River of Eden (13 page)

“São Gabriel is out, but I think we can make it to the Salesians at Barcelos tonight,” he told her. “If we can get Gabriela to call in a plane, Bogotá is still your best bet for an international flight, but Venezuela is closer, and anywhere out of Brazil will be enough to throw Fat Eddie off your trail.” It wasn't that he didn't have a plan. He just didn't have a way of forcing her to buy into it—other
than force itself. He hoped it wouldn't come to that, but he certainly wasn't above it. Not by a long shot.

“And your trail?” she asked, surprising him by meeting his gaze directly, a flash upward of hazel eyes shot through with green and gold.

She was a cat. Fat Eddie had gotten that much right.

“I can handle Fat Eddie.”

“So can I.” She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. She was still wary, still looking guilty as hell, but there wasn't any hesitation in her statement. She could handle Fat Eddie.

He didn't doubt that she would try. She'd made her claim to fame long before the Woolly Monkey Incident. What he couldn't figure out was why she would still want to “handle” the fat man.
Merda
, she'd seen Johnny Chang's head.

“There's a point where ambition crosses the line into foolishness.” And she was skirting the edge.

“If I get there, I'll send you a postcard,” she said coolly, too coolly to suit him.

“It's not just Fat Eddie Mano,” he said, though he knew damn well that she knew the facts as well as he did. “He's got a hundred
jagunços
working for him and access to hundreds more.”

“You're not working for him. Wherever you're taking his gemstones, it's no favor to him,” she said, surprising him again.

Okay, he thought, she's shrewd, just one more reason to get rid of her.

“Let's say it's mutually beneficial,” he conceded, and so help him God, she smirked, twisted her lips up into a wry little curve that all but called him a liar.

He let out a short laugh in disbelief and set his coffee aside.

“Can you explain to me just exactly what it does take to scare you?” He really wanted to know. Hell, he was scared for her. He'd been scared for her since Eddie had dragged that damned head out of the water.

“Fat Eddie scares me,” she admitted—much to his relief. He didn't like to think she was crazy. “Just not enough to turn me around and send me packing.”

Of course not.

“Nobody needs the kind of firepower you have up on my deck to research peach palms. Israeli Galil rifles? With two hundred rounds of ammo? Hell, you're better armed than half the Brazilian army. Why?” He arched his brow, demanding an explanation, which—from the look on her face—he wasn't going to get.

“You opened my crates?”

“Opened, inventoried, and catalogued, and I have to tell you that, including the piece you're wearing on your hip, you've got one hell of an arsenal working for you. I mean, what
are
you planning on doing with two dozen grenades?”

Her gaze narrowing, she pursed her lips and told him exactly nothing.

“And the dynamite, for God's sake?”

Still nothing.

“Who is Jackson Reid?” he asked, changing tactics, and because he was damned curious about the man whose name had shown up three different times in her supplies— once on a duffel bag address tag, once in indelible marker on a flashlight, and once on a very expensive camera.

“A friend,” she said after a considerable pause, giving
him plenty of reason to doubt her answer, but he'd be damned if he would sink so low as to grill her about the men in her life.

“Well, how about telling me where you got this.” He took two steps across the cabin and reached behind the wheel, pulling out a blowgun dart. He'd found it in one of her packs with a piece of crumpled paper shoved in next to it. “‘Leave Manaus,'” he quoted the message. “That's a little too anonymous for Fat Eddie, so I'm guessing Johnny Chang sent this to you?”

“Is there anything I own that you haven't been through?” she asked peevishly.

“Other than the pockets on the shorts you're wearing and your little black pack, nothing.”

The startled look she gave him quickly transformed into one of galled sensibilities, as if he were the real piece of work on the
Sucuri.

He wanted to kiss it off her face.

“The dart was stuck in your boat, Dr. Travers,” she said, commandeering the high ground, such as it was. “Certainly, I considered showing it to you, and if you'd been sober yesterday morning I might have remembered to drag it out.”

“Considered?”

“In case it was meant for you.”

“No.” He shook his head, not buying her theory. “Nobody would threaten me with something like this. It's too simple, a cheap jungle trick meant to scare a—” He stopped suddenly, recognizing his error.

“A woman?” she finished, her eyebrows rising above the rims of her glasses.

“A
turista,”
he filled in, a concession she seemed to
accept, though she was the only woman he would have conceded the point to, her and Gabriela.

“Okay. Let's cut to the chase. I can pay you a lot more than I already have to get me to Santa Maria. A lot more,” she said, proving that she at least understood that he was holding most of the cards.

But the offer was ridiculous.

With a flick of his wrist, he impaled the dart into the wooden cowling above the helm's windows. “You're working on a grant. You don't even have gas money, unless Gabriela doles it out. So what are you going to pay me with?”

“Guns.”

He added resourcefulness to her list, but shook his head.

“If I can get rid of you, I don't need any guns. I can patch things up with Fat Eddie, tell him I was
mulher louco
, crazy for a woman, so I lied to keep you with me for the night.” He reached for his coffee. “He'll understand that.” At least Will thought it was worth a shot.

She glanced out the window, and he noticed a trace of color tinging her cheeks. Intrigued, he looked at her more closely, thinking she couldn't possibly be blushing—not Amazon Annie.

“And what are you going to tell him happened to me when he notices I'm not around anymore?”

His mouth curved into a quick grin. “This is Brazil, Dr. Parrish, where the most common postcoital response in a woman is to throw something and walk out.”

“We're in the middle of nowhere,” she objected, tossing a glance in his direction and making an absent gesture toward the forest all around. The color across her face deepened to a rosy hue.

Will paused with his cup halfway to his mouth, going from being mildly intrigued to utterly fascinated, wondering if it was the thought of being in a postcoital situation with him that disconcerted her, or just the thought of sex in general—because she was blushing, definitely blushing.

He took a slow, considering sip of his coffee. He should have asked Gabriela more questions about her, more about Yavareté. The old doctor had always been straight with him. She would have told him anything, if he'd asked.

“Being in the middle of nowhere is no deterrent to a determined woman,” he said, “and you, in particular, have proven to be a very determined woman.”

“Money, then,” she offered, tightening her arms across her chest, a body signal he didn't have any trouble interpreting in and of itself, but when combined with the blush burning up her cheeks, the message got a little more complex. “I will have money, more than grant money, a lot more. You can set your own price, and I'll pay you when I get it.”

He gave his head another slow shake. “You're working way too hard here, Doctor. You only have two things I'm interested in, and money isn't one of them.”

She went very still across from him in the cabin, and he knew beyond doubt that he had her full and undivided attention.

“The first thing is information,” he told her, not waiting for her to ask. “And the second…” He shrugged, letting his voice trail off. He had no intention of telling her the second. Her imagination was doing fine at filling in the blank all on its own. Her eyes widened slightly, before shying away from his. Her blush deepened even more, and he pretty much instantaneously figured out at least one thing that disconcerted the hell out of her—him and the thought of sex in the same breath.

I'll be damned, he thought. She was tough, all right, but he'd bet his boat and everything in it, including Fat Eddie's emeralds, that whatever Corisco Vargas had done to her, it hadn't included rape. Her reaction to him was too unabashedly coy, not frightened. She hated reacting to him at all. He could tell. But she couldn't control it. She couldn't meet his eyes and think about sex at the same time.

His grin broadened. If she wasn't careful, she was going to charm the pants right off him, and then there would be hell to pay.

“I'm talking a lot of money,” she said, her gaze firmly focused somewhere in the vicinity of her feet.

“And I'm still thinking Barcelos, by nightfall if we're lucky. By this time tomorrow you could be on your way to Miami.”

“So you get the guns either way,” she said, flashing him a mutinous look. It was a flat-out accusation she didn't sound any too happy about.

“Yeah,” he admitted, forcing himself to get back to business. He could fantasize all he wanted, but Annie Parrish was off limits. “I get the guns either way.” And a hell of a lot of use he had for a bunch of guns. Of course, giving them back to Fat Eddie would go a long way toward mending the bridges he'd burned last night.

“I'm not getting on a plane in Barcelos,” she insisted, not surprising him in the least. But as far as he was concerned, it was a done deal. He was going to save her and help himself, whether she liked it or not.

“Well, go ahead and cast off. The idea might look a lot better to you once we get there.” And if it didn't, Will figured that was just too damn bad. One way or the other, he was getting her the hell out of Brazil.

CHAPTER 11

B
arcelos came into view shortly
before nightfall, its riverfront marketplace bustling with people buying up the day's last bargains. Merchants up and down the docks were hawking their wares. Fishermen had their catches laid out on pallets, undercutting each other with cries of
“Bar Mo! Bar Mo!”

Travers found a mooring on the north end of the waterfront, tying up on the low-rent end of the docks between a small barge piled high with cargo and a riverboat that made the
Sucuri
look new. Three mongrel dogs patrolled the barge, a brindle bitch and two half-grown pups, all of them emaciated and looking junkyard mean. An old man lay sleeping in a hammock strung between the crates, his arm wrapped around a shotgun. The public launches and the
gaiolas
were docked to the south, near the fruit and vegetable stands.

There wasn't a plane in sight.

Annie was relieved, but it was a backhanded victory at best. The day had gone from bad to worse. Travers
had finally raised RBC on the radio about mid-morning, but it had been Dr. Ricardo Solano who had taken the call; Gabriela was ill. How ill, Dr. Solano hadn't felt at liberty to say, but Annie had a bad feeling. Gabriela was a tough old bird, but not even tough old birds lasted forever.

All Solano had promised was to do what he could, which might not include sending a plane to pick up Dr. Parrish. He hadn't thought the situation warranted such an expensive, unfunded measure, but neither had Travers mentioned Fat Eddie, the shrunken heads, or the guns.

She owed him for that now, along with everything else. If Solano knew what she'd done, he'd be the first to notify the police and have her arrested. Travers had called her situation a medical emergency, and she had to admit that having Solano dismiss her supposed health crisis with a noncommittal “I'll do what I can” had been disconcerting. Gabriela was her connection to RBC, her lifeline, if she needed one, and without the old doctor, Annie realized she was on her own—or at least she would be, if she could get away from Will Travers.

“Let's get something to eat,” he said, walking out on deck, buttoning his shirt—a first, she was sure. “If the plane still isn't here by the time we finish and pick up a few supplies, we'll head farther up the river.”

“Why not spend the night in Barcelos?” she asked, feigning a casual tone.

He grinned, obviously seeing right through her. “Because there are a hundred men here you could talk into taking you to Santa Maria, all of whom would be more than happy to do it for guns or grenades, and most of whom think dynamite is a fishing lure.”

He was right, but she'd figured it was a long shot. She
wouldn't have any reservations about approaching one of the fishermen or
caboclos
and taking her chances on another boat. She'd been on a hundred boats in the Amazon basin, from private, first-class launches filled with scientific equipment, to dugout canoes, and she'd never gotten into trouble until the Cauaburi. On the other hand, she'd already paid Travers, and he had her cargo. When the plane didn't come—and she was sure it wouldn't— he would have little choice but to continue on to Santa Maria.

She changed into a pair of pants and took the extra precaution of tying a long-sleeved shirt around her waist to conceal her Taurus 9-millimeter. Wearing a gun was one thing. Advertising it was another.