Thunder in the Night (Crimson Romance) (14 page)

He put both hands on my shoulders, steering me around a curve in the cave wall which was actually an opening to another chamber. He pushed me gently down onto the nearest flattish rock and joined me.

“What happened?”

And I realized that way down below me in the river, the group hadn’t seen the man on the ATV, hadn’t known I’d been bolting frantically through the jungle, hadn’t guessed I’d been frightened and panicked.

So I told him in a low voice about Clark’s really vague directions and feeling lost and being chased by a nameless man whose face I recognized. As I related my story the damp of the cave made me feel shivery. When Mart put his arm around me and pulled me tight, the warmth and comfort of his body went a long way toward righting my world.

“I’d no idea,” Mart said in my ear. “I heard an ATV, but we heard them all along the river.”

“But listen to this. Here’s what happened first!” And I told him about the employee at the zipline, about what he’d revealed so casually. “You were right!” I grabbed Mart’s arm, pinching hard. “Tommy Mendoza’s death wasn’t an accident. He was shot in the head!”

To my surprise, Mart nodded. His lips pressed together and he looked decidedly grim. “I know.”

“You know? You know he was shot?”

Mart pulled his arm from my death grip, then applied one of his own to my hands.

“I heard about it, yes. But I couldn’t tell you. Endanger you further.”

“Endanger me!” I quoted. “Forewarned is forearmed, Mart. It might have been a good thing to know!” The news about Tommy Mendoza had been startling enough, but to find out Mart had kept that news from me was nothing short of stunning.

“I’ve kept you safe, haven’t I?” he countered. “Look, you can be angry at me about it later. Right now, we need to think.”

“This isn’t over,” I told him. “How could you not tell me?”

Not playing fair, he leaned in, kissing me quickly, soundly, thoroughly.

“Okay,” he said, pulling back. His gaze roamed my face, assessing me. When he got to my eyes, the corners of his mouth softened.

Something at the core of me warmed and melted with that look, even though I tried to fight it. For the space of one heartbeat, then another, then another, we were silent. Then, it was back to business.

“Who told you Tommy was shot? Is there anything else I need to know?” I asked.

Mart gave a swift bob of his head, not in answer to my question, but as if making a decision. He dropped his voice even lower, practically whispering.

“There’s a federal investigation underway. I didn’t know, you have to believe me. I didn’t know until we were here in Belize. But — ” he stopped, took a breath, hurried on, “they’ve contacted me about helping them. Working with them to find any clues linking smuggling to our zoo treks.”

I sucked in a breath. “That sounds dangerous.”

“I’m supposed to keep my eyes open and report. That’s all. No James Bond stuff.”

Looking down at my shoes, trying to process this latest newsflash, I wriggled my toes against the sandy rubble of the cave floor.

“Have they approached Clark, too? Is that why he’s looking into Tommy’s death?”

That made sense. Clark would go in for James Bond stuff.

Mart shrugged. “I don’t know all the details. I was told not to discuss this with him.”

“But shouldn’t one hand know what the other is doing?”

“Allison, I don’t know anything about this sort of operation. I rescue rhinos! This is all uncharted territory.”

He seemed sincere, looked it, too. But he’d kept one secret, already … .

“Who was that guy on the ATV? Where does he fit?”

“Certainly it’s obvious he and Clark are in cahoots one way or another,” Mart said. “We’ve never seen the Guatemalan unless Clark is more than close at hand.” He rubbed a palm over his hair, fingers scratching as he thought. “If Clark is probing Tommy’s death — on his own or at government request — that would explain the proximity.”

“I don’t ever want to be in that guy’s proximity again!” I said, giving a shudder. “I think he’s way too dangerous to tangle with. Frankly, I’m surprised Clark would do anything while dragging all these innocent citizens along for the ride. What if someone got hurt? I mean, really hurt?” I clarified when Mart dropped his eyes to my scabby knees.

“We’ll be home in a few days, Allison. We just need to stay sharp until then. I’m sure even Clark wouldn’t be stupid enough to endanger the zoo group. Can you imagine the bad press?”

“And the lawsuits!” I added.

“Yes, and — ” Mart broke off in mid-sentence, sniffing the air and scowling. He was looking past me, over my shoulder to where the unexplored cave curved off into inky darkness.

“What?”

He gave his head a shake. “I don’t know. I thought I saw a light back there. Behind you. And I smell smoke.”

I whirled around at his words, narrowing my eyes to peer into the cave, lifting my nose to test the air. Yes, there it was, the faintest smell of cloves, of cigarette smoke.

Mart reached up, switched off his headlamp, deepening the blackness.

Then I saw a light, too.

Chapter Seventeen

Far, far away and faintly, a tiny orange dot of light glowed brightly then faded. Brightly, then faded, as if in time to a person’s breathing.

“What the — ”

“My thoughts exactly.” Mart stood up. “You’d better wait here.”

“What? Wait here! Alone? I don’t think so.”

“You’re right,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “We need to stick together. But, listen!” He tugged me even closer so he could whisper straight into my ear. “Keep quiet and hold my hand. I’m going to keep my lamp turned toward the ground. We should be able to see where we’re going without throwing too much light in front of us.”

I nodded without speaking and then we were haring off down a dark tunnel to investigate the smell of cigarettes. If it were that man from the jungle, would he and Mart fight it out in the back of the cave? Our mission was definitely unclear here, but when Mart squeezed my fingers, I squeezed back. If it were that man from the jungle, the fight would be two against one.

Mart did more than direct his light down. He shielded it with his hand to concentrate the beam about three feet in front of us. Our feet crunched softly on the sandy earth littering the floor of the cave.

“Do you think it’s the man who chased me?” I asked.

“Don’t know.”

“I think it must be,” I persisted, “to be right here, right now, by our tour group.”

“Could be.”

Still holding his hand, I pressed. “What will we do? Beat him up?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Mart said, sounding calm.

“He could be gone by now,” I whispered. “I can’t smell the smoke anymore. There must be plenty of other tunnels and ways out of here.”

The whole situation was unnerving. The darkness, the warm dampness, the scent of the river, the eerie almost-silence.

“Do you always talk so much on when you’re nervous?” Mart asked, not unkindly, but as if he really wanted to know.

My breath whooshed out of me. “It’s already been kind of a trying day,” I reminded him. “I mean, I’m as up for adventure as your next girl, but — ”

“Ssh!”

He squeezed my hand, then let it go, advancing on the chamber where we had seen the glowing end of a cigarette. Or, at least, that’s what we thought we had seen. I slipped my finger through the belt loop on his shorts and followed. No way was he going to leave me halfway down a dark tunnel alone. No way was he going to confront the guy without me.

I bumped into Mart when he came to an abrupt halt. Looking past him, I saw an empty alcove. The scent of smoke lingered in the air and when Mart turned his lamp to the ground, we could both see the stubby end of a cigarette butt, smashed into the earth.

“Rats!”

Mart turned this way and that, looking off into tiny dark spaces that must be tunnels to other chambers, other exits. “Let’s look around. See what else we can find,” he said. “I wish we had a map of these caves to show the feds this exact location.” He’d already begun scanning the ground around us for clues.

We could see a lot with just three feet of light, which surprised me. I found a few coins that must have slipped from someone’s pocket, and plenty of other cigarette butts. Right up against the wall of the cave, I narrowly avoided stepping in a pile of dog doo while checking out some crumpled sheets of paper. Stained with grease, they must have wrapped up someone’s lunch.

“I wonder if they shared their lunch with the dog,” I said, pointing.

Mart aimed his light to look and his eyebrows knit together.

“And look here. Looks like drag marks,” he told me. The surface of the ground had been disturbed all around. His finger followed a path which ran from where we stood out of the circle of light and off to where the headlamp couldn’t reach.

“Storage?” I guessed. “They use this cave for storage before the drugs are smuggled out of the country?” I guessed.

“Well, the whole of Belize is peppered with caves. They could make a convenient transfer point, I suppose.”

“But not for the long term. There must be other warehouses in a town or village.”

“Count on that,” Mart said. “They’d have to ship the contraband from somewhere nearer roads and airports.”

When I heard that word, “ship,” I quit looking down and looked up instead, as the entire text of Clark’s odd phone message popped into my brain like a well-loved phrase. Mart hadn’t been the only one not telling all he knew and now it was my turn to blurt out a secret.

“Clark dropped his phone in the elevator our first night here,” I said, which must have sounded like quite a change of subject.

“Oh?” Mart was still scanning the cave for clues.

“And I picked it up for him. He’d been reading a text.”

Now, Mart stopped. He looked up swiftly, his headlamp pelting me in the eye with a piercing light.

Shielding my eyes, glad I couldn’t see his expression, I repeated the phrase about shipments and uncles coming to call. “I don’t know what it means. But it’s obviously connected to the smuggling.”

“That’s definitely something else the feds will want to know,” he said after a moment’s ponder. “Thanks for telling me.”

I’d expected him to ask why I’d kept the note to myself, but he didn’t. Putting his hands on his hips, he said, “Wish we had a camera.”

I thought of my tote bag, filled with the borrowed camera and my cell, far away back at the lodge.

“There’s got to be a map of these caves in the brochure for this trip,” I said. “We can amend it to add this branch.” I indicated the tunnel we occupied. “That should be close enough for the authorities to investigate.”

“We can’t do much else right now,” Mart said. “And we’d better get back before we’re missed.”

He reached for my hand again and we stepped carefully back the way we’d come into the central part of the cave where a few of the group were already back in the water.

I saw Clark give a sharp glance our way as Mart handed me into my inner tube. On this river voyage Mart had definitely been shirking his assistant director duties, but that’s what the guide was for.

“Thought we were gonna have to come in after you,” Dan teased, giving me a broad, knowing wink.

Elaine sighed mightily and stretched his name into three syllables. “D-a-a-n.” She looked to me. “Never mind him. He has no romance in his soul.”

Even as I smiled the heat of a blush warmed my cheeks. Elaine should only know how romantic it had been in the dark, avoiding dog doo and food scraps.

“But he does have a dirty mind, I think,” Mart quipped in a tone so light I had to look over to where he bobbed beside me. His smile, which did so much to enhance his good looks, was genuine. Really, he was mercurial, slipping easily from off duty to on. Or from on to really on.

“It’s always the ones you don’t suspect,” Jen piped up, splashing water in every direction as she paddled by.

Our river guide clapped his hands, calling for our attention, to explain the last leg of our journey.

It was easy to just float along in the chain of inner tubes, trailing a hand in the water and thinking. After I’d mulled our interesting discovery over in my mind for a few minutes, though, I let it go. It would be a shame — and a disservice to my blog readers — to not pay full attention to my surroundings now. Then, too soon it seemed, we were floating into a wider spot in the river and the trip was over.

“You are welcome to swim around as long as your time allows,” the guide told us, indicating the path to the car park. “A five-minute walk and you will be back at your starting point,” he explained, leaping up onto the bank beside the river.

Clark looked at his very expensive waterproof watch and told us we had a full ten minutes to splash around in the water if we were to remain on schedule.

“So hurry up and relax!” Patty shouted and there was laughter all around. Even Clark didn’t take offense when the remark came from a pretty woman who wasn’t his wife.

I flipped out of my tube, ready to be free of it again. Mart was ahead of me, floating lazily on his back. If he were thinking about anything important, you’d never know it from his blissful expression.

When athletic Clark engaged in a strong crawl directly in my path, I took the opportunity to let him have it.

“Hey, Clark, thanks for those great directions you gave me before. I was lost on those trails in about ten seconds,” I said and I didn’t smile.

He interrupted his stroke just long enough to say, “I encourage you to keep up with the tour group in the future.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but never did. Mart was beside me, giving my arm a squeeze firm enough to leave marks.

“Let it go,” he said in an urgent tone. “Until we can talk and figure things out, just let it go.”

He grabbed me playfully around the waist with both hands then and swept me in a circle through the water, first one way then the other. I laughed, shaking water from my eyes.

“Race you!” I challenged, seeing others in our group head to shore.

“You’re on!” Mart dropped me like a hot potato and headed off.

But I’m a strong swimmer, so I caught him easily and we called it even as we emerged from the water, laughing.