River of Eden (6 page)

Holding on to the last tie-down, she stood on the boat's aft deck and looked down the length of the Rio Negro. Jungle rose up on the near bank, dense and impenetrable, a hothouse of plants and mysteries. The river's black waters reflected a white stream of moonlight all the way to the lights of the city farther to the southeast. She had a year on her visa. By the time she returned to Manaus, there would probably be rumors running all over town about her. Like Travers, she planned on being “lost” for a while herself. Unlike Travers, she planned on coming back a hero, not an outcast. If the Amazon and its creatures had devoured anybody's life, it was Dr. Will Travers's, not hers.

A soft noise coming from the other side of the boat brought her head around. In the next second, she heard a soft thud and the sound of running feet racing up the dock toward shore. Moving quickly to the walkway between the two cabins, she barely caught sight of a man before he veered off the lantern-lit path and disappeared into the palm trees on the riverbank. The palms' fronds gleamed silver in the moonlight, great swaths of curves silhouetted against the sky. Below the trees, all was darkness.

It could have been Paco, she thought, though she doubted it. Paco wouldn't have left the path. It certainly hadn't been Carlos. The old man was incapable of moving faster than a shuffle. That only left the about forty or so people who lived and worked at RBC to choose from for the nighttime runner, any of whom could have had a
legitimate reason to board Travers's boat. Given where she'd been standing, they probably hadn't even realized she was on board.

Curious, but not overly disturbed, Annie turned back into the walkway and came to sudden halt, her gaze riveted to the blowgun dart sticking out of the aft cabin's door. The small wad of white kapok fluff on the end shone brightly in the moonlight.

Alarmed, she looked back to the shore to make sure the man was gone, before she moved in closer to the dart and saw the scrap of paper pinned to the door. With a quick tug, she pulled the dart out of the wood and held the paper up to the light.

The message was short and ominously direct:
LEAVE MANAUS
.

CHAPTER 5

S
unlight streamed through the
windows fronting the
Sucuri's
helm, making a hot band across Will's face where he lay in his hammock between the wheel and the door, slowly rousing to the day. The thought of opening his eyes to such a blast of brightness was too painful to contemplate, so he gingerly rolled himself over into a spot of shade. A soft groan escaped him.

The mere fact of the sunlight's existence told him he'd overslept and missed the dawn departure time. He wondered, briefly, if Annie Parrish had found another boat and left without him. Or better yet, if Gabriela had come to her senses in the night and canceled the woman's project.

“A-hem.” A purely feminine voice sounded from the doorway.

No such luck.

By pure force of will, he lifted his head a bare fraction of an inch and pried one eyelid open. It was her, all right, looking incredibly fresh and lovely, and
incredibly annoyed. With a pained sigh, he sank back into his hammock.

He didn't blame her. He was pretty annoyed himself. It had taken half the night and two bottles of
cachaça
, before Fat Eddie Mano had relinquished the map. Bitching and moaning had been the first two items on the fat one's agenda. The old thief had been robbed, a load of merchandise taken out of one of his warehouses right out from under his nose and undoubtably by one of his own
jagunços
, henchmen, the only people with access to Eddie's various hidey-holes. Eddie hadn't said what had been stolen, but Will had a pretty good idea of the kind of goods Fat Eddie traded in and out of Manaus, and none of it was legal. The man couldn't go to the police, especially since whatever had been stolen from Fat Eddie, Fat Eddie had originally stolen from them—a fact the man had let slip sometime after they'd cracked open the second bottle, then repeatedly forgotten as he'd bemoaned the fate of “honest” businessmen at the mercy of corrupt police officials and perfidious employees. Vengeance had been sworn, with various tortures amply described—hour after hour and shot after shot of brain-numbing
cachaça.

Will had gotten the point, however unnecessary. He had no intention of stealing the contraband Fat Eddie had given him in Pancha's. For Will, meeting with Corisco Vargas face to face to deliver the goods was far more important than the bag of gemstones Fat Eddie had entrusted in his care. The map was what he'd come to Manaus to get, not a clutch of rough-cut diamonds and emeralds.

He carefully slipped his hand into the front pocket of his pants, felt the folds of paper and told himself the end had justified the means—a reasoning he usually found spurious at best.

His body told him it was still damn spurious thinking. Everything inside his skull had congealed into one, big, giant throb of hangover pain. His mouth felt as if a hundred
pistoleiros
in dusty, old leather boots had tromped through it, and he and Eddie had been drinking the good stuff.

“It's seven-thirty,” Miss Bright Eyes said with an edge to her voice. “I've been here since five, and this is the first time you've budged.”

Definitely irritated, he thought.

“I thought maybe you'd died.”

Close, he could have told her, and still in critical condition.

“Can you get up? Or do I need to go get Carlos?”

He was tempted to tell her yes, go get Carlos. Not because he couldn't get up, but because running back to the hacienda might help her work off some energy. She sounded pretty keyed up and a little on the bitchy side, and with his head pounding, what he needed was a smooth slide into the day, a nice quiet unmooring and a slow drift into the current.

Yeah, he thought. That's what he needed, a nice and easy slide into consciousness—or back into oblivion. There was no reason to hurry, now that he had the map. Hell wasn't going anywhere without him. It would still be up on the Cauaburi, whether it took him a week or two weeks to get there. With the hangover he'd made out of two bottles of rotgut and less sleep last night, his money was on the two weeks.

“Are we going to make it out of here before noon, or not?” she demanded to know. “I am on a schedule. A tight… very tight schedule.”

He snorted in disbelief—and damn near blew his head off. A groan of pure pain lodged in his throat, right behind a foul curse. Tight schedule? There was no such thing in the Amazon. A person had their choice of two speeds on the river, slow crawl and dead stop, with reverse a possible third. Nobody ever went anywhere on a schedule, tight or not. Anybody who tried was destined for the loony bin.

Then he remembered something Gabriela had said.

“Peach palms,” he muttered under his breath. Annie Parrish was supposed to research the peach palm harvest around Santa Maria—something he could have done in his sleep.

No, he thought, remembering a little more of the conversation. The peach palm thing was just a cover for something else, but he'd be damned if he could remember what.

“You oughta just go home,” he mumbled, too hungover to sort through the mess.

“I beg your pardon?” she said, her voice reaching a new note of stridency.

Merda
, he swore to himself, oblivion forgotten. Where was that kitteny, soft-looking woman he'd met yesterday in Pancha's? And who had let this sanctimonious alley cat into his cabin?

“How did you get in here?” he asked, working to raise his voice above a hoarse whisper. With Fat Eddie's gems on board, Will had felt compelled to take a few precautions. Locking the door had been one. The pistol digging into his rib cage was the other.

“I picked the lock,” she said without even a trace of apology in her voice.

So much for sanctimony, he thought. She was just plain angry with him and not afraid to show it.

Once again, he could hardly blame her. He could have told her there was a law against breaking and entering, even on a boat, but he was getting the idea she wouldn't give a damn. He was also beginning to think Gabriela was right. Annie Parrish was a woman on a mission— and her mission didn't have a damn thing to do with peach palms. That's what Gabriela had said, or rather, implied. Dr. Oliveira didn't really know what Dr. Parrish was up to any more than he did.

And he was stuck with her on his boat.

“Go get Carlos,” he suggested, every word grating across his aching brain. “And coffee.” If she wanted to leave before noon, he was going to need Carlos, and coffee wouldn't hurt.

Muttering something about it taking more than coffee to get his sorry hide moving—to which he could only agree—she turned and walked out the door.

Blessed silence descended, and every cell in Will's body begged him to go back to sleep. He ignored them. Putting one hand on his brow to keep his head from exploding, he carefully swung his legs over the side of the hammock and put his feet on the floor. Whether hell was going to wait for him or not, he would be better off out of Manaus.

But twenty minutes later, when Dr. Parrish returned with Carlos, he hadn't gotten so much as an inch closer to leaving. He was still sitting on the side of the hammock, his head in his hands.

“Como vai, Guillermo?”
the old man asked, shuffling into the cabin and over to the small gas stove sitting on
the counter. Carlos was part Indian, about five feet two, and as wizened as an old tobacco leaf.

“Vou bem,”
he answered, his voice little more than a croak. I'm well.

The old man cackled at his obvious lie, showing blackened teeth, then set about getting some water on to boil.

Stationing herself by the door, Annie watched as Carlos pulled handful after handful of vegetal whatnot out of a cloth bag slung over his shoulder. Most of the debris went into the pot. Some went directly into a tin cup. Considering the shape the specimens were in, she wasn't surprised not to recognize anything, but she trusted Carlos to know what he was doing. Every grad student who had ever worked for RBC knew about Carlos's famous hangover remedies—and William Sanchez Travers was undeniably, colossally hungover.

The man had practically paralyzed himself, she thought with disgust. She'd purposely kept her expectations and qualifications for a boat captain low, but as of five o'clock that morning, he'd bottomed out below any base minimum requirements. She didn't mind that he'd gotten drunk. In fact, after yesterday's confusing conclusions, she took some small comfort in the verification of his cheap and easy character—but his timing sucked. Dawn, he'd said. She did a quick check of her watch, and her lips thinned. They'd be lucky to cast off by ten o'clock.

The last thing Carlos pulled out of his bag was a sheaf of wild
Piperacea
leaves, his
shinki-shinki.
He began shaking it over Travers's head and shoulders, and her expectations slipped even lower. When the old witch doctor started to chant, Annie knew they were sunk.

Noon, she groaned inwardly. If Carlos thought Travers
needed a full-blown healing ritual, they were going to miss half the day.

This was what she got for depending on a down-on-his-luck river rat given to drink and waterfront alliances not so very different from the one making it necessary for her to get the hell out of Manaus.

Yet there she stood, not five feet from shore with the day bearing down on her and a crumpled piece of sweat-stained paper in her pocket telling her she was doomed.

“Could you speed this up a little, Carlos?” she muttered to the old man in a whispered aside.

“Yeah, Carlos,” Travers mumbled in Portuguese, slanting her a wry glance from beneath his lashes. “The lady is on a schedule, a tight schedule.”

Annie didn't deign to respond. She obviously hadn't spoken softly enough, but she hardly cared. The important thing was to get under way.

“Tight schedule,” Travers repeated, a grin flickering across his mouth, and she dared to hope. He could drink himself into a coma after he got her to Santa Maria, and he probably would, but his grin was an undeniable sign of life.

He was coming around.

“I
was
on a schedule,” she said doggedly and watched his grin broaden before he turned away and buried his face behind his hands with another soft groan. Long swaths of sun-streaked hair fell over his fingers. For a moment, she feared he'd peaked and was heading back down. Then he let out another soft sound and dragged his hands back through his hair.

Relief flooded through her. He was definitely coming around.

Three days, she told herself, that's as long as she needed him to stay on course. Three days if everything went as planned, which of course it never did on the river. She knew that as well as he, but she was working with a schedule anyway, a tight, year-long schedule with only one goal—to get herself back to the exact spot where she'd been standing when that woolly monkey had fallen out of the sky and landed in her arms.

Carlos had given a slight nod in answer to her question and was shaking his
shinki-shinki
a bit faster. When the old man handed her a cigar out of his pocket, she didn't hesitate to take it. She bit off the end, spit it out the porthole, and bent toward the stove. With a few good puffs, she had the cigar glowing and smoking.