn't hear, but that caused Fat Eddie to smile again, showing his double row of razorlike teeth.

With a hearty laugh, the fat man reached over the side of his boat, grabbing a black rope and hauling an oddly shaped creature up into the air.

Annie stared at it for a moment, trying to figure out what it was, and then, with an awful wave of shock rolling through her, she knew.

Her knees buckled, and slowly, ever so slowly, she slid down the wall, her hand clasped over her mouth, her mind reeling.

Will felt his stomach roll over. He'd been around. He'd seen a lot of things, and he knew a man's head when he saw one, even if it had been dragged through the Rio Negro for a few hours.

Kneeling on the
Sucur
'
s
deck, he'd noticed the dark skein trailing off Fat Eddie's boat into the water. Black, thick, and twisted, it had gleamed in the light, looking too fine to be a rope. Following the dark skein down had revealed the reason for its fineness and the grisly trophy at its end. The river warlord had tied a man's head to his boat by its long, braided queue.

“Your thief from the warehouse,” he said flatly, when the fat man pulled up his prize. It wasn't a question. The only question Will had was how Fat Eddie had managed to behead the guy without getting himself covered in blood.

“One of them.” The fat man chuckled. “His name
was Johnny Chang. Now all I need is the woman, the blond cat. They'll make a good pair. No, Guillermo?”

Will shrugged, ignoring the alarm Eddie's comment generated. He'd seen the man in the speedboat that morning. He'd been stocky, well muscled, and armed with a machine gun. Fat Eddie hadn't gotten the best of Johnny Chang without one hell of a struggle, and Fat Eddie wasn't one for struggling—ever. He paid people to do that for him, and any dread the sight of Chang's flaccid, waterlogged head hadn't dredged up was more than compensated for by the dire realization that the fat man wasn't alone. Somewhere out in the swampy channels, someone was watching them—watching for Annie Parrish, the blond cat.

Will finished putting the stones in the bag, careful to keep his attention focused on the task.

“I have a friend from Ecuador, a Jivaro friend, who will shrink the heads for me,” Fat Eddie continued, letting Johnny's head drop back into the water. “When I hang both of them in the Praça de Matriz, no one will think to steal from
Senhor
Eduardo again, hey?”

“No,
senhor,”
Will agreed, shoving the bag in his pants pocket, wondering what kind of guns Dr. Parrish had in her crates and how quickly he could get to them. Whatever she'd bought, it had to be bigger and better than the pistol he had tucked in his waistband. “But only a fool would have stolen from you in the first place. From Yavareté to Belém, everyone knows better than to steal from
Senhor
Eduardo.”

“Everybody who isn't already dead—or about to be!” The fat man laughed. “So I am back to Santo Antonio to collect my guns and the little cat's head.
Tchau
, Guillermo.”

“Até a próxima, senhor.”
Until we meet again—and Will was going to do everything in his power to make sure they never did.

With a short wave, Fat Eddie pushed the boat's throttle up a notch and spun the wheel to head off into the flooded forest, on a course back to the main flow of the Rio Negro.

Will watched the speedboat's spotlight wind through the trees and lianas until it disappeared. Then he walked across the deck and blew out both lanterns, plunging the
Sucuri
into the rich, velvet darkness of an Amazonian night. Santo Antonio was two hours behind them, which gave him and the little cat a four-hour lead.

He hoped to hell it would be enough.

CHAPTER 8

S
tepping inside the sucuri s cabin
, Will felt an instant surge of panic. She was gone.

Damn her.
He'd told her to stay put. He swung around to check the deck outside, and a flash of blond hair caught his eye. She was huddled on the floor in a pool of moonlight, her knees drawn up, her glasses pushed up on top of her head with her face in her hands.

He let out a soft curse in relief. She looked damn small in her oversized shirt and ratty tennis shoes, but without a doubt she was the biggest friggin' disaster to come into his life since Tutanji's anaconda.

Fat Eddie's guns, for God's sake. What was she working on? A death wish?

He let out another curse, not so softly, and her head came up. Their gazes locked in the dim light, hers startled and tinged with wariness, his probably far fiercer than he meant it to be—but damn, she'd cost him.

He'd lied to Fat Eddie Mano to save her, and he could smell his bridges burning the length of the Rio Negro.

“What am I going to do with you?” he asked, a rhetorical question if he'd ever heard one.

“I have to get to Santa Maria.”

That was the last thing he'd expected her to say. She was scared. She couldn't hide it, not with her eyes that wide and her mouth that soft.

Soft, soft mouth. Sweet legs.
God save him. This was a damn poor time for lust to start figuring into his life.

“No good. You heard him. He wants your head, and if you were watching out the window, you know that is
not
a figure of speech.”

“I was watching.”

Of course she'd been watching, and he'd found her huddled on the floor. It took more than a disembodied head to unnerve Will, but she couldn't have seen many, and probably none belonging to someone she knew.

“I think we can outrun Fat Eddie to São Gabriel,” he said, wondering where his sense of responsibility for her was coming from, and wondering just how damned misplaced it might be. She'd been around. She was a big girl. She knew the rules. No one who didn't know the rules and play the game damn well could have hustled Fat Eddie's guns out from under him. “From there you can catch a plane to Bogotá, or São Paulo, or Rio. Take your pick. Within twenty-four hours after that, you could be back in the States.”

It was the best he had to offer, the absolute best. She had to know it, but she wasn't jumping at his great plan, only staring up at him, her face pale, and her chin—so help him God—set at a determined angle.

“Fat Eddie owns this river,” he explained further. “You've got nothing to look forward to but dying young if you stay.” He couldn't say it any plainer.

“You don't know what I'm looking forward to,” she said quietly, adjusting her glasses back down over her eyes and rising to her feet.

A wave of frustration rolled through him, tightening his jaw. She was a big girl all right, and what she had—that damnable unflinching grit—was an admirable quality. It was also the sort of thing that got people killed.

“Yesterday,” he said, “in Pancha's, when I agreed to take you to Santa Maria, you were a slightly notorious botanist with Gabriela Oliveira's stamp of approval, a busy woman in need of passage. That started to change last night when Gabriela told me about Yavareté.”

He saw her stiffen and hold herself a little taller.

“Yavareté has nothing to do with you.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed easily enough, “but when Fat Eddie gets to Santo Antonio, he's going to know I lied about you, and then he's going to want three heads to hang in the Praça de Matriz.”