River of Eden (24 page)

Fat Eddie looked down at the paper Marcos had handed him, and his smile grew even wider.
“Incrível,”
he exclaimed and looked up at Will. “It seems you are
right, Guillermo. She is worth much more in one piece. Ten thousand
reais
more.”

With that, he burst into another round of rolling laughter, setting his whole body shaking like a boatload of Jell-O.

Sweet Christ, Will thought, staring at the paper Fat Eddie was waving around. Even in the fading light, he could see the worst—Annie's face on a wanted poster with a bounty of ten thousand
reais
printed in big bold numbers at the bottom, and the words “Wanted Alive” printed at the top.

Right then and there, she became the single most amazing woman he'd ever met anywhere on the planet. She was like a friggin' magnet for disaster, and how in the hell he'd ever thought he could simply give her a lift up the river without his whole life coming unglued was beyond him, totally beyond him.

He swore, a single succinct word that didn't begin to encompass his frustration. She'd said she'd decided to stay, and he doubted she'd waited too long after he'd left to break out something a damn sight more deadly than her 9-millimeter handgun.

He only hoped she wouldn't hesitate to use it.

CHAPTER 18

F
ull dark had fallen by the time
Fat Eddie's henchmen had gotten him levered into his little black speedboat and headed west up the Rio Negro to the Marauiá. Motoring up the mouth of the tributary in Marcos's
gaiola
riverboat, Will spotted his landmark, a
lupuna
tree towering above the rest of the canopy, its crown silhouetted by a waning half-moon. The
Sucuri
was tied up in the
igapó
on the other side of the tree.

There was no way for Fat Eddie and his half a dozen boatloads of goons not to see the
Sucuri
once they passed the bend. Annie was smart, though, he kept telling himself. She wouldn't take any chances. She'd seen Johnny Chang's head. She knew the price she was going to pay, if Fat Eddie got a hold of her. She just didn't know there had been another price put on her head. Will only wondered how good she was with her Galils and how long she would hesitate before she used them, and whether or not she could manage to protect herself without killing him by accident—and it would be an accident, if she shot
him. She more than liked him. He knew it down to his bones.

Standing on the deck, he watched the night-black wall of the jungle slip by. The river was quiet, the sound of rushing water a low undercurrent as their boats turned into the bend and passed beneath the
lupuna
tree.

“How much farther, Guillermo?” Fat Eddie asked from where he was shoehorned into the speedboat running alongside the
gaiola.

“A few more miles,
senhor,”
It wouldn't be much of a lie in about another minute, but it might buy her a few extra seconds, when she would see them, but they'd all still be looking up the river for her.

“Marcos?” Fat Eddie called out.

“Sim, senhor?”
the man answered.

“Put Guillermo in front. The woman has guns, many guns.”

Marcos didn't hesitate, grabbing Will by the arm and shoving him toward the bow of the boat.

Okay, Annie, he thought, stationing himself at the prow, a gun at his back. Be careful.

As they came fully around the bend, he was relieved to see she hadn't put out a lantern. Then he was concerned. She should have lit a lantern by now—unless she was lying in ambush.

Honest to God, he wouldn't put it past her. She hadn't survived all these years without a sixth sense for danger.

But as the boats continued up the river, Will realized there was more than just a lantern missing. The whole damn
Sucuri
was gone.

He swore under his breath, leaning forward on the rail and scanning the western shore, looking for the pale
silhouette of a boat floating on the water—and not finding it.

Son of a bitch.
She'd stolen the
Sucuri, and
ten to one said she was heading straight for Vargas. It hadn't taken her long to make her decision, either. Hell, she must have practically followed him down the Marauiá to the Negro and just missed Marcos. God knows where she was now. The Cauaburi was only fifty miles west of the Marauiá, the two rivers on a parallel course as they wound down from the Venezuelan highlands to the Rio Negro. She'd be at the mouth of the Cauaburi by morning, and he knew from Fat Eddie that Vargas was patrolling the whole river. If she lasted until dark tomorrow, it would be a miracle.

A great commotion from the other boats brought his head around.

“Jacaré! Jacaré!”
the men shouted.
“Um monstro!”

Will couldn't see the
jacaré
, the caiman, they were pointing at, but every man jack of them was shouldering a rifle or pulling a pistol and holding their lanterns high. Some of the men were laughing, but it was laughter with an edge of fear.

Fat Eddie motored toward the fray as the boats began circling around in the middle of the river, a broad grin splitting his face as he pointed into the water.

“One thousand
reais
to the boat that brings me the beast's hide!” he shouted.

“Um jacaré monstruoso!”
Another boatload of men caught sight of the reptile.

“Jacaré! Jacaré!”

More men took up the shouting, the activity on the boats growing more frenzied. A few men fired off shots.

Others were dragging out ropes and pieces of net. Marcos's boat moved closer, with Will torn between watching for the giant beast and trying to find some sign of Annie or the
Sucuri
where he'd left them at the shoreline.

Damn it all! What in the hell was she thinking to head for Reino Novo alone? It didn't make sense.

“Ooohhh!” A wave of fearful awe rose in a crescendo, and Will whirled around—just in time to see a huge, leathery snout rising out of the water, rows of fearsome, conical teeth bared and glinting in the light of a dozen lanterns, the animal's knobby, scaly hide cutting through the inky black surface of the water in a long, unbelievably long, unbroken line.

Sweet Jesus! His breath caught in his throat on an instant of pure primal fear. The thing had to be twenty feet or more, an unheard-of length for an Amazonian caiman.

“Two thousand
reais!”
Fat Eddie shouted louder, maneuvering his boat nearer the action. The flotilla of boats and men drifted and motored closer to the shore, ineffectually trying to cage the caiman thrashing in the water. Nets had been thrown into the river, and shots were still being fired off. Someone had gotten a hold of the gargantuan reptile with a boat hook.

God, what a beast, the hide easily worth double the two thousand
reais
Fat Eddie was offering, but it wasn't going down without a fight. Water was flying everywhere, waves splashing into the boats, the caiman's tail cracking against the surface of the river.

With everybody overly excited, circling around each other, and shooting off their guns, Will figured it was only a matter of minutes before somebody got killed. He hoped to hell it wouldn't be him.

Letting out a strangled bellow, the animal sank back below the water, taking the nets and boat hook with him, and in a heartbeat, all the laughing and shouting stopped. Tension filled the air as men watched over the sides of their boats, playing out rope where they still had a hold on the caiman, everybody waiting, some in anticipation, some—from the looks on their faces—in abject dread.

Will's gaze was pulled back toward the shore. It didn't make sense for Annie to have left him, but there wasn't a person in the Amazon who could have taken that boat away from her. No one boarded the
Sucuri.
No one.

Except for Tutanji.

The thought came out of nowhere to take hold of him, and with his own sense of abject dread, he felt his heart sink into the vicinity of his stomach.

The old shaman could have come this far south.

He thought back to Annie's nightmares and what she'd said about the
sucuri
on his boat, and his sick feeling got even worse. He didn't understand Tutanji any more than he had to, but during the year he'd spent with the Dakú, he'd understood the shaman enough to survive. Annie didn't stand a chance. Will didn't care how smart she was, or how strong she was, no woman was a match for a
payé
witch doctor with Tutanji's skills. The old man had nearly killed him half a dozen times with his concoctions and his trials, always pushing Will to his limits, to the end of his rope, and then cutting him free to fall where he may. Will's future had been read and molded as much by his failures as his successes. They were all the same to Tutanji, whose only goal was to destroy the demon who had invaded Dakú land, his method of destruction to create his own white devil to fight the white devil
who dared to bring his sorcery to the lost world at the headwaters of the Cauaburi and the Rio Marauiá.

Something bumped against Marcos's
gailoa
, and everybody drew back with a gasp, expecting the giant caiman to rise up and snap the boat in two—but it wasn't the overgrown reptile. Will looked down with everybody else and saw a board knocking against the hull.

The board was old and needed paint, but the faded letters written across its sun-bleached face were clear to him in the yellow light of someone's lantern: SUCURI.

His boat hadn't been stolen. It had been destroyed.

So where the hell was Annie?

The sick feeling in his stomach turned into a cold hard knot.

“What is it?” someone asked. “The monster?”

“No, no, no. It's wood,” another answered. “Just a piece of wood.”

“Where's the monster?”

“There!”

“No, there!”

“Shut up, you fools!” Marcos hissed. “It's wood. It's all just wood. Stay sharp! Two thousand
reais
to the boat that captures the beast. Stay sharp!”

Looking back up to shore, closer now, Will could see the debris strewn across the forest floor and piled up between the trees like tidewrack. Dozens of other boards were drifting out into the river, some of them from her weapons crates, the pieces churned up by the wakes of the boats.

The
Sucuri
had been blown apart—or torn apart.

Behind him, the cries of
“Jacaré!”
started up again, with everyone rushing to the far rail, but Will couldn't
quite convince himself that a giant caiman had risen up out of the Marauiá and eaten his boat. He didn't care how damn big the animal was. It hadn't been Annie's dynamite going off and taking all her ammunition with it, either. They would have heard an explosion of that size— which brought him full circle back to Tutanji and the cold, hard knot in his stomach.

The shaman had given him the boat, an ancient wreck beached deep in the jungle and overgrown with vines, left high and dry by the receding waters of the annual flooding of the rivers. It had never been much more than a floating hulk, but it had been home for the last two years, until tonight, when he was sure it had been Tutanji who had destroyed it.

So be it, Will thought, his gaze scanning the rubble. They were nearing the end, he and the shaman. The
Sucuri
was just the first of many things about to change, but the old man had gone too far when he'd taken Annie. Tutanji wouldn't kill her, not outright, but that's as much as Will dared to concede.

Jaguar bait—that's what he'd called her, and Tutanji could be the worst kind of jaguar. He just prayed she wasn't somewhere on the shoreline as broken up as the
Sucuri
, and the only way he was going to know that was by getting off Marcos's boat.

And swimming to the riverbank.

With a monster caiman thrashing in the water, maddened by pain behind him.

Shit.

Grim faced, he swung his leg over the side rail, hoping the
jacaré monstruoso
knew who in the hell he was,
pasuk panki
to the great shaman Tutanji, Master of the
Otherworld, and friggin' king of the hoodoo metaphysics of this world.

Shit.

He swung his other leg over, and as soon as he cleared the rail, jackknifed into the river—before anyone could notice that he was escaping, though he doubted if anyone would think it was much of an escape. “Suicide” was the word most likely to come to mind.

The water engulfed him, still warm from the day's sun, the current around the bend strong and pushing him into shore. He dove deep and with every stroke prayed he wouldn't find her hurt, and that the giant caiman wasn't in the mood for man.

T
HE OLD MAN
had disappeared. One minute he'd been with them, leading the way through the forest, and the next he'd been gone. Either way, the pace hadn't slackened, and Annie was bruised from the knees down from all the tree roots she'd run into and tripped over. She'd done her share of rain-forest bushwacking and then some, but she hadn't made a habit of doing it in the dark.