River of Eden (12 page)

“Merda,”
she swore under her breath. She rose to her feet and wiped a hand across her damp brow. Johnny was dead, murdered by Fat Eddie Mano, his head severed and waiting to be shrunk by a Jivaro tribesman, his body dumped in the river for fish food.

“Sucuri
, hell,” she muttered, turning toward the cabin. She needed a cup of coffee.

Inside, a fresh stalk of bananas hung from a hook in the ceiling. Papayas and guavas were piled in a basket on the counter. She set a pot of coffee to start on the kerosene stove and opened a cupboard, looking for sugar. On her fourth door, she came to a sudden halt, her search forgotten.

Books. Dozens of them.

Lifting her hand, she ran her fingers across the spines, encountering a veritable cornucopia of classic Amazonia, books on botany, plant structure and classification, books written by the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century botanists who had explored the Amazon and the Andes, discovering thousands of new plants for western science. She owned them all and had been deeply influenced by most of them, especially the works of Spruce and Schultes, and the adventures of Humboldt and Waterton. Their true-life stories in the tropics had become the stuff of dreams for a girl living on the dry, western plains of North America.

And Travers had them all, including his own, hardly the library of a man who'd completely abandoned
botany for criminal vice. She could only conclude that on some level, he was still in the game.

A small smile curled her mouth. The Dr. William Sanchez Travers whose name was on the books would have been damned impressed by what she'd found up on the Cauaburi.

The last book in the row didn't have a title on the spine, and when she pulled it down, she saw only one word on its cover: TRAVERS.

An excited thrill went through her. His logbook.

A thousand rumors had gone around about him, one for every day since he'd disappeared—and she was holding the answers to them all. Heady stuff for someone who needed a little leverage after Fat Eddie had all but pronounced her dead.

With only the faintest twinge of guilt, she opened to the first page—and frowned. Her brow furrowed, and she pushed her glasses a little higher on her nose.

“I'll be damned,” she muttered, flipping through the pages one by one. The dates were there, starting well before his disappearance, along with line after line of daily entries—every one of them written in a language she didn't even recognize, let alone understand.

But the details—her gaze skimmed another dozen pages, all of them covered with a distinctively illegible script and spare, concise drawings, both botanical and geographical.

Forget the rumors, she thought. He hadn't been lost for a moment, let alone a whole year. He knew exactly where he'd been every minute of every day, but without a latitude and longitude or a translation, he was the only one who knew.

So what had he been doing? she wondered, paging forward through more of the log.

And what was he hiding?

A splash outside brought her head up and her hand to her gun. Her heart pounded in her chest. If it was Fat Eddie and his goons, this could prove to be a pretty short trip for somebody.

Leaning forward, she peeked through the window and saw Travers pulling up in his canoe. He was naked from the waist up, propelling the boat through the water and leaving a swirling trail of mist in his wake.

She unconsciously relaxed her grip on the pistol, her sense of danger forgotten as she watched him—lithe and powerful, the muscles in his chest and arms bunching with each paddle stroke. With his hair damp and his skin sheened silver with morning dew, he was the river creature again, a picture of primitive grace and near preternatural beauty.

Her mouth thinned into a tight line. It was the last thing she wanted to admit, the absolute last—that he was beautiful.

With an annoyed admonition at herself to stop staring, she started to turn her attention elsewhere, but got sidetracked by two white scars marking his chest above his heart, just under the curve of his shoulder, an interesting detail she tucked away. Anything could have happened to him. She had a few scars herself and wouldn't have given his a second thought, until he glided by her down the side of the boat, and she saw his back. Startled, she could only stare, her breath caught in her throat.

He'd been tattooed, thoroughly, disconcertingly, the images running in a line down his spine from the base of his neck to below the waistband of his shorts, their crude precision far beyond what could be achieved with
genipa
or
rocou
body paint. She'd seen the design before, two
snakes intertwined, one dark, one light. It was common up on the Vaupes River in Desana territory.

He'd been changed by it—the truth came to her with chilling clarity. Whoever had marked him, had changed him. Without knowing when, where, or why he'd been tattooed, she knew she was looking at the moment when he'd ceased being Dr. William Sanchez Travers, world-renowned botanist with the Harvard pedigree, and become what he was today… a mystery.

Snakes. God. Her nemeses. No artisan had put the paint beneath his skin. The serpents were crudely drawn, yet there was power in the simple, bold lines crossing and recrossing each other down his back.

Eaten by an anaconda, so the rumor went, and so it might have been, she thought, her gaze drifting down the long, intertwined curves, his former life devoured by what had happened to him.

Travers shrugged into a shirt he'd picked up out of the canoe and turned toward the cabin. For a moment, he stood still, looking off into the mist-bound forest, and her gaze went to the chunk of rock crystal and the jaguar teeth hanging from the cord around his neck—a shaman's crystal.

Another uneasy sensation coursed a path up her spine. This was him, she realized, not the reprobate of the rumors. He was no waterfront tramp, no drunk, no matter how drunk he'd gotten with Fat Eddie. He was something altogether different, and this was his place—the wild river and the rain forest.

In Pancha's she'd wondered if he knew how to use the crystal. It was considered a powerful talisman, both a protection from one's enemies in the Otherworld, and a way of seeing beyond the boundaries of this world. In
Pancha's she'd wondered just how far over the edge he'd gone.

Far enough and then some, she decided… and then some more. She glanced down at the book in her hands. She doubted if Gabriela had underestimated him, but she knew Fat Eddie had, and so had she. Before his disappearance, he'd been a lauded naturalist, a scientific adventurer who had built a reputation for going beyond the proscribed boundaries of conventional wisdom, geographically and academically.

She would put a dollar to anyone's dime that he hadn't changed in that respect, that he was still going beyond the proscribed boundaries, maybe even into the shaman's realm—or so he might believe. She lifted her gaze from the writhing snakes drawn in his log. She wasn't sure what she believed about him, but there he stood, the most brilliantly infamous Harvard ethnobotanist to ever come out of the Ivy League, with row upon red row of
shoroshoro
beads wrapped around his ankle, barefoot and more than half naked on the deck of an Amazon riverboat with feathers tied in his hair.

And that tattoo, the shamanic abstraction of a man's cerebral fissure if she'd ever seen one, and she'd seen plenty up on the Vaupes.

His existence didn't revolve around something as simple as taking passengers up and down the river or being the fat man's pawn, quite the contrary. The edge he'd gone over was the border onto an abyss—and there the hell she was, trapped with him on a boat named
Sucuri.

CHAPTER 10

R
eleasing a deep breath, will
glanced over his shoulder toward the cabin where he'd left her sleeping. She'd ruined him. One little blond-haired, too-smart-for-her-own-good woman with two crates of illegal guns had gotten on his boat and ruined him. It seemed almost impossible.

He'd spent two years working the river, getting to know every
caboclo
settlement and tributary on both shores, and doing a lot of chasing of his own tail, and the same trip that had finally nabbed him Corisco Vargas had also saddled him with Annie Parrish—the one-woman riot squad.

Good God. His life was on the line, and she was gnawing at the rope.

The signal he'd been waiting for sounded through the trees, a pounding rhythm of
manguare
drumbeats that would be picked up and repeated the length of the river north, and those who understood the message would be warned to beware and to watch for the
Sucuri.

“Watch her sink like a stone or go up in flames,” he muttered, heading toward the main cabin. Fat Eddie was out for blood, more than blood, if he could get it.

While Will would be the last person to certify his waterfront
amigos
as reliable, they all knew chaos when they saw it, and when he'd finally raised Diego Martinelli in Santo Antonio on the radio just before dawn, the old sot had confirmed that chaos had arrived with hellfire and a torch.

Stepping inside the cabin door, he was surprised to see his own personal bête noire awake and stirring. She looked slightly rumpled, but no worse the wear for their long night.

Good, he thought, she's going to need her strength— just as he was going to need his to keep from shaking her, or doing something really stupid, like making a pass. Anything between them had nowhere to go. He wasn't crazy enough to let it go anywhere. But rumpled, like everything else, looked good on Annie Parrish. Damn good. In that respect, she was the most amazing creature. Wet, muddy, scraped up, and wild haired—she managed to look good through it all, fresh faced and soft skinned, her small body lithely curved, her eyes bright and curiously aware behind her gold-rimmed glasses.

And the little white T-shirt she'd put on that morning looked especially good.

It fit.

It more than fit, and all he could think was that she'd picked a damn poor time to run out of baggy shirts. God help him if it rained and she got wet.

“Good morning,” she said, her expression oddly subdued, wary even.

Justifiably wary, in his opinion.

“Not exactly,” he said, not even attempting to lie. It was a hell of a morning, no matter how he looked at it. He had to get rid of her, the quicker the better, and he'd be damned if he knew how to do it.

She accepted his curmudgeonly greeting with an equanimous nod and a question. “The
manguares.
What are they saying?”

“It's a warning to stay off the main river. Fat Eddie torched Santo Antonio about ten o'clock last night,” he said, reaching past her and pouring himself a cup of coffee. “They're still fighting the flames.”

He sipped the hot brew, strong and black, and had to admit she made good coffee. The
prato feito
she'd made for dinner had been good, too, even if he had eaten it hours later.

“Fat Eddie set the town on fire?” A note of guilt crept into her voice. Also justifiable in his opinion.

“Actually, just the dock, but then somebody's fishing shack caught on fire, and it was all downhill after that.” He took another sip, looking at her over the rim of his cup. She'd done a good job of making herself at home in his galley, such as it was, but he didn't recall culinary skills as being at the top of his list of desirable traits in a woman. As he recalled, he'd usually just stopped at desire, his and the woman's, and called it good.

“Was anybody hurt?”

“Not when I talked to my friend on the radio this morning, but I thought it best to send out a warning. There's a rubber-tappers settlement not too far from here, and an Indian village a few miles beyond that.”

She glanced away at his answer, doing that slow sweep of the eyelashes thing that he swore to God he'd never noticed on another human being. But he noticed it
on her. He noticed how long her eyelashes were, their color a golden brown to match her eyebrows. He noticed the softness of her cheeks… her mouth.

His gaze drifted farther, down the front of her T-shirt, over her shorts and down the length of her legs, before settling on her bare feet. He'd like to call it good with her—but the last time he'd checked, and appearances aside, he didn't have a death wish.

He sighed and lifted his gaze back to her face. He was glad to see she was wearing a gun. He was afraid she was going to need it. He didn't know what was in her little black pack, but when he'd left her shortly after dawn, she'd had it buckled around her waist, and she'd worn it all the previous day. It was the only thing she owned that he hadn't gone through with a fine-tooth comb—and what an amazingly deadly cache of treasures she had hauled on board his boat. If he'd been a policeman, he would have arrested her himself.

But she'd looked damned sweet asleep—damned sweet and perfectly, metaphorically edible—her body limply relaxed in her hammock, her lips partly open. He'd wanted to kiss her, press his mouth to hers and slip his tongue inside, taste her. He'd wanted to feel her come awake in his arms, rise against him and return his kiss. Instead, he'd checked to make sure her pistol was loaded and closed the door behind him.