River of Eden (26 page)

Idiota.

It was impossible for Fat Eddie to have any respect whatsoever for a man who couldn't think of anything better to do with virgins than to cut them open on an altar—but he wanted the altar. Solid gold, according to rumor, and hidden somewhere around Reino Novo.

He wondered if the altar was what awaited the little cat, when he found her—and he would find her. He'd already set those wheels in motion, ordering a hundred of his
jagunços
up the river to meet him on the Cauaburi.

The major would pay more than ten thousand
reais
to have the woman. He could see it in the man's eyes. Vargas wanted the little
doutora
very badly, indeed.

No body meant she hadn't been on Travers's boat when it had fallen apart, and it had fallen apart. There weren't any burn marks to indicate an explosion. The
sucuri
had left, that was all, and when the snake had left, the boat had fallen apart and mostly fallen into the river, including the
Sucur
'
s
cargo.

A smile flickered across his lips. He'd gotten his guns back, by God, and only lost one man doing it. Whatever protection Travers had enjoyed these last couple of years hadn't quite left him, or that giant caiman would have had him for dinner instead of one of Fat Eddie's boat captains.

Travers had gone after the woman, Fat Eddie knew, and he'd been in a hurry to do it.

Taking the woman away from him might not be so easy. Guillermo had lied and stolen his way into an early grave for Annie Parrish, and he'd jumped into the Rio
Marauiá with a twenty-foot caiman in order to go after her.

Eddie was beginning to think his old friend was in love, but love wouldn't be enough to save either one of them. It never was. When Eddie got back to his boat, he would radio the band of men he'd left on the Marauiá. They'd had a day to track the pair through the jungle and must be closing in. The woman he would bring to Reino Novo.

And Guillermo?

Fat Eddie had told Vargas he was dead, more for Guillermo's sake than his own. He liked the man too much to kill him. Guillermo was no fool, not like the major. Guillermo knew the
jurijuri
and the
brujos.
There were times when Eddie wondered if Guillermo was a
brujo
himself. There was a look he got in his eyes sometimes that reminded Eddie of his father, a
brujo
from Ecuador. Like Eddie's father, Guillermo had blood on his hands. Not the weak blood of women, like Vargas, but blood rich with power.

No, Guillermo was not to be underestimated.

A movement in the tank caught his eye, drawing his attention, and Fat Eddie had to admit that Vargas had gotten himself a fine snake, big and brutish looking, its coloring dark and splotchy, its head blockishly large without any of the delicacy or fineness of the other rain-forest serpents.

His glance strayed back to Vargas, sizing him up. The snake was big, and the major was a skinny son of a bitch. A good fit, he thought, his face splitting into a big grin.

Yes, he would be back in a week.

CHAPTER 20

W
ill passed his hand over a circle
of burned wood in a rain-forest clearing, feeling the warmth left by the fire. Tutanji and his group were no more than two hours ahead of him, and Fat Eddie's men were still somewhere behind him—and somewhere behind Fat Eddie's men was another group. He'd heard them when he'd circled back to see how many
jagunços
Eddie had put on his tail. There were fifteen men from Fat Eddie's boats, and the group following the fifteen had sounded much larger than that. Either way, the drainage between the Marauiá and the Cauaburi was getting damned crowded. He looked up at the circle of sky outlined by the canopy trees. It would be dark before he caught up with the Dakú.

A soft scrabbling in the forest brought his head around, his gaze quickly scanning the perimeter of the clearing. When a paca, a spotted rodent, trotted out of the deepening shadows of the trees and made a beeline for the overgrown gardens, Will looked back to the fire ring.

He'd been in the camp before…
before he'd killed the jaguar and set himself free.
He'd lived in the clearing with the Dakú during the first few months after his encounter with the anaconda. He'd done his healing here beneath the peach palms, before they'd all headed farther north.

He sifted his fingers through the cooling ash before slowly rising to his feet.

Tutanji was heading north again and had been for the last four days with his band of men and Annie. Will had lost the trail the first night at a stream crossing, but found it again at dawn. Fat Eddie's men hadn't been far behind him then, but had been losing ground ever since. The larger group would be moving even more slowly. He hadn't heard Eddie's men for the last night and a day, but he didn't doubt that they were still there, any more than he doubted the others were still behind the
jagunços
, tracking them with the same diligence he was using to track the Dakú.

Marcos was good. Damn good.

Tutanji was better, but he'd lost his advantage when he'd reached the clearing and taken on women and children.

Will looked around the area again, noting signs of domestication: manioc gratings on the ground, a half-finished basket woven from palm fronds. The Dakú's women and children had waited here while the men had gone south to get Annie. She must be exhausted by now. It had been a long time since he'd run night and day through the forest. He doubted if Annie had ever had to push so hard.

It had been even longer since the first time he'd journeyed into the low mountain ranges at the base of the
Serra da Neblina, into the lost world where Tutanji's anaconda had found him. The shaman could be taking her there, to the misty headwaters of the rivers.

It was a land under siege, like all the Amazon, and Will knew Tutanji would go to any lengths to save it from the white man's incursions, even share its secrets with him if that would save it from gold miners' greed and rampant scientific exploration, both of which tore away at the Dakú's way of life, upsetting balances and creating discord. The mere act of observing, however objective the gaze, changed what was observed. Tutanji knew this and had kept his people hidden, a people known only by myth and rumor, until gold had been discovered on the Cauaburi and the demon Corisco Vargas had brought in his hordes of
garimpeiros
, his diesel-powered engines, his hoses and planes and began tearing up the earth and poisoning the rivers with mercury. No woman was safe from the
garimpeiros
, no settlement safe from attack. Many of Tutanji's people had already been lost, much of their once rich hunting grounds decimated by the hundreds of miners needing food, the fish-poor black-water rivers giving less every year. Soon there would be nothing but starvation and hardship and disease left in the land between the rivers.

The wind picked up, rustling through the palms, and with one final look around, he turned back to the trail. The Indians were moving too fast for anybody to be getting any jaguar-bait ideas about her—which was going to save Tutanji a whole lot of trouble when he finally caught up to the old man.

A tired Annie he could handle. A hurt or raped Annie would make him cruel.

Run. Run. Run.

She jerked awake in her hammock, her heart racing, ready to flee.

But the night was not full of demons, only a warm wind and the chirping of tree frogs. All around, the Indians were sleeping under
miritisabas
, temporary palm-thatched roofs, mothers with babies at their breasts, children snuggled together, men with their wives. Fires burned at regular intervals around the camp. Men guarded the perimeter, some with bows and spears in their hands, others carrying her guns with rounds of ammunition slung across their chests.

Two men sat by the closest fire, talking in low voices. One was Tutanji, the paint on his legs and arms glowing red in the light of the flames.

The other was William Sanchez Travers, his blond-streaked hair unmistakable.

He'd come.

Relief washed through her in a slow-moving wave, easing the tension from her body.

He'd come.

He'd found her.

Her hand went to the necklace she wore, his necklace. The chunk of quartz was jagged without being sharp.

The teeth were smooth, weighted around her neck. There had been no snakes in her dreams, no giant anacondas, and no jaguars, only the lesser demons.

Will had found her, and now everything would be all right.

Her eyelids, so heavy, drifted back down over her eyes. A sigh left her mouth.

Everything would be all right…
everything would be all right.

Will glanced over to where Annie slept, checking for himself one more time that she was okay. Being the only towhead for a good five hundred miles, and the only person wearing clothes, she was easy to spot among all the hammocks full of naked Indians. She was also still wearing her fanny pack.

For himself, he'd long since stripped out of his own clothing, tearing his shirt into a makeshift sling and stuffing his shorts inside. He'd come to the Dakú as one of their own, with a loincloth strung around his waist and toucan feathers tied into his hair. The transition—as always—had been disturbingly easy, like walking into warm water, making him wonder if he only fooled himself on the river, pretending to be a civilized man, when at heart he'd been claimed forever by the rain forest.

It had been six months since the last time he'd been with the Indians, too long, perhaps, and he didn't want Tutanji to make any mistake about who and what he still was, the man who had run the shaman's jaguar to ground and cut the cat's fangs out of his skull, the man who had killed the shaman's anaconda. There was blood on his hands, powerful
pasuk
blood, and Tutanji forgot it at his peril, especially where Annie was concerned.

“The Dakú do not sell their women,” he said, his
voice utterly emotionless, his gaze fixed on the paper Tutanji had given him.

She looked like hell in the photograph. Even in the poorly made black-and-white copy, he could tell she'd been hit. Her cheek was bruised. What he thought was blood matted her hair, and even though the picture had been cut off just below her shoulders, she didn't seem to be wearing a shirt—details he'd missed in Santa Maria.

“She is not Dakú,” Tutanji said, the words coming out softened on the edges, the result of many missing teeth.

“She is mine, and I am Dakú.” He brought his gaze up to meet the old man's. “You have seen the truth of my blood. It is the same as yours.” Through a
yagé
vision, they had watched their histories twine together, backward to an ancient Dakú ancestor. Neither of them had doubted what they'd seen at the time. Will wasn't going to let the old man doubt it now. When Tutanji had gone looking in the forest for a white devil apprentice, it was not a stranger he'd been looking for—and the shaman knew it.

“You've had many women on your boat and claimed none of them in all these years.”

“I have claimed this one.” And a fine mess he'd made of it, losing her on the river to an old friend who wanted to sell her to Corisco Vargas for ten thousand
reais.
Where in the hell, he wondered, had Tutanji gotten hold of a wanted poster while the ink was practically still wet? Vargas had worked fast. There had been no wanted posters in Barcelos.

“No, little brother,” the old man disagreed. “No one has claimed this woman. She is still wild.”

“Wild or not, she is mine,” he said, knowing by Dakú
standards Annie was wild. Hell, even by his own standards she was pushing the envelope—not such a bad thing considering that they'd ended up in a camp with a bunch of Indians who had been pushed to the edge of desperation by forces neither their shamans nor their warriors could control.

That, of course, was where he was supposed to have come in, and a damn lousy job he'd done of it so far. He'd been fooled by the pace of life on the river, fooled into believing time ran on forever and he could take as much as he wanted.

His glance strayed back to the wanted poster in his hand.

He'd been wrong. He should have taken care of Vargas a year ago, before the bastard had gotten his hands on a blond-haired Wyoming botanist who'd been minding her own business making the plant find of the century.

But a year ago, he hadn't known it was Vargas that he wanted. The mine bosses on the Cauaburi had been reporting to a man named Fernando, and the connection between Vargas and Fernando had taken a long time to make—too damn long.

Without Fat Eddie, he might still be looking.

“Merda,”
he whispered under his breath.